FOLLOWING THE SUN-FLAG
FOLLOWING
THE SUN-FLAG
A VAIN PURSUIT
THROUGH MANCHURIA
BY
JOHN FOX, JR.
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1905
COPYRIGHT, 1905, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published April, 1905
TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK
To
"THE MEN OF MANY WARS"
WITH CONGRATULATIONS TO
THOSE ON WHOM FELL
THROUGH CHANCE OR PERSONAL EFFORT
A BETTER FORTUNE THAN WAS MINE
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. THE TRAIL OF THE SAXON 1
II. HARDSHIPS OF THE CAMPAIGN 18
III. LINGERING IN TOKIO 50
IV. MAKING FOR MANCHURIA 74
V. ON THE WAR-DRAGON'S TRAIL 102
VI. THE WHITE SLAVES OF HAICHENG 128
VII. THE BACKWARD TRAIL OF THE SAXON 160
INTRODUCTION
After a long still-hunt in Tokio, and a long pursuit through Manchuria,
following that Sun-Flag of Japan, I gave up the chase at Liao-Yang.
Not being a military expert, my purpose was simply to see under that
flag the brown little "gun-man"--as he calls himself in his own
tongue--in camp and on the march, in trench and in open field, in
assault and in retreat; to tell tales of his heroism, chivalry,
devotion, sacrifice, incomparable patriotism; to see him fighting,
wounded--and, since such things in war must be--dying, dead. After seven
months my spoils of war were post-mortem battle-fields, wounded
convalescents in hospitals, deserted trenches, a few graves, and one
Russian prisoner in a red shirt.
Upon that unimportant personal disaster I can look back now with no
little amusement; and were I to re-write these articles, I should
doubtless temper both word and spirit here and there; but as my feeling
at the time was sincere, natural, and justified, as there is, I believe,
no over-statement of the facts that caused it, and as the articles were
written without malice or the least desire to "get even"--I let them go,
as written, into book form now.
No more enthusiastic pro-Japanese than I ever touched foot on the shores
of the little island, and no Japanese, however much he might, if only
for that reason, value my good opinion, can regret more than I any
change that took place within me when I came face to face with a land
and a people I had longed since childhood to see.
I am very sorry to have sounded the personal note so relentlessly in
this little book. That, too, was unavoidable, and will, I hope, be
pardoned.
JOHN FOX, JR.
BIG STONE GAP, VIRGINIA.
FOLLOWING THE SUN-FLAG
FOLLOWING THE SUN-FLAG
I
THE TRAIL OF THE SAXON
An amphitheatre of feathery clouds ran half around the horizon and close
to the water's edge; midway and toward Russia rose a great dark shadow
through which the sun shone faintly. Such was the celestial setting for
the entrance of a certain ship some ten days since at sunset into the
harbor of Yokohama and the Land of the Rising Sun; but no man was to
guess from the strange pictures, strange people, and jumbled mass of new
ideas and impressions waiting to make his brain dizzy on shore, that the
big cloud aloft was the symbol of actual war. No sign was to come, by
night or by day, from the tiled roofs, latticed windows, paper houses,
the foreign architectural monstrosities of wood and stone; the lights,
lanterns, shops--tiny and brilliantly lit; the innumerable rickshas, the
swift play under them of muscular bare brown legs which bore
thin-chested men who run open-mouthed and smoke cigarettes while waiting
a fare; the musical chorus of getas clicking on stone, mounted by men
bareheaded or in billycock hats; little women in kimonos; ponies with
big bellies, apex rumps, bushy forelocks and mean eyes; rows of painted
dolls caged behind barred windows and under the glare of electric
lights--expectant, waiting, patient--hour by hour, night after night, no
suggestion save perhaps in their idle patience; coolies with push carts,
staggering under heavy loads, "cargadores" in straw hats and rain coats
of rushes, looking for all the world like walking little haycocks--no
sign except in flags, the red sunbursts of Japan, along now and then
with the Stars and Stripes--flags which, for all else one could know,
might have been hung out for a holiday.
For more than a month I had been on the trail of the Saxon, the westward
trail on which he set his feet more than a hundred years ago, when he
cut the apron-strings of Mother England, turned his back on her, and,
without knowing it, started back toward her the other way round the
world, to clasp hands, perhaps, again across the Far East. Where he
started, I started, too, from the top of the Cumberland over which he
first saw the Star of Empire beckoning westward only. I went through a
black tunnel straight under the trail his moccasined feet wore over
Cumberland Gap, and stopped, for a moment, in a sleeper on the spot
where he pitched his sunset camp for the night; and the blood of his
footprints still was there.
"This is a hell of a town," said the conductor cheerfully.
I waited for an explanation. It came.
"Why, I went to a nigger-minstrel show here the other night. A
mountaineer in the gallery shot a nigger and a white man dead in the
aisle, but the band struck up 'Dixie,' and the show never stopped. But
one man left the house and that was Bones. They found him at the hotel,
but he refused to go back. 'I can't be funny in that place,' he said."
