THE NUN'S CELL
(NAGANO)
It is one more incitement to a man to do well.--BOSWELL
Eighty per cent. of Nagano is slope. Hence its dependence on
sericulture. The low stone-strewn roofs of the houses, the railway
snow shelters and the zig-zag track which the train takes, hint at the
climatic conditions in winter time. Despite the snow--ski-ing has been
practised for some years--the summer climate of Nagano has been
compared with that of Champagne and there is one vineyard of 60,000
vines.
I was invited to join a circle of administrators who were discussing
rural morality and religion. One man said that there was not 20 per
cent. of the villages in which the priests were "active for social
development." Another speaker of experience declared that "the four
pillars of an agricultural village" were "the _sonchō_ (headman), the
schoolmaster, the policeman and the most influential villager." He
went on: "In Europe religion does many things for the support and
development of morality, but we look to education, for it aims not at
only developing intelligence and giving knowledge, but at teaching
virtue and honesty. But there is something beyond that. Thousands of
our soldiers died willingly in the Russian war. There must have been
something at the bottom of their hearts. That something is a certain
sentiment which penetrates deeply the characters of our countrymen.
Our morality and customs have it in their foundations. This spirit is
_Yamato damashii_ (Japanese spirit). It appeared among our warriors as
_bushido_ (the way of the soldier), but it is not the monopoly of
soldiers. Every Japanese has some of this spirit. It is the moral
backbone of Japan."
"I should like to say," another speaker declared, "that I read many
European and American books, but I remain Japanese. Mr. Uchimura sees
the darkest side of Buddhism and Mr. Lafcadio Hearn expected too much
from it. 'So mysterious,' Hearn said, but it is not so mysterious to
us. We must be grateful to him for seeing something of the essence of
our life. Sometimes, however, we may be ashamed of his beautifying
sentences. I am a modern man, but I am not ashamed when my wife is
with child to pray that it may be healthy and wise. It is possible for
us Japanese to worship some god somewhere without knowing why. The
poet says, 'I do not know the reason of it, but tears fall down from
my eyes in reverence and gratitude.' I suppose this is natural
theology. The proverb says, 'Even the head of a sardine is something
if believed in.' I attach more importance to a man's attitude to
something higher than himself than to the thing which is revered by
him. Whether a man goes to Nara and Kyoto or to a Roman Catholic or a
Methodist church he can come home very purified in heart."
"Some foreigners have thought well to call us 'half civilised,'" the
speaker went on. "Can it be that uncivilised is something distasteful
to or not understood by Europeans and Americans? We have the ambition
to erect some system of Eastern civilisation. It is possible that we
may have it in our minds to call some things in Europe 'half
civilised.' Surely the barbarians are usually the people other than
ourselves. When the townsman goes to the country he says the people
are savages. But the countryman finds his fellow-savages quite decent
people."
"Some time ago," broke in a professor, "I read a novel by René Bazin
and I could not but think how much alike were our peasants and the
peasants of the West."
The previous speaker resumed: "The other day a foreigner laughed in my
presence at our old art of incense burning and actually said that we
were deficient in the sense of smell. I told him that fifty years ago
our samurai class, in excusing their anti-foreign manifestations,
said they could not endure the smell of foreigners, and that to this
day our peasants may be heard to say of Western people, 'They smell;
they smell of butter and fat.'"
In the city of Nagano early in the morning I went to a large Buddhist
temple where the authorities had kindly given me special facilities to
see the treasures--alas! all in a wooden structure. A strange thing
was the preservation untouched of the room in which the Emperor Meiji
rested thirty years ago. May oblivion be one day granted to that awful
chenille table cover and those appalling chairs which outrage the
beautiful woodwork and the golden _tatami_ of a great building! At the
entrance of the temple priests in a kind of open office were reading
the newspaper, playing _gō_ or smoking. More pleasing was the sight of
matting spread right round the temple below its eaves, in order that
weary pilgrims might sleep there, and the spectacle of travel-stained
women tranquilly sleeping or suckling their infants before the shrine
itself. There is a pitch dark underground passage below the floor
round the foundations of the great Buddha, and if the circuit be made
and the lock communicating with the entrance door to the sacred figure
be fortunately touched on the way, paradise, peasants believe, is
assured. I made the circuit a few moments after an old woman and found
the lock, and on returning to the temple with the rustic dame knelt
with her before the shrine as the curtain which veils the big Buddha
was withdrawn. The face of one wooden figure in the temple had been
worn, like that of many another in Japan, with the stroking that it
had received from the ailing faithful.
[Illustration: IN A BUDDHIST NUNNERY.]
[Illustration: GRASS-CUTTING TOOLS COMPARED WITH A WESTERN SCYTHE.]
I had the privilege of visiting the adjoining nunnery. As I was
specially favoured by a general admission, I asked to be permitted to
see some nuns' cells. They showed a Buddhist advance on Western ideas.
