impression. We are sensitized to light and shade. The traveller who
goes to one of the great capitals of the world and endures as his first
impression a visit to the dregs of the underworld forever finds the
darkness of that shadow over his concept of aught else. This comparison
is indeed putting a superlative exaggeration upon Hori’s not wishing
to go to the inn-tea-house across the street. Just because I happened
to glean something of his attitude about our excursion as a whole from
that particular incident did not mean that he was attaching particular
importance to it. The subject was dropped and as we were all tired, we
went to bed, and allowed the double row of paper lanterns to swing on
in the breeze without our three figures casting shadows on the path
beneath, and the question that interested me about what sort of a
license had been issued there was never settled.
The next morning O-Owre-san and I were off at an early hour, leaving
Hori to follow on the bicycle. The heavy dew had clotted the dust
and the cobwebs were glistening. It was so cold that we fell into
our fastest gait, but perversely the town kept creating some new and
picturesque allurement to slow our stride at almost every pace. Many
of the most important houses had the dignity of villas. I suppose the
owners of those houses look upon the town’s activity as a railway
junction not as a crowning glory but as a deplorable disturbance.
Before the railroad was dreamed of, Japan’s aristocracy had cherished
that particular hillside overlooking the view of the valley with the
snow ridges beyond. The prosperous shopkeeping streets were busy even
at our early hour; boys and girls were flushing the pavements, fanning
out the water from wooden dippers; the fathers were taking down the
shutters; and the mothers were giving indiscriminate directions while
they rubbed their eyes and pulled their _kimonos_ straight. Many
greeted us with a cheery “_O-hayo_.”
At the edge of the town a temple gate stood invitingly open and we
entered the garden and crossed a diminutive bridge to an island. We
sat down to listen to the birds, admire the butterflies, and watch the
gold and silver fish bob out of the water. The silent temple, hidden
in the shadows of the trees, was built after the noble lines of the
Kyoto tradition and may have been contemporary with that era. We were
waiting for Hori. We knew that we had several intricate turnings before
we should come to our mountain road to Kama-Suwa, and we were indulging
ourselves that morning in unwonted conservatism over the possibility
of a mistake. We sat for some time waiting to hear the jangling of the
bicycle bell, but as no such sound came from the distance and as the
sun had not warmed the air, we decided to take the most attractive
turns that came, right or wrong. The street that intrigued our fancy
wound delightfully between large country houses. While there was
nothing except the trees and a certain pervading atmosphere to suggest
the English country, nevertheless there was the instinctive feeling
that within those screened, luxurious houses the sleeping families were
quality folk, a class never forgetting that their position carries
responsibilities, duties, and privileges. To meet a panting coolie
dragging a ’ricksha along an English lane would strike one not only
as strange but ridiculous. To have seen a gate open that morning in
the outskirts of Shiogiri and to have had a shining British dogcart
swing out into the road atop the heels of a cob would have seemed
neither incongruous nor absurd. That’s the reward the English achieve
from their devout worship of the correct. In any corner of the globe
when the beholder finds people getting serious about form, his mind
immediately institutes a comparison with the British standard.
[Illustration: WE DECIDED TO TAKE THE MOST ATTRACTIVE TURN, RIGHT OR
WRONG]
We walked on into a maze of hills. In the age of chaos the mountain
range had tried to turn to the south but, meeting some powerful
opposition, had been rolled back over on itself. When we came to the
meeting of a half-dozen crooked paths there was no possible guess for
our direction. We sat down in the sun for a few minutes, allowing that
much time to good fortune to send us help, if the god of luck should so
wish to aid, before attempting anything on our own initiative. We were
sent two farmers whom we almost lost through their sudden surprise upon
seeing us spring up out of the bowels of the earth. However, they had
only been startled, and they did not think we were transformed demons.
They entered into an energetic discussion of our route, insisting that
we take the trail which was the faintest of all and which seemingly
wandered off in the most irresponsible way. It first crossed a
footbridge over the stream. One of the men dug a map in the dust with
his toe. We finally parted with bows and protestations of gratitude and
they stood in the valley and directed us on our climb as long as we
could see them. Then they waved a final adieu and started on their own
path.