Now the curious thing is that each one of those three, the slayer and
the slain--the Saxon through the arrogance of race, the African through
the imitative faculty that has given him something of that same
arrogance toward the people of other lands--felt himself the superior of
any Oriental with a yellow skin. And now when I think of the exquisite
courtesy and ceremony and gentle politeness in this land, I smile; then
I think of the bearing of the man toward the woman of this land, and the
bearing of the man--even the mountaineer--toward the woman in our own
land, and the place the woman holds in each--and the smile passes.
Along that old wilderness trail I went across the Ohio, through prairie
lands, across the rich fields of Iowa, the plains of Nebraska, over the
Rockies, and down into the great deserts that stretch to the Sierras.
Along went others who were concerned in that trail: three Japanese
students hurrying home from England, France, and Germany, bits of that
network of eager investigation that Japan has spread over the
globe--quiet, unobtrusive little fellows who rushed for papers at every
station to see news of the war; three Americans on the way to the
Philippines for the Government; an English Major of Infantry and an
English Captain of Cavalry and a pretty English girl; and two who in
that trail had no interest--two newspaper men from France. I have been
told that the only two seven-masted vessels in the world collided one
night in mid-ocean. Well, these sons of France--the only ones on their
mission, perhaps, in broad America--collided not only on the same train,
the same sleeper, and the same section, I was told, but both were
gazetted for the same lower berth. Each asserted his claim with a
politeness that became gesticulatory and vociferous. Conductor,
brakeman, and porter came to the scene of action. Nobody could settle
the dispute, so the correspondents exchanged cards, claimed Gallic
satisfaction mutually, and requested the conductor to stop the train and
let them get off and fight. The conductor explained that, much as he
personally would like to see the scrap, the law of the land and the
speed of the Overland Limited made tarrying impossible. Without rapiers
I have often wondered how those two gentlemen of France would have drawn
each other's blood. Each still refused to take the upper berth, but next
day they were friends, and came over sea practically arm and arm on
shipboard, and arm and arm they practically are in Japan to-day.
Through the stamping grounds of Wister's "Virginian" and other men of
fact and fiction in the West, the trail led--through barren wastes with
nothing alive in sight except an occasional flock of gray, starved sheep
with a lonely herder and his sheep-dog watching us pass, while a
blue-eyed frontiersman gave me more reasons for race arrogance with his
tales of Western ethics in the old days: How men trusted each other and
were not deceived in friendship and in trade; how they sacrificed
themselves for each other without regret, and no wish for reward, and
honored and protected women always.
Then forty miles of snowsheds over the Sierras, and the trail dropped
sheer into the dewy green of flowers, gardens, and fruit-tree blossoms,
where the grass was lush, cattle and sheep were fat, and the fields
looked like rich orchards--to end in the last camp of the Saxon, San
Francisco--where the heathen Chinee walks the streets, where Robert
Louis Stevenson's bronze galley has motionless sails set to the winds
that blow through a little park, where Bret Harte's memory is soon to be
honored in a similar way, and where a man claimed that the civilization
of the trail had leaped in one bound from Chicago to the Pacific Coast.
And I wondered what the intermediate Saxons, over whose heads that leap
was made, would have to say in answer.
He had sailed one wide ocean--this Saxon--the other and wider one was by
comparison a child's play on a mill-pond with a boat of his own making,
and over it I followed him on.
On the dock two days later I saw my first crowd of Japanese, in Saxon
clothes, waving flags, and giving Saxon yells to their countrymen who
were going home to fight. After that, but for an occasional march of
those same countrymen on the steerage deck to the measure of a war-song,
no more tidings, or rumors or suggestions of war.
Seven days later, long, slowly rising slopes of mountains veiled in mist
came in view, and we saw waves of many colors washing the feet of newest
America, where the Saxon has pitched his latest but not his most
Eastern--as I must say now--camp; and where he is patching a human crazy
quilt of skins from China, Japan, Portugal, America, England, Africa.
The patching of it goes swiftly, but there will be one hole in the quilt
that will never be filled again on this earth, for the Hawaiian is
going--as he himself says, he is "pau," which in English means finished,
done for, doomed. Now girls who are three-quarters Saxon dance the
hula-hula for tourists, and but for a movement of their feet, it is the
dance of the East wretchedly and vulgarly done, and the spectator would
wipe away, if he could, every memory but the wailing song of the woman
with the guitar--a song which to my ear had no more connection with the
dance than a cradle song could have with a bacchanalian orgy.
At a big white hotel that night hundreds of people sat in a brilliantly
lighted open-air garden with a stone floor and stone balustrade, and
heard an Hawaiian band of many nationalities play the tunes of all
nations, and two women give vent to that adaptation of the Methodist
hymn that passes for an Hawaiian song.
Every possible human mixture of blood I had seen that day, I fancied,
but of the morals that caused the mixture I will not speak, for the
looseness of them is climatic and easily explained. I am told that after
five or six years the molecules even in the granite of the New England
character begin to get restless. Still there seems to be hope on the
horizon.
At midnight a bibulous gentleman descended from a hack in front of the
hotel.
"Roderick Random," he said to his Portuguese driver, "this is a bum-m
town," spelling the word out thickly. Roderick smiled with polite
acquiescence. The bibulous gentleman spoke likewise to the watchman at
the door.
"Quite right, sir," said the watchman.
