Act I. _Scene: Interior of public bathhouse. Sugimoto Nasaku in the

"OUT OF THE EAST"

REVERIES AND STUDIES IN NEW JAPAN

LAFCADIO HEARN

AUTHOR OF "GLIMPSES OF UNFAMILIAR JAPAN"

"As far as the east is from the west--"

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

The Riverside Press, Cambridge

1895

TO

NISHIDA SENTARŌ

IN DEAR REMEMBRANCE OF

IZUMO DAYS

CONTENTS

I. The Dream of a Summer Day

II. With Kyūshū Students

III. At Hakata

IV. Of the Eternal Feminine

V. Bits of Life and Death

VI. The Stone Buddha

VII. Jiujutsu

VIII. The Bed Bridal

IX. A Wish fulfilled

X. In Yokohama

XI. Yuko: A Reminiscence

"The Dream of a Summer Day" first appeared in the "Japan Daily

Mail."

OUT OF THE EAST

I

THE DREAM OF A SUMMER DAY

I

The hotel seemed to me a paradise, and the maids thereof celestial

beings. This was because I had just fled away from one of the Open

Ports, where I had ventured to seek comfort in a European hotel,

supplied with all "modern improvements." To find myself at ease once

more in a yukata, seated upon cool, soft matting, waited upon by

sweet-voiced girls, and surrounded by things of beauty, was therefore

like a redemption from all the sorrows of the nineteenth century.

Bamboo-shoots and lotus-bulbs were given me for breakfast, and a fan

from heaven for a keepsake. The design upon that fan represented only

the white rushing burst of one great wave on a beach, and sea-birds

shooting in exultation through the blue overhead. But to behold it

was worth all the trouble of the journey. It was a glory of light, a

thunder of motion, a triumph of sea-wind,--all in one. It made me want

to shout when I looked at it.

Between the cedarn balcony pillars I could see the course of the pretty

gray town following the shore-sweep,--and yellow lazy junks asleep at

anchor,--and the opening of the bay between enormous green cliffs,--and

beyond it the blaze of summer to the horizon. In that horizon there

were mountain shapes faint as old memories. And all things but the gray

town, and the yellow junks, and the green cliffs, were blue.

Then a voice softly toned as a wind-bell began to tinkle words of

courtesy into my reverie, and broke it; and I perceived that the

mistress of the palace had come to thank me for the chadai,[1]

and I prostrated myself before her. She was very young, and more

than pleasant to look upon,--like the moth-maidens, like the

butterfly-women, of Kuni-sada. And I thought at once of death;--for

the beautiful is sometimes a sorrow of anticipation.

She asked whither I honorably intended to go, that she might order a

kuruma for me. And I made answer:--

"To Kumamoto. But the name of your house I much wish to know, that I

may always remember it."

"My guest-rooms," she said, "are augustly insignificant, and my maidens

honorably rude. But the house is called the House of Urashima. And now

I go to order a kuruma."

The music of her voice passed; and I felt enchantment falling all about

me,--like the thrilling of a ghostly web. For the name was the name of

the story of a song that bewitches men.

[1] A little gift of money, always made to a hotel by the guest shortly

after his arrival.

II

Once you hear the story, you will never be able to forget it. Every

summer when I find myself on the coast,--especially of very soft,

still days,--it haunts me most persistently. There are many native

versions of it which have been the inspiration for countless works

of art. But the most impressive and the most ancient is found in the

"Manyefushifu," a collection of poems dating from the fifth to the

ninth century. From this ancient version the great scholar Aston

translated it into prose, and the great scholar Chamberlain into both

prose and verse. But for English readers I think the most charming form

of it is Chamberlain's version written for children, in the "Japanese

Fairy-Tale Series,"--because of the delicious colored pictures by

native artists. With that little book before me, I shall try to tell

the legend over again in my own words.

Fourteen hundred and sixteen years ago, the fisher-boy Urashima Taro

left the shore of Suminoyé in his boat.

Summer days were then as now,--all drowsy and tender blue, with only

some light, pure white clouds hanging over the mirror of the sea. Then,

too, were the hills the same,--far blue soft shapes melting into the

blue sky. And the winds were lazy.

And presently the boy, also lazy, let his boat drift as he fished. It

was a queer boat, unpainted and rudderless, of a shape you probably

never saw. But still, after fourteen hundred years, there are such

boats to be seen in front of the ancient fishing-hamlets of the coast

of the Sea of Japan.

After long waiting, Urashima caught something, and drew it up to him.

But he found it was only a tortoise.

Now a tortoise is sacred to the Dragon God of the Sea, and the period

of its natural life is a thousand--some say ten thousand--years. So

that to kill it is very wrong. The boy gently unfastened the creature

from his line, and set it free, with a prayer to the gods.

But he caught nothing more. And the day was very warm; and sea and air

and all things were very, very silent. And a great drowsiness grew upon

him,--and he slept in his drifting boat.

Then out of the dreaming of the sea rose up a beautiful girl,--just

as you can see her in the picture to Professor Chamberlain's

"Urashima,"--robed in crimson and blue, with long black hair flowing

down her back even to her feet, after the fashion of a prince's

daughter fourteen hundred years ago.

