JAPAN
I
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN
Japan, surely, must be a mirage created by enchantment. Nothing so
beautiful could be real. Take the west coast of Scotland, bathe it in
Mediterranean light and sun, and let its waves be those of the Pacific.
Take the best of Devonshire, enlarge the hills, extend the plains, and
dominate all with the only perfect mountain in the world--a mountain
that catches at your breath like a masterpiece of art. Make the copses
woods, and the woods forests. For our fields with their hedgerows
substitute the vivid green of rice, shining across the gleam of flooded
plains. Everywhere let water flow; and at every waterfall and cave erect
a little shrine to hallow the spot. Over the whole pour a flood of pure
white light, and you have a faint image of Japan. Perhaps it is not,
naturally, more beautiful than the British Isles--few countries are. But
it is unspoilt by man, or almost so. Osaka, indeed, is as ugly as
Manchester, Yokohama as Liverpool. But these are small blots. For the
rest, Japan is Japan of the Middle Ages, and lovely as England may have
been, when England could still be called merry.
And the people are lovely, too. I do not speak of facial beauty. Some
may think, in that respect, the English or the Americans handsomer. But
these people have the beauty of life. Instead of the tombstone masques
that pass for faces among Anglo-Saxons, they have human features, quick,
responsive, mobile. Instead of the slow, long limbs creaking in stiff
integuments, they have active members, for the most bare or moving
freely in loose robes. Instead of a mumbled, monotonous, machine-like
emission of sound they have real speech, vivacious, varied, musical.
Their children are the loveliest in the world; so gay, so sturdy, so
cheeky, yet never rude. It is a pure happiness merely to walk in the
streets and look at them. It is a pure happiness, I might almost say, to
look at anyone, so gay is their greeting, so radiant their smile, so
full of vitality their gestures. I do not know what they think of the
foreigner, but at least they betray no animosity. They let his stiff,
ungainly presence move among them unchallenged. Perhaps they are sorry
for him; but I think they are never rude. I am speaking, of course, of
Old Japan, of the Japan that is all in evidence, if one lands, as I did,
in the south, avoids Osaka, and postpones Yokohama and Tokio. It is
still the Japan of feudalism; a system in which I, for my part, do not
believe; which, in its essence, in Japan as in Europe, was harsh,
unjust, and cruel; but which had the art of fostering, or at least of
not destroying beauty.
And in this point feudalism in Japan was finer and more sensitive, if it
was less grandiose, than feudalism in Europe. There is nothing in Japan
to compare with the churches and cathedrals of the West, for there is no
stone architecture at all. But there is nothing in the West to compare
with the living-rooms of Japan. Suites of these dating from the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are to be seen in Kyoto and
elsewhere. And till I saw them I had no idea how exquisite human life
might be made. The Japanese, as is well known, discovered the secret of
emptiness. Their rooms consist of a floor of spotless matting, paper
walls, and a wooden roof. But the paper walls, in these old palatial
rooms, are masterpieces by great artists. From a background of gold-leaf
emerge and fade away suggestions of river and coast and hill, of
peonies, chrysanthemums, lotuses, of wild geese and swans, of reeds and
pools, of all that is elusive and choice in nature; decorations that are
also lyric poems, hints of landscape that yet never pretend to be a
substitute for the real thing. The real thing is outside, and perhaps it
will not intrude; for where we should have glass windows the Japanese
have white paper screens. But draw back, if you choose, one of these
screens, and you will see a little landscape garden, a little lake, a
little bridge, a tiny rockery, a few goldfish, a cluster of irises, a
bed of lotus, and, above and beyond, the great woods. These are royal
apartments; but all the cost, it will be seen, is lavished on the work
of art. The principle is the same in humbler homes.
People who could so devise life, we may be sure, are people with a
fineness of perception unknown to the West, unless it were once in
ancient Greece. The Japanese indeed, I suspect, are the Greeks of the
East. In the theatre at Kyoto this was curiously borne in upon me. On
the floor of the house reclined figures in loose robes, bare-necked and
barefooted. On the narrow stage were one or two actors, chanting in
measured speech, and moving slowly from pose to pose. From boxes on
either side of the stage intoned a kind of chorus; and a flute and
pizzicato strings accompanied the whole in the solemn strains of some
ancient mode. I have seen nothing so like what a Greek play may have
been, though doubtless even this was far enough away. And still more was
I struck by the resemblance when a comedy succeeded to the tragedy, and
I found the young and old Japan confronting one another exactly as the
young and old Athens met in debate, two thousand years ago, in the
_Frogs_ of Aristophanes. The theme was an ascent of Mount Fuji; the
actors two groups of young girls, one costumed as virgin priestesses of
the Shinto cult, the other in modern European dress. The one set were
climbing the mountain as a pilgrimage, the other as a lark; and they
meet and exchange sharp dialectics (unintelligible to me, but not
unguessable) on the lower slopes. The sympathies of the author, like
those of Aristophanes, were with the old school. It is the pilgrims who
reach the top and the modern young women who collapse. And the modern
young man fares no better; he is beaten by a coolie and frightened by a
ghost. The playwright had at least Aristophanes' gift of lampoon, though
I doubt whether he had a touch of his genius. Perhaps, however, he had a
better cause. For, I doubt, modern Japan may deserve lampooning more
than the Athens of Aristophanes. For modern Japan is the modern West.
And that--well, it seemed to be symbolised to me yesterday in the train.