The elevator got the same blighting criticism from the visitor, whose
good-night to the clerk at the desk still was:
"This is a bum-m town."
The clerk, too, agreed, and the man turned away in disgust.
"I can't get an argument out of anybody on that point," he said--all of
which would seem to cast some doubt on the public late-at-night
flaunting of vice in Honolulu.
Two pictures only I carried away of the many I hoped to see--the
Hawaiian swimmers, bronzed and perfect as statues, who floated out to
meet us and dive for coins, and a crowd of little yellow fellows, each
on the swaying branch of the monkey-pod tree, black hair shaking in the
wind, white teeth flashing, faces merry, and mouths stretched wide with
song.
Thence eleven long, long days to that sunset entrance into the Land of
the Rising Sun--where Perry came to throw open to the world the
long-shut sea portals of Japan.
The Japanese way of revealing heart-beats is not the way of the
Occidental world, and seeing no signs of war, this correspondent, at
least, straightway forgot the mission on which he had come, and
straightway was turned into an eager student of a people and a land
which since childhood he had yearned to see.
On a certain bluff sits a certain tea-house--you can see it from the
deck of the ship. It is the tea-house of One Hundred and One Steps, and
the mistress of it is O-kin-san, daughter of the man who was mayor when
Perry opened the sea portals at the mouth of the cannon, whose guest
Perry was, and whose friend.
O-kin-san's people lost their money once, and she opened the tea-house,
as the American girl under similar circumstances would have taken to the
typewriter and the stenographer's pen. The house has a year of life for
almost every one of the steps that mount to it, which is ancient life
for Japan, where fires make an infant life of three years for the
average Japanese home. The tea-girls are O-kin-san's own kin. Everything
under her roof is blameless, and the women of any home in any land can
be taken there fearlessly.
An American enthusiast--a voluntary exile, whom I met later--told me
that O-kin-san's Japanese was as good as could be found in the empire;
that her husband was one of the best-educated men he had ever known, and
had been a great help and inspiration to Lafcadio Hearn. There were all
the pretty courtesies, the pretty ceremonies, and the gentle kindness of
which the world has read.
After tea and sake and little Japanese cakes and peanuts, thence
straightway to Tokio, whence the soldiers went to the front and the
unknown correspondent was going, at that time, to an unknown destination
in an unknown time. It is an hour between little patches of half-drowned
rice bulbs, cottages thatched with rice straw, with green things growing
on the roof, and little gardens laid out with an art minute and
exquisite, blossoming trees of wild cherry, that beloved symbol of
Japanese bravery because it dares to spread its petals under falling
snow, dashed here and there with the red camellia that is unlucky
because it drops its blossom whole and suggests the time when the
Japanese head might fall for a slight offence; between little hills
overspread with pine trees, and little leafless saplings that help so
much to give the delicate, airy quality that characterizes the landscape
of Japan. At every station was a hurrying throng of men, women, and
children who clicked the stone pavements on xylophones with a music that
some writer with the tympanum of a blacksmith characterized as a
clatter. These getas are often selected, I am told, to suit the
individual ear.
At Tokio outward evidences of war were as meagre as ever. But to that
lack, the answer is, "It is not the Japanese custom." I am told that the
night war was declared the Japanese went to bed, but about every
bulletin board there is now always an eager crowd of watchers. The shout
of "Nippon banzai!" from the foreigner, which means "Good luck to
Japan," always gets a grateful response from the child in the street,
the coolie with his ricksha, policeman on his beat, or the Japanese
gentleman in his carriage.
And then the stories I heard of the devotion and sacrifice of the people
who are left at home! The women let their hair go undressed once a month
that they may contribute each month the price of the dressing--five sen.
A gentleman discovered that every servant in his household, from butler
down, was contributing a certain amount of his wages each month, and in
consequence offered to raise wages just the amount each servant was
giving away. The answer was:
"Sir, we cannot allow that; it is an honor for us to give, and it would
be you who would be doing our duty for us to Japan."
A Japanese lady apologized profusely for being late at dinner. She had
been to the station to see her son off for the front, where already were
three of her sons.
Said another straightway:
"How fortunate to be able to give four sons to Japan!"
In a tea-house I saw an old woman with blackened teeth, a servant, who
bore herself proudly, and who, too, was honored because she had sent
four sons to the Yalu. Hundreds and thousands of families are denying
themselves one meal a day that they may give more to their country. And
one rich merchant, who has already given 100,000 yen, has himself cut
off one meal, and declares that he will if necessary live on one the
rest of his life for the sake of Japan.
There is a war play on the boards of one theatre. The heroine, a wife,
says that her unborn child in a crisis like this must be a man-child,
and that he shall be reared a soldier. To provide means, she will
herself, if necessary, go to the yoshiwara.
On every gateway is posted a red slab where a man has gone to the war,
marked "Gone to the front"--to be supplanted with a black one--"Bravery
forever"--should he be brought home dead. And when he is brought home
dead his body is received at the station by his kin with proud faces and
no tears. The Roman mother has come back to earth again, and it is the
Japanese mother who makes Japan the high priestess of patriotism among
the nations of the world. In that patriotism are the passionate fealty
of the subject to his king, the love of a republic for its flag, and
straightway the stranger feels that were the Mikado no more and Japan a
republic to-morrow, this war would go on just as it would had the
Japanese only this Mikado and no land that he could call his own. The
soldier at the front or on the seas will give no better account of
himself than the man, woman, or child who is left at home, and a
national spirit like this is too beautiful to be lost.
