CHILDREN
A cluster of little Japanese children at play somehow suggests to me a
grand picture-gallery, a picture-gallery of a nation. Every picture is a
child upon which has been expended the subtle decorative sense of its
family or neighbours, as expressed in the tint of its dress and sash and
in the decoration of its little head. It is in the children that the
national artistic and poetic nature of the Japanese people most
assuredly finds expression. Each little one expresses in its tiny dress
some conception, some idea or thought, dear to the mother, some
particular aspect of the national ideals. And just as in the West the
character of a man can be gauged by the set and crease of his trousers,
so in Japan are the sentiments and ideals of a mother expressed in the
design and colouring of her baby's little kimono. Thus, when watching a
group of children, maybe on a fete day, one instinctively compares them
with a gallery of pictures, each of which is a masterpiece, painted by
an artist whose individuality is clearly expressed therein. Each little
picture in this gallery of children is perfect in itself; yet on closer
study it will be found that the children are more than mere pictures.
They tell us of the truths of Japan.
One child, in the clearness and freshness of its dress, seems to embody
an expression of that unselfish cheerfulness so characteristic of the
Japanese, among whose children you can go for days without seeing one
cry. Another, in the graceful dignity and rich yet severe colouring of
its costume, tells of that faithful spirit of loyalty and pride that has
always marked the lives of the Japanese. One tiny baby, in the dainty
sombreness of colour and quiet arrangement of the folds of its little
kimono, suggests the thoughtful consideration and sweet seriousness of
the women of Japan; and another child, dressed in a wonderful
combination of red and bronze relieved by glimpses of white, expresses
in its rich glowing colour, and the purity of the white within, the fire
of Japanese patriotism.
[Illustration: BABY AND BABY]
But come with me for a walk on any day, in sun or in rain, whether on a
gala day or on an ordinary day, and we shall meet little units in the
decorative whole, every one of them a colour picture bringing to the
mind some characteristic of the people. We shall find one little one
who, to the eye of the artist, flashes like a gem, her white kimono,
decorated, or rather made vivid, as by the hand of a master, with only
three or four great black crosses, each formed of the crisp dexterous
drags across the surface of the cloth. Again the black is repeated in
the carefully-arranged hair, and the white in the little wooden shoes;
but all is toned and touched by just a little old rose in the ribbon
that ties her head-dress and the fastening of the thongs at her feet.
Such an art in a people is living; it has its root in national spirit
and national character, and must continue to foster and strengthen the
national ideals.
The clothing of her children is a matter of great and serious
consideration to the Japanese mother. When a baby is born she gathers
together all her friends, and they discuss a scheme of decoration for
the set of miniature dresses that the little one is to wear. More care
is taken with these baby dresses than with those of any grown person,
and if the parents are rich the sums that are spent on silk crepe are
sometimes such as would shock any English mother. So much has to be
taken into consideration with regard to the design of a child's dress:
it might be cherry-blossom or a landscape, according to the month and
the circumstances amid which the infant was born. The colouring of the
costume is generally suggestive of the ideas and sentiments of the
mother. She does not say, "I will take this bough of apple-blossom, and
it shall be the dress of my child," or "I will take Fuji at sunset, and
the colouring of my baby's dress shall be of old rose and white snow."
She does not grab at nature in this crude way; but the artistic and
poetical feelings innate in her unconsciously find expression in the
little frock. When the mother and her neighbours have finally decided
upon a scheme of decoration, the designs are placed in the hands of some
great artist, who carries them out in water-colour drawings on silk,
which the friends gather together again to examine and generally enjoy.
Then the designs are handed over to some expert stencil-cutter, go
through the regular elaborate course, and are finally retouched, by the
artist himself, directly on to the silk. If the parents are rich enough
the stencils are destroyed, and the dress consequently becomes unique.
Such a dress will doubtless be an exquisite work of art, and very
costly. Indeed, a dress for a Japanese baby can cost quite as much as a
picture by a leading Academician, and is of far greater artistic value.
