THE WESTERN CAPITAL AND INLAND SEA.
Kioto is the western metropolis of Japan, and was the only capital from
793 until twenty years ago, when the present Mikado re-established his
supremacy over the Shoguns, and selected Tokio as the metropolis of the
Empire.
We began the next day by doing our duty by the sights of Kioto, and
commenced with His Majesty's palace, of Gosho, for which a special
permission had been sent us. This is now the third Imperial palace that
we have visited. I think we were foolish to come, because by this time
we might have known that there is really nothing worthy of interest to
see.
The palace is enclosed by high walls and covers an area of twenty-six
acres. At the gate of "the August Kitchen," we went through an
elaborate ceremony of inscribing our names in the lacquer and gold
tasselled visiting book of the Mikado, whilst two exceedingly unkempt
officials, in rusty black kimonos, superintended our movements. Of
course this palace, like the others, is bare of furniture, carpets or
hangings. The fusumas, or screens are decorated with splashes of blue
paint and green mountains, or with funny little pictures of Japanese
life, drawn with a total neglect of perspective. A lot of old women
in wicker hats were raking, with bamboo claws, His Imperial Majesty's
courtyards. The garden is scarcely so good as the one at the Hotel,
with its pond on which floated an unpainted wooden gondola. The whole
produces an impression of discomfort.
We pass first into the Seiryoden, or "Pure and Cool Hall," where the
square of cement in the corner was every morning strewn with earth,
so that the Mikado could worship his ancestors on the earth without
leaving the palace. Then into the Audience hall, in the centre of which
is the Imperial throne, hung with white silken curtains and a pattern
meant to represent the bark of a pine tree. The stools on either
side of the throne were for the Imperial insignia, the sword and the
jewel. On the eighteen steps stood the eighteen grades into which the
Mikado's officials were divided. Then we see the Imperial study, where
His Majesty's tutors delivered lectures. The suite of rooms called the
"August Three Rooms," where Nō performances, a kind of lyric drama,
were performed, and lastly a suite of eleven rooms, where the Mikados,
when Kioto was the capital, lived and died. We see the Imperial
sitting-room with the bed-room behind, completely surrounded by other
apartments, so that no one should approach His Majesty without the
knowledge of his attendants. This sounds perhaps interesting enough,
and having read Murray's elaborate description we were eager to see
Gosho, but the reality is a succession of ordinary Japanese rooms, dark
and bare, without the redeeming feature of well painted fusumas.
The obnoxious janitors, notwithstanding our credentials, obstinately
refused to show us the only thing of interest, namely the present
Imperial living rooms, on the plea that they are being now prepared
for the reception of the Heir Apparent who arrives in a few days, and
we see bales of furniture covered with green and blue cloths, bearing
the royal insignia of the chrysanthemum, being dragged across the inner
courts.
The Nijo Palace is surrounded by a moat and pagoda-guarded wall of
Cyclopean masonry. It is undergoing repair, and we can therefore only
see the handsome outer gateway formed of lacquer and beaten gold, and
the beautifully worked gilt fastenings to the gates, but inside the
descriptions read like a dream of beauty, which we should be most
anxious to see, were it not for the experience we have just gone
through at the other palace of Gosho.
Kioto has its Diabutsu, its big bronze bell, its pagodas, palaces,
gardens and monasteries, but above all it has its temples--temples
large and small, decorated and plain, dull and uninteresting. You might
easily spend a week at Kioto seeing nothing save these, but of temples
I confess we are by this time thoroughly sick and tired. The sight of
a torii makes us turn wearily away, and from a sāmmon (or gateway)
we hastily flee. Everyone who visits Japan ends by experiencing this
satiety of temples, a feeling induced by their monotonous identity and
entire want of originality. Still we feel that we must visit some of
the sights, so somewhat half-heartedly we go forth towards the Show
Temple of Nishi Hongwanji, the headquarters of the western branch
of the Hongwanji Buddhist sect, a dark massive structure. In the
courtyard is the large tree which, "by discharging showers of water,"
protects the temple from fire in the vicinity. We wander through the
state rooms, the minor shrines, and the big temple; and in truth the
decorations are marvellously beautiful, but I will not weary you with
the detailed descriptions of lacquer-ribbed ceilings, golden pillars,
of kakemonos (hanging scrolls) over 200 years old, of cornices wrought
in coloured arabesques, and shrines painted and carved in floral
designs. Again there are those most exquisitely painted scenes on the
sliding screens, of peacocks and peahens seated on a peach tree with
white blossoms; of wild geese on a dead-gold ground, of scroll patterns
carved in the design of the peony or chrysanthemum leaf and flower, nor
of the angels in full relief that gaze down upon us from the ceiling.
But I must make especial mention of the gilt trellised folding-doors,
opening back to disclose a wintry scene of life-sized bamboo and plum
trees, and of pine with dark-spreading branches covered with snow.