In my carriage were two Japanese. One was loosely wrapt in a kimono,
bare throat and feet, fine features, fine gestures, everything
aristocratic and distinguished. The other was clad in European dress,
sprigged waistcoat, gold watch-chain, a coarse, thick-lipped face, a
podgy figure. It was a hot July day, and we were passing through some of
the loveliest scenery in the world. He first closed all doors and
windows, and then extended himself at full length and went to sleep.
There he lay, his great paunch sagging--prosperity exuding from every
pore--an emblem and type of what in the West we call a "successful" man.
And the other? The other, no doubt, was going downhill. Both, of course,
were Japanese types; but the civilisation of the West chose the one and
rejected the other. And if civilisation is to be judged, as it fairly
may be, by the kind of men it brings to the top, there is much to be
said for the point of view of my Tory playwright.
II
A "NO" DANCE
On entering the theatre I was invaded by a sense of serenity and peace.
There was no ornament, no upholstery, no superfluity at all. A square
building of unvarnished wood; a floor covered with matting, exquisitely
clean, and divided into little boxes, or rather trays (so low were the
partitions), in which the audience knelt on their heels, beautiful in
loose robes; running out from the back wall a square stage, with a roof
supported by pillars; a passage on the same level, by which the actors
entered, on the left; the screens removed from the outer walls, so that
the hall was open to the air, and one looked out on sky and trees, or
later on darkness, against which shone a few painted lanterns. Compare
this with the Queen's Hall in London, or with any of our theatres, and
realise the effect on one's mood of the mere setting of the drama. Drama
was it? Or opera? Or what? It is called a "dance." But there was very
little dancing. What mainly remains in my mind is a series of visual
images, one more beautiful than another; figures seated motionless for
minutes, almost for half-hours, with a stillness of statues, not an
eyelash shaking; or passing very slowly across the stage, with that
movement of bringing one foot up to the other and pausing before the
next step which is so ridiculous in our opera, but was here so right and
so impressive; or turning slowly, or rising and sitting with immense
deliberation; each figure right in its relation to the stage and to the
others. All were clothed in stiff brocade, sumptuous but not gorgeous.
One or two were masked; and all of them, I felt, ought to have been. The
mask, in fact, the use of which in Greek drama I had always felt to be
so questionable, was here triumphantly justified. It completed the
repudiation of actuality which was the essence of the effect. It was a
musical sound, as it were, made visible. It symbolised humanity, but it
was not human, still less inhuman. I would rather call it divine. And
this whole art of movement and costume required that completion. Once I
had seen a mask I missed it in all the characters that were without it.
To me, then, this visual spectacle was the essence of the "No" dance.
The dancing itself, when it came, was but a slight intensification of
the slow and solemn posing I have described. There was no violence, no
leaping, no quick steps; rather a turning and bending, a slow sweep of
the arm, a walking a little more rhythmical, on the verge, at most, of
running. It was never exciting, but I could not say it was never
passionate. It seemed to express a kind of frozen or petrified passion;
rather, perhaps, a passion run into a mould of beauty and turned out a
statue. I have never seen an art of such reserve and such distinction.
"Or of such tediousness," I seem to hear an impatient reader exclaim.
Well, let me be frank. Like all Westerners, I am accustomed to life in
quick time, and to an art full of episode, of intellectual content, of
rapid change and rapid development. I have lost to a great extent that
power of prolonging an emotion which seems to be the secret of Eastern
art. I am bored--subconsciously, as it were--where an Oriental is lulled
into ecstasy. His case is the better. But also, in this matter of the No
dance he has me at a disadvantage. In the first place he can understand
the words. These, it is true, have far less importance than in a drama
of Shakspere. They are only a lyric or narrative accompaniment to the
music and the dance. Still they have, one is informed, a beauty much
appreciated by Japanese, and one that the stranger, ignorant of the
language, misses. And secondly, what is worse, the music failed to move
me. Whether this is my own fault, or that of the music, I do not presume
to decide, for I do not know whether, as so often is the case, I was
defeated by a convention unfamiliar to me, or whether the convention has
really become formal and artificial. In any case, after the first shock
of interest, I found the music monotonous. It was solemn and religious
in character, and reminded me more of Gregorian chants than of anything
else. But it had one curious feature which seemed rather to be primitive
and orgiastic. The two musicians who played the drums accompanied the
performers, almost unceasingly, by a kind of musical ejaculation,
starting on a low note and swooping up to a high, long-held falsetto
cry. This over and over again, through the dialogue and through the
singing. The object, I suppose, and perhaps, to Japanese, the effect, is
to sustain a high emotional tone. In my case it failed, as the music
generally failed. My interest, as I began by saying, was maintained by
the visual beauty; and that must have been very great to be able to
maintain itself independently of the words and the music.
As to the drama, it is not drama at all in the sense in which we have
come to understand the term in the West. There is no "construction," no
knot tied and untied, no character. Rather there is a succession of
scenes selected from a well-known story for some quality of poignancy,
or merely of narrative interest. The form, I think, should be called
epic or lyric rather than dramatic. And it is in this point that it most
obviously differs from the Greek drama. It has no intellectual content,
or very little. And, perhaps for that reason, it has had no development,
but remains fossilised where it was in the fifteenth century. On the
other hand, these actors, I felt, are the only ones who could act Greek
drama. They have, I think, quite clearly the same tradition and aim as
the Greeks. They desire not to reproduce but to symbolise actuality; and
their conception of acting is the very opposite of ours. The last thing
they aim at is to be "natural." To be unnatural rather is their object.
