As a matter of fact, while it is picturesque at a distance of space or
time, actual living in the flimsy toy houses of Japan is far from
convenient to one “raised” in Western fashion. It is glorious to be able
to nudge one’s neighbor during a performance of “Madame Butterfly” and
hoarsely to boast, “I once lived like that”—I am, of course, speaking of
the stage-setting, not of the story—but it is equally inglorious to
forget for a moment the frailty of paper walls and thrust a hand through
one of those sliding _shoji_. To be able—and expected—to run about
indoors on bare or stockinged feet, leaving all the dust or mud of the
street—and, from Tokyo down, one or both are rarely lacking in Japan—at
the threshold has an Elysian sound, a suggestion of speckless Golden
Stairs and noiselessly flitting angels. It is an unusual Westerner,
however, who does not feel his dignity swiftly evaporating when deprived
of his customary footwear. Nor is it merely his shoes which are _de
trop_ in a Japanese house; for ideal convenience he should leave his
legs, too, at the door. The awkward school-boy’s difficulty in disposing
of his hands and arms is mild indeed beside that of the Occidental guest
faced with the problem of what to do with his superfluous lower limbs on
the cushion-scattered matting of a Japanese room. In flowing kimono it
is bad enough; in trousers, which custom decrees shall retain the
suggestion of a crease, it is disheartening. It is all very well, of
course, to be able to tuck beds in a closet during the day, to have a
room uncluttered by furniture, but the total lack of drawers, shelves,
or hooks leaves Japan the original land for hanging things on the floor.
More troublesome still to us of an ungregarious race is the utter
absence of seclusion in Japanese dwellings. Since that initiation in
Tokyo we have inhabited a score of them, mainly inns and public
hostelries; and of the petty annoyances of life, of which Japan has her
share, even as other lands, perhaps the most exasperating, certainly the
most wearying, is the impossibility of sometimes being alone. No wonder
so many Japanese turn Shinto or Buddhist recluses and retire to temple
or monastery—though even for them there is little genuine seclusion. The
romantic paper walls have very slight capacity for deflecting sound. Let
the man four rooms removed from you in a native inn turn over in his
sleep, and you spring awake ready to do battle with an intruder. Let a
pair of fellow-guests engage in one of those interminable conversations
which seem to be the most frequent toward midnight and beyond, and a
megaphone could scarcely increase the din.
The Japanese are not a noisy race. Verbal strife is rare, domestic
quarrels all but unknown, or at least inaudible to the outer world; the
streets, usually innocent of paving, give back dust rather than uproar;
the gentle-voiced temple bells of all Japan could not equal the din of a
single belfry-hung copper kettle of South America. Yet, if all else
fails, at least the omnipresent servant can be relied upon to shorten
one’s springless slumber. Besides the paper-covered _shoji_ forming the
walls of the room itself, there are the heavier sliding walls of the
house itself, usually of solid boards, occasionally of glass. No human
power can induce house or inn servant to close these before one has
fallen asleep; all the studied cruelties of the Orient could not coax
her to leave one of them ajar during the night, nor to refrain from
opening with a mighty slamming and stowing them away in their daytime
box on the house corners at the first peep of dawn. From that moment on,
if not, indeed, during the brief night itself, one’s most private
chamber is never wholly one’s own. Soft-footed servant-girls patter in
and out on every possible provocation, often with none at all, shoving
aside the semi-transparent _shoji_ not only without a “by your leave”
but without a suggestion of warning, magnificently oblivious to even a
complete state of nudity on the part of the possibly somewhat modest
inmate. Would one bathe? A maid will make every effort to assist at the
disrobing; a “bath-boy,” if not a domestic of the just then still less
welcome gender, must needs force his way in to lend a helping hand
during the ablutions, while the common tub is all too likely to contain
already a denizen or two, smiling a welcome to the hesitating new-comer.
Fortunately the temperature of a Japanese bath, as unendurable to the
Occidental as the quilt of arctic thickness with which he is expected to
cover himself on the most breathless summer night, furnishes an
inoffensive excuse for preferring a spigot and one of the wooden
half-buckets scattered about the flooded floor.
Though the equipment of Japanese hostelries of the native type does not
include dining-rooms, let not the humanity-weary guest fancy that his
meals at least may be taken in delicious solitude. From the moment when
he claps his hands thrice to announce the arrival of appetite, a
serving-maid, if not two or three of them, will be always with him, now
touching face to mat as she places before him on the floor a more or
less edible dish, the rest of the time sitting on her heels within arm’s
length, with the inscrutable face of a bronze Buddha, yet watching with
eyes that catch every faintest suggestion of a _faux pas_ his
inexperienced wielding of the untractable chop-sticks, that she may
report his barbarianisms later to a cachinnatory kitchen. Constantly, on
every side, one has the sense of being but a thin paper sheet removed
from other beings, those ubiquitous human beings with which all Japan
teems, so that in street or train, on country road or mountain trail,
almost nowhere can the traveler escape for a brief moment, when the
Occidental mood is upon him, from the fellow-mortals with which the
island empire is so overcrowded. And through it all lurks the burden of
his superfluous legs, the necessity of squatting when he would sit, and
the subconscious worry as to where shoes should be worn and where
removed, intensified rather than lightened in those scattered
establishments for the wanderer ranked as “semi-foreign.” We shall never
regret, I am sure, our stay in Japan; but we were often thankful that it
was to be only a brief stepping-stone to China, where tables and chairs,
and beds and hooks, and less ephemeral footwear would again be found
among the stage properties of life.