We wander through the peaceful stillness of the monastery garden, where
the jostle and noise of the thick crowding streets around comes over
the wall in a dull hum, feed the gold fishes in a pond from the cool
cloister, and climb up to a little tower--or pavilion of the flying
clouds--where, on kneeling on the ground, we can trace a few pencil
lines on a gold ground, supposed to be the work of the great artist,
Kana Molonobii.
Then, passing the Hijashi Hongwangi, which, when finished, will be the
largest Buddhist temple of Japan, we go on through a narrow street,
under an archway, and pass into an enclosure, where booths of gay
trifles line the road running to the Sanjūsangendo, or the temple of
33,333 images of Kwannon, the Goddess of Mercy, where a thousand gilt
images of five feet rise in tiers above each other, the number being
completed by the smaller effigies engraved on the face and hands of
the larger ones. Near by the great Buddha, twin to the Kamakura one,
is dwarfed into a building where his head touches the ceiling, and
you can only gaze up from underneath at his colossal sleepy features.
To the right, hung under a belfry, is one of the two largest bronze
bells in the Island, and immediately under it is a little open temple,
where five Buddhist priests, squatted in a semicircle, monotone the
evensong. We return home with that comfortable feeling that comes of
duty performed, and proceed to enjoy ourselves by a drive in the dusk
through the fairy lighted streets.
Kioto is a fascinating place, but, as I have said, it is not the
sights that make it so. The attraction partly lies, as it always does
in Japan, in those wonderful little brown streets, with their wide
eaved and diminutive two-storied dolls' houses, hung with original sign
posts of fans, monster paper lanterns and gay flags, that stand out in
sharp relief down a long vista, from the purple mountains. Kioto is on
the plain surrounded by a circle of mountains, and at the end of all
the streets, face which way you will, there is always this effective
background to the toy town. If you mount a little way up them, you can
look back and have a panoramic view over thousands of brown-roofed
huts, presenting a perfectly level surface, except when a temple roof,
square and dark, overshadows the others.
[Illustration: My carriage at Kioto.]
We had thought Tokio the most fascinating imaginable place, but,
except for its grass-grown moats, reflecting waters, and cawing
rooks, Kioto is even more enticing. The streets are narrower and more
untouched by that dreaded European taint, showing itself at Tokio in
small drapers' shops, and cheap lamp and umbrella stores. Life is more
primitive, the people are more unsophisticated, as we know by the
little crowd, polite and interested, that attends us in our shoppings,
and that makes the dusk in the shops darker, by the blackness of their
gathering round. The gay china shops, the chemists, blacksmiths,
booksellers, the fish and fruit stores cease not to interest us; the
walking picture, coming to meet us of a Japanese lady with shapely,
tightly-girt figure, with the baby on her inclined back, sheltered
under a paper umbrella, charms us as much as ever. The wee children in
their blue and white kimonos or wadded jackets, their heads shaved,
with a bald circle on the crown, just like the Japanese doll of a toy
shop; the little ten-year-old nurses with their brown babies asleep,
and heads waddling from side to side as they shuffle along; the ladies,
in handsome dress, taking an afternoon airing with their husbands in
a double jinrikisha; the sellers crying their goods and attracting
attention by the help of a bell, gong, drum, or whistle: all these
things, though we seem to have been in their midst for so long, almost
at times to have lived all our lives with them, are a never-ending
source of interest. But a new charm has been added to these, one that
exceeds them all, one that is all-absorbing. We throw temples, palaces,
gardens, sight-seeing to the winds, and resolve to devote the few
remaining hours of our stay in Japan, to shopping and the curio shops.
We drive through many winding streets and draw up in one not
different to the others, and, lifting up the black draperies, enter.
There may, perhaps, be a few bronze or lacquer articles spread
about, but nothing to indicate the priceless art-treasures that we
are presently going to see. With hands on knees, sliding down with
bows of reverence, and the gasping produced by sucking in of breath
between the teeth, stands the proprietor, surrounded by a background of
assistants. With deferential encouragement he leads you to the backmost
recesses of the shop, through winding passages, across paved squares,
until you come to the prettiest little picture of a garden made out
of a courtyard of a few square feet, and here in rooms opening out of
this, surrounded by fire-proof godowns, far away from the eyes of an
inquisitive crowd of passers-by, he shows forth his precious treasures.
This courtyard is so artfully arranged as to deserve description. There
will be, perhaps, a clump of bamboos in one corner, a stone lantern on
one side, a piece of water with gold fish in it in the centre, and an
azalea on bamboo supports trained round it; a bronze urn with drinking
water and a wooden scoop by it, and a green metal stork. First of all
tea is brought, and the smoking boxes, which contain the hot ashes in
a bronze or china urn, and the bamboo trough for the used ashes; then
the real work commences. An art museum, the labour of hundreds of years
ago, when a man devoted his life-time to the production of one or two
works of art, are laid on the matting before you.
