THE INLAND SEA AND NAGASAKI
In making six trips through the Inland Sea I have seen its beautiful
shores by daylight and moonlight and in all seasons—clothed in the filmy
green of spring, golden with ripened grain or stubble, blurred with the
haze of midsummer heat, and clear in the keen, midwinter winds that,
sweeping from the encircling mountains, sting with an arctic touch.
My first sail on its enchanted waters was a September holiday, the dim
horizon and purple lights prophesying of the autumn. From sunrise to
dark, shadowy vistas opened, peaceful shores slipped by, and heights
and islands rearranged themselves. The coast of southeastern Alaska is
often compared to the Inland Sea, but the narrow channels, wild cañons,
and mountain-walls of the Alaska passage have no counterpart in this
Arcadian region. The landlocked Japanese water is a broad lake over
two hundred miles long, filled with islands, and sheltered by uneven
shores. Its jagged mountains of intensest green nowhere become wild
enough to disturb the dream-like calm. Its verdant islands lie in
groups, the channel is always broad and plain, and signs of human life
and achievement are always in sight. Along the shores stretch chains of
villages, with stone sea-walls, castles, and temples soaring above the
clustered roofs or peeping from wooded slopes, and the terraced fields
of rice and grains ridging every hill to its summit and covering every
lower level. Stone lanterns and torii mark the way to temple groves, and
cemeteries with ancient Buddhas of granite and bronze attest that these
little communities are centuries old. Junks and sampans lie anchored
in fleets, or creep idly across the water, and small coasting steamers
thread their way in and out among the islands. The railway follows the
west shore of the sea, touching many old castle towns, most important
of which is Hiroshima, whose great citadel is army headquarters, and
was occupied by the Emperor during the war of 1894-95. The chief naval
station of the empire is at Kure, a few miles away, and the naval
college is on the island of Etajima. The sacred island of Miajima,
facing Hiroshima, is one of the _Sankei_, or three most beautiful sights
of Japan. Miajima is more enchanting and idyllic than Nara, and offers
more of landscape beauty, of picturesque architecture, of historic and
legendary interest than the others of the Sankei—either “the thousand
pine-clad islands of Matsushima,” in the bay of Sendai, or “the Bridge of
Heaven,” the fairy peninsula of Ama-no-Hashidate, in the bay of Miyazu.
No one has been born, no one has been allowed to die, on Miajima, and
formerly no woman could set foot there, although the great temple and
its galleries, built on piles in the water and approached by boats
through a giant torii in the water, is dedicated to the Shinto goddess,
Itsukushima, and her two sisters. Hundreds of votive lanterns line the
shores and are frequently lighted; sacred deer roam everywhere, and the
place is so idyllic and peaceful that one cannot realize that every
wooded point and height conceals a battery, and that sketching and
photographing within this fortified area are as rigorously prohibited as
in France and Germany.
At Shimonoseki, the Inland Sea ends, and ships pass out by the narrowest
of its channels—a channel that boils with tide-rips and across which
a chain once held all craft at bay. New forts replace the old ones
bombarded by the combined English, Dutch, French, and American fleets in
September, 1868. The “Shimonoseki Affair” is conspicuous in the annals of
the scandalous diplomacy and international bullying that has constituted
the policy of Christian nations in their relations with Japan. The United
States did, indeed, make a late and lame apology for its disgraceful
share in the plundering of a weaker people, by restoring its portion of
the indemnity, thus tardily acknowledging the injustice of its conduct.
As travel increases, the harbor of Nagasaki will be everywhere known as
one of the most picturesque in the world. Green mountains, terraced and
wooded to their very summits, have parted far enough to let an arm of
the sea cleave its way inland, and chains of islands with precipitous
shores guard the entrance of the tortuous reach. The town seems to have
run down from the ravines and spread itself out at the end of the inlet,
and temples, tea-houses, and the villas of foreign residents cling to the
hill-side and dot the groves on the heights.
Nagasaki lost commercial importance for some years after the opening
of the port of Kobé, since that took the tea trade to the upper end
of the Inland Sea, around which lie the great tea districts of Japan.