Hence the costume, hence the mask, hence the movement and gesture. And
how effective such "unnaturalness" can be in evoking natural passion
only those will understand who have realised how ineffective for that
purpose is our "naturalness" when we are concerned with Sophocles or
Shakspere. The Japanese have in their No dance a great treasure. For out
of it they might, if they have the genius, develop a modern poetic
drama. How thankful would hundreds of young men be, starving for poetry
in England, if we had as a living tradition anything analogous to work
upon!
III
NIKKO
Waking in the night, I heard the sound of running water. Across my
window I saw, stretching dimly, the branch of a pine, and behind it
shone the stars. I remembered that I was in Japan and felt that all the
essence of it was there. Running water, pine trees, sun and moon and
stars. All their life, as all their art, seems to be a mood of these.
For to them their life and their art are inseparable. The art is not an
accomplishment, an ornament, an excrescence. It is the flower of the
plant. Some men, some families of men, feeling beauty as every one felt
it, had the power also to express it. Or perhaps I should say--it is the
Japanese view--to suggest it. To them the branch of a tree stands for a
forest, a white disk on gold for night and the moon, a quivering reed
for a river, a bamboo stalk for a grove. Their painters are poets. By
passionate observation they have learnt what expression of the part most
inevitably symbolises the whole. That they give; and their admirers,
trained like them in feeling, fill in the rest. This art presupposes,
what it has always had, a public not less sensitive than the artist; a
similar mood, a similar tradition, a similar culture. Feel as they do,
and you must create as they do, or at least appreciate their creations.
It was with this in my mind that I wandered about this exquisite place,
where Man has made a lovely nature lovelier still. More even than by the
famous and sumptuous temples I was moved by the smaller and humbler
shrines, so caressing are they of every choice spot, so expressive, not
of princely, but of popular feeling. Here is one, for instance, standing
under a cliff beside a stream, where women offer bits of wood in the
faith that so they will be helped to pass safely through the pangs of
childbirth. Here in a ravine is another where men who want to develop
their calves hang up sandals to a once athletic saint. "The Lord," our
Scripture says, "delighteth not in any man's legs." How pleasant, then,
it must be to have a saint who does! Especially for the Japanese, whose
legs are so finely made, and who display them so delightfully. Such, all
over the world, is the religion of the people, when they have any
religion at all. And how human it is, and how much nearer to life than
the austerities and abstractions of a creed!
Hour after hour I strolled through these lovely places, so beautifully
ordered that the authorities, one feels, must themselves delight in the
nature they control. I had proof of it, I thought, in a notice which
ran as follows:
"FAMOUS TAKINO TEMPLE STANDS NOT FAR AWAY, AND SOMEN FALL TOO.
IT IS WORTH WHILE TO BE THERE ONCE."
It is indeed, and many times! But can you imagine a rural council in
England breaking into this personal note? And how reserved! Almost like
Japanese art. Compare the invitation I once saw in Switzerland, to visit
"das schönste Schwärm- und Aussichtspunkt des ganzen Schweitzerischen
Reichs." There speaks the advertiser. But beside the Somen Fall there
was no restaurant.
Northerners, and Anglo-Saxons in particular, have always at the back of
their minds a notion that there is something effeminate about the sense
for beauty. That is reserved for decadent Southern nations. _Tu regere
imperio populos, Romane memento_ they would say, if they knew the tag;
and translate it "Britain rules the waves"! But history gives the lie to
this complacent theory. No nations were ever more virile than the Greeks
or the Italians. They have left a mark on the world which will endure
when Anglo-Saxon civilisation is forgotten. And none have been, or are,
more virile than the Japanese. That they have the delicacy of women,
too, does not alter the fact. The Russian War proved it, if proof so
tragic were required; and so does all their mediæval history. Japanese
feudalism was as bloody, as ruthless, as hard as European. It was even
more gallant, stoical, loyal. But it had something else which I think
Europe missed, unless it were once in Provence. It had in the midst of
its hardness a consciousness of the pathos of life, of its beauty, its
brevity, its inexplicable pain. I think in no other country has anything
arisen analogous to the Zen sect of Buddhism, when knights withdrew from
battle to a garden and summerhouse, exquisitely ordered to symbolise the
spiritual life, and there, over a cup of tea served with an elaborate
ritual, looking out on a lovely nature, entered into mystic communion
with the spirit of beauty which was also the spirit of life. From that
communion, with that mood about them, they passed out to kill or to
die--to die, it might be, by their own hand, by a process which I think
no Western man can bear even to think of, much less conceive himself as
imitating.
This sense at once of the beauty and of the tragedy of life, this power
of appreciating the one and dominating the other, seems to be the
essence of the Japanese character. In this place, it will be remembered,
is the tomb of Iyeyasu, the greatest statesman Japan has produced.
Appropriately, after his battles and his labours, he sleeps under the
shade of trees, surrounded by chapels and oratories more sumptuous and
superb than anything else in Japan, approached for miles and miles by a
road lined on either side with giant cryptomerias. His spirit, if it
could know, would appreciate, we may be sure, this habitation of beauty.