From behind cabinets, from underneath tables, boxes are silently
produced, and from out of folds of soft crêpe or flannel, and many
paper wrappers come lovely objects, lovingly, caressingly fingered and
stroked by their owner. There are vases of rock crystal, jade, plaques,
and trays of the most exquisite cloisonné, when a magnifying glass is
gently pushed into your hands that you may enter into the minutest
details of the minute work. Bronzes, and satsuma china, inro or lacquer
medicine boxes, with their succession of trays for powders, and those
lovely Netsuke or carved ivories where each wrinkle and hair, each line
and feature are so faithfully graven in the quaint heads and groups.
The prices asked are fabulous, but I often scarcely thought that the
dealer wanted to part with his curios, he seemed so proudly fond of
them.
I confess that our taste inclined often to the baser kind of shops,
where the goods were of doubtful origin, but Japan has, in the last few
years, been so overrun with curio buyers and Americans, that the few
really antique things left are scarce, and hard to find. The Japanese,
like the Chinese, always reserve their best things to the last, and
then somewhat reluctantly produce them. We haunted the old shops
where great golden Buddhas sat enthroned amidst a most miscellaneous
collection--men in armour, memorial cabinets, huge bronze vases,
inlaid swords with quaint tsuba, or sword guards, mingling with lovely
china vases, which, if modern, are nevertheless a joy for ever to
possess--to feast your eyes on their delicate shiny surfaces of ruby
_sang-de-bœuf_, imperial yellow, lilac, blue, apple-green, or rose
pink, strewn with a spray of snowy blossom or a spiky shaft of bamboo,
where little birds fly across the pale sea of colour, or solemn storks
perch beside some waving reeds.
Again and again we are made to wonder how these small shops, so meagre
and unpretentious outside, find the capital and become possessed of
such wondrous treasures. Hours you can spend there, and hours they will
be pleased to show you these, for in Japan no one is ever in a hurry.
Life is very leisurely.
The "curio fever" is upon us. To anyone who has visited Japan the
description of a Canadian authoress is but "too intensely true."
"You don't 'shop' in this country. Shopping implies premeditation,
and premeditation is in vain in Japan. If you know what you want,
your knowledge is set aside in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,
and your purchases gratify anticipations that you never had, to be
paradoxical. And you never fully know the joy of buying until you buy
in Japan. Life condenses itself into one long desire, keener and more
intense than any want you ever had before--the desire of paying and
possessing. The loftiest aims are swallowed up in this; the sternest
scientist, or political economist, or social theorist that was ever set
ashore at Yokohama straightway loses life's chief end among the curios,
and it is at least six weeks before he finds it again. And as to the
ordinary individual, without the guidance of superior aims, time is no
more for him, nor things temporal; he is lost in contemplation of the
ancient and the beautiful in the art of Nippon, and though he sell his
boots and pawn his grandfather's watch, he will carry it off with him
to the extent of his uttermost farthing...."
And so we felt.
But of course it is the crêpe and silk shops that woman-like
fascinate me most. Those lovely, soft, crisp, textiles, in rose-pink,
coral, lilac, blue, and silver-grey, in sea-green, mignonette, and
chrysanthemum-yellow, shades that you can find in no other country,
because the secret of these heavenly dyes is known only to the
Japanese. Oh! they are things to make your coveteousness strong,
your heart ache, unless your purse is full and deep. Then there are
the common washing crêpes, with their graceful running designs so
artistically disposed, their harmony of colouring, and of which I order
kimonos for dressing-gowns for all the children of the family. There
is a lovely crêpe with rainbow stripes, not as you who have seen the
brilliant orange-green and purple rays of the original would imagine,
for it is a white filmy texture, with only a suspicion of pale melting
zephyr stripes, slanting across it.
Then there are the silks and crêpes embroidered with blood-red autumn
sprays, with butterflies, pink dolphins and sea-shells, or panels
of satin of such exquisite workmanship, with ever recurring views
of Fuji, and hanging kakemonos and screens and coverlets, all so
beautiful, and of such faithful artistic merit. We are shown specimens
of a newly-revived industry, handed down from ancient dyers, where
pictures rich and soft are raised in velvet, against a pale silk or
satin ground. By an ingenious process of wires, running parallel with
the hard thread of the woof, bearing the outline of the picture in
velvet, which are, after the dyeing and steaming cut out, these quaint
pictures, which at first you think painted, are produced. Everything
you see in Japan is art. It is brought into the manufacture of the
commonest things of daily life, and seen to perfection in these cut
velvets and rich embroideries. It is in the air they breathe. For even
as we pass out from this rich inner sanctum, into the open street
shop, where the crowd of customers, each seated on cushions on the
counter step, with a salesman squatted before him, swiftly running
the counters of his abaca up and down, multiplying and dividing like
lightning by this ingenious machine, we see piles of coloured goods,
of quite common quality only one degree less delightful in colour and
design, than those we have chosen from. I must not forget to mention
in our shoppings the photographs, which are extraordinarily good and
very cheap. It might also be of use to someone to know that we found
at Kioto, Daimaruicha and Co., and Takashimaya Ilda and Co., the best
shops for crêpes, silk, embroideries, and kimonos, made to order, and
Nishimura for the cut velvets, these shops having but one price, and
with the goods marked in plain figures.