Gliding over the waters she came, softly as air; and she stood above

the sleeping boy in the boat, and woke him with a light touch, and

said:--

"Do not be surprised. My father, the Dragon King of the Sea, sent me to

you, because of your kind heart. For to-day you set free a tortoise.

And now we will go to my father's palace in the island where summer

never dies; and I will be your flower-wife if you wish; and we shall

live there happily forever."

And Urashima wondered more and more as he looked upon her; for she

was more beautiful than any human being, and he could not but love

her. Then he took one oar, and he took another, and they rowed away

together,--just as you may still see, off the far western coast, wife

and husband rowing together, when the fishing-boats flit into the

evening gold.

They rowed away softly and swiftly over the silent blue water down into

the south,--till they came to the island where summer never dies,--and

to the palace of the Dragon King of the Sea.

[Here the text of the little book suddenly shrinks away as you read,

and faint blue ripplings flood the page; and beyond them in a fairy

horizon you can see the long low soft shore of the island, and peaked

roofs rising through evergreen foliage--the roofs of the Sea God's

palace--like the palace of the Mikado Yuriaku, fourteen hundred and

sixteen years ago.]

There strange servitors came to receive them in robes of

ceremony--creatures of the Sea, who paid greeting to Urashima as the

son-in-law of the Dragon King.

So the Sea God's daughter became the bride of Urashima; and it was a

bridal of wondrous splendor; and in the Dragon Palace there was great

rejoicing.

And each day for Urashima there were new wonders and new

pleasures:--wonders of the deepest deep brought up by the servants of

the Ocean God;--pleasures of that enchanted land where summer never

dies. And so three years passed.

But in spite of all these things, the fisher-boy felt always a

heaviness at his heart when he thought of his parents waiting alone. So

that at last he prayed his bride to let him go home for a little while

only, just to say one word to his father and mother,--after which he

would hasten hack to her.

At these words she began to weep; and for a long time she continued to

weep silently. Then she said to him: "Since you wish to go, of course

you must go. I fear your going very much; I fear we shall never see

each other again. But I will give you a little box to take with you. It

will help you to come hack to me if you will do what I tell you. Do not

open it. Above all things, do not open it,--no matter what may happen!

Because, if you open it, you will never be able to come hack, and you

will never see me again."

Then she gave him a little lacquered box tied about with a silken cord.

[And that box can be seen unto this day in the temple of Kanagawa, by

the seashore; and the priests there also keep Urashima Tarō's fishing

line, and some strange jewels which he brought back with him from the

realm of the Dragon King.]

But Urashima comforted his bride, and promised her never, never to open

the box--never even to loosen the silken string. Then he passed away

through the summer light over the ever-sleeping sea;--and the shape of

the island where summer never dies faded behind him like a dream;--and

he saw again before him the blue mountains of Japan, sharpening in the

white glow of the northern horizon.

Again at last he glided into his native bay;--again he stood upon its

beach. But as he looked, there came upon him a great bewilderment,--a

weird doubt.

For the place was at once the same, and yet not the same. The cottage

of his fathers had disappeared. There was a village; but the shapes

of the houses were all strange, and the trees were strange, and the

fields, and even the faces of the people. Nearly all remembered

landmarks were gone;--the Shintō temple appeared to have been rebuilt

in a new place; the woods had vanished from the neighboring slopes.

Only the voice of the little stream flowing through the settlement,

and the forms of the mountains, were still the same. All else was

unfamiliar and new. In vain he tried to find the dwelling of his

parents; and the fisherfolk stared wonderingly at him; and he could not

remember having ever seen any of those faces before.

There came along a very old man, leaning on a stick, and Urashima asked

him the way to the house of the Urashima family. But the old man looked

quite astonished, and made him repeat the question many times, and then

cried out:--

"Urashima Tarō! Where do you come from that you do not know the story?

Urashima Tarō! Why, it is more than four hundred years since he was

drowned, and a monument is erected to his memory in the graveyard. The

graves of all his people are in that graveyard,--the old graveyard

which is not now used any more. Urashima Tarō! How can you he so

foolish as to ask where his house is?" And the old man hobbled on,

laughing at the simplicity of his questioner.

But Urashima went to the village graveyard,--the old graveyard that

was not used any more,--and there he found his own tombstone, and

the tombstones of his father and his mother and his kindred, and

the tombstones of many others he had known. So old they were, so

moss-eaten, that it was very hard to read the names upon them.

Then he knew himself the victim of some strange illusion, and he took

his way hack to the beach,--always carrying in his hand the box, the

gift of the Sea God's daughter. But what was this illusion? And what

could be in that box? Or might not that which was in the box be the

cause of the illusion? Doubt mastered faith. Recklessly he broke the

promise made to his beloved;--he loosened the silken cord;--he opened

the box!

Instantly, without any sound, there burst from it a white cold spectral

vapor that rose in air like a summer cloud, and began to drift away

swiftly into the south, over the silent sea. There was nothing else in

the box.

And Urashima then knew that he had destroyed his own happiness,--that

he could never again return to his beloved, the daughter of the Ocean

King. So that he wept and cried out bitterly in his despair.

Yet for a moment only. In another, he himself was changed. An icy chill

shot through all his blood;--his teeth fell out; his face shriveled;

his hair turned white as snow; his limbs withered; his strength ebbed;

he sank down lifeless on the sand, crushed by the weight of four

hundred winters.

