PART II

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MYSTERIOUS JAPAN

[Illustration: Calligraphy that translates as "Mysterious Japan"]

* * * * * *

_Books by Julian Street_

ABROAD AT HOME

AFTER THIRTY

AMERICAN ADVENTURES

THE NEED OF CHANGE

THE MOST INTERESTING AMERICAN

(_A close-range study of Theodore Roosevelt_)

PARIS à LA CARTE

SHIP-BORED

WELCOME TO OUR CITY

THE GOLDFISH

(_For Children_)

SUNBEAMS, INC.

MYSTERIOUS JAPAN

* * * * * *

[Illustration: Photo. by Marguerite Leonard

At the top of the temple steps, above Lake Biwa]

MYSTERIOUS JAPAN

by

JULIAN STREET

[Illustration: Publisher's logo]

With Illustrations from Photographs

by the Author and Others

Garden City, N. Y., and Toronto

Doubleday, Page & Company

1921

Copyright, 1921, by

Julian Street

All Rights Reserved, Including That of Translation

into Foreign Languages, Including the Scandinavian

Copyright, 1920, 1921, by McClure's Magazine, Incorporated

All Rights Reserved

Copyright, 1921, by the Century Company, the Outlook Company,

P. F. Collier & Son Company, and the New York Times

Printed at Garden City, N. Y., U. S. A.

First Edition

TO

FRANK A. VANDERLIP

"_To see once is better than

to hear a hundred times_"

--MENCIUS

CONTENTS

PART I

CHAPTER PAGE

I. DISCUSSING CURIOUS TRAITS OF THE PACIFIC OCEAN . . 1

II. THE ROAD TO TOKYO . . . . . . . . . 16

III. THE CAPITAL AND COSTUMES . . . . . . . 26

IV. EARTHQUAKES AND BURGLARS . . . . . . . 38

V. INVERSIONS AND THE ORIENTAL MIND . . . . . 48

VI. THE ISLES OF COMPLEXITIES . . . . . . . 63

PART II

VII. THE GENTLEST OF THE GENTLER SEX . . . . . 81

VIII. MORE ABOUT WOMEN . . . . . . . . . 93

IX. THE NATIONAL SPORT . . . . . . . . 103

X. ON SAKé AND ITS EFFECTS . . . . . . . 115

XI. DIET AND DANCING . . . . . . . . . 127

XII. GEISHA PARTIES . . . . . . . . . 137

XIII. THE NIGHTLESS CITY . . . . . . . . 154

XIV. IN A GARDEN . . . . . . . . . . 163

XV. AN EXPLOSIVE PHILOSOPHER . . . . . . . 172

PART III

XVI. GRAND OLD MEN . . . . . . . . . . 183

XVII. RECOLLECTIONS OF VISCOUNT SHIBUSAWA . . . . 201

XVIII. VISCOUNT KANEKO'S MEMORIES OF ROOSEVELT . . . 212

XIX. ARE THE JAPANESE EFFICIENT? . . . . . . 228

XX. JAPANESE-AMERICAN RELATIONS . . . . . . 242

XXI. COURTESY AND DIPLOMACY . . . . . . . 258

PART IV

XXII. A RURAL RAILROAD . . . . . . . . . 273

XXIII. ADVENTURES IN A BATH AT KAMOGAWA . . . . . 284

XXIV. A NIGHT AT AN INN . . . . . . . . . 295

XXV. PRETTY GEN TAJIMA . . . . . . . . . 306

XXVI. SUPERSTITIONS AND YUKI'S EYES . . . . . 315

XXVII. "JAPANNED ENGLISH" AND ART . . . . . . 321

XXVIII. SAYONARA . . . . . . . . . . . 335

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

At the top of the temple steps, above Lake Biwa _Frontispiece_

FACING PAGE

Peasants of the region speak of Fuji as _O Yama_,

the "Honourable Mountain" . . . . . . . . 6

With his drum and his monkey he is Japan's

nearest equivalent for our old-style organ-grinder . . 22

The Japanese is not a slave to his possessions . . . 38

Sawing and planing are accomplished with a pulling instead

of a driving motion . . . . . . . . . 38

The bath of the proletariat consists of a large barrel . 54

While Yuki's fortune was being told I photographed her . 70

You cannot understand Japan without understanding the

Japanese woman . . . . . . . . . . . 86

A laundry on the river's brim . . . . . . . 94

Digging clams at low-tide in Tokyo Bay . . . . . 94

Cocoons--Five thousand silk worms make one kimono . . 118

No one without a sweet nature could smile the smile of one

of these tea-house maids . . . . . . . . 118

Family luncheon à la Japonaise . . . . . . . 134

Kimi-chiyo was at almost every Japanese-style party

I attended . . . . . . . . . . . . 154

It takes two hours to do a geisha's hair . . . . 162

Mrs. Charles Burnett in a 15th-Century Japanese

Court costume . . . . . . . . . . . 170

A teahouse garden, Tokyo . . . . . . . . 178

Viscount Shibusawa . . . . . . . . . . 190

Viscount Kentaro Kaneko . . . . . . . . . 190

The film was not large enough to hold the family of this

youngish fisherman at Nabuto . . . . . . . 214

Tai-no-ura . . . . . . . . . . . . 230

The theatre street in Kyoto is one of the most interesting

highways in the world . . . . . . . . . 246

The gates of the Tanjo-ji temple . . . . . . 246

Nor could a _grande dame_ in an opera box have exhibited

more aplomb . . . . . . . . . . . . 262

Pretty Gen was between the shafts . . . . . . 278

The middle-aged coolie hurriedly seated him on the bank . 294

Asakusa, the great popular temple of Tokyo . . . . 310

Saki, the housekeeper, obligingly posed for me . . . 326

PART I

MYSTERIOUS JAPAN

Far lie the Isles of Mystery,

With never a port between;

Green on the yellow of Asia's breast,

Like a necklace of tourmaline.

CHAPTER I

_A Day Goes Overboard--A Sunday Schism--A Desert Island--Water,

Water Everywhere--Men with Tails--Anecdotes of the Emperor of

Korea--Korean Reforms--Cured by Brigands--The Man who Went to

Florida--The Black Current--White Cliffs and Coloured

Sails--Fuji Ahoy!_

A peculiar ocean, the Pacific. A large and lonely ocean with few ships

and many rutty spots that need mending. Ploughing westward over its

restless surface for a week, you come to the place where East meets West

with a bump that dislocates the calendar. It is as though a date-pad in

your hand were knocked to pieces and the days distributed about the

deck. You pick them up and reassemble them, but one is missing. Poor

little lost day! It became entangled with the 180th meridian and was

dragged overboard never to be seen again.

With us, aboard the admirable _Kashima Maru_, the lost day happened to

be Sunday, which caused a schism on the ship. In the smokeroom, where

poker was a daily pastime, resignation was expressed, the impression

being that with the lost day went the customary Sunday services. But in

reaching this conclusion the smokeroom group had failed to reckon with

the fact that missionaries were aboard. The missionaries held a hasty

conference in the social hall, and ignoring the irreverent pranks of

longitude and time, announced a service for the day that followed

Saturday. Upon this a counter-conference was held around the poker

table, whereat were reached the following conclusions:

That aboard ship the captain's will is, and of a right ought to be,

absolute; that the captain had pronounced the day Monday; that in the

eyes of this law-abiding though poker-playing group, it therefore _was_

Monday; that the proposal to hold church services on Monday constituted

an attempt upon the part of certain passengers to set their will above

that of the captain; that such action was, in the opinion of the

smokeroom group, subversive to the ship's discipline, if indeed it did

not constitute actual mutiny on the high seas; that members of this

group could not, therefore, be party to the action proposed; that, upon

the contrary, they deemed it their clear duty in this crisis to stand

back of the captain; and finally, that in pursuance of this duty they

should and would remain in the smokeroom throughout the entire day,

carrying on their regular Monday game, even though others might see fit

to carry on their regular Sunday game elsewhere in the vessel.

* * * * *

Had this been the Atlantic crossing we should by now have landed on the

other side; yet here we were, pitching upon a cold gray waste a few

miles south of Behring Sea, with Yokohama a full week away.

Yet land--land of a kind--was not so distant as I had imagined. Early

one morning in the middle of the voyage my steward, Sugimoto, came to my

cabin and woke me up to see it. (A splendid fellow, Sugimoto; short and

round of body, with flesh solid and resilient as a hard rubber ball, and

a circular sweet face that Raphael might have painted for a cherub, had

Raphael been Japanese.)

"Good morning, gentleman," said he. "Gentleman look porthole, he see

land."

I arose and looked.

A flounce of foam a mile or two away across the water edged the skirt of

a dark mountain jutting abruptly from the sea. Through a mist, like a

half-raised curtain of gray gauze, I saw a wintry peak from which long

tongues of snow trailed downward, marking seams and gorges. It was, in

short, just such an island as is discovered in the nick of time by a

shipwrecked whaler who, famished and freezing in an open boat, has

drifted for days through the storm-tossed pages of a sea story. He would

land in a sheltered cove and would quickly discover a spring and a cave.

He would devise a skilful means of killing seals, would dress himself in

their skins, and subsist upon their meat--preceded by the customary clam

and fish courses. For three years he would live upon the island,

believing himself alone. Then suddenly would come to him the knowledge

that life in this place was no longer safe. About the entrance to his

cave he would find the tracks of a predatory animal--fresh prints of

French heels in the snow!

Austere though the island looked, my heart warmed at the sight of it;

for there is no land so miserable that it is not to be preferred above

the sea. Moreover I saw in this land a harbinger. The Empire of Japan, I

knew, consisted of several large islands--to the chief one of which we

were bound--and some four thousand smaller ones stretching out in a vast

chain. This island, then, must be the first one of the chain. From now

on we would no doubt be passing islands every little while. The

remainder of the voyage would be like a trip down the St. Lawrence

River.

Soothed and encouraged by this pleasant thought, and wishing always to

remember this outpost of the Island Empire, I asked its name of

Sugimoto.

"That Araska, gentleman," he answered.

"Are you glad to see Japan again, Sugimoto?"

"That Araska," he repeated.

"Yes. A part of Japan, isn't it?"

Sugimoto shook his head.

"No, gentleman. Araska American land."

"That island belongs to the United States?"

"Yes, gentleman. That Araska."

I had never heard of an island of that name. Surely Sugimoto was

mistaken in thinking it an American possession.

"Could you show it to me on the map?" I asked.

From my dresser he took a folder of the steamship company and opening to

a map of the Pacific, pointed to one of many little dots. "Aleutian

Islands," they were marked. They dangled far, far out from the end of

that peninsula which resembles a long tongue hanging from the mouth of a

dog, the head of which is rudely suggested by the cartographic outlines

of our northernmost territory. We had sailed directly away from our

native land for a week, only to find ourselves, at the end of that time,

still in sight of its outskirts. Like many another of his fellow

countrymen, good Sugimoto had difficulties with his _l_'s and _r_'s. He

had been trying to inform me that the island--the name of which proved

to be Amatisnok--belonged to Alaska.

I began to study the map and look up statistics concerning the Pacific

Ocean. It was a great mistake. It is not pleasant to discover that three

quarters of the world is worse than wasted, being entirely given over to

salt water. Nor is it pleasant to discover, when far out on the Pacific,

that more than a third of the surface of the earth is taken up by this

one ocean. Any thought of getting General Goethals to remedy this matter

by filling up the Pacific is, moreover, hopeless, for all the land in

the world, if spread over the Pacific's surface, would only make an

island surrounded by twenty million square miles of sea.

Feeling depressed over these facts I now began to look for points of

merit; for we are told to try to find the good in everything, and though

I fear I pay but scant attention to this canon when in my normal state

ashore, at sea I become another man.