We get up early the next morning, for now that we are so soon leaving
Japan, we feel that every hour is wasted that we are not out and about,
drinking in last scenes from these bewitching streets. We direct our
jinrikishas into a distant quarter of far-reaching Kioto, into the
meanest and dirtiest of streets, where most of the shops are full of
old iron, and hung round with second-hand goods like a pawnbroker's,
but where we are told that the real old-fashioned curio-shops, not got
up collections of curio for the circumnavigator, still exist. I must
say that they seemed full of impossible rubbish.
In the afternoon, somewhat satiated with buying, we drove out to
Shugaku--one of the Mikado's summer villas. It was an intensely hot
afternoon, but the first disagreeably warm day that we have had, as our
weather has been perfect, with no rain and sunny skies day after day.
October and November are always delicious months in Japan.
The villa consisted of an absolutely bare, undecorated, matted,
tea-house, of modest, you might in the case of this, its royal owner,
say mean dimensions, but the garden is a gem. From it there is a near
view of purple hills, all in little crinkled edges, running in lines
one below the other, made nearer to us by the warm still atmosphere,
whilst behind the garden rises a formal hill; truly Japanese in its
conical structure, covered with pine trees, whose pink and purple stems
gleam out from the dark fir needles. There is the usual figurative mile
upon mile of winding paths, the steep hills to descend and climb up by
stone steps, the familiar bridges, one with pagoda-covered roof, and
the other of bamboo and turfed, crossing the neatly devised harbours
and bays of the artificial lake, whose banks are covered with palms,
but it is the hedges that are worth coming to see. They are of azalea
and camellia, and honeysuckle, cut low, so that they spread out to an
enormous thickness, to a breadth of twenty feet, and it is over these
green open ramparts, that you look out on the lovely view.
We refused in coming home, though we had time to spare, to visit any
more temples, and we spent the last evening in going to a fair, given
in honour of the God of Water. As at Tokio, where we saw a similar
festival for the God of Writing, it was held in a special quarter. The
dark, narrow streets are outlined in coloured lamps, with arches, the
light glowing through the paper, and the varieties of colour--red,
green, blue, and pink, forming a soft and effective illumination, not
surpassed by many more elaborate Jubilee ones. Many of the houses are
decorated with wonderful marine representations of blue waves, with
fishes and dolphins, and fir trees placed at intervals, with more
lanterns and red paper devices. The locality is _en fête_, and the
entire population is thronging the streets, which we wander delightedly
through. There are performances of monkeys and dogs proceeding, and
a crowd outside trying to look over the partitions; geishas, with
the accompanying twang of the Samisens, are going through their slow
performances behind the open bars. Children are flattening their noses
against the glass cases of the confectioners', with their sweetmeats
and temptingly sugared cakes, or group round the vendors of paper toys
stuck on pieces of wood, whilst the women gaze as longingly at the
cheap combs, tawdry hair-pins, and gaudy flowers, laid out under the
hawkers' glaring oil lamps. There are booths for the sale of cheap
soap, cutlery, sandals, glass, jewellery, and candles. The tea-houses
are doing an enormous trade, and the naturally contented people look
supremely happy.
We left Kioto to pay a flying visit to Osaka on our way to Kobe. Each
town seems prettier than the last, and Osaka is no exception. Our chief
object in going there was to visit the Arsenal, and according to the
special instructions of the Minister of War, we were most courteously
received by the chief, Colonel Ota, and given tea at his official
residence before being conducted over the arsenal.
We are much struck that instead of having to teach Japan, there is
something that we can learn from her. Her civilization, coming, as it
has, so late in the decade, breaking in suddenly upon centuries of
dark ages, she has benefited by the experience of other nations, and
constructed her civilization on the best systems of other countries.
Here in this arsenal we see the newest improvements of science in
machines of every nation. Some are from England, some from Italy,
France, or Germany. The Arsenal is in beautiful order and keeps
employed a large number of workmen. They manufacture their own cannon,
and we passed through the large workshops, the smelting furnaces, and
saw mouldings and castings, the making and filling of cartridges. The
arsenal is inside the outer moat or glacis of the castle, and, with
canals and rivers, has through water communication to the sea and to
the forts on the coast.
