IX

Were facetiousness toward so solemn a people permitted, one might say

that the Japanese are imitators at top rather than at bottom. The nation

has apparently almost no notions of its own in the matter of head-dress;

but certainly no one can accuse it of copying its footwear from

extraneous sources. Fortunately the “derbies” and “bowlers” which topped

off kimonos and European garb alike a decade or two ago seem to have

passed into the limbo befitting such eyesores; but the foreign

adaptations that have taken their place are little less incongruous. A

group of Japanese males in their native costume, to which three out of

four of them still cling more or less unalterably, and wisely, look as

if they had been suddenly beset by a whirlwind in a foreign land, and

had borrowed for the return journey whatever head coverings their hosts

could spare them. Fedoras, caps, slouchy felts, particularly, now that

summer was spreading northward across the empire, stiff straw hats,

loomed forth on every hand—or head. Is it because the Restoration caught

them with nothing between the fantastic hair-dress of _shoguns_ and

_samurai_, still retained in a modified form by their hog-fat wrestlers,

and the parasol-like sun- and rain-shades of the peasants, that most of

the nation copies with such poor success our Western styles of

head-dress? Personally I much prefer the bareheaded tooth-brush

pompadour or closely clipped pates of most boys and of no small number

of men of old-fashioned or indifferent attitude. The distinctly national

feminine coiffure, too, never covered with anything but a parasol or an

umbrella, helps to save the situation.

The two-toed human biped, reminiscent of the primitive horse, the

cloven-hoofed mortal who shuffles his way in many millions through the

islands of Japan is, however, unknown in all the rest of the round

world. No other race has had the genius—to use a polite word—to evolve

that cross between a stocking-foot and a foot-mitten, the great toe

separated from the rest, which rounds off Japanese bare legs,

irrespective of sex. Beneath this may be seen every manner of makeshift,

always gripped by the independent great toe,—wooden clogs of many shapes

and sizes, _getas_ ranging from flat boards to veritable stilts that

raise the wearer a foot above the ground in the rainiest muddy weather,

matted-topped sandals of wood, slippers—if a mere sole with a V-shaped

cord as upper may be so called—for house wear, of a score of different

forms and materials, slippers for the hallways, others for certain

unmentioned chambers, special rubber slippers for the bath-room, crude

straw _waraji_ for pilgrims and peasants, worn-out examples of which lie

strewn along any traveled road, varied and special footwear for every

time, place, and occasion.

In the old days when this was all, when man, woman, or child stepped

instinctively in or out of his multifarious sole-protectors with

unhesitating ease, it was a mere question of knowing the intricate

etiquette of footwear. But now, with Western shoes wide-spread among the

men and making headway among school-girls, there is often physical labor

involved in the Japanese persistence in his peculiar footwear habits. At

the “semi-European” hostelry where we sojourned for a week in Kyushu,

southernmost island of Japan proper, the sub-manager laced or unlaced

his shoes thirteen times in showing us our Japanese quarters. No wonder

the island empire is the favorite dumping-ground for congress gaiters!

[Illustration: A Shinto priest (if the word fits) of Nikko]

[Illustration: The tomb of Iemitsu, founder of the Nikko shrines, and

the holy of holies of its great group of temples, photographed only by

stealth]

[Illustration: Not a palace garden, but the entrance to a house of

prostitution in Tokyo’s Yoshiwara]

[Illustration: The front of a Yoshiwara house in Tokyo, with the usual

advertising features of large framed photographs of the inmates, two of

whom appear in person behind the railing, one hiding behind a newspaper

rather than be photographed; the sign reads “3-yen two-storied natural

inn”]

The Nipponese take extraordinary care to keep their feet off the ground.

