a voice so soft and melodious it almost lulled me back to sleep. With
the coffee, which tended to wake me, he announced, “Madam Sanger go in
maybe. Yes, Japanese Government let her go in.” In ten minutes he would
return with the reversal of this news. He was aware of the contents of
the radiograms which kept the aerials crackling even before they had
been delivered to me. One read, “Thousands disciples welcome you.”
Another, “Possible land Yokohama; impossible discourse.” From the ship’s
daily I learned first that I might lecture, but not publicly; and then,
a day later, after continuous derision on the part of the press—all
right, I might talk publicly if I wished, but under no condition on
birth control. The last word I received was that I could land but speak
only in private. From the Ishimotos came the message, “Anticipate your
staying with us.”
March 10th was so dripping and foggy that when we reached Tokyo Bay I
could not see Japan. The arrival of the _Taiyo Maru_ bearing such an
array of distinguished passengers as the conference delegates was bound
to call forth unusual activity. A veritable flotilla met the ship—police
and health officers’ launches, mail tenders and press dispatch carriers.
Two officials came on board to interrogate me, and the three of us
retired to my cabin, where our bags had been hopefully packed. I showed
my passport, told the purpose of my visit, explained how I happened to
know the Ishimotos and Mr. Yamanoto of the Kaizo group. Inspector and
interpreter alike smiled amiably as they plied their questions, ending
with the polite query, “Who is paying your expenses?” The implication
was that I might be a secret agent sent by the United States Government
to deplete the population of Japan and to prepare the way for an
American invasion. This was particularly amusing, since I was one of the
persons thoroughly disapproved of by my Government.
At the end of the lengthy catechism it was agreed that the ban would be
removed if I, for my part, agreed not to lecture publicly on birth
control, and provided the American Consul General Skidmore formally
requested permission for me to land. I had sent him a wireless message
from the _Taiyo Maru_ saying I would like to visit the country, if not
as a lecturer at least as a private citizen, and asking him to use his
influence. Though I had had no reply I sent off a telegram to him
immediately, and Grant and I sat down on the luggage to await
developments.
The two officials had no sooner taken their departure than the little
cabin was filled to bursting with the gentlemen of the press. We started
and blinked with each rapid-fire, flashlight explosion. The room was
literally smoking with the acrid powder, and not an inch of standing
room remained. Seventy were all trying to get in at once; whatever I
said had to be relayed and translated to the unsuccessful ones who
brimmed over into the corridor.
Meanwhile, we had docked at Yokohama and, when the reporters were
finally disposed of, my friends, who had been patiently enduring the
rain, greeted me—Mr. Yamanoto, Mr. Wilson of the British Embassy,
Baroness Ishimoto, and “the missionary who lived next door.” After
welcoming me they left, the last named carrying with him my briefcase
laden with my most private papers and pamphlets, which I did not wish
seized at the Customs.
Now came the tapping of clogs along the passage, and in the doorway were
framed slight, doll-like figures, pale white faces, crimson lips, black
glossy hair beautifully coiffured, butterfly-looking obis. The trials of
the day vanished before their bobbing little bows. Here was a Japanese
fairy tale come true.
In precise English the leader introduced the others; this one
represented the silk manufacturers, that one the weavers; each of the
twenty-five was appearing for some laboring organization. She explained
they had been there all day, but it was nothing—they were so proud to be
the first to welcome the herald of freedom for women. The Industrial
Revolution which had put them to work was still so young that they were
in virtual slavery. Yet, she said, they were so accustomed to
subservience that it would be a long time until they learned to rebel
against their wrongs. Suffrage was slow—Japanese women found it
difficult to see its advantages. They could not be stirred by offers of
economic independence; it was a higher ideal to have husbands take care
of their wives than have them battle for themselves. She was certain no
inspiration was to be found in that quarter.
Then, with eyes sparkling, she added, “But when the message of birth
control came to us from Honolulu, like the lightning we understood its
meaning, and now we are all awakened.”