Here forks the trail of the Saxon. One branch goes straight to the
Philippines. The other splits here into a thousand tiny paths--where
railway coach has supplanted the palanquin, battle-ship the war-junk,
electricity the pictured lantern; where factory chimneys smoke and the
Japanese seems prouder of his commerce than of his art and his exquisite
manners; where the boycott has started, and even the word
strike--"strikey, strikey" it sounds--has become the refrain of a song.
How shallow, after all, the tiny paths are, no man may know; for who can
penetrate the mystery of Japanese life and character--a mystery that has
been deepening for a thousand years. Here is the chief lodge of the
Order of Sealed Lips the world over, and every man, woman, and child in
the empire seems born a life-member. It may be Japan who will clasp the
hands of the Saxon across this Far East. And yet who knows? Were Mother
Nature to found a national museum of the curiosities in plant and tree
that humanity has wrested from her, she would give the star-chamber to
Japan. This is due, maybe, to the Japanese love of plant and tree and
the limitations of space that forbid to both full height. Give the
little island room, and the dwarf pine and fruit-tree may become in
time, perhaps, as great a curiosity here as elsewhere in the world. What
will she do--when she gets the room? The Saxon hands may never meet.
Japan Saxonized may, in turn, Saxonize China and throw the tide that has
moved east and west, some day, west and east again.
II
HARDSHIPS OF THE CAMPAIGN
I have taken to the big hills in some despair and to rest from the
hardships of this campaign. Truly the life of the war correspondent is
hard in Japan.
* * * * *
The Happy Exile left America three years ago with a Puck-purpose of
girdling the world. He got no farther than Japan, and here most likely
he will rest. He is a big man and a gentle one, and I have seen his
six-feet-two frame quiver with joy like jelly as we rickshawed through
the streets, he pointing out to me meanwhile little bits of color and
life on either side. I have heard him when the dusk rushes seaward
muttering half-unconsciously to himself:
"I'm so glad I am here. I'm _so_ glad I am here."
It is the "lust of the eye" he says, and the lust is as fierce now as on
the day he landed--which is rare; for the man who has been here before
has genuine envy of the eye that sees Japan for the first time. I have
watched the man who has seen, showing around the man who has not, with a
look of benevolent sympathy and reflected joy such as one may catch on
the face of a middle-aged gentleman in the theatre who is watching the
keen delight of some youth to whom he is showing the sights of a great
city. The Happy Exile was a painter once, but he came, saw Japanese art,
and was conquered.
"I have never touched brush to canvas again. What's the use? Why, I
can't even draw their characters. Other nations draw this way"; he
worked his hands and fingers from the wrist and elbow. "The Japanese
learn, drawing their characters in childhood, to use the whole arm.
Imagine the breadth and sweep of movement!" The Happy Exile threw up
both hands. "It's of no use, at least not for me. I have given it up."
So he studies life and Myth in Japan, collects curios, silks, and
satsuma, writes a little, dreams a good deal, and gives up his whole
heart to his eye. The Happy Exile has a friend, a Japanese friend, who
is one of the new types that one finds now in New Japan. His name is
Amenemori. He is the husband of O-kin-san, mistress of the tea-house of
One Hundred and One Steps, who herself can talk with her guests from all
parts of the world in five languages and is an authority on
tea-ceremonies and a poetess of some distinction. Amenemori is not only
a linguist, but a scholar. He has English, French, German, Italian and
Russian at his command, and more. Not long ago a wandering Indian priest
came to Yokohama and could talk with nobody. Amenemori tried him in
Japanese, Korean, and Chinese without success, and the two finally found
communication in Sanscrit. One of Lafcadio Hearn's books is dedicated to
him, and through him that author acquired the widest acquaintance with
old Japanese poetry yet attained by any foreigner. Illustrating the
change that has taken place in an ancient Japanese word to its modern
form, he quotes Chaucer and the modern equivalent for the Chaucerian
phrase!
But the lust of the eye! Well, the eye is all the stranger has. The work
his brain does has little value. No matter what he may learn one day,
that thing next day he may have to unlearn. The eye alone gives
pleasure--to the color-loving, picture-loving brain--delight
unmeasurable: but the eye does not understand. The ear hears strange new
calls and sounds--unmusical except in the xylophonic click of wooden
getas, the plaintive cry of the blind masseur, and in the national
anthem, which is moving beyond words; and the ear, too, does not
understand. But the nose--"that despised poet of the senses"--his
faculty holds firm the world over. In Tokio he puts on sable trappings
at sunset that would gloom the dark hour before dawn. You will get used
to it, you are told, and that frightens you, for you don't want to get
used to it. You should go to China, is the comfort you get, and in that
suggestion is no comfort. Straightway you swear, and boldly:
No call of the East for me,
Till the stink of the East be dead.
