FOREIGNERS
My Tokyo relatives had arranged for me to live with them and attend
a celebrated school for girls, where English was taught by a man who
had studied in England. This I did for several months, but my brother
was not satisfied. The girls were required to give much attention
to etiquette and womanly accomplishments; and since my uncle lived
in a stately mansion, a great part of my time at home was occupied
with trifling formalities. Brother said that I was receiving the same
useless training that had been given him, and, since I was to live in
America, I must have a more practical education.
Once more my poor brother was totally misunderstood by our kindred on
account of his stubborn opposition to all advice; but finally Father's
old friend, Major Sato, suggested a mission school that his wife
had attended and which bore the reputation of being the best girls'
school for English in Japan. This pleased Brother and, since it was a
rule of the school that each pupil should have a resident guardian,
Major Sato accepted the responsibility and it was arranged that,
until the beginning of the next term, some weeks away, I should be a
member of the Sato household. Major Sato's wife was a quiet, gentle
lady, unassuming in manner, but with a hidden strength of character
most unusual. Having no daughter, she accepted me as her own and in
numberless kind ways taught me things of lasting value.
It was a five-mile walk to school from the Sato house. In very bad
weather I was sent in Mrs. Sato's jinrikisha, but, true to my dear
priest-teacher's training, I felt that it was almost a disgrace to
consider bodily comfort when on the road to learning, so I usually
walked.
Starting immediately after an early breakfast, I went down the hill and
along an old temple road until I reached the broad street passing the
palace of His Imperial Majesty. I always walked slowly there. The clear
water of the moat, reflecting every stone of the sloping wall and the
crooked pine trees above, formed a picture of calm, unhurried peace.
It was the only place I had seen in Tokyo that gave me the familiar
feeling of ceremonious dignity. I loved it. From there I came out upon
the wide, sunshiny parade ground. There was a solitary tree standing
just in the centre, where I always rested a few minutes; for beyond
was a long climb through a series of narrow, crooked, up-hill streets
crowded with children, almost every one having a baby on its back.
These city children did not have the care-free manner of the street
children of Nagaoka. They were older and graver, and although all were
busy, some playing games, some chattering in groups, and some jogging
along on errands, there was little noise except the "gata-gata" of
their wooden clogs.
At the top of the hill was my school. It stood behind a long mound-wall
topped with a thorn hedge. A big gateway opened into spacious grounds,
where, in the midst of several trees, stood a long, two-storied wooden
house with a tiled roof and glass windows divided into large squares by
strips of wood. In that building I spent four happy years, and learned
some of the most useful lessons of my life.
I liked my school from the first, but some of my experiences were very
puzzling. Had it not been for the constant sympathy and wise advice of
kind Mrs. Sato, my life might have been difficult; for I was only a
simple country girl alone in a new world, looking about me with very
eager, but very ignorant, eyes, and stubbornly judging everything by my
own unreasonably high standards of conservative opinion.
All our studies, except English and Bible, were taught by Japanese
men--not priests, but professors. Since they came only for their
classes, we saw little of them. The foreign teachers were all women.
I had seen one foreign man in Nagaoka, but, until I came to this
school, I had never seen a foreign woman. These teachers were all
young, lively, most interesting and beautiful. Their strange dress,
the tight black shoes, the fair skin untouched by the cosmetics which
we considered a necessary part of dressing, and the various colours of
hair arranged in loose coils and rolls, were suggestive of dim visions
I had had about fairyland. I admired them greatly, but their lack of
ceremony surprised me. The girls, most of whom were from Tokyo, where
living was less formal than in my old-fashioned home, made very short
bows and had most astonishing manners in talking with one another;
nevertheless, I had a certain interest in watching them. But the free
actions of the teachers with the pupils and the careless conduct of the
girls in the presence of the teachers shocked me. I had been taught
such precepts as "Step not on even the shadow of thy teacher, but walk
reverently three steps behind," and every day I saw familiar greetings
and heard informal conversations that seemed to me most undignified on
the part of the teacher and lacking in respect on the part of the pupil.
And there was another thing which troubled me greatly. Friendly
smiles and small attentions from teachers seemed to be liked by these
city girls, but I shrank indescribably from personal advances made
to myself. My rigid training held me back from being even mildly
responsive to either teachers or schoolmates, and it was a long time
before the strangeness wore away and I found myself joining with the
girls in their games and beginning to feel acquainted with my teachers.
