_The Courageous Congressmen--Geisha and Nesan--The Maple
Club--The Gentleness of Servants--Removable Walls--Dancing
Girls--A Lesson in the Use of Chopsticks--"Truthful Girl"--A
Toast in Saké--Drunkenness--My Friend the Amiable Inebriate--The
Great Rice-Ball Mystery_
It amused me to hear, a little while ago, that a party of our
Congressmen, on a junket in Japan, had been implored by certain pious
Americans over there, to avoid such sinful things as teahouses and
geisha. No doubt the poor devils of Congressmen had fancied they would
be able to lead their own lives five thousand miles from home and
constituents. And evidently they proposed to do it, for they replied
with uncongressmanlike boldness that teahouses and geisha were among the
things they most desired to see. That pleased me not only because it
showed that a Congressman can be spunky--even though he has to go to
another hemisphere to do it--but because it showed a normal human
interest in what is assuredly a very curious phase of life.
I, too, was interested in tea houses and geisha, and I made it a point
to find out as much about them as I could.
The first geisha I saw were in attendance at a luncheon for some forty
persons--about half of them Americans--given by a Tokyo gentleman for
the purpose of showing us what a purely Japanese luncheon was like. It
was held at the Maple Club, a large, rambling Japanese-style building
standing in charming gardens in the midst of one of the Tokyo parks--a
Far Eastern equivalent of such Parisian restaurants as the Café
d'Armenonville or the Pré Catelan.
As we alighted from our rickshas a flock of smiling serving maids
appeared in the doorway to greet us, indicating to us that we were to
sit on the high door-step and have our shoes removed by the blue-clad
coolies who were in attendance--each with the insignia of the Maple Club
in a large design upon the back of his coat. (If you wish the coolie who
draws your ricksha or does other work for you to wear your crest you
supply his costume and pay him a few cents extra per day.)
When our shoes had been checked and our feet encased in soft woollen
slippers like bed-bootees, we were bowed into the building and escorted
through a series of rooms with soft straw-matted floors and walls of
wood and paper. Emerging upon an outer gallery of highly polished wood,
we followed it, looking out over the lovely garden as we moved along,
and finally reached a flight of stairs, also of wood having a satiny
polish, which led to the banquet hall. Our escorts on this journey were
several little Japanese maids in pretty kimonos, who, though they spoke
no English, talked to us in soft international smiles. No one without a
sweet nature could smile the smile of one of these Japanese serving
maids. They are called _nesan_, meaning literally "elder sister." This
familiar appellation is generally used in speaking to a maidservant
whose name one does not know, and in the term is revealed a hint of the
beautiful relationship which exists in Japan between master and servant,
whether in a private house or a Japanese inn. In the great cities this
old relationship is to some extent breaking down as Japan becomes
Westernized, but in Japanese hotels and country inns, and in prosperous
homes one sees it still. Service is rendered with a grace and
friendliness which make it very charming. Even about the menservants in
the houses of the rich there is nothing of the flunkey spirit. The
Japanese manservant generally wears silken robes which give him a fine
dignity and make it difficult, sometimes, to differentiate him from
members of the family. He is extremely polite, but not rigid. You feel
that he is a self-respecting _man_. As for maidservants, they are like
so many pet butterflies. One of Japan's strongest claims to democracy,
it seems to me, is founded on the attitude existing between master and
servant.
[Illustration: No one without a sweet nature could smile the
smile of one of these tea-house maids. They are called
_nesan_--"elder sister"]
Those who have visited Japan, yet who do not agree with me as to the
exquisite courtesy of the Japanese servant, will be those whose stopping
places have been European-style hotels in the large cities. In such
hotels the service is often poor and one occasionally encounters a
servant who is surly and ill-mannered. I encountered one such in
Kobe--said to be the rudest city in Japan. But by the time I ran across
him I had seen enough of the real Japan to know what such rudeness
signified. It showed merely that in this individual case native courtesy
had been worn away by contact with innumerable ill-bred foreigners.
But to return to our luncheon.
As a concession to American custom our host greeted us with a handshake,
and his Japanese guests walked in and shook hands instead of dropping to
their knees on entering and bowing to the floor according to the old
national custom.
The room, which was large, well illustrated the elasticity of the
Japanese style of building. Five or six private dining rooms usually
occupied this section of the house, but for the requirements of the
present occasion the walls forming these rooms had been removed making
the entire area into one spacious chamber. It is a simple matter to
remove such walls, since they consist only of a series of screens of
wood and paper which slide in grooves and can easily be lifted out and
put away in closets. And let me add that, though the climate of Japan is
very damp, the Japanese use such thoroughly seasoned wood, and work in
wood so admirably, that I never once found a sliding screen that stuck
in its grooves.