But no price can be too great, no colouring too gorgeous, for the
dresses of these little butterflies, the children of Japan. The poorest
mother will scrape together sufficient money, and the father sacrifice
one half of his daily portion of rice, in order that a child may attend
a festival in the bright hues befitting its age. The younger the child,
the more brilliant is its dress. You will see a mite, a little baby girl
that cannot walk or talk, clothed in silk crepe of the most brilliant
colour possible--rainbow colour, almost prismatic in its brilliancy. As
the child grows older the colours fade, and become duller, until by the
time she is a full-grown woman they have sobered down almost to Quaker
hues--except here and there, where some tiny edging of colour shows
itself.
[Illustration: A JAP IN PLUM-COLOUR]
The science of deportment occupies quite half the time of the Japanese
children's lives, and so early are they trained that even the baby of
three, strapped to the back of its sister aged five, will in that
awkward position bow to you and behave with perfect propriety and
grace. This Japanese baby has already gone through a course of severe
training in the science of deportment. It has been taught how to walk,
how to kneel down, and how to get up again without disarranging a single
fold of its kimono. After this it is necessary that it should learn the
correct way to wait upon people--how to carry a tray, and how to present
it gracefully; while the dainty handing of a cup to a guest is of the
greatest importance imaginable. A gentleman can always tell the
character of a girl and the class to which she belongs by the way she
offers him a cup of Sake. And then the children are taught that they
must always control their feelings--if they are sad, never to cry; if
they are happy, to laugh quietly, never in a boisterous manner, for that
would be considered vulgar in the extreme.
Modesty and reserve are insisted upon in the youth of Japan. A girl is
taught that she must talk very little, but listen sympathetically to the
conversation of her superiors. If she has a brother, she must look up to
him as her master, even although he be younger than herself. She must
give way to him in every detail. The baby boy places his tiny foot upon
his sister's neck, and she is thenceforth his slave. If he is sad, her
one care must be to make him happy. Her ambition is to imitate as nearly
as possible the behaviour of her mother towards her own lord and master.
Many attempts have been made by enterprising Westerners to "broaden" the
minds of the Japanese girls, and to make them more independent, by
establishing schools for them, where they can be educated on purely
Western principles; but these attempts have always failed. The women
turned out from such establishments are always unhappy, and continue to
suffer for the rest of their lives, because they are disliked and
resented by all their people, and no man will marry any of them. The
beautiful side of life seems to have been taken from them; imagination
is crushed and spoilt; they are unfitted for the life that every
Japanese woman must lead. Naturally they are hated by the men, for the
womanly qualities that are most valuable in a Japanese girl are
destroyed by this Western "broadening" of their minds: they wear
high-heeled shoes, put nosegays on the table, and are altogether
demoralised. Sad to say, Western influence is keenly felt within the
schools which belong to all classes and conditions of Japanese children,
and one trembles lest gradually the simplicity and quaint formality of
their bringing-up should become hardened and roughened into the system
which has done so much to spoil the child-life of the West. Their own
artistic training is perfect; and although Japan is the land of
ceremony, and the children are brought up with a certain strictness of
propriety unknown in the less ceremonious West, their utter naturalness
and absolute freedom from seeking after effects present in them a
simplicity of character which helps to make them the most delightful of
their kind. A little boy flying a kite is like no other boy you have
ever seen in England. There is a curious formality and staidness
about him and his companions which never degenerates into shyness.
[Illustration: SUGAR-WATER STALL]
Once I drifted into a country village in search of subjects for
pictures, and I found to my astonishment that every living soul there
was flying a kite, from old men down to babies. It was evidently a fete
day, dedicated to kites; all business seemed abandoned, and every one
either stood or ran about, gazing up in the air at the respective toys.
There were kites of every variety--red kites, yellow kites, kites in the
shape of fish, teams of fighting kites, and sometimes whole battalions
of them at war with kites of a different colour, attempting to chafe
each other's strings. It rather surprised me at first to see staid old
men keenly interested in so childish an amusement; but in a very short
time I too found myself running about with the rest, grasping a string
and watching with the greatest joy imaginable the career of a floating
thing gorgeously painted, softly rising higher and higher in the air,
until it mingled among the canopy of other kites above my head, becoming
entangled for a moment, then leaving them and soaring up above the
common herd, and side by side with a monstrous butterfly kite; then came
the chase, the fight, and the downfall of one or the other. They were
all children there, every one of them, from the old men downwards; all
care and worry was for the time forgotten in the simple joy of flying
kites; and I too, in sympathy with the gaiety about me, felt bubbling
over with pure joy. To see these lovely flower-like child faces
mingling with the yellow wrinkled visages of very old men, all equally
happy in a game in which age played no part, was an experience never to
be forgotten. None was too old or too young, and you would see mites
strapped to the backs of their mothers, holding a bit of soiled knotted
string in their baby fingers, and gazing with their black slit eyes at
some tiny bit of a crumpled kite floating only a few inches away.
