truly extraordinary phenomenon. The claret red of the sun flamed and
danced against the snows of the mountain wall at our left. Finally
our road broke up into a delta of small paths. The soft earth had
been so cut into ruts by heavy carts that Hori was forced to accede
to the demands of the bicycle that it should be assisted and not
ridden, but he did not surrender until the wheel had demonstrated its
malevolence by pitching him a half-dozen times off the saddle. Thus
we all walked along together. The villages were rather mean, with the
air of having come down in the world. Some of the towns, in the days
before machinery, had had special fame in the various handicrafts; one
had been known for its hand-made wooden combs. Evidently there remain
some conservatives who have not yet countenanced modern vulcanite
innovations, as wooden combs were still being made for sale. Entire
families, from grandparents to children, were the manufacturers, the
factories their own homes. We bought a boxful for a few _sen_. In
arriving at a selling price they must have valued their time in the
manufacturing as a gratuitous contribution to the arts.
Every once in a while O-Owre-san and I had had our pleasure in drawing
the long bow of our imagination concerning the architectural reason for
a certain peculiar type of house. A recurring example is to be found
in nearly every village. These buildings are unusually substantial
and the windows are always heavily barred and shuttered. They give a
suggestion of descent from the castles of feudal days. As I said, we
had employed our elaborate imagining over the mysterious buildings,
but our guesses had never brought us anywhere near to the truth. Hori
explained that they are the houses of the pawnbrokers. Hori is the
son of a _samurai_. (He has the right to wear, if he wishes, the full
number of crests on his formal _kimono_.) The artists who made the old
colour prints used to give to the eyes of the two-sworded _samurai_
an expression of warlike ferocity. When Hori spoke of the pawnbrokers
his eyes glared, and I was sure that I detected his hand starting to
reach for the sword that has now gone from his girdle. However, the
ubiquitous bicycle just then swung around and entangled him, as a
reminder, probably, that this is a new age, a mechanical and not a
feudal one, and that a _samurai_ no longer has the general and hearty
acquiescence of law and society to proceed to direct action against
the loathed money lender. The law of the land says to-day that the
pawnbroker must be considered as a free and equal citizen, enjoying
full rights under the mercy of the Mikado; albeit (as the bars and
shutters of his windows show), the money lender still wisely believes
in keeping his powder dry even in an age of enlightenment.
When we had extricated Hori from the bicycle and we had all got going
again, he explained why the pawnbroker is the most hated member of
Nipponese society. Here are some of the other remarks that Hori made
about pawnbrokers:
They are always rich. (He meant the Asiatic wealth,--hoards of gold,
not a checking account at a bank.)
They are uncanny.
They lead isolated, unhappy lives.
They always have a beautiful daughter (one only) to fall heir to the
riches.
This daughter dreams of noble lovers, but no Japanese, whatever his
rank, be it noble, humble, or decayed (or, for that matter, no matter
how much in debt he may be to her father), would ever throw away his
pride to wed a pawnbroker’s daughter. Thus she is left to grieve out
her heart in the midst of her father’s luxury.
A Japanese believes certain things patriotically. I know that Hori
does not believe these same things intellectually, for I was once rude
enough to continue an argument until he capitulated intellectually--but
for the love of country and the required loyalty to what should be, he
also keeps to the beliefs which he should have as a Japanese. After
all, juxtapositioned to such faith, mere intellectual judgment does
seem lacking in vital fluid.
The hiatus in Hori’s Japanese life--the foreign period and
influence--began when he was of the high school age and went to
America. Thus, at the time when the mind is supposed to be most
receptive, he was separated from the traditions and ethical customs
of his homeland, and he made no return home until he had left his
American university. A peculiar duality may come from such a training.
It would be impossible otherwise, for instance, that one individual
should really appreciate both a symphony orchestra and a _samisen_,
not so much from the angle of technical divergence in the use of
notes, tones, and scales as in aesthetic comparison. To any human
being with emotional sensitiveness and response, not possessing a dual
personality, acknowledgment of the rights of the symphony would seem to
preclude those of the _samisen_.
