Professor _F----_ are all ill again, and the other people not visible.
I felt more than a little ill myself, and my bicycle was so bad it had
to go into hospital. A very grey day--and in the evening torrents of
rain fell from the heavens, and I began to feel inclined to weep also,
when Mrs. _F----’s_ little daughter came round to ask me to go in to
dinner, as the weather was so depressing. Eastern life has its share of
compensations.
=July 15.=--At 11 I started my work, and took some micro-photos, and I
am also seeing about chemical analysis of nodules, covering glasses
of great size for fossil slides, printing of photos, artificial
cultivation of _ginkgo_ prothallia (and the wretches insist on going
mouldy, like my boots), collecting of gymnosperm material, and half a
hundred other things that are pulling me in as many directions as the
points of a compass for a universe of six dimensions. Why I was such an
ass as to undertake both fossil and recent work, I can’t imagine--one
must go to the wall.
Coming home late to-day (Professor _F----_ turned up about 3.30),
I passed through the road to a temple where there was a children’s
festival, along whose sides were rows of gay little stalls with all
manner of bright things to tempt the children, who throng in holiday
attire. I never saw more children and fewer elders, and all the
children were so bright, and, excepting for the crude, almost savage
decorations in their hair, so prettily dressed. The various toys and
eatables are indescribable, all brilliant and all ridiculously cheap,
from half of a farthing up to a penny or so being the normal prices.
Among the eatables were little brown germinating beans, with long white
rootlets sticking out, then there was a special stall for a kind of
clear seaweed jelly, which was squeezed into a glass cup through a
bamboo squirt.
Very decorative little stalls were arranged with brilliant seaweed and
shells, and one man did quite a lively trade cutting up small wriggling
living fish. That is one thing about eating raw fish, it should be
alive to be really good. As you may imagine, I have not yet tested it.
Then there is the man that “pops” sugary beans over a charcoal fire,
and makes a delicious noise with his shaking grid-like box. The dealer
of live red crabs attracts a crowd, and the crabs crawl up the sides
of his cage as he pours water down on their backs. Though why any one
should buy the crabs, I don’t know, for they are less than 2 inches
from toe to toe. One boy I met had a lovely toy--a great dragon-fly, 6
inches across the wings, eagerly flying attached to a red thread--but
alas! I soon saw it was real.
All the sentimental nonsense that is written about Japanese love of
animals is simply not worth the paper it is written on, and as for
their treatment of horses! In England I would go up and beat a man
myself that I only pass quickly here, with a prayer for his horse.
There was inevitably among the stalls one for second-hand odds and
ends. These I examined carefully, for it is just at such times one can
get lovely curios very cheaply. This time I got a tiny double figure,
most delicately carved, and an old carved horn comb.
=July 16.=--My “At Home” day--and therefore, of course, pouring in
torrents. When I get to the level ground below the Botanical Gardens I
found the road under 2 feet of water. Fortunately there were _kurumas_
waiting to ferry one across, and I got in one, and had a man to carry
my bicycle on his shoulders. It was serio-comic to see the houses with
2 and 3 feet of water in them, and clothes hung up out of reach of
the dirty flood. The channels between the houses are deep, and I saw
several people waist high, with a pole, feeling their way. To think
that less than six hours’ rain made that flood, and that it is in the
_city_ of Tokio, and that it happens every few weeks in the summer,
fills one with surprise. How can they put up with it? It only means
the deepening of the channel of the little stream which drains the
district--but men and women tuck up their skirts and wade a quarter
of a mile up to their knees, and those whose houses the water invades
place what they can of their goods out of its way--and probably the
last thing any one of them would do would be to grumble at the City
Council.
I bought some peaches coming back, they are now in season, and in
Tokio more than in any place I know it is a case of “gather ye roses
while ye may.” They were very big, soft, and glowing crimson, and cost
one halfpenny each. When we cut them the stones separated perfectly,
and the rich blood-red flesh stained one’s lips and fingers with its
juice. In buying fruit and vegetables the only Chinese character I know
is of great use, it is that for “Mountain,” and is used for piles of
cucumbers or trios of peaches, and I can read “one mountain cost 10
sen,” or whatever it may be that a cucumber mountain costs.
