Until familiarity dulls the attention, one misses the sight of animals
and of pastureland in Japan except in Hokkaido to the north. Perhaps
there are a few more horses to the square _ri_ in half-tropical Kyushu
than on the long main island, but even there mankind furnishes the great
majority of beasts of burden—and of milch animals, too, one might be so
frank as to add, for Japanese children are habitually, and
unsecretively, suckled long after they can walk and talk. Japan, like
South America, outside the narrow llama-zone, was not supplied by nature
with four-footed assistants. The first horses are said to have reached
the islands from Korea late in the third century of the Christian era,
and they are still far from numerous. With a people doomed to do nearly
all its own hauling and carrying, it is not so strange that the horse is
a kind of sacred animal of Shintoism.
Without horses there was no great reason for roads, and to this day the
Japanese do not fully realize the importance of good highways and solid
bridges, so that the automobile has not been much of a relief to their
horseless condition. Besides, the Government seems to regard this new
contraption from the West as a luxury to be kept out of the hands of the
people, and to be saddled with a staggering proportion of the
tax-returns. In addition to a heavy import duty and all that goes with
it, the yearly licence-fee for an automobile in Tokyo is three hundred
dollars. One might easily suspect a policy of keeping the government
railways free from competition, and be thankful that at least these only
serious means of transportation by land in the empire are being steadily
extended.
The line down the east coast of Kyushu is complete now, except for
twenty miles of the most execrable road extant, linked up by the
ubiquitous, omnivorous, all-suffering Ford. The railway is mainly
tunnels, so frequent in Japan, with wonderfully terraced hills or vistas
of blue tropical waters between them, seas so mirror-clear that it seems
a sacrilege to scratch the surface of them with an occasional steamer.
Along it, too, lies Beppu, landing-place of three shipwrecked Portuguese
sailors in a rowboat half a century after the discovery of America,
where multitudes of Japanese come now to bake or boil, sporting the
naïve garb of Adam and Eve, in the overflow from smoking Aso-san behind.
The peasants of Kyushu were already harvesting their grain in May,
though frogs still croaked in choruses in the flooded rice-fields. Fancy
our farmers working under umbrellas, and tilling their soil at sunset on
Sunday. Above each scattered village along the way still floated in the
wind the huge fish of gaily colored cloth that are put up on boys’
festival day early in May over every house in the empire in which a boy
has been born within the past few years. Its open mouth fastened to a
bamboo pole, and filled with wind, each seemed to be swimming in the air
high above the lowly abodes it honored. They are emblematic of the carp,
it seems, which to the Japanese personifies perseverance, a fighter to
the end, and hence a fitting example or spiritual guardian for the
rising male generation.
Kagoshima, in the far south, was dusty and uninteresting as a city, and
so hot that its people were more indecent in exposure than Hindus. But
the famous island volcano in its harbor gave it a suggestion of Naples,
and the place teems with history. Here, legend has it, the divine pair
which founded Japan landed; or, if you will have none of mythology,
there is the reality of that probably Malay race with paper houses and
no chairs making this the first stepping-stone to a modern empire.
Kagoshima was the first to greet and the last to accept the Occident.
Father Xavier, the Jesuit, set foot here seven years after his
wind-blown fellow-countrymen drifted upon the empire at Beppu; here, not
yet half a century ago, the Satsuma lords made the last stand against
the influx of Western ways that had followed the restoration—a final
rebellion of the old loose-jointed order opposed to strong centralized
government, which ended for the defeated leaders in _seppuku_, a politer
term for _harakiri_. There are statues of these forgiven rebels now in
the hillside park above the town still in their curious shogunal dress.
Only those of retentive memories can recall how many times Kagoshima
town and castle have been destroyed. Usually it was by their own
fellow-countrymen, but England did likewise in 1863, because of the
killing of an Englishman near Yokohama by a vassal of the Satsuma lord.
It was by such outspoken methods that the Western world brought Japan to
her modern knowledge of the rights of foreigners within her borders. And
through it all Kagoshima continued to make its famous Satsuma ware,
looking to the uninitiated like the checked and cast-off crockery of a
ten-cent store, until Kyoto wrested the art from her.
We are apt to forget that Japan did not hermetically seal herself up for
more than two centuries from mere hermit temperament, but because she
had tried the faith and the ways of the West and found them wanting. The
Jesuits were welcomed, and had everything their own way for a long time.
Then came the Franciscans and the Dominicans, aggressive Spanish priests
who refused to recognize the pope’s award of this region of “heathen
gentiles” to their Portuguese rivals; and the bewildered Nipponese
sought in vain to reconcile the practice of deadly quarreling with the
preaching of brotherly love of these strange beings from an outside
world. Finally, in 1600, the Protestant Dutch came, led by the
Englishman, Will Adams, and mutual slander became the order of the day.