For these men, ruthless as they were, were none the less sensitive. For
example, the traveller is shown (in Kyoto, I think) a little pavilion in
a garden where Hideyoshi used to sit and contemplate the moon. I believe
it. I think Iyeyasu did the same. And also he wrote this, on a roll here
preserved:
"Life is like unto a long journey with a heavy load. Let thy
steps be slow and steady, that thou stumble not. Persuade
thyself that privations are the natural lot of mortals, and
there will be no room for discontent, neither for despair. When
ambitious desires arise in thy heart, recall the days of
extremity thou hast passed through. Forbearance is the root of
quietness and assurance for ever. Look upon wrath as thy enemy.
If thou knowest only what it is to conquer, and knowest not what
it is to be defeated, woe unto thee! It will fare ill with thee.
Find fault with thyself rather than with others. Better the less
than the more."
Marcus Aurelius might have said that. But Marcus Aurelius belonged to a
race peculiarly insensitive to beauty. The Japanese stoics were also
artists and poets. Their earliest painters were feudal lords, and it was
feudal lords who fostered and acted the No dances. If Nietzsche had
known Japan--I think he did not?--he would surely have found in these
Daimyos and Samurai the forerunners of his Superman. A blood-red blossom
growing out of the battlefield, that, I think, was his ideal. It is one
which, I hope, the world has outlived. I look for the lily flowering
over the fields of peace.
IV
DIVINE RIGHT IN JAPAN
When Japan was opened to the West, after more than two centuries of
seclusion, she was in possession of a national spirit which had been
enabled, by isolation, to become and remain simple and homogeneous. All
public feeling, all public morals centred about the divinity of the
Emperor; an idea which, by a process unique in history, had hibernated
through centuries of political obscuration, and emerged again to the
light with its prestige unimpaired in the middle of the nineteenth
century. In the Emperor, one may say, Japan was incarnate. And to this
faith the Japanese, as well as foreign observers, attribute their great
achievement in the Russian War. The little book of Captain Sakurai,
_Human Bullets_, testifies to this fact in every sentence: "Through the
abundant grace of Heaven and the illustrious virtue of his Majesty, the
Imperial forces defeated the great enemy both on land and sea." ... "I
jumped out of bed, cleansed my person with pure water, donned my best
uniform, bowed to the East where the great Sire resides, solemnly read
his proclamation of war, and told his Majesty that his humble subject
was just starting to the front. When I offered my last prayers--the last
I then believed they were--before the family shrine of my ancestors I
felt a thrill going all through me, as if they were giving me a solemn
injunction, saying: 'Thou art not thy own. For his Majesty's sake, thou
shalt go to save the nation from calamity, ready to bear the crushing of
thy bones and the tearing of thy flesh. Disgrace not thy ancestors by an
act of cowardice.'" This, it is clear, is an attitude quite different
from that of an Englishman towards the King. The King, to us, is at most
a symbol. The Emperor, to the Japanese, is, or was, a god. And the
difference may be noted in small matters. For instance, a Japanese,
writing from England, observes with astonishment that we put the head of
the King on our stamps and cover it with postmarks. That, to a Japanese,
seems to be blasphemy. Again, he is puzzled, at the Coronation in
Westminster Abbey, to find the people looking down from above on the
King. That, again, seems to him blasphemy. Last year, when the Emperor
was dying, crowds knelt hour after hour, day and night, on the road
beside the palace praying for him. And a photographer who took a picture
of them by flashlight was literally torn to pieces. One could multiply
examples, but the thing is plain. The national spirit of Japan centres
about the divinity of the Emperor. And precisely therein lies their
present problem. For one may say, I think, with confidence that this
attitude cannot endure, and is already disappearing. Western thought is
an irresistible solvent of all irrational and instinctive ideas. Men
cannot be engineers and pathologists and at the same time believe that a
man is a god. They cannot be historians and at the same time believe
that their first Emperor came down from heaven. Above all, they cannot
be politicians and abstain from analysing the real source and sanction
of political power. English political experience, it is true, suggests
immense possibilities in the way of clinging to fictions with the
feelings while insisting upon facts in practice. And the famous verse:
"But I was thinking of a plan
To dye my whiskers green,
And always wear so large a fan
That they should not be seen,"
might have been written to summarise the development of the British
Constitution. But the success of that method depends upon the condition
that the fictions shall be nothing _but_ fictions. The feelings of the
English can centre about the King only because they are well assured
that he does not and will not govern. But that condition does not exist
in Japan. The Japanese Constitution is conceived on the German, not the
English, model; and it bristles with clauses which are intended to
prevent the development which has taken place in England--the shifting
of power from the Sovereign to a Parliamentary majority. The Ministers
are the Emperor's Ministers; the policy is the Emperor's policy. That is
the whole tenour of the Constitution. No Constitution, it is true, can
"trammel up" facts and put power anywhere but where nature puts it. If
an Emperor is not a strong man he will not govern, and his Ministers
will. And it seems to be well understood among Japanese politicians that
the personal will of the Emperor does not, in fact, count for very much.
But it is supposed to; and that must become an important point so soon
as conflict develops between the Parliament and the Government. And such
conflict is bound to arise, and is already arising. Japanese parties, it
is true, stand for persons rather than principles; and the real
governing power hitherto has been a body quite unknown to the
Constitution--namely, the group of "Elder Statesmen." But there are
signs that this group is disintegrating, and that its members are
beginning to recognise the practical necessity of forming and depending
upon a party in the country and the House of Representatives. The crisis
which led, the other day, to the fall of Prince Katsura was provoked by
popular tumults; and it was noticeable that, for the first time, the
name of the Emperor was introduced into political controversy. It seems
clear that in the near future either the Emperor must appear openly as a
fighting force, as the German Emperor does, or he must subside into a
figure-head and the government pass into the hands of Parliament. The
former alternative is quite incompatible with the idea of the god-king;
the latter might not be repugnant to it if other things tended to foster
it. But it is so clear that they do not! An Emperor who is titular head
of a Parliamentary Government might, and in Japan no doubt _would_, be
surrounded with affection and respect. He could never be seriously
regarded as divine. For that whole notion belongs to an age innocent of
all that is implied in the very possibility of Parliamentary government.