By the way, it may interest you at home to know that a pile of four
cucumbers costs 3 sen, which is exactly 3 farthings the lot. Are you
surprised that I eat boiled cucumbers with white sauce? It is at home a
vegetable we could not often indulge in, with cucumbers 1s. each, but
here, where all things are ridiculous prices, being either too dear or
too cheap, I have the power to indulge in this delicate dish.
Eggs are funny things here; they get dear in the summer, just when
the man in _Punch_ finds his hens begin to lay. Here the extreme heat
enervates the hens for a couple of months in the summer.
=July 17.=--A long solitary day’s work till the late afternoon, when
Professor _F----_ came, and we did a little “joint work”--it is
beginning to be almost farcical; however, without him I should never
have got on at first, so it is all right.
=July 18.=--Work till 2, when a party of provincial botanists came to
the laboratory, and I met once more the Mr. _O----_ who was kind to me
at Okoyama in my second tour, as funny and as amusing as ever, with
his twinkling black eyes and mobile eyebrows, that so incongruously
reminded me of “the silk-worm moth eyebrows of a woman.” At 3 I left
the party, who had, of course, to see all the sights of the Institute,
among which was the “Fossil Lab.”
=July 19.=--At 6.30 I got up to go and see the “Morning Glories,”
huge brilliant convolvulus flowers, which are specially cultivated in
a number of gardens in a part of the town near Oyeno Park. We went
to about a dozen gardens, and saw many of the flowers, though it is
still a little early in the season. The flowers are trained in pots
to grow round light bamboo frames, and are specially cultivated to
be very large. Each morning at ten o’clock all the flowers that have
bloomed that day are picked off, so as to ensure the next day’s blooms
shall not be deprived of any nourishment. The bells are very large and
extremely brilliant, blue, purple, magenta, all the possible intense
shades of each. The flowers are almost a little crude, some verging
on vulgarity in their flaring tones. Many of them are delightful, and
some so large they are said to reach 8 inches or so across a single
bloom; such huge ones I did not see, but what I saw made it possible to
believe in the bigger ones.
In some of the gardens there are many other beautiful things to be
seen, one in particular was almost like a museum of precious things.
There were open rooms in it, with the flowers arranged according to
the best artistic styles, with valuable dwarf trees and curios placed
beside them; there were three old _kakemonos_ I should have loved to
possess. In this garden also was a wonderful collection of landscape
stones, arranged as islands on flat porcelain trays filled with water.
It was indeed a case of bringing the mountain to Mahomet--perfect rocky
scenes, with gleaming waterfalls made by streaks of white quartz. The
innumerable lovely stones--from an inch to a foot high--represented
perfectly, enchantingly, all types of grand, beautiful, natural
scenery. The one I liked best was (even in Japanese things my fancy
usually hits on the most expensive) just a thousand yen in price!
An old man, apparently master of the garden, came up and talked to us,
he was curious to see a foreigner so interested in stones, and wished
to hear which I liked best, and so on. I wished I could speak fluently
with him, he was just the type of character that seems to be dying out,
and that is so rich in interest and quaint wisdom and remote culture.
His deep wrinkles and keen light eyes were so attractive. I wished I
had gold to spend in that garden, he and I would enjoy the good old
Japanese way of spending several days over selecting the treasures. He
had a pretty little piece of carved white jade among his flowers, six
inches long and an inch high--a foil for a dark foliage arrangement,
£20 it cost, he said, and he didn’t lie as to its worth.
This is the first nursery garden I have been in that seems to be the
creation of an _old_ artistic Japanese, it was indeed charming.
Afterwards we lunched in Oyeno Park, and then I went a round of calls
on my bicycle, then home to have two friends to tea, and a view of
copies of old Japanese prints: half a chapter I forced myself to write
in the evening sent me to sleep.
=July 20–24.=--An uneventful week of work, all the Institute seems
asleep, and Professor _F----_ only came an hour or two for some of the
days till Friday, when we worked very hard.
=July 25.=--The cycads in Tokio won’t flower, and it is a long way to
go to the places they are reported to grow, so that when I heard they
were to be found in Yokohama, I went off at once by an early train to
visit the various gardens where they are said to be found. There were
two female trees and a male, but they were not very healthy; still,
as the Tokio ones refuse to bloom, and as I need them, they will be
visited by my pilgrimages.
