called Uji. We had that tea after a lecture in the city hall. It is
strong to the danger point, and has a flavor unlike anything else. An
acid like lemon and no bitter at all; leaves a smooth pleasant taste
something like dry sherry, and is generally delicious. It costs at least
ten yen a pound here, but I shall get some to take home. Very good
ordinary tea here costs fifteen sen a pound, seven and a half cents.
KYOTO, April 22.
To-day we were taken visiting schools--first a Boys' High school, then
an elementary school which had an American flag along with the Japanese
over the door in our honor, and which was awfully nice. The children did
lots of cunning stunts for us, one little kid beating the Japanese drum
for their rhythmic marching, which they are good at. Then a textile
school for textile design, weaving and dyeing, which for some
unexplained reason was bad and poorly attended. The machines were old,
German and out of date. In fact, it all looked as if it had been worked
off on them second hand by some Germans who didn't want them ever to
amount to anything. All of the best work here is still done by hand,
although they have good electric power developed from the water they
have. Then we went to a Girls' High School, combined with a college for
girls, preparing teachers for the regular high schools. The elite of
Kyoto go there, and it, like the other schools, was very nice and good.
They specialize in domestic science and we ate a fine Japanese lunch
they had prepared. All this, like most our other trips, in the mayor's
car.
This is really a country where the scholar is looked up to and not down
upon. In virtue of having lectured at the Imperial University I am "Your
Excellency" officially. Osaka city does not wish to be outdone by Kyoto,
so I am to lecture to the teachers there, and the city is to provide for
us at the hotel, and the mayor to give us a banquet there. Of course,
Mamma is the only woman present, as it would not occur to them to invite
their own wives. Foreign women are expected, however, to do strange
things, and they are very polite to them. The geisha women seem to be
about the only ones who have an all-around education--not of the book
type, but in the sense of knowing about things and being able and
willing to talk--and I think the men go to these banquets and talk to
them because they are tired of their too obeyful wives and their
overdocility. One woman at the banquet we went to was known as the
Singing Butterfly, and has the name Constitution as a nickname, because
of her supposed interest in politics, especially on the liberal side.
When we heard that she had been in prison because of her interest in
politics, we sat up and took notice, but it turned out that it was for
bribing voters to vote for a man she was interested in. But she is a
local celebrity all right, and her stay in prison had evidently added to
her interest and prestige.
April 28, on the _Kumano Maru_.
En Route to China.
The lecture yesterday was a success, going off rather better than the
others. It was in a school hall and they are always beautiful rooms. I
was entertained during its two hours of duration by watching a splendid
pink azalea and a pine on either side of the desk. They are each about
five feet high and of the most lovely shape, and there were about a
thousand blossoms on this azalea. We know but very little about dwarfed
trees and shrubs in our country as the specimens we see are very small
ones and inferior in shape and interest to those we see here. They are
everywhere, each little shop has in the midst of its mess of second hand
or cheap new things a charming little peach or plum, pine, azalea, or
redberry. In a hot house we saw a tree that had two plums on it, and we
frequently see tiny orange trees covered with fruit. The white peach is
one of the loveliest things in the world, double blossoms like roses,
and is entirely artificially produced.
The smoke has lifted and we are seeing the hills of the shore very well.
On the other side of the ship we see the Island of Awaji, so we are now
between the two islands and it is much like the Thousand Islands in the
St. Lawrence River. I suppose this is the entrance to the Inland Sea. It
is partly clear and the land is so close it is easy to see. There are
many Japanese ladies on board with their husbands and they seem to enjoy
it. With their faces white with rice powder and their purple color in
their haoris they are pretty, and especially here where they do not feel
the necessity of covering the obi with haori so they look less
humpbacked than in fashionable Tokyo. Their footwear I love, only, of
course, it holds them still more to the conventional position as it
leaves the legs bare above the ankle, and they must walk so as not to
show that as well as not to disturb the lap of the kimona down the
front. But the tabi feel like bare feet on account of the division of
the big toe from the other toes, and as soon as you put them on you feel
as if the toes were really made to use, and the foot clings as you walk.