That is why a man who comes from a land where he can fill both lungs
fearlessly and stoop to drink from any stream that his feet may cross
must go down now and then to the sea or turn his face firmly to the
hills.
From Yokohama the little coaches start slowly for the country--so slowly
that, like Artemus Ward, you wonder if it wouldn't be wise sometimes to
put the cow-catcher on behind. There is the charm of thatched cottage,
green squares of wind-shaken barley, long waving grass and little hills,
pine-crowned; but by and by your heart gets wrung with sympathy for
Mother Nature. Every blade of grass, every rush, every little tree seems
to have been let grow only through human sufferance. It is as though a
solemn court-martial had been held on the life of everything that grew
not to make feed for man and man alone, for nowhere are there sheep,
cattle, horses, and rarely even a dog. Here and there the little hills
have been cut down sheer, that the rice squares might burrow under them.
The face of the earth looked terribly man-handled, but the effect was
still lovely. The little rows of pines on the hills seemed to have been
so left that no rearrangement would have been necessary to transfer them
to canvas, and even the crown of a pine sloping from a group of its
fellows seemed to have been spared for no other reason than picturesque
effect. Perhaps for that reason Nature herself seemed to enter no
protest. It was as though she said:
"I know your needs, my children, you do only what you must; you know
just what you do, and I forgive you, for you rob me with loving hands. A
little farther on is my refuge."
And a little farther on was her refuge in the big volcanic hills,
guarded by great white solemn Fuji, where birds sing and torrents lash
with swirling foam and a great roar through deep gorges or drop down in
white cataracts through masses of trembling green. But you have an hour
first in an electric car, with a bell ringing always to keep
multitudinous children from the track, along the old road that the
Daimios took in their semi-annual trip from their up-country estates to
Tokio and back again--the Daimios--gorgeously arrayed, in palanquins,
with their retinues following, while the people kept their foreheads to
the earth and dared not raise their eyes--honors which they no longer
pay even to the great Mikado. It seemed a sacrilege. Then an hour in a
rickshaw--two pushers behind, up a deep winding gorge from which comes
the wild call of free rushing water, and you are in the untainted air of
the primeval Cumberland.
It is pleasant to be welcomed by a host and a host of servants bent at
right angles with courtesy--a courtesy that follows you everywhere. Ten
minutes later, as I stepped from behind the screen--the ever-present
screen--in my room, the Maid of Miyanoshita--another new type in New
Japan--stood bowing at my door, and I am afraid I gave her scant
greeting. I had read of feminine service, and Saxon-like I was fearsome;
but how could I know that she was the daughter of mine host--a man more
well-to-do than most of his guests, who include the princes and
princesses at times of the royal household--and that she had come merely
to welcome me? And how could I know that she was a lady, as I understand
the word, for how can a stranger know who is gentlewoman or gentleman in
a land where gentle manners are universal, when he has not learned the
distinctions of dress and when face and voice give no unerring guidance
in any land? Later I was sorry and tried to make good, but here lack of
breeding is condoned in a barbarian. Straightway one little maid came in
to build a fire, while another swiftly unpacked my bag, laid out evening
clothes, and played the part of a blind automatic valet. Embarrassment,
even consciousness, fled like a flash, as it must flee with any man who
is not blackguard or fool, and I am thinking now how foreigners have
lied about the women of Japan.
I want no better dinner than the one that came later, and I went to
sleep with mountain air coming like balm through the windows, the music
of hushed falling water somewhere, and a cherry tree full-blown shining
like a great white, low star at the foot of a mountain that rose darkly
toward the stars. This life of the war correspondent in Japan--truly
'tis hard!
Next morning I heard the scampering of many feet and much laughter in
the hallways, and I thought there were children out there playing games.
It was those brown little chambermaids hard at work. I wonder whence
comes the perpetual sunny cheer of these little people; whether it be
simple temperament or ages of philosophy--or both.
"You have your troubles," they say, "therefore I must not burden you
with mine." And a man will tell you, with a smile, of some misfortune
that is almost breaking his heart.
The little maid who had unpacked my bag brought breakfast to me, and I
could see that I was invested with some interest which was not at all
apparent the night before. Presently it came out:
"You are going to Korea?"
"Yes, I am going to Korea."
"I want to go to Korea, but they won't let girls go."
"Why do you want to go to Korea?"
For the first time I saw Japanese eyes flash, and her answer came like
the crack of a whip:
"To fight!"
Among the thousands of applications, many of them written in blood,
which the war office has received from men who are anxious to go to the
front, is one from just such a girl. In her letter she said that she was
the last of an old Samurai family. Her father was killed in the war with
China; her only brother died during the Boxer troubles. She begged to be
allowed to take the place in the ranks which had always belonged to her
family. She could shoot, she said, and ride; and it would be a lasting
disgrace if her family name should be missing from the rolls, where it
has had an honored place for centuries, now that her country and her
Emperor are in such sore need.
After breakfast I climbed the mountain that I could see from my
window--it ran not so high by day--and up there great Fuji was gracious
enough for one fleeting moment to throw back the gray mantle of a cloud
and bare for me for the first time his sacred white head. Coming down, I
found a pretty story of American Chivalry and the Maid of Miyanoshita.