This was helped along greatly by certain democratic rules in the
school, which, though not enforced, were encouraged, and became the
fashion. One of these was giving up the use of the honorific "Sama"
and substituting the less formal prefix, "O"; thus placing the girls
on a plane of social equality. Another, which greatly interested me,
was the universal agreement to give up arranging the hair in Japanese
style. All wore it alike, pulled back from the face and hanging in a
long braid behind. This change was a mixed pleasure. I was no longer a
martyr to the "gluing-up process" of scented oil and hot tea, but as
I was the only curly-haired girl in the school I could not escape a
certain amount of good-natured ridicule.
These things I accepted with ease, but my shoes were a real annoyance.
All my life I had been accustomed to leave my shoes at the door
whenever I stepped inside a house, but here, in the school, we wore
our sandals all the time, except in the straw-matted dormitory. I was
slow to adapt myself to this, and it was months before I conquered the
impulse to slip back my toes from the cord when I reached the door of
the class room. The girls used to wait outside, just to laugh at my
moment's hesitation.
These changes in my lifelong habits, combined with the merry ridicule
of the girls, made me feel that I was one of them, and that Etsu-bo had
slipped entirely out of the old life and was now fitted happily into
the new. Nevertheless, there were times when, aroused from deep study
by someone suddenly calling, "O Etsu San!" and, after a dazed moment
of adjusting myself to the new name, I would hurry down the hall, my
sandals sounding a noisy "clap-clap" on the floor, and my head feeling
light with the cool looseness of unbound hair, I would be vaguely
conscious, somewhere within me, of an odd fear that Etsu-bo was nowhere.
However, this feeling could never last long; for there was a dreaded
something which constantly reminded me that I was still a daughter of
Echigo. My pronunciation of certain sounds, which was different from
that of Tokyo, caused considerable amusement among the girls. Also, I
suppose I used rather stately and stilted language, which, combined
with the odd Echigo accent, must have sounded very funny to city-bred
ears. The girls were so good-natured in their mimicry that I could not
feel resentment, but it was a real trial to me, for it touched my deep
loyalty to my own province. Since I did not quite understand where
the difficulty lay, I was helpless, and gradually got in the habit of
confining my conversation to few remarks and making my sentences as
short as possible.
Mrs. Sato noticed that I was growing more and more silent, and by
tactful questioning she discovered the trouble. Then she quietly
prepared a little notebook with a diagram of the troublesome sounds
and, in the kindest way in the world, explained them to me.
Brother was there that evening, and he laughed.
"Etsu-bo," he said, looking at me rather critically, "there is not such
good reason to be shamed by the accent of an honourable province as
over your countrified dress. I must get you some different clothes."
I had already grown suspicious of the glances which my schoolmates had
been casting at the sash that Toshi had so painstakingly made me of
a piece of newly imported cloth called _a-ra-pac-ca_, so I was glad
to accept the garments which Brother brought the next day. They were
surprisingly gay, and the sash, with one side of black satin, reminded
me of the restaurant waiters of Nagaoka, but the girls all said they
had a "Tokyo air," so I wore them with a pride and satisfaction greater
than I ever had felt about clothes--except once. That was many years
before, when my father, on one of his visits to the capital, had seen
in a store foreign clothes for a child and had brought them home for
me. They were of dark blue cloth and very peculiar in shape. None of us
knew they were clothes for a little boy. Ishi dressed me and I strutted
about, cramped into a straitjacket of cold, tight, scratchy discomfort.
But the family admired me, the servants watched me with in-drawn
breaths of awe, and I was as proud as the "bird of many eyes," which is
our symbol of vanity.
The more I saw of my teachers, the more I admired them. I had lost
my feeling of repulsion at their lack of ceremony when I learned
to understand the hidden dignity that lay beneath their individual
differences, and finally it began to dawn upon me that the honourable
position of instructor was not inconsistent with being merry and gay.
My Japanese teachers had been pleasantly courteous, but always lofty
and distant in manner; while these smiling, swift-moving creatures ran
with us in the gymnasium, played battledore and shuttlecock with us,
and took turns in eating with us in our own dining room where Japanese
food was served on trays as it was on our small tables at home.