What a hideous influence is the “foreign” style at Yokohama, where red
brick warehouses and treeless streets covered with a pall of smoke
remind one of the “advance” made by modern Japan. Fortunately the
plague spots are not very extensive, one needs to go but a very little
way to find beauty again, but I shudder for the future when moss-grown
walls and green hedges shall have been ousted from the cities, as they
are from ours.
=July 26.=--I got up at 6 to go to Boshu after more cycads, as the
temple, Awajinja, is reported to have fine ones. The sail down the
coast in the little steamer was very pleasant. It took seven and a half
hours, but we passed very pretty scenery, and for some time seemed
out of sight of land in a sea dotted with innumerable white-sailed
fishing-boats. In the middle of the day many of the fishers were taking
a siesta, the square sail lowered so as to lie along the boat and form
an awning, under whose shade they slept.
When we neared the coast, it required but the smallest imagination
to picture myself in a savage country, for over the rocks ran and
scrambled dark brown men, stark naked, not even the proverbial string
of beads to adorn them. They had long bamboo poles in their hands,
which they waved like savage spears, and gave them a truly wild aspect.
After landing I bicycled about 8 miles to the temple, and found
splendid male flowers on the cycads, but no female. Last year
there were lots of female. It is too bad, this year seems to be so
unfavourable for the seeds.
I put up at a little hotel near the sea, and after six went down for
a bathe. The coast was perfect, shelving rocks sloping out to sea,
with little bathing coves and sheltering rocks, and, as I imagined,
perfect solitude. But, of course, in this out of the way place I had
been noticed, and before I was in the water a minute a crowd of women
and children had collected. Nothing I could do or say would drive
them away, and so I had to get out and dress under the fire of their
eyes and criticisms. In their long-drawn country tones they kept up a
running commentary, “Ooā--how white she is!” “Is she married?” “Why
does she wear a dress in the sea?” “How old can she be?” “Perhaps
twenty years.” There was no escape from nearly fifty people forming
a cordon but 3 feet away from me; if I had fled they would have
followed; so I dressed as leisurely and as unconcernedly as if I were
at home, and gravely buttoned the little buttons of my bodice and put
on my stockings while I returned the compliment and made a searching
examination of them.
The boy children were naked, with smooth glowing copper limbs like
sun-burned clay--as indeed they were. The girl children had usually
some floating robe of a dressing-gown nature, open to show the whole
body, or caught at the waist and turned down to leave the upper part
free. Bright-eyed they were and muddy-cheeked, but neither pretty nor
attractive. The women were naked to below the waist, the kimono being
turned down over the girdle to form a kind of double skirt. No one wore
any ornament of any kind, save a few coloured beads to tie their hair,
but few of them had even that. The men wore 3 inches of cloth round
their waists and sometimes a band round their heads made of a small
Japanese towel. All were perfectly quiet, and the remarks were made one
at a time by the older women; the children stood open-mouthed. I know
that the blue of the sea-water makes one gleam like white ivory, and as
all my clothes were white, I suppose the effect must have seemed novel
to them. The deep colour of the Japanese is chiefly due to sunburn, but
as they are exposed to it from their earliest days it gets so ingrained
that they may not realise it is an attempt at clothing on the part of a
body otherwise so unprotected.
=July 27.=--I rode back again to the starting-point of the steamer, and
got there twenty minutes too soon, and so went along the shore and had
a bathe. The steamer was very crowded and hot--I wonder who it was that
started the fiction that a Japanese crowd does not possess an odour?
Why, the detestable smell of the rancid oil in the women’s hair is
enough for one alone, without any of the other items, which include a
peculiarly virulent pickle, _daikon_, and an odour of decayed fish that
hangs over a good many in a poor crowd.
The heat is now upon us, and as I returned on my cycle through the
Tokio streets I met gentlemen with fans, schoolboys with fans,
errand-boys with big baskets and fans, _kuruma_ men with fans, even the
men dragging heavy carts fanned themselves as they struggled along. Yet
very few women had fans, only the ladies riding in _kurumas_.