It is this rapid civilization, of which the arsenal is only an
example, that fills the traveller with admiration. Japan was only
opened to foreigners in 1868, and with the fall of the last Shogun and
the beginning of the present Mikado's reign European customs rapidly
spread. Some say that Japan has gone too fast, and has absorbed and
not digested sufficiently the forms of civilized life. The Japanese
went to Prussia for a constitution, and call their Parliament the
Diet; to England for their railway system, which was built, organized,
and worked at first by English engineers and firemen. They went to
France and Germany for an army organization, borrowing their blue and
scarlet infantry uniforms with white leggings from the French, and
their artillery uniform of blue and yellow from Germany. To France
again for their culinary art; for which these Japanese have a latent
talent, making excellent cooks. To England again for her model of Court
etiquette and nobles' titles, and then again to Germany for medicine.
The great reaction that followed naturally in the course of this rapid
innovation is not yet dead. The struggle is still going on, as one can
easily see, but a few years hence the revolution will be complete,
and Japan will cease to be so intensely fascinating to foreigners. It
presents, perhaps, the most wonderful page in the history of the world:
this deposition of the Shogun, the reinstatement of the old dynasty,
a great revolution in a remarkable intelligent country, perfectly
bloodless, of short duration, and changing the whole face and destinies
of the land.
But these Japanese civilize so fast, that now there is scarcely a
European employed in their State departments. They are very proud of
this, and gradually European agents for their steamships, companies,
the managers of banks and commercial houses are being dismissed, or
superseded by Japanese, who take the management into their own hands.
But to return to Osaka. If the castle at Nagoya is so well worth
seeing, this one of Osaka is equally so, for it is the exact
counterpart of the other, only minus the keep and the dolphins. There
are the same outer and inner moats, the same white plaster walls
edged with crenellated bronze tiles, resting on stone walls, guarded
at the four corners with those square towers, loopholed in several
storeys; but I think that the perfectly gigantic stones of the walls
are even more colossal than at Nagoya, for there are several opposite
the entrance by the gateway and the guard-room, that measure at least
twelve feet square. It will always remain one of the wonders of Japan,
how these stones, with the primitive appliances of the earlier Shoguns,
were ever placed in position. The open square of the inner moat is
now a garden, and the palace has been used to accommodate the General
and his staff. It is worth climbing up to the top of the walls for
the splendid view over the plain, always bordered by those chains of
mountains, that run as a prickly backbone from north to south of Japan.
Osaka is a charming town. It is called the Venice of Japan, and with
its flowing rivers and canals intersecting the streets, its high,
arched bridges thrown across on a single sweep, its grassy banks and
avenues of weeping willows, it is fitly likened to that Queen City of
the sea. The houses are built on piles projecting over the water, and
narrow passages in between, lead down to the stone steps, where there
are multitudes of boats.
To stand on one of the bridges and watch the ceaseless ebb and flow of
the changing stream of life, is a dream of delight, only to be compared
to standing on the Bridge of Galata at Constantinople. Blue-coated
coolies, with their bare brown legs, roped to heavy carts, with their
encouraging grunts; itinerant sellers slung with bamboo trays of
vegetables; jinrikishas by the hundred, pedestrians jostled from side
to side, closed sedan chairs, from behind the curtains of which peer
out priests whose way is cleared by running attendants, for it is a
day of ceremony, with much coming and going from the temples--all this
kaleidoscopic stream, accompanied by the warning cries, and the dull
thud of the echoing wood pavement, is what we see. And then look up
and down the river, with a vista of bridges, and see the irregular
mass of brown houses, winding round the bend of the stream, with poles
on the roof, hung with waving blue cottons, placed there to dry, and
the overhanging balconies, from which men are fishing. And then the
scenes of river life--the brown shiny figures bathing and plunging in a
cool bath, the hundreds of sampans moored by the banks, where reside a
large aquatic population, and the high-peaked prows of others, which,
propelled along by six oarsmen, again remind one of the gondolas of
Venice. There are other sampans, which, with one square brown sail
set, come skimming down the canals before the afternoon breeze. Yes,
Osaka is a charming place, and these river scenes passed in crossing
the bridges, add to the never-ending joys of the dark, narrow streets,
compressed on to the restricted peninsulas of land.
Having done our duty by the arsenal, and to our good constituents at
Sheffield, we sit out and have tea on the balcony of the hotel, and
then go for a prowl in the dusk round the streets.
