The undoubtedly many attractions of the island empire for the mere
traveler are, unfortunately, greatly offset by the high cost of living
there. The rapidity with which letters of credit are depleted turns
almost to naught the well nigh frantic efforts of such publicity
agencies as the diligent Japan Tourist Bureau to attract visitors. Two
or three years ago those who cater to and depend upon the passing
foreigner comforted themselves with the thought that his scarcity was
merely a temporary aftermath of the World War. Now that he still fails
to come in appreciable numbers, there is dismay in such quarters, though
it is characteristic of the Japanese temperament to assert that “the
increase is gratifying.” Word has drifted to the ear of many a
prospective tourist that life is unreasonably expensive in Japan, or he
hears proof of that fact in crossing the Pacific and goes on to China
without landing, or cuts to a fraction the time he planned to spend in
the mikado’s realm. If even Americans feel that way about it, one can
easily imagine the sensations of those from war-impoverished lands with
a feeble currency.
Some of this raising of prices is justifiable; much of it is not. The
Japanese working-man has recently won a wage commensurate with a citizen
instead of a serf, and the consumer must take care of it. But the war
engendered the profiteer there as elsewhere; it left behind newly rich
to set bad examples and crowd the heels of their more honest brethren; a
great increase in taxes has popularized the pastime of seeing how much
of them can be passed on to the next man. Then there is what a Tokyo
editor calls “expensive face-saving.” In olden days the Japanese “saved
face” in other ways; it is no doubt in keeping with the general
westernization of their standards that the modern method of doing so
should be by ostentatious extravagance. The ordinary Japanese business
man who would keep up with the procession and not give his colleagues
and his clients the impression that he is hovering on the verge of
insolvency must waste much money on mere show. Completely separate
wardrobes for the four seasons, often European as well as native style,
are indispensable. When he entertains his friends or customers he can
scarcely invite them to his home, not so much because of domestic
seclusion as because it is the fashion to have such gatherings in a
tea-house, where geisha-girls may be summoned to serve or dance. Not
only do the more famous of these expect an opera-singer’s fee, but the
_chaya_ itself has boosted its prices to the new-rich level. Then there
is the very serious matter of tipping. In the United States this vicious
importation from Europe has swollen almost beyond recognition of its
origin, but the extra fees exacted there are mere flea-bites compared
with the _chadai_, or “tea-money,” of Japan. On the amount of it depends
the reputation for importance of the giver, and it is a common failing
to wish to impress the world with one’s importance. The Japanese of any
standing who puts up in a native hotel, for example, and is handed a
bill for twenty yen at the end of a three-day stay, is expected to send
at least half that amount as a tip to the proprietor, to give another
five yen to the maid who brought his food and kept his room in order,
and generously to remember the bath-boy and the shoe-man. “Is there any
other country,” asks the irate editor, “where such a ridiculous custom
as tipping to eighty per cent of the bill prevails?”
All this, of course, is reflected in general prices. But what has
particularly aroused the wrath of travelers is the almost universal
Japanese custom of expecting the foreigner, particularly the Caucasian
visitor, to pay higher prices for the same things than the native.
Perhaps this is merely an extension, almost flattering, of the notion
that one pays according to one’s importance. The fact remains that the
American and the European are sometimes frankly and naturally, more
often surreptitiously, made to pay more than the Japanese, a custom
which ignorance of the language, among other things, makes it next to
impossible to combat. In some cases this, too, is justifiable. An
American staying in a native inn is likely to require more attention, to
call for stranger foods, to be more careless with the floor-matting than
the Japanese guest—and he is almost certain to be ignorant of, or to
scorn, the native custom of exorbitant tips. But the overcharging is not
confined to justifiable cases; among those who habitually come into
contact with foreign travelers it has become a fixed habit, and has
spread to a considerable extent to the rank and file. I have already
mentioned the high cost of _kuruma_-riding. In the slang of the
rickshaw-man and his class, a foreigner is a _kane-mochi_, a “possessor
of money,” in other words, a rich man, and whenever it is possible he is
treated accordingly. Wherever he moves, except by the government
railways or the strictly public means of conveyance, the tourist has the
feeling that his money is being taken away from him with unjust
rapidity; whenever he stops he is likely to be quickly impressed with
the nation that it is better for his financial constitution to move on
again.