Even the peasants, market-women, boys and girls whose weather-toughened

supports have never been subjected to the effeminate niceties of the

toed-sock-foot, almost invariably wear at least straw _waraji_ out of

doors. Pleasing custom, and a wise one, too, in a land where nothing

that may enrich the land is wasted. But I believe I am giving no proof

of extraordinary perspicacity in asserting that to her footwear is

largely due the poor roads and the abominable streets of Japan. Her

people are not great believers in pavements; they can easily hobble and

scrape through life on their clumsy stilts without them. If it rains—and

there are weeks on end when it does, indeed—until the shoe-clad

foreigner cannot stir out of doors without covering himself to the

ankles with paste-like mud, the native merely steps into higher and

higher _getas_ and stumps serenely on. In the classic speech of recent

years, “he should worry.” Before it fell in a crash one Saturday noon

there was scarcely a square yard of street even in Tokyo that was not

deep in dust or deep in mud, according to the weather. The municipal

fathers had recently threatened to spend forty million yen toward giving

the capital a modern pavement. If the threat is made good, now that the

opportunity for general improvement is so excellent, Tokyo will no

longer seem Japan, for dust and mud are as national as _getas_ and

kimonos. When a stretch of Japanese street becomes really impassable, a

few loads of sea-shore stones are spilled into it—to the still greater

discomfiture of the shoe-shod foreigner.

At least one class of Japanese profits by this atrocity of streets and

roads. Scores of what would be pleasant strolls, were there anything fit

to stroll on, must be abandoned, to the advantage of the rickshaw-man.

If he had no such allies, it is doubtful whether this human horse of the

Orient would not already have passed from the stage in Japan, for there

his constantly increasing demands have made him almost a luxury. To be

jogged about Tokyo for a short day of sight-seeing or shopping costs

even the initiated ten or twelve yen, which is almost half as bad as if

it were American dollars. No extraordinary reward in these times,

perhaps, for a hard day’s toil. Let us not, however, in our fairness to

the physical toiler, lose sight of the fact that it is what he

accomplishes, not how greatly he exerts himself, which counts; and your

rickshaw-man moves you from place to place but little faster than you

could walk, and not much more comfortably.

Personally, I found riding in a _kuruma_—which is a politer, more

ladylike Japanese word for rickshaw—an unpleasant, almost a humiliating

experience, as if I were being impressed with the notion that the man

trotting in the shafts before me was more sturdy than I—which in Japan

at least he usually wasn’t. Or my mind harked back to the origin of this

unseemly means of conveyance, to the American—we admit we are an

inventive nation—missionary who, half a century ago, converted—in

addition, we trust, to many parishioners—a baby-carriage into a means of

giving his invalid wife an occasional outing. Even the glistening wire

wheels and the plump pneumatic tires to which the contrivance has since

advanced cannot blot out that unmanly derivation.

Perhaps it is true also that no rickshaw-runner survives his tenth year

in the profession, but as some of those I have ridden behind were

plainly over fifty, and the speed of the majority in Japan by no means

killing, I found this no great contributing cause of my displeasure in

rickshaw riding. But often the choice is narrow,—a mud bath, a coating

of dust and perspiration, a small and ancient type of tram-car with a

floor as muddy or dusty as the street outside and inevitably packed

beyond any American conception, possibly a limping, asthmatic,

purse-flattening exile from our most popular automobile factory, or—the

spider-mannered _kuruma-ya_, sitting on his own dashboard, awaiting a

victim. The miniature member of our family became instantly fond of

“widin’ man,” fortunately, for his walking was still limited; the

unofficial head thereof recognizes the rickshaw’s domestic convenience,

in spite of her constant dread that the runner’s reputedly brief span of

life will end between the shafts sustaining her; but I, the minority,

prefer stretching my legs to cramping them.

X

It is nearly a score of years now since the many private “iron roads” of

the island empire were combined under a cabinet minister, yet when all

is said and done the Imperial Government Railways of Japan are a

refutation of an almost universal experience elsewhere, that trains will

not run properly under government ownership. Perhaps it is the

combination of religion and patriotism of which Shintoism seems to be

concocted, the semi-deification of the mikado and all his belongings;

perhaps it is due to mere habit, or racial temperament; the fact remains

that government ownership and employment do not mean carelessness and

neglect, indolence and waste, in Japan. One has, to be sure, the

impression, at sight of the swarms of men and boys in the dull-blue

railway uniform, that the system is over-staffed; but nothing, one

recalls, is more plentiful in Japan than human beings. If improvement

and extension languish a bit, there are reminders that the railways,

like schools and many another ward of the mikado’s Government, must

often be content with modest rations, that its favorite sons, the army

and navy, may lose none of their sturdy corpulence.

