street and down another Ushi whirled me and drew up in a narrow alley
leading into Theater Street, and invited me to alight. "We will have
to walk through Theater Street. All must walk, no can ride in Theater
Street," Ushi announced.
[Illustration: But Ushi's card had pulled a customer]
He took from under the seat of his rikisha a green bag, such as
lawyers in the United States used to carry.
No, he didn't have his jewels in that bag.
Through Theater Street, we walked, Ushi at my side, with his bag, the
street brilliantly lighted and seething with Japanese life.
Both sides were lined with theaters big and little, shooting
galleries, sideshows, fakirs' stands--a bit of Coney Island life with
Japanese coloring and settings. High and low of Kioto's populace, a
city of half a million, surged through Theater Street. A mother with a
baby on her back; couples and trios of little girls with their arms
around each other's waists; and girls in bevies. Swains and
sweethearts. Big boys and little ones. Kids just able to walk, all
sorts, all conditions. Theater Street in Kioto of an evening is worth
seeing.
Ushi took me to the leading theater, up to the ticket window, and told
me it was on the evening's program to go to that show.
Ushi was boss.
I bought a ticket for ten cents and Ushi led me to the entrance and
bade me halt and hoist. At the side of the entrance was a great stack
of Japanese wooden street shoes, the owners of which were in the
theater.
I would not be allowed in that theater without removing my shoes if it
were not for Ushi with his bag. Hence Ushi's command to halt and
hoist.
Down on his knees at my feet went Ushi, opened his bag, and selected
from it a pair of cloth footgear to slip on over my shoes. An
assortment of these things he carried, small, medium and large.
Fortunate for me, he had an assortment--he found some big enough to go
over my shoes, tied them around my ankles, and I was shod with the
preparation necessary to take in a Japanese theater.
Twenty minutes of the show sufficed, and I came out and found Ushi
waiting for me. He took off those cloth over-shoes, put them in his
bag, and led me to his rikisha.
For two hours Ushi showed me Kioto by electric light, taking me
rapidly through thoroughfare after thoroughfare, pointing out and
explaining points of interest as we passed, always on a rapid trot.
Now a leading business house, here a temple, there a leading Japanese
hotel--down through the underworld, threading narrow streets and dark
alleys, over a famous bridge, across, and through, and back again,
always on his rapid trot, an eight or nine miles' run, at last to drop
the shafts of his rikisha at the entrance to my hotel.
Ushi wiped the sweat from his beetling brow and demanded twenty cents
for that evening's service. Yes, sir, Ushi thought he was entitled to
twenty cents!
"Ushi," I said, "tomorrow, Sunday, I'll hire you for the day," and
Ushi said, "Good-night," well pleased.
I went into my hotel, showed Ushi's card to mine host, the Japanese
proprietor, and said: "Ushi is quite a character."
"Beware of him," mine host replied, "he is not reliable. He used to
work for us, but we had to dismiss him, and now he has gone and got
those cards printed, and has stationed himself just outside our gate.
He has cut under the regular prices (a yen and a half a day is our
regular rikisha men's charge), and he seeks to capture trade with that
card."
"So?" I replied.
I read the card again, and thought, "Ushi, you clever rascal. Somehow
my heart warms up to you. Competition's fierce, Ushi, and it's war,
alias 'hell,' to make a livin'"--and I went to sleep that night with
designs on Ushi's time for the morrow.
Bright and early next morning, after breakfast, I stepped outside the
gate, and Ushi, the "rascal," who was doing business "near a HoTeL,"
greeted me with a smile, briskly arranged the seat to his rikisha and
stepped aside for me to take my place.
I didn't get in. I said, "Ushi, you got a family?"
"No," Ushi said.
"What? No wife, no children?"
"No," Ushi said, "my wife, she die. Very sorry."
"Tough luck, Ushi," I said.
"Lost your wife, lost your job. Life's made up of lights and shadows.
You don't fit into the color scheme for my day's program, Ushi. I must
have a rikisha man with a wife and children," and I walked away,
leaving Ushi standing there, sadly watching an all day's job go
glimmering.
I stepped back into the yard, looked over the semi-circle of rikisha
boys, accredited, guaranteed, within the pale rikisha boys, boys of
reputation, standing and character. No "rascals" who had to resort to
the "nefarious" expedient of issuing cards like Ushi's, and standing
"outside the gate" to secure trade at a cut price.