Ever more puzzled, the rulers of Japan sent a man to Europe to
investigate these strange things at their source, and after seven years
he came back to report what Japan was already concluding, that
Christianity was vicious and the ways of the West to be avoided. Rumors
of rough doings in the unfortunate New World seem to have drifted in,
too, and brought the astonished realization that this handful of Spanish
and Portuguese friars and traders dreamed of conquering this ancient
empire and of forcing upon it their own corrupt faith, as upon other
“barbarians.” There followed increasing orders for them to retire, and
justifiable, even if too bloodthirsty, punishments for disobedience,
culminating in beheadings and crucifixions which supplied the church
with a long list of martyrs and saints. All foreigners were at length
forbidden to move about in Japan, “for fear that Portuguese would travel
with Dutch passports.” Then finally, in his wrath, the ruling _shogun_
commanded that so long as Japan should be Japan any Christian who had
the temerity to set foot upon it should forthwith lose his head; and for
long afterward his threat was approximately made good. Even books from
the Western world were forbidden, and when, more than a century later,
they were again permitted, it was on condition that they contain nothing
concerning Christianity.
It must have been a dreary life to the handful of Dutch traders who were
allowed to remain, imprisoned on the little flat island of Deshima in
what is now the heart of Nagasaki. Perhaps, being Dutch, they smoked
their pipes contentedly in their sea-level patch of earth, indifferent
to the lure of winding trails climbing away out of the hill-girdled
harbor. About them Nagasaki grew from a mere fishing-village to a center
of commerce with the outside world, though even that did not mean much
by modern standards. The forbidden faith, too, seems to have dug in and
remained, awaiting a more propitious occasion to reassert itself; for of
the seventy-seven thousand Roman Catholics now credited to Japan
fifty-seven thousand are in and about Nagasaki, as against only ten
thousand even in Tokyo. The count is stretched, of course, after the
Catholic-mission custom of crediting the church with a family of five
members whenever one of them is baptized, even though the other four be
non-existent or totally ignorant of the existence of churches; but,
assuming that the fraud is evenly practised, the proportions are
suggestive. No doubt it was by the same intensive methods of census that
the martyrs of the sixteenth century won the reputation of having made
more than a million converts in sixty years. To-day, though there are
about thirteen hundred Christian missionaries of all sects on the field
in Japan, and the Protestants claim almost twice as many converts as the
older branch of the faith, and the Greek orthodox Church nearly half as
many, there is barely one confessed Christian among one hundred and
fifty-eight persons throughout the island empire.
The Nagasaki we saw was dull and considerably down at heel, dusty and
hot and dirty, by no means the busy city even of my first visit early in
the century. Women, repulsive in their rags and soot as beings from the
infernal regions, still load passing ships with coal by handing endless
baskets of it over their heads along steep gangways; and establishments
of the “Madame Butterfly” type may still be found here and there in the
hilly, sometimes flower-scented suburbs. Next year, they say, the
inauguration of a daily twenty-four-hour steamer service to Shanghai
will give the place new life, but in the meanwhile changes in world
routes have left it sad and discouraged. Even the rickshaw-men stop our
American quartermaster in the street to ask, as does the governor,
whether there is not some way of getting American transports to come
there again for coal, instead of putting in through Hyasaki Strait to a
port nearer the mines. The Washington Conference was almost the last
straw, forcing Nagasaki’s great shipyard to give up a mammoth
warship-building contract. Speaking of the conference, there lay in
Nagasaki Harbor at the time of our visit a newly launched
forty-million-yen battle-ship, still in her first red coat of paint,
which was actually and visibly being dismantled—unless, as a cynical
foreigner long resident in Japan put it, they tow the hulk up some creek
and throw their convenient pall of military secrecy about her until she
has been rebuilt. But cynicism, after all, is not the trait most needed
in the world just now. Besides, June had come, the golden-yellow _biwas_
were ripe, and the long rainy season was upon us; it was high time we
pushed on to throttled Korea and topsyturvy China.
[Illustration: A memorial in the park of Kagoshima to the old-fashioned
men who perished in the Satsuma rebellion, an attempt to halt the
restoration and keep Japan closed to the outside world]
[Illustration: The workhorse saddles of Kagoshima are gaily decorated in
red and gold]
[Illustration: Government House at Taihoku, capital of Formosa]
[Illustration: One often wonders if the Japanese have not made the
streets of Formosan cities too broad for its tropical climate]