ORIENTAL OBSEQUIES
_A Japanese Funeral_
IN Japan it is chiefly the middle class that has become Europeanised.
The upper nobility and the poorer peasantry are the classes most
tenacious of the old national customs. The upper middle class is the
travelled class. The masses are too poor, the nobles are too tied by
grave responsibilities, to go far from Japan. It is the son of some
petty nobleman or well-to-do gentleman who goes to Oxford or Harvard for
his education, and returns home a very Westernised Oriental indeed.
Then, too, class prejudice is always stronger in the very high and in
the very lowly than in the intermediate classes.
I went to a Japanese funeral in Tokio. But I do not for a moment pretend
that it was a typical funeral. Even those who attempt to write
exhaustively about Japan find little or nothing to say about the burial
customs of the Japanese. There are a number of reasons why it is very
difficult to say anything definite. First, all Japan, like Gaul of old,
is divided into three parts: into Japan the old, the conservative, into
Japan the new and iconoclastic, and into Japan the compromising. In this
third Japan, nothing is anything, anything is everything. European
habits and Japanese customs are jumbled together in the most unhappy
way. Then, as for the second reason, if we confine our inquiries to the
old conservative Japanese—the only Japanese picturesquely
interesting—we find them so divided into sects and so subdivided into
families that what you say, truthfully enough, about Yamamato, would be
entirely false about Nozeyama. Japanese religion is a very puzzling
thing to any one who comes of a race accustomed to take religion
seriously. Religion in Japan is a subject by itself—a big subject. I
will try to be intelligible briefly. A large proportion of the Japanese
are Buddhists, free-and-easy Buddhists, lightly-worshipping Buddhists,
but still Buddhists. But these Buddhists are divided into fifteen sects.
The funeral customs of each sect differ from those of the other
fourteen. There are also many of the funeral observances determined by
the rank of the dead, still others decided by the family to which he
belonged, and, again, some dependent upon his financial placement.
I went to a Japanese funeral. It was, I repeat, typical of some Japanese
funerals only.
The day before the interment I went to the house in which the death had
occurred. The dead man had been prominent in the upper mercantile
circles. Hundreds of Japanese men and women were passing noiselessly in
and out of the house. They had come to say good-bye to a man they had
known well and liked well; they were all dressed quietly. It is an
insult to enter a Japanese house of death clad in anything but the
plainest, simplest garments. We passed in with the others. I was with a
Japanese gentleman and his wife. An old man-servant showed us into a
large, handsome room. Another servant took charge of us. Both these men
were dressed in the plainest dark-blue livery; both had red eyes. The
room was furnished in strict Japanese style; it was full of
sorrowful-looking people. Several of them hastened to extemporise a seat
for me out of cushions and the broad window-seat. There were no chairs
in the room, of course, only mats. Japanese courtesy never fails, never
flags; it is the real, the universal religion of Japan, and from it
there are no dissenters. A Japanese allows nothing to lessen the full
measure of graceful politeness which he pays you, because he owes it to
himself to do so. Absolutely nothing!
The condemned man about to perform hara-kiri, bows with extreme civility
to his witnesses and assistants. No sorrow, no trouble, no illness, not
death, not marriage, not even birth itself, in the least way frees a
Japanese from the grave obligation of being very polite. I went one
night in Kobe to the hut of a poor Japanese woman who had been suddenly
taken very ill. When I went in, I saw that the joy of motherhood would
be hers in a very few moments. But I was allowed to do nothing for her
until she had spoken all the prescribed words of Japanese greeting and
given me a cup of tea. No wonder that the Japanese women are more
charming than those of almost any other race, when the poorest and
lowliest of them are so heroic in their practice of a woman’s greatest
charm—courtesy!
The room in which they had so kindly contrived me a delightful seat was
the ante-chamber of the room in which the dead man lay. Maid-servants
were passing round trays of sweetmeats, which every one refused,
pointing to the inner door and shaking their heads. Then a white-haired
old man, who was evidently not a servant, brought us an exquisitely
carved ivory tray. On it were thimble-sized silver cups holding saki.