[Illustration: Approaching the great Buddha of Kamakura which stood

through the earthquake of September 1, 1923]

[Illustration: Thus the great Buddha has gazed down through the ages

with what strikes the Western beholder as indifference to the woe or

weal of puny mankind]

A narrow gauge is not conducive to reckless speed; the Japanese

express-train that covers a mile in two minutes congratulates itself on

a feat, while the locals that fulfil most of the promises, nearly always

to the minute, of a bulky national time-table consume an incredible

amount of time both at stations and between them. But few sports in

Japan are far beyond the reach of rail, and the risk to life and limb is

negligible. The adolescent squeal of the European-copied locomotives may

be annoying to Americans, who will probably regret that the two

car-length cushions on either side in first- and second-class are better

suited to squatting on one’s heels or stretching out at full shoeless

length than to ease in viewing the passing landscape; one may question

the Japanese conception of certain indispensable conveniences, but such

as he conceives them they are always in order. Diligent scrub-women at

the terminals are no more so than the train-boy, in no way related to

the commerce-minded nuisance of the same name in our own land, who come

hourly to sweep out the carriages with but slight disturbance to its

occupants, and several times a day to mop them. All cars are

smoking-cars; there is no division by sex even of wash-rooms. But in

what other land does the guard, whom we would call conductor, uncover

with a regal bow as he enters to announce the regretful necessity of

troubling the honorable passengers to display their respectable tickets,

or pause to rearrange a rug over a sleeping traveler and to set aright

the shoes, clogs, sandals, _getas_, and slippers scattered along his way

through the train?

The experienced traveler rarely brings his lunch with him on a Japanese

railway journey; he knows that he will find frequent and fresher

supplies along the way, and at prices no higher than in his own street.

Prices can sprout wings in Japan quite as easily as elsewhere, but it

may be due to a frowning government that the wide-spread custom of

considering travelers by train temporary prisoners, to be mulcted during

the confinement of as great a portion of their financial solvency as

possible, has not yet taken root there. In the very likely event of

there being no dining-car, with tolerable European meals of four or five

courses at a scant seventy cents each, there is a system of station

venders more frequent and more dependable perhaps than anywhere else in

the world. Never does a train halt at a place of any importance that the

singsong cry of “O-bento!” does not call attention to green-capped

youths marching up and down the platform offering for sale all that a

reasonable traveler can demand in the way of food and drink.

It is conceivable that the foreigner may not at once take kindly to the

“honorable _bento_,” the staff of life of Japanese travelers; but with

persistence he will come to endure and even to relish it. Two fresh

wooden boxes tied together with a paper ribbon contain the collation,

which is uniform in cost,—forty _sen_, the half-cents of Japan,

everywhere now, since the war,—and almost so in contents and quality. On

top clings a paper napkin and a paper-sealed pair of chop-sticks, the

virginity of the latter assured by their being but half split in two,

with—such is the Japanese genius for unexpected little details!—the

inevitable toothpick tucked between them. The larger box contains hot

boiled rice, all a native cares to eat at one sitting and more than the

normal American can. The several little compartments of the other hold a

piece of fish—fortunately not usually raw, as the Japanese like

it—perhaps a bit of meat, some slices of cold potato, a cut of sweet

omelet that is most likely of all Japanese viands to appeal to the

average Western taste, two or three unknown vegetables, some boiled, the

others pickled, perhaps some brown beans to give one chop-stick

practice, and a shaving of red ginger to lend the rest seasoning.

Variations on this menu, according to the locality and the things each

place is famed for, are pickled lily- or lotus-root, black mushrooms,

bean-curd, shrimps, steamed eel, edible seaweed, sliced octopus, and

even stranger sea-foods.