Now in the official annals of the Emperors it is written that "in the

twenty-first year of the Mikado Yuriaku, the boy Urashima of Midzunoyé,

in the district of Yosa, in the province of Tango, a descendant of

the divinity Shimanemi, went to Elysium [_Hōraï_] in a fishing-boat."

After this there is no more news of Urashima during the reigns of

thirty-one emperors and empresses--that is, from the fifth until the

ninth century. And then the annals announce that "in the second year

of Tenchiyō, in the reign of the Mikado Go-Junwa, the boy Urashima

returned, and presently departed again, none knew whither."[1]

III

The fairy mistress came back to tell me that everything was ready,

and tried to lift my valise in her slender hands,--which I prevented

her from doing, because it was heavy. Then she laughed, but would not

suffer that I should carry it myself, and summoned a sea-creature with

Chinese characters upon his back. I made obeisance to her; and she

prayed me to remember the unworthy house despite the rudeness of the

maidens. "And you will pay the kurumaya," she said, "only seventy-five

sen."

Then I slipped into the vehicle; and in a few minutes the little gray

town had vanished behind a curve. I was rolling along a white road

overlooking the shore. To the right were pale brown cliffs; to the left

only space and sea.

Mile after mile I rolled along that shore, looking into the infinite

light. All was steeped in blue,--a marvelous blue, like that which

comes and goes in the heart of a great shell. Glowing blue sea met

hollow blue sky in a brightness of electric fusion; and vast blue

apparitions--the mountains of Higo--angled up through the blaze, like

masses of amethyst. What a blue transparency! The universal color

was broken only by the dazzling white of a few high summer clouds,

motionlessly curled above one phantom peak in the offing. They threw

down upon the water snowy tremulous lights. Midges of ships creeping

far away seemed to pull long threads after them,--the only sharp lines

in all that hazy glory. But what divine clouds! White purified spirits

of clouds, resting on their way to the beatitude of Nirvana? Or perhaps

the mists escaped from Urashima's box a thousand years ago?

The gnat of the soul of me flitted out into that dream of blue, 'twixt

sea and sun,--hummed back to the shore of Suminoyé through the luminous

ghosts of fourteen hundred summers. Vaguely I felt beneath me the

drifting of a keel. It was the time of the Mikado Yuriaku. And the

Daughter of the Dragon King said tinklingly,--"Now we will go to my

father's palace where it is always blue." "Why always blue?" I asked.

"Because," she said, "I put all the clouds into the Box." "But I must

go home," I answered resolutely. "Then," she said, "you will pay the

kurumaya only seventy-five sen."

Wherewith I woke into Doyō, or the Period of Greatest Heat, in the

twenty-sixth year of Meiji--and saw proof of the era in a line of

telegraph poles reaching out of sight on the land side of the way. The

kuruma was still fleeing by the shore, before the same blue vision of

sky, peak, and sea; but the white clouds were gone!--and there were

no more cliffs close to the road, but fields of rice and of barley

stretching to far-off hills. The telegraph lines absorbed my attention

for a moment, because on the top wire, and only on the top wire, hosts

of little birds were perched, all with their heads to the road, and

nowise disturbed by our coming. They remained quite still, looking down

upon us as mere passing phenomena. There were hundreds and hundreds

in rank, for miles and miles. And I could not see one having its tail

turned to the road. Why they sat thus, and what they were watching

or waiting for, I could not guess. At intervals I waved my hat and

shouted, to startle the ranks. Whereupon a few would rise up fluttering

and chippering, and drop back again upon the wire in the same position

as before. The vast majority refused to take me seriously.

The sharp rattle of the wheels was drowned by a deep booming; and as

we whirled past a village I caught sight of an immense drum under an

open shed, beaten by naked men.

"O kurumaya!" I shouted--"that--what is it?"

He, without stopping, shouted back:--- "Everywhere now the same thing

is. Much time-in rain has not been: so the gods-to prayers are made,

and drums are beaten." We flashed through other villages; and I saw

and heard more drums of various sizes, and from hamlets invisible,

over miles of parching rice-fields, yet other drums, like echoings,

responded.

[1] See _The Classical Poetry of the Japanese_, by Professor

Chamberlain, in Trübner's _Oriental Series_. According to Western

chronology, Urashima went fishing in 477 A.D., and returned in 825.

IV

Then I began to think about Urashima again. I thought of the pictures

and poems and proverbs recording the influence of the legend upon the

imagination of a race. I thought of an Izumo dancing-girl I saw at

a banquet acting the part of Urashima, with a little lacquered box

whence there issued at the tragical minute a mist of Kyōto incense.

I thought about the antiquity of the beautiful dance,--and therefore

about vanished generations of dancing-girls,--and therefore about dust

in the abstract; which, again, led me to think of dust in the concrete,

as bestirred by the sandals of the kurumaya to whom I was to pay only

seventy-five sen. And I wondered how much of it might be old human

dust, and whether in the eternal order of things the motion of hearts

might be of more consequence than the motion of dust. Then my ancestral

morality took alarm; and I tried to persuade myself that a story which

had lived for a thousand years, gaining fresher charm with the passing

of every century, could only have survived by virtue of some truth in

it. But what truth? For the time being I could find no answer to this

question.