Then succeeded one of those lovely evenings. I shall never forget
those sunsets and twilight evenings, with their pale, washed skies,
that we had in Japan. They only last for a short half hour, but they
are entrancing. If you watch carefully, you may see the shadows
lengthening, but after the brightest and hottest afternoon, suddenly
the colour of the sun seems to go out of everything, and in its place
steal up soft shadows, the vista of streets grow dim, and darkness
falls into the little open shop fronts, whilst the sky is suffused with
the palest wash of lilac or saffron. The jinrikisha bulbous lights come
out, one by one, like glow-worms, and the single lamp lights a dark
interior. And then as we pass across some street, which lies to the
west, we see a blaze of orange, lying low on the horizon, where the sun
has just dipped. It becomes cold and chilly for an hour, and then begin
the fairy scenes of night, in a Japanese town.
It is an hour in the train from Osaka to Kobe, where we arrived at
eight o'clock.
Kobe is a pretty seaport, girt round, close at hand, by great
mountains, up into which the streets run. It is too cosmopolitan
and European to be very interesting. But from the handsome Oriental
houses, with their pale buff and grey tints, the deep balconies with
green blinds of the foreign consulates on the Bund--from the curio
shops, Europeanized like Yokohama, you can pass into the quaintest
and brightest native bazaar, where from feeling yourself in Europe
(especially if you are staying at the French Oriental Hotel), you can
suddenly plunge back again into native Japan. We find the steamer of
the Nippon Company in quarantine, by reason of a cholera death on board
and coming from Shanghai, an infected port; so we have to wait for two
days.
On one afternoon we went up to the waterfall in one of the green
mountains, crowned with straggling pine trees, to see sunset over
the harbour. After having hovered round and inspected half the gold
Buddhas for sale in Japan, now that we have reached the last place of
departure, we have at length bought one. Of course, directly we had
done so, we immediately saw a much better one in an adjacent shop. I
cannot help feeling that it is a matter for thankfulness that we are
leaving this seductive country, not ruined, it is true, but greatly
impoverished!
I was glad that to the end the enchantment continued, and we shall
carry away the memory of that last evening in Japan on board the
Japanese Mail Company's steamer, the _Saikio Maru_. This line is
excellent and the ships the perfection of comfort.
We saw the sunset from the deck, behind the peaked mountains of
Kobe, with their dragon-armed fir trees outlined atop, and against
the hundred masts of a fleet of sampans, the pale grey-green sky
so deliciously soft and milky. There was a little white Japanese
man-of-war mysteriously covered over, and ships of all nations coming
from all parts of the world, in port; and from over the dark waters of
the harbour, comes the low crooning chant from the sampans, towing in a
huge junk.
As the darkness gathered the lights from Kobe, came out against the
sable background of lofty mountains clustering thickly along the
Bund, and reflecting shining dots in the water, whilst arcs of light
march up the ascending roads. Black monsters, marked by red and green
eyes, are darting about the harbour, whilst puffing steam launches,
black lighters, and oar-propelled sampans are dimly seen. Over this
bewitching scene rises a crescent moon, with a trailing path of silver
on the waters, and in our last view of Japan, as is only right, there
are the jinrikisha lights on shore, drawn by their patient human
horses, their soft quivering lights running swiftly, hither and
thither, up and down.
We have been for the last twenty hours on the Inland Sea of Japan. I
have spent the whole day on the bridge or in the bows of the _Saikio
Maru_, and the sea in its incomparable beauty surpasses all ideas
formed by written pictures. It is a succession of the most perfect
inland lakes, varying in breadth from forty miles to a few yards,
and with mountains rising around the shores. These mountains have a
peculiar look that I have seen nowhere else so marked. They have great
zig-zags of sands running up and down their sides, indicated by a
sparse vegetation. It gives to them a mottled and zebra appearance, and
this feature is common to them all. Many of their castle-like crags are
fringed with fir trees, whilst often their sides are deeply terraced
to the water's edge, and planted with paddy and sweet potatoes. Little
brown thatched villages, with their big roofs crowding down over the
mud walls, lie hidden up the many inlets and winding channels, or
nestle on the beach of the sea-shore.
Time and again we look back on the undulating track of our course,
and cannot see the winding entrance now shut out by islands. We look
forward; there is a rounded shore. It is a perfect lake. Just as we
enter the narrowest and therefore most beautiful passage, the Captain
points out a barren cone, well ensconced behind several mainlands of
islands. Not so very long hence we shall be passing underneath, but
on the other side of that mountainous peak, and so it goes on, one
intricate strait succeeding another.
The Inland Sea is a long procession of islands. The Japanese reckon
several thousands, but it would be an impossible task to count them,
as one by one they unfold themselves to us, as we steam among their
fantastic shapes. For there are islands of every imaginable form and
size, square and round with sugar-loaf cones, or extinguisher tops with
castellated summits, or small and four-sided like a floating haystack.
Some are so large that they are like the mainland, and others mere
thimble points. Here, there are three tiny islands formed of three
little rocks, with a tuft of palms, and joined by a spit of sand;
there, a barren heap of sand with a solitary fir tree on the top; or,
again, it is a mountain island with deep evergreens.