It was decidedly a short cut they had disclosed. When we were on a
summit we discovered Hori far below wheeling over the long valley road
and undoubtedly wondering why he did not overtake us. Probably a
’ricksha could get through those hills by keeping to the lower paths,
but neither our generation nor that of our children’s children will
find those narrow trails made over into motor highways. For generations
the tramper will have his “unspoiled” Japan. It is true that east to
west the mountains have been pierced by two lines of railway and the
foot trails sometimes cross the steel, but now that the railroads have
been built the trains running through the valleys and plunging into the
tunnels seem to be as alien to, as outside the lives of the mountain
folk, and as little considered in their existence as the invisible
messages hastening along the telegraph wires. Japan has been opened
to the world and science has brought an infinite change to the Japan
that we think of, but over those mountain paths long lines of coolies
stagger with their loads of merchandise as did they in the days before
wheels were invented. Many of the coolies are women and girls. Over the
steep miles the backs of the little girls are bent under chests which,
thrown to the ground, would be large enough for playhouses. I know
nowhere else in the world where faces do not grow stolid and stupid
under such strain, but these women and little girls often turn upon
you faces not only pretty but even strangely beautiful as they raise
their heads for a quick glance. Their wistful eyes ask unanswerable
questions. You feel as if they were eternally pondering the _why_.
I do not mean that such glimpses can bring more than a merest intuition
of a people’s attitude toward life. Such a gossamer web of intuition
is a personal speculation, but it may be not too presumptuous
for foreign eyes to make a diagnostic examination of physical
characteristics and to believe that some truth may be reached from
accumulated observations. While the Japanese nation is old in history
and civilization, and while time’s hammer has made the people as
nearly homogeneous as is synthetically possible, nevertheless their
predominant physical characteristic is that as a race they are youthful
in vitality. The coolie bends his shoulders to as heavy a load as
he can carry, but also does the coolie of Southern India. Existence
seems to offer not much more in prizes to one than the other beyond
the promise of the opportunity to labour day after day until death,
but in the Indian’s face one reads that the draught of unquestioning
acceptance of fate was drunk by his fathers ages ago. That strong arch
of the Japanese jaw means _future_. The struggle among nations for
dictatorship may end in competition’s giving the award to the people
having the best teeth.
We passed two or three lonely, terraced farms where the earth was being
coaxed and coddled not to run away, but through most of the hours of
the climb the mountain sides were a forest reservation serving as a
reservoir to save the water of the streams for the lower valleys. When
we came to a spring gushing from the hill we drank, an action which
is sternly warned against, and probably with absolute justification.
However, with a four-mile-an-hour pace under the July sun thirst
becomes positive. We mixed into the clear water, against any lurking
germs, the antidote of deciding to consider ourselves immune. After a
time our trail brought us down again into the valley, and it was not
until then that Hori caught up with us although he had been circling
around the base of the hills at full speed. He found us locked in a
bargaining struggle with a gooseberry peddler. The man was carrying his
produce in a bucket swung at one end of a yoke across his shoulders,
and his pensive little daughter was balancing the load by sitting in
the other bucket. Our first advances had unutterably confused his wits,
beginning with the logical wonderment why two pedestrians miles from
any town should wish to buy green gooseberries. As the bargaining
continued his puzzlement was relieved by a sudden lightning suspicion.
We were not buying gooseberries, we were trying to buy his daughter!
It seemed so discourteous to rob him of his hard thought out solution
that I urged O-Owre-san strongly to adopt the child and carry her off
in his rucksack. It was just then that Hori arrived. He jerked the
demon bicycle to a stop and vaulted to the ground. At first he was as
uncomprehending of why we wished to load up with green gooseberries as
had been the peddler, but that night he fully acknowledged the value of
our whim when the berries, stewed in sugar, stood before him.
I had taken the camera out of my pack but the man was most suspicious
of it. We compromised that I should stand up and show just what taking
a picture was. As soon as I made the demonstration his quick refusal
against such devil’s work followed. Quite by chance the camera had
clicked during the demonstration.