We were served with tea, and I continued to await a reply from Mr.
Skidmore, but none ever came. Finally, at seven-thirty, due to the
British Mr. Wilson’s intercession, the Imperial Government at last
opened its gates to me without the sponsorship of my own Government.
I still had to go through Customs. Papers and books, including forty
copies of _Family Limitation_, were confiscated. Thereafter I usually
left spaces in my diaries instead of writing out names, because I never
knew who was going to see them.
The Customs men further minutely examined my clothes, accessories, even
necklaces and ornaments, holding them up, laughing at them, calling each
other to come and look, in order to inform themselves as much on the
composition and design as to determine whether they were dutiable. The
data they gleaned thus from incoming travelers they stored away like
squirrels—and cheaply-manufactured replicas shortly appeared on
Woolworth counters, stamped in purple ink, “Made in Japan.”
When I emerged, tired and damp, more crowds pressed around seeking
autographs. Everywhere in Japan people wanted your signature. One man,
who spoke some English, said he represented the Ricksha-men’s Union and
apologized for the trouble to which I had been put. “Sometime Japanese
Government he little autocratic.” For that matter everybody apologized
for the Government.
After the torrents of rain, logs blazing in fireplaces warmed us in the
Ishimotos’ charming house at Tokyo. Grant and I were both in a large
room, almost bare of furnishings, exquisite in its simplicity. The
fragile walls of painted silk gave an impression of airiness.
Next to us was the huge bathroom, the floor and lower walls of
burnished, shining copper. In the center, raised on legs, stood a great
wooden tub with a top that closed down, and a hole for your neck. Five
or six basins were ranged around the room and, beside each, brush and
soap. You were supposed to scrub and scrub and then rinse by throwing
pans of water over you. Finally you entered the steaming tub to relax.
It was not etiquette to leave any trace of soap in the bath or any
evidence of its use, because everybody in the family soaked in that
water before the night was over—guests, hosts, and servants in order.
I sank gratefully on one of the mattresses borrowed for our comfort and
laid on the floor; the rest of the household slept on mats with wooden
blocks in place of pillows, a custom which allowed the ladies to keep
their coiffures intact for a week at a time. Through the frail
partitions we could hear the servants laughing and chatting until late
into the night, men and women together, carrying on their bathing as
though it were a function of eating.
Our days were tremendously busy, beginning early with the ringing of the
antiquated telephone on the wall. People came silently in rickshas and
departed after conversing with the Baron and Baroness.
Old Japan had extended esthetics into the realm of ordinary existence,
and undoubtedly had produced a thing of beauty. The gestures of ceremony
might have meant little, but they made delightful the arranging of any
affair whatever. The Japanese always greeted each other with a bow from
the waistline, hands gliding down to the knees. The difference between
one and another was so subtle that a foreigner could hardly distinguish
it, but it was there all the same. A particular mark of respect was the
triple bow, graduated according to the social rank—an inclination, a
slight pause, a deeper inclination, again a pause, and then down further
until the back was nearly horizontal.
Grant, who was very affectionate, had been accustomed to kiss me when we
met, whether it were in a restaurant, hotel, on the street, or anywhere
else for that matter. But he had to forego this salute in Japan when we
observed that kissing was a shock to Japanese sensibilities, and,
indeed, was considered immoral. Instead, he took over Japanese manners
and became marvelously courteous. Practically every time he spoke to me
he made the three bows, and unconsciously I soon found myself returning
them with equal formality.
Politeness in behavior, impersonal and ritualistic, was most noticeable
in those relationships where we naturally expected habitual and
conventional reserve to be thrown aside. When the Baroness Ishimoto’s
mother and sister were coming for lunch, she donned a special kimono,
set out special vases and screens, greeted them with the prescribed
bows, wordings, and gestures. Even I noticed the civilities accorded the
two were not the same. The effect was that the mother occupied the place
of honor as though she were receiving.