On land I have a childish feeling that the Creator has not time to pay

attention to me, having so many other people to look after; but a ship

far out at sea is a conspicuous object. I feel that it must catch His

eye. I feel Him looking at me. And though I hope He likes me, I see no

special reason why He should. I am so full of faults, so critical, so

prejudiced. Consider, for instance, the way I used to go on about

President Wilson and Josephus Daniels and W. J. Bryan. I am afraid that

was very wrong in me. Instead of studying their failings I should have

remedied my own. I should have given more to charity. I should have been

more gentle in expressing my opinions. I should have written often to my

sister, who so enjoys getting letters from me. I should have looked for

good in everything.

Immediately I begin to run about the ship looking for it. And lo! I find

it. The ship is comfortable. It seems to be designed to stay on top of

the water. The table is beyond criticism. The passengers are

interesting. The very vastness of this ocean tends to make them so.

Instead of being all of a pattern, as would be one's fellow passengers

on an Atlantic liner, they are a heterogeneous lot, familiar with

strange corners of the globe and full of curious tales and bits of

information. Instead of talking always of hotels in London, Paris,

Venice, Rome and Naples, they speak familiarly of Seoul, Shanghai,

Peking, Hongkong, Saigon and Singapore. And amongst them are a few

having intimate acquaintance with islands and cities so remote that

their names sing in the ears like fantastic songs. Fragrant names. The

Celebes and Samarkand!

There was a little Englishman who hunted butterflies for a museum. He

told me of great spiders as big as your two hands, that build their webs

between the trees in the jungles of Borneo--I think he said Borneo. But

whatever the name of the place, he found there natives having tails from

two to four inches long--I think he said two to four inches. But

whatever the length of the tails, he had photographs to prove that tails

there were. The latest theory of man's evolution, he told me, is not the

theory of Darwin, but holds that there existed long ago an intermediary

creature between man and ape, from which both are derived--the ape

having, I take it, evolved upward into the treetops, while man evolved

downward--down, down, down, until at last came jazz and Lenine and

Trotzky.

Another man had lived for years in Korea. In the old days before it was

taken over by Japan, he said, it was a perfect comic-opera country with

the Emperor as chief comedian. He knew and liked the Emperor, and told

me funny stories about him. Once when His Majesty's teeth required

filling the work had to wait until the American dentist in Seoul could

have a set of instruments made of gold, that being the only metal

permitted within the sacred confines of the Imperial mouth.

The concession to build an electric street railway in Seoul was given to

Americans on the understanding that they should import motormen from the

United States and that these should be held in readiness to fly to the

Emperor's aid in case of trouble. A private wire connected the Imperial

bedchamber with that of the manager of the street-car company, so that

the latter might be quickly notified if help was needed. For more than a

year the wire stood unused, but at last late one night the bell rang.

The manager leaped from his bed and rushed to the special telephone. But

it was not a revolution. The Emperor had just heard about a certain

office building in New York and wished to know if it had, in fact, as

many stories as had been reported to him.

In his fear of revolution or invasion the Emperor built a palace

adjoining the American legation. And when, as happened now and then,

there came a _coup d'état_, threatening his personal safety, he would

get a ladder and climb over the wall separating the back yard of the

palace from that of the American minister. This occurring frequently, so

embarrassed the latter, that in order to put an end to His Majesty's

habit of informal calling, he caused the top of the wall to be covered

with inhospitable broken glass.

Up to the time of the annexation of Korea by Japan, my informant said,

the Koreans were entirely without patriotism, but the Japanese so

oppressed them that a strong national feeling was engendered after it

was too late. That the Japanese had been harsh and brutal in Korea, he

said, was indisputable, but this was the work of militarists, and was

contrary to the will of the people of Japan who, when they learned what

had been going on, protested with such violence that newspapers had to

be suppressed in Japanese cities, and there was clubbing of rioters in

the streets by the police. This caused immediate reform in Korea. The

brutal Governor General was recalled and was replaced by Admiral Baron

Saito, a humane and enlightened statesman who has earnestly striven to

improve conditions, with the result that Koreans are to-day being better

educated and better governed than they have been within the memory of

man. Also they are prospering. First steps are now being taken toward

allowing them to participate in their own government, and if conditions

seem to justify the extension of their privileges, it is hoped that they

may ultimately have home rule.

From another passenger I got a story about an American who was captured

by brigands in China. The victim was a civil engineer, very skilful at

laying out railroad lines. The American International Corporation wished

to send him to China to plan a railroad, but he demurred because he was

in bad health. Finally, on being pressed by the company, he consented to

go if his private physician was sent with him. This was agreed to.

In China brigands caught the civil engineer but not the doctor. They

kept him for a long time. He was taken from place to place over the

roughest country, walking all night, sleeping by day in damp caves,

eating coarse and insufficient food. At last he was released. He

returned in rugged health. The life of the brigand was just the thing

that he had needed.

"Out here on the seas, without home newspapers," one thoughtful

traveller remarked to me, "we lose touch with the world and never quite

make up all that we have lost. When we land we hear about some of the

things that have happened, but there are minor events of which we never

hear, or of which the news comes to us long after, as a great surprise.

I recall one example from my own experience.

"In the New England town in which I live there was a banker, a prominent

old citizen with a reputation for being very close, and none too

scrupulous in the means he sometimes took for making money.

"It had for years been his habit to go every winter to Florida, but his

daughter, who kept house for him, liked the northern winter and remained

at home.

"Some years ago, while I was in the Far East, this old man died, but I

was gone for a long time and heard nothing of it. When I got back it was

winter. One day I met the daughter and stopped to speak to her. It was

snowing and a cold wind was whistling down the street. We had been

having trouble with the furnace at our house and my mind was full of

that. So when I met her I said:

"'One good thing--on a day like this you don't have to worry about your

father. Furnaces don't get out of order down there where he is.'

"Now, when I am away, I have the newspapers saved, and on my return I

read them all if it takes me a whole week."

* * * * *

Somewhere in those seas that lie between the islands of Formosa and

Luzon there arises a wide tepid current, known as the Black Current

which, flowing northward, tempers the climate of Hondo, the main island

of Japan. "To this beneficent stream," remarks the guidebook, "the

shores of Nippon owe their luxuriant greenness."

As we crossed the Black Current a certain greenness likewise was

revealed upon my countenance. I did not find the stream beneficent at

all. It was only about two hundred miles wide, however, and by morning

the worst of it was past. I came on deck to find the _Kashima Maru_

riding like a placid bulky water-fowl upon a friendly sunlit sea. And

far away on the horizon lay a streak of mist that was Japan.

In an hour or two the mist attained more substance. It was like a

coloured lantern-slide coming slowly into focus. Someone showed me a

white dot upon the shadow of a hill and said it was a lighthouse, and

some one else discerned a village in a little smudge of buff where land

and water met. Gulls were circling around us--gulls with dark serrated

margins to their wings; smaller than those we had seen on Puget Sound.

Foreign gulls!

Since leaving Victoria we had sighted only one ship, but now an unladen

freighter, pointing high and showing a broad strip of red underbody,

reeled by like a gay drunkard, and was no sooner gone astern than we

picked up on the other bow a wallowing stubby caravel with a high-tilted

poop like that of the _Santa Maria_--a vessel such as I had never

dreamed of seeing asail in sober earnest. And she was hardly gone when

we overhauled a little fleet of fishing boats having the lovely colour

of unpainted wood, and the slender graceful lines of viking ships. All

of them but one carried a square white sail on either mast, but that one

had three masts and three sails, two of which were yellow, while the

third was of a tender faded indigo. It promised things, that boat with

coloured sails!

Distant white cliffs, tall and ghostly like those of Dover, brought

memories of another island kingdom, far away through the cheek of the

world, whose citizens were at this moment sleeping their midnight

sleep--_last night_. Presently the white cliffs vanished, giving place

to a wall of hills with conical tops and bright green sides splattered

with blue-green patches of pine woods. And when I saw the brushwork on

those wrinkled cone-shaped hills, so unlike any other hills that I had

seen, I knew that Hokusai and Hiroshige, far from being merely

decorative artists, had "painted nature as they saw it."

The villages along the shore could now be seen more plainly--rows of

one-story houses taking their colour from the yellow wood of which they

were constructed, and the yellow thatch of their roofs, both tempered by

the elements.

Then, as I was looking at a village on a promontory reaching out to meet

us, some one cried:

"Fuji! Come and look at Fujiyama!" and I ran forward and gazed with

straining eyes across the sea and the hilltops to where, shimmering

white in the far-off sky, there hung--was it indeed the famous

fan-shaped cone, or only a luminous patch of cloud? Or was it anything

at all?

"Where's Fuji?"

"Right there. Don't you see?"

"No. Yes, now I think----"

"It's gone. No! There it is again!"

So must the chorus ever go. For Fuji, most beautiful of mountains, is

also the most elusive. Later, in Tokyo, when some one called me to come

and see it, it disappeared while I was on the way upstairs.

Splendid as Vesuvius appears when she floats in opalescent mist above

the Bay of Naples with her smoke plume lowering above her, she is, by

comparison with Fuji, but a tawny little ruffian. Vesuvius rises four

thousand feet while Fuji stands three times as high. And although the

top of Pike's Peak is higher than the sacred mountain of Japan by some

two thousand feet, the former, starting from a plain one mile above

sea-level, has an immense handicap, whereas the latter starts at

"scratch." Thus it comes about that when you look at Pike's Peak from

the plains what you actually see is a mountain rising nine thousand

feet; whereas when you look at Fuji from the sea the whole of its twelve

thousand and more feet is visible.

Aside from Fuji's size, the things which make it more beautiful than

Vesuvius are the perfection of its contour, the snow upon its cone, and

the atmospheric quality of Japan--that source of so much disappointment

to snapshotting travellers who time their pictures as they would at

home.

A Japanese friend on the ship told me that though Fuji had been

quiescent for considerably longer than a century there was heat enough

in some of its steaming fissures to permit eggs to be boiled. Eighteen

or twenty thousand persons make the climb each year, he said, and some

devout women of seventy years and over struggle slowly up the slope,

taking a week or more to the ascent, which is made by able-bodied men in

half a day or less.

Peasants of the region speak of Fuji not by name but merely as _O Yama_,

"the Honourable Mountain," but my Japanese friend added that though the

honorific _O_, used so much by his countrymen, was translated literally

into English as "honourable," it did not have, in the Japanese ear, any

such elaborate and ponderous value, but was spoken automatically and

often only for the sake of cadence.

[Illustration: Peasants of the region speak of Fuji not by name

but merely as _O Yama_, the "Honourable Mountain"]

"We say _O_ without thinking," he explained, "just as you begin with

'dear sir,' in writing to a stranger who is not dear to you at all."

For Fuji, however, I like the full English polysyllabic of respect.

It is indeed an "honourable mountain." The great volcanic cone

hanging, as it sometimes seems, in thin blue air, has an ethereal

look suggesting purity and spirituality, so that it is not

difficult for the beholder from another land to sense its quality

of sacredness, and to perceive its fitness to be the abiding

place of that beautiful goddess whose Japanese name means

"Princess-who-makes-the-Blossoms-of-the-Trees-to-Flower."

"There are two kinds of fools," says a Japanese proverb: "--those who

have never ascended Fuji and those who have ascended twice." To this

category I would add a third kind of fool, the greatest of them all: the

fool who fails to appreciate the spectacle of Fuji. A creature who would

be disappointed in Fuji would be disappointed in any spectacle, however

grand--be it the Grand Cañon, the Grand Canal, or the Grand Central

Station.