If all this does not suffice, one may summon other wearers of the green

cap. There is the tea boy, the hot milk boy, fruit sellers, venders of

rice-cakes, of the dough-ball sweetmeats of Japan, of wood-wrapped

native jams, of California raisins, a trifle cheaper than at home, a

hawker of cigarettes, periodicals, beer, and more doubtful

thirst-quenchers, perhaps even an incongruous purveyor of near-bread and

sandwiches. Hot boiled milk in bottles holding a scant glassful is

expensive; tea, on the other hand, is almost given away. For eight

_sen_, a bare four cents, the boy furnishes an earthenware tea-pot with

cover and handle, crudely glazed, like the tea-cup that goes with it,

and fills it with hot water from his traveling buffet—furnishes

everything, in fact, except tea, in lieu of which the purchaser finds

merely a sack-inclosed handful of leaves that do the water no harm if

one prefers to throw them out and add real tea of one’s own, some

bouillon cubes, or whatever individual taste suggests. Most traveling

Japanese deceive themselves into believing that this tasteless hot water

is really their indispensable beverage. The stranger cannot but wonder

how all this can be supplied at so slight a price, and why the pot and

cup cannot be retrieved at some other station. They never are, however,

but, like the _bento_ boxes and all the rest of the waste which Japanese

travelers cast under the seats, and never out of the window, they are

periodically swept up by the train-boy and dumped as the train passes

over some river or arm of the sea. Where these are shallow, one may see

thousands of broken tea-pots and cups heaped up at the bottom. Thus, for

a yen at most, a rugged appetite can be tamed into submission for

several hours. To be sure, the Imperial Government Tobacco Monopoly

cigar, which may sometimes be had to top off with, sadly belies even its

misspelled Spanish label; but one may be so fortunate as still to have

left a few of the fifty genuine smokes which the Japanese customs

generously allow the traveler to bring into the country with him—and

what boots it to worry about to-morrow?

To-night, however, is a more serious matter. All the horrors of the

American so-called “sleeping-car” are as nothing compared with the

bitter tragedy in many acts of a night spent in one of the poor

imitations thereof that ramble up and down Japan. The natives, I

believe, find little fault with them, and there is no reason that they

should be remodeled to fit the few foreigners who might use them. For it

is mainly a question of fit, so far at least as the Anglo-Saxon is

concerned. By day second class differs from first only in the color of

the upholstery, and perhaps a bit more companionship. But not only is

the normal second-class berth built to Japanese specifications; the

so-called “large size” ones are merely wider, which is very slight

advantage to the full-length man. Granted, however, that he has

succeeded in stowing himself away, there are other inconveniences. The

Imperial Railways being narrow-gauge, it is inevitable that some portion

of the average Western anatomy shall more or less continually protrude

into the aisle. The flimsy curtains that satisfy the atrophied sense of

privacy of the Japanese are always half open for one cause or another;

there is no real dressing-room; if one is so daring, dexterous, and

determined as to disrobe inside a berth, where the retention of a

tooth-brush means overcrowding, one must resort to the customary

Japanese custom of hanging one’s clothes on the floor—and the only floor

available is that of the aisle. Worst of all, perhaps, the sleeping-car

of Japan is never really that but a day-coach with furnishings which

runs at night. The lights blaze unabated; short-distance passengers

stalk in or out of the car at every station and chatter and smoke

incessantly between them; trainmen are constantly marching through, and

never fail to slam the four or five noisily sliding doors; at every halt

brazen-voiced youth walk back and forth along the platform outside

insistently repeating the name of the station—in short, there is even

less likelihood of a bit of sound sleep than in a Japanese inn.

First class ought to be better, but it is not unlikely to be worse.

Yokels along the way, or in third class, are curious to see the rare

personage who travels thus, and the magnificence about him; the scarcity

of occupants makes it the favorite rendezvous of the train-crew as

work-, play-, or catnapping-room; the other half of the same coach is

not infrequently the dining-car and all-night café; and the train-boy

will die at his post rather than permit a window to stay open for an

instant on the hottest night. Old travelers who know the ropes often

make their night trips in first class without taking a berth. Their

sleeping-place is the same that it would be with a berth-ticket, in some

ways all the better for not being made up—and there is a saving of seven

yen.

It is perhaps natural that “boys” in hotels and on trains have no

realization of the advisability of quieting down toward midnight in a

land where the most courteous seem to have no respect for the sleeper,

where even husbands habitually wake their wives or children at any hour

of the night on the flimsiest provocation. A nation accustomed since

time immemorial to paper walls, overcrowding, and uncomfortable

substitutes for beds probably is not conscious of the value of long,

sound slumber. The passing foreigner who sees ill-slept faces all about

him and notes the tendency to nap by day whenever a chance offers

realizes that a wise people should be as insistent on restful sleep as

in avoiding dyspeptic food and unhealthful eating habits. Our impression

is that the Japanese are careless in both these respects.