Men came also to the Ishimotos’ to plan for the various meetings and
entertainments. A member of the House of Lords telephoned to say he was
a “disciple.” The press sought interviews. Early in my career I had
realized the importance of giving clear, concise, and true concepts of
birth control to those who wished to quote me. This simple policy served
my purpose particularly well in the Orient, where technical phrases in
English were hopelessly confusing. Under any circumstances our language
was peculiarly difficult for the Japanese, and their phraseology was
sometimes convulsively funny. One letter from a dismissed government
employee to the head of his department was making the rounds of
Occidentals in the East:
Kind Sir, on opening this epistle you will behold the work of a
dejobbed person, and a very be-wifed and much childrenized
gentleman, who was violently dejobbed in a twinkling by your
goodself. For Heaven’s sake, sir, consider this catastrophe as
falling on your own head, and remind yourself on walking home at the
moon’s end to savage wife and sixteen voracious children with your
pocket filled with non-existent pennies and pity my horrible state.
When being dejobbed and proceeding with a heart and intestines
filled with misery in this den of doom, myself did greedily
contemplate culpable homicide, but Him who protected Daniel (poet)
safe through the Lion’s den will protect his servant in this home of
evil. As to reason given by yourself esquire for my dejobment the
incrimination was laziness.
NO SIR. It were impossible that myself who has pitched sixteen
infant children into this vale of tears can have a lazy atom in his
mortal frame, and a sudden departure of eleven pounds has left me on
the verge of the abyss of destitution and despair.
I hope this vision of horror will enrich your dreams this night and
good Angel will meet and pulverize your heart of nether millstone so
that you will awaken and with such alacrity as may be compatible
with your personal safety, and will hasten to rejobulate your
servant.
So mote it be, Amen,
Yours despairfully,
Akono Subusu
And on the bottom of the letter the district officer had noted:
Gentle Reader, do not sob—
Akono Subusu has been rejobbed.
I myself had a letter from a gentleman who wrote, “How I am unavoidably
in need to execute your ‘Ism’ and hope to know your effective method.”
Had it been allowed, I should have given forth practical information.
Since it was not, I believed if I could make plain to the authorities
that I was not going to break this rule in my lectures, they could find
no fault with them.
Accordingly, the morning of our second day in Tokyo an appointment was
made with the Police Governor. In spite of the early hour the hard
little official, his close-cropped hair revealing all the bumps and
developments, served us tea. The Japanese always handed you tea as we
pass cigarettes—in embarrassment, for relaxation, or just to tie up
loose moments. Disregarding the vital subject completely we discussed
current topics through an interpreter. Though all the people were
intensely serious, they were remarkably fond of plays on words. Merrily
I was told my name had created much confusion owing to its similarity to
_sangai san_, which meant “destructive to production.”
Birth control was thus delicately introduced. For the first time I heard
about the Dangerous Thought Law, which had been sponsored in Parliament
by a group called the “Thought Controllers,” who aimed to exclude from
the country all ideas not conforming to ancient Japanese tradition. The
Police Governor assumed he knew exactly what I had planned to talk
about, and I could not move him from the conviction that I wanted to
present a Dangerous Thought.
I was not, however, going to let the matter drop. I went higher up to
the Home Affairs Office. A courteous gentleman informed me the Minister
sent his regards and hoped to have the pleasure of seeing me some other
time. There was no tea. I was politely bowed out.
My next stop was at the Kaizo office, where the entire staff was called
into consultation. They were bristly and burly enough to be taken for
Russians; only their kimonos identified them as Japanese. One and all
decided we should go in person to the Imperial Diet. There, on
presentation of our cards, couriers started running around to find the
Chief. In a few moments the door of the room into which we had been
ushered was opened, and in came the very same man with whom I had
conversed at the Home Office that morning. Profoundly embarrassed I
explained this was the way of impatient Americans, who were bent on
hurrying things along. He was very kind, and said he had been on the
point of giving me permission to speak publicly provided I did not
mention birth control. When I sketched an outline of a possible
population lecture we laughed and agreed the Empire of Japan was not, as
a result, going to fall.