There are two things in this world I cannot drink—whisky and saki. They
are very much alike. Saki is the Japanese whisky, and is even nastier to
my thinking than Occidental whisky. The friend I was with knew my
repugnance to saki, and hastened over to me as swiftly as she might, for
Japanese etiquette forbids one to move except very slowly in a house of
mourning. “You must drink it,” she whispered, “it is a health to the
dead. And his brother, who is offering it to you, will be deeply
offended if you don’t.” I took the cup and rose, meaning to bow to the
ground as every one else was doing. But the old cup-bearer motioned me
gently back on to my cushions. “Try not yourself with our strange
customs. My sister feels it very kind that you are here.” I had known
the dead man’s wife rather well, years before, in Washington.
Every few moments a servant pushed back from the inside the door of the
next room. When he did so, a few people passed in to the dead. Our turn
came and we went in. A large white cloth was spread upon the floor. In
the centre lay a low bier, on it, clad in his best robes, lay the dead
man. Upon his bosom, half inside the opening of his kimono, lay a rose.
The room was sweet with flowers. The servants stood silently near the
doors, and the whole room spoke of sad, loving care. My two friends bent
and kissed the dead face, and we passed out by a door opposite to that
through which we had entered.
We were leaving the house when word was brought me that the widow would
like to see me. I went upstairs, and was shown into a room just over the
one we had left. It was a typical Japanese bedroom. The bereaved woman
half sat, half lay upon her sleeping mat, one elbow resting upon her
peculiar little Japanese pillow. She was dressed in coarse hempen cloth,
which is the prescribed Japanese mourning. It would be wrong, I think,
for me to write about the five minutes I spent with her. We were
friends, and the wide racial difference between us would afford me a
poor excuse if I utilised her grief for a paragraph.
The next day I went to the funeral service in the temple. The body was
no longer visible. It had been encased, in a sitting posture, in a
square wooden box. Then the box had been filled with carmine to preserve
the body from decay. This is expensive. When it cannot be afforded,
carmine is put in the ears, nose, and mouth of the corpse as a partial
preventative of decomposition.
In a room of the temple had been placed the white stone tablet, upon
which was inscribed the new name by which the dead would enter paradise.
After death, every conservative Japanese, who was a Buddhist, receives a
new name; it is called okurina, or accompanying name. Into this room
passed the incense burners. Each was provided with a paper packet of
incense, which he burned before the tablet. Behind the tablet sat the
priests of the temple. The temple itself was a gay, joyous looking
place, which seemed strangely out of keeping with the grave, subdued
manner of the company. Demeanour is everything at a Japanese funeral;
but were it not so, it would be impossible for a people of such
exquisite good taste to behave lightly on such an occasion.
The cemetery to which we went was also bright and gay. It was built upon
a gently-sloping hillside, and was literally a paradise of
sweet-smelling flowers. The graves were at some distance from each
other, and, without exception, most carefully tended. Over many of them
were built carved marble roofing, peaked in shape. From some of these
roofs hung one of the tiny chimes of bells of which the Japanese are so
fond, and which they invariably have in their temples or prayer-houses.
The coffin was placed in a grave that was half-full of honeysuckle and
roses. More flowers were thrown above the coffin, or rather coffins, for
the inner box had been put in several others. Again incense was burned,
until the air grew very peculiar with the mingling of the fresh perfumes
of the growing flowers and the heavy odour of the preserved spices. Then
we left the dead in the least depressing cemetery I have ever seen. A
tuneful brook ran through that burial ground, and in it were several
squat pagodas or prayer-houses—miniature temples. Everything was clean,
quiet, and in order, except the flowering vines—they ran mad riot
everywhere.
Cremation used to be practised in Japan, but never, I believe, very
generally. Certainly it has long been confined to the lower and poorer
classes, and even they employ it less and less every year.
The custom of burying the dead in a sitting position is general but not
universal, and is decreasing. In many Japanese families, children are
still trained explicitly in the offices of respect they may at any time
be called upon to perform at the obsequies of a relative. One quaint old
custom still holds in Japan. Upon slips of paper are written the names
of all persons present at a funeral. The slips are bound together,
sometimes very elegantly, and handed down from generation to generation
as heirlooms. Curiously, the writing of these lists is the only one
exception I know to the Japanese rule of writing from the right to the
left. The lists of funeral guests are written as we write from left to
right.
The Japanese deal with death and the attendant ceremonies with more
dignity and simplicity than any of the other Oriental peoples. They are
not naturally gloomy, and they never exaggerate gloom. Their burial
grounds are pretty, peaceful places, in every way fitting resting places
for the dead of a superlatively graceful, artistic, pleasant people.