JAPANESE HOSPITALITIES
Among Japanese virtues stands hospitality, but, until the adoption of
foreign dress and customs by the court nobles, no Japanese allowed his
wife to receive general visitors, or entertain mixed companies. The
Japanese is, consequently, a born club-man, and makes the club-house a
home. The Rokumeikwan, or Tokio Nobles’ Club, is the most distinguished
of these corporations. Its president is an imperial prince, and its
members are diplomats, nobles, officials, rich citizens, and resident
foreigners. The exquisite houses and gardens of the smaller, purely
Japanese clubs, are perfect specimens of native architecture, decoration,
and landscape gardening. By an arrangement of sliding screens, the houses
themselves may afford one large room or be divided into many small ones,
besides the tiny boxes in which are celebrated the rites of cha no yu, or
ceremonial tea.
Their elaborate dinners, lasting for hours, with jugglers, dancers,
and musicians between the courses, are very costly. Rich men display a
Russian prodigality in entertaining, which was even greater in feudal
times. A day or two after arriving in Japan it was my good-fortune to be
a guest at one of these unique entertainments, given at the Koyokwan,
or Maple Leaf Club-house, on the hill-side above the Shiba temples. We
arrived at three o’clock, and were met at the door by a group of pretty
nesans, or maids of the house, who, taking off our hats and shoes, led
us, stocking-footed, down a shining corridor and up-stairs to a long,
low room, usually divided into three by screens of dull gold paper. One
whole side of this beautiful apartment was open to the garden beyond a
railed balcony of polished cedar, and the view, across the maple-trees
and dense groves of Shiba, to the waters of the Bay was enchanting. The
decorations of the club-house repeat the maples that fill the grounds.
The wall screens are painted with delicate branches, the _ramma_, or
panels above the screens, are carved with them, and in the outer wall and
balcony-rail are leaf-shaped openings. The dresses of the pretty nesans,
the crape cushions on the floor, the porcelain and lacquer dishes, the
saké bottles and their carved stands, the fans and bon-bons, all display
the maple-leaf. In the _tokonoma_, or raised recess where the flower-vase
and kakemono, or scroll picture, are displayed, and that small dais upon
which the Emperor would sit if he ever came to the house, hung a shadowy
painting, with a single flower in a bronze vase.
Before each guest were set the _tabako bon_, a tray holding a tiny
_hibachi_ with live coals lying in a cone of ashes, and a section of
bamboo stem for an ash-receiver. Then came the tea and sweetmeats,
inevitable prelude to all good cheer. Next the nesans set in front of
each guest an _ozen_, or table, not four inches in height, on which stood
a covered lacquered bowl containing the first course, a tiny cup of
soy, or piquant bean sauce, in which to dip morsels of food, and a long
envelope containing a pair of white pine chopsticks. The master of the
feast broke apart his chopsticks, which were whittled in one piece and
split apart for only half their length, to show that they were unused,
and began a nimble play with them. In his fingers they were enchanted
wands, and did his bidding promptly; in ours they wobbled, made x’s in
the air, and deposited morsels in our laps and upon the mats alternately.
The nesans giggled, and the host almost forgot his Japanese decorum,
but the company patiently taught us how to brace one chopstick firmly
in the angle of the thumb and against the third finger. That stick is
immovable, and the other, held like a pen with the thumb and first and
second fingers, plays upon it, holding and letting go with a sureness
and lightness hardly attained with any other implements. The supreme
test of one’s skill is to lift and hold an egg, the round surface making
a perfect balance and firm hold necessary, while too much force applied
would cause disasters.
[Illustration: FIG. 1]
[Illustration: FIG. 2]
[Illustration: FIG. 3]
Innumerable courses of dainty dishes followed, accompanied by cups of
hot saké, which our host taught us to drink as healths, offered by each
one of the company to the others in turn, rinsing, offering, filling,
and raising the cup to the forehead in salutation, and emptying it in
three prescribed sips. Custom even requires one to offer a health to the
nesans, which they receive with a modest and charming grace.