Almost from the time of landing I had been deeply conscious that I was
in one of the most thickly populated countries of the world. The
Ishimotos’ automobile honked, honked, at every turn of the wheels to
squeeze through rickshas, pedestrians, and children in the narrow,
unpaved streets.
In any traffic danger the first concern was always for the baby. I never
saw one slapped, struck, scolded, or punished. I never heard one cry;
they all seemed happy and smiling, though I must admit a few of them
needed to have their little noses wiped. I could not believe any country
could contain so many babies. Fathers carried them in their arms;
mothers carried them in a sort of shawl; children carried babies; even
babies carried smaller babies. I saw a land of one-story houses but of
two-story children. Boys with babies on their backs were playing
baseball, running to bases, the heads of the babies wobbling so that you
thought their necks were surely going to be broken.
The momentum that had come from the high birth rate was felt in every
walk of life. Peers, business and professional men were all having large
families. One told me he wanted twenty children. When I asked him how
many he had already he replied, “Two,” and he was offended when I
suggested that perhaps his wife, instead of himself, had had those.
The density of population in tillable areas of Japan averaged two
thousand human beings to the square mile, and it was increasing at the
rate of almost a million a year. Although they built terraced rice
paddies on their hillsides with tremendous labor they could not feed
themselves. Furthermore, lacking ore, petroleum, and an adequate supply
of coal, they could not develop their industries to a point where they
could exchange their products for enough food.
The Government should itself have been disseminating contraceptive
information, but the army faction was not friendly to it and claimed
Japan could never be respected in the eyes of the world until she
possessed a force sufficiently powerful to make might right. It was even
then too late for birth control to offset the inevitability of her
overflowing her borders; the population pressure was bound to cause an
explosion in spite of the safety valve of Korea. How long this could be
delayed was a matter of pure conjecture.
_Chapter Twenty-six_
THE EAST IS BLOSSOMING
After I found out where I stood with the Government, the silent friends
who had come and gone so frequently from the Ishimoto home produced
plans for various meetings. In each one the address was to a particular
class which did not mingle with others—commercial, educational, medical,
parliamentary.
The Kaizo group were intensely disappointed that I could not deliver the
lectures I had prepared and for which they had invited me to Japan. As a
compromise we agreed that I should have to focus my War and Population
talk around Germany and the Allies. It was going to be difficult,
because I was not satisfied with the European facts and figures I had.
My first meeting was at the Tokyo Y.M.C.A. Shortly before one o’clock I
was escorted with great ceremony into a room behind the auditorium,
pungent with smoke from a charcoal stove. Then I was presented to a
gathering of about five hundred—prosperous-looking men, well-dressed
women, students, a number of foreigners, a Buddhist priest or two, and a
liberal sprinkling of the Metropolitan Police to make certain my
audience thought no dangerous thoughts as a result of my speech.
Most of the auditors apparently understood some English, because while I
was speaking they leaned forward attentively, laughing in the proper
places, but when I paused for the translation they relaxed, rustled
papers, and whispered to each other.
I had discovered that the five-hour clause in my contract was no mistake
and no joke. Standing from one until six was a frightful strain. The
lecture with interpretations took three hours, although I could have
delivered it in one, and questions took two more. Many of these were on
subjects entirely alien to my own. “What do you think of missionaries?
What do you think of Christianity? Are you yourself a Christian?” This
last was naïvely posed, and, thoroughly aware of the significance of
what it meant truly to be a Christian, I replied, “I’m afraid I’m not a
very good one.”
My questioner put out his chest and said confidently, “I am.”
I seemed to recall my adolescence when I had exacted the last ounce of
righteousness from every breathing hour. Many of the Japanese converts
had this spirit. They were trying to change their ancestral ideas of
morality and, instead, adopt wholesale the Christian code without having
had time to assimilate it.