=July 28.=--I had to go up to the University and to several places and
get ready for my start to-morrow. Fearfully hot.
=July 29.=--Started for Hakone. After the railway journey there was a
tram ride for several miles along the old Tokkaido road; a beautiful
avenue of Cryptomerias shaded it most of the way, and on one side
gleams of the blue sea shone between the tree trunks. After reaching
the foot of the hills there was a four-hours’ walk up the pass, by
a steep and very rough path, with beautiful views of a clear river
rushing over big rocks, and blue hills rising peak by peak behind the
trees.
My luggage was carried by the quaintest human being to whom I have
ever spoken--a dwarf. He hardly reached up to my elbow, and had bent
legs and long arms, yet he was very strong and very genial, though so
hideous. His back view was like this sketch, and his short stick, about
18 inches long, was very thick and used as a walking-stick or a support
to prop up the saddle-like luggage-holder when he rested.
Going with him quite alone through the narrow paths in the woods I felt
as though I had been transported into the Middle Ages, where damsels
were served by strange dwarfs who led them to witches’ haunts and
fairies’ palaces. I walked slowly in this dreamland, and he pattered
along, half in a run, for his legs were so short that my slow pace was
haste for him. But I need not have felt that his burden was too heavy,
I met several charcoal-burners carrying six and seven times more than
his load. It is wonderful what the natives can carry here.
We passed a mountain hamlet, a double row of houses built along a path.
There was a runnel of clear water rushing down the middle of the road,
and a tributary stream brought between each of the houses to join it.
In its building the village must be very old, and is not so “Japanese”
looking as the buildings of the plain. There seemed to be no gardens,
but in the space between the houses grew banks of blue hydrangeas,
crimson phlox, and great white lilies.
[Illustration: THE QUAINTEST BOW-LEGGED DWARF CARRIED MY LUGGAGE, AND
TROTTED ON AHEAD LIKE A BEAR.]
After a long and rather weary pull up the hills, where the road was bad
and very stony, we crested them, and looked down on the lake of Hakone,
girt with Cryptomerias.
In the evening I was housed in an old dwelling where daimios used to
sleep when they travelled along the Tokkaido--by the lake whose farther
shore was cut off by driving clouds. One could imagine it an ocean, and
cool fresh breezes made me forget the stifling heat of Tokio.
=July 30.=--We are living in the clouds; below, above, and around us
they swirl and writhe in the wind, sometimes breaking a little to show
us the edge of the lake, but then directly driving together again and
shutting us out from all but our own garden. Below us in the plain the
sun will be shining and the people sweltering, but we are cool--and
damp.
=July 31.=--Still the mist and clouds dance past and wreathe round the
trees in such enchanting wise that they make poems and pictures and
mysteries of the swift visions they are allowed to reveal.
Sad that I am ill--terrible pain in the night, so that I had to rouse
the house; and all day I have done nothing--but grin sometimes when it
returned.
August 1.--Clouds still there; and I am a little better though not
well. The household in which I am staying is unconsciously amusing. It
is to join J---- that I came; the other inmates are missionaries of
uncertain age,--very high church, with prayers night and morning, grace
before and after meat, with devout crossings and bows, till I long to
tell them they are popish idolaters, but refrain, for J----’s sake. The
first night I felt too crushed to venture a remark at meals; the book
I brought (a clever light thing by Barry Pain) was said to be “such
weak rubbish it seemed a pity to read it” by the lady who told us all
one evening that she “had read a _very_ great deal--and among it no
rubbish!”
J---- begs me not to catch her eye at meals, and I refrain. The
Pan-Anglican Congress and the Bishops attending it are the staple
articles of interest at present.
While we are not supposed to be seen in a kimono “because the Japanese
think us ridiculous in them” (with which I quite agree in one way),
the Japanese servants are brought into prayers, and I wonder whether
prayers said in Japanese by an English woman escape the ridiculous!
