YOKOHAMA
The Settlement is bounded by the creek, from whose opposite side many
steep hill-roads wind up to the Bluff, where most of the foreigners have
their houses. These bluff-roads pass between the hedges surrounding trim
villas with their beautifully set gardens, the irregular numbering of
whose gates soon catches the stranger’s eye. The first one built being
number one, the others were numbered in the order of their erection,
so that high and low numerals are often side by side. To coolies,
servants, peddlers, and purveyors, foreign residents are best known by
their street-door numeration, and “Number four Gentleman” and “Number
five Lady” are recurrent and adequate descriptions. So well used are
the subjects of it to this convict system of identification that they
recognize their friends by their _alias_ as readily as the natives do.
Upon the Bluff stand a public hall, United States and British marine
hospitals, a French and a German hospital, several missionary
establishments, and the houses of the large American missionary
community. At the extreme west end a colony of Japanese florists has
planted toy-gardens filled with vegetable miracles; burlesques and
fantasies of horticulture; dwarf-trees, a hundred years old, that could
be put in the pocket; huge single flowers, and marvellous masses of
smaller blossoms; cherry-trees that bear no cherries; plum-trees that
bloom in midwinter, but have neither leaves nor fruit; and roses—that
favorite flower which the foreigner brought with him—flowering in
Californian profusion. A large business is done in the exportation of
Japanese plants and bulbs, encased in a thick coating of mud, which makes
an air-tight case to protect them during the sea-voyage. Ingenious fern
pieces are preserved in the same way. These grotesque things are produced
by wrapping in moist earth the long, woody roots of a fine-leafed variety
of fern. They are made to imitate dragons, junks, temples, boats,
lanterns, pagodas, bells, balls, circles, and every familiar object.
When bought they look dead. If hung for a few days in the warm sun, and
occasionally dipped in water, they change into feathery, green objects
that grow more and more beautiful, and are far more artistic than our one
conventional hanging-basket. The dwarf-trees do not stand transportation
well, as they either die or begin to grow rapidly.
The Japanese are the foremost landscape gardeners in the world, as we
Occidentals, who are still in that barbaric period where carpet gardening
seems beautiful and desirable, shall in time discover. Their genius
has equal play in an area of a yard or a thousand feet, and a Japanese
gardener will doubtless come to be considered as necessary a part of a
great American establishment as a French maid or an English coachman.
From generations of nature-loving and flower-worshipping ancestors these
gentle followers of Adam’s profession have inherited an intimacy with
growing things, and a power over them that we cannot even understand.
Their very farming is artistic gardening, and their gardening half
necromancy.
On high ground, beyond the Bluff proper, stretches the race-course, where
spring and fall there are running races by short-legged, shock-headed
ponies, brought from the Hokkaido, the northern island, or from China.
Gentlemen jockeys frequently ride their own horses in flat races,
hurdle-races, or steeple-chases. The banks close, a general holiday
reigns throughout the town, and often the Emperor comes down from Tokio.
This race-course affords one of the best views of Fuji, and from it
curves the road made in early days for the sole use of foreigners to keep
them off the Tokaido, where they had more than once come in conflict with
trains of travelling nobles. This road leads down to the water’s edge,
and, following the shore of Mississippi Bay, where Commodore Perry’s
ships anchored in 1858, strikes across a rice valley and climbs to the
Bluff again.
The farm-houses it passes are so picturesque that one cannot believe
them to have a utilitarian purpose. They seem more like stage pictures
about to be rolled away than like actual dwellings. The new thatches are
brightly yellow, and the old thatches are toned and mellowed, set with
weeds, and dotted with little gray-green bunches of “hen and chickens,”
while along the ridge-poles is a bed of growing lilies. There is an old
wife’s tale to the effect that the women’s face-powder was formerly made
of lily-root, and that a ruler who wished to stamp out such vanities,
decreed that the plant should not be grown on the face of the earth,
whereupon the people promptly dug it up from their gardens and planted it
in boxes on the roof.