I had lost my Japanese pipe. Those little iron bowls continue to be a
most admirable luxury through all of the days that one is in the land
of their invention. When the traveller leaves the shores of Japan he
takes away with him packages of silken tobacco and his pipe, only to
find that he never lights it again. The charm is broken when the circle
is broken, and the circle, I suppose, is a unity when one is lying on
the cushions of a balcony overlooking a garden, and a maid brings the
charcoal _hibachi_ and a pot of tea. You touch the bowl of the pipe
to the fire and then--three puffs and a half. You knock the ash into
a bamboo cup. Perhaps the maid refills the pipe, touches it to the
charcoal, and hands it to you again.
Ordinarily these pipes are sold everywhere, but at Narii we could not
find them. When we were walking into Shiogiri I asked Hori to help me
keep an eye on the shops as we passed. After a time he said: “Here we
are. Here’s a one-price store.”
We had not come upon just such a shop before. While the stock and
the arrangement was purely native, the atmosphere of the place was
distinctly un-Japanese. A little of everything was for sale, but
instead of the selling being a social ceremony, the shopkeeper and his
wife and his sons and his daughters were expeditious clerks and not
hosts. The entering customer asked for what he wished to see, and a
price tag told him the cost. That was the beginning and the end of any
bargaining.
In the conventional shop the buyer sits down leisurely, after removing
his _geta_, and perhaps has a cup of tea. If an ordinary utility is
wished, the negotiating is necessarily devoid of much opportunity for
extended approach, consideration, and conclusion, but it is always
to be remembered that our idea of what is a waste of time may be the
Japanese idea of a valuably used moment. The little shops have no
opening and closing hours. Literally, there is all the time there is.
The clerk does not sell eight, nine, or ten hours of his day to his
employer. He sells all of it. As it is impossible to keep at high
pressure for maybe twenty hours of the twenty-four (and twenty hours
is not an exaggeration in some instances) nature’s insistence for rest
has to come out of the working day. The fact that the workers are not
awaiting the striking of a clock for their liberty, but are more or
less taking it as it comes, accounts for what is often a mystery to
travellers, the easy gaiety of a busy Japanese street. Workmen put down
their tools and stop for a visit; the shopkeeper chats indefinitely
with a customer; the maids at the inns have plenty of time to light
pipes for the guests and pour tea. Our idea is that the individual’s
liberty begins at the sharp demarcation of the hour which ceases to
belong to the employer. After the wanderer has lived for a time in
the midst of the Oriental system, the impression comes that time is a
continuous flow and that it is not a succession of intervals as it is
with us. The people of the East have even found a counteracting thrust
to oppose the tyranny of the railroad schedule. By arriving at the
station indefinitely early they can show their contempt for definite
departures.
While we were buying my new twelve-_sen_ pipe in the Shiogiri one-price
store, Hori commented with obvious emphasis several times that he
was pleased that the prices were so carefully marked on the tags. As
smoking may at any time become a ceremony, I spent many minutes in my
selection, and through these minutes Hori kept dropping his pointed
comments, but I stored away the impression of his satisfaction over the
price tags to be asked about later. An appropriate time did not come
for several days. An hour came when we were lounging on an inn balcony
in the soft night air.