I am taking a set of cotton kimonas to China so as to have them to wear
in my room with the tabi on hot days. Without the obi the dress becomes
quite cool if made of thin material. The thin silk, which is practically
transparent, is one of the most beautiful things in Japanese weaving, as
it is still firm enough to keep its shape and wear for years.
The dress of the geisha is very like the ceremonial dress of the lady,
especially when black with decorations at the bottom. The little girls
are very touching, many of them are not over eight or nine, and they
wear the elaborate dress and coiffure which is theirs for the part. In
cherry season it is bright peacock blue. In Osaka the decorations were
butterflies in colors and gold. The samisen players are older and they
dress more plainly in black or plain blue, the drum players are young
and gay colored. The teeth of the little girls are so bad that I asked
if they blackened them. The dances are lovely poetical things with
themes of the most delicate subjects. There is never anything coarse
either in the thought or the execution. They say the geisha is the most
unselfish person in the world. Perhaps that might be said for all the
women. They do their hard work and keep themselves out of sight to a
degree that shows the pain there must be in it. When I was asked what I
thought of them I answered that I thought Japanese women were not
appreciated for what they did. They said, "No, that is not so, we do not
show it but we appreciate them in our hearts."
SHANGHAI, May 1.
We have slept one night in China, but we haven't any first impressions,
because China hasn't revealed itself to our eyes as yet. We compared
Shanghai to Detroit, Michigan, and except that there is less coal smoke,
the description hits it off. This is said to be literally an
international city, but I haven't learned yet just what the technique
is; every country seems to have its own post office though, and its own
front-door yard, and when we were given a little auto ride yesterday, we
found that the car couldn't go into Chinatown because it had no license
for that district.
I shall be interested to find out whether in this really old country
they talk about "ages eternal" as freely as they do in Japan; the
authentic history of the latter begins about 500 A.D., their mythical
history 500 B.C., but still it is a country which has endured during
myriads of ages. In spite of the fact that they kept the emperors shut
up for a thousand years, and killed them off and changed them about with
great ease and complacency, the children are all taught, and they repeat
in books for foreigners, that the rule of Japan has been absolutely
unbroken. Of course, they get to believing these things themselves, not
exactly intellectually but emotionally and practically, and it would be
worth any teacher's position for him to question any of their patriotic
legends in print. However, they say that in their oral lectures, the
professors of history of the universities criticise these legends. In
the higher elementary school we visited in Osaka, we saw five classes in
history and ethics, in each of which the Emperor was under
discussion--sometimes _the_ Emperor and what he had done for the
country, and sometimes _an_ Emperor in particular. Apparently this
religion has been somewhat of a necessity, as the country was so divided
and split up, they had practically nothing else to unite on--the Emperor
became a kind of symbol of united and modern Japan. But this worship is
going to be an Old Man of the Sea on their backs. They say the
elementary school teachers are about the most fanatical patriots of the
country. More than one has been burned or allowed the children to be
burned while he rescued the portrait of the Emperor when there was a
fire. They must take it out in patriotism in lieu of salary; they don't
get a living wage, now that the cost of living has gone up.
SHANGHAI, May 2.
We have been taken in hand by a reception committee of several Chinese
gentlemen, mostly returned American students. The "returned student" is
a definite category here, and if and when China gets on its feet, the
American university will have a fair share of the glory to its credit.
They took us to see a Chinese cotton spinning and weaving factory. There
is not even the pretense at labor laws here that there is in Japan.
Children six years of age are employed, not many though, and the wages
of the operatives in the spinning department, mainly women, is thirty
cents a day, at the highest thirty-two cents Mex. In the weaving
department they have piece work and get up to forty cents.
I will tell you something of what we had to eat in one small afternoon.