I stepped up to one who looked the best to me and said: "What is your
name?"
"Yamamoto. You want rikisha?"
"Yamamoto, you got wife and children?"
"Yes," wonderingly.
"How many children, Yamamoto?"
"Three, two girls and a boy."
"Yamamoto, I'll hire you for the day," and Yamamoto fixed the seat and
asked: "Where go?"
"Take me out first to where Ushi stands."
Ushi wasn't standing. He was sitting, dejectedly, on the dashboard of
his rikisha, waiting for someone to come along on whom he could spring
his card--that "nefarious" card that cut the rates, and as he saw me
draw up seated in Yamamoto's rikisha--Yamamoto, favored of fortune,
taking off his fare, Ushi cast a reproachful glance on me.
"Ushi, what for you mope? Didn't I make a deal with you last night to
be my rikisha boy today? Hitch on behind and push, Ushi--what
difference if you pull or push? That yen is yours when night shall
come."
Ushi caught on--behind. He left his rikisha standing by the wall.
There's some class to serve a man who'll hire a rikisha boy to push as
well as one to pull in Kioto, and with reckless abandon I had decided
to blow myself for a whole dollar and twenty-five cents for ten hours'
horse and carriage hire that day, just because Ushi didn't have a
family.
If Ushi hadn't lost his wife, and if he had had a pickaninny or two,
I'd got off for fifty cents and could have given my story the twist
I'd planned for it.
[Illustration: "Ushi, what for you mope? Didn't I make a deal with you
last night to be my rikisha boy today? Hitch on behind and push,
Ushi"]
[Illustration: With reckless abandon I had decided to blow myself for
a whole dollar and twenty-five cents for ten hours' horse and
carriage hire]
But East or West or North or South the picking is always good for a
story in Japan, and while to tell it as it is may not be so
spectacular, at least it's safe.
My old grandfather, who was somewhat of a sage, once said to me (and
his words of wisdom have survived the years), "George, a man must have
an excellent memory to be a successful liar." I have a wretched
memory, so the beaten, conservative, humdrum path of narrative for me.
With Ushi duly coupled on behind--"Where go?" Yamamoto asked. The
pride of a double team was noticeable.
Now "Missouri's" hard luck in his missionary hunt with an automobile
had inspired me to do a little investigating of this world's work on
my own account, but in a more humble way. So I gave Yamamoto the
address of a leading missionary, which I had easily secured from mine
host, the hotel man.
"I know," Yamamoto said, "other side Emperor's palace, thirty
minutes."
With Ushi on behind the ground fairly flew under us and Yamamoto and
Ushi vied with each other to tell about the points of interest that we
passed.
In less than thirty minutes I was landed at the missionary's gate.
"Man, man," I said, waving my hand to my coolies as I alighted. Say
"man, man" to your rikisha coolie when you leave him and you'll find
him right there waiting for you when you come back. It's an imaginary
hitching strap I've never known to break.
X
MISSIONARIES, TRACTS, AND A JOB WORTH WHILE
The missionary met me at the door and I told him who I was--a
wayfaring man in Japan, and would he show me somewhat of his work?
He would, and gladly. If I had been a long lost brother or a wealthy
uncle with a will to make, he couldn't have been more cordial--a keen
young man of thirty-six or thirty-eight I found this missionary.
"Do you mind walking?" he asked.
"I have a team of rikisha coolies at your gate," I said.
"Well," he replied, "our work is scattered over Kioto. We can reach it
by trolleys and walking, with an occasional rikisha ride between
trolley lines, better than to try to do it all by rikisha from here.
Better pay off your coolies and dismiss them."
"I've chartered them for the day," I said.
We started out to see the missionary work in Kioto, that young
missionary and I.
At the gate I told my boys to loaf, or play, or fish, or pick up fares
which they might pocket for themselves--they were on my payroll for
the day--but to report for duty there at the gate at 1 P. M.
The missionary and I walked a mile and passed two of his mission
churches on the way, where services were being held, and which through
the week were used for schools and meetings; the missionary dispensing
tracts as we walked along. That young missionary seemed to exude
tracts--I didn't know one missionary could hold so many.
We boarded a trolley, and all the passengers got a tract. We
dismounted at a corner to look over another mission church where the
natives were holding a meeting; a little walk and we boarded another
trolley and the missionary started in to give the passengers tracts.