Often on Friday evenings we were allowed to arrange a Japanese
programme of entertainment. We would bring out our bright
undergarments, which are the gayest part of Japanese dress, and hang
them across the room, where they swayed in long curves suggesting the
broad-striped and crest curtains stretched by ancient warriors in
camp. Then we would borrow things of each other to make costumes for
tableaux or character sketches of celebrated people. Sometimes a daring
girl would select a teacher--but always a favourite--and pleasantly
caricature her. Occasionally we gave a pantomime of an old historic
drama, but we never acted with words. That would have been too bold and
unladylike. Even in theatres, women's parts were taken by men, for our
stage was not yet far removed from the time when actors were called
"beggars on the shore."
The teachers were always present on these occasions, laughing,
applauding, and praising our efforts as freely and happily as if they
were girls of our own age. And at the same time, they were all busy
knitting and sewing, or--most interesting of all the things in that
wonderful school--darning stockings.
But in spite of my steadily increasing contentment there was one
thing that was a constant ache to me. Neither at school nor near
the Sato home was there a shrine. Of course, there were prayers at
morning service in the school chapel, and they were very beautiful and
solemn. I always felt as if I were in a temple. But they lacked the
warm homeliness of our family gathering in Honourable Grandmother's
quiet room with the lighted candles and curling incense of the open
shrine; and the consciousness of the near-by protecting presence of the
ancestors. This I missed more than anything else. And an added grief
was that I could have no part in the service held on the twenty-ninth
of each month in memory of my father's death-day.
Before I left home Mother had given me a very sacred thing. It was my
father's death-name written on a certain kind of paper by my revered
priest-teacher. Preciously I had carried this with me wherever I went,
but after I became a boarder in the school I had a vague feeling that
for me to keep it there permanently would be disloyal to the sacred
name and also discourteous to the school; for it would be intruding
something of the old into an atmosphere which belonged only to the
new. I felt I could not keep it, and yet I could not part with it. I
was sorely puzzled.
One week-end I went to visit Mrs. Sato. It was the twenty-ninth day
of the month. We were sewing, and our cushions were drawn close to
the open doors overlooking the garden. I had dropped my work and was
thinking, my unseeing eyes gazing out at a path of stepping-stones that
ran between two little hills and around a big stone lantern before
disappearing in a group of small trees.
"What are you thinking, O Etsu San?" asked Mrs. Sato. "You look
worried."
Turning, I saw real concern in her face. Perhaps under the influence of
the school my reserve was beginning to melt. At any rate, I told her of
my trouble.
At once she was all sympathy.
"I am ashamed that we have no shrine," she said; "for we have not even
the excuse of being Christians. We are nothing. It is the fashion
lately to adopt the Western way, and we have no house shrine. But there
is one in the nun's house at the end of the garden."
"The nun's house at the end of the garden!" I repeated in great
astonishment.
She explained that the land on which they lived had once belonged to
an old temple where priestesses were in charge, which, on account of
the changing times, had grown very poor. The property had been sold to
Major Sato on condition that a little thatched hut, once belonging to a
temple servitor, should be allowed to remain as the home of a very old
and very holy nun, who wished to spend her life in this much-loved spot.
That evening we went to see her, walking over the stepping-stones
between the little hills and around the stone lantern to where, through
the foliage, I could see a small house surrounded by a low brush
fence. Faint candlelight twinkled through the paper doors, and I heard
the gentle, familiar "ton-ton, ton-ton" of the soft wooden drum and the
low chanting of Buddhist words. I bowed my head, and in the darkness
homesick tears came to my eyes.
Mrs. Sato opened the humble bamboo gate.
"Pardon. May we enter?" she called gently.
The chanting ceased. The door slid back, and a kindly looking, very
aged nun in a gray cotton robe welcomed us most cordially.
The room was simply furnished except that on one side stood a very
beautiful temple shrine of gilded lacquer. It was darkened by age and
constant incense smoke. Before the gilded Buddha lay a pile of worn
chanting-books and the small wooden drum we had heard.
The nun was gentle and sweet like my grandmother, and it was easy for
me to explain my trouble and show her the paper holding the sacred
name. Lifting it to her forehead, she took it to the shrine and
reverently placed it before the Buddha. Then we had a simple service,
such as we used to have in Honourable Grandmother's room at home, and
when I came away I left the precious paper in the safe keeping of her
shrine. After that, on the last Friday of every month, I used to visit
the holy nun and listen to her soft voice chant the service in memory
of Father's death-day.