_TRAVELS IN MANY LANDS_
THE JAPANESE EMPIRE
A Geographical Reader
BY
HARRY A. FRANCK
WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS, LARGELY FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR
F. A. OWEN PUBLISHING COMPANY
DANSVILLE, NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1927
F. A. OWEN PUBLISHING COMPANY
_Travels in Many Lands—The Japanese Empire_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
FOREWORD
The very best way to give boys and girls a clear idea of just what life
is to their brothers and sisters of other lands is to take them through
those lands. If they cannot go in person (and of course few can), a
well-written story of travel will be a valuable substitute for personal
experience.
To be of educational value to the reader, a book of travel must first of
all be authentic. It must have been written by one who knows at first
hand the things about which he writes. A superficial knowledge gained by
flitting through a country along its main traveled routes is not
sufficient to enable a writer to tell a complete story about it.
Among the notable travelers of our time, probably none has more
thoroughly covered many countries than Harry A. Franck, the author of
this book. His travels have not been mere sight-seeing tours. He has
gone into the out-of-the-way places and lived in the homes of the common
people, to study their habits and manner of living. He has visited their
temples and schools. He has learned something of their language and
talked with them on all manner of subjects so as to become familiar with
their views of life.
From boyhood, Harry Franck had a desire to know about the great outside
world. In 1900, during his first summer vacation while attending the
University of Michigan, he set out, with only $3.18 in his pocket, to
see something of Europe. He worked his way across the ocean on a
cattle-boat, visited the principal cities of England, then Paris and the
Exposition that was being held there. He signed as an “able seaman” for
the return trip and reached Ann Arbor for the fall term, only two weeks
late.
Mr. Franck worked his way through college and intended to make teaching
his profession, but that first European trip gave him an appetite for
more travel. When he was graduated, he started out, with only enough
money to buy supplies for his camera, to work his way around the
world—which he did in sixteen months. After this trip he wrote “A
Vagabond Journey Around the World,” which is regarded as one of the most
remarkable books of the kind ever published. Since then he has written
many other volumes telling of his experiences.
During more than twenty years of travel, Mr. Franck has covered half a
hundred countries. He has journeyed 50,000 miles on foot and at least an
equal distance by primitive native methods. In gathering material for
this volume and for “China” (in the same series), he traveled for two
and a half years through the Far East. He often endured hardship and
faced danger to give the world the truth about the Oriental lands.
This book may be given to children as supplementary geographical reading
with the assurance that every statement is based on actual facts gained
by recent travel. The world to-day is not what it was even a decade ago.
Conditions, customs, the very people themselves have changed; some
greatly, some slightly. A book of this kind to be really helpful must
reflect these changes. The author, having recently returned from the
Orient, is able to write and show pictures of the Far East as it now is.
Mr. Franck carries equipment for taking the best possible pictures and
most of the illustrations in this volume are from photographs taken by
him personally, often under conditions that involved difficulty and
sometimes danger.
As children read this book on the Japanese Empire, we feel sure they
will be impressed with the fact that the people of the whole world are
one great family; that what affects one nation affects all nations to a
greater or less extent. They will realize that while certain lands may
seem “backward” to us who enjoy the conveniences of Western
civilization, we are indebted to them for many things that have made our
civilization possible. For example, the compass, which was essential to
the development of navigation and which, as improved by the Italians,
enabled Columbus to make his great voyage of discovery, was invented by
the Chinese nearly 4000 years ago. Children, like adults, must be led to
see that people everywhere have their virtues and ambitions, their
trials and hardships, and that the misfortune or the prosperity of one
country is reflected in other countries far away.
Knowledge of these facts should prompt us to work for the peace and
well-being of all peoples, particularly through the channel of our
schools. In this connection, Payson Smith, Commissioner of Education for
Massachusetts, has aptly said: “Education in all lands should lead the
youth to recognize those interests which are common to humankind, to
magnify the virtues which all men hold in common, to minimize those
differences and distinctions which divide, and to interpret the history
of race and nation in those terms that are helpful to world progress as
well as to national self-respect.”