The heat had become very great; and I cried,--

"O kurumaya! the throat of Selfishness is dry; water desirable is."

He, still running, answered:--

"The Village of the Long Beach inside of--not far--a great gush-water

is. There pure august water will be given."

I cried again:--

"O kurumaya!--those little birds as-for, why this way always facing?"

He, running still more swiftly, responded:--"All birds wind-to facing

sit."

I laughed first at my own simplicity; then at my

forgetfulness,--remembering I had been told the same thing, somewhere

or other, when a boy. Perhaps the mystery of Urashima might also have

been created by forgetfulness.

I thought again about Urashima. I saw the Daughter of the Dragon King

waiting vainly in the palace made beautiful for his welcome,--and the

pitiless return of the Cloud, announcing what had happened,--and the

loving uncouth sea-creatures, in their garments of great ceremony,

trying to comfort her. But in the real story there was nothing of all

this; and the pity of the people seemed to be all for Urashima. And I

began to discourse with myself thus:--

Is it right to pity Urashima at all? Of course he was bewildered by the

gods. But who is not bewildered by the gods? What is Life itself but a

bewilderment? And Urashima in his bewilderment doubted the purpose of

the gods, and opened the box. Then he died without any trouble, and the

people built a shrine to him as Urashima Miō-jin. Why, then, so much

pity?

Things are quite differently managed in the West. After disobeying

Western gods, we have still to remain alive and to learn the height and

the breadth and the depth of superlative sorrow. We are not allowed to

die quite comfortably just at the best possible time: much less are we

suffered to become after death small gods in our own right. How can

we pity the folly of Urashima after he had lived so long alone with

visible gods.

Perhaps the fact that we do may answer the riddle. This pity must be

self-pity; wherefore the legend may be the legend of a myriad souls.

The thought of it comes just at a particular time of blue light and

soft wind,--and always like an old reproach. It has too intimate

relation to a season and the feeling of a season not to be also related

to something real in one's life, or in the lives of one's ancestors.

But what was that real something? Who was the Daughter of the Dragon

King? Where was the island of unending summer? And what was the cloud

in the box?

I cannot answer all those questions. I know this only,--which is not at

all new:--

I have memory of a place and a magical time in which the Sun and the

Moon were larger and brighter than now. Whether it was of this life or

of some life before I cannot tell. But I know the sky was very much

more blue, and nearer to the world,--almost as it seems to become above

the masts of a steamer steaming into equatorial summer. The sea was

alive, and used to talk,--and the Wind made me cry out for joy when

it touched me. Once or twice during other years, in divine days lived

among the peaks, I have dreamed just for a moment that the same wind

was blowing,--but it was only a remembrance.

Also in that place the clouds were wonderful, and of colors for which

there are no names at all,--colors that used to make me hungry and

thirsty. I remember, too, that the days were ever so much longer

than these days,--and that every day there were new wonders and new

pleasures for me. And all that country and time were softly ruled by

One who thought only of ways to make me happy. Sometimes I would refuse

to be made happy, and that always caused her pain, although she was

divine;--and I remember that I tried very hard to be sorry. When day

was done, and there fell the great hush of the light before moonrise,

she would tell me stories that made me tingle from head to foot with

pleasure. I have never heard any other stories half so beautiful. And

when the pleasure became too great, she would sing a weird little song

which always brought sleep. At last there came a parting day; and she

wept, and told me of a charm she had given that I must never, never

lose, because it would keep me young, and give me power to return. But

I never returned. And the years went; and one day I knew that I had

lost the charm, and had become ridiculously old.

V

The Village of the Long Beach is at the foot of a green cliff near the

road, and consists of a dozen thatched cottages clustered about a rocky

pool, shaded by pines. The basin overflows with cold water, supplied

by a stream that leaps straight from the heart of the cliff,--just as

folks imagine that a poem ought to spring straight from the heart of a

poet. It was evidently a favorite halting-place, judging by the number

of kuruma and of people resting. There were benches under the trees;

and, after having allayed thirst, I sat down to smoke and to look at

the women washing clothes and the travelers refreshing themselves at

the pool,--while my kurumaya stripped, and proceeded to dash buckets of

cold water over his body. Then tea was brought me by a young man with

a baby on his back; and I tried to play with the baby, which said "Ah,

bah!"

Such are the first sounds uttered by a Japanese babe. But they are

purely Oriental; and in Itomaji should be written _Aba_. And, as

an utterance untaught, _Aba_ is interesting. It is in Japanese

child-speech the word for "good-by,"--precisely the last we would

expect an infant to pronounce on entering into this world of illusion.

To whom or to what is the little soul saying good-by?--to friends in

a previous state of existence still freshly remembered?--to comrades

of its shadowy journey from nobody--knows--where? Such theorizing is

tolerably safe, from a pious point of view, since the child can never

decide for us. What its thoughts were at that mysterious moment of

first speech, it will have forgotten long before it has become able to

answer questions.

Unexpectedly, a queer recollection came to me,--resurrected, perhaps,

by the sight of the young man with the baby,--perhaps by the song of

the water in the cliff: the recollection of a story:--

Long, long ago there lived somewhere among the mountains a poor

wood-cutter and his wife. They were very old, and had no children.