First, lunch of all courses here at the hotel. Then we went to the
newspaper where we had tea and cake at about four. From there to the
house of the daughter of a leading statesman of the Manchus, she being a
lady of small feet and ten children, who has offered a prize for the
best essay on the ways to stop concubinage, which they call the whole
system of plural marriage. They say it is quite unchanged among the
rich. There we were given a tea of a rare sort, unknown in our
experience. Two kinds of meat pies which are made in the form of little
cakes and quite peculiar in taste, delicious; also cake. Then after we
went to the restaurant where we were to have dinner. First we got into
the wrong hotel and there, while we were waiting, they gave us tea. We
were struck by the fact that they asked for nothing when we left, and
thanked us for coming to the wrong place. Then we went to the right
hotel across the street from the first. They called it the corner of
Broadway and 42nd Street, and it is that. There is a big roof garden
besides the hotels, and they are both run by the Department stores which
have their places underneath. It may be a sad commentary on the human
character that one can eat more than one can remember, but that is what
we did last night. First of all we went into the room which was all
Chinese furniture; very small round table in the middle and the rows of
stools along one side for the singing girls, who do not dance here.
Those stools were not used, as all the young Chinese are ashamed of that
institution and want to get rid of it. On a side table were almonds
shelled, nice little ones, different from ours and very sweet. Beside
them were dried watermelon seeds which were hard to crack and so I did
not taste them. All the Chinese nibbled them with relish. Two ladies
came, both of them had been in New York to study. All these people speak
and understand English in earnest. On the table were little pieces of
sliced ham, the famous preserved eggs which taste like hard-boiled eggs
and look like dark-colored jelly, and little dishes of sweets, shrimps,
etc. To these we helped ourselves with the chop sticks, though they
insisted on giving us little plates on which they spooned out some of
each. Then followed such a feast as we had never experienced, the boys
taking off one dish after another and replacing them with others in the
center of the table, to which we helped ourselves. There was no special
attempt at display of fine dishes such as you might have expected with
such cooking and such expense, and such as would have happened in Japan.
We had chicken and duck and pigeon and veal and pigeon eggs and soup and
fish and little oysters that grow in the ground (very delicious and
delicate) and nice little vegetables and bamboo sprouts mixed in with
the others, and we had shrimps cooked, and shark's fin and bird's nest
(this has no taste at all and is a sort of very delicate soup, but costs
a fortune and that is its real reason for being). It is gelatine which
almost all dissolves in the cooking. We had many more things than these,
and the boy in a dirty white coat and an old cap on his head passing
round the hot perfumed wet towels every few courses, and for dessert we
had little cakes made of bean paste filled up with almond paste and
other sweets, all very elaborately made, and works of art to look at,
but with too little taste to appeal much to us; then we had fruits,
bananas and apples and pears, cut up in pieces, each with a toothpick in
it so it can be eaten easily. Then we had a soup made of fish's stomach,
or air sac. Then we had a pudding of the most delicious sort imaginable,
made of a mold of rice filled in with eight different symbolic things
that I don't know anything about, but they don't cut much part in the
taste. In serving this dish we were first given a little bowl half full
of a sauce thickened and looking like a milk sauce. It was really made
of powdered almonds. Into this you put the pudding, and it is so good
that I regretted all that had gone before, and I am going to learn how
to make it.
SHANGHAI, May 3.
Some one told us when we were on the boat that the Japanese cared
everything for what people thought of them, and the Chinese cared
nothing. Making comparisons is a favorite, if dangerous, indoor sport.