There was a man here whose nationality will not be mentioned, and a big
young American who hasn't lost the traditions of his race and country.
With the lack of understanding that is not uncommon with foreigners
during their first days in Japan, this particular foreigner said
something to the little lady that he would not have said under similar
circumstances at home. Now, just behind the hotel are two foaming
cascades which drop into a clear pool of water wherein sport many fishes
big and little--green, silver, gold, or mottled with white and
scarlet--which it is the pleasure of the guests to feed. A few minutes
later there was a commotion on the margin of the pond, and those fishes,
gathering as usual for biscuit and sugar, got a surprise. The American
had invited the other foreigner out there, and the two were having a
mighty mill. After a nice solar-plexus landing, the American caught up
his opponent and threw him bodily into the fish-pond. The man
disappeared next morning by the first train. Wallah, but it was grateful
to the soul--striking a Saxon trail like that!
After tiffin I was struggling with Japanese idioms in a guide-book. "I
will be glad to help you," said the Maid of Miyanoshita.
She had gone to school in a convent in Tokio. Only Japanese girls and a
few Eurasians, girls whose fathers are foreigners, were students, and
they were allowed to speak only French. There she was taught to read and
write English. To speak it, she had learned only from guests at the
hotel.
"Well," I said, "if the Japanese in this book is as bad as the English,
I don't think I want to learn it." She looked at the book.
"It iss bad," she said; "there are words here you must not use." (It is
impossible to give dialectic form to her quaint variations from normal
pronunciation.) By and by we found an example.
"Yes," she said, "sukimas means 'I like.' I like flowers, birds, and so
on, but you must not use that--" with one pointed finger on a word that
I proceeded straightway to damn forever.
"What is the proper word for _that_ word?"
"Ai suru," she said.
"And what does that mean?"
A vertical line of mental effort broke the smoothness of her forehead.
"It iss _deeper_ than 'like.'"
"Oh," I said. She continued her mental search for an English equivalent.
I tried to help.
"Love?" I ventured.
With straight eyes she met purely impersonal inquiry with response even
more impersonal.
"Yess," she said.
* * * * *
That afternoon I walked farther up the gorge, past curio shops, with the
river roaring far beneath and water tumbling from far above, and I
turned in for a moment where the word "Archery" curved in big letters
over a doorway, to see an old chap put eight arrows out of ten in a
small target a hundred feet away, and triumphantly shout:
"Russian!"
And then on past tea-houses and workshops and rice-mills with undershot
water-wheels such as I had left in the Cumberland Mountains. In a rice
square below and beyond me three little girls were playing. When they
saw me they ran toward the road, stooping now and then to pick up
something as they ran. The littlest one held up to me a bunch of blue
flowers. I was thrilled; here I thought is where I get the courtesy of
the land even from the peasant class and untainted by the rude manners
of the Saxon and his Caucasian kind. I took off my hat.
"Arigato," I said, which means "Thank you." Out came the mite's chubby
hand.
"Shinga!" she said, "mucha shinga!"
Now I have not been able to find anyone who knows what "shinga" means
except the little highway robbers who held me up in the road and made it
plain by signs. I went down into my pocket for a coin. Up stepped number
two of the little hold-ups, with number three in close support; but I
was too disappointed and sore, and I declined. Those three little ones
followed me half a mile and up many score of steep steps to a temple in
a grove, still proffering flowers and saying,
"Shinga." It was sad.
Going back I met another mite of a girl in a many-colored kimono. She
said something. I am afraid I glowered, but she said it again, with a
bow and a smile, and it was--
"Konnichi-wa!" which means "Good-day." Then wasn't I sorry! This was the
real thing. I took off my hat, and then and there this little maid and I
exchanged elaborate Oriental ceremonies in the middle of the road,
concluding with three right-angle bows of farewell, each saying three
times that very beautiful Japanese good-by,
"Sayonara."
I went on cheered and thinking. This was Old and New Japan, the
lingering beauty of one, the trail of the tourist over the other, and
this was Japan in general. When you are looking for a thing you get
something else; when you look for something else you get what you were
looking for. The trouble was that in neither case should I have been
surprised, for the Japanese even say,
"It is not surprising if the surprising does not surprise," which must
be thought about for a while. And then again, What's the odds, no matter
what happens.
"Shikata ga nai," says the Japanese; "It can't be helped"--a fatalistic
bit of philosophy that may play an important part on many future
battle-fields.
* * * * *
The Little Maid of Miyanoshita and I were tossing bits of cracker to the
gold-fishes in the pond, and each bit made a breaking, flashing rainbow
as they rushed for it in a writhing heap. She had never been to America
nor to England.
"Wouldn't you like to go?"
"Verry much," she said.
"Well, aren't you going some day?"
"I hope so, but--" she paused; "if I wore these clothes the people would
follow me about the streets. If I wore European clothes, I would look
like--what you say--a fright."
"Never!" Again she shook her head.
"Yess, yess I would." And the pity of it is I am afraid she was right.
The Little Maid did not walk the hills much.
"Japanese men do not like for women to go about much," she said. "My
uncle does not like that I go about alone, but my father he does not
care. He has been in America."
