XI

Along Broadway complaints have been heard during recent years of the

almost dishonest brevity of some plays. Of all the things that may be

said against theatrical performances in Japan, that would be the most

unreasonable. I pride myself on a certain amount of endurance, in any

good cause, but I confess to a kindly feeling toward that Tokyo friend

who did not take me to the “Meiji-za” until the show was half over. Not

that it was so far beyond me, or that I am incapable of appreciating,

even of enjoying at times, things wholly foreign to our American point

of view; but even Fred Stone, I fancy, would begin to grow wearisome if

he cavorted about the stage almost incessantly from two until midnight.

[Illustration: Venders of food and religious trinkets line with their

shops the shaded walks of the island of Enoshima]

[Illustration: The leglessness of Japanese houses! A corner of our room

in the Japanese hotel at Kozu]

[Illustration: The façade of a moving-picture theater in Nagoya]

By the time we had checked our shoes in one of the adjoining

tea-houses—for to do so at the door of the theater itself means a long

and severe struggle to recover them—and were shown to a box six inches

deep and furnished with cushions and a tray of tea, most of the crowded

house had already had four and a half hours’ worth of the admission fee.

For most of them it was supper-time, and scores of men and boys flitted

back and forth along the “aisles,” level with the tops of patrons’

heads, serving meals contained in lacquered boxes, the inevitable tea,

and white vase-like bottles of warm _sake_. Unshod and experienced, they

caused little or no annoyance, especially to an audience accustomed to

see actors often enter or leave the stage by these same polished wooden

runways. In the gently sloping balcony the rice-fed multitude, gathered

in family groups in similar square, shallow, mat-floored inclosures,

piled about them the plentiful waste of their lunches without for a

moment letting their attention waver from the stage.

Unchaperoned not merely by a Japanese but by one capable of appreciating

and mitigating a foreigner’s difficulties, the performance would have

been as meaningless and unintelligible to me as a baseball game to an

Englishman. But a few well-chosen words of explanation now and then

disclosed as many unsuspected fine points as pass unnoticed by a novice

at a Spanish bull-fight. The one thing the Japanese actor must avoid

above all others, it transpired, was “acting,” in the Western sense. The

more nearly, apparently, he acts like a normal, genuine, every-day human

being, the lower he is rated in histrionic ability. There are, to be

sure, topical farces and the like in modern Japan; but the national

drama, patronized by the great mass of the recreation-seeking, and

offering the greatest stage fame, consists of little more than endless

elocution, accompanied by certain stilted actions cut and dried for

centuries, any deviation from which diminishes by just that much the

player’s applause. His every step, gesture, and inflection is

stereotyped by age-long custom and repetition, and his highest goal is

to approximate as nearly as possible those steps, gestures, and

inflections which won the undying fame of some bygone king of the stage.

That does not mean, however, that the Japanese actor has no chance to

develop and display personal advantages. The more nearly, for example,

he can make his voice sound like an enraged giant imprisoned in the pit

of his stomach the greater will be the uproar that greets the conclusion

of one of his speeches. He is given, too, frequent opportunities to

imply by facial expression alone the thoughts that are supposed to be

passing through his mind, which are often expressed at the same time by

a sort of Greek chorus of three or four men dimly seen behind wooden

bars in a kind of raised box on one side or the other of the stage, who

declaim in a curiously unrhythmic rhythm as they pick at native

instruments. The _koto_ and the _samisen_, by the way, are not the last

word in musical contrivances, but I confess to a decided preference for

Japanese “music” over American “jazz,” and for much of her theater to

the unsuccessful striving for originality which often afflicts our own.

There is a reminder of the three thumps which announce the raising of

the curtain in France in the beating together of two sticks of wood so

hard that they have almost the resonance of bell-metal, faster and

faster, until it reaches a deafening crescendo, which constitutes the

signal for the next act in Japan. There is lacking the perfect

imagination of a Chinese audience, which makes a property-man in black

or coolie-blue invisible, or the stick on which a new moon is raised

above the cloth horizon quite in keeping with the poetic spirit of the

drama; but the scenery is decidedly elementary, and many conventions

which strike the Western visitor as ludicrous pass quite unnoticed. Not

merely do the actors often make their entrance or exit along the raised

aisles through the audience, declaiming as they come or go, but bands of

them, representing the _samurai_ of rival _shoguns_, now and then wage

pitched battle far out on these passageways, to the seeming peril of the

lacquered rice-dishes of auditors beneath them. If a wall or a fence is

indicated in the scene, only the gate or door, standing in dignified

isolation, is actually in evidence, and must be carefully opened and

closed whenever a character passes through it. There is something

curiously incongruous between such medieval contrivances and the

ultramodern revolving stages of the best Tokyo theaters, on which a

group of actors, suddenly coming to the end of their scene, relapse into

motionlessness and are spun around in plain sight of the audience until

the next group and setting are disclosed and put into action.