Midway in the feast three charming girls in dark crape kimonos, strewn
with bright maple-leaves, slipped the screens aside and knelt on the mats
with the koto, samisen, and tsuzumi drum, on which they played a prelude
of sad, slow airs. Then the gilded panels disclosed a troop of dazzling
maiko in soft blue kimonos brocaded with brilliant maple-leaves and
broad obis of gold brocade, the loops of their blue-black hair thrust
full of golden flowers, and waving gold fans painted with gay maples. To
the melancholy accompaniment of the geisha, they danced the song of the
maple-leaf in measures that were only a slow gliding and changing from
one perfect pose to another. Watching these radiant creatures in their
graceful movements, we were even deaf to the soft booming of the temple
bells at the sunset hour, and the answering croak of the mighty ravens.
These maiko and geisha, professional dancers and singers, are necessary
to any entertainment, and are trained to amuse and charm the guests with
their accomplishments, their wit, and sparkling conversation; lending
that attraction, brightness, and charm to social life, which wives and
daughters are permitted to do in the Occident. The maiko dances as soon
as she is old enough to be taught the figures and to chant the poems
which explain them; and when she begins to fade, she dons the soberer
attire of the geisha, and, sitting on the mats, plays the accompaniments
for her successors and pupils. Until this modern era, the geisha were the
most highly educated of Japanese women, and many of them made brilliant
marriages.
Long before the beautiful band had finished their poem and dance of the
four seasons, twilight had fallen. _Andons_, or saucers of oil, burning
on high stands inside square paper lantern frames, made Rembrandtesque
effects. Everything was lost in shadow but the figures of the maiko
moving over the shining mats. One tiny girl of thirteen, belonging to the
house, slipped in and out with a bronze box and snuffers, and, kneeling
before the andons, opened the paper doors to nip off bits of the wicks.
The child, a miniature beauty, was grace itself, gentle and shy as a
kitten, blushing and quaintly bowing when addressed.
It was six hours after the entrance of the tabako bons before the guests
rose to depart. All the troop of maidens escorted us to the door, and
after endless bows and farewells, sat on the mats in matchless tableaux,
their sweet _sayonaras_ ringing after us as our jinrikishas whirled us
down the dark avenues of Shiba.
Cha no yu might well be a religious rite, from the reverence with which
it is regarded by the Japanese, and a knowledge of its forms is part
of the education of a member of the highest classes. Masters teach its
minute and tedious forms, and schools of cha no yu, like the sects of a
great faith, divide and differ. The cha no yu ceremony is hedged round
with the most awesome, elaborate, and exalted etiquette of any custom
in polite Japanese life. Weddings or funerals are simple affairs by
comparison. The cha no yu is a complication of all social usages, and
was perfected in the sixteenth century, when it was given its vogue by
the Shogun Hideyoshi. Before that it had been the diversion of imperial
abbots, monarchs retired from business, and other idle and secluded
occupants of the charming villas and monasteries around Kioto. Hideyoshi,
the Taiko, saw in its precise forms, endless rules, minutiæ, and stilted
conventionalities a means of keeping his daimios from conspiracies and
quarrels when they came together. It was an age of buckram and behavior,
when solemnity constituted the first rule of politeness. Tea drinking was
no trivial incident, and time evidently had no value. The daimios soon
invested the ceremony with so much luxury and extravagance that Hideyoshi
issued sumptuary laws, and the greatest simplicity in accessories
was enjoined. The bowls in which the tea was made had to be of the
plainest earthen-ware, but the votaries evaded the edict by seeking out
the oldest Chinese or Korean bowls, or those made by some celebrated
potter. Tea-rooms were restricted to a certain size—six feet square;
the entrance became a mere trap not three feet high; no servants were
permitted to assist the host, and only four guests might take part in the
six-hour or all-day-long ceremony. The places of the guests on the mats,
with relation to the host, the door, and the tokonoma, or recess, were
strictly defined. Even the conversation was ordered, the objects in the
tokonoma were to be asked about at certain times, and at certain other
times the tea-bowl and its accompaniments were gravely discussed. Not to
speak of them at all would be as great an evidence of ill-breeding as to
refer to them at the wrong time.