"Here, dominie," I said, "give me some of those tracts and I'll help
you to push God's word along"--I rather surmised by then that he was
out of tracts and had a momentary--just a teenty, decent little
momentary pang of shame that I hadn't offered sooner.
But the missionary wasn't out of tracts. His clothes were full of
pockets and they all held tracts. He dug up a pack and handed them to
me.
[Illustration: That missionary seemed to exude tracts--I didn't know
one missionary could hold so many]
I started at one end of the car and he at the other, and every Jap in
that car had a tract when we met midway.
We must have boarded six more trolley cars and still the tracts held
out, and I had a few left in my pocket after the last car was served.
No tract was thrown away. They were read on the spot and then safely
tucked away in the folds of kimonos, or respectfully received and
tucked away to be carried home and read.
Every tract would serve five readers, on an average, the missionary
told me.
We looked in on little mission churches scattered over Kioto, all
under the jurisdiction of that one missionary. He told me how, through
himself, his board had bought land and built the little missions, or
were renting places for their work.
We worked our way across that tremendous town and at the end of a
rikisha ride he showed me his chief pride--a plot of several lots he'd
bought, and on them erected a splendid church at the very gates of one
of Japan's chief universities of learning.
Ten thousand dollars had been donated toward the work by an American
soap manufacturer who had visited Kioto and seen his work, and placed
the cash in the young man's hands to build that church.
"Dominie," I asked, as we worked our way back to his home, via
rikisha, trolleys and on foot, "what is your yearly budget for all
this work you are carrying on here in Kioto?"
"Twenty-five hundred gold dollars," he told me. His and his wife's
salary (he married a missionary) was $750.00 each.
Only one thousand dollars for the annual expense, outside their
salaries, to pay for tracts and current expenses for the work--native
preachers and teachers to keep the enterprise going--twenty-five
hundred dollars came from the homeland to push the gospel in Kioto
under his charge.
I mentally took this missionary's measure as he told me his story. He
was more than preacher, as we know the ordinary type at home. Of
necessity his was a wider range of activities; a business man, a man
of affairs, keen, alert, his eye on the gun.
His heart was in his work, to hold up his end in bringing over to
Christianity a constituency of half a million souls--a young man
putting in ability which, if as intelligently and earnestly directed
in a business career in America, should win him ten, twenty--who
knows how many thousand dollars per year reward?
I doubt if a guarantee of that difference in pay would tempt the young
man from his chosen work--at least that was the impression I got as he
unburdened his heart to me.
The young man had a vision of things worth more to him than money.
We wound up the forenoon tour at one o'clock at a union meeting of
missionaries--got in as the meeting was drawing to an end.
He introduced me to these missionaries as they passed out at the
close. I told each one whose hand I shook that the meeting gave me
pleasure, and handed out a tract.
One or two of the bunch without the saving sense of humor the Lord
meant all should have, didn't receive them as gratefully as the
Japanese I passed them to--it takes all kinds of folks to make a
world, I find, and most all of them are good, I think--but some are
better than others.
* * * * *
The best thing in Japan I missed this trip--a kindergarten of Japanese
children.
This missionary's wife had, among other things, this work in hand. I
saw the room and the little empty chairs where fifty Japanese
children, of from three to five years, were taught.
[Illustration: Except potato bugs, I always want to poison them]
Babies are always a lot of fun. The young of the animal kingdom are
always interesting--a baby colt, a baby calf, or pig, or dog, or
cat--I can't think of the young of anything that don't appeal to me
(except potato bugs--I always want to poison them), and most of all
human babies. I'd turn aside from any task to see a lot of babies in a
bunch.
But fifty Japanese babies in their fantastic clothes doing
kindergarten stunts--my eye! a show to please the gods!
The obsequies of the Empress Dowager had closed the kindergarten
school for days, and I missed the best show in Japan.
The missionary and his wife insisted that I take lunch with them. My
team of coolies were champing at their bits--my lunch was ready at my
hotel--I told them so. They told me that the hotel would excuse me and
they would not.
XI
YAMAMOTO AND HIGH COST OF LIVING
After lunch at the missionary's I found my team at the gate spoiling
for a run.
"Yamamoto, take me to your home," I said; "I want to meet your family.
I want to see how a rikisha man lives. And, Yamamoto, I'll give you a
yen if you'll invite me to supper at your home tonight."
The yen looked tempting, but Yamamoto wouldn't play the game.