April-like showers had been tumbling upon us now and again without
disturbing the sunshine. We had one more long climb and then found
ourselves with Lake Suwa far below. The town of Kama-suwa rested on
the farther shore of the lake in a narrow line of houses. Despite
the rain flurries the day seemed very clear, but we did not have the
famous first view of O-Fuji-san which sometimes gloriously greets the
traveller when he stands, as did we, suddenly on the heights above the
lake. On those rare days the mountain rises against the blue sky, the
vista coming through a sharp gap in the granite hills, and casts its
image on the grey-blue waters. This is the view from the north. The
conventional view is from the south, but the sacred mountain lessens
never in beauty as the worshipper circles the paths about its base,
north, south, east, or west. Like a glorious and beautiful soul, its
moods change while it changes not.
Is it idolatrous to worship Fuji? Is it pagan to love its beauty, to
feel one’s spirit freed for a brief moment, forgetful of experience
tugging at one’s elbow, of caution, of fear, of expediency, of pride?
[Illustration: IS IT IDOLATROUS TO WORSHIP FUJI?]
IX THE INN AT KAMA-SUWA
The railway train with its sly befuddling through the luxury of speed
has picked the traveller’s wallet. Cooped behind a smudged window, how
can he sense the personality of the town he enters? One should stand in
isolation on the heights above a city, and then follow down some path
until within the streets one is absorbed by the throbbing life. (Hobo
Jack, _ipse dixit_. And is this not true?)
To appreciate Kama-Suwa’s surcharge of culture, prosperity, and
importance, the reader should think of a small city in Kansas (one of
those temperate, prosperous, ideal cities of which one has a vividly
exact idea without the proof or disproof from having visited it). I say
this, knowing only the standardized impression of those ideal cities,
but often a common, standardized impression may be more expeditious,
not to say more valuable, or even more truthful, to communicate a
comparison than the truth itself. Thus, by such a comparison let
Kama-Suwa be known.
The Kama-Suwa streets are filled with good citizens; the shops are
superior, the town has “as fine a school system as you could find
anywhere”; the temple is “well supported”; and there are not any very
poor people. Also the town has famous hot springs and famous views. In
the age when Nature was distributing her gifts she favoured Suwa with
excessive partiality, in anticipation, perhaps, of the future births of
to-day’s appreciative, virtuous, honest, and industrious Kama-Suwans.
We had had a good report of a certain inn in the town and, after we
reached the path around the shore, Hori went ahead on the bicycle
to prepare the way. The machine’s parts were working together with
remarkable smoothness that day, perhaps because its superfluous temper
had been cooled down through its having been left out in a short, hard
beating rain while we were taking refuge under a tree. We promised
Hori to hurry, but we did not. The mountains overhanging the lake
were responsible in the beginning for our forgetting our word, but we
augmented that beginning by finding some cause for a violent argument,
one of those tempestuous discussions which gain their heat from the
insidious conceding of small points. An obstinate, unyielding opponent
who stays put is a far more satisfactory antagonist. We were well into
the town before we discovered that we were hemmed in by houses. The
interruption which opened our eyes was a polite pulling at our sleeves.
One waylayer, out of the many who had surrounded us, had cast away in
despair the usual Japanese respect for not touching the person.
Why our entry had created such excess of excitement we could not
imagine. We had grown _blasé_ in our role of being interesting
exhibits. One may even grow so accustomed to having an interest taken
in every detail that a lack of acknowledgment of curiosity seems the
abnormal. This time mere curiosity did not appear to be the factor.
Each waylayer was trying to speak. In the confusion I could not catch
one familiar word. I knew most of the names that are sometimes cried
at foreigners in the port cities, but there was nothing hostile in the
present attack. As a sedative I tried to ask the way to the inn but my
simple question increased the babel. We had no answer that we could
understand. We had been smiling and bearing the mystery, and there was
no choice but to continue so doing. Every shopkeeper in the street was
apparently out now, helping to gesticulate if not to add words. We had
continued walking and we came to an open space. All the brown hands
simultaneously pointed in a dramatic sweep across a swampy field. On
the roof of a large, new building stood Kenjiro Hori. He had changed
into a _kimono_ which he was modestly trying to hold around him in the
freshening breeze and at the same time to wave a huge white sheet with
all the energy of his other wiry arm.
