I
China's chief ally in the late war, being deaf and blind, knew
nothing, and still knows nothing, of treaties or of peace. It
followed the returning armies of Japan, invaded the victorious
empire, and killed about thirty thousand people during the hot
season. It is still slaying; and the funeral pyres burn
continually. Sometimes the smoke and the odor come wind-blown
into my garden down from the hills behind the town, just to
remind me that the cost of burning an adult of my own size is
eighty sen,--about half a dollar in American money at the present
rate of exchange.
From the upper balcony of my house, the whole length of a
Japanese street, with its rows of little shops, is visible down
to the bay. Out of various houses in that street I have seen
cholera-patients conveyed to the hospital,--the last one (only
this morning) my neighbor across the way, who kept a porcelain
shop. He was removed by force, in spite of the tears and cries of
his family. The sanitary law forbids the treatment of cholera in
private houses; yet people try to hide their sick, in spite of
fines and other penalties, because the public cholera-hospitals
are overcrowded and roughly managed, and the patients are
entirely separated from all who love them. But the police are not
often deceived: they soon discover unreported cases, and come
with litters and coolies. It seems cruel; but sanitary law must
be cruel. My neighbor's wife followed the litter, crying, until
the police obliged her to return to her desolate little shop. It
is now closed up, and will probably never be opened again by the
owners.
Such tragedies end as quickly as they begin. The bereaved, so
soon as the law allows, remove their pathetic belongings, and
disappear; and the ordinary life of the street goes on, by day
and by night, exactly as if nothing particular had happened.
Itinerant venders, with their bamboo poles and baskets or buckets
or boxes, pass the empty houses, and utter their accustomed
cries; religious processions go by, chanting fragments of sutras;
the blind shampooer blows his melancholy whistle; the private
watchman makes his heavy staff boom upon the gutter-flags; the
boy who sells confectionery still taps his drum, and sings a
love-song with a plaintive sweet voice, like a girl's:--
"_You and I together_.... I remained long; yet in the moment of
going I thought I had only just come.
"_You and I together_.... Still I think of the tea. Old or new
tea of Uji it might have seemed to others; but to me it was
Gyokoro tea, of the beautiful yellow of the yamabuki flower.
"_You and I together_.... I am the telegraph-operator; you are
the one who waits the message. I send my heart, and you receive
it. What care we now if the posts should fall, if the wires be
broken?"
And the children sport as usual. They chase one another with
screams and laughter; they dance in chorus; they catch
dragon-flies and tie them to long strings; they sing burdens of
the war, about cutting off Chinese heads:--
"_Chan-chan bozu no
Kubi wo hane!_"
Sometimes a child vanishes; but the survivers continue their
play. And this is wisdom.
It costs only forty-four sen to burn a child. The son of one of
my neighbors was burned a few days ago. The little stones with
which he used to play lie there in the sun just as he left
them.... Curious, this child-love of stones! Stones are the toys
not only of the children of the poor, but of all children at one
period of existence: no matter how well supplied with other
playthings, every Japanese child wants sometimes to play with
stones. To the child-mind a stone is a marvelous thing, and ought
so to be, since even to the understanding of the mathematician
there can be nothing more wonderful than a common stone. The tiny
urchin suspects the stone to be much more than it seems, which is
an excellent suspicion; and if stupid grown-up folk did not
untruthfully tell him that his plaything is not worth thinking
about, he would never tire of it, and would always be finding
something new and extraordinary in it. Only a very great mind
could answer all a child's questions about stones.
According to popular faith, my neighbor's darling is now playing
with small ghostly stones in the Dry Bed of the River of Souls,
--wondering, perhaps, why they cast no shadows. The true poetry
in the legend of the Sai-no-Kawara is the absolute naturalness of
its principal idea,--the phantom-continuation of that play which
all little Japanese children play with stones.