The Chinese are noisy, not to say boisterous, easy-going and dirty--and
quite human in general effect. They are much bigger than the Japanese,
and frequently very handsome from any point of view. The most surprising
thing is the number of those who look not merely intelligent but
intellectual among the laborers, such as some of the hotel waiters and
attendants. Our waiter is a rather feminine, ultra refined type, and
might be a poet. I noticed quite a number of the same Latin quarter
Paris type of artists among the teachers whom I addressed to-day. The
Japanese impressions are gradually sinking into perspective with
distance, and it is easy to see that the same qualities that make them
admirable are also the ones that irritate you. That they should have
made what they have out of that little and mountainous island is one of
the wonders of the world, but everything in themselves is a little
overmade, there seems to be a rule for everything, and admiring their
artistic effects one also sees how near art and the artificial are
together. So it is something of a relaxation to get among the easy-going
once more. Their slouchiness, however, will in the end get on one's
nerves quite as much as the "eternal" attention of the Japanese. One
more generalization borrowed from one of our Chinese friends here, and
I'm done. "The East economizes space and the West time"--that also is
much truer than most epigrams.
SHANGHAI, May 4.
I have seen a Chinese lady, small feet and all. We took dinner with her.
She did not come into the room until after dinner was over, having been
in the kitchen cooking it while the servant brought things in. She has
one of those placid faces which are round and plump and quite beautiful
in a way, a pretty complexion, and of course a slow, rocking, hobbling
way of walking. Yesterday after the lecture we went there again and she
showed us all over her flat. It is well kept, with not many conveniences
from our point of view, but I think it is regarded as quite modern here.
It has a staircase, and a little roof where they dry clothes or sit. The
bath is a tin tub, warmed by carrying water from the little stove like
our little laundry stoves. It has an outlet pipe to the ground, no
sewers as usual in the Orient. The kitchen has a little stove of iron
set up on boxes and they burn small pieces of wood. It has three
compartments, two big shallow iron pots for roasting and boiling and a
deep one in the middle for keeping the hot water for tea. Only two fires
are needed as the heat from the two end fires does for the water in the
middle.
There is no doubt that the Chinese are a sociable people if given a
chance. Of course, men like the husband of our hostess are the extreme
of ability and advanced ideas here. But it is remarkable that he shows
us things as they are. When we visited schools he did not arrange in
advance because he did not want us to see a fixed up program. When we
went out to lunch he took us to a Chinese place where no foreigners ever
go.
Yesterday we went to a department store to buy some gloves and garters.
Gloves were Keyser's, imported, so were the stockings, so were the
garters and suspenders, etc. The gloves were from $1 to $1.60 and the
suspenders were a dollar. I bought some silk, sixteen inches wide, for
fifty cents a yard. The store was messy and the floors dirty, but it is
a popular place for the Chinese. We paid three dollars for a book marked
1sh. 6p. in England, and everything here is like that. Gloves and
stockings are made in Japan, and good and cheap there; fine silken
stockings $1.60 a pair. But still the Chinese do not buy of them, but
from America. We have visited a cotton mill. The Chinese cotton and silk
are now inferior, owing to lack of scientific production and of proper
care of seed. In weaving, they sometimes mix their cotton with ours.
SHANGHAI, Monday, May 12.
The Peking tempest seems to have subsided for the present, the
Chancellor still holding the fort, and the students being released. The
subsidized press said this was due in part to the request of the
Japanese that the school-boy pranks be looked upon indulgently.
According to the papers, the Japanese boycott is spreading, but the ones
we see doubt if the people will hold out long enough--meanwhile Japanese
money is refused here.