When we reached the door Hori had come down from the roof. He was very
expeditious in his instructions to the servants and our shoes were off
and we were in our room before we had a chance to ask a question.
“Now that we’re _settled_----” Hori began with a slight accent on the
“settled.” He then hesitated.
“Yes?” we inquired.
“Oh, I was just going to ask whether you wouldn’t rather dry your
clothes and take a bath before we go exploring around the town.”
As O-Owre-san had been answering that question by hanging up his wet
clothes and getting into a cotton _kimono_, it did not seem to require
argument.
“Is the bath ready?” he asked.
“It’s always ready--natural hot springs,” Hori answered.
I stacked up some cushions and stretched out in comfort along the
balcony. I sipped tea and smoked until I was sure O-Owre-san would not
be returning for something forgotten. I had been suspecting that Hori’s
nonchalance had clay feet.
“O-Hori-san,” I asked, “what did you say was the name of this inn?”
O-Owre-san was always off to the bath as soon as his feet were inside
an inn. This time I had marvelled that the habit was so strong that
he could put off attempting to solve the mystery of our reception,
especially as Hori’s naïve casualness suggested that he knew the kernel
of the mystery.
“It’s a new inn. Very good, don’t you think?” Hori answered my question.
“What is the secret?” I demanded. It was evidently very dark and if the
facts had to be modified in the telling, I thought that perhaps they
might come forth less modified for me than for O-Owre-san. The other
inn had been one of our few planned quests. “Why didn’t we go to the
other inn?”
It may have been most unfair to use such a direct method of
questioning, especially the distressing, bee-line “hurry-up.” I was
trading upon my being a foreigner from a land without the tradition of
the proper ceremony of questions.
Yes, Hori had visited the inn of which we had had the superior report.
It was a most superior place. He paused. Then he vouchsafed the
information that it was expensive. That was indeed a serious objection.
He thought that the bill there might have come to three, four, or even
five _yen_ a day. That explanation should have been final enough for
me. It was, in fact. I would have accepted it. I merely happened to ask
whether he had looked at the rooms.
“Yes,” said he, and then he suddenly threw discretion away. “And what
do you think? _They had rocking-chairs and American bureaus in the
rooms._”
Poor Hori! He had been having to listen to us inveigh in American
exaggeration against the infamous inroads of modernity. I cannot
imagine that he took our chants of hatred against innovations actually
at their word value, but he had had much reason to become weary and
bored from their repetition. He implied that his reason for leaving the
other inn was for our aesthetic protection, but be it said he was wise
in his own protection. There is not much doubt that if we had reached
the presence of those rooms there would have been another merry-to-do
of wild epithets against machine-made American export furniture
bespoiling native simplicity for him to listen to. The tourist animal
is truly a snobbish beast, and natives should occasionally be given
dispensations for outright murder.
Once I was chatting over tall iced lemon squashes with a Japanese
physician. In a surge of confidence, and also in burning curiosity, he
told me about his trip to America. He had learned his English in Japan.
While visiting a family whom he had known in his homeland, he met one
of America’s daughters who asked him to call. He was somewhat startled
by the invitation but he remembered that he was not in the Orient. He
described the conversation to me in awed phrases.
“She had a box of chocolates. ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘I am mad about
chocolates, simply crazy.’
“I thought,” he explained, “that she was confessing to a craving
appetite and wished my assistance and advice. I imagined, then, that
I knew the reason of my invitation. I was a physician from a foreign
land and, as I must soon return to my own country, her secret with
me would be as good as buried. I explained that I could do nothing
for her without the full confidence of her father and mother. She
took this natural suggestion as if it were meant to be humorous. When
she had stopped laughing she told me that the Japanese are perfect
dears and horribly cute. Then she asked me if I didn’t love--what was
it she asked me that I loved? I forget. You see we Japanese have few
words to express the affections and use those sparingly. And now,” he
leaned eagerly forward, “I want to ask you whether that young lady was
charming?”
I tried to evade by asking him what was his idea of charming.
“That’s just what I don’t know. I was told that she was beautiful and
charming. I could see that she was beautiful. Then I asked people what
charming meant. They all told me something different.”
“You can’t define charming,” I hazarded. “It’s something different
from a mere attribute. Foreigners always say that Japanese women are
charming.”