The Japanese section of Yokohama is naturally less Japanese than places
more remote from foreign influence, but the stranger discovers much that
is odd, unique, and Oriental. That delight of the shopper, Honchodori,
with its fine curio and silk shops, was once without a shop-window, the
entire front of the cheaper shops being open to the streets, and only
the old lacquer and bronzes, ivory, porcelains, enamels, silver, and
silks concealed by high wooden screens and walls. Now glass windows
flaunt all that the shops can offer. The silk shops are filled with
goods distracting to the foreign buyer, among which are the wadded silk
wrappers, made and sold by the hundreds, which, being the contrivance of
some ingenious missionary, were long known as missionary coats.
Benten Dori, the bargain-hunter’s Paradise, is a delightful quarter of
a mile of open-fronted shops. In the silk shops, crapes woven in every
variety of cockle and wrinkle and rippling surface, as thin as gauze, or
as thick and heavy as brocade, painted in endless, exquisite designs,
are brought you by the basketful. Each length is rolled on a stick, and
finally wrapped in a bit of the coarse yellow cotton cloth that envelopes
every choice thing in Japan, though for what reason, no native or
foreigner, dealer or connoisseur can tell.
Nozawaya has a godown or fire-proof storehouse full of cotton crapes,
those charmingly artistic fabrics that the Western world has just begun
to appreciate. The pock-marked and agile proprietor will keep his small
boys running for half an hour to bring in basketfuls of cotton crape
rolls, each roll measuring a little over eleven-yards, which will
make one straight, narrow _kimono_ with a pair of big sleeves. These
goods are woven in the usual thirteen-inch Japanese width, although
occasionally made wider for the foreign market. A Japanese kimono is
a simple thing, and one may put on the finished garment an hour after
choosing the cloth to make it. The cut never varies, and it is still
sewn with basters’ stitches, although the use of foreign flat-irons
obviates the necessity of ripping the kimono apart to wash and iron it.
The Japanese flat-iron is a copper bowl filled with burning charcoal,
which, with its long handle, is really a small warming-pan. Besides this
contrivance, there is a flat arrow point of iron with a shorter handle,
which does smaller and quite as ineffectual service.
To an American, nothing is simpler than Japanese money. The _yen_
corresponds to our dollar, and is made up of one hundred _sen_, while
ten _rin_ make one sen. The yen is about equal in value to the Mexican
dollar, and is roughly reckoned at fifty cents gold United States money.
One says dollars or yens indiscriminately, always meaning the Mexican,
which is the current coin of the East. The old copper coins, the rin and
the oval _tempo_, each with a hole in the middle, are disappearing from
circulation, and at the Osaka mint they are melted and made into round
sens. Old gold and silver coins may be bought in the curio shops. If they
have not little oblong silver _bu_, or a long oval gold _ko ban_, the
silversmith will offer to make some, which will answer every purpose!
When you ask for your bill, a merchant takes up his frame of sliding
buttons—the _soroban_, or abacus—and plays a clattering measure before
he can tell its amount. The soroban is infallible, though slow, and in
the head of the educated Japanese, crowded with thousands of arbitrary
characters and words, there is no room for mental arithmetic. You buy
two toys at ten cents apiece. Clatter, clatter goes the soroban, and the
calculator asks you for twenty cents. Depending entirely on the soroban,
they seem unable to reckon the smallest sums without it, and any peddler
who forgets to bring his frame may be puzzled. The dealer in old
embroideries will twist and work his face, scratch his head, and move his
fingers in the air upon an imaginary soroban over the simplest addition,
division, and subtraction. At the bank, the _shroff_ has a soroban a yard
long; and merchants say that in book-keeping the soroban is invaluable,
as by its use whole columns of figures can be added and proved in less
time than by our mental methods.
By an iron bridge, the broad street at the top of Benten Dori crosses
one of the many canals extending from the creek in every direction, and
forming a net-work of water passages from Mississippi Bay to Kanagawa.