It seemed that our method of shopping was the disturbing pressure
against Hori’s peace of mind. We two foreigners undoubtedly had many
flaws which came to light under the wear of intimate association,
but it was this one which at last drove Hori to the verge where he
had to unburden his feelings. In the curio shops, or wherever we were
making purchases, when we came upon something that interested us, we
immediately asked: “How much?” It had been natural, when Hori was
with us, to rely upon him to interpret rather than to employ our own
cumbrous methods of transmitting ideas. As soon as we received an
intimation of the bargain price we proceeded to the bargaining and
continued until we arrived at what was presumably the lowest compromise
of the shopkeeper. Hori had also noticed that we sometimes put off
deciding whether we really wished to purchase until we discovered
the eventual price. We quite reversed the ceremonial purchase making
enacted by a Japanese gentleman. As Hori witnessed it, the difference
was meaningful. The Japanese collector looks first of all at an object
to see whether it merits his attention. If it does, there follows an
extended conversation about its intrinsic excellence. Every question as
to artistic value, authenticity, age, workmanship, uniqueness--these
are all settled before a word about the price arises. If the object
does not equal his demands of it, the collector departs without inquiry
about the money value--for why should he be interested in the cost of
an article if not in the article itself?
Hori shook his head sadly. “You always ask right away: ‘How much?’” he
said. “That sounds very mercenary to us. It looks as if you were more
interested in cheapness than quality.”
We had not suspected that Hori was writhing when, under the pressure
of our Occidental impetus, he had been asking for us the questions of
price. As a matter of fact, be it to his credit and our discredit,
despite the simplification of his quick interpreting against our
imperfect use of the few words that we did know, when it came to the
detail of price our efforts often seemed to be able to effect a more
extraordinary drop from the original quotation than when such arguing
was put off until all other details were settled. It is true that the
merchants who have really fine things will not show nor sell their
best to customers whose appreciation they doubt, but it may also be
true that as far as we did have appreciation, we made up our minds
more quickly than does the Japanese collector, and thus the stages of
consideration which Hori missed were not so much lacking as they were
abbreviated.
The standards of the _samurai_ when he goes forth to make purchases
should not be confused as being an index to the methods of modern
Japan in attacking the world’s markets. In such trading there is
no nation which is more intent upon giving the customer what the
customer thinks he wants, and price and profit are sufficiently an
affair of cold business to be safely refrigerated against any germs of
sentimentalism. Hori was speaking as the son of the civilization which
flowered in the feudal days. Whatever that civilization was, it was not
commercial. In that old régime the shopkeeper was only a shopkeeper,
and a discussion of ethics in trade occupied little space in the code
of honour of the nation. When Hori’s fathers stopped to buy a fan or a
bronze or a roll of brocade or sandals for their feet, or whatever it
might be that they wished, bargaining stopped as soon as they reached
the end of their patience--and they were most impatient warriors. They
might arrogantly pay what was asked, or, if their patience was too far
gone, they might lop off the head of the obdurate merchant. The last
probability had a tendency to keep prices fairly near to an equitable
level when the two-sworded men were purchasers.
It is not an appreciated trait in the modern world to have contempt
for money. Japan’s nobility, when the _Shogun_ ruled, had sincere
contempt for money. There is something dramatic, even noble, in
having such a contempt, but it must be said that it is a much
easier possession to maintain if back of it the possessors have the
inalienable ownership of their landed estates. The descendants of the
ancient orders in Japan do not own the land to-day and, examining
their position in the cold light of fact, their contempt for any
consideration of things commercial is the sign-board finger pointing
to their eventual elimination. It was the miracle of all time when
those noble families responded to the necessity of the new order,
forced upon Japan by the outside world, and gave up their feudal
right to the land to the Emperor for a more democratic distribution.
They not only surrendered their land in response to the Emperor’s
edict, but they metamorphosed their sons into statesmen to help carry
through the ideal. Their children went to foreign lands and laboured
at menial tasks to learn the ways of the _seiyo-jin_. Returning home
they recognized that the standards both of commerce and ordinary trade
had to be raised. Their encouragement to their country to proceed along
new lines was practical and effective; nevertheless few were the sons
of the nobility who themselves entered the world of commerce. Rather
was it that they encouraged a middle class to rise. Even with no longer
a perpetuation of power through landed estates, the old aristocracy
has so far continued to exert the preponderating influence in national
leadership. Can they continue to cherish a contempt of money and at
the same time withstand the power of the new commercial class which is
becoming richer every year while they are becoming poorer? Can they
prove that, even in this age, honour and loyalty need not have to go
hand in hand with money, and that poverty, second only to death, is not
the great leveller?