CHAPTER II

_The Pier at Yokohama--The Flower-People--A Celestial

Suburb--French Cooking and Frock Coats--From a Car-Window--Elfin

Gardens--"The Land of Little Children"_

The satisfying thing about Japan is that it always looks exactly like

Japan. It could not possibly be any other place. The gulls are Japanese

gulls, the hills are Japanese hills, Tokyo Bay is a Japanese bay, and if

the steamers anchored off the port of Yokohama are not all of them

Japanese, many of them have, at least, an exotic look, with their

preposterously fat red funnels or their slender blue ones. Even the

little launches from which the port authorities board you as you lie in

the harbour are not quite like the launches seen elsewhere, and though

the great stone pier, to which at last you are warped in, might of

itself fit the picture of a British seaport, the women and children

waiting on the pier, trotting along beside the ship as she moves slowly

to her berth, waving and smiling up at friends on deck, are costumed in

inevitable suggestion of great brilliant flower-gardens agitated by the

wind. Amongst these women and children in their bright draperies, the

dingy European dress of the male is almost lost, so that, for all its

pantaloons and derby hats, Japan is still Japan.

Through this garden of chattering, laughing, fluttering human flowers we

made our way to--score one for New Japan--a limousine, and in this

vehicle were whirled off through the crowd: a jumble of blue-clad

coolies wearing wide mushroom hats and the insignia of their employers

stamped upon their backs, of rickshas, and touring cars, and

motor-trucks, and skirted schoolboys riding bicycles, and curious little

drays with tiny wheels, drawn by shaggy little horses which are always

led, and which, when left to stand, have their front legs roped. Over a

bridge we went, above the peaked rice-straw awnings of countless wooden

cargo boats; then up a narrow road, surfaced with brown sand, between

rows of delightful little wooden houses, terraced one above the other,

with fences of board or bamboo only partly concealing infinitesimal

gardens, and sliding front doors of paper and wood-lattice, some of

which, pushed back, revealed straw-matted floors within, with perhaps

more flower-like women and children looking out at us--the women and the

larger children having babies tied to their backs. By some of the doors

stood pots containing dwarf trees or flowering shrubs, by others were

hung light wooden birdcages from which a snatch of song would come, and

in front of every door was a low flat stone on which stood rows of

little wooden clogs. Dogs of breeds unknown to me sat placidly before

their masters' doors--brown dogs to match the houses, black and white

dogs, none of them very large, all of them plump and benignant in

expression. Not one of them left its place to run and bark at our car.

They were the politest dogs I have ever seen. They simply sat upon their

haunches, smiling. And the women smiled, and the children smiled, and

the cherry blossoms smiled from branches overhead, and the sun smiled

through them, casting over the brown roadway and brown houses and brown

people a lovely splattering of light and shadow.

And what with all these things, and a glimpse of a _torii_ and a shrine,

and the musical sound of scraping wooden clogs upon the pavement and the

faint pervasive fragrance, suggesting blended odours of new pine wood,

incense, and spice--which is to me the smell of Japan; though hostile

critics will be quick to remind me of the odour of paddy fields--what

with all these sights and sounds and smells, so alluring and antipodal,

I began to think we must be motoring through a celestial suburb, toward

the gates of Paradise itself.

But instead of climbing onward up the hill to heaven we swung off

through a garden blooming with azaleas white, purple, pink, and

salmon-colour, and drew up at a pleasant clubhouse. There we had

luncheon; and it is worth remarking that, though prepared by Japanese,

both the menu and the cooking were in faultless French. The Japanese

gentlemen at this club were financiers, officials and prominent business

men of Yokohama. One or two of them wore the graceful and dignified

_hakama_ and _haori_--the silk skirt and coat of formal native

dress--but by far the larger number were habited in European style: some

of the younger men in cutaways, but the majority in frock-coats,

garments still widely favoured in Japan, as are also congress gaiter

shoes--a most convenient style of footwear in a land where shoes are

shed on entering a house.

Luncheon over, we drove to the station of the electric railroad that

parallels the steam railroad from the seaport to the capital--which, by

the way, will itself become a seaport when the proposed channel has been

dredged up Tokyo Bay, now navigable only by small boats.

From the car window we continued our observations as we rushed along.

The gage of the steam railway is narrower than that of railways in

America and Europe; the locomotives resemble European locomotives and

the cars are small and light by comparison with ours. The engine

whistles are shrill, and instead of two men, three are carried in each

cab. This we shall presently discover, is characteristic of Japan. They

employ more people than we do on a given piece of work--a discovery

rather surprising after all that we have heard of Japanese efficiency.

But Japan's reputation for efficiency is after all based largely on her

military exploits. Perhaps her army is efficient. Perhaps her navy is.

Certainly the discipline and service on the _Kashima Maru_ would bear

comparison with those on a first-rate English ship. Yet why three men on

a locomotive? Why several conductors on a street car? Why three servants

in an ordinary middle-class home which in America or Europe would be run

by one or two? Why fifteen servants in a house which we would run with

six or eight? Why so many motor cars with an assistant sitting on the

seat beside the chauffeur? Why so few motors? Why men and women drawing

heavy carts that might so much better be drawn by horses or propelled by

gasolene? Why these ill-paved narrow roads? Why this watering of streets

with dippers or with little hand-carts pulled by men? Why a dozen or

more coolies operating a hand-driven pile-driver, lifting the weight

with ropes, when two men and a little steam would do the work so much

faster and better? Why, for the matter of that, these delightful

rickshas which some jester of an earlier age dubbed "pull-man" cars? Why

this waste of labour everywhere?

Can it be that in this densely populated little country there are more

willing hands than there is work for willing hands to do? Must work be

spread thin in order to provide a task and a living for everyone? But

again, if that was it, would people work as hard as these people seem

to? Would women be at work beside their husbands, digging knee deep in

the mud and water of the rice fields, dragging heavy-laden carts,

handling bulky boats? And would the working hours be so long? Here is

something to be looked into. But not now.

It is a hand-embroidered country, Japan, though the embroidery is done

in fine stitches of an unfamiliar kind. The rural landscape is so formed

and trimmed and cultivated that sometimes it achieves the look of a

lovely little garden, just as the English landscape sometimes has the

look of a great park. Here, much more than in England, every available

inch of land is put to use. Where hillsides are so steep that they would

wash away if not protected, tidy walls of diamond-shaped stone are laid

dry against them; but whenever possible the hillsides are terraced up in

a way to remind one of vineyards along the Rhine and the Moselle, making

a series of shelf-like little fields, each doing its utmost to help

solve the food problem.

It is hard to say whether the towns along this line of railroad are

separated by groups of farms, or whether the groups of farms are

separated by towns, so even is the division. The farms are very small so

that the open country is dotted over with little houses--the same low

dainty houses of wood and paper that delighted us when we first saw

them, and which will always delight us when, from the other side of the

world, we think of them. For there is something in the sight of a neat

little Japanese house with its few feet of garden which appeals

curiously to one's imagination and one's sentiment. It is all so light

and lovely, yet all so carefully contrived, so highly finished. To the

Western eye--at least to mine--it has a quality of fantasy. I feel that

it cannot be quite real, and that the people who live in it cannot be

quite real: that they are part--say a quarter--fairy. And I ask you: who

but people having in their veins at least a little fairy blood would

take the trouble to plant a row of iris along the ridges of their roofs?

The houses, too, are often set in elfin situations. One will stand at

the crest of a little precipice with a minute table-land of garden back

of it; another will nestle, half concealed, in a small sheltered basin

where it seems to have grown from the ground, along with the trees and

shrubbery surrounding it--the flowering hedges and the pines with

branches like extended arms in drooping green kimono sleeves; still

another rises at the border of a pond so small that in a land less

toylike it would hardly be a pond; yet here it is adorned with

grotesquely lovely rocks and overhanging leaves and blooms, and in the

middle of it, like as not, will be an island hardly larger than a

cartwheel, and on that island a stone lantern with a mushroom top, and

reaching to it from the shore a delicate arched bridge of wood beneath

which drowsy carp and goldfish cruise, with trading fins and rolling

ruminative eyes.

Just as one better understands Hokusai and Hiroshige for having seen the

coastal hills, one understands them better for having seen these magic

little houses with their settings resembling so charmingly those

miniature landscapes made with moss, gravel, small rocks, and dwarf

trees, arranged in china basins by a Japanese gardener, who is sometimes

so kind as to let us see his productions in a window on Fifth Avenue.

Often one feels that Japan herself is hardly more than such a garden on

a larger scale. Over and over again one encounters in the larger, the

finish and fantastic beauty of the smaller garden. And when one does

encounter it, one is happy to forget the politics and problems of Japan,

and to think of the whole country as a curiously perfect table

decoration for the parlour of the world.

And the children! Children everywhere! Children of the children Kipling

wrote of thirty years ago, when he called Japan

"... the land of Little Children, where the

Babies are the Kings."

[Illustration: With his drum and his monkey he is Japan's

nearest equivalent for our old-style organ-grinder]

Of course we had heard about the children. Everyone who writes about

Japan, or comes home and talks about Japan, tells you about them. Yet

somehow you must witness the phenomenon before you grasp the fact of

their astonishing profusion. Even the statistics, showing that the

population of Japan increases at the rate of from 400,000 to 700,000

every year, don't begin to make the picture, though they do make

apparent the fact that there are several million children of ten years

or younger--about two thirds of whom go clattering about in wooden

clogs, while the remainder ride on the backs of their parents and

grandparents and brothers and sisters. All in a country smaller than the

State of California.

Children alone, children in groups of three or four, children in dozen

lots. Children in all sizes, colourings, attitudes, and conditions.

Children blocking the roads, playing under the trees or in them, romping

along paths, swarming over little piles of earth like bees on

bell-shaped hives. Children watching the passing cars, children in tiny

skiffs, children wading in ponds. Children glimpsed through the open

wood and paper _shoji_ of their matchbox houses, scampering on clean

matted floors or placidly supping--the larger of them squatting before

trays and operating nimble chopsticks, the smaller nursing at the

mother's breast. (Sometimes those children nursed at the breast are not

so very small--which is the reason why so many Japanese have

over-prominent teeth.) Children brown and naked, ragged children,

children in indigo or in bright flowered kimonos and white aprons.

Demure children, wild rampageous children, children with shaved heads,

children with jet-black manes bobbing about their ears and faces as they

run. Chubby children with merry eyes and cheeks like rosy russet apples.

Children achieving the impossible: delighting the eye despite their

dirty little noses.

Can it be that they pile the children on each others' backs, making two

layers of them, because there isn't room upon the ground for all of them

at once? Babies riding on their mothers' backs travel in comparative

dignity and safety. Under their soft little mushroom hats they sleep

through many things--street-car trips, shopping expeditions and gabbling

parties in the tea-rooms of department stores. But those who ride the

shoulders of their elder brothers lead lives of wild adventure. Their

presence is not allowed to interfere with the progress of young

masculine life. The brother will climb trees, walk on stilts and even

play baseball, seemingly unconscious of the weight and the fragility of

the little charge attached to him by ties of blood and cotton. If the

drowsy baby head drops over, getting in the way, the brother alters its

position with a bump from the back of his own head. When the small rider

slips down too far, whether on the back of child or adult, its bearer

stoops and bucks like a broncho, tossing baby into place again. Through

all of which the infant generally sleeps. Are its dreams disturbed, one

wonders, when big brother slides for second-base? I doubt it. Knowing no

cradle, no easy-riding baby carriage, the Japanese baby is from the

first accustomed to a life of action. It seems to be a fatalist. And

indeed it would appear that some special god protects the baby, for it

always seems to go unscathed.

Sometimes in the streets the children outnumber their elders by two or

three to one. Contemplating them one can easily fall into the way of

looking upon adults as mere adjuncts, existing only to wash the

children, see that they wear aprons, and give them their meals.

CHAPTER III

_Growing Tokyo--Architecture and Statuary--The Westernization of

Japan--The Story of Costumes--Women's Dress Advantages of

Standardized Styles--Selection and Rejection_

As you reach the outskirts of Tokyo you think you are coming to another

little town, but the town goes on and on, and finally as the train draws

near the city's heart large buildings, bulking here and there above the

general two-story tile roofline, inform you in some measure of the

importance of the place. In 1917 Tokyo ranked fifth among the cities of

the world, with a population almost equal to Berlin's, and it seems

likely that when reliable statistics for the world become available

again we shall find that the population of Berlin has at most remained

stationary, while that of Tokyo has grown even more rapidly than usual,

owing to exceptional industrial activity and to the influx of Russian

refugees, whose presence in large numbers in Japan has created a housing

problem. Nor shall I be surprised to hear that Tokyo has passed Chicago

in the population race, becoming third city of the world.

