Yokohama is industrial and dirty everywhere but on the drive beside the
harbour, and on the Bluff, where the rich foreigners live. I visited one
house on this pleasant eminence and there was nothing in it to suggest
that it was in Japan any more than in, say, Cheltenham. The form was
English, the furniture was English, the pictures and books were English;
photographs of school and college cricket elevens gave it the final home
touch. Only in the garden were there exotic indications. The English
certainly have the knack of carrying their atmosphere with them. I had
noticed that often in India; but this Yokohama villa was the completest
exemplification.
Wandering about the city I came one morning on a funeral procession that
ought to have pleased Henry Ward Beecher, who, on the only occasion on
which I heard him, when he was very old and I was very young, urged upon
his hearers the importance of bright colours and flowers instead of the
ordinary habiliments and accoutrements of woe. For when a soul is on its
way to paradise, he said, we should be glad. The Yokohama cortege was
headed by men bearing banners; then came girls all in white, riding in
rickshaws; then the gaudy hearse; then priests in rickshaws; and
finally the relations and friends. The effect conveyed was not one of
melancholy; but even if every one had been in black, impressiveness
would have been wanting, for no one can look dignified in a rickshaw.
Compared, however, with a funeral which I saw in Hong-Kong, the Yokohama
ceremony was solemnity in essence. The Hong-Kong obsequies were those
of a tobacco-magnate's wife and the widower had determined to spare no
expense on their thoroughness. He had even offered, but without success,
to compensate the tramway company for a suspension of the service, the
result of his failure being that every few minutes the procession was
held up to permit the cars to go by; which meant that instead of taking
only two hours to pass any given point, it took three. The estimated
cost of the funeral was one hundred thousand dollars and all Hong-Kong
was there to see.
To Chinese eyes it doubtless had a sombre religious character, but to us
it was merely a diverting spectacle of incredible prolongation. We were
not wholly to blame in missing its sanctity, for the participants,
who were more like mummers than mourners, had all been hired and were
enjoying the day off. For the most part they merely wore their fancy
dress and walked and talked or played instruments, but now and then
there was a dragon and a champion boxing it and these certainly earned
their money. At intervals came bearers with trays on which were comforts
for the next world or symbolical devices, while, to infinity both in
front and behind, banners and streamers and lanterns danced and jogged
above all. A miracle-show of the middle ages can have been not unlike
it.