IV

One need not go to the records of her patent-office to confirm the

wide-spread impression that the Japanese mainly imitate. Merely to skim

through one of the phrase-books so carefully compiled to give the casual

traveler all the words and phrases except those he will really need is

to unearth ample evidence on this score. Philologically speaking, if one

may convict on such slight testimony, the Japanese language is visibly a

hodgepodge, a _potpourri_, an _ollo podrida_; in other words, a mess. I

cannot carry the curious reader back to their gleanings from the

Malaysian fields from which perhaps they sprang, from the Yemishi, or

“hairy Ainu,” whose place in the sun they usurped, nor yet do more than

repeat the common knowledge that they fish new words from the Chinese

classics far more freely than we of the West help ourselves to a needed

tidbit of Latin or Greek. But their later history can be sketched with a

handful of words chosen almost at random from one of these simple

vocabularies-for-travelers, words which bring back to mind the days when

the Portuguese, the Dutch, then the English-speaking races, and finally,

in restricted fields, the Germans and the French spread out linguistic

displays for their choosing.

[Illustration: The American-like main street of Sapporo, capital of

Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan proper]

[Illustration: A street-lamp, a mail-box, and an American-copied

baby-carriage before a shop of Sapporo]

[Illustration: The old Ainu chief who threatened to crown me with a

plow]

[Illustration: The younger Ainu chief of another village, in ceremonial

garb]

Could, for example, a fat volume on “Japanese Cleanliness through the

Ages” say more than does the fact that their word for “soap” is

“_shabon_”? The Portuguese brought it, of course, and they did not

“discover” Japan for the Western world until exactly half a century

after Columbus sighted the West Indies. To this day “_pan_” remains the

Japanese word for “bread”—or for the horrible dough-balls which their

semi-Europeanized cooks occasionally perpetrate. If the Lusitanians

brought them the Western substitute for rice, they were repaid by

carrying back tea, which in the Portuguese tongue is to this day known

by the Japanese—or Chinese—word “_cha_.” Reminders of the two and a half

centuries during which a dozen Dutch traders, imprisoned on a little

swampy island in their westernmost port, were the only white men

permitted to come into contact with the Nipponese are still scattered

through the speech of the masses. The children of Nagasaki still call

Europeans indiscriminately “Orando-san” (Mr. Hollander); it would

probably be unearthing no scandal to conclude that the _tabako_ and

_beeru_ so generously stocked throughout the island empire came from the

same source. At length came the Americans, and the English, with their

ships and railways, and all the complicated paraphernalia of modern

civilization—and one inquires one’s way to the _suteishon_, perhaps to

ask the uniformed coolie who is lighting a _rampu_ there for a _matchi_

with which to incinerate one of the miserable _maki-tabako_ inflicted

upon its people by the Japanese Imperial Government Tobacco Monopoly.

It is a rare Japanese even to-day who uses a _hankechi_ in place of a

wad of soft native paper; and though _aisukuriimu_ now and then offers

to minister to a parched and dusty throat, it may be better on the whole

to await one’s return to Philadelphia. The letter _l_ is for the

Japanese tongue the greatest stumbling-block in Western speech; hence

one is warned that predatory mosquitos may cause _marariya_, that the

train is about to enter a _tunneru_, that there is not a _hoteru_ in

town, but only Japanese inns. Newboys occasionally announce their

ability to supply the “Mairu” as well as the “Taimusu”; in the first-

and second-class waiting-room of important stations may be found, in a

cover with large embossed gold letters, the “REGURATIONS” of the

Imperial Government Railways.

German, say those who should know, is sometimes heard in barracks and on

drill-field, localities with no welcoming smile for the foreigner, and

here and there it has left its impress upon the schoolroom; but the

casual traveler will be more likely to run across it in the realms of

physicians and druggists, should misfortune turn his attention thither.

In a land where virtually all others interested in attracting a foreign

clientele announce themselves in what purports at least to be English,

the native leech with the excuse for his presumption of a visit to

Germany, or of a Berlin correspondent, calls himself a “Praktische Artz”

and his establishment an “AugenundohrenheilAnstalt.”