[Illustration: ADVANCE JAPAN]
Another game in which both the youth and the age of Japan play equal
parts is the game of painting sand-pictures on the roadside. These
sand-pictures are often executed by very clever artists; but I have seen
little children drawing exquisite pictures in coloured sands. Japanese
children seem to have an instinctive knowledge of drawing and a facility
in the handling of a paint-brush that is simply extraordinary. They will
begin quite as babies to practise the art of painting and drawing, and
more especially the art of painting sand-pictures. You will see groups
of little children sitting in the playground of some ancient temple,
each child with three bags of coloured sand and one of white, competing
with one another as to who shall draw the quaintest and most rapid
picture. The white sand they will first proceed to spread upon the
ground in the form of a square, cleaning the edges until it resembles a
sheet of white paper. Then, with a handful of black sand held in the
chubby fingers, they will draw with the utmost rapidity the outline of
some grotesque figure of a man or an animal, formed out of their own
baby imaginations. Then come the coloured sands, filling in the spaces
with red, yellow, or blue, according to the taste and fancy of the
particular child artist. But the most extraordinary and most fascinating
thing of all is to watch the performance of a master in sand-pictures.
So dexterous and masterly is he that he will dip his hand first into a
bag of blue sand, and then into one of yellow, allowing the separate
streams to trickle out unmixed; and then with a slight tremble of the
hand these streams will be quickly converted into one thin stream of
bright green, relapsing again into the streams of blue and yellow at a
moment's notice. A Japanese mother will take infinite pains to cultivate
the artistic propensities of her child, and almost the first lesson she
teaches it is to appreciate the beauties of nature. She will never miss
the opportunity of teaching the infant to enjoy the cherry-blossom on a
sunny day in Uyeno Park. Hundreds of such little parties are to be seen
under the trees enjoying the blossom, while the mother, seated in the
middle of the group, points out the many beauties of the scene. She will
tell them dainty fairy stories--to the boys, brave deeds of valour, to
strengthen their courage; to the girls, tales of unselfish and
honourable wives and mothers. Every story has a moral attached to it,
and is intended to educate and improve the children in one direction or
another. There is one fairy story which is a universal favourite with
both mothers and children, and that is the story of Momotaro. When
seeing a mother talking earnestly to her children, I have always
discovered that it was the same old story, old yet ever fresh. It is a
curiously simple tale about an old woman who goes every day to the river
to wash clothes, and an old man who goes to the mountain to fetch wood.
The old woman is always unhappy because she has no children, and one
day, when she is washing clothes in the river, a large peach comes
floating down towards her. On carrying it home, she hears the cry of a
child, which appears to come from the inside of the peach. She rapidly
cuts it in two, and finds to her amazement a fine baby sitting in the
middle of it, which, since it was born in a peach, she afterwards called
Momotaro. The story then goes on to tell how the baby grows up to be a
fine healthy lad, who, on reaching the age of seventeen, plans an
expedition to subjugate an island of the devil. A minute description is
given of the food he takes with him--of the corn and rice wrapped in a
bamboo leaf--and how on his journey he meets with a wasp, a crab, a
chestnut, and a millstone, who all promise to help him if he will give
them half of his food. The lad complies, and a beautiful description is
given of their journey to the island of the devil, on which journey a
very skilful plan is thought out by which to kill him. On arriving at
the island, they find that the chief of the devils is not in his own
room. They soon take advantage of his absence. The chestnut hops into
the ash; the millstone mounts on to the roof; the crab hides in the
washing-pan; the wasp settles in a corner; and the lad waits outside.
The poor devil comes back, and has a terrible time between them all. He
goes to the fireplace to warm his hands; the chestnut cracks in the fire
and burns them; he rushes to the water-pan to cool himself, and the crab
bites his hand; he flies to a safe place, and is tormented by the wasp;
in an agony of pain he tries to leave the room, but the remorseless
millstone descends with a crash upon his head, and mortally wounds him.