The word "cells" was a misnomer for beautiful little flower-adorned
rooms of a cheerful Japanese house. The fragile, wistful nun who was
so kind as to speak with me had a consecrated expression. Her dress
was white, and over it was brocade in a perfect combination of green
and cream. Her head was shaven; her hands, which continually told
her beads, were hidden. Religious services are conducted and sermons
are delivered here and in other nunneries by the nuns themselves. I
could not but be sorry for some girl children who had become nuns on
their relatives' or guardians' decision. Adult newcomers are given a
month in which, if they wish, they may repent them of their vows; but
what of the children? The head of this nunnery was a member of the
Imperial family. The institution, like the temple from which I had
just come, stores thousands of wooden tablets to the memory of the
dead. There are many little receptacles in which the hair, the teeth
or the photographs of believers are preserved. I found that both at
the nunnery and the temple a practical interest was being shown in the
reformation of ex-criminals.
[Illustration: THE CHILD-COLLECTORS OF VILLAGERS' SAVINGS.]
[Illustration: NUNS PHOTOGRAPHED IN A "CELL" BY THE AUTHOR.]
[Illustration: STUDENTS' STUDY AT AN AGRICULTURAL SCHOOL.]
While in the highlands of Nagano I spent a night at Karuizawa, a hill
resort at which tired missionaries and their families, not only from
all parts of Japan but from China, gather in the summer months beyond
the reach of the mosquito.[133] I stayed in the summer cottage of my
travelling companion's brother-in-law. The family consisted of a
reserved, cultivated man with a pretty wife of what I have heard a
foreigner call "the maternal, domestic type." In their owlishness
newcomers to the country are inclined to commiserate all Japanese
housewives as the "slaves of their husbands." They would have been
sadly wrong in such thoughts about this happy wife and mother. The
eldest boy, a wholesome-looking lad, had just passed through the
middle school on his way to the university, and spoke to me in simple
English with that air of responsibility which the eldest son so soon
acquires in Japan. His brothers and sisters enjoyed a happy relation
with him and with each other. The whole family was merry, unselfish
and, in the best sense of the word, educated. As we knelt on our
_zabuton_ we refreshed ourselves with tea and the fine view of the
active volcano, Asama, and chatted on schools, holidays, books, the
country and religion. After a while, a little to my surprise, the
mother in her sweet voice gravely said that if I would not mind at all
she would like very much to ask me two questions. The first was, "Are
the people who go to the Christian church here all Christians?" and
the second, "Are Christians as affectionate as Japanese?"
Karuizawa, which is full of ill-nourished, scabby-headed,
"bubbly-nosed"[134] Japanese children, is an impoverished place on one
of the ancient highways. We took ourselves along the road until we
reached at a slightly higher altitude the decayed village of Oiwaké.
When the railway came near it finished the work of desolation which
the cessation of the daimyos' progresses to Yedo (now Tokyo) had begun
half a century ago. In the days of the Shogun three-quarters of the
300 houses were inns. Now two-thirds of the houses have become
uninhabitable, or have been sold, taken down and rebuilt elsewhere.
The Shinto shrines are neglected and some are unroofed, the Zen temple
is impoverished, the school is comfortless and a thousand tombstones
in the ancient burying ground among the trees are half hidden in moss
and undergrowth.
The farm rents now charged in Oiwaké had not been changed for thirty,
forty or fifty years. In the old inn there was a Shinto shrine, about
12 ft. long by nearly 2 ft. deep, with latticed sliding doors. It
contained a dusty collection of charms and memorials dating back for
generations. Outside in the garden at the spring I found an irregular
row of half a dozen rather dejected-looking little stone _hokora_
about a foot high. Some had faded _gohei_ thrust into them, but from
the others the clipped paper strips had blown away. At the foot of the
garden I discovered a somewhat elaborate wooden shrine in a
dilapidated state. "Few country people," someone said to me, "know who
is enshrined at such a place." It is generally thought that these
shrines are dedicated to the fox. But the foxes are merely the
messengers of the shrine, as is shown by the figures of crouching or
squatting foxes at either side. A well-known professor lately arrived
at the conviction that the god worshipped at such shrines is the god
of agriculture. He went so far as to recommend the faculty of
agriculture at Tokyo university to have a shrine erected within its
walls to this divinity, but the suggestion was not adopted.
In the course of another chat with the old host of the inn he referred
to the time, close on half a century ago, when 3,000 hungry peasants
marched through the district demanding rice. They did no harm. "They
were satisfied when they were given food; the peasants at that time
were heavily oppressed." To-day the people round about look as if they
were oppressed by the ghosts of old-time tyrants. But there is
"something that doth linger" of self-respect. When we left on our way
to Tokyo I gave the man who brought our bags a mile in a barrow to the
station 40 sen. He returned 10 sen, saying that 30 sen was enough.
FOOTNOTES:
[133] Although, as has been seen, the rural problems under
investigation in this book are inextricably bound up with religion,
limits of space make it necessary to reserve for another volume the
consideration of the large and complex question of missionary work.
[134] As to the "bubbly-nosed callant," to quote the description given
of young Smollett, nasal unpleasantness seems to be popularly regarded
as a sign of health. The constant sight of it is one of the minor
discomforts of travel.
IN AND OUT OF THE SILK PREFECTURE[135]