When the desk-man of a Japanese inn comes to obliterate his legs and bow

his head on the more or less spotless matting of the room assigned you

and discovers to his horror that you cannot write—in the crippled

hieroglyphics with which he is familiar—the information demanded by the

ever-inquisitive police, he still declines to believe that the printed

questions on the tissue-paper register in his hand are worse than Greek

to you. Many a time I have had a hotel “boy” give up hope of making me

understand some verbal remark, only to see him triumphantly jot it down

for me in his irrational ideographs, or invisibly write it with a finger

on his open palm. A Chinese or Korean would no more catch the meaning of

his spoken word than I, but they would almost certainly recognize its

conventionalized picture; therefore why should not also this other

_gwai-koku-jin_, or “outside-country man”? A roughly drawn square means

a mouth or opening, an entrance or an exit, to all three races, though

their respective verbal terms for it may be utterly devoid of

similarity—merely to mention one example among thousands.

Travelers in at least as good a position as I to know have reported the

Japanese excellent linguists. My own brief experience implies quite the

contrary. The study of English is obligatory in the higher schools, yet

I have rarely found even a square-capped, beskirted university student

capable of understanding three consecutive words of my native tongue, or

of comprehensively pronouncing half a dozen nouns. I looked in vain for

any improvement in this respect since I first wandered through Japan a

score of years ago. If there is any, it is among the higher officials of

those government departments or large industrial enterprises where it is

indispensable, and with whom the average traveler rarely comes in

contact. Among the rank and file, even of the educated, with mild

exceptions in favor of what were once treaty-ports, there are now and

then unexpected oases of comprehension, but almost never anything

dependable. I am quite ready to admit myself in error, but I carried

away the impression that the average American school-boy retains more

French or German from a two-year course than does the newly graduated

Japanese youth from his five or six years of English.

The comparison is, I hasten to admit, not entirely fair. An Oriental

language is far more widely separated from our own than is any of the

important tongues of Europe. If the Japanese student struggling with

English finds his way beset with as great difficulties as I found mine

in attempting to piece together a minimum vocabulary of Japanese, it is

small wonder if he loses heart. Probably he is as much dismayed by the

incredible brevity of our tongue as we are by the redundant elaboration

of his. To be informed that our brief “I” becomes in Japanese

_watakushiwa_ is likely to be even more disheartening than the mere

necessity of turning one’s thinking topsyturvy and attempting to assert

that “Watakushi no tsuma wa hoteru no Shimonoseki ni des-ka”—“Me of

dishonorable wife in the nominative case hotel of Shimonoseki in is

question mark.” For like some other Orientals the Japanese have the

charming custom of pronouncing their grammatical distinctions and

quotation-marks along with the rest of the sentence.

It is partly their policy of “Japan for the Japanese” that makes them so

backward in speaking a tongue which they strive so assiduously to teach

themselves, for though they constantly emphasize the necessity of

knowing the most wide-spread Occidental language they refuse to hire

more than a handful of foreign teachers. The teaching of English is,

with almost negligible exceptions, left to natives who could not, though

starvation stared them in the face, make themselves understood in a New

York quick lunchroom. For one thing English or American teachers demand

several times the pittance paid Japanese pedagogues—Lafcadio Hearn is

not the only man to learn that the granting of Japanese citizenship

reduces the beneficiary to the Japanese scale of salaries—with the army

and navy eating the lion’s share of the national revenues. Strange as it

may seem, too, bashfulness is a noticeable Japanese characteristic,

though in groups and in predicaments where no one speaks English the

difficulty is made several times worse by many thinking they can.

However, I must admit that I wandered over all Japan, from the primeval

forests of the thinly inhabited north island to the southernmost town of

Formosa, on nothing but a faulty phrase-book, more than once passing a

full week without meeting a fellow-Caucasian, yet saw and procured all

there was to see or procure which was worth a little persistence. But it

was not always a simple task. The Japanese lack completely that

quickness of comprehension under difficulties which flowers best perhaps

in Spanish-speaking peoples. Pronounce the commonest of his words a

score of times, and if your pronunciation is in the slightest degree

faulty he will stare blankly at you until doomsday. His own speech being

utterly devoid of gestures, those simple motions which carry the

tongue-tied traveler far in many another country convey to him no

meaning whatever. Pick up an egg and a frying-pan, pretend to break the

former into the latter, light a match under it, and make the elsewhere

universal sign for eating by feigning mastication, and you will

unquestionably succeed in gathering the entire village as an amazed and

intently amused audience to your strange outlandish antics, but under no

circumstances will a single bystander guess that you harbor an innate

desire to partake of a pair of fried eggs. This characteristic is so

ingrained that all the pointing in the world will never call the

attention of your auditor to the near-by object you are attempting to

indicate, though it may cause him and the throng which quickly gathers

behind him to examine with meticulous care your outstretched finger. The

kingpin of all possible misunderstandings in attempting to wrestle with

this more than alien tongue, however, is the difficulty of

distinguishing “yes” from “no.” Ask your waiter, “Is there no bread?”—or

shall I play upon the popularity of the day and say “bananas”?—and his

violent nodding of the head, accompanied by a very positive “Hai!” which

the phrase-book translates as “Yes,” may cause you to wait long in vain

before you discover that what he really meant was, “Yes, you are

perfectly right; there is no bread.”