He said to have a foreigner as a guest at his humble home would bring
around his house such a crowd of curious neighbors that all pleasure
in the repast would be spoiled--or words to that effect; but he would
take me to his home. Off we started, a three-mile run; Ushi pushed and
Yamamoto pulled, and I was soon a self-invited guest in Yamamoto's
home; and, if to break bread or chopstick rice in Yamamoto's home
would have brought a greater horde of curious neighbors than gathered
to witness a foreigner's call at that home, then Yamamoto's head was
level--Yamamoto's head was level anyway.
[Illustration: He said to have a foreigner as a guest at his humble
home would bring around his house such a crowd of curious neighbors]
A little house 8 x 16, two rooms 8 x 8, the front opening on a street
about eight feet wide; a yard in the rear 6 x 8, was Yamamoto's home.
It was as neat as wax and furnished with an _hibachi_ on which to
cook, a _tanstu_ in which to store their clothes. No chairs--they sit
on the floor; no beds, save _futons_, to lay on the floor; and an
_okimono dai_, a sort of what-not stand, on which a few ornaments and
articles of household use were placed.
The wife was gone for the day, but his children were at home, and a
more interesting trio of children one wouldn't ask to meet.
My team took me back to the hotel. I dismissed them for the day at
five o'clock. I paid off Ushi, and made a deal with Yamamoto to go
home and write me the story of his life. I told him I'd pay him a yen
to tell me all about himself, his family, how they lived, and what it
cost. To bring me the letter written the next morning and get one yen
fifty for the day and an extra yen for the letter. Two yen fifty I
would hand him in the morning when he handed me the letter; and
Yamamoto said he would, and Yamamoto did--I imagine one of his
daughters did the writing.
Here is an exact translation of Yamamoto's letter as he handed it to
me the next morning--and Yamamoto has his stand within the wall, but
Ushi does business without the gate:
The present living condition of Tokichi Yamamoto. He was born in
the 12st May 2nd year Meiji 1869. I was born and bred in the city
of Kioto, and have been engaging in the job of Rikisha for these
twenty years, and my family is consisting of my wife and three
children. Elder and younger girls who have had finished the whole
course of the Primary school (4 years), and they are now working
in the factory of the Tobacco Monopoly Buelow, and the young son
is attending the Primary school.
I am somewhat puzzling with the expense of living. My estimated
income is 30 yen each month in the months of April, May, October
and November and the rest of is about 18 yen per month,
therefore, I make it average, it becomes about 22 yen per month,
and two girls get 16 yen, so all the income of my house is
reckoned 38 yen per month.
The elder sister has just abandoned her work in the factory, and
she attends a house for learning of sewing. The list of paying
out a month:
House rent 3.00 yen
City tax and town expense .50
The expense of education 1.10
The rice charge 12.00
Wood, charcoal and oil 1.30
Vegetable and fish 7.00
Dressing charges 3.00
Miscellaneous expense 5.00
-----
Total 32.90[A]
[Footnote A: $16.45 American money.]
Fortunately I am in robust health. Though I am not educated
myself, I am thinking that the dutifulness and truthfulness are
the most important to intercourse with people, and as I am
truthful and dutiful to my friends, I am rather welcomed by them.
XII
THE SOLDIER SAID SOMETHING IN CHINESE
Before starting on this around-the-world trip a friend of mine in the
United States said to me: "When you get to Shanghai look up my friend,
Dr. "John Blank." He has been in China over thirty years. He is the
biggest individual intellectual asset in China today--the founder and
moving spirit of an International Institute which recognizes the good
in all religions and gives them all a hearing.
"He is a graduate of Hamilton College in your town of Clinton. He is a
strong, a busy man, and true. Please look him up and arrest his
attention long enough to give him my regards"--and I promised this
enthusiastic friend of "John Blank's" I would do this thing.
"Missouri" had, by rare good luck, driven his business in Japan ahead
of him to such purpose that he was ready to sail on the same ship that
brought me from Nagasaki to Shanghai. He had, in his peregrinations
through Japan, run his intense Americanism plumb against an English
tea. Somehow, when "Missouri" and an English tea collided the tea got
spilt--as "Missouri" told me the tale en route from Nagasaki to
Shanghai the tea took second honors.