Beyond the bridge is Isezakicho, a half mile of theatres, side-shows,
merry-go-rounds, catch-penny games, candy shops, restaurants, second-hand
clothes bazaars, labyrinths of curio, toy, china, and wooden-ware
shops. Hundreds of perambulating restaurateurs trundle their little
kitchens along, or swing them on a pole over their shoulders. Dealers in
ice-cream, so called, abound, who will shave you a glass of ice, sprinkle
it with sugar, and furnish a minute teaspoon with which to eat it. There
are men who sell _soba_, a native vermicelli, eaten with pungent _soy_;
and men who, for a penny, heat a big gridiron, and give a small boy a
cup of batter and a cup of soy, with which he may cook and eat his own
griddle cakes. There the people, the middle and lower classes, present
themselves for study and admiration, and the spectator never wearies of
the outside dramas and panoramas to be seen in this merry fair.
Pretty as she is on a pictured fan, the living Japanese woman is far more
satisfying to the æsthetic soul as she patters along on her wooden clogs
or straw sandals. The very poorest, in her single cheap cotton gown,
or kimono, is as picturesque as her richer sister in silk and crape.
With heads elaborately dressed, and folds of gay crape, or a glittering
hair-pin thrust in the smooth loops of blue-black hair, they seem
always in gala array; and, rain or shine, never protect those elaborate
coiffures with anything less ornamental than a paper umbrella, except in
winter, when the _zukin_, a yard of dark crape lined with a contrasting
color, is thrown over the head, concealing the whole face save the eyes.
A single hair-pin of tortoise-shell, sometimes tipped with coral or gold,
is all that respectable women of any class wear at one time. The heavily
hair-pinned women on cheap fans are not members of good society, and only
children and dancing-girls are seen in the fantastic flowers and trifles
sold at a hundred shops and booths in this and every street.
The little children are the most characteristically Japanese of all
Japanese sights. Babies are carried about tied to the mothers’ back,
or to that of their small sisters. They sleep with their heads rolling
helplessly round, watch all that goes on with their black beads of eyes,
and never cry. Their shaven crowns and gay little kimonos, their wise,
serene countenances, make them look like cabinet curios. As soon as she
can walk, the Japanese girl has her doll tied on her back, until she
learns to carry it steadily and carefully; after that the baby brother or
sister succeeds the doll, and flocks of these comical little people, with
lesser people on their backs, wander late at night in the streets with
their parents, and their funny double set of eyes shine in every audience
along Isezakicho.
[Illustration: JAPANESE CHILDREN]
These out-of-door attractions are constantly changing. Native inventions
and adaptations of foreign ideas continually appear. “Pigs in clover”
and pot-hook puzzles followed only a few weeks behind their New York
season, and street fakirs offer perpetual novelties. Of jugglers the
line is endless, their performances filling interludes at theatres,
coming between the courses of great dinners, and supplying entertainment
to any garden party or flower fête in the homes of rich hosts. More
cunning than these gorgeously clad jugglers is an old man, who roams the
vicinity of Yokohama, wearing poor cotton garments, and carrying two
baskets of properties by a pole across his shoulders. On a street corner,
a lawn, a piazza, or a ship’s deck, he sets up his baskets for a table,
and performs amazing feats with the audience entirely encircling him. A
hatful of coppers sufficiently rewards him, and he swallows fire, spits
out eggs, needles, lanterns, and yards of paper-ribbon, which he twirls
into a bowl, converts into actual soba, and eats, and by a magic sentence
changes the remaining vermicelli into the lance-like leaves of the iris
plant. This magician has a shrewd, foxy old face, whose grimaces, as well
as his pantomime, his capers, and poses, are tricks in themselves. His
chuckling, rippling stream of talk keeps his Japanese auditors convulsed.
Sword walkers and knife swallowers are plenty as blackberries, and the
phonograph is conspicuous in Isezakicho’s tents and booths. The sceptic
and investigator wastes his time in the effort to penetrate the Japanese
jugglers’ mysteries. Once, at a dinner given by Governor Tateno at
Osaka, the foreign guest of honor determined to be cheated by no optical
delusions. He hardly winked, so close was his scrutiny, and the juggler
played directly to him. An immense porcelain vase having been brought in
and set in the middle of the room, the juggler, crawling up, let himself
down into it slowly. For half an hour the sceptic did not raise his eyes
from the vase, that he had first proved to be sound and empty, and to
stand on no trap-door. After this prolonged watch the rest of the company
assailed him with laughter and jeers, and pointed to his side, where the
old juggler had been seated for some minutes fanning himself.