Its coal mines and its million-dollar dry-dock make it a harbor that
no ships pass by, more vessels entering annually than at Yokohama. The
American occupation of the Philippines, the events occurring in China
in 1900, the progress and completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and
the development of Vladivostock and Dalny have all greatly increased
the business of Nagasaki, which now looks upon the busiest and most
crowded harbor of Japan. It is coal and supply station for all fleets,
the American soldier scatters money wildly when transports anchor, and a
large Russian colony comes down from the frozen North each winter. The
picturesqueness of Nagasaki has appealed to the novelist and short-story
writer, and certain villas and tea-houses have romantic interests.
Its people are conservative and cling to old customs tenaciously. The
old festivals are kept up with as much spirit as ever, and boat-loads of
farmers praying for rain often make Nagasaki’s harbor ring with their
shouts and drum-beating. Twenty of these rustics, sitting by the gunwales
in one long boat, and paddling like so many Indians in a war-canoe, go up
and down the narrow fiord waving banners and tasselled emblems.
While the inhabitants kept it, Nagasaki’s observance of the _Bon_, the
festival of the dead, was even more picturesque than the Daimonji of
Kioto. On the night when Nagasaki’s spirits were doomed to return to the
place of the departed, lights twinkled in all the graveyards, and the
mourners carried down to the water’s edge tiny straw boats set with food
offerings. These they lighted and started off; and the tide, bearing
the frail flotilla here and there, finally swept it out to sea—a fleet
of fire, a maze of floating constellations. Many junks and bridges were
burned on these festival nights, and the authorities have forbidden the
observance.
While Nagasaki was the first port opened to foreigners, it now has fewer
foreign residents than any other. There are large mission establishments,
but, outside of their community, the society open to the consuls and
merchants is very limited when the harbor is empty of men-of-war. Their
villas on the heights are most luxurious, and the views these command
down the narrow fiord and out to the ocean entrancing. Life and movement
fill the harbor below. Ships, junks, and sampans come and go; bells
strike in chorus around the anchorage-ground; whistles echo, bands play,
saluting and signalling flags slip up and down the masts, and the bang
and long-rolling echo of the ships’ guns make mimic war. At night the
harbor lights are dazzling, and the shores twinkle to the very hill-tops.
The crowded masts of native junks are as trees hanging full of golden,
glowing spheres, and electric flash-lights from the men-of-war illuminate
sections of hill and town and harbor niches.
The Nagasaki winter is delightful—clear, bright, sunny days continually
succeeding each other; but in summer-time the climate leaves much to
be desired. The air is heavy with moisture, and when the thermometer
registers 90° there is a steamy, greenhouse temperature that encourages
the growth of the hundred varieties of ferns that amateur botanists
collect on these hills. This damp heat is exhausting and wearing, trying
to temper and patience, and annihilating to starch and artificial crimps.
Man’s energy fails with his collar, and although all the sights of the
empire were just over the hill, the tourist would miss them rather than
go to see them. Everything mildews then; boots taken off at night are
covered with green mould in the morning, gloves spot and solidify, and
fungi gather on any clothing packed away. Every morning, on balconies
and clothes-lines, is aired and sunned the clothing that nevertheless
mildews. Only a strong sense of reverence for a hero’s memory can then
lead one up the terraces of the public gardens near the O Suwo temple
to see the tree that General Grant set out. When he came to Nagasaki,
both the General and Mrs. Grant planted trees to commemorate the visit,
and his autograph certificate recording the event was cut in fac-simile
on the face of the large, irregular stone between the two saplings.
Though the trees have been most carefully tended, one died and had to
be replaced, but both now promise to spread into a generous shade. At
the tea-house where the great Japanese dinner was given by the local
governor, with maiko and geisha and jugglers performing between the
courses, they still preserve the floor-cushion on which their illustrious
guest was seated, and bring it out to show to favored Americans. To the
Japanese, General Grant and Commodore Perry mean America; nor could we
have sent them better types than the great sailor who peaceably opened
Japan to the world, and the greater soldier who made use of war only to
insure enduring peace.