"It is perfectly safe?"
"Yes, perrfectly safe. Is it not so in America?"
"Well, no, not always; at least not in the South, where I come from."
She did not ask why, though I should not have been surprised to learn
that she knew, and I did not explain.
She was very fond of Schiller, she said, and she had read many American
and English novels. She liked "The Crisis" very much--she did not
mention others--though she liked better the novels that were written by
women.
"Because you understand them better?"
"Not only that," she said slowly, "but I think that men who write novels
try to make the women happy, and the women who write novels do not do
that so much; and I think the women must be nearer the truth."
She turned suddenly on me:
"_You_ have written a book."
"Guilty," I said.
"And what does that mean?"
"It means that I have," I said lamely. We talked international
differences.
"American women use very many pins, is it not true?"
"I think it is true," I said.
"We do not," she said; "we use what you call"--with her fingers on a
little cord at the breast of her kimono--"strings. But," she added
suddenly, "an American says to me that I must not speak of such things."
"Tut!"
"Well," she said, "I do not see anything wrong."
In America, I explained, we put the woman in a high place and looked up
at her.
"Is it not so in Japan?" I said.
"No," she said simply, "it is not so in Japan." She thought a while.
"That must be very nice for the woman in America," she said.
"I think it is," I said.
"But then," she said, to explain the mystery, "they are so well
ed-u-ca-ted."
"Well, I don't think it is because they are so well educated," I said.
"Then they are worthy," said the Little Maid.
* * * * *
I have been to Big Hell--a climb of some three thousand feet past rice
squares and barley fields and little forests of bamboo trees, where on a
God-forsaken mountain top sulphurous smoke belches into the clouds that
drift about it. Now smoke suggests human habitation, human food, and
human comfort, and that smoke swirling up there gave the spot a
loneliness unspeakable. Under you the gray earth was hot, here and there
were springs of boiling water, and the ashy crust crackled under your
feet. Around the crest we went, and down through a forest of big trees
left standing because the place was a royal preserve. The absence of
animals, tame or wild, has constantly depressed me ever since I have
been in Japan. Even up there in the hills I had seen nothing hopping,
crawling, or climbing by the roadside or in the woods, and I could see
nothing now.
"Is there nothing wild up here?" I said.
"Oh, yes," said the guide, "there are deer and monkeys." If he had said
there were dodos I could have been no more surprised; but to this day I
have seen nothing in freedom except a few birds in the air.
By and by a thatched roof came in view. The path led sharply around one
corner of the house and I was brought up with a gasp. I had read and
heard much about bathing customs in Japan. The government has tried, I
believe, to legislate into the people Occidental ideas of modesty. One
regulation provided that the sexes should be separated. They were
separated--by a bamboo rod floating on the water. Another time it was
announced that bathing trunks must be worn at a certain place by the
sea. One old chap issued leisurely from his house on the hill-side and
stalked down without clothes, swinging his trunks in his hand. After he
got into the water he put the trunks on, and as soon as he came out he
took them off again and stalked home swinging them as before.
Well, there they were, old and young and of both sexes, and it was
apparent that the regulations of the bamboo rod and the bathing trunks
had not reached that high. It was a natural Turkish bath-house, and it
seems that the farmers around Big Hell furnish a certain amount of
produce each year to the proprietor for the privilege of hot baths, and
when work is slack they go up there--husbands and wives, sons and
daughters--and stay for days. Apparently work was slack just then. The
bath, some ten feet square, and sunk in the floor, was screened from the
gaze of the passing pedestrian and the coldness of the outer air merely
by slender bamboo rods, some eighteen inches apart. It was full to the
brim.
That night an Englishman seemed greatly taken with Big Hell.
"Most extraordinary!" he said. "Do you know, they never minded us at
all--not at all. A chap had a camera, and one dear old lady actually
stood upright when he was taking a picture. They asked me to come in,
and I really think I would, but--gad, you know, there wasn't any room."
The key-note of this symphony of ills will not be sounded here.
* * * * *
She could play the koto (the harp), and the piano a little--could the
Maid of Miyanoshita. She would play neither for me, but that afternoon
she would take me, she said, to hear a friend play the koto--an elderly
friend, whom she called, she said, her aunt. Later, she said she had
asked another gentleman also. Now when I spoke once of the musical click
of the getas, the Happy Exile had told me that the wearers often chose
them, taking only such pairs as pleased the individual ear. The
statement has since been much laughed at, so I asked the Maid of
Miyanoshita for confirmation. She at least did not choose her getas for
their sound.
"But," she said, "the Japanese say the getas go--
"'Kara-ko, kara-ko, kara-ko!'"
The notes she gave were the notes I had heard on the stone platforms of
every station between Tokio and Yokohama, and going straightway to the
piano I found those notes to be F and D in the scale of F Minor. Let the
laugh proceed. The Happy Exile possibly might say that those notes were
the prominent ones in some old national song, and that the geta-makers
had been unconsciously reproducing them ever since.
* * * * *
It was raining. Alack and alas! the Little Maid carried an American
umbrella--impious trail of the Saxon! while the Other Man and I bore
picturesque Japanese ones that would have given the crowning touch to
her, but looked simply ridiculous over us. Thus we went to meet the
exquisite courtesy and genuine kindness of a real Japanese home.