The central railroad station exhibits the capital's modern architectural

trend. It is conveniently arranged and impressive in its magnitude as

seen across the open space on which it faces, but there its merit stops.

Like most large foreign-style buildings in Japan, it is architecturally

an ugly thing. Standing at the gate of Japan's chief city, it has about

it nothing Japanese. Its façade is grandiose and meaningless, and as one

turns one's back upon it and sees other large new public structures, one

is saddened by the discovery that the Japanese, skilful at adaptation

though they have often shown themselves, have signally failed to adapt

the requirements, methods, and materials of modern building to their old

national architectural lines. One thing is certain, however: there will

be no new public buildings more unsightly than those already standing.

This style of architecture in Japan has touched bottom.

In twenty years or so I believe the ugliness of these modern piles will

have become apparent to the Japanese. It will dawn upon them that they

need not go to Europe and America for architectural themes, but to the

castle of Nagoya, the watch-towers above the moat of the Imperial

Palace, the palace gates, and the temples and pagodas everywhere.

When this time comes the Japanese will also realize how very bad are

most of the bronze statues of statesmen and military leaders throughout

the world, and how particularly bad are their own adventures in this

field of art.

Until I saw Tokyo I was under the impression that the world's worst

bronzes were to be found in the region of the Mall in Central Park, New

York; but there is in Tokyo a statue of a statesman in a frock coat,

with a silk hat in his hand, which surpasses any other awfulness in

bronze that I have ever seen.

Looking at such things one marvels that they can be created and

tolerated in a land which has produced and still produces so much minute

loveliness in pottery, ivory, and wood. How can these people, who still

know flowing silken draperies, endure to see their heroes cast in Prince

Albert coats and pantaloons? And how can they adopt the European style

of statuary, when in so many places they have but to look at the

roadside to see an ancient monument consisting of a single gigantic

stone with unhewn edges and a flat face embellished only with an

inscription--simple, dignified, impressive.

All nations, however, have their periods of innovation-worship, and if

Japan has sometimes erred in her selections, her excuse is a good one.

She did not take up Western ways because she wanted to. She wished to

remain a hermit nation. She asked of the world nothing more than that it

leave her alone. She even fired on foreign ships to drive them from her

shores--which, far from accomplishing her purpose, only cost her a

bombardment. Then, in 1853, came our Commodore Perry and, as we now

politely phrase it, "knocked at Japan's door." To the Japanese this

"knocking" backed by a fleet of "big black ships," had a loud and

ominous sound. The more astute of their statesmen saw that the summons

was not to be ignored. Japan must become a part of the world, and if she

would save herself from the world's rapacity she must quickly learn to

play the world's game. Fourteen years after Perry's visit the Shogunate,

which for seven centuries had suppressed the Imperial family, and itself

ruled the land, fell, and the late Emperor, now known as Meiji

Tenno--meaning "Emperor of Enlightenment"--came from his former capital

in the lovely old city of Kyoto, the Boston of Japan, and took up the

reins of government in Yedo--later renamed Tokyo, or "Eastern

Capital"--occupying the former Shogun's palace which is the Imperial

residence to-day.

The Meiji Era will doubtless go down as the greatest of all eras in

Japanese history, and as one of the greatest eras in the history of any

nation. To Viscount Kaneko, who is in charge of the work of preparing

the official record of the reign for publication, President Roosevelt

wrote his opinion of what such a book should be.

"No other emperor in history," he declared, "saw his people pass through

as extraordinary a transformation, and the account of the Emperor's part

in this transformation, of his own life, of the public lives of his

great statesmen who were his servants and of the people over whom he

ruled, would be a work that would be a model for all time."

Under the Emperor Meiji, Japan made breathless haste to westernize

herself, for she was determined to save herself from falling under

foreign domination. Small wonder, then, if in her haste she snatched

blindly at any innovation from abroad. Small wonder if she sometimes

snatched the wrong thing. Small wonder if she sometimes does it to this

day. For she is still a nation in a state of flux; you seem to feel her

changing under your very feet.

But because Japan has accepted a thing it does not mean that she has

accepted it for ever. In great affairs and small, her history

illustrates this fact. A case in point is the story of European dress.

More than thirty years ago, when the craze for everything foreign was at

its height, when the whole fabric of social life in the upper world was

in process of radical change, European dress became fashionable not only

for men but for women. When great ladies had worn it for a time their

humbler sisters took it up, and one might have thought that the national

costume, which is so charming, was destined entirely to disappear.

Men attached to government offices, banks, and institutions tending to

the European style in the construction and equipment of their buildings,

had some excuse for the change, since the fine silks of Japan do not

wear so well as tough woollen fabrics, and the loose sleeves tend to

catch on door-knobs and other projections not to be found in the

Japanese style of building.

But in Japan more than in any other country, "woman's place is in the

home," and just as the Japanese costume is not well suited to the

European style of building, so the European costume is not well suited

to the Japanese house and its customs. For in the Japanese house instead

of sitting on a chair one squats upon a cushion, and corsets, stockings

and tight skirts were not designed to squat in. Equally important, clogs

and shoes are left outside the door of the Japanese house in winter and

summer, and as in the winter the house is often very cold, having no

cellar and only small braziers, called _hibachi_, to give warmth, the

covering afforded the feet by the skirts of a Japanese costume is very

comforting. Moreover, the Japanese themselves declare that European

dress is not becoming to their women, being neither suited to their

figures nor to the little pigeon-toed shuffle which is so fetching

beneath the skirts of a kimono.

What was the result of all this?

The men who found foreign dress useful continued to wear it for

business, although those who could afford to do so kept a Japanese

wardrobe as well. But the women, to whom European dress was only an

encumbrance, discarded it completely, so that to-day no sight is rarer

in Japan than that of a Japanese woman dressed in other than the native

costume.

If a Japanese lady be cursed with atrocious taste, there is practically

no way to find it out, no matter how much money she may spend on

personal adornment. The worst that she may do is to carry her clothes

less prettily than other women of her class. The lines she cannot

change. The fabrics are prescribed. The colours are restricted in

accordance with her age. Her dress, like almost every other detail of

her daily life, is regulated by a rigid code. If she be middle-aged and

fat she cannot make herself absurd by dressing as a débutante. If she be

thin she cannot wear an evening gown cut down in back to show a spinal

column like a string of wooden beads. Nor can she spend a fortune upon

earrings, bracelets, necklaces. She may have some pretty ornamental

combs for her black lacquer hair, a bar pin for her _obi_, a watch, and

perhaps, if she be very much Americanized, a ring and a mesh bag. A

hairdresser she must have, both to accomplish that amazing and effective

coif she wears, and to tell her all the latest gossip (for in Japan, as

elsewhere, the hairdresser is famed as a medium for the transmission of

spicy items which ought not to be transmitted); but her pocketbook is

free from the assaults of milliners; hats she has none; only a draped

hood when the cold weather comes.

The feminine costume is regulated by three things: first, by the age of

the wearer; second, by the season; third, by the requirements of the

occasion. The brightest colours are worn by children; the best kimonos

of children of prosperous families are of silk in brilliant flowered

patterns. Their pendant sleeves are very long. Young unmarried women

also wear bright colours and sleeves a yard in length. But the young

wife, though not denied the use of colour, uses it more sparingly and in

shades relatively subdued; and the pocket-like pendants of her sleeves

are but half the length of those of her younger unmarried sister. The

older she grows the shorter the sleeve pendants become, and the darker

and plainer grows her dress.

In hot weather a kimono of light silk, often white with a coloured

pattern, is worn by well-dressed women. Beneath this there will be

another light kimono which is considered underwear--though other

underwear is worn beneath it. Japanese underwear is not at all like

ours, but one notices that many gentlemen in the national costume adopt

the Occidental flannel undershirt, wearing it beneath their silks when

the weather is cold--a fact revealed by a glimpse of the useful but

unlovely garment rising up into the V-shaped opening formed by the

collar of the kimono where it folds over at the throat.

As with us, the temperature is not the thing that marks the time for

changing from the attire of one season to that of another. Summer

arrives on June first, whatever the weather may be. On that date the

Tokyo policeman blossoms out in white trousers and a white cap, and on

June fifteenth he confirms the arrival of summer by changing his blue

coat for a white one. So with ladies of fashion. Their summer is from

June first to September thirtieth; their autumn from October first to

November thirtieth; their winter from December first to March

thirty-first; their spring from April first to May thirty-first. In

spring the brightest colours are worn. Those for autumn and winter are

generally more subdued.

Young ladies wear brilliant kimonos for ceremonial dress, but ceremonial

dress for married women consists of three kimonos, the outer one of

black, though those beneath, revealed only where they show a V-shaped

margin at the neck, may be of lighter coloured silk. On the exterior

kimono the family crest--some emblem generally circular in form, such as

a conventionalized flower or leaf design, about an inch in

diameter--appears five times in white: on the breast at either side, on

the back of either sleeve at a point near the elbow, and at the centre

of the back, between the shoulder-blades. Because of these crests the

goods from which the kimono is made have to be dyed to order, the crests

being blocked out in wax on the original white silk so that the dye

fails to penetrate. Even the under-kimonos of fashionable ladies will

have crests made in this way.

With the kimono a Japanese lady always wears a neck-piece called an

_eri_ (pronounced "airy"), a long straight band revealed in a narrow

V-shaped margin inside the neck of the inner kimono. The eri varies in

colour, material, and design according to the wearer's age, the occasion

and the season, and it may be remarked that embroidered or stencilled

eri in bright colourings make attractive souvenirs to be brought home as

gifts to ladies, who can wear them as belts or as bands for summer hats.

If the weather be cold the haori, an interlined silk coat hanging to the

knees or a little below, is worn over the kimono. This is black, with

crests, or of some solid colour, not too gay. A young lady's haori is

sometimes made of flowered silk. Men also wear the haori, but the man's

haori is always black; and while a man will wear a crested haori on the

most formal occasions, a woman _en grande tenue_ will avoid wearing hers

whenever possible for the reason that it conceals all but a tiny portion

of the article of raiment which is her chief pride: namely the sash or

obi.

The best obi of a fashionable woman consists of a strip of heavy

brocaded or hand-embroidered silk, folded lengthwise and sewn at the

edges making a stiff double band about thirteen inches wide and three

and one third yards long. This is wrapped twice around the waist and

tied in a large flat knot in back, the mode of tying varying in

accordance with the age of the wearer, and differing somewhat in divers

localities. The average cost of a fine new obi is, I believe, about two

hundred dollars, and I have heard of obi costing as much as a thousand

dollars. Some of the less expensive ones are very pretty also, and many

a poor woman will have as her chief treasure an obi worth forty or fifty

dollars which she will wear only on great occasions, with her best silk

kimono.

A Tokyo lady notable for the invariable loveliness of her costumes gives

me the following information in response to an inquiry as to the cost of

dressing.

"As our style never changes," she writes, "we don't have to buy new

dresses every season, as our American sisters do. When a girl marries,

her parents supply her, according to their means, with complete costumes

for all seasons. Sometimes these sets will include several hundred

kimonos, and they may cost anywhere from two thousand to twenty thousand

yen. [A yen is about equal to half a dollar.]

"So if a girl is well fitted out she need not spend a great deal on

dress after her marriage. A couple of hundred yen may represent her

whole year's outlay for dress, though of course if she is rich and cares

a great deal for dress, she may spend several thousand.

"Our fashions vary only in colour and such figures as may be displayed

in the goods. Therefore they are not nearly so 'busy' as your fashions.

And we can always rip a kimono to pieces, dye it, and make it over."