V

My impression that Japan is only a little country after all somewhat

evaporated during a visit to its slightly known northern island. This

was no doubt partly due to the almost Oriental leisureliness of Japanese

trains, and it is perhaps as much the long day’s ride from Tokyo to the

northern end of the main island as the uninviting aspect of the steamers

which set one across to Hokkaido that causes the overwhelming majority

of visitors to confine themselves to the well-beaten track from Nikko to

Nagasaki and miss a region amply worth while.

Beyond beautiful Volcano Bay with its smoking cones lies quite another

Japan, inconspicuous on the world map yet of a surprising vastness.

Hakodate, the chief landing-place, burdened with that silly Japanese

rule forbidding photography within modern cannon-shot of fortifications

which the most slow-witted of spies could easily find some other means

of picturing, calls for nothing more than the unavoidable halt of an

hour or two. But on the long day’s journey northward from there to

Sapporo one’s coming is already rewarded. Though May will soon be half

gone, it is cold enough for an overcoat, and the Imperial Government

Railways are still heating their trains. Low huts, with heavily thatched

or rusty-tin roofs, held down by scores of stones that testify to the

occasional violence of storms, hug the ground closely, in a way unknown

in the main island. Instead of rice-fields, the rich black soil is given

over mainly to corn and potatoes, corn shocked as it is in the United

States, as weatherbeaten cones of it that have stood through the long,

arduous winter still testify. Now and again the train rumbles for an

hour or more along the very edge of this or that magnificent bay,

through collections of miserable huts, with thatched fishing-boats and

millions of herring split in two and hung on lines to dry in the sun,

and millions more in heaps and bales ready for shipment. There is a

genuine Japanese atmosphere, not to say scent, about these clusters of

toilsome poverty, though certainly there is little of that cleanliness

which the mind habitually associates with the Japanese.

But these familiar touches, like the rare glimpse of an aged wife with

unsightly blackened teeth, are merely the reminders of the old

well-known Japan which give contrast to the real Hokkaido. New England

landscapes of hills, then low mountains dabbled with snow, finally big

white patches beside and below the track, succeed one another as the

train struggles inland. At length come rugged, snowcovered peaks rising

into the clouds; before long all the mountains in view, more than can be

counted on the fingers of both hands, are blanketed with snow, great

fields of which lie in the hollows far below us. Yet, as I have already

said, May was well along. It required a distinct mental effort to keep

in mind that this was still Japan.

Lower down again there was a profusion of wild flowers, though the buds

did not seem so far advanced as they are along our northern border on

the same date. There came whole hours of primeval forest, with at most a

rare patch of clearing, then broad vistas of charred stumps and the

primitive conditions that go with them, finally some square-cut

cultivated fields, but these only in the dead-flat lands, as if there

were far too much room available to trouble with hilly ground. On the

whole, the fields, though still small to the American eye, were ten

times the size of those of Japan’s main island. Also there was much

plowing with shaggy horses, instead of mud-wading men and women with

hoes, goodly herds of cattle grazing here and there—in short, a

landscape in which a rural American from our Northern States would have

felt almost at home.

Yezo, as the island which the Japanese, for some political reason, have

renamed Hokkaido is still best known to the outside world, has never

kept pace with the rest of Japan. Though the primitive Ainus were

reduced to serfdom at least a dozen centuries ago, the north island was

an almost unknown wilderness even when the Japanese resumed their

intercourse with the outside world in the middle of the last century. A

plan to make it an independent fief of the crumbling Tokugawa shogunate

at the time of the imperial restoration having been bloodily upset a

year later, various schemes of government under an executive appointed

from Tokyo finally crystallized in 1886 in an independent

administration, with Sapporo as the capital. To the already American

aspect of the landscape were added, through the initiative of the first

governor, charged with the task of colonizing the island, a group of

American agricultural experts, who brought with them machinery, seeds,

trees, and other aids of a similar nature. To-day Hokkaido produces, for

instance, an ample supply of American apples for all Japan—and incoming

travelers must hand over to courteous but stern custom officials the

last remnants of this fruit in their possession, though a case of

oranges or a month’s supply of raisins pass duty-free.