This story is told to the Japanese children over and over again, but is
always received with wide-eyed delight and excitement.
[Illustration: CHUMS]
I have never seen a child in Japan cry; nor have I ever seen one
smacked, for what mother can have the heart to touch so dainty a blossom
as the child flower of this land of flowers? A group of Japanese
children is perhaps the prettiest sight on earth, and they themselves
are works of art, the beauty of which can scarcely be imagined. Each
head and each piquant face is but a field where the ever-present artist
can exercise his ingenuity and his skill in colour and design.
Deliberately the child's head and face are treated as subjects fit for
the most decorative of design, and the result, though quaint and formal
to the last degree, is invariably as pleasing as it is undoubtedly
startling and original. And the children themselves are no less full of
interest than their heads and faces are full of paint. I once saw a
pyramid of children gazing in at a sweet-stuff shop. They looked like
three children; but on closer inspection I discovered that one was a
doll looking about the age of a child of two, with its great head
lolling on the back of its mother, aged three. The three-year-old was a
boy, strapped to the back of his sister aged five. The doll and the
sister looked very sleepy and tired as they gazed vacantly at the rows
of tempting pink sugar-water bottles in the sweet-stuff shop; but what
arrested my attention was the alert and intelligent expression of the
three-year-old child in the middle, who, just as I took out my notebook
to sketch the group, put a lighted cigarette between his lips, holding
it between two chubby fingers, eyeing me with the peculiar introspective
look of the old hand as he both tests the excellence of the tobacco and
gives himself up to its enjoyment. As I sketched him he looked
composedly at me out of his big eyes, and posed twice without a particle
of artificiality--once with the cigarette in his mouth, and again as if
he had just taken it from his lips for a moment while he paid attention
to me.
[Illustration: A SUNNY STROLL]
I remember once passing a temple, an ancient Shinto temple called
"Kamogamo"; it was a sacred temple and very popular, being much
frequented for picnics. On this particular day there was going on one of
the two important picnics or festivals of the year; the great ground of
the temple and the playground were enclosed about with straw ropes on
bamboo poles, to separate one from another. It was a festival for girls
under ten, and there were hundreds of children, all with their kimonos
tucked up, showing their scarlet petticoats, and looking for all the
world like a mass of poppies. The scarlet in the petticoats was
universally repeated in neck and hair; but their kimonos varied much,
and were of almost every shade and texture of Japanese cloth and silk
crepe imaginable. There were luminous greens, fawns, stripes, golden
browns shading into lemon-yellows, harmonies in brown and violet, and
dresses striped and chequered in tones of almost every conceivable
value. Two rows or armies of these girls were placed several yards
distant from each other in this long emerald-green field; and in the
space between them stood two servants, each holding a long bamboo pole,
fresh and green, being evidently just cut down for the fair, and
suspending from its top a flat shallow drum covered with tissue paper.
Presently two young men teachers appeared on the scene carrying two
baskets of small many-coloured balls, which they threw down on the grass
between the children and the drums. Then a signal was given, and all the
girls started running down the field at full tilt towards one another,
pouncing on the balls as they ran, and throwing them with all their
force up at the paper drums. The great majority of them missed their aim
altogether, and flew either above or below the drums, some of the mites
getting so excited that they threw the balls forty or fifty yards in mid
air. After a time, when a perfect shower of balls had passed through the
tissue drums, quite demolishing them, a shower of coloured papers,
miniature lanterns, paper umbrellas, and flags came slowly fluttering
down among the children on to their jet-black bobbing heads, and into
their eager outstretched hands. Never have I seen anything more
beautiful than these gay, brightly-clad people, packed closely together
like a cluster of flowers in the brilliant sparkling sunshine, with
their pretty upturned faces watching the softly falling rain of coloured
toys. I strolled through the temple grounds, passed this brilliant
stream of colour and lovely laughing children, passed the cherry-trees
and dainty tea-houses, and in a few minutes found myself in a cool
grey-green forest of bamboo, an academic bamboo grove looking like a
pillared temple, sunless and silent. It was here that the philosophers
of old taught and meditated, and it seemed a place to meditate in--so
quiet, so sombre, shut off from the world with its endless lofty pillars
of grey luminous green--silent, a world apart.
[Illustration: THE CHILD AND THE UMBRELLA]
WORKERS