Some other items I get from this lady: When a Japanese girl is married

it is customary for the bride's family to present obi to the ladies of

the groom's family. For a funeral the entire costume including the obi,

is black, save for the white crests. Ladies of the family of the

deceased wear white silk kimonos without crests, and white silk obi. The

Japanese ladies' costume, put on to the best advantage, is not so

comfortable as it looks. It is fitted as tight as possible over the

chest, to give a flat appearance, and is also bound tight at the waist

to hold it in position. The obi, moreover, is very stiff, and to look

well must also be tight.

The more select _geisha_ are said to attain the greatest perfection of

style; which probably means merely that, being professional entertainers

whose sole business it is to please men, they make more of a study of

dress, and spend more time before their mirrors than other women do.

* * * * *

The speed with which women reverted to the lovely kimono after their

brief experiment with foreign fashions, may have been due in part to a

lurking fear in Japanese male minds that along with the costume their

women might adopt pernicious foreign ways, becoming aggressive and

intractable, like American women who, according to the Japanese idea,

are spoiled by their men--precisely as, according to our idea, Japanese

men are spoiled by their women.

But whatever the reasons, the fact remains that the Japanese revealed

good practical judgment. They kept what they needed and discarded the

rest. It is their avowed purpose to follow this rule in all situations

involving the acceptance or rejection of western innovations, their

object being to preserve the national customs wherever these do not

conflict with the requirements of the hideous urge we are pleased to

term "modern progress." This is a good rule to follow, and if we but

knew the story of the period when Chinese civilization was brought to

Japan, nearly fourteen centuries ago, we might perhaps find interesting

parallels between the two eras of change.

CHAPTER IV

_Quakes and the Building Problem--Big Quakes--Democracy in

Architecture--Narrow Streets and Tiny Shops--The Majestic Little

Policeman--The Dread of Burglars--What to Do in a Quake--The Man

Who Went Home--"Fire!"--A Ricksha Ride to the Wrong Address--A

Front-Porch Bath_

Have I given the impression that Tokyo is a disappointing city to one in

search of things purely Japanese? If so it was because I tarried too

long in the district of railroad stations and big business. Moreover, to

the practical commercial eye, this portion of the city must look

promising indeed, because of the wide streets and the new building going

on. And it is building of a kind to be approved by the man of commerce,

for in her new edifices Tokyo is adopting steel-frame construction.

That she is only now beginning to build in this way is not due to

inertia, but to the fact that earthquakes complicate her building

problem. The tallest of her present office buildings is, I believe, but

seven stories high, and I have heard that twice as much steel was

employed in its construction as would have been employed in a similar

building where earthquakes did not enter into the calculations of the

architect.

It would be difficult to overestimate the part that earthquakes play in

establishing the character of Japanese cities. There will never be

skyscrapers in Japan, or apartment buildings with families piled high in

air. The family, not the individual, is the social unit of the land, and

the private house is the symbol of the family. Even in the congested

slums of Japanese cities, or in the quarters given over to the pitiful

outcast class called _eta_, each family has its house, though the house

may consist only of a single room no larger than a woodshed and may

harbour an appalling number of people, as miserable and as crowded as

those of the poorest slums in the United States.

Though the seismograph records an average of about four earthquakes a

day, most of the shocks are too slight to be felt. Tokyo is however,

conscious of about fifty shocks a year. But she has not had a

destructive earthquake since 1894, nor a great disaster since 1855, when

most of the city was shaken down or burned, and 100,000 persons

perished.

Minor shocks receive but little attention. In fact by many they are

regarded with favour, on the assumption that they tend to reduce

pressure in the boiler-room, preventing savage visitations. However,

these do occasionally occur and on the seacoast they are sometimes

accompanied by tidal waves which ravage long stretches of shore, wiping

out towns and villages.

Earthquake shocks are sometimes accompanied by terrifying subterranean

sounds. Scientists have their ways of accounting for all these things,

but the man who really knows is the old peasant of the seacoast village.

He can tell you what really causes the earth to tremble. It is the

wrigglings of a pair of giant fish called _Namazu_, whiskered creatures

somewhat resembling catfish, which inhabit the bowels of the earth and

support upon their backs the Islands of Japan.

Even though the quakes are slight, they serve to keep in people's minds

certain unpleasant possibilities; and these possibilities are, as I have

said, acknowledged in the structure of Japanese houses. Two stories is

the maximum height for a residence, and even tea-houses and hotels are

seldom more than three stories high. This, together with the fact that

everyone who can afford it has a garden, causes Japanese cities to

spread enormously.

On the other hand, the Japanese requires fewer rooms than we do; his

home life is simple and he is less a slave to his possessions than any

other civilized human being. The average family can move its household

goods in a hand-cart. Even the houses of the rich are not blatant except

in a few cases in which florid European architecture has been attempted.

The difference between the houses of the rich and of the poor is in

degree, not in kind. As with the Japanese costume, the essential lines

do not vary.

[Illustration: The Japanese is not a slave to his possessions.

The average family can move its household goods in a hand-cart]

This democracy in architecture is restful to the eye and to the senses.

It gives the streets of Tokyo--excepting the important thoroughfares--a

sort of small-town look. Nor is a great metropolis suggested by the old

narrow streets, with their bazaar-like open shop fronts, their

banner-like awnings of blue and white, and their colourful displays of

fish, fresh vegetables, fruits, wooden clogs, curios, and many other

objects less definable, the possible uses of which entice the alien

wayfarer to speculation or investigation.

I never got enough of prowling in the narrow streets of Tokyo, staring

into shops (and sometimes, I fear, into houses), watching various

artisans carrying on home industries, wondering what were the legends

displayed in Chinese characters on awnings, banners and lacquered signs;

stumbling now upon an ancient wayside shrine, now upon a shop full of

"two-and-a-half-puff pipes," tobacco pouches for the male and female

users of such pipes, and _netsuke_ (large buttons for attaching

pipe-cases and pouches to the sash) carved in delightfully fantastic

forms; now upon a tea-shop full of tall coloured earthenware urns,

shaped like the amphoræ of ancient Rome and marked with baffling black

ideographs. Now I would discover a tea-house on the brink of a stream,

its balconies abloom with little geisha, its portals protected from

impurity by three small piles of salt; now it would be a geisha quarter

I was in, and I would hear the drum and flute and _samisen_; or again I

would discover a little shop with Japanese prints for sale, and would

enter and drink green tea with the silk-robed proprietor, bagging the

knees of my trousers and cramping my legs by squatting for an hour to

look at his wares.

Heavy wheeled traffic was not contemplated when the narrow streets of

Tokyo were laid out. From the most attenuated of them, automobiles and

carriages are automatically excluded by their size, while from others

they are excluded by the policeman who inhabits the white kiosk on the

corner. The policeman has discretionary power, and if you have good

reason for wishing to drive down a narrow street he will sometimes let

you do so, granting the permission coldly. He is a majestic little

figure. He wears a sword and is treated as a personage.

Naturally, the first consideration in the construction of a Japanese

house is flexibility. In an earthquake a house should sway. Earthquakes

are thus responsible for the general use of wood, which is in turn

responsible for the frequency of fires. And next to earthquakes, fires

are regarded by the Japanese as their greatest menace.

Third on the list of things feared and abhorred comes the burglar. I

doubt that there are more burglars in Japan than elsewhere, or that the

Japanese burglar is more murderous than the average gentleman of his

profession in other lands, but for some reason he is more thought about.

This may be because of the vicious knife he carries, or it may be

because Japanese houses are so easy to get into. In the daytime one

would only have to push a hand through the paper shoji and undo the

catch--which is about as strong as a hairpin. At night one might need a

cigar-box opener. At all events, it is for fear of burglars that the

Japanese householder barricades himself, after dark, behind a layer of

unperforated wooden shutters, which are slid into place in grooves

outside those in which the shoji slide. If the shutters keep out

burglars they also keep out air; and even though you may be willing to

risk the entrance of the former with the latter, the police will not

permit you to leave your shutters open--not if they catch you at it.

I made some inquiries as to the course to be pursued in the event of

burglary, fire, or severe earthquakes.

In earthquakes people act differently. I asked our maid, Yuki, what she

did, and found that, when in a foreign-style house, she would crouch

beside a wardrobe or other heavy piece of furniture which she thought

would protect her if the ceiling should come down.

"But what if the wardrobe should fall over on you?" I asked.

Yuki, however, was not planning for that kind of an earthquake.

In a Japanese house one need not worry about the ceiling, as it is of

wood; and as a matter of fact most of the ceilings in foreign-style

houses are of sheet metal.

It seems to me that the most intelligent thing to do in an earthquake is

to stand in the arch of a doorway; certainly it is a bad plan to try to

run out of the house, as many people, attempting that, have been killed

by falling fragments.

One night I got a letter from a friend at home. "Try to be in a little

earthquake," he wrote. "They build their houses for them, don't they?"

In the middle of that same night a little earthquake came, as though on

invitation. The bed-springs swung; the doors and windows rattled.

At breakfast next morning I asked my hostess, an American lady who has

lived most of her life in Japan, whether she had felt the tremor.

"I always feel them," she said. "They bother me more and more. In the

last few years I have got into the habit of waking up a minute or two

before the shocks begin."

"What do you do then?" I asked.

"I lie still," she said, "until the shaking stops. Then I wake my

husband and scold him."

The husband of this lady told me of a man he knew, an American, who came

out to Japan some years ago on business, intending to stay for a

considerable time. On landing in Yokohama he went directly to the office

of the company with which he was connected, and had hardly stepped in

when the city was violently shaken.

By the time the shocks were over he had changed all his plans.

"Nothing could induce me to stay in a country where this sort of things

goes on," he said. "I shall take the next boat back to San Francisco."

He did--and arrived just in time for the great San Francisco quake.

The course to take in case of fire is the same the world over. Shout

"Fire!" in the language of the country and try to put the fire out.

But if you find a burglar in your room don't shout the Japanese word for

"burglars," even if you know it--which I do not. The thing to shout is

"Fire!"--so I am advised by a Japanese friend, who, I am sure, has my

best interests at heart. For if you shout "Fire!" in the middle of the

night, the neighbours, fearing that the fire will spread to their own

houses, rush to your assistance; whereas if you cry "Burglars!" it

merely gives them gooseflesh as they lie abed.

Many times it happened in Tokyo that when I was bound on a definite

errand somewhere, the chauffeur or the ricksha coolie would land me

miles from my intended destination. There are three reasons why this

happened so often. First, Tokyo is a very difficult place in which to

find one's way about. Second, addresses in Tokyo are not always given by

street number, but by wards and districts, and there are tricks about

some addresses, as, for instance, the fact that 22 Shiba Park isn't on

Shiba Park at all, but is a block or two distant from the park's margin.

And third, though the language in which I told the chauffeur or the

_kurumaya_ where to go, was offered in good faith as Japanese, it was

nine times out of ten not Japanese, but a dead language--a language that

was dead because I myself had murdered it.

In some other city I might have felt annoyance over being delivered at

the wrong address. But in Tokyo I never really cared where I was going,

I found it all so charming.

Once a kurumaya trotted with me for three hours around the city to reach

a place he should have reached in one. I knew I would be hours late for

my appointment. I knew I ought to fret. But did I? No! Because of all

the things that I was seeing.

I saw the bean-curd man jogging along the street with a long rod over

his shoulder, at each end of which was suspended a box of _tofu_, which

he announced at intervals by a blast on a little brass horn: "Ta--ta:

teeya; _tee-e-e_--ta!" I saw a thicket of bamboo. I saw a diminutive

farmhouse, with mud walls and a deep straw thatch, and in the doorway

was a bent old white-haired woman seated at a wooden loom, weaving plaid

silk. And behind the bamboo fence and the flowering hedge, stood a

cherry tree in blossom.