THE PUBLISHERS.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to The Century Company, New York, for
their courtesy in allowing us to use the illustrations on the following
pages of this book: 89, 91, 92, 99, 101, 102, 105, 109, 110, 113, 114,
119, 124, 126, 128, 131, 133, 134 (right), 137, 140, 144, 145, 147, 157,
158, 159, 160, 165, 169, 171, 178 (right), 186, 193, 197, 211, 219, 223,
233, 235, 240.
Acknowledgment is made also to the South Manchuria Railway Company, New
York, for their kindness in providing the illustrations used on the
following pages: 213, 242, 244, 245, 247, 248, 249, 250, 253.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I WESTWARD TO THE FAR EAST 11
II WE LAND AND GO TO TOKYO 17
III LIFE IN THE JAPANESE CAPITAL 35
IV LIVING WITH THE JAPANESE 45
V THE JAPANESE AT WORK AND PLAY 61
VI JAPANESE EVENINGS 78
VII I TRAVEL INTO THE NORTH 88
VIII AMONG THE “HAIRY” AINU 98
IX WESTWARD HO! 108
X SOME HOLY PLACES OF JAPAN 122
XI WESTERN AND SOUTHERN JAPAN 139
XII FORMOSA, JAPAN’S TROPICAL ISLAND 151
XIII JAPAN’S WILD MEN 162
XIV KOREA OR CHOSEN 175
XV HOW THE PEOPLE OF KOREA DRESS 185
XVI HOW THE KOREANS LIVE 194
XVII KOREA UNDER JAPANESE RULE 207
XVIII COUNTRY TRIPS IN KOREA 214
XIX THE DIAMOND MOUNTAINS AND NORTHWARD 229
XX JAPAN’S RENTED TERRITORY 243
PRONUNCIATION LIST 255
MAPS
THE JAPANESE EMPIRE 10
THE HEART OF THE JAPANESE EMPIRE 28
FORMOSA 152
KOREA 174
[Illustration: The Japanese Empire]
THE JAPANESE EMPIRE
CHAPTER I
WESTWARD TO THE FAR EAST
For five days we had been rolling across the United States in a Pullman
car, on our way to the opposite side of the globe. We might have set out
from New York across the Atlantic, changing steamships in some European
port and going the whole distance by water. But we had decided to see
our own country first, and after our long journey across the continent,
here we were at last rumbling into the city of Seattle.
The Pacific Ocean was spread before us. Perhaps more people sail from
San Francisco than from Seattle in crossing this largest body of water
on the globe, but the farther north one crosses, the shorter is the
trip. If you will look at your school globe you will see why ships can
reach Japan more quickly from Puget Sound than from the Golden Gate.
Mother Earth’s waistline, the Equator, is the greatest distance around
the world (east and west), and the nearer to it one is, the longer the
distance. So you will understand how we saved a few days on our journey
to Asia by sailing from Seattle; but it hardly paid, for we had winter
weather in April, all the way across.
How limitless the sea about us seemed morning after morning! It was not
hard to realize that this body of water, which often does not live up to
its name (Pacific means “peaceful”), is greater in area than all the
land on the globe. And we were on our way to the largest piece of land
on the earth, the continent of Asia. Years ago, I went eastward to the
Far East. In returning to America, I crossed the Pacific as a sailor on
a sailing vessel and we were more than a month without a glimpse of
anything but the sea and sky. My journey home seemed long indeed.