Every day the husband went alone to the forest to cut wood, while the

wife sat weaving at home.

One day the old man went farther into the forest than was his custom,

to seek a certain kind of wood; and he suddenly found himself at

the edge of a little spring he had never seen before. The water was

strangely clear and cold, and he was thirsty; for the day was hot,

and he had been working hard. So he doffed his great straw hat, knelt

down, and took a long drink. That water seemed to refresh him in a most

extraordinary way. Then he caught sight of his own face in the spring,

and started back. It was certainly his own face, but not at all as he

was accustomed to see it in the old mirror at home. It was the face of

a very young man! He could not believe his eyes. He put up both hands

to his head, which had been quite bald only a moment before. It was

covered with thick black hair. And his face had become smooth as a

boy's; every wrinkle was gone. At the same moment he discovered himself

full of new strength. He stared in astonishment at the limbs that had

been so long withered by age; they were now shapely and hard with dense

young muscle. Unknowingly he had drunk at the Fountain of Youth; and

that draught had transformed him.

First, he leaped high and shouted for joy; then he ran home faster than

he had ever run before in his life. When he entered his house his wife

was frightened,--because she took him for a stranger; and when he told

her the wonder, she could not at once believe him. But after a long

time he was able to convince her that the young man she now saw before

her was really her husband; and he told her where the spring was, and

asked her to go there with him.

Then she said: "You have become so handsome and so young that you

cannot continue to love an old woman;--so I must drink some of that

water immediately. But it will never do for both of us to be away from

the house at the same time. Do you wait here while I go." And she ran

to the woods all by herself.

She found the spring and knelt down, and began to drink. Oh! how cool

and sweet that water was! She drank and drank and drank, and stopped

for breath only to begin again.

Her husband waited for her impatiently; he expected to see her come

back changed into a pretty slender girl. But she did not come back at

all. He got anxious, shut up the house, and went to look for her.

When he reached the spring, he could not see her. He was just on the

point of returning when he heard a little wail in the high grass near

the spring. He searched there and discovered his wife's clothes and a

baby,--a very small baby, perhaps six months old!

For the old woman had drunk too deeply of the magical water; she had

drunk herself far back beyond the time of youth into the period of

speechless infancy.

He took up the child in his arms. It looked at him in a sad, wondering

way. He carried it home,--murmuring to it,--thinking strange,

melancholy thoughts.

In that hour, after my reverie about Urashima, the moral of this story

seemed less satisfactory than in former time. Because by drinking too

deeply of life we do not become young.

Naked and cool my kurumaya returned, and said that because of the heat

he could not finish the promised run of twenty-five miles, but that he

had found another runner to take me the rest of the way. For so much as

he himself had done, he wanted fifty-five sen.

It was really very hot--more than 100° I afterwards learned; and far

away there throbbed continually, like a pulsation of the beat itself,

the sound of great drums beating for rain. And I thought of the

Daughter of the Dragon King.

"Seventy-five sen, she told me," I observed;--"and that promised to be

done has not been done. Nevertheless, seventy-five sen to you shall be

given,--because I am afraid of the gods."

And behind a yet unwearied runner I fled away into the enormous

blaze--in the direction of the great drums.

II

WITH KYŪSHŪ STUDENTS

I

The students of the Government College, or Higher Middle School,

can scarcely be called boys; their ages ranging from the average of

eighteen, for the lowest class, to that of twenty-five for the highest.

Perhaps the course is too long. The best pupil can hardly hope to reach

the Imperial University before his twenty-third year, and will require

for his entrance thereinto a mastery of written Chinese as well as a

good practical knowledge of either English and German, or of English

and French.[1] Thus he is obliged to learn three languages besides all

that relates to the elegant literature of his own; and the weight of

his task cannot be understood without knowledge of the fact that his

study of Chinese alone is equal to the labor of acquiring six European

tongues.

The impression produced upon me by the Kumamoto students was very

different from that received on my first acquaintance with my Izumo

pupils. This was not only because the former had left well behind them

the delightfully amiable period of Japanese boyhood, and had developed

into earnest, taciturn men, but also because they represented to a

marked degree what is called Kyūshū character. Kyūshū still remains,

as of yore, the most conservative part of Japan, and Kumamoto, its

chief city, the centre of conservative feeling. This conservatism is,

however, both rational and practical. Kyūshū was not slow in adopting

railroads, improved methods of agriculture, applications of science

to certain industries; but remains of all districts of the Empire

the least inclined to imitation of Western manners and customs. The

ancient samurai spirit still lives on; and that spirit in Kyūshū was

for centuries one that exacted severe simplicity in habits of life.

Sumptuary laws against extravagance in dress and other forms of luxury

used to be rigidly enforced; and though the laws themselves have been

obsolete for a generation, their influence continues to appear in

the very simple attire and the plain, direct manners of the people.

Kumamoto folk are also said to be characterized by their adherence to

traditions of conduct which have been almost forgotten elsewhere, and

by a certain independent frankness in speech and action, difficult

for any foreigner to define, but immediately apparent to an educated

Japanese. And here, too, under the shadow of Kiyomasa's mighty

fortress,--now occupied by an immense garrison,--national sentiment is

declared to be stronger than in the very capital itself,--the spirit

of loyalty and the love of country. Kumamoto is proud of all these

things, and boasts of her traditions. Indeed, she has nothing else to

boast of. A vast, straggling, dull, unsightly town is Kumamoto: there

are no quaint, pretty streets, no great temples, no wonderful gardens.