It began to rain. In any other land I might have felt annoyance over so

much rain as we were having. But not so in Japan. Japan could not look

gloomy if it tried. Rain makes the landscape greener and the flowers

fresher. It makes the coolies put on bristling capes of straw which shed

the water as a bird's feathers do, and transform the wearer into a

gigantic yellow porcupine. It makes the people leave off the little

cotton shoes, called _tabi_, and go barefoot in their clogs. It makes

them change their usual clogs for tall ones lifted up on four-inch

stilts; and these as they scrape along the pavement give off a musical

"clotch-clotch," which is sometimes curiously tuned in two keys, one for

either foot. It brings out huge coloured Japanese umbrellas of bamboo

and oiled paper, with black bull's-eyes at their centres, and a halo of

little points around their outside edges. And as you go splashing by

them with your kurumaya ringing his little bell, the women turn their

great umbrellas sidewise, resting the margins of them in the road to

keep their kimonos from being splattered. And even then they do not look

at you severely. They understand that you can't help it. And are you

not, moreover, that lordly creature, Man, whereas they are merely women?

All these things I saw while I was lost, that afternoon. Then, just when

I might have begun to wonder if I was ever going to reach my

destination, what did I see?

Under the eaves of a thatched house beside the way a bronze young mother

and three children, all innocent of clothing and self-consciousness,

preparing to get into a great wooden barrel of a bathtub. You never saw

a sweeter family picture!... Yes, the Japanese are peculiarly a clean

race. It is not merely hearsay. It is a front-porch fact.

[Illustration: The bath of the proletariat consists of a large

barrel with a charcoal stove attached. Frequently it stands out

of doors]

Could any man lose patience with a kurumaya who can get him lost and

make him like it?

CHAPTER V

_Reversed Ideas--Some Advantages of Old Age--Morbidity and

Suicide--High Necks and Long Skirts--Language--Chinese

Characters and Kana--Calligraphy as a Fine Art--The Oriental

Mind--False Hair--The Mystery of the Bamboo Screens--A Note on

Cats at Cripple Creek--The Occidental Mind_

On the day of my arrival in Japan I started a list of things which

according to our ideas the Japanese do backwards--or which according to

their ideas we do backwards. I suppose that every traveller in Japan has

kept some such record. My list, beginning with the observation that

their books commence at what we call the back, that the lines of type

run down the page instead of across, and that "foot-notes" are printed

at the top of the page, soon grew to considerable proportions. Almost

every day I had been able to add an item or two, and every time I did so

I found myself playing with the fancy that such contrarieties ought in

some way to be associated with the fact that we stand foot-to-foot with

the Japanese upon the globe.

The Japanese method of beckoning would, to us, signify "go away"; boats

are beached stem foremost; horses are backed into their stalls; sawing

and planing are accomplished with a pulling instead of a driving motion;

keys turn in their locks in a reverse direction from that customary with

us. In the Japanese game of _Go_, played on a sort of checkerboard, the

pieces are placed not within the squares but over the points of linear

intersection. During the day Japanese houses, with their sliding walls

of wood and paper, are wide open, but at night they are enclosed with

solid board shutters and people sleep practically without ventilation.

At the door of a theatre or a restaurant the Japanese check their shoes

instead of their hats; their sweets, if they come at all, are served

early in the meal instead of toward the end; men do their _saké_

drinking before rather than after the meal, and instead of icing the

national beverage they heat it in a kettle. Action in the theatre is

modelled not on life but on the movements of dolls in marionette shows,

and in the classic _No_ drama the possibility of showing emotion by

facial expression is eliminated by the use of carved wooden masks.

[Illustration: Sawing and planing are accomplished with a

pulling instead of a driving motion]

Instead of slipping her thread through the eye of her needle a Japanese

woman slips the eye of her needle over the point of her thread; she

reckons her child one year old on the day it is born and two years old

on the following New Year's Day. Thus, when an American child born on

December thirty-first is counted one _day_ old, a Japanese child born on

the same day is counted two _years_ old.

Once when I was dining at the house of a Japanese family who had resided

for years in New York, their little daughter came into the room. Hearing

her speaking English, I asked:

"How old are you?"

"Five and six," she answered. Then she added, by way of explanation,

that five was her "American age" and six her "Japanese age."

Old age is accepted gracefully in Japan, and is, moreover, highly

honoured. Often you will find men and women actually looking forward to

their declining years, knowing that they will be kindly and respectfully

treated and that their material needs will be looked after by their

families. Old gentlemen and ladies are pleased at being called

grandfather and grandmother--_o-ji-san_ and _oba san_--by those who know

them well, and elderly unmarried women like similarly to be called _oba

san_--aunt. The same terms are also used in speaking to aged servants

and peasants whom one does not know, but to whom one wishes to show

amiability.

The duty of the younger to the older members of a family does not stop

with near relatives, but includes remote ones, wherefore poorhouses have

until quite recently been considered unnecessary.

It seems to me that one of the most striking differences between the two

nations is revealed in the attitude of Japanese school and college boys.

Instead of killing themselves at play--at football and in automobile

accidents--as is the way of our student class, Japanese boys not

infrequently undermine their health by overstudy, and now and then one

hears that a student, having failed to pass his examinations, has thrown

himself over the Falls of Kegon at Nikko. Undoubtedly there is a morbid

strain in the Japanese nature. Translations of the works of unwholesome

European authors have a large sale in Japan, and suicides are by no

means confined to the student class. Poisoning, and plunging before an

oncoming locomotive are favourite methods of self-destruction. Once when

I was riding on an express train I felt the emergency brakes go on

suddenly. A moment after we had stopped I saw a woman running rapidly

away on a banked path between two flooded rice-fields with a couple of

trainmen in pursuit. They caught her, but after a few minutes' agitated

talk during which they shook her by the sleeves as though for emphasis,

let her go. We were told that the engineman had seen her sitting on the

track. Two or three days later I read in a newspaper that a woman had

committed suicide beneath a train at about the place where I witnessed

this episode. Her husband, the paper said, had deserted her. I suppose

it was the same woman.

Another curious inversion is to be found in the Japanese point of view

concerning woman's dress--and undress. I have been told that our style

of evening gown, revealing shoulders, arms and ankles (to state the

matter mildly), does not strike the Japanese as modest. Certainly the

mandate of the Japanese Imperial Court is not the same as that of the

French _modiste_ (how curiously and inappropriately the word suggests

our word "moddest"!) for whereas, at the time of writing, the latter

decrees skirts of hardly more than knee length, the former decrees, for

ladies being presented at court, skirts that touch the ground.

Considering the foregoing facts it is, however, somewhat perplexing to

the Occidental mind to find that men and women often dress and undress,

in Japanese inns, with their bedroom shoji wide open, and that

furthermore they meet in the bath without, apparently, the least

embarrassment.

Like the English, the Japanese are persistent bathers, but whereas the

English take cold baths the Japanese bathe in water so hot that we could

hardly stand it. And when they have bathed they dry themselves with a

small, damp towel, which they use as a sort of mop.

Also like the English they drive to the left of the road. There is much

to be said for that, but some of their other customs of the road

surprise one. Wherever they have not been "civilized" out of their

native courtesy you will find that one chauffeur dislikes to overtake

and pass another. Surely to an American this is an inversion! When a

procession of automobiles is going along a road and one of them is for

some reason required to stop, the cars which follow do not blow their

horns and dash by in delight and a cloud of dust, but draw up behind the

stationary car; and if it becomes necessary for them to go on, the

chauffeurs who do so apologize for passing. This custom, which is dying

out, comes, I fancy, from that of ricksha-men, who never overtake and

pass each other on the road, but always fall in behind the slowest

runner, getting their pace from him, protecting him against the

complaints which his passenger would make if others were continually

coming up behind and going by.

* * * * *

Of all differences, however, none is more pronounced than that of

language. Instead of a simple alphabet like ours, the fairly educated

Japanese must know two or three thousand Chinese ideographs, and a

highly cultivated person will know several thousand more. To be sure,

there is a simple way of writing by a phonetic system, not unlike

shorthand, which is called _kana_. Every Japanese can read kana, which

is sometimes also mastered by foreigners long resident in Japan. There

are but forty-eight characters in kana, and as the characters have in

themselves no meaning, but signify only a set of sounds, they can be

used to write English names as well as Japanese words. My own name is

written in kana characters having the following sounds:

_Su-t[=o]-rii-t[=o]_--which being spoken in swift succession produce a

sound not unlike "Street."

[Illustration: su

t[=o]

ri

a character denoting

that the preceding

syllable is

long

t[=o]

Dono or Esquire--a

Chinese character]

The Chinese ideographs used by the Japanese have the same forms as the

characters used in China, but are pronounced in an entirely different

way, so that the Japanese and Chinese can read each other's writing, yet

cannot talk together. Books and newspapers published in Japan are

printed in a mixture of Chinese characters and kana, and there is,

moreover, beside each Chinese character in newspapers a tiny line of

kana giving the sound of the word represented. In this way a reader of

newspapers gets continual instruction in the written language and

finally comes to know the most frequently used words from the

ideographs, without referring to the kana interpretation. Thus there are

actually two ways of reading a Japanese paper. A thoroughly educated man

reads the ideographs, while a poorly educated one reads the kana, which

gives him the sound of a word that he knows by ear, though he does not

know it by sight when it is written in the classic character. These

conditions, of course, eliminate the use of our sort of typewriter,

though there is an extremely complicated and slow Japanese typewriter

which is used chiefly where carbon copies are required. Also, they

render the use of the linotype impracticable, and make hand-typesetting

an extremely complicated trade. The difficulty of learning the Chinese

characters, moreover, makes it necessary for students to remain in

school and college several years longer than is the case with us. There

is a movement on foot to Romanize the Japanese language, just as in this

country there is a movement to adopt the metric system; but practical

though such improvements would be in both cases, the realization of them

is, I fear, far distant, because of the difficulties involved in making

the change. And, indeed, from the standpoint of picturesqueness, I

should be sorry to see the Chinese characters discarded, for they are

fascinating not only in form but by reason of the very fact that we

never, by any chance, know what they mean.

The Japanese write with a brush dipped in water and rubbed on a stick of

India-ink; they seem to push the brush, writing with little jabs,

instead of drawing it after the hand, even though they write down the

column. Calligraphy is with them a fine art; and beautiful brushwork,

such as we look for in a masterly painting, is a mark of cultivation.

Because of their drilling with the brush almost all educated Japanese

can draw pictures. Short poems and aphorisms written in large characters

by famous men are mounted on gold mats and hung like paintings in the

homes of those so fortunate as to possess them. A scription from the

hand of General Count Nogi or Prince Ito would be treasured by a

Japanese as we would treasure one from the hand of Lincoln or

Roosevelt--possibly even more so, for where a letter from one of our

great men has a sentimental and historical value, a piece of writing

from one of their great men has these values plus the merit of being a

work of art. Such bits of writing bring large prices when put up at

auction, and forgeries are not uncommon.

In its structure the Japanese language is the antithesis of ours.

Lafcadio Hearn declares that no adult Occidental can perfectly master

it. "Could you learn all the words in the Japanese dictionary," he

writes, "your acquisition would not help you in the least to make

yourself understood in speaking, unless you learned also to think like a

Japanese--that is to say, to think backward, to think upside down and

inside out, to think in directions totally foreign to Aryan habit."

The simplest English sentence translated word for word into Japanese

would be meaningless, and the simplest Japanese sentence, translated

into English, equally so. To illustrate, I choose at random from my

phrase book: "Please write the address in Japanese." The translation is

given as: _Doka Nihon no moji de tokoro wo kaite kudasai_. But that

sentence translated back into English, word for word, gives this result:

"Of beseeching Japan of words with a place write please." And there is

one word, _wo_, which is untranslatable, being a particle which,

following the word _tokoro_, "a place," indicates it as the object of

the verb.

I shall mention but one more inversion. The Japanese use no profanity.