Arriving in Shanghai, "Missouri" went his way on business bent, while
I looked up Dr. "John Blank," only to find that this busy man was out
of town, and I regretted that I should have to disappoint our mutual
friend and not be able to deliver his regards to Dr. "Blank." And I
took a railroad trip to Pekin.
While I have come to China several times, until this trip I had never
ridden a mile on a railroad in China, nor had I been north of
Shanghai, and I was full of curiosity to see what I should see on a
thousand-mile ride through China with its teeming millions.
At eleven P. M. of a sweltering night I found myself ensconced in a
very comfortable sleeping car, composed of commodious staterooms of
four berths each, two upper and two lower, and as the only traveling
companion to share my stateroom, a young German of twenty-six years.
He was a keen young chap who had right ideas of life. Dropped in
Shanghai four years ago, with an expired term in the German navy and
fifty Mexican dollars in his pocket, bare-handed and alone, he had
hit the Orient with such sturdy resolution and solid German sense that
he had, in four short years, added to the fifty Mex. a young Urasian
wife, half German and half Chinese (he assured me she was the dearest,
sweetest little thing), a baby, and nine thousand good hard Mexican
dollars in the bank.
A feat like that is worth mentioning--when you know the Orient--they
don't all do so well, even with pull and influence to help.
It's good to have a chap like that, a right-principled, wholesome
chap, who can speak your tongue and Chinese as well, in the berth
across from you on a lonesome thousand-mile trip through China. A
night's run and Nankin is reached at seven A. M. with a three hours'
wait for breakfast, and to ferry across the Yangtze to Pukow to
connect, at ten A. M., with the Pukow-Tientsin road--then settling
down in a comfortable train, carrying a good restaurant car, for a
ride of thirty hours without change of cars until we should reach
Tientsin.
For an hour we followed up the delta of the Yangtze, low, level land
devoted to rice culture, splendidly tilled. The only remarkable thing
about the landscape was dearth of population.
We passed no towns of any size. A lonesome railroad station, now and
then some little mud-walled, straw-thatched hamlets. A like ride over
such agricultural land in any of our Middle States at home would show
much greater evidence of population.
Then for another hour a poor strip of territory, a hilly, semi-barren
country, then we rolled out onto level plains which stayed with us
until darkness shut out the scene.
From a little after noon till dark on a day in early June we passed
through Illinois and Iowa land, prairies bounded by the horizon, with
fields of waving wheat and barley just coming into harvest, and fields
of corn and beans six inches high. And in all that seven or eight
hours of travel, at an average speed of twenty-five miles an hour, we
passed no city of any size.
Lonesome, solidly well-built brick railroad stations, at long
intervals villages and hamlets, set back from the railroad, of the
same one-story, mud-walled, thatched construction.
The wonder to me was: Where did the population live to till the land
so thoroughly?--for it was all tilled like a well-kept garden. Where
the early wheat and barley was harvested it was threshed on threshing
floors, even as Boaz threshed his grain, and all of those millions of
acres of grain we passed was cut either with a crude cradle or sickle,
or pulled up by the roots; and the farm animals used were the
caribou, the ox, and ass.
No fences, no wagon roads. Where one man's land ended and another
man's began you'd never guess, viewed from the car windows.
And all that plain defaced with graves! Out in the fields,
helter-skelter, here and there. Here a single grave, there two or
three, again six in a row. Pa, and ma, and brother John, sister Ann,
and Will, and baby Tim, were buried there. Pa had a big grave. Ma's
not so large, and tapering down in size to a small one for baby Tim,
all of the same pattern; a haycock-shaped mound of earth topped with a
wad of mud.
I had it in for the geography I studied as a boy that told me of
China's teeming population. That geography told me that China was so
full of folks that to support the congested population they loaded
dirt onto flat boats and moored those boats in rivers and utilized the
ground thus made for gardens--and in that same geography lesson I
learned that these boats were called flower boats.
The erudite writer of that geography got mixed in his metaphors. The
flower boats of China have been pointed out to me in the rivers of
China. They are places where "gilded youth" resort, and it is not
garden truck they raise on them, but Sherman's definition of war--but
let it pass.
Night shut out the scene, and morning dawned and found us at a city. I
was glad to find a city in China, and here I lost my German friend. I
regretted the parting, for I could talk to him. We were in a
mountainous country now with some vegetation snatched in spots. Not
much, but some, and through this strip of meagre land they had good
stone houses and wagon roads--and it looked more prosperous and more
like folks back home.