It is not the Japanese alone who are to blame for this baiting of the
visiting traveler. The score of more or less foreign hotels throughout
the country which cater especially to such clients have been joined
together in a price-fixing association, mainly by the efforts of the
typically American manager of the most pretentious of them, situated in
a busy “treaty-port.” In the best few of these the virtually uniform
charges are not entirely out of reason; but to come upon a run-down or
poorly constructed and badly provided member of the association, far
from the beaten track, only to be confronted by the same inflated rates,
is likely to turn one’s attention once more to the train schedule. It
would perhaps be unfair to suspect that the typical American hotel man
above mentioned resorted to a manœuver time-honored in his native land
in order to remove an incentive for travelers to desert his own
ostentatious and necessarily high-priced establishment for more modest
ones in out-of-the-way places; but the Japanese, for all his reputation
for cleverness and foresight, is often dense.
There are many Americans, to be sure, who would not consider the foreign
hotels of Japan high-priced, though they might express dissatisfaction
at what they get for their money. But I am one of the firm believers in
travel for persons of modest means, and not merely for the wealthy or
those shielded from financial worries by an expense account. There are
many who can, and should, and do go to see foreign lands, who still
cannot, will not, and should not continually pay at least six dollars a
day for a place to sleep and three heavy meals which they often do not
wish to eat—plus constant increases for bottled water, for many services
that should not be regarded as extras, for clever manipulations of the
stated daily rate, and the high tips expected at their departure by a
long line of more or less useless servants. Yet there is often no choice
but to patronize the sometimes flea-bitten members of the hotel
association or stay at home. One may not have the courage, or even the
ability, to live in Japanese inns, and even these have in many cases
caught the hint and greet the foreigner with “special rates,” on the
pretense that they are furnishing him with silk- instead of
cotton-covered _futons_, and “European food,” though they are as
ignorant even of the appearance of the latter as a Tennessee mountaineer
is of Japanese viands. Their own overreaching is depriving those who
long to do business with him of the patronage of the modest traveler,
and the immodest are too scarce to bring them a livelihood.
All that has saved some of these ill-advised exotic hostelries from
disaster is an increasing Japanese patronage. Men who have been abroad
sometimes prefer to live in foreign style, or at least to show their
families a sample of it; some find it cheaper to pay the high rates and
low tips of these establishments than the low rates but high tips
expected of “persons of importance” in native hotels; the war-rich make
them new forms of ostentation and overrun some of them with their geisha
parties. Hence it is a rare dining-room that does not contain a few men
faultlessly European from the neck down, audibly enjoying their soup,
tea, or toothpick in Japanese fashion or striving to conceal their
chagrin at the unadaptability of wives still distinctly native in garb
and manners. For if the Japanese smile at our clumsiness with the
chop-sticks, we recover the amusement with interest among the native
sojourners in these so-called European hotels. Daintily kimonoed ladies
clutching forks upside down in the wrong hand, grasping the body of a
tea-cup for fear the handle to which they are unaccustomed will prove
too frail, paring their fruit backward with what is to them a clumsy
knife, unconsciously trying to draw their feet up on their chairs—and
often succeeding—the while avoiding the eye of inwardly wrathful though
outwardly imperturbed husbands, enliven many a meal. That their mishaps
are not confined to the detested public place of eating is suggested by
the unfailing anecdote of those traveled Japanese who are given to
admitting personal discomfiture of how they fell out of their first bed.
It is as much as anything the commonplace atmosphere and stereotyped
menus of these exorbitant imitations of Occidental hotels that make one
inclined to hurry through Yokohama, Nagoya, Kobe, even temple-rich
Kyoto, and spend such time as one can afford in smaller and less
sophisticated places. There—almost anywhere off the one well-beaten
track, in fact—one must endure the unconscious bad manners of a race
which, for some unexplainable reason, always quickly gathers about a
foreigner, though a hundred others have passed within a fortnight, and
giggles childishly at him if he speaks, though the study of his language
is compulsory in every higher school and, except that his eyes do not
squint, his appearance is scarcely a whit different from many of the
gigglers themselves. But there are compensations, in glimpses of
unsophisticated corners, unadvertised bits of picturesqueness,
semi-survivals of customs that carry one back to the days, not yet
nearly a century distant, when to wander in a land now as safe as any on
the globe would have been to lose one’s head forthwith by order of some
wrathful _daimyo_. Nor does one ever tire of seeing the velvety Japanese
landscape, its rugged misshapen pines, its terraced hillsides, and its
crazy-quilt rice-fields cut up into absurd little patches so carefully
tended that there is hardly a weed in the whole country, or of the
laborious, uncomplaining, mud-wading men and women who spend their lives
in them. Fields pink with Chinese clover that is to be plowed under to
enrich the soil change to white stretches of daisies doomed to the same
undignified end as one rambles southwestward; otherwise, there is a
picturesque sameness which nevertheless does not grow wearisome.