[Illustration: Cocoons--Five thousand silk worms eat 125 lbs. of
mulberry leaves and yield eight skeins of silk, which make one
kimono]
For the meal we knelt upon silk cushions laid two or three feet apart
around three walls of the room. As the weather was chilly there stood
beside each of us a brazier, or hibachi, consisting of a pot of live
charcoal standing in a wooden box. The Japanese love of finish in all
things is shown in the careful way they have of banking the ashes in a
hibachi, and making neat patterns over the top of them.
In front of each of us was placed a little table of red lacquer about a
foot high, with an edge like that of a tray, and on this table were
sundry covered bowls of lacquer and of china, and little dishes
containing sour pickles and a pungent, watery brown sauce. In front of
every one or two guests knelt a nesan, presiding over a covered
lacquered tub, containing boiled rice, which is eaten with almost
everything, and even mixed with green tea and drunk with it out of the
rice-bowl.
Also, in attendance upon each guest, there was a geisha. Some of the
geisha were women perhaps twenty years old, wearing handsome dark
kimonos which they generally carried with a great deal of style, but
others were little _maiko_, dancing girls, in brilliant-coloured kimonos
with the yard-long sleeves of youth. The youngest of these was perhaps
twelve years of age, while the oldest may have been sixteen.
As I afterward learned, there is a vast difference between various
grades of geisha. Those present at this luncheon were among the most
popular in Tokyo. They were truly charming creatures, sweet-faced,
soft-eyed and gentle, with beautiful manners and much more poise than is
shown by the average Japanese lady. For Japanese ladies are not, as a
rule, accustomed to our sort of mixed social life, in which husbands and
wives take part together, whereas geisha are in the business of
entertaining men and presumably understand men as women seldom do.
Since few geisha speak English, and very few Americans speak Japanese,
we travellers from abroad are rather outsiders with the geisha, and our
appreciation of them must be largely ocular. But a geisha can come as
near to carrying on a wordless conversation as any woman can. Mine
smiled at me, filled my shallow little cup with warm saké from time to
time, and showed me how to use my chop-sticks. I found the lesson most
agreeable, and was presently rewarded by being told, through the
Japanese friend at my side, that for a beginner I was doing very well.
If you want to know what it is like to eat with chop-sticks try sitting
on the floor and eating from a bowl, placed in front of you, with a pair
of pencils or thick knitting needles. It is a dangerous business, and
the risk is rendered greater by the fact that the Japanese do not wear
napkins in their laps, and that to soil the spotless matting is about
the greatest sin the barbarian outlander can commit. The Japanese napkin
is a small soft towel which is brought to one warm and damp, in a little
basket. It is used on the face and hands as a wash-cloth and is then
removed.
[Illustration: Family luncheon à la Japonaise. The serving maid
is kneeling in the corner at the back. If you would essay eating
with chopsticks, try it with a pair of heavy knitting needles]
Presently my geisha called one of her sisters in the craft to witness my
progress with the chop-sticks. The new arrival was named
Jitsuko--otherwise "truthful girl"--and she seemed to be quite the most
fashionable of them all. Her kimono, with its dyed-out decorations and
its five ceremonial crests, was very handsome and was worn with great
_chic_, her obi was a gorgeous thing richly patterned in gold brocade,
and I noticed that she wore upon it a pin containing a very fine large
diamond--a most unusual sort of trinket in Japan. Also she wore a ring
containing a large diamond. Nor was this foreign note purely
superficial. For, to my delight, Jitsuko spoke to me in English. She was
one of Tokyo's two English-speaking geisha, and as I later learned, had
the honour of being nominated as the geisha to entertain the Duke of
Connaught at dinners he attended at the time of his visit to the
Japanese capital.
Jitsuko and the other geisha talked together about me. Then Jitsuko paid
me the compliment of saying that they agreed in thinking that I looked a
little bit like a Japanese. I thanked her, and returned the compliment
in kind, saying that I thought they also looked like Japanese, and very
pretty ones, whereat they both giggled.
By this time we had established an _entente_ so cordial that it seemed
fitting that we should drink to each other. Aided by the gentleman at my
side and by Jitsuko, I learned the proper formalities of this ceremony.
First I rinsed my saké cup in a lacquer bowl provided for the purpose,
then passed it to Jitsuko. The preliminary rinsing indicated that she
was now to fill the cup and drink. Had I passed it to her without
rinsing, it would have meant that she was to refill it for me--for a
geisha never "plies" one with saké but waits for the cup to be passed.
When she had sipped the saké she in turn rinsed the cup, refilled it,
and handed it to me to drink. Thus the friendly rite was completed.
I had heard that saké was extremely intoxicating, but that is not so. It
is rice wine, almost white in colour, and is served sometimes at normal
temperature and sometimes slightly warm. It is rather more like a pale
light sherry than any other Occidental beverage, but it lacks the full
flavour of sherry, having a mild and not unpleasant flavour all its own.