If they wish to be insulting or abusive they omit the customary

honorifics from their speech, or else go to the opposite extreme,

inserting honorifics in a manner so elaborate as to convey derision.

* * * * *

Numerous and curious though these reversals be, they are but the merest

surface ripples upon the deep, dark, pool of Japanese thought and

custom.

At first I did not quite grasp this fact. In my early days in Japan,

when I was asking questions about everything, it sometimes looked to me

as if the average Japanese was constitutionally unable to give a direct

and simple answer to a direct and simple question, and my first

impression was that this was due to some peculiarity of the far-famed

Oriental Mind. But that impression soon changed--so much so that I am

now disposed to doubt that such a thing as the Oriental Mind exists in

Japan, if by that term is meant a mental fabric constitutionally

different from that of Occidental peoples. That is to say, I believe the

average Japanese child starts out in life with about the same

intellectual potentialities as the average American, English, French or

Italian child, and that differences which develop as the child grows

older are not differences in mental texture, but only in the mental

pattern produced by environment. My contention is not that Japanese

brains are never imperfect or peculiar, but that their imperfections and

peculiarities are precisely those found everywhere else in the world.

And the same rule applies, of course, when one compares the great

intellects of Japan with the great intellects of other nations. At

bottom we are much more of a piece with the Japanese than either they or

we generally suppose. The differences between us, aside from those of

colour, size, and physiognomy, are almost entirely the result of our

opposite training and customs and the effect of these upon our

respective modes of thought. Neither nation has a corner on brains nor

on the lack of them.

In a hotel in Kobe a lady of my acquaintance ordered orange juice for

breakfast. The Japanese "boy"--waiters and stewards are all "boys" in

the Far East--presently returned to say that there was no orange juice

to be had that morning. But he added that he could bring oranges if she

so desired.

The Oriental Mind? Not at all. The Orient has no monopoly of stupid

waiters. The same thing might have happened in our own country or

another. And that is the test we should apply to every incident which we

are inclined to attribute to some basic mental difference between the

Orientals and ourselves.

_Granted the same background, could not this thing have happened in an

Occidental country?_

Never, in Japan, was I able to answer that test question with a final,

confident "No."

Sometimes, however, I thought I was going to be able to.

One day on the Ginza, the chief shopping street of Tokyo, I saw a

well-dressed young lady strolling along the walk with her long,

beautiful hair hanging down her back, and false hair dangling from her

hand. She was evidently returning from the hairdresser's where she had

been for a shampoo. The situation, from my point of view, was precisely

as if I had seen a similar spectacle on Fifth Avenue. But when I spoke

about it to Yuki, who besides being our maid was our guide, philosopher,

and friend, she assured me that the young lady was quite within the

bounds of custom.

"We Japanese no think it shame to have false hair," she said.

Once I thought I had the Oriental Mind fairly cornered, and had I not

later chanced to discover my mistake I should probably be thinking so

still.

I was driving in an automobile with a Japanese gentleman, a director in

a large pharmaceutical company. Parenthetically, I may say that he had

been telling me how, when his company bought three hundred thousand

_hectares_ of land in Peru, for the purpose of raising plants from which

some of their products are manufactured, the anti-Japanese press of the

United States took up the story, falsely declaring that here was a great

emigration scheme backed by the Japanese Government. But that is by the

way.

Presently we came to a place where a large building was being erected.

The framework was already standing and was surrounded by screens of

split bamboo which were attached to the scaffolding. Having noticed

other buildings similarly screened, I asked about the matter.

"Ah," said the gentleman, "the screens are to prevent the people on the

streets from seeing what is going on inside."

"But what goes on inside that they ought not to see?" I asked,

mystified.

My informant gazed at me gravely for a moment through his large round

spectacles. Then he said, as it seemed to me cryptically: "It is not

thought best for the people to see too much."

I pondered this answer for a moment, then noted it down in my little

book, adding the memorandum: "The Oriental Mind!"

Doubtless I should now be making weird deductions from that brown-eyed

gentleman's explanation of the screens, had I not chanced to mention the

matter to another Japanese with whom I was more intimately acquainted.

"But that is not correct," he said, smiling. "The screens are not there

to prevent people from seeing in, but to prevent things from falling on

their heads as they pass by."

The bamboo screens, in other words, served precisely the protective

purpose of the wooden sheds we erect over sidewalks before buildings in

process of construction. The pharmaceutical gentleman did not know what

they were for, just as we do not know the uses of a great many things we

see daily on the streets of cities in which we live; he was anxious to

be helpful to me; he did not wish to fail to answer any question I might

ask him; so he guessed, and guessed wrong. But as any reporter can tell

you, the practice of passing out the results of guessing in the guise of

accurate information is by no means exclusively a Japanese practice.

Reporters sometimes guess at things themselves, but that is not what I

mean. I mean that a conscientious reporter now and then finds himself

deceived by misinformation coming from some source he had supposed

reliable.

In writing about American towns and cities I have more than once been so

deceived. An old inhabitant of Colorado told me that the altitude of

Cripple Creek was so great that cats could not live there. Later,

however, I learned that cats can perfectly well live in Cripple Creek

despite the altitude. Indeed some cats having but little regard for the

character of their surroundings do live there. It is only the more

critical cats who cannot stand the place.

Every American knows that he could be asked questions about his own

country and its ways which he could not answer accurately offhand, but

in a foreign land he expects every resident of that land to be able to

explain anything and everything. I wonder if the Japanese expect as much

of us when they question us.

"Why do you say 'Dear me!'?" I once heard a Japanese gentleman inquire

of an American lady. And though the lady explained why she said "Dear

me!" I doubt that the Japanese gentleman was able to understand. I know

that I was not.

Another Japanese who had been in New York wished to know why we called a

building in which there were no flowers "Madison Square _Garden_," and

why ladies called a certain garment, once generally worn by them, a

"petti_coat_," although it is distinctly not a coat, but a skirt.

My answers to these questions were, to put it mildly, vague, and I

suppose my questioner said to himself as he listened to me:

"Ah, the Occidental Mind! How curiously it works!"

CHAPTER VI

_Interlocking Ideas--Customs and Symbolism--Simplicity versus

Complexity--Flower Arrangement--Teaism--The Egg-Shaped God--The

Feudal Era--Ceremonial Tea--Household Decoration--Keys to

Japan--The Seven Blind Men_

When I had been several weeks in Japan, striving continually to gain

some comprehension of the people and their ways, I began to feel a

little bit discouraged. Never had I been so fascinated by a foreign

land. Never in so short a time had I seen and heard so much that was new

and strange and charming. Yet never had my observations been so

fragmentary, so puzzling. My notebooks made me think of travelling-bags

packed with unrelated articles of clothing. With the stockings belonging

to one theme I had, as it were, packed the shoes of another. Here was a

full dress coat; here a pair of overalls. Nothing was complete and no

two things seemed to match. I could help to dress an army of ideas, but

I wondered if I could fully clothe one.

I kept asking questions, but frequently the answers led me far afield,

and were incomplete and unsatisfactory.

After a time, however, I began to understand why a Japanese so often

fails to give a simple and direct answer to a simple and direct question

about things Japanese. It is because, in many instances, no such answer

is possible. Nor is this impossibility due to any mental kink in the

Japanese of whom the question is asked. It is due to the fact that the

thing asked about is not a simple, self-contained unit, but is a minute

part of some great mass of thought or custom which must be in a general

way understood before any single detail of it can be understood. It is

as though you were to ask a question about a coloured pebble only to

find yourself thereby involved with cosmos.

Japan is a land of customs. Her customs are based on principles which

are rooted in traditions, which in turn frequently rest upon foundations

of history, religion, superstition, or perhaps a mythology involving all

three. Thus it often seems that every little word and act of a Japanese

can be accounted for in some curious, complex yet essentially logical

manner--that every thought in the Japanese mind has, so to speak, a

genealogy, which, like the genealogy of the Japanese Imperial Family,

reaches back into the mists of antiquity. Symbolism, moreover, plays an

immense part in the daily life of Japan, and this fact enormously

complicates matters for the foreigner who aspires to understand the

country and the people. These are some of the reasons why in an article

recently written for a magazine, I called Japan "The Isles of

Complexities."

Yet when I mentioned the title of that article to an American friend who

has lived for many years in Japan, he wrote me that he considered it a

misnomer.

"I should call Japan 'The Isles of Simplicities,'" he declared, "just

because life there is so different from life in our own artificial

civilization. I am speaking particularly of our false modesty as

compared with the more natural ideas of the Japanese concerning natural

functions and unnatural emotions--or emotions unnaturally excited. If

you will get down to fundamentals I think you will find that we are the

complex people and they the simple people. Can you, for instance,

project yourself into the mind of a Martian visiting this earth for the

first time, taking a trip through the dance-halls, cabarets, and

midnight frolics of New York and Chicago, then going to Japan and seeing

the class of entertainment there provided for natives and foreigners

alike? Let such an unprejudiced outsider watch the street scenes of

Japan, note the frank customs of the people, including those revealed in

the community baths, and I think he would say the Japanese are

essentially simple as compared with us, that they are purer in thought

and action, and (though I know I am inviting contradiction) that they

have on the average a higher sense of real morality."

My friend makes out a good case and I agree with much that he says, but

he is thinking along one line while I am thinking along another. He is

thinking of the outward simplicities of Japanese life, while I am

thinking of its inward complexities, especially with regard to the

relation of one fact to another--I might almost say of every fact to

every other fact.

Let me illustrate:

That grouping of flowers in a bamboo vase, which you find so satisfying,

is not the result of any fancy of the moment, but is the product of an

elaborate art, dating back at least five centuries. Flower Arrangement

is a part of the curriculum of girls' schools and is one of the

accomplishments of every lady. Hundreds of books have been written on

the art and there are thousands of professional teachers of it. It has,

you are informed, a philosophy of its own. Confucianism is invoked. The

Universe is represented by three sprays of different height--an effect

often found also in plantings in Japanese gardens. The tallest spray,

standing in the middle, symbolizes Heaven; the shortest, Earth; the

intermediate, Man. There may be five, seven or nine sprays, but the

principle of Heaven, Earth and Man must be preserved. There must never

be an even number of sprays, and four is a number to be avoided above

all others, since _shi_, the Japanese word for "four", also means

"death."

Significance likewise attaches to the species of blooms and branches

used. The plum blossom, which is sent to brides, symbolizes purity, and

also, because it flowers when snow is on the ground, stands for courage

in adversity.

But just when you begin to flatter yourself that you have acquired some

understanding of Flower Arrangement you meet some one who does not

follow the tenets of the particular school of Flower Arrangement you

have heard about--which, let us say, is the popular Ikenobo school--but

believes in the teachings of the Enshiu school, the Koriu school, or the

Nagéire--"thrown in"--school. Or perhaps he favours the kindred art

called Morimono--"things-piled-up"--which deals with compositions of

fruit and vegetables; or the Morihana school, which applies the

"things-piled-up" principle to flowers; or that other kindred art which

teaches the making of "tray landscapes"--pictures drawn on the flat

surface of a tray in pebbles and various kinds of sand.

The essential point in all Flower Arrangement is that there shall be

form and balance, yet that the composition shall not be perfectly

symmetrical, as perfect symmetry is not found in nature. In order to

attain the desired effects the flower-stalks and branches used are

carefully bent and twisted, and this work is done with such delicacy and

dexterity as to conceal the fact that their forms have been altered by

artificial means. I have seen a Flower Master make waterlilies stand

upright on their stalks by forcing water up through the stalks with a

syringe. He then set them on one of those flat metal flower-holders we

have lately been learning to use in this country, so arranging them in a

shallow bowl that there was an open space between the stems, which he

said was "for the fish to swim through"--though the fish was in this

case purely a creature of his imagination.

Many methods of making flowers draw water are also taught. Especially in

the case of chrysanthemums, the ends of the stalks are burned; the end

of a hardwood branch is often crushed so that it admits water more

freely; certain flowers are put in hot water; others are dipped in a

solution of strong tea and pepper.