Curiously, indeed, the abandon which comes from contempt for wealth by
this class in Japan has had a bullish effect in one small department
of world trade. Westerners first thought of Japan as a nation so given
over to aestheticism that it used its hours in creating beautiful works
of art and then admiring them. In those early days examples of their
highest achievement in art were to be found at incredibly low prices.
For a decade or two after its ports were forced open by the foreigner,
the country was absorbed in adjusting itself to meet conditions unique
to its traditions. It was a revolution which had to endure the strain
of the uncompromising lavishness of war without the excitement of war.
In such a period “priceless” art objects had their price. Those objects
of art had been so intimately associated with the calm of the old order
in its social and religious system that when that order gave ground the
Japanese disregarded such possessions. It was then that gold lacquer
boxes were either sold for a sum equal to the mere salvage of the gold
or else melted in the furnace.
Those first years of readjustment presented the glorious days for
the foreign collector. Then came reaction. To their own bewilderment
the Japanese awoke to find that their love for the beautiful had not
been merely an appendage of the feudal system. They began to compete
for their own treasures. Prices began to advance to the mystification
of the foreign buyers. The Japanese aristocrats were entering into
collecting with that abandon which can exist only through sincere
contempt for money. Thus it is that very few fine things now come out
of Japan. Japan is poor, desperately poor, and it would seem that our
millionaires should easily outbid them, but to a mind commercially
trained, eventually there enters a consideration of price. To the son
of the old Japanese nobility there is no such consideration except the
limit of his purse. I heard the story of a young nobleman who desired
a certain Korean antique. His wealth was about six hundred thousand
_yen_. Like the Roman youth who shook dice, hazarding himself to become
the slave of his opponent should he lose, this young Japanese entered
the bidding until it was his last _yen_ which bought the antiquity. The
dilettante does not bid successfully against that spirit.
VIII MANY QUERIES
In abrupt change as we neared Shiogiri the people grew more prosperous
and more smiling. One housewife along the way was busy with a gigantic
baking in the sun. I have forgotten just what she said the small cakes
were which she was patting out so expeditiously by the hundred. Her
hands coquettishly fell into error in her routine when we wished her
good-day. She had an adventurous spirit behind the work-a-day masque of
her face. Inordinate questioners as we could generally prove ourselves,
it was she who took and kept the lead in every kind of interrogation.
She wanted to know all about the great world over the ridge of
mountains which stopped her sight. She followed this questioning with
an exposition of facts which she already knew about foreigners. She
could be quite sure, she said, that the information which she had
previously collected through gossip had in no way been adulterated
by exaggeration. The proof was that we looked exactly as she had
hitherto imagined foreigners. This comment was more interesting than
flattering. Her anecdotes about foreigners were fluently parallel to
the tales about pagans which I used to hear as a child from the cook
when she returned from her missionary circle.
I asked our hostess if she would let me take her picture. My hesitation
in asking was an unnecessary contribution to the proceedings. She was
much pleased. She patted down her hair, rubbed her cheeks with a pale
blue towel until they were rosy red, and then dusted her hands and arms
with rice powder. After that she ran into the house to reappear without
her trousers. Hori told her quickly that foreigners are greatly shocked
to see women in skirts. We appropriately pretended to be unseeing long
enough for the hasty redonning of the discarded trousers and then the
camera clicked.
Foreigners, particularly missionaries, are by no means unknown in the
quarter of Shiogiri built around the railway station. The town is a
rather important junction. At the new inn the servants who met us at
the door told us that they knew just what the foreigner likes. We in
our obstinacy refused to like what the foreigners who had come before
us had said that they liked. It was one of the least happy of all our
rests.