Hundreds of junks come sailing by, with the pleasant swish of the water
against their keels, whilst even here they have screens of paper,
covering the wooden trellises of their sides. They are a perpetual
delight, these curious whimsically-fashioned vessels, with their
ancient prows standing high out of the water, recalling as they do the
old prints of the fleet of the Spanish Armada, of which they are exact
reproductions. Their one square sail is attached to a single mast, and
pulls up and down like a curtain on running strings, and the black
patch sewn on it denotes the owner's name.
What makes the Inland Sea so beautiful? The Japanese themselves have
no name for it, nor have their poets ever sung its praises. I suppose
we must say it is the innumerable islands, though many of these are the
reverse of beautiful in themselves. Or is it the great ocean steamer
threading so swiftly the successive intricate windings and snake-like
passages? No. I think it is perhaps the ceaseless variety. Every minute
the scene changes; it is never the same for more than a few seconds,
and is often so beautiful that you want to look on both sides at once.
Certainly in the course of our many wanderings, we have never been
more pleased than with this Inland Sea. All the morning the sky was
overcast, and a purple haze rested lightly on the mountains, and the
sea was pale green. But in the afternoon, just as we reached the most
charming part by the northern course, the sun broke through, and we had
the long afternoon shadows, with softened sunlight, on this scene of
rare beauty.
We have had, too, a wonderful conjunction of pleasures in a superb
sunrise, and a more exquisite sunset in one day. This morning at
Kobe I saw sunrise. At six o'clock the sky was heralded with crimson
glory. To-night the sun, as it always does in these Eastern latitudes,
sinks suddenly--a golden ball into an orange bed. It is going, going
slowly, until gone behind that purple range, and just as it is dying
the symmetry of the orb is cut into and spoilt by a jutting rock on
the mountains. Then, whilst darkness falls over the land, the golden
bed begins to glow and palpitate with colour, and spreads and spreads,
until the exquisite pink, and lilac and green, melt into the cobalt
vault above. The sea is extended in a tremulous sheet of dazzling
gold, and the black prows and the figures on the junks are cut in
Vandyck relief out of this gilded background. The silver moon rises
over a lighthouse on the other side of the ship. Soon little mackerel
clouds separate themselves, and float over the sky, and as we watch a
ruddy glow succeeds, growing blood-red, and bathing sky and sea in a
crimson flood, which dies, oh! so lingeringly and wistfully into purple
darkness.
Nor is this all, for by-and-by, as we are looking over the bulwarks,
perhaps still a little awe-bound by this superb display of nature, a
great, green, electric wave rises up from the dark sea, thrown aside
by the ships' bows, and breaks away in gleaming particles. It is the
brilliant phosphorescence of the spawn of the sardine, which in daytime
is spread out like red dust upon the waves. Sometimes it is so bright
that the whole sea is alight, and in passing a channel ships have to
stop, being unable to see the coast.
At two o'clock in the morning we stop to coal at Shimonoseki, in the
straits between the main island of Nippon and that of Kyushu. A party
of geishas, or dancing girls, come on board and go over the ship, and
I get up in time to see a row of little policemen with their coloured
lanterns going down the gangway.
The next day, at midday, we again come into an even more beautiful
inland channel. Islands of emerald green are seen across a
white-flecked sapphire ocean on a glorious day--a line of white creamy
foam denting the black rock-bound coast, above which rise volcanic
strata of grey and black cliff of the most wonderful formations,
deformed and twisted into spinular columns and basaltic contortions,
and the unwieldy mass of the huge ship is made to double round sharp
angles, and avoid the conical islands sticking so irritatingly out in
the mid-ocean passage. In one place there is a lighthouse towering on a
rock so rugged and steep, that no path can be cut in the cliffs, and we
see the derrick and the basket which are used for letting people up and
down, from the boats to the platform of the phare.
We are pointed out the place, where, in this far-distant island
of Japan, François de Xavier, in 1549, first landed to try and
Christianize the natives. We are in an inner channel. Far, far away,
beyond two grey islands on the sky line, lies Corea. Whichever way we
look there is a dotted circuit of islands, always of those whimsical
shapes. Occasionally, miles ahead, one little island will stand all
solitary amid the ocean, or in another you can see the half that has
fallen away, leaving a clear cut scar, an abrupt termination to the
island. But the most curious of all is an enormous bell-shaped rock,
standing erect in the ocean with a perfect arch through it.
Captain Connor, the best and most genial of commanders, puts the ship
about that we may "kodak" it, and by degrees the slit of light opens
out into a perfect archway.
Over the archipelago of islands, under a green mountain, lies Nagasaki,
and we find an entrance--a blind and mysterious one--into its harbour.