But these after all mainly mechanical differences are not the chief ones

between the Japanese and American stage. It is more surprising to find

that the two corner-stones of our theater, novelty and the sex appeal,

are wholly unnecessary to the Nipponese playwright. “Old stuff” pleases

best, even in the “movies.” Month after month, year after year, one

might almost say century after century, the Japanese playgoer is content

to witness the same dramas, to follow with breathless interest some

national legend, some event in the history of the island empire as well

known to its every school-boy as is Washington’s crossing of the

Delaware to us. He is not merely satisfied; he prefers these ancient

tales, dressed in the elaborate costumes of shogunal days, ruled by the

curious morality of long ago, when parents slew a beloved son for some

intangible point of honor, and suicide was considered, under certain

circumstances, the height of virtue. The Japanese is decidedly not a

demonstrative race, yet the suppressed sobs and blowing of noses of the

“Meiji-za” audience all but drowned out the stentorian, cavernous voices

of the actors at the climax of a scene between a self-doomed father and

his infant son, though every native present had heard the story a

hundred times.

[Illustration: Farming in Japan rice-fields is a great life—if you don’t

weaken]

[Illustration: A Japanese woman enjoying her pipe and the seascape at

Toba]

[Illustration: Little girls of Yamada-Isé dressed in a riot of color,

topped by hats of real flowers, for the twenty-one-yearly rebuilding

festivities]

[Illustration: A peasant woman of Japan up to her knees in work]

The same themes suffice for the now fairly numerous Japanese

motion-picture producers. The old familiar kimono-clad figures, whitened

faces, and well-tried situations all but monopolize the posters before

“movie” houses. As on the speaking stage, the rare female rôles are most

often played by men; in the few cases where they are not, the women

never under any circumstances give the slightest reminders of the appeal

of sex. The result is that when, to fill out its program, the cinema

flashes an American or a European picture on the screen, this unfailing

motif fairly shrieks at one from the very first foot of film. The

traveler from the West is suddenly astounded by the realization of the

omnipresence of this appeal in the dramas, good and bad, high and low,

of our own land. What would have been at home the most innocent of

flirtations, the purest youthful love-story, becomes all at once, sensed

in the curiously tense atmosphere of the Oriental audience about one,

the height of indecency. If the film is of the type the Westerner would

regard in his home land as mildly risqué, a burning sense of shame

surges up his spine; he feels an all but overwhelming desire to rise and

shout to the now gaping audience that it is completely misunderstanding,

to hurry back home and demand that laws be framed to forbid the

exporting for the amusement of peoples so utterly different from

ourselves of screen-stories which cause them completely to misjudge us,

to the appreciable widening of that gulf between nations that so much

largely futile effort is being made to narrow.

Misunderstandings of this sort, however, are inevitable. Honest Japanese

themselves admit that they are no models for the average of other

nations in relations between the sexes, but with them there is almost no

indication of this fact on the surface. Nor is this hypocrisy; it is

age-long custom, and temperament, for they are above all things

outwardly undemonstrative. For a man and woman to shake hands, to take

an arm, fills the untraveled Japanese with amazement; for husband and

wife to exchange the most perfunctory of kisses in public at parting or

greeting is more scandalous than in holy Zion City itself. Even to show

such signs of affection to one’s children where others may see is

extremely bad form.

“Do Japanese man and wife never kiss?” I asked one of my Tokyo

acquaintances.

“Never!” he replied, with an amazement at the question that showed

through his habitually expressionless face. “Of course,” he added a

moment later, with the air of a man who would be truthful at all costs,

but with the cynical smirk of one treading lewd ground, “they sometimes

do, but only in the privacy of their chamber.”

It was this same man who, more familiar with the speech of England than

with our own, explained that the only outward manifestation which

distinguishes a geisha from her more respectable sisters is “too much

swank.” Certainly her public manners and personal appearance give no

other indication of her calling. Japan’s very _yoshiwaras_, these walled

and sternly policed restricted districts of her larger cities, are

outwardly models of propriety; the big framed photographs of the

inmates, displayed to attract passing clients, invariably show them as

properly attired as the most circumspect of dowagers. It may be that the

frank, casual disclosure of what in Western lands commonly remain hidden

charms, in the public baths and the naturally rather disclosing garb of

Japan, makes the Japanese callous to any such incitements.