It belongs to the age of mythology and poetry, not to the age of reason.
Japanese patriotism in the future must depend on love of country,
unsupported by the once powerful sanction of a divine personality.
If this be true, I question very much the wisdom of that part of the
Japanese educational system which endeavours to centre all duty about
the person of the Emperor. The Japanese are trying a great experiment in
State-imposed morality--a policy highly questionable at the best, but
becoming almost demonstrably absurd when it is based on an idea which is
foredoomed to discredit. The well-known Imperial rescript, which is kept
framed in every school, reads as follows:
"Our Ancestors founded the State on a vast basis, and deeply
implanted virtue; and Our subjects, by their unanimity in their
great loyalty and filial affection, have in all ages shown these
qualities in perfection. Such is the essential beauty of Our
national polity, and such, too, is the true spring of Our
educational system. You, Our beloved subjects, be filial to your
parents, affectionate to your brothers, be loving husbands and
wives, and truthful to your friends. Conduct yourselves with
modesty, and be benevolent to all. Develop your intellectual
faculties and perfect your moral power by gaining knowledge and
by acquiring a profession. Further, promote the public interest
and advance the public affairs; and in case of emergency,
courageously sacrifice yourself to the public good. Thus offer
every support to Our Imperial Dynasty, which shall be as lasting
as the Universe. You will then not only be Our most loyal
subjects, but will be enabled to exhibit the noble character of
your ancestors.
"Such are the testaments left us by Our Ancestors, which must be
observed alike by their descendants and subjects. These precepts
are perfect throughout all ages and of universal application. It
is Our desire to bear them in Our heart, in common with you Our
subjects, to the end that we may constantly possess their
virtues."
This rescript may be read with admiration. But common sense would teach
every Westerner that a document so framed is at variance with the whole
bent of the modern mind, and, if forced upon it, could only goad it
into rebellion. And such, I have been informed, and easily believe, is
the effect it is beginning to have in Japan. Young people brought up on
Western languages and Western science demand a Western, that is a
rational, sanction for conduct. They do not believe the Emperor to be
divine, and therefore they cannot take their moral principles on trust
from him and from his ancestors. The violent reaction from this
State-imposed doctrine drives them into sheer scepticism and anarchy.
And here, as always throughout history, authority defeats its own
purposes. Western ideas cannot be taken _in part_. They cannot be
applied to the natural world and fenced off from the moral world. Japan
must go through the same crisis through which the West is passing; she
must revise the whole basis of her traditional morals. And in doing so
she must be content to lose that passionate and simple devotion which is
the good as well as the evil product of an age of uncritical faith.
V
FUJI
It was raining when we reached Gotemba and took off our boots at the
entrance of the inn. I had never before stayed at a Japanese inn, and
this one, so my friend assured me, was a bad specimen of the class.
Certainly it was disorderly and dirty. It was also overcrowded. But that
was inevitable, for a thousand pilgrims in a day were landing at Gotemba
station. Men and women, young and old, grandparents, parents, children
come flocking in to climb the great mountain. The village street is
lined with inns; and in front of each stood a boy with a lantern hailing
the new arrivals. We were able, in spite of the crowd, to secure a room
to ourselves, and even, with difficulty, some water to wash in--too many
people had used and were using the one bath! A table and a chair were
provided for the foreigner, and very uncouth they looked in the pretty
Japanese room. But a bed was out of the question. One had to sleep on
the floor among the fleas. Certainly it was not comfortable; but it was
amusing. From my room in the upper storey I looked into the whole row
of rooms in the inn opposite, thrown open to the street, with their
screens drawn back. One saw families and parties, a dozen or more in a
room, dressing and undressing, naked and clothed, sleeping, eating,
talking; all, of course, squatting on the floor, with a low stool for a
table, and red-lacquered bowls for plates and dishes. How people manage
to eat rice with chopsticks will always be a mystery to me. For my own
part, I cannot even--but I will not open that humiliating chapter.
Of the night, the less said the better. I rose with relief, but dressed
with embarrassment; for the girl who waited on us selected the moment of
my toilet to clean the room. It was still raining hard, and we had
decided to abandon our expedition, for another night in that inn was
unthinkable. But, about eleven, a gleam of sun encouraged us to proceed,
and we started on horseback for the mountain. And here I must note that
by the official tariff, approved by the police, a foreigner is charged
twice as much for a horse as a Japanese. If one asks why, one is calmly
informed that a foreigner, as a rule, is heavier! This is typical of
travel in Japan; and there have been moments when I have sympathised
with the Californians in their discrimination against the Japanese.
Those moments, however, are rare and brief, and speedily repented of.