On this trip westward we did not see another ship for more than a week,
to say nothing of sighting land. Then one morning we saw north of us to
starboard (the right-hand side of the ship as one faces the bow) what
looked like a great motionless iceberg. The Japanese “boy” who tended
our cabin and waited on us at table called it “American country,” and he
was right. For it was one of the Aleutian Islands, a great string of
which stretch southwestward from Alaska and, like it, belong to the
United States. Yet it was a whole week since we had sailed from Seattle,
thinking we had left our native land behind. If we had gone from San
Francisco we should have seen other islands belonging to us, the
Hawaiian group. There we should have stopped for a day, and enjoyed a
delightful run ashore in a garden spot of the tropics. But only seals,
and now and then a few fishermen in the summer time, or navy men flying
across the Pacific, think it worth while to land on the Aleutian
Islands, so closely does each resemble a glacier or a mountaintop
emerging from the sea.
My Son Loses a Birthday
The rest of the trip was the same, day after day, except for one curious
incident. My son, who was born on a British steamer in the Caribbean
Sea, lost his second birthday! When a ship westbound crosses what is
called the international date line, it must move its clocks forward
twenty-four hours, so to speak. Otherwise its calendar will not agree
with the calendar of Asia. It happened that we crossed the international
date line on Tuesday evening, April 24, and when my son woke up next
morning it was Thursday, the 26th! His birthday, the 25th, had
disappeared without a trace, a cake, or a candle, and if he lives to be
a hundred he will have had only ninety-nine birthdays. Had we been
traveling eastward instead of westward, he might have had two
birthdays—two April 25’s—for in that case the ship, on reaching the
international date line, would have added a day to fit the calendar of
the western hemisphere.
[Illustration:
Japanese artists delight to paint the sacred mountain Fujiyama.
]
Another week and we sighted Japan, the eastern edge of the great
continent of Asia which contains almost one-third the land and fully
one-half the people of the earth, a continent larger than both the
Americas plus all other land in the western hemisphere. It was not
really the continent of Asia, of course, that we saw growing ever larger
on the horizon ahead. It was merely one of the islands off its eastern
coast—just as Bermuda, the Bahamas, and the West Indies lie off the
coast of the United States. These islands stretching along the coast of
Asia, however, are not like most of the West Indies politically, for
instead of being colonies of other nations, they form an independent
empire.
Japan has often been called a great string of pearls flung down along
the western side of the Pacific. The Japanese have a legend that their
islands were formed of water dropped from the spear of Izanagi, one of
their gods. Scientists explain the islands in a way much easier to
believe, saying that they are the tops of ancient volcanoes. According
to them Japan is a great mountain chain rising from very deep water.
These mountain tops that are islands stretch all the way from the
climate of Greenland in Sakhalin to that of Cuba in Formosa, a sort of
stepping stone to our Philippines. Some of the “pearls” are large, some
of the others are very small, mere rocks on which no one lives. The
Kuriles hang like a necklace from the peninsula of Kamchatka, and the
Riu Kiu or Ladrones connect the southern end of old Japan with Formosa,
which also belongs to the Empire now. If we could count them all we
should find nearly three thousand islands!
Yet all of them together do not give room enough for the sixty million
people who live on them. Besides, being the tops of mountains, only a
small part of the islands of Japan can be cultivated. But for the same
reason they have many forests, nearly all minerals, countless mountain
streams to furnish water power, and beautiful scenery almost everywhere.
The most important of all the islands that make up Japan is Honshu, on
which at least half the Japanese live. North of it, where the winters
are cold and snow often caps the mountains, is the second largest
island, called Hokkaido, Yezo, or Hokushu. South of Honshu come two
middle-sized islands, Kyushu and Shikoku, and after that the islands
dwindle down through all sizes to those mere uninhabited rocks in the
sea which make Japan the most broken-up country in the world.
How Japan got its present name is interesting. Once the country was
called Yamato, but centuries ago a Chinese emperor sent a man there to
look for medicine or the elixir of life or something of the sort. As the
emperor did not know what name to give it, he had to say Jrr-pen, which
would be translated as “native of the sun” or “place the sun comes
from.” Gradually the Japanese themselves adopted this new name for their
country, and to-day they write those characters for it which in their
language are pronounced Nippon. So it is natural that Japan should be
called the “land of the rising sun,” and that its national flag should
be a white banner bearing a red sun, either round or with rays.