The service in the shiny new inn had lost the spontaneity, the
not-to-be-imitated bloom of the _yado-ya_ which makes each guest
believe that he is the most honoured. It had resolved into the
inevitable mortification which comes from trying to please two masters.
When they asked whether we wished native dishes or foreign dishes for
dinner, we kept insisting that we wished Japanese fare, but the inn
could not shake itself free from compromises and we had a native dinner
cooked after some imagined foreign style; just as we would have had
a semblance of a foreign dinner cooked in the native pots if we had
consented to act our proper parts as _seiyo-jins_. The trouble with
such in-between places is not so much that they are jerry-built or that
the ignorance of _why_ is naturally followed by an ignorance of _how_,
but that something essentially vital has been abstracted; the fire has
gone, and the result is a listless lassitude.
Across the street was the entrance to another inn, with an electric
sign at the gate and with two rows of paper lanterns hanging over the
path. While we were taking a walk and looking in at the shops Hori
picked up the information from someone that the rival establishment
to ours was half inn, half _geisha_ house, that the maids, in fact,
were country _geishas_. Every _geisha_ must have a _geisha’s_ ticket
from the government to follow her vocation of innocent amusing. All
_geishas_ are not innocent, but says the government, if they are not
they must possess another license. Through its varieties and grade of
licenses the government relies largely upon maintaining order; thus,
much of the work of the police is devoted to social regulation to
prevent disorder rather than to the otherwise necessity of curbing it
after it breaks forth. In any social system, whether the general scheme
reaches out for the ideal or not, if the cogs fit in smoothly enough to
work at all, the logical conclusion reads that the better the machine
runs the more nearly have the everyday, actual wishes of the people
been satisfied. In Japan the social regulations and the demands of the
popular moral standard appear to mesh without much friction. This does
not mean that the social problem has been solved, but it does mean that
the compromise has measurably been made with eyes open and thus some
evils have been successfully eliminated.
The _geisha_ tea-houses have their special licenses, and inns have
special licenses. While many combinations of licenses are possible, it
is contrary to custom to issue a permit to a _geisha_ house to have
all the privileges of an inn. Hori thought that there might be licenses
of that sort issued in the smaller provincial towns such as Shiogiri.
Whatever the facts were, such a combination license would seem to
be contrary to the usual intent of the regulations. The government
proceeds about its business of regulation without much sentiment, but
it does seek by its very system of labelling to secure to the innocent
the assurance of travelling through the kingdom without unwittingly
having to come into contact with vice. The traveller is supposed to be
able to go to an inn without having to inquire whether it is also a
questionable tea-house.
It might seem that the easiest way to have found out what was the
exact status of the inn across the street would have been to have
walked there and asked. Hori, however, was lukewarm for any such
investigation. I discovered in this mood of Hori’s cosmos a trait more
interesting than the entire subject of licenses. The intuition came
suddenly in a wholeness. This trait might have been called patriotic,
a patriotism so very broad that in the first inkling it seemed narrow.
He had a deep desire that we should understand Japanese ideals, and his
process of thought was that while he believed that to understand Japan
we must see everything, nevertheless at all times there should be a
certain normality in the seeing. As he explained, many Japanese customs
and modes of thought, puzzling at first, are quite comprehensible when
the entire fabric is examined. He did not wish to have certain squares
of the embroidery held up to be criticized without the offset of
properly contrasting squares. Naturally his own impetus often carried
him a little beyond that normal into looking for the bright and golden
patches and ignoring the dull ones. I think he was theoretically right,
but most of us have a childish overconfidence in our maturity and we
do not wish to have it doubted that we are capable observers even of
the abnormal. Experience has not trained us to follow, even if we
wished, an idealized instruction. Thus I am afraid that O-Owre-san and
I remained recalcitrant observers most of the time and in our own way
used our philosophical microscopes in grandiose attempt to disintegrate
the atom and conclude the infinite.