Two kotos were played for us, while the players sang "Wind Among the
Pines," and the tale of the fairies who fell in love with the fisherman.
"Do you like Japanese music?" said the Little Maid to the Other Man.
"Yes," he said promptly, lying like a gentleman.
"Don't you think it is rather monotonous?" she asked.
"Well--um--um. Don't you like Japanese music?" he said, taking refuge.
"Well," she said, "I like your music better, I think. It is more lively
and has more variety."
Then we had tea, and after tea of the kind usually served in Japan, the
husband, a fierce Samurai in the pictures he showed us, but now a
genial, broad-smiling doctor of the old Japanese school, insisted that
we should take bowls of powdered tea which he prepared with his own
hands. In the drinking of this the Little Maid instructed us. We were to
take the bowl, the left hand underneath, the fingers of the right hand
clasped about it, lift it to the forehead, a movement of unspoken
thanks, and very gently, so as not to suggest that the tea needed to be
dissolved, were to roll the tea around in the bowl three times and then
take one drink--making much noise, meanwhile, with the lips to show how
much we enjoyed it.
"That is very vulgar in your country," interrupted the Little Maid, "is
it not so?"
"Well," I said, "lots of people do it, but not for the reason of
courtesy."
We were to roll it around three times more, and then drink again; three
times more, and a third drink, leaving this time but a little, which,
without being rolled around again, was to be drunk at a swallow--three
drinks and one swallow to the bowl. O-kin-san says that this last
swallow should be only the foam, which must be drunk to show that the
tea is so good that the guest must have even the foam; and that not
until then does the noise of appreciation come, and then only because
the foam cannot be drunk without noise. It was well. We exchanged
autographs and cards. With the kind permission of the Little Maid's aunt
we took pictures of the interior, and then with much bowing and many
"sayonaras" we passed out under the cherry trees.
"We say 'Good-morning,'" said the Little Maid, explaining the courtesies
of Japanese greeting and good-by, "and we bow; and we say 'It is a long
while since I have seen you,' or 'It is a fine day,' and we bow again.
At the end of each sentence you must bow, and it is the same when you
say good-by."
* * * * *
Before I learned that the Mikado had sent a general edict through the
land that all foreigners in Japan were to be treated with particular
consideration while this war is going on--thus making it safer for the
tourist now in this country than it ever has been or will be, perhaps,
for a long time--I had been greatly impressed by the absence of all
signs of disorder, street quarrels, loud talking, and by the fact that
in Tokio, one of the largest cities in the world, one could go about day
or night in perfect safety. I told this to the Maid of Miyanoshita.
"So desuka," she said without surprise, and that means "Indeed." And
when she said later that there were many Japanese novelists, but they
did not write love stories, I was reminded further that I had seen no
man in Japan turn his head to look at a woman who had passed him--no
exchange of glances, no street gallantry at all.
"The song of the 'Goo-goo Eyes,'" I said, "would never have been written
in Japan."
"What iss 'Goo-goo Eyes'?" said the Little Maid, mystified.
Then had I trouble--but I must have made it clear at last.
"Perhaps the Japanese girl does not want to be seen--looking."
"Oh, you mean that she may look, but the foreigner doesn't see it?"
"Well, we are all human. That is very frank, is it not?"
It was frank--very frank--and of an innocence not to be misunderstood
save by a fool. Then I got a degree.
"But I am always frank with you, for if you are what you say 'guilty,' I
think you must understand. I call you to myself a Doctor of Humanity."
Wallah, but the life is hard!
* * * * *
By and by this remarkable Little Maid went on:
"The Japanese may be what you call in love, but they must not tell
it--must not even show it."
"Not even the men?"
"No, not even the men. Is it not so in your country?"
I laughed.
"No, it is not so in my country." I found myself suddenly imitating her
own slow speech. "That's the first thing the man in my country does.
Sometimes he tells it, even when he can't ask the girl to marry him, and
sometimes they even tell it over there when they don't mean it."
"So desuka!"
"They call that 'flirting.'"
"Yes, I know 'flirting,'" said the Little Maid.
"It is not a very nice word," I said. "There is no flirting in Japan?"
"There is no chance. Parents and friends make marriage in Japan."
"They don't marry for love?"
"It is as in France--not for love. And in America?"
"Well, we don't think it nice for people to marry unless they are in
love."
"So desuka," she said, which still means "Indeed." And then she went on:
"Japanese girls obey their parents." And then she added, rather sadly, I
thought, "and sometimes they are very unhappy."
"And what then?"
"Oh, deevorces--are very common among the lower classes, but among the
middle and upper classes it is verry difficult."
"So desuka!" I said, for I was surprised.
"So desu," said the Little Maid, which is the proper answer.
* * * * *
The Maid of Miyanoshita loves flowers, and at sunset this afternoon I
saw her coming down from her garden, where she had been at work. She had
a great round straw hat on her black hair. I got her to draw it about
her face with both hands, and with a camera she was caught as she
laughed. We went down the steps and stopped above the cascade which
shook the water where the goldfishes were playing.