Naturally, as soon as we had started the weather clouded over again. We
rode for three hours at a foot-pace, and by the time we left our horses
and began the ascent on foot we were wrapped in thick, cold mist. There
is no difficulty about climbing Fuji, except the fatigue. You simply
walk for hours up a steep and ever-steeper heap of ashes. It was perhaps
as well that we did not see what lay before us, or we might have been
discouraged. We saw nothing but the white-grey mist and the purple-grey
soil. Except that, looming out of the cloud just in front of us, there
kept appearing and vanishing a long line of pilgrims, with peaked hats,
capes, and sandals, all made of straw, winding along with their staffs,
forty at least, keeping step, like figures in a frieze, like shadows on
a sheet, like spirits on the mountain of Purgatory, like anything but
solid men walking up a hill. So for hours we laboured on, the slope
becoming steeper every step, till we could go no further, and stopped at
a shelter to pass the night. Here we were lucky. The other climbers had
halted below or above, and we had the long, roomy shed to ourselves.
Blankets, a fire of wood, and a good meal restored us. We sat warming
and congratulating ourselves, when suddenly our guide at the door gave a
cry. We hurried to see. And what a sight it was! The clouds lay below us
and a starlit sky above. At our feet the mountain fell away like a
cliff, but it fell rather to a glacier than a sea--a glacier infinite as
the ocean, yawning in crevasses, billowing in ridges; a glacier not of
ice, but of vapour, changing form as one watched, opening here, closing
there, rising, falling, shifting, while far away, at the uttermost
verge, appeared a crimson crescent, then a red oval, then a yellow
globe, swimming up above the clouds, touching their lights with gold,
deepening their shadows, and spreading, where it rose, a lake of silver
fire over the surface of the tossing plain.
We looked till it was too cold to look longer, then wrapped ourselves in
quilts and went to sleep. At midnight I woke. Outside there was a
strange moaning. The wind had risen; and the sound of it in that lonely
place gave me a shock of fear. The mountain, then, was more than a heap
of dead ashes. Presences haunted it; powers indifferent to human fate.
That wind had blown before man came into being, and would blow when he
had ceased to exist. It moaned and roared. Then it was still. But I
could not sleep again, and lay watching the flicker of the lamp on the
long wooden roof, and the streaks of moonlight through the chinks, till
the coolie lit a fire and called us to get up. We started at four. The
clouds were still below, and the moon above; but she had moved across to
the west, Orion had appeared, and a new planet blazed in the east. The
last climb was very steep and our breath very scant. But we had other
things than that to think of. Through a rift in a cloud to the eastward
dawned a salmon-coloured glow; it brightened to fire; lit up the clouds
above and the clouds below; blazed more and intolerably, till, as we
reached the summit, the sun leapt into view and sent a long line of
light down the tumultuous sea of rolling cloud.
How cold it was! And what an atmosphere inside the highest shelter,
where sleepers had been packed like sardines and the newly kindled fire
filled the fetid air with acrid smoke! What there was to be seen we
saw--the crater, neither wide nor deep; the Shinto temple, where a
priest was intoning prayers; and the Post Office, where an enterprising
Government sells picture-postcards for triumphant pilgrims to despatch
to their friends. My friend must have written at least a dozen, while I
waited and shivered with numbed feet and hands. But after an hour we
began the descent, and quickly reached the shelter where we were to
breakfast. Thence we had to plunge again into the clouds. But before
doing so we took a long look at the marvellous scene--more marvellous
than any view of earth; icebergs tossing in a sea, mountains exhaling
and vanishing, magic castles and palaces towering across infinite space.
A step, and once more the white-grey mist and the purple-grey soil. But
the clouds had moved higher; and it was not long before we saw, to the
south, cliffs and the sea, to the east, the gleam of green fields,
running up, under cloud-shadows, to mountain ridges and peaks. And so
back to Gotemba, and our now odious inn.
We would not stop there. So we parted, my friend for Tokyo, I for
Kyoto. But time-tables had been fallacious, and I found myself landed at
Numatsa, with four hours to wait for the night train, no comfort in the
waiting-room, and no Japanese words at my command. I understood then a
little better why foreigners are so offensive in the East. They do not
know the language; they find themselves impotent where their instinct is
to domineer; and they visit on the Oriental the ill-temper which is
really produced by their own incompetence. Yes, I must confess that I
had to remind myself severely that it was I, and not the Japanese, who
was stupid. At last the station-master came to my rescue--the
station-master always speaks English. He endured my petulance with the
unfailing courtesy and patience of his race, and sent me off at last in
a rickshaw to the beach and a Japanese hotel. But my troubles were not
ended. I reached the hotel; I bowed and smiled to the group of
kow-towing girls; but how to tell them that I wanted a bathe and a meal?
Signs were unavailing. We looked at one another and laughed, but that
did not help. At last they sent for a student who knew a little English.
I could have hugged him. "It is a great pity," he said, "that these
people do not know English." The pity, I replied, was that I did not
know Japanese, but his courtesy repudiated the suggestion. Could I have
a bathing costume? Of course! And in a quarter of an hour he brought me
a wet one. Where could I change? He showed me a room; and presently I
was swimming in the sea, with such delight as he only can know who has
ascended and descended Fuji without the chance of a bath. Returning to
the inn, I wandered about in my wet costume seeking vainly the room in
which I had changed. Laughing girls pushed me here, and pulled me there,
uncomprehending of my pantomime, till one at last, quicker than the
rest, pulled back a slide, and revealed the room I was seeking. Then
came dinner--soup, fried fish, and rice; and--for my weakness--a spoon
and fork to eat them with. The whole house seemed to be open, and one
looked into every room, watching the ways of these gay and charming
people. At last I paid--to accomplish _that_ by pantomime was easy,--and
said good-bye to my hostess and her maids, who bowed their heads to the
ground and smiled as though I had been the most honoured of guests
instead of a clumsy foreigner, fit food for mirth. A walk in a twilight
pine wood, and then back to the station, where I boarded the night
train, and slept fitfully until five, when we reached Kyoto, and my
wanderings were over. How I enjoyed the comfort of the best hotel in the
East! But also how I regretted that I had not long ago learnt to find
comfort in the far more beautiful manner of life of Japan!
