We had left Tokyo before the latest catastrophe overwhelmed her and the
surrounding section of Japan, and threw into greater relief some of her
most striking national traits. Among the stories of the great earthquake
and fire which have been confirmed, perhaps the most astounding to us
was the refusal of the captains of Japanese war-ships and transpacific
liners to rescue the refugees who appealed to them for succor, while
foreign ships near-by were making every effort to save them. But—they
were waiting for orders! The Japanese mind, particularly of the official
class, is not trained to function on its own initiative. Their superiors
seem to partake of some of the divinity of the superior of them all, the
being so sacred that he can only be referred to indirectly and by
inference as “mikado,” the “honorable gate”—behind which he reigns.
Besides, the Japanese are Orientals, and nowhere does the Oriental soul
seem to quiver with anything like the profundity of our own at the sight
of suffering and violent death. The longer one has lived in the East,
provided it has been in actual living contact with its strange peoples,
the less impossible it will be to visualize those stern Japanese
captains in Yokohama Harbor unflinchingly dooming to death under their
very eyes scores of their own race because they considered it their
solemn duty not to take them on board until they had received official
instructions to do so.
That extreme Japanese reticence on questions concerning their own
country, less often adroitly sidestepped than deliberately refused as a
subject of conversation even by those readiest to talk, and inquire,
freely on any other, is exemplified in the secrecy that still prevails
over their losses. We shall never know how many perished in that great
earthquake and fire of 1923 even if the Japanese themselves ever work it
out exactly; we shall particularly remain in all the ignorance in which
they are capable of keeping us as to the amount of damage done to their
navy and their great naval base at Yokosuka. We also might have
attempted—though probably it would not have struck us as worth the
trouble—to keep the results of such a disaster in our own land from the
rest of the world, but we certainly should not have succeeded. We have
no such training in national reticence.
Underneath their protestations of thankfulness for our national and
individual help during their hour of trial, say those who were in close
contact with the Japanese at the time of the catastrophe and immediately
afterward, there was no real gratitude at all; they accepted our help as
something naturally due them, as if we were merely instruments of the
Kami or national gods that watch over them. I am in no position to
confirm or deny this statement, but it is wide-spread enough to be worth
reporting. After all, how genuine is gratitude, East or West? I
certainly can name several races, in both hemispheres, that do not have
a visible trace of it. But it was surely adding insult to injury not
only not genuinely to thank us but to suspect us of the worst motives in
aiding them. Perhaps that is still more typical of the race. Knowing
them even imperfectly it is not hard to imagine them asking themselves
what these foreigners were up to, why they were coming into their
harbors, not only the open commercial ports but into those officially
closed to outside nations, merely on the pretext of wishing to help
their suffering people. Surely there must be some real reason behind
this apparently gratuitous altruism,—a chance in a lifetime to get
secret information about their precious country, possibly even to
photograph those inviolate “strategic zones”, that had turned gray so
many officers assigned to protect them from kodaking tourists—something
up their sleeves, certainly. It needs no comment to show what such a
people would evidently have done under similar circumstances; we suspect
others particularly of what we do or would like to do ourselves.
[Illustration: A peasant’s house near Beppu, with hot water for bathing
and heat for cooking furnished by nature, there being a live volcano
near at hand]
[Illustration: The terraced hills of Kyushu are even more remarkable
than those of the main island]
[Illustration: A glimpse of Nagasaki through the loggia of a hilltop
temple]
It is quite as typical of Japan to find that Tokyo is being rebuilt with
astonishing rapidity, and its complex business of life resuming. But no
less so is the order in which it is being reconstructed. No part of the
destroyed capital has been so artistically, so thoroughly, and so
quickly resurrected as its _yoshiwara_, the official segregated district
out beyond the temple of Kwannon, goddess of mercy and most popular of
all with the Japanese masses. One of the great holocausts of that
horrific first day of September took place there. Hundreds of the women
of the _yoshiwara_ who escaped from the crashing houses and devouring
flames took refuge in a shallow artificial pond, perhaps fifty by thirty
feet in size, within the inclosure, one of the decorative features of
the high-walled precinct about which the courtezans used to place their
tutelary gods and goddesses. There was soon hardly standing-room in it,
and the flames rose ever higher. The water of the pool became tepid,
then hot, then took to boiling. When squads of soldiers and workmen
could get near the place on the following day there was little left but
an enormous caldron of cooked bodies. A granite stone roughly carved
with Chinese characters recalls the tragedy to those who can read them,
but it seems already almost forgotten, though from the stone rises
intermittently the smoke of incense, a tribute perhaps from their
successors to those who so miserably perished there.