The Portuguese and Dutch have left records of their occupancy here
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Francis Xavier and the
Jesuit fathers who succeeded him converted thousands of Japanese to
Christianity, and though it had been supposed that the persecutions and
tortures under Iyeyasu had destroyed the Christians, the opening of the
country after the Restoration discovered whole communities of them near
Nagasaki, who retained their belief, wore the peculiar dress prescribed
for them by the Jesuits, knew the prayers and forms, and made the sign
of the cross. Nothing in the _Book of Martyrs_ exceeds the tortures and
suffering of these Christians, who would not deny their religion, nor
tread upon the paper picture of Christ, as they were bidden to do. The
tradition goes that at Pappenberg, the precipitous little island at the
mouth of the harbor, thousands of converts were forced by spear-points
into the sea, but the best scholars and authorities now discredit this
wholesale horror, of which no trustworthy record exists.
From 1641 the Dutch lived as prisoners on the little island of Deshima,
where the porcelain bazaar now stands, suffering incredible restrictions
and humiliations for the sake of monopolizing the trade of the country.
Nagasaki’s children and beggars still follow strangers with the shout,
“_Hollander san! Hollander san!_” as a remembrance of those first foreign
residents, and in curio-shops queer clocks and ornaments show the
adaptation and imitation of many Dutch articles by the Japanese.
The fact of Nagasaki’s being only a port of call makes its curio market
fluctuate in proportion to the number of merchantmen and men-of-war in
port. When the harbor is full, no resident visits the curio-shops, whose
prices always soar at such times. Tortoise-shell carving is a great
industry of the place, but porcelain is still the specialty of this
southern province, where the art was first introduced. Those wares of
South Japan known anciently as Nabeshima and Hirado are the finest of
Japanese porcelains, their blue and white beauty being simply perfect.
The potters who brought the art from Korea and China settled in Satsuma
and Hizen, and the kilns of Arita and Kagoshima are still firing. The
Dutch carried the Arita ware to Europe under the name of Hizen. This
porcelain is now more commonly termed Imari, while Deshima is another
general name for the modern product, and Nabeshima and Hirado are the
words used by connoisseurs in vaunting precious wares. This confusion
of names misleads the traveller, who cannot at once discern that Hizen
is the name of the province; Arita of the town where the potters
live and the kilns are at work; Imari of the port from which it is
shipped; Nabeshima the family name of that daimio of Hizen who brought
the potters from Korea; and Hirado of the daimio, whose factory at
Mikawaji, near Arita, produced the exquisite pieces coveted by all of his
fellow-daimios. Modern Imari ware is much too fascinating and tempting
to the slender purse, but when one acquires a fondness for the exquisite
porcelains the old Nabeshima made for themselves, learns the comb-like
lines and the geometrical and floral marks on the underside that
characterize them, and is aroused to the perception of the incomparable
“seven boy” Hirado, his peace of mind is gone. Genuine old Hirado vases
or plates, with the seven boys at play, or even five boys or three boys,
are hardly to be bought to-day, and the countless commercial imitations
of the old designs do not deceive even the amateur connoisseur. Old
Satsuma is even rarer, and a purchaser needs to be more suspicious of
it in Japan than in London. It is true that the air is full of tales
of impoverished noblemen finally selling their treasures; of forgotten
godowns being rediscovered; and of rich uncles leaving stores of Hirado
and Satsuma to poor relations, whose very rice-box is empty. But the wise
heed not the voice of the charmer. The credulity of the stranger and the
tourist is not greater than the ignorance of residents who have been in
the country for years without learning to beware of almost everything on
which the Emperor’s chrysanthemum crest, the Tokugawa trefoil, or the
Satsuma square and circle stand conspicuous.
The fine modern Satsuma, all small pieces decorated in microscopically
fine work, is painted chiefly by a few artists in Kioto and Osaka,
and their work and signatures are easily recognized. The commoner
Satsuma—large urns, koros, vases, and plates—is made in the province
of Satsuma and in the Awata district of Kioto, but it is decorated
anywhere—Kobé, Kioto, Yokohama, and Tokio all coating it with the blaze
of cheap gilding that catches and delights the foreign eye. Once upon
a time ship-loads of porcelains, bronzes, and lacquer were sold for a
song; fine bells going for ship ballast, and ships’ cooks using veritable
old Satsuma jars to put their drippings in. But that time is not now.