Burnt to the ground in the civil war of the tenth Meiji, the place

still gives you the impression of a wilderness of flimsy shelters

erected in haste almost before the soil had ceased to smoke. There are

no remarkable places to visit (not, at least, within city limits),--no

sights,--few amusements. For this very reason the college is thought

to be well located: there are neither temptations nor distractions for

its inmates. But for another reason, also, rich men far away in the

capital try to send their sons to Kumamoto. It is considered desirable

that a young man should be imbued with what is called "the Kyūshū

spirit," and should acquire what might be termed the Kyūshū "tone." The

students of Kumamoto are said to be the most peculiar students in the

Empire by reason of this "tone." I have never been able to learn enough

about it to define it well; but it is evidently a something akin to the

deportment of the old Kyūshū samurai. Certainly the students sent from

Tokyo or Kyoto to Kyūshū have to adapt themselves to a very different

_milieu_. The Kumamoto, and also the Kagoshima youths,--whenever not

obliged to don military uniform for drill-hours and other special

occasions,--still cling to a costume somewhat resembling that of the

ancient bushi, and therefore celebrated in sword-songs---the short robe

and hakama reaching a little below the knee, and sandals. The material

of the dress is cheap, coarse, and sober in color; cleft stockings

(_tabi_) are seldom worn, except in very cold weather, or during

long marches, to keep the sandal-thongs from cutting into the flesh.

Without being rough, the manners are not soft; and the lads seem to

cultivate a certain outward hardness of character. They can preserve

an imperturbable exterior under quite extraordinary circumstances, but

under this self-control there is a fiery consciousness of strength

which will show itself in a menacing form on rare occasions. They

deserve to be termed rugged men, too, in their own Oriental way. Some

I know, who, though born to comparative wealth, find no pleasure so

keen as that of trying how much physical hardship they can endure. The

greater number would certainly give up their lives without hesitation

rather than their high principles. And a rumor of national danger

would instantly transform the whole four hundred into a body of iron

soldiery. But their outward demeanor is usually impassive to a degree

that is difficult even to understand.

For a long time I used to wonder in vain what feelings, sentiments,

ideas might be hidden beneath all that unsmiling placidity. The native

teachers, _de facto_ government officials, did not appear to be on

intimate terms with any of their pupils: there was no trace of that

affectionate familiarity I had seen in Izumo; the relation between

instructors and instructed seemed to begin and end with the bugle-calls

by which classes were assembled and dismissed. In this I afterwards

found myself partly mistaken; still such relations as actually existed

were for the most part formal rather than natural, and quite unlike

those old-fashioned, loving sympathies of which the memory had always

remained with me since my departure from the Province of the Gods.

But later on, at frequent intervals, there came to me suggestions of an

inner life much more attractive than this outward seeming,--hints of

emotional individuality. A few I obtained in casual conversations, but

the most remarkable in written themes. Subjects given for composition

occasionally coaxed out some totally unexpected blossoming of thoughts

and feelings. A very pleasing fact was the total absence of any false

shyness, or indeed shyness of any sort: the young men were not ashamed

to write exactly what they felt or hoped. They would write about their

homes, about their reverential love to their parents, about happy

experiences of their childhood, about their friendships, about their

adventures during the holidays; and this often in a way I thought

beautiful, because of its artless, absolute sincerity. After a number

of such surprises, I learned to regret keenly that I had not from the

outset kept notes upon all the remarkable compositions received. Once

a week I used to read aloud and correct in class a selection from the

best handed in, correcting the remainder at home. The very best I could

not always presume to read aloud and criticise for the general benefit,

because treating of matters too sacred to be methodically commented

upon, as the following examples may show.

I had given as a subject for English composition this question: "What

do men remember longest?" One student answered that we remember our

happiest moments longer than we remember all other experiences, because

it is in the nature of every rational being to try to forget what is

disagreeable or painful as soon as possible. I received many still

more ingenious answers,--some of which gave proof of a really keen

psychological study of the question. But I liked best of all the simple

reply of one who thought that painful events are longest remembered.

He wrote exactly what follows: I found it needless to alter a single

word:--

"What do men remember longest? I think men remember longest that which

they hear or see under painful circumstances.

"When I was only four years old, my dear, dear mother died. It was a

winter's day. The wind was blowing hard in the trees, and round the

roof of our house. There were no leaves on the branches of the trees.

Quails were whistling in the distance,--making melancholy sounds. I

recall something I did. As my mother was lying in bed,--a little

before she died,--I gave her a sweet orange. She smiled and took it,

and tasted it. It was the last time she smiled.... From the moment

when she ceased to breathe to this hour more than sixteen years have

elapsed. But to me the time is as a moment. Now also it is winter. The

winds that blew when my mother died blow just as then; the quails utter

the same cries; all things are the same. But my mother has gone away,

and will never come back again."