The masters of cha no yu were revered above scholars and poets. They
became the friends and intimates of Emperors and Shoguns, were enriched
and ennobled, and their descendants receive honors to this day. Of the
great schools and methods those of Senké, Yabunouchi, and Musanokoji
adhere most closely to the original forms. Their first great difference
is in the use of the inward or the outward sweep of the hand in touching
or lifting the utensils. Upon this distinction the dilettanti separated,
and the variations of the many schools of to-day arose from the original
disagreement. To get some insight into a curious phase of Japanese
social life, I took lessons in cha no yu of Matsuda, an eminent master
of the art, presiding over the ceremonial tea-rooms of the Hoishigaoka
club-house in Tokio.
There could be no more charming place in which to study the etiquette
of tea drinking, and the master was one of those mellow, gentle,
gracious men of old Japan, who are the perfect flower of generations of
culture and refinement in that most æsthetic country of the world. In
the afternoon and evening the Hoishigaoka, on the apex of Sanno hill,
is the resort of the nobles, scholars, and literary men, who compose
its membership, but in the morning hours, it is all dappled shadow and
quiet. The master was much pleased at having four foreign pupils,
and all the hill-side took an interest in our visits. We followed
the etiquette strictly, first taking off our shoes—for one would as
soon think of walking hob-nailed across a piano-top, as of marring
the polished woods of Japanese corridors, or the fine, soft mats of
their rooms with heel-marks—and sitting on our heels, as long as our
unaccustomed and protesting muscles and tendons permitted.
[Illustration: THE NESANS AT THE HOISHIGAOKA]
First, bringing in the basket of selected charcoal, with its pretty twigs
of charred azalea coated with lime, Matsuda replenished the fire in the
square hearth in the floor, dusted the edges with an eagle’s feather, and
dropped incense on the coals. Then he placed the iron kettle, filled with
fresh water from a porcelain jar, over the coals, and showed us how to
fold the square of purple silk and wipe each article of the tea-service,
how to scald the bowl, and to rinse the bamboo whisk. For cha no yu,
tea-leaves are pounded to a fine powder, one, two, or three spoonfuls of
this green flour being put in the bowl, as the guests may prefer a weak
or a strong decoction. Boiling water is poured on the powder, and the
mixture beaten to a froth with the bamboo whisk. This thick, green gruel,
a real purée of tea, is drank as a loving-cup in the _usu cha_ ceremony,
each one taking three sips, wiping the edge of the bowl, and passing it
to his neighbor. The measures and sips are so exact that the last one
drains the bowl. Made from the finest leaves, this beverage is so strong
that a prolonged course of it would shatter any but Japanese nerves.
[Illustration: MATSUDA, THE MASTER OF CHA NO YU]
It is in the precise management of each implement, in each position of
the fingers, in the deliberation and certainty of each movement, that
the art of cha no yu lies, and its practice must be kept up throughout
the lifetime of a devotee. Even with all the foreign fashions, the old
ceremonial rites are as much in vogue with the upper classes as ever, and
the youth of both sexes are carefully trained in their forms.
Much less pretentious and formal are the eel dinners with which Japanese
hosts sometimes delight their foreign friends, as well as those of their
own nationality. Even Sir Edwin Arnold has celebrated the delights of
eels and rice at the Golden Koi, and there are other houses where the
delicious dish may be enjoyed. When one enters such a tea-house, he is
led to a tank of squirming fresh-water eels, and in all seriousness
bidden to point out the object of his preference. Uncertain as the
lottery seems, the cook, who stands by with a long knife in hand, quickly
understands the choice made, and seizing the wriggling victim, carries it
off to some sacrificial block in the kitchen. An eel dinner begins with
eel-soup, and black eels and white eels succeed one another in as many
relays as one may demand. The fish are cut in short sections, split and
flattened, and broiled over charcoal fires. Black eels, so called, are
a rich dark brown in reality, and the color is given them by dipping
them in soy before broiling; and white eels are the bits broiled without
sauces. Laid across bowls of snowy rice, the eels make as pretty a dish
as can be served one, and many foreigners besides the appreciative
English poet have paid tribute to their excellence. An eel dinner in a
river-bank tea-house, with a juggler or a few maiko to enliven the waits
between the courses, is most delightful of Tokio feasts.