VI
JAPAN AND AMERICA
On the reasons, real or alleged, for the hostility of the Californians
to the Japanese this is not the place to dwell. At bottom, it is a
conflict of civilisations, a conflict which is largely due to ignorance
and misunderstanding, and which should never be allowed to develop into
avowed antagonism. For with time, patience, and sympathy it will
disappear of itself. The patience and sympathy, I think, are not lacking
on the side of the Japanese, but they are sadly lacking among the
Californians, and indeed among all white men in Western America. The
truth is that the Western pioneer knows nothing of Japan and wants to
know nothing. And he would be much astonished, not to say indignant,
were he told that the civilisation of Japan is higher than that of
America. Yet there can, I think, be no doubt that this is the case, if
real values be taken as a standard. America, and the "new" countries
generally, have contributed, so far, nothing to the world except
material prosperity. I do not under-estimate this. It is a great thing
to have subdued a continent. And it may be argued that those who are
engaged in this task have no energy to spare for other activities. But
the Japanese subdued their island centuries, even millenniums, ago. And,
having reduced it to as high a state of culture as they required, they
began to live--a thing the new countries have not yet attempted.
To live, in the sense in which I am using the term, implies that you
reflect life in the forms of art, literature, philosophy, and religion.
To all these things the Japanese have made notable contributions; less
notable, indeed, than those of China, from whom they derived their
inspiration, but still native, genuine, and precious. To take first bare
externals, the physical life of the Japanese is beautiful. I read with
amazement the other day a quotation from a leading Californian newspaper
to the effect that "there is an instinctive sense of physical repugnance
on the part of the Western or European races towards the Japanese race"!
Had the writer, I wonder, ever been in Japan? Perhaps it would have made
no difference to him if he had, for he is evidently one of those who
cannot or will not see. But to me the first and chief impression of
Japan is the physical attractiveness of the people. The Japanese are
perfectly proportioned; their joints, their hands, their feet, their
hips are elegant and fine; and they display to the best advantage these
natural graces by a costume which is as beautiful as it is simple. To
see these perfect figures walking, running, mounting stairs, bathing,
even pulling rickshaws, is to receive a constant stream of shocks of
surprise and delight. In so much that, after some weeks in the country,
I begin to feel "a sense of physical repugnance" to Americans and
Europeans--a sense which, if I were as uneducated and inexperienced as
the writer in the _Argonaut_, I should call "instinctive," and make the
basis of a campaign of race-hatred. The misfortune is that the Japanese
abandon their own dress when they go abroad. And in European dress,
which they do not understand, and which conceals their bodies, they are
apt to look mean and vulgar. Similarly, in European dress, they lose
their own perfect manners and mis-acquire the worst of the West. So that
there may be some excuse for feeling "repugnance" to the Japanese
abroad, though, of course, it is merely absurd and barbarous to base
upon such superficial distaste a policy of persecution and insult.
If we turn from the body to the mind and the spirit, the Japanese show
themselves in no respect inferior, and in some important respects
superior, to the Americans. New though they are to the whole mental
attitude which underlies science and its applications, they have
already, in half a century, produced physicians, surgeons, pathologists,
engineers who can hold their own with the best of Europe and America.
All that the West can do in this, its own special sphere, the Japanese,
late-comers though they be, are showing that they can do too. In
particular, to apply the only test which the Western nations seem really
to accept, they can build ships, train men, organise a campaign, and
beat a great Western Power at the West's own game of slaughter. But all
this, of science and armaments, big though it bulks in our imagination,
is secondary and subordinate in a true estimate of civilisation. The
great claim the Japanese may make, as I began by saying, is that they
have known how to live; and they have proved that by the only test--by
the way they have reflected life.
Japanese literature and art may not be as great as that of Europe; but
it exists, whereas that of America and all the new countries is yet to
seek. While Europe was still plunged in the darkest of the dark ages,
Japanese poets were already producing songs in exquisite response to the
beauty of nature, the passion and pathos of human life. From the seventh
century on, their painting and their sculpture was reflecting in tender
and gracious forms the mysteries of their faith. Their literature and
their art changed its content and its form with the centuries, but it
continued without a break, in a stream of genuine inspiration, down to
the time when the West forced open the doors of Japan to the world. From
that moment, under the new influences, it has sickened and declined. But
what a record! And a record that is also an incontrovertible proof that
the Japanese belong to the civilised nations--the nations that can live
and express life.
But perhaps this test may be rejected. Morals, it may be urged, is the
touchstone of civilisation, not art. Well, take morals. The question is
a large one; but, summarily, where do the Japanese fail, as compared
with the Western nations? Is patriotism the standard? In this respect
what nation can compete with them? Is it courage? What people are
braver? Is it industry? Who is more industrious? It is their very
industry that has aroused the jealous fears of the Californians. Is it
family life? Where, outside the East, is found such solidarity as in
Japan? Is it sexual purity? On that point, what Western nation can hold
up its head? Is it honesty? What of the honesty of the West? No; no
Westerner, knowing the facts, could for a moment maintain that, all
round and on the whole, the morals of the Japanese are inferior to those
of Europe or America. It would probably be easier to maintain the
opposite. Judged by every real test the Japanese civilisation is not
lower, it is higher than that of any of the new countries who refuse to
permit the Japanese to live among them.