The harbour of Nagasaki is very beautiful. It is "long and narrow,
winding in among the mountains like a Scotch firth." Every separate
mountain is terraced in green circles down to the water's edge, and
in each little conical hill the circles get narrower at the top. In
some, there are wooded knolls crowned by a chapel, with winding stone
steps, that lead up from the black torii on the banks, where prayers
are offered for sailors and the safe return of the fishing junks. We
pass at the entrance the round island of Pappenburg, where we can still
see the flight of steps, down which the Christians were thrown into the
sea 300 years ago. We get safely past the quarantine station, pitying
a British ship lying bound, with the yellow flag hoisted on her mast.
There are red lights, in the shape of a cross, strung from the masts
of a sunken vessel across our passage, for last week the captain of
this 400-ton brig took out the ballast, and a few hours afterwards she
suddenly heeled over and sank, drowning the captain's wife, who was in
the cabin, and the first officer.
As we breast this landed-locked harbour, under the opal hues of a
delicate sunset, we give to it the palm (always excepting Sydney) over
all other harbours. At the head of the bay we see the town and the
handsome houses of the consulates on the Bund, and above that again
many more pleasantly situated houses, equally handsome and belonging to
missionaries.
I do not wish to make any observations on the missionary question,
which, without special knowledge, it would be wrong to speak of, but I
must say that we have never heard any _resident_ of any foreign country
speak a single word in favour of the missionaries. On the contrary,
we are struck how they generally condemn them, I hope unjustly, as
mischievous, idle, and luxurious.
As we come to our buoy opposite the town, thousands of lights, running
out in zig-zag lines into the harbour, seem to come out with one
accord, creeping in scattered dots of fire up the mountain sides, and
there with these myriads of twinkling lights, winking and blinking at
us like a thousand eyes, and with the dull splash of oars in the water,
we get such unrestful sleep as is possible on a ship in port. Now we
can well imagine the scene described thus:--
"Every year, from the 13th to the 15th of August, the whole population
of Nagasaki celebrate the Bon Matsuri, or the Feast of the Dead. The
first night all the tombs of those who died in the past year are
illuminated with bright-coloured paper lanterns. On the second and
third nights all the graves without exception are so illuminated, and
the families of Nagasaki install themselves in the cemeteries, where
they give themselves up, in honour of their ancestors, to plentiful
libations. The bursts of uproarious gaiety resound from terrace to
terrace, and rockets fired at intervals seem to blend with the giddy
human noises the echoes of the celestial vault. The European residents
repair to the ships in the bay to see from the distance the fairy
spectacle of the hills, all resplendent with rose-coloured lights.
"But on the third night, suddenly, at about two o'clock in the
morning, long processions of bright lanterns are seen to descend from
the heights, and group themselves on the shore of the bay, while the
mountains gradually return to obscurity and silence. It is fated that
the dead embark and disappear before twilight. The living have plaited
them thousands of little ships of straw, each provisioned with some
fruit and a few pieces of money. The frail embarkations are charged
with all the coloured lanterns which were used for the illumination
of the cemeteries; the small sails of matting are spread to the
wind, and the morning breeze scatters them round the bay, where they
are not long in taking fire. It is thus that the entire flotilla is
consumed, tracing in all directions large trails of fire. The dead
depart rapidly. Soon the last ship has foundered, the last light is
extinguished, and the last soul has taken its departure again from this
earth."
The next morning we were ashore before breakfast to see the fish
market, for Nagasaki is one of the largest fishing ports in the world,
and it has been proved that there are 600 specimens of fish brought
into this market, by a gentleman who has drawn them and written a book
on the subject.
Nagasaki has several canals, and is a quaint little town developed from
a fishing village, but with nothing of much interest in it. We spend
the day as usual in the shops, plunging with a desperation born of the
feeling that it is really our last chance of buying in Japan; we are in
an agony of fear up to the last minute lest our purchases should not
arrive before the steamer sails at 4 o'clock.
And it is in the dull light of a clouded afternoon that we glide out
of the beautiful harbour of Nagasaki, and in a few hours even the
coast line is lost to us, and fair Nippon, the Land of the Rising Sun
(such an appropriate name for the swiftly progressing Island Empire)
is a remembrance of the past. Bright memories will linger with us in a
medley dream, of rosy sunsets, of clear skies in those marvellous pale
washes, of gaudy temples with their moss-grown steps, hallowed by the
solemn hush around, mingling with the pictures of those queer, dark
little shops, of tiny gardens comprised in tiny courtyards, of gentle
little men and women in flapping cotton garments, of golden lacquer,
red and black, of gorgeous kakemonos, bronzes, cloisonné, of delicately
tinted textures, and above all of solemn gilt Buddhas, seated on
lotus-leaved pedestals, and gleaming at us from out dark corners.
We pass out into the grey space of the Yellow Sea.