It was these same American experts who laid out the capital, Sapporo,

thereby wholly depriving it of the picturesqueness of genuine Japanese

towns and giving it the spaciousness, convenience, and solidity of an

American city. Its wide, squarely intersecting streets—a hundred and

sixty feet from wall to wall, if you must have statistics—have not

merely sidewalks but rows of trees to delimit them from the roadway that

is the common battle-ground of pedestrians and vehicles in the rest of

Japan. Lawns and lawn-mowers, men shingling the roofs of clapboard

houses, even government barracks built in similar fashion, elms and

maples in lieu of the rugged and distinctive Japanese pine-tree, the big

campus of an agricultural college copied after that of Massachusetts,

with a snow-capped mountain background to its broad baseball, track, and

tennis field, are but a few of the reminders of Sapporo’s origin. Even

the women have almost abandoned the elaborate and costly coiffure of

their southern sisters, and dress their hair in American fashion. Paper

walls are all but unknown; baby-carriages—but what gain are these in a

land where children come so thick and fast that every perambulator seems

to hold twins, to be indeed evidently designed for them, while a still

later arrival dozes on the propeller’s back? With its big fruit-stores,

its self-sufficient, well-supplied people, an extent seeming to belie

its mere half-century of age, Sapporo looks almost a transplanted bit of

our own land, for all the rickshaws racing noiselessly through its wide

streets and notwithstanding some of the unfortunately still Japanese

personal habits of many of its inhabitants—and by the same token it does

not, of course, offer the mere traveler a tithe of the interest of

almost any village of the real Japan.

Beyond Sapporo lies nearly the whole island, wonderful plains of black

loam soil almost as flat as our prairies, now stretching from the

distant sea on one hand to faintly delimned ranges of snow-capped

mountains on the other, now filling some vast basin between whitened

rival ramparts which merge in either direction into the horizon. The

great valleys now and again pinched out between brown hills littered

with charred stumps, growing gradually into heavily wooded mountains,

with many a snow-capped peak more massive and well nigh as symmetrical

as Fujiyama itself, yet thus far doomed to fameless isolation. Big

rivers brought down thousands of fresh-cut logs, whole acres of which

gathered in placid back-waters. But the fertile plains always soon came

again, now with wigwam-like stacks of hop-poles recalling Bavaria in

spring,—Sapporo beer is famous throughout Japan,—now mile after mile of

fields completely flooded, though plainly not destined for rice, with

plowing horses and their drivers wading thigh-deep in the cold mud and

water. It was a land like the richest sections of Illinois or Kansas;

yet gangs of women were piling up great logs, a score of them supplied

the motive-power of a primitive, singsong pile-driver, and half-starved

fisher-folk still battle for existence along the coast. It seemed as if

the few inhabitants, accustomed for countless generations to the crowded

struggle for existence farther south, were mentally incapable of taking

advantage of the wide and fertile opportunities all about them, of

casting out the centuries-old sense of inequality they brought with them

and enjoying the fulsome prosperity of ample elbow-room.

There are signs everywhere that the Japanese Government is doing its

best to turn Hokkaido into a cleared and settled land. A hundred

telegraph or telephone wires, on half a dozen rows of posts, parallel

the track, not to mention an important power line; pine, or at least

evergreen, nurseries cover a sloping hillside here and there; much

forest has recently been denuded and burned, with somewhat less wasteful

methods than those in vogue before the spreading sugar-fields of Cuba.

But of all the obstacles its people set against the laborious efforts of

the Government more nearly to equalize the density of population of this

great north island with the rest of the empire, the dread of battling

with the rigorous climate stands first. The man of Japan is not on the

whole adaptable. He hesitates at the limits of heat and cold to which

his frail type of architecture and his thin, flowing garb are unfitted;

he is, by temperament, no pioneer, but resembles those militant birds

that prefer to settle down in the warm, well-feathered nest built by

some other species. If he goes to a new and undeveloped land, it is, by

choice, as an economic hanger-on, as shopkeeper or official, rather than

to do his share in the rude labor of reducing the primitive to the

cultivated. No one, I believe, has ever accused the Japanese of

laziness; it seems to be rather his inherent dread of the primeval, of

great unpeopled spaces, that leaves Hokkaido, large and fertile enough

to support in unaccustomed style a third of the people of all Japan,

with a scattered population barely one fifth that of the city of Tokyo.