The East is an example of what masculine civilization can be and do. The
trouble I should say is that the discussions have been confined to the
subjection of the women as if that were a thing affecting the women
only. It is my conviction that not merely the domestic and educational
backwardness of China, but the increasing physical degeneration and the
universal political corruption and lack of public spirit, which make
China such an easy mark, is the result of the condition of women. There
is the same corruption in Japan only it is organized; there seems to be
an alliance between two groups of big capitalists and the two leading
political "parties." There the very great public spirit is nationalistic
rather than social, that is, it is patriotism rather than public spirit
as we understand it. So while Japan is strong where China is weak, there
are corresponding defects there because of the submission of women--and
the time will come when the hidden weakness will break Japan down. Here
are two items from the Chinese side. A missionary spoke to Christian
Chinese about spending the time Sunday, making chiefly the point that it
was a good time for family reunions and family readings, conversation
and the like. One of them said that they would be bored to death if they
had to spend the whole day with their wives. Then we are told that the
rich women--who have of course much less liberty in getting out than the
poorer class women--spend their time among themselves gambling. It is
universally believed that the attempt to support a number of wives
extravagantly is one of the chief sources of political corruption. On
the other hand, at one of the political protest meetings in Peking a
committee of twelve was appointed to go to the officials and four of
them were women. In Japan women are forbidden to attend any meetings
where politics are discussed, and the law is strictly enforced. There
are many more Chinese women studying in America than there are
Japanese--in part, perhaps, because of the lack of higher schools for
girls here, but also because they don't have to give up marriage here
when they get an education--in fact we are told they are in especial
demand not only among the men who have studied abroad, but among the
millionaires. Certainly the educated ones here are much more advanced on
the woman question than in Japan.
"You never can tell" is the coat of arms of China. The Chancellor of the
University was forced out on the evening of the eighth by the cabinet,
practically under threat of assassination; also soldiers (bandits) were
brought into the city and the University surrounded, so to save the
University rather than himself, he left--nobody knows where. The release
of the students was sent out by telegraph, but they refused to allow
this to become known. It seems this Chancellor was more the intellectual
leader of the liberals than I had realized, and the government had
become really afraid of him. He has only been there two years, and
before that the students had never demonstrated politically and now they
are the leaders of the new movement. So of course the government will
put in a reactionary, and the students will leave and all the honest
teachers resign. Perhaps the students will go on strike all over China.
But you never can tell.
Tuesday A.M.
Ex-President Sun Yat Sen is a philosopher, as I found out last night
during dinner with him. He has written a book, to be published soon,
saying that the weakness of the Chinese is due to their acceptance of
the statement of an old philosopher, "To know is easy, to act is
difficult." Consequently they did not like to act and thought it was
possible to get a complete theoretical understanding, while the strength
of the Japanese was that they acted even in ignorance and went ahead and
learned by their mistakes; the Chinese were paralyzed by fear of making
a mistake in action. So he has written a book to prove to his people
that action is really easier than knowledge.
The American sentiment here hopes that the Senate will reject the treaty
because it virtually completes the turning over of China to Japan. I
will only mention two things said in the conversation. Japan already has
more troops, namely twenty-three divisions, under arms in China than she
has in Japan, Japanese officered Chinese, and her possession of
Manchurian China is already complete. They have lent China two hundred
millions to be used in developing this army and extending it. They
offered China, according to the conversation at dinner, to lend her two
million a month for twenty years for military purposes. Japan figured
the war would last till '21 or '22, and had proposed an offensive and
defensive alliance to Germany, Japan to supply its trained Chinese army,
and Germany to turn over to Japan the Allies' concessions and colonies
in China. As an evidence of good faith, Germany had already offered to
Japan its own Chinese territory, and it was the communication of this
fact to Great Britain which induced the latter to sign the secret pact
agreeing to turn over German possessions to Japan, when the peace was
made. These men are not jingoists; they think they know what they are
talking about, and they have good sources of knowledge. Some of these
statements are known facts--like the size of the army and the two
hundred million loan--but of course I can't guarantee them. But I'm
coming to the opinion that it might be well worth while to reject the
treaty on the ground that it involved the recognition of secret treaties
and secret diplomacy. On the other hand, a genuine League of
Nations--one with some vigor--is the only salvation I can see of the
whole Eastern situation, and it is infinitely more serious than we
realize at home. If things drift on five or ten years more, the world
will have a China under Japanese military domination--barring two
things--Japan will collapse in the meantime under the strain, or Asia
will be completely Bolshevikized, which I think is about fifty-fifty
with a Japanized-Militarized China. European diplomacy here, which of
course dominates America, is completely futile. England does everything
with reference to India, and they all temporize and drift and take what
are called optimistic long-run views and quarrel among themselves, and
Japan alone knows what it wants and comes after it.