The following, also, was written in reply to the same question:--

"The greatest sorrow in my life was my father's death. I was seven

years old. I can remember that he had been ill all day, and that my

toys had been put aside, and that I tried to be very quiet. I had

not seen him that morning, and the day seemed very long. At last I

stole into my father's room, and put my lips close to his cheek, and

whispered, '_Father! father!_'--and his cheek was very cold. He did

not speak. My uncle came, and carried me out of the room, but said

nothing. Then I feared my father would die, because his cheek felt cold

just as my little sister's had been when she died. In the evening a

great many neighbors and other people came to the house, and caressed

me, so that I was happy for a time. But they carried my father away

during the night, and I never saw him after."

[1] This essay was written early in 1894. Since then, the study of

French and of German has been made optional instead of obligatory, and

the Higher School course considerably shortened, by a wise decision

of the late Minister of Education, Mr. Inouye. It is to be hoped that

measures will eventually be taken to render possible making the study

of English also optional. Under existing conditions the study is forced

upon hundreds who can never obtain any benefit from it.

II

From the foregoing one might suppose a simple style characteristic

of English compositions in Japanese higher schools. Yet the reverse

is the fact. There is a general tendency to prefer big words to

little ones, and long complicated sentences to plain short periods.

For this there are some reasons which would need a philological

essay by Professor Chamberlain to explain. But the tendency in

itself--constantly strengthened by the absurd text-books in use--can

be partly understood from the fact that the very simplest forms of

English expression are the most obscure to a Japanese,--because they

are idiomatic. The student finds them riddles, since the root-ideas

behind them are so different from his own that, to explain those ideas,

it is first necessary to know something of Japanese psychology; and in

avoiding simple idioms he follows instinctively the direction of least

resistance.

I tried to cultivate an opposite tendency by various devices. Sometimes

I would write familiar stories for the class, all in simple sentences,

and in words of one syllable. Sometimes I would suggest themes to

write upon, of which the nature almost compelled simple treatment. Of

course I was not very successful in my purpose, but one theme chosen

in relation to it--"My First Day at School"--evoked a large number of

compositions that interested me in quite another way, as revelations

of sincerity of feeling and of character. I offer a few selections,

slightly abridged and corrected. Their naïveté is not their least

charm,--especially if one reflect they are not the recollections of

boys. The following seemed to me one of the best:--

"I could not go to school until I was eight years old. I had often

begged my father to let me go, for all my playmates were already

at school; but he would not, thinking I was not strong enough. So I

remained at home, and played with my brother.

"My brother accompanied me to school the first day. He spoke to the

teacher, and then left me. The teacher took me into a room, and

commanded me to sit on a bench, then he also left me. I felt sad as I

sat there in silence: there was no brother to play with now,--only many

strange boys. A bell ring twice; and a teacher entered our classroom,

and told us to take out our slates. Then he wrote a Japanese character

on the blackboard, and told us to copy it. That day he taught us how to

write two Japanese words, and told us some story about a good boy. When

I returned home I ran to my mother, and knelt down by her side to tell

her what the teacher had taught me. Oh! how great my pleasure then was!

I cannot even tell how I felt,--much less write it. I can only say that

I then thought the teacher was a more learned man than father, or any

one else whom I knew,--the most awful, and yet the most kindly person

in the world."

The following also shows the teacher in a very pleasing light:--

"My brother and sister took me to school the first day. I thought I

could sit beside them in the school, as I used to do at home; but

the teacher ordered me to go to a classroom which was very far away

from that of my brother and sister. I insisted upon remaining with my

brother and sister; and when the teacher said that could not be, I

cried and made a great noise. Then they allowed my brother to leave

his own class, and accompany me to mine. But after a while I found

playmates in my own class; and then I was not afraid to be without my

brother."

This also is quite pretty and true:--

"A teacher--(I think, the head master) called me to him, and told me

that I must become a great scholar. Then he bade some man take me into

a classroom where there were forty or fifty scholars. I felt afraid and

pleased at the same time, at the thought of having so many playfellows.

They looked at me shyly, and I at them. I was at first afraid to speak

to them. Little boys are innocent like that. But after a while, in some

way or other, we began to play together; and they seemed to be pleased

to have me play with them."

The above three compositions were by young men who had their first

schooling under the existing educational system, which prohibits

harshness on the part of masters. But it would seem that the teachers

of the previous era were less tender. Here are three compositions by

older students who appear to have had quite a different experience:--

1. "Before Meiji, there were no such public schools in Japan as there

are now. But in every province there was a sort of student society

composed of the sons of Samurai. Unless a man were a Samurai, his son

could not enter such a society. It was under the control of the Lord

of the province, who appointed a director to rule the students. The

principal study of the Samurai was that of the Chinese language and

literature. Most of the Statesmen of the present government were

once students in such Samurai schools. Common citizens and country,

people had to send their sons and daughters to primary schools called

_Terakoya_, where all the teaching was usually done by one teacher.

It consisted of little more than reading, writing, calculating, and

some moral instruction. We could learn to write an ordinary letter,

or a very easy essay. At eight years old, I was sent to a terakoya,

as I was not the son of a Samurai. At first I did not want to go; and

every morning my grandfather had to strike me with his stick to make

me go. The discipline at that school was very severe. If a boy did

not obey, he was beaten with a bamboo,--being held down to receive

his punishment. After a year, many public schools were opened: and I

entered a public school."