The origin of Flower Arrangement is traced by Okakura to a time when

ancient Buddhist saints "gathered the flowers strewn by the storm and,

in their infinite solicitude for all living things, placed them in

vessels of water." We are told that Soami, a painter of the Ashikaga

period, was an adept, and that Juko the Tea Master was his pupil. Flower

Arrangement thus became a recognized art in the fifteenth century,

albeit not an independent art, since it was at first a branch of Teaism.

Teaism? They tell you you cannot understand Flower Arrangement unless

you also understand Teaism. What is Teaism?

Here is unfolded to you a further range for study. You knew, of course,

that the first thing which happens when you pay a call in Japan, be it a

business or social call, is the arrival of a cup of clear Japan tea, and

that the second and third things which happen are the arrival of the

second and third cups. You knew that the tea of Japan is green tea, and

that it is taken without cream or sugar from cups having no handles. You

knew, perhaps, that such tea is made with hot--_not_ boiling--water. But

were you aware that tea is in its highest sense not a beverage, but a

creed, a ritual, a philosophy?

The discovery of the brew is said to have been made by the Chinese

Emperor Chinnung, in the year 2737 B.C., but the mythology of Buddhism

traces the creation of the tea-bush itself to the diverting god

Daruma--that amusing egg-shaped fellow often represented in a child's

toy which, when pushed over, persists in rolling back to an upright

position, thereby symbolizing unflagging aspiration. "Down seven

times--up eight times," the Japanese say of Daruma.

Having meditated day and night for weeks, Daruma fell asleep. On

awakening he was so vexed with his drowsy eyelids that he cut them off

and flung them to the ground, where they sprouted into plants from the

leaves of which a sleep-destroying beverage might be made.

The seeds of the tea-plant were brought to Japan from China in the year

805 A.D., but the initiation of the habit of tea-drinking is generally

dated from the time, about four centuries later, when the priest Eisai,

of the Zen sect of Buddhists--a favourite sect among artists and

tea-drinkers to this day--wrote a treatise on "The Salutary Influence of

Tea-Drinking," which he presented, along with a cup of tea, to one of

the early _shoguns_, who was ill. Thus tea was first taken as a medicine

"to regulate the five viscera and expel evil spirits."

Not long after this we find the drinking of tea becoming a pastime of

the nobility, and by degrees we see the development of aesthetic

practices in connection with it. Art objects were displayed when people

met for tea; sumptuous tea-parties were given by _daimyos_, and one

writer tells us that there came a period of decadence in the Feudal Era

when warriors would lay down the sword in favour of the teapot, and die

cup in hand when their castles were taken by their enemies.

* * * * *

Let me digress here to speak briefly of the Feudal Era, the most

interesting era of Japanese history. It lasted from the twelfth to the

middle of the nineteenth century--that is, throughout the period during

which Japan was ruled not by its Emperors, but by several successive

families of shoguns, or as for reasons given later they were sometimes

called, _tycoons_. Though the shoguns usurped Imperial power it is a

noteworthy fact that they did not usurp the throne itself nor attempt to

destroy the Imperial family, but were content to keep the successive

emperors in a state of impotence. Under the shoguns were the daimyos,

powerful feudal lords acting in effect as provincial governors; and each

daimyo had his _samurai_, or fighting men, holding rank in several

grades. There was also a class of samurai known as _ronin_ who

acknowledged no lord as their master, but were independent fighters and

trouble-makers. I give this outline because these various terms confused

me at first. There was but one shogun at a time; the daimyos numbered

between two and three hundred, and it has been estimated that there were

some two million samurai. With a very few exceptions--among them rich

farmers and swordmakers--no one below the rank of samurai could wear a

sword. The sword-wearing class was the ruling class, and ordinary

workers were regarded as of little consequence. A samurai could strike

down with his sword any plebeian who jostled him by accident, or who as

much as looked at him in a manner which he found distasteful.

The rank of samurai corresponded with that of knights in feudal Europe,

and Japanese families who are descended from samurai are proud of the

fact, precisely as some European families, and indeed some American

families, are proud of having sprung from knightly forbears.

* * * * *

But to return to our tea. A Zen priest named Shuko is said to have

originated the idea of associating with the habit of tea-drinking the

cultivation of "the four virtues"--urbanity, purity, courtesy, and

imperturbability--and this conception, originating about the middle of

the fifteenth century, is to this day a tradition of the Tea Ceremony,

or _cha-no-yu_.

The great soldiers Nobunaga and Hideyoshi, chief figures of the latter

half of the sixteenth century, were addicts of the Tea Ceremony. It was

Hideyoshi who caused the Tea Master, Sen-no-Rikyu, to consider the

various schools of Ceremonial Tea which had developed, and codify them.

The keynote of the ceremony prescribed by Sen-no-Rikyu was "simplicity"

of a most elaborate kind. There must be a special teahouse in the

garden--though in recent times a special tearoom in the house is

considered adequate. The teahouse was required to be small. Its exact

dimensions were given, down even to the height of the doorway, which was

so low as to compel guests to enter with bowed heads. The house must be

simple in the extreme, yet built of the choicest woods. The character of

the tea equipment was specified, as was the nature of the decorations.

This was where Flower Arrangement originally came in. A _kakemono_--one

of those Oriental paintings mounted on a vertical panel of silk arranged

to roll up on a cylindrical piece of wood and ivory attached to its

lower margin--must hang in the shallow alcove which is the place of

honour in every Japanese room; and beneath the kakemono must be

displayed an object of art or an arrangement of flowers having a certain

relationship to the painting.

For example, if the painting be that of a lion the suitable flower to be

displayed beneath it is the peony, because the lion is the king of

beasts and the peony the king of flowers. This is merely one simple

instance of an artistic association of ideas, infinite in number and

sometimes complicated in character. Yet these decorative affinities are

understood not only by the highly educated Japanese, but by a large

proportion of the people--for the feeling for art is, I believe,

distributed more widely amongst the people of Japan than amongst those

of any other nation. The Japanese do not jam their homes with furniture

and decorations as we so often do, but exhibit their art treasures a few

at a time, keeping most of them put away. It is said that Japanese rooms

look bare to the average foreigner. To me, however, their rooms do not

look bare, but have an air of exquisite refinement seldom found in an

American or English room.

Some Americans who have learned to appreciate the Japanese idea of

decoration, and who imitate it superficially, nevertheless achieve

assemblages of art objects which, because of the lack of relationship

between them, offend the trained Japanese eye precisely as a discord

offends a trained musical ear. As Chamberlain points out, the Japanese

have few mere "patterns." They don't make "fancy figures" merely for the

sake of covering up a surface. Their decoration means something--as

indeed decoration has in its highest periods in all countries.

There have been many Tea Masters since Sen-no-Rikyu, and the names of

not a few of them are remembered to this day with veneration. The chief

treasure of a friend of mine in Tokyo is a little teahouse, standing in

his garden, which belonged some three hundred years ago to

Kobori-Enshiu, Tea Master to the third Tokugawa shogun. If you would

know how such associations are valued in Japan, go to an auction when

some piece of Ceremonial Tea equipment, once the property of a famous

Tea Master, is coming up for sale.

Ceremonial Tea has practically nothing to do with ordinary tea-drinking.

The very tea used for the purpose is not like other tea. It comes in the

form of fine green powder which is placed in a special sort of bowl in a

special sort of way, whereafter water of exactly the right temperature

and quantity is added, and the mixture is whipped to a creamy froth with

a tiny bamboo brush, manipulated in a special manner. Great stress is

laid upon the frame of mind brought into the tearoom, as well as on the

etiquette and technique governing every detail connected with the making

and drinking of the tea. The bowl is passed and received according to

exact rules, and there is profound bowing back and forth. First it

circulates as a loving-cup amongst the guests; later a special bowl is

served to each in turn. On accepting the bowl the guest revolves it

gently in both hands; then with as much of the calm dignity of a Zen

Buddhist as he is able to exhibit, he raises it and takes a large sip.

Removing the bowl from his lips he pauses meditatively; then repeats the

process. Etiquette demands that when three large sips have been taken

there shall remain in the bowl enough tea to make a small sip. In

disposing of this final draught great gusto must be shown. The head is

thrown back in indication of eagerness to drain the last drop, and the

tea is drawn into the mouth with a sucking sound which advertises the

delight of the drinker.

[Illustration: Nor is the potency of Ceremonial Tea diminished

by the fact that it is served by a lovely little Japanese hand]

The second night afterward he may be able to sleep. Ceremonial Tea is

potent. Nor is its potency diminished by the fact that the hand which

makes and serves it is a characteristically exquisite little Japanese

hand, set off by the long soft sleeve of a flowered silk kimono.

* * * * *

Obviously you cannot understand Japan without understanding the Japanese

woman--the nation's crowning glory. But as Lafcadio Hearn tells you, she

is not to be understood without an understanding of the organization of

Japanese society, which in turn, is not to be understood without a

comprehension of Shintoism, the State religion.

Everyone has a prescription for understanding Japan. One friend told me

I could never understand it until I had grasped the attitude of the

people toward the Imperial House. But that is only another way of saying

that Shintoism must be understood. Many, naturally, speak of Buddhism.

Others mention the feudal system, with its clan loyalty, as the

touchstone, and still others assured me that a knowledge of the Tea

Ceremony and the No drama were essential.

"Fujiyama is the key-note of Japan," wrote Kipling. "When you understand

the one you are in position to learn something about the other." Sir

Charles Eliot, long before he became British Ambassador at Tokyo, wrote

that it is hopeless to attempt to understand Japan without first

recognizing "the peculiar spirituality of the Japanese"; but there are

not wanting others to deny the existence of any such spirituality as Sir

Charles describes, and who, instead, harp upon the alleged Prussianism

of Japan as explaining everything.

Doctor Nitobé, the gifted Japanese author, who, like Okakura, writes

delightfully in English, gives us as the key to Japan the doctrine of

_bushido_, or "military knight ways"; but again there are students of

Japan who affirm that the system of practical ethics attributed by the

doctor's patriotic pen to the samurai of old, would astound those

doughty warriors could they hear of it. The book "Bushido," declare

these critics, is less a key to Japan than to Doctor Nitobé.

Is not the interdependence of facts, of which I spoke earlier,

illustrated in the trend of this chapter, all of which, remember, grew

out of a discussion of a bunch of flowers in a bamboo vase? Do you see

why I called Japan "The Isles of Complexities"? And do you see that I

might also call it "The Isles of Contradictions"?

Perhaps you will not be surprised, then, at my confession that after

having spent several weeks in Japan I found myself fascinated but also

puzzled. Why, I asked myself, had I so gaily set forth under an

agreement to write about Japan? Why hadn't I made it a mere pleasure

trip? For it is one thing to see and be satisfied with seeing, and quite

another to attempt interpretation.

It has often been said that if a man stays in Japan six or eight weeks

he can write a book about it; that if he stays a year or two he may

write a single article for a magazine; but that if he stays several

years he will be afraid to write at all.

"To get the Japanese background," one friend told me, "you ought to have

a month or two in Korea, and at least a year in China. Then you should

come back and rent a house and live in Japanese fashion for a while."

"Say about two hundred years?" I suggested.

My friend smiled.

"One hundred and fifty years might do," he said, "if you made every

minute count."

Then, perhaps because he read in my face the signs of my discouragement,

he reminded me of an old fable:

Seven blind men went to "see" an elephant. One of them, bumping

into the great beast's side, said, "Here is a creature

resembling a wall." Another, feeling the trunk, likened the

elephant to a serpent; another, touching a tusk, announced that

the animal resembled a spear; and still another, grasping an

ear, compared the elephant to a large leaf. The one who got hold

of the tail likened it to a rope, while he who embraced a leg

thought of a tree, and he who crawled over the back declared

that an elephant resembled a hill.

There in a paragraph you have Japan and her interpreters.

PART II