That, I admit, does not settle the question. Competent and impartial men
like Admiral Mahan, who would admit all that I have urged, still
maintain that the Japanese ought not to be allowed to settle in the
West. This conclusion I do not now discuss. The point I wish to make is
that the question can never be fairly faced, in a dry light, and with
reference only to the simple facts, until the prejudice is broken up and
destroyed that the Japanese, and all other Orientals, are "inferior"
races. It is this prejudice which distorts all the facts and all the
values, which makes Californians and British Columbians and Australians
sheerly unreasonable, and causes them to jump at one argument after
another, each more fallacious than the last, to defend an attitude which
at bottom is nothing but the childish and ignorant hatred of the
uncultivated man for everything strange. If the Japanese had had white
skins, should we ever have heard of the economic argument? And should we
ever have been presented with that new shibboleth "unassimilable"?
VII
HOME
Moscow, Berlin, Paris, London! What a crescendo of life! What a
quickening of the flow! What a gathering intensity! "Whatever else we
may think of the West," I said to the young French artist, "it is, at
any rate, the centre of life." "Yes," he replied, "but the curious thing
is that that Life produces only Death. Dead things, and dead people." I
reflected. Yes! The _things_ certainly were dead. Look at the Louvre!
Look at the Madeleine! Look at any of the streets! Machine-men had made
it all, not human souls. The men were dead, then, too? "Certainly!" he
insisted. "Their works are a proof. Where there is life there is art.
And there is no art in the modern world--neither in the East nor in the
West." "Then what is this that looks like Life?" I said, looking at the
roaring streets. He shrugged his shoulders and said, "Steam."
With that in my mind, I crossed to England, and forgot criticism and
speculation in the gleam of the white cliffs, in the trim hedgerows and
fields, in the sound of English voices and the sight of English faces.
In London it was the same. The bright-cheeked messenger boys, the
discreetly swaggering chauffeurs, the quiet, competent young men in City
offices who reassured me about my baggage, the autumn sun on the maze of
misty streets, the vast picturesqueness of London, its beauty as of a
mountain or the sea, fairly carried me off my feet. And passing St.
Paul's--"Dead," I muttered, as I looked at its derivative facade,--I
went in to take breath. From the end of the vast, cold space came the
dreary wail I remembered so well. I had heard Church music at Moscow,
and knew what it ought to be. But the tremendous passion of that Eastern
plain-song would have offended these discreet walls. I was in a "sacred
edifice"; and with a pang of regret I recalled the wooden shrines of
Japan under the great trees, the solemn Buddhas, and the crowds of
cheerful worshippers. I walked down the empty nave and came under the
dome. Then something happened--the thing that always happens when one
comes into touch with the work of a genius. And Wren's dome proves that
he was that. I sat down, and the organ began to play; or rather, the
dome began to sing. And down the stream of music floated in fragments
visions of my journey--Indians nude like bronzes, blue-coated Chinese,
white robes and bare limbs from Japan, plains of corn, plains of rice,
plains of scorched grass; snow-peaks under the stars, volcanoes, green
and black; huge rivers, tumbling streams, waterfalls, lakes, the ocean;
hovels and huts of wood or sun-dried bricks, thatched or tiled; marble
palaces and baths; red lacquer, golden tiles; saints, kings, conquerors,
and, enduring or worshipping these, a myriad generations of peasants
through long millenniums, toiling, suffering, believing, in one
unchanging course of life, before the dawn of history on and down to
here and now. As they were, so they are; and I heard them sound as with
the drone of Oriental music. Then above that drone something new
appeared. Late in time, Western history emerged, and--astonishing
thing--began to move and change! "Why," I said, "there's something
trying to happen! What is it? Is there going to be a melody?" There was
not one. But there was--has the reader ever heard the second--or is it
the third?--overture to "Leonora"? A scale begins to run up, first on
the violins; then one by one the other instruments join in, till the
great basses are swept into the current and run and scale too. So it was
here. The West began; but the East caught it up. The unchanging drone
began to move and flow. Faster and faster, louder and louder, more and
more intensely, crying and flaming towards--what? Beethoven knew, and
put it into his music. We cannot put it into ideas or words. We can see
the problem, not the solution; and the problem is this. To reconcile the
Western flight down Time with the Eastern rest in Eternity; the Western
multiformity with the Eastern identity; the Western energy with the
Eastern peace. For God is neither Time nor Eternity, but Time in
Eternity; neither One nor Many, but One in Many; neither Spirit nor
Matter, but Matter-Spirit. That the great artists know, and the great
saints; the modern artists and the modern saints, who have been or who
will be. Goethe was one; Beethoven was one; and there will be greater,
when the contact between East and West becomes closer, and the sparks
from pole to pole fly faster.
I had dropped into mere thinking, and realised that the organ had
stopped. I left the great church and came out upon the back of Queen
Anne, which made me laugh. Still, it was quite religious; so were the
'buses, and the motor-cars, and the shops and offices, and the Law
Courts, and the top-hats, and the crossing-sweepers. "Dear people," I
said, "you are not dead, any more than I am. You think you are, as I too
often do. When you feel dead you should go to church; but not in a
'sacred edifice.' Beethoven, even in the Queen's Hall, is better."