A collection of old Satsuma lately gathered up in Europe by a Japanese
buyer brought five times its cost when disposed of in Japan. Some notion
of the wealth of art works, and of the great stores the country contained
in the old days, may be conveyed by the drain of these twenty years,
since Japanese art began to revolutionize the art world. The Restoration,
the Satsuma rebellion, the adoption of foreign dress for the army and the
court, each sent a flood of rare things into the curio market, and hard
times still bring forth treasures. The great collectors and connoisseurs
are now so generally known that sacrifices of choice curios are made
directly to them by private sale, and not in the open market. Government
has begun to realize the irrecoverable loss of the country, and the
necessity of retaining what still remains, and lists and photographs
are being made of all art treasures stored in the Government and temple
godowns throughout the empire. Much has been destroyed by fire, of
course, and it is said that the priests themselves have put the torch
to their temples at the approach of the official commission that would
have discovered what priceless temple treasures they had sold in times of
need. All the Buddhist establishments suffered loss of revenues after the
Restoration, and only by secretly disposing of the sacred objects in the
godowns were many priests kept from starvation.
While the Dutch were there, Nagasaki had a large trade with China, and
still does a great business with that country in the exportation of dried
fish. It smells to heaven all along the Bund, and in the court-yards of
the large warehouses men and women turn in the sun and pack into bags
oblong brown things that might be either the billets of wood used in
cricket, or old boot-soles. These hard blocks are the dried bonito which,
shaved on a plane, stewed, and eaten with rice, are a staple of food in
both countries, and not unpalatable, as we found while storm-bound on
Fuji.
Almost all the coal used in China and Japan, and by the Asiatic fleets of
the different nations, comes from the mines on the island of Takashima,
at the entrance of Nagasaki’s fiord-like harbor. Cargoes of it have been
sent even to San Francisco with profit, although this soft and very dirty
fuel is much inferior to the Australian coal. The Takashima mines and the
dry-dock at Nagasaki are owned by the Mitsu Bishi company, which retained
those properties when it sold its steamship line to the Government, and
the coal-mine brings in two million yen a year to its owners. Its deepest
shaft is only one hundred and fifty feet down, and barges carry the coal
from the mouth of the shafts to the waiting ships in harbor.
In 1885, the year of the great cholera epidemic, the village of mining
employés was almost depopulated. The harbor was nearly deserted, the
American and English mission stations were closed, and the missionaries
and their families fled to Mount Hiyeizan. Only the Catholic fathers and
the nuns remained, much to the concern of the governor and officials, who
begged them to go. On our way to China we touched at Nagasaki while the
epidemic was at its height, but no passenger was allowed to go ashore,
and all day we kept to the decks that were saturated with carbolic acid.
It took six hours to coal the ship, and from noon to sundown we beheld
a water carnival. As the first coal-barge drew near, a man in the airy
summer costume of the harbor country—which consisted of a rope around
his waist—jumped over the side and swam to the stern of our steamer.
He was like a big, brown frog kicking about in the water, and when he
came dripping up the gang-way the faithful steerage steward gave him a
carbolic spraying with his bucket and brush. The barge was hauled up
alongside and made fast, and our consignment of coal was passed on board
in half-bushel baskets from hand to hand along a line of chanting men and
women. Nothing more primitive could be imagined, for, with block, tackle,
windlass, steam, and a donkey engine on board, it took a hundred pairs
of hands to do their work. At the end of each hour there was a breathing
spell. Many of the women were young and pretty, and some of them had
brought their children, who, throwing back the empty baskets and helping
to pass them along the line, thus began their lives of toil and earned
a few pennies. The passengers threw to the grimy children all the small
Japanese coins they possessed, and when the ship swung loose and started
away their cheerful little sayonaras long rang after us.