The village street was illuminated last night and to-night with square
paper lanterns, for to-day is a great festival at the temple by the
lake; and there will be a week’s _matsuri_, during which time the
carpenter cannot mend the boat because he wishes to play with his
children. Sunshine came for a couple of hours and we went in a boat to
the temple. The boat was beached at the end of a little path, leading
straight up from the water to the temple, by a flight of grey stone
steps, moss-grown and decked with ferns. On either side were great
Cryptomerias and bamboo, a cool deep wood in which the greyness and
the greenness were set off by huge white lilies and their visitors,
black butterflies with blue-tipped wings. Our path was solitary, but by
another meeting it trooped gaily dressed villagers, brilliant in blue,
red, and pink--sometimes whole families, father, mother, sons, and
daughters in blue kimonos all alike.
The temple service was already well begun before we got there, but
we came in time to see the presentation of the first-fruits. In the
outer part of the temple the congregation sat on the floor,--the front
rows all occupied by elderly gentlemen clad in their black _haori_
with white _mons_, behind them sat the small boys, and at the back the
young girls. By accident, or for some reason I do not understand, there
were no women at all in the temple, though a few old ones with babies
stood outside. They made no difficulty about us entering, so perhaps
it was the preparations for the feasts to follow which kept (as it so
often does at home) the women from worship. While the solemnity of
presentation went on a man with a ridiculously flat face, dressed in
semi-foreign style, played a harmonium, like the ones missionaries use
on the seashore in the summer holidays. It was only given the chance
of droning half a dozen notes with no tune audible to Western ears,
but it was solemn enough, and had a certain fitness for the occasion.
Three priests officiated, one in white and one in yellow over-dress
with baggy trousers, just like a Turkish lady’s, beneath, and one in a
lovely peach-coloured satin dress, an exquisite “Liberty” colour, and a
great contrast to the harsh yellow one. The other brought the lacquer
trays of offerings to him, with many slow reverences, and he walked up
the altar steps and presented them. The walking up the steps was quite
a feat--he turned his body sideways, at right angles to the steps, and
brought both his feet together on each step. I noticed that his toes
were moved up and down in the way prescribed in the ceremonial walk of
the _Nō_.
One of the missionary ladies amused me as we were coming away. She
dropped behind with another missionary and said in a tragical stage
whisper, “Did you see that English lady in a red-striped dress? She
was buying charms and mementoes of the priest! Oh, I _hope_ she is not
_one of them_! It is so horrible to think of----” This dear lady takes
all things very seriously, and is as devoid of humour as any one I have
met. I marked the lady in a red-striped dress, and discovered that she
was carrying a quite new scarlet Kelly & Walsh (a little phrase-book
used by all tourists). We all buy little odds and ends when we are
touristing.
=August 2.=--I feel still ill. I expect it was the relative cold and
the constant wet, for all the time the clouds were driving through us.
So I walked down the pass and went back to Tokio--a long hot journey.
Last summer I described all the varieties of undress one can study in
the railway carriage, and as the Kobe express cars are as big as big
Pullmans and crowded, you can imagine I did not lack entertainment.
=August 3.=--I went up to the University and the Bank in the morning,
and in the afternoon Professor B---- came to tea. He is as talkative
as ever, but is now thoroughly disgusted with the Japanese. Their
“futility,” their “absurd waste of time,” their “indirectness” irritate
him, as they must irritate any one; and he sees no deeper to the
things one loves, and which in some degree compensate. He proclaims,
infuriated, that all the mysticism that was ever in Japan was brought
there by Lafcadio Hearn himself.
=August 4.=--I set off with my bicycle, carrying all my luggage, for a
fossil-insect hunt in Shiobara. The train takes five hours, according
to the time-table, to go to the nearest station, and after that I had
about 16 miles to ride to the haunt of the fossil insects. Fossil
insects are shy and scarce, and I am the first to stalk them here, so
I came with a double lot of patience; and I believe I remarked half a
year ago, I have been so battered and worn in this country, where my
impetuous spirit tugs at Oriental passivity in vain, that I have now
normally the patience of two Jobs.
The train journey was remarkable only for the small quantity of
clothing the passengers in the cushioned second class (pauper as I am,
I only once travelled third) considered essential. Then the bicycle
began, and as I spun past the jolting _kurumas_ the other travellers
engaged, my heart rejoiced, for not only was I safe from their horrors,
but I should reach the hotel first and get the pick of what rooms there
might be; for it is a hot-spring place, and much frequented in August.