But there seems to be no particular difficulty in securing women for
this degrading “necessity” in Japan, any more than in getting right of
way for the rebuilding of the district. The houses in which the new
oiran are housed are among the finest in phenix-like Tokyo, much finer
than the dwellings erected for mere citizens, while the barracks put up
for the homeless are pigsties in comparison. Trees and flowers have been
planted to give the place an air of quiet dignity and respectability;
the streets are straight, broad, and clean, which is more than can be
said of the commercial and industrial part of Tokyo; the houses are
artistically constructed on Japanese-Chinese lines; inside of each of
them is a miniature landscape garden with little altars where each
inmate burns a candle or a lantern to her particular god. Street
peddlers again sing their multifarious wares gaily from brothel to
brothel, flattering the women on their appearance, and showing them how
to improve it with trinkets from their stocks; out in the wide portico
beside the inviting photographs two men sit like spiders, warming their
hands over a _hibachi_ as the night chill advances, and scanning each
passer-by with a furtive eye to business. Those who can get them to talk
on the point will be assured that “business is as flourishing as ever,
perhaps more so, for the women are nearly all new, and all the houses
have agreed upon a flat rate of a yen and a half an hour, so that many a
fine sturdy young fellow has regretfully to leave for lack of
accommodations.”
It was an appalling disaster, that latest of Japan’s misfortunes, in the
front rank of those that have befallen mankind; yet it was not the first
of its kind, not only in Japan but in Tokyo itself, and a people so
familiar with its own long unbroken historical records should have been
at least subconsciously prepared for it. Besides, no small part of Tokyo
ought to have been destroyed, anyway; those noisome old shacks along
dirty narrow streets down near the muddy bank of its alleged river, for
instance, were unworthy of the capital of an enlightened people. Though
it already boasted some quite modern skyscrapers, a considerable portion
of the city was so built that once a fire started it must sweep an
enormous area. For a year an American expert in city planning had been
laying out on paper a new Tokyo, which the disaster will make it so much
more simple to carry out—though I believe no one has been cynical enough
to assert that the earthquake was made to order. Yokohama is gone;
whether or not it is rebuilt, it was only an insignificant little
fishing village when it was first opened to foreign trade in 1859, an
ephemeral thing indeed in the long history of Japan.
A dreadful calamity, there is no question. But I like to dwell on the
comedy rather than the tragedy of life, and the picture that recurs most
often to my mind is not of little children pinned under fallen timbers
and awaiting the licking flames, not that giant cooking-pot of the
_yoshiwara_, but of that haughty English lady living on the bluff at
Yokohama, who was just taking a bath before sitting down to luncheon, on
what must have been a hot and dusty day, when the crash came—and who
promptly tobogganed in her tub down the long slope of the bluff to the
sea-shore, as easily and as unhurt as Minerva riding the waves. I cannot
find absolute court-room proof of the story—ma, si non è vero è ben’
trovato.
[Illustration: A stream which languishes through Nagasaki furnishes a
drying-place for new parasols]
[Illustration: A glimpse of Kagoshima, southernmost city of Japan
proper, with its island volcano of Sakurajima in its splendid harbor]