“Then she wasn’t charming,” he decided judicially.
Several times I have been so rash as to try to explain to men of
other nations how much an ordinary American conversation should be
discounted. I fear that they did not accept my formula but held to the
extremes, either continuing to take us literally or not believing us at
all.
After Hori had discovered the untoward action of the first inn in
adding rocking-chairs and bureaus to its equipment, he hurried down the
street and warned the shopkeepers whom he could find to stop any two
wandering _seiyo-jins_ and direct their attention to the new inn. They
must have been impressed that the affair was one of moment.
We heard O-Owre-san, the feared critic of varnished, golden-oak-pine
bureaus, coming up the stairs. A striped, blue _kimono_ made in
Japanese standard length somehow does not suggest dignity when worn by
a more than six-foot foreigner with a beard, but O-Owre-san came so
solemnly across the mats in his bare feet that his ominous repression
created its own aura of dignity. Something had happened, but he was not
inviting questions.
Hori started in turn for his bath. I remained on my cushions. I sat
and sipped my tea. O-Owre-san sat and sipped his tea. Hori with his
secret of the rocking-chair inn had not been impregnable to questions.
O-Owre-san was too dangerously calm. I waited.
He began by alluding to the excellence of the rooms we had. They were
excellent, the best in the inn, being a part of an extra cupola story
and giving a splendid view across the lake. Then he restated the known
fact that the baths were served by natural hot springs. “The water
comes pouring in through bamboo pipes,” he said.
“Well,” I spoke for the first time, “and then what happened?”
The honourable _seiyo-jin_ drank another cup of tea.
“I got into the wrong bath,” he said.
It was news that there could be any such thing as a wrong bath in a
Japanese inn.
“You see,” he continued, “the baths for the guests of the inn are
just under us, but I didn’t notice them when I walked by. When I got
to the other end of the hall I found a large bath room. Those are
the public baths, but I didn’t know that then. There were several
big tubs with the water tumbling in all the time from the pipes.
There was nobody else there nor a sign of anybody. I made myself at
home and was floating in one of the tubs when suddenly I heard a
monstrous chattering out in the hall and then right into the room
walked twenty girls. Maybe there were twice that many. I don’t know.
Well, I’ve called upon my practical philosophy to recognize the
extenuating virtues of--ah--the natural simplicity of the traditional
exposure of the Japanese bath--so to speak--its insecurity--as it
were--but--but--h’m--yes--but this was too much.”
I shouted.
He glared.
“I was just thinking----” I tried to say.
“I can see you are just thinking,” he interrupted, “and I know what you
are thinking. You are thinking what a great story this will be to tell
when we get home. Believe me, if you ever do----”
“How could you ever imagine such treachery?” I wedged in.
“Well, and then what was I to do?” he demanded. “I couldn’t jump out
and run and I couldn’t stay in that boiling water until I was cooked.
I relied upon some instinct of feminine chivalry to give me a chance,
but----”
I tried to be sympathetically consoling. “A very, very trying
situation.”
“Huh! They were all stepping in and they just naturally crowded me out.
Of course they paid absolutely no attention----”
Hori’s step was on the stair. He came in and sat down and poured a cup
of tea. Then he stretched out on his back and gazed innocently at the
ceiling. “O-Doctor-san,” he said, “you’ve settled a disputed point in
Kama-Suwa and everybody’s much obliged.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, there’s been an argument for a long time whether _seiyo-jins_
are white all over----”
X THE GUEST OF THE OTHER TOWER ROOM
Our tower wing of the inn at Kama-Suwa had required no architectural
ingenuity in its design, but I do not remember ever having seen a
Japanese building planned in the same way. The walls were open on the
four sides and there was no _takemono_ corner. The only approach was
by a flight of stairs which belonged to it exclusively. We thus had an
isolation most unusual. It mattered not the length and breadth of the
space given us, our few possessions were always scattered over all the
space available.
We heard steps on the stair and our hostess and a maid came up to us
and bowed many times and brought many apologies. Half our space was to
be taken away. This was only following the very equitable custom that
a guest may have all of the extension of his floor until some other
traveller must be accommodated, and then, presto! there are two rooms
where one was before.