The most painful experience I had in Japan was in addressing the Tokyo
medical association. The volunteer interpreter was a young doctor who
had been on a three weeks’ tour of America, and his command of English
was correspondingly slight. From the attitude of the audience I could
tell whenever he was not conveying my meaning as I had intended it,
though I did not always know what specifically was wrong. The Baroness,
unable to bear his mis-translation of “prevention of conception” as
abortion, which she knew would distress me intensely, finally rose and
attempted to correct the erroneous impression he was giving. But the
meeting was over before she could make it clear.
Nothing had been said about remuneration. I expected none. But the next
day an army of ten rickshas appeared. The officers of the society, laden
with packages and bundles, presented themselves. One by one they offered
boxes in which I found an elaborate kimono, an embroidered table cover,
a purse, a fan, a cloisonné jar, and, in conclusion, the President
offered me the smallest package of all, wrapped in tissue and tied with
a paper tape on which were the characters wishing me health, happiness,
and longevity. Opening it I found crisp new bills in payment. This
delicate gesture was typically Japanese.
At other meetings we usually sat on clean, fresh mats; the room might be
chilly, but a little charcoal burner was beside you and occasionally you
warmed your hands over it. I liked the service and the food which the
maids silently brought all at once on a tray, covered over and steaming
hot. After _saké_ in diminutive porcelain cups the group was ready to
converse, and it was cozy and interesting. Often we did not get away
until midnight because, although the discussion was carried on in
English, each remark was translated for the benefit of those who did not
understand. The Baroness always went with me, and it was a revelation to
them to have one of their own countrywomen present.
I had heard much talk of the Elder Statesmen, but nobody at the Peers’
Club, where I gave an afternoon address, seemed to be even elderly. They
were curious to know why women were divorced, whether they wanted more
than one husband, whether they really could ever care for more than one
man, the nature of their love for children, how long it could continue.
They were like Europeans in the frankness with which they regarded the
relationship of the sexes. Yet they were not satisfied with the accepted
Japanese tradition—on the one hand geisha girls who played and coquetted
and amused them, and on the other wives whose place as yet was
definitely in the home. They asked, “Is it not true that the American
woman can be all things to her husband—his companion, mother of his
children, mistress, business manager, and friend?”
I agreed with them that this was the ideal, but had to confess that by
no means every American wife fitted into this picture.
Many of the Japanese had themselves forgotten that in the heroic and
epic days women had enjoyed freedom and equality with men. Only with the
rise of the powerful military lords in the Eighth Century had this most
rigid, most persistent, and most immovable discrimination arisen.
The _Ona Daigaku_, the feudal moral code, counseled:
A woman shall get up early in the morning and go to bed late in the
evening. She must never take a nap in the daytime. She shall be
industrious at sewing, weaving, spinning, and embroidery. She shall
not take much tea or wine. She shall not visit places of amusement,
such as theaters or musicals. She must never get angry—she must bear
everything and always be careful and timid.
The resultant upper-class Japanese lady, exquisite and decorative, was a
living work of art particularly created by the imagination of numberless
generations of men. My original conception of all Japanese women had
been fashioned out of romantic fallacies—partly by the three little
maids from school who simpered through the _Mikado_, and to no small
extent by the gaudy theatricalism of _Madama Butterfly_. The
unrestrained exoticism of Pierre Loti and Lafcadio Hearn had
strengthened my illusions, as had also the color prints that had aroused
so much enthusiasm towards the end of the century.
But I soon found the cherry blossom fairyland was being destroyed by the
advent of machinery. In Yokohama and Kobe you heard factory whistles and
saw tall smokestacks, new shipyards, and great steel cranes. The
Industrial Revolution, accomplished in our Western countries gradually,
had invaded the Island Empire with an impact and a shock the
repercussions of which were still evident. It had not brought freedom to
the women whose low status was admirably suited to the purpose of
manufacturing with its ever-increasing demand for cheap and unskilled
labor.