On the whole I rather liked saké, and I found myself able to detect the
difference between ordinary saké and saké that was particularly good.
While on this subject I may add that liquor of all sorts flows freely in
Japan. Saké is the one alcoholic beverage generally served with meals in
the Japanese style, but at the European-style luncheons and dinners I
attended two or three kinds of wine were usually served, and there were
cocktails before and sometimes liqueurs afterward. The Japanese have
also taken up whisky-drinking to some extent. They import Scotch whisky
and also make a bad imitation Scotch whisky of their own. But saké still
reigns supreme as the national alcoholic drink, and when you see a
Japanese intoxicated you may be pretty sure that saké--a lot of
saké--did it.
In my evening strolls, particularly in the gay, crowded district of
Asakusa Park in Tokyo--a Japanese Coney Island, full of theatres,
motion-picture houses, animal shows, conjuring exhibitions, teahouses,
bazaars and the like, surrounding a great Buddhist temple--I saw many
intoxicated men, but I never came upon one who was ugly or troublesome.
Whether because of some quality in the Japanese nature, or in the saké,
this drink seems only to make gay, talkative and sometimes boisterous
those who have taken too much of it. I should not be surprised if the
Japanese need alcoholic stimulants rather more than other races need
them. For one thing the climate of Japan, except in the mountains, is
enervating; and for another, the Japanese nature is generally repressed,
and saké tends to liberate it.
I noticed this at another entertainment in Tokyo--a dinner of newspaper
editors. Being the only foreigner there, and being enormously interested
in the problems connected with relations between the United States and
Japan, I launched forth, telling them my views in the hope of learning
theirs. But although I sensed that they did not agree with all I said,
their responses exhibited only the sort of polite tolerance that a
courteous host will show a somewhat obstreperous guest. For some time I
felt that I had acted like a bad boy at a party. But after the geisha
had filled our cups with saké more than once, I got what I was looking
for--an argument. It was a polite argument, but we had become friendly
enough to speak frankly. _In saké veritas._
This was a case of just enough saké, but so far as I was able to
observe, even too much saké produces no very objectionable results. I
shall never forget the young man, brightly illuminated with this
beverage, who came up to me one evening on the street, in a small town.
He was full of a desire to practise English on me and to help me. He
didn't care what he helped me to do. He would help me to buy whatever I
wanted to buy, go wherever I wanted to go, or stay wherever I wanted to
stay.
I explained to him that I was only strolling about while waiting for a
train and that it was now time for me to return to the station.
"Wait!" he cried. "I like you. I am drawn to you. I have been in
America. I can talk to you. We are friends. Wait!" He looked about him
hurriedly, then darted into a near-by shop.
In a moment he emerged and came running toward me bearing in his
extended hand a curious-looking object, resembling, as nearly as I could
see in the dim light, a somewhat soiled popcorn ball. This he pressed
into my hand with a generous eagerness which could not fail to convey to
me the fact his heart went with the gift.
"It is a present. It is for you. You will remember me. Another kind
might be better, but you are in a hurry."
My fingers grasped something heavy but yielding and glutinous. As I
thanked my new-found friend I examined it. It was a ball of rice
somewhat larger than a baseball. Scattered through it were brown objects
the precise nature of which I was unable to determine. I might very
accurately have told the donor that I was "stuck on" his present, since
the mass in my hand was held in form not merely by the cohesiveness of
the rice, but also by some substance of the nature of molasses.
We parted. I moved toward the railroad station where my family and
friends were waiting with Yuki, our invaluable maid. As I walked along I
studied the object. Obviously it was intended to be eaten. Yet there
were other purposes to which it might be put. It was a thing that a Sinn
Feiner would like to have in his hand as the British Premier passed by
in a silk hat. Charley Chaplin would have known what to do with it. It
was heavier than a custard pie and fully as dramatic.
My first impulse was to drop it as soon as I could do so unobserved; but
the thought occurred to me that it was probably a Japanese delicacy, and
that Yuki might like it; wherefor I carried it to the station.
When I offered it to Yuki she looked surprised. Her refusal was
courteous but determined.
"Where Mr. Street get that?" she demanded.
"A man gave it to me. Here, you take it."
Yuki giggled and stepped back.
"But what the man give it to Mr. Street for?"
"A present. What's the matter with it? Isn't it good to eat?"
"Yes--good to eat."
"Why don't you take it, then?"
Giggling, she shook her head.
"But Yuki--I don't understand. What's the joke?"
Shaking with merriment she whispered to my wife. It developed that the
saké-inspired Japanese had presented me with a tidbit specially prepared
for prospective mothers.
All things considered it seemed advisable to get rid of it at once. I
threw it on the railroad track.