2. "A great gate, a pompous building, a very large dismal room with

benches in rows,--these I remember. The teachers looked very severe;

I did not like their faces. I sat on a bench in the room and felt

hateful. The teachers seemed unkind; none of the boys knew me, or

spoke to me. A teacher stood up by the blackboard, and began to call

the names. He had a whip in his band. He called my name. I could not

answer, and burst out crying. So I was sent borne. That was my first

day at school."

3. "When I was seven years old I was obliged to enter a school in my

native village. My father gave me two or three writing-brushes and some

paper;--I was very glad to get them, and promised to study as earnestly

as I could. But how unpleasant the first day at school was! When I went

to the school, none of the students knew me, and I found myself without

a friend. I entered a classroom. A teacher, with a whip in his hand,

called my name in a _large_ voice. I was very much surprised at it,

and so frightened that I could not help crying. The boys laughed very

loudly at me; but the teacher scolded them, and whipped one of them,

and then said to me, 'Don't be afraid of my voice: what is your name?'

I told him my name, snuffling. I thought then that school was a very

disagreeable place, where we could neither weep nor laugh. I wanted

only to go back home at once; and though I felt it was out of my power

to go, I could scarcely bear to stay until the lessons were over. When

I returned home at last, I told my father what I had felt at school,

and said: 'I do not like to go to school at all.'"

Needless to say the next memory is of Meiji. It gives, as a

composition, evidence of what we should call in the West, character.

The suggestion of self-reliance at six years old is delicious: so is

the recollection of the little sister taking off her white tabi to deck

her child-brother on his first school-day:--

"I was six years old. My mother awoke me early. My sister gave me her

own stockings (_tabi_) to wear,--and I felt very happy. Father ordered

a servant to attend me to the school; but I refused to be accompanied:

I wanted to feel that I could go all by myself. So I went alone; and,

as the school was not far from the house, I soon found myself in front

of the gate. There I stood still a little while, because I knew none

of the children I saw going in. Boys and girls were passing into

the schoolyard, accompanied by servants or relatives; and inside I

saw others playing games which filled me with envy. But all at once

a little boy among the players saw me, and with a laugh came running

to me. Then I was very happy. I walked to and fro with him, hand in

hand. At last a teacher called all of us into a schoolroom, and made a

speech which I could not understand. After that we were free for the

day because it was the first day. I returned home with my friend. My

parents were waiting for me, with fruits and cakes; and my friend and I

ate them together."

Another writes:--

"When I first went to school I was six years old. I remember only that

my grandfather carried my books and slate for me, and that the teacher

and the boys were very, very, very kind and good to me,--so that I

thought school was a paradise in this world, and did not want to return

home."

I think this little bit of natural remorse is also worth the writing

down:--

"I was eight years old when I first went to school. I was a bad boy.

I remember on the way home from school I had a quarrel with one of

my playmates,--younger than I. He threw a very little stone at me

which hit me. I took a branch of a tree lying in the road, and struck

him across the face with all my might. Then I ran away, leaving him

crying in the middle of the road. My heart told me what I had done.

After reaching my home, I thought I still heard him crying. My little

playmate is not any more in this world now. Can any one know my

feelings?"

All this capacity of young men to turn back with perfect naturalness

of feeling to scenes of their childhood appears to me essentially

Oriental. In the Occident men seldom begin to recall their childhood

vividly before the approach of the autumn season of life. But childhood

in Japan is certainly happier than in other lands, and therefore

perhaps is regretted earlier in adult life. The following extract from

a student's record of his holiday experience touchingly expresses such

regret:

"During the spring vacation, I went home to visit my parents. Just

before the end of the holidays, when it was nearly time for me to

return to the college, I heard that the students of the middle school

of my native town were also going to Kumamoto on an excursion, and I

resolved to go with them.

"They marched in military order with their rifles. I had no rifle, so

I took my place in the rear of the column. We marched all day, keeping

time to military songs which we sung all together.

"In the evening we reached Soyeda. The teachers and students of the

Soyeda school, and the chief men of the village, welcomed us. Then

we were separated into detachments, each of which was quartered in a

different hotel. I entered a hotel, with the last detachment, to rest

for the night.

"But I could not sleep for a long time. Five years before, on a similar

'military excursion,' I had rested in that very hotel, as a student of

the same middle school. I remembered the fatigue and the pleasure;

and I compared my feelings of the moment with the recollection of my

feelings then as a boy. I could not help a weak wish to be young again

like my companions. They were fast asleep, tired with their long march;

and I sat up and looked at their faces. How pretty their faces seemed

in that young sleep!"

III

The preceding selections give no more indication of the general

character of the students' compositions than might be furnished by any

choice made to illustrate a particular feeling. Examples of ideas and

sentiments from themes of a graver kind would show variety of thought

and not a little originality in method, but would require much space.

A few notes, however, copied out of my class-register, will be found

suggestive, if not exactly curious.

At the summer examinations of 1893 I submitted to the graduating

classes, for a composition theme, the question, "What is eternal in

literature?" I expected original answers, as the subject had never

been discussed by us, and was certainly new to the pupils, so far as

their knowledge of Western thought was concerned. Nearly all the papers

proved interesting. I select twenty replies as examples. Most of them

immediately preceded a long discussion, but a few were embodied in the

text of the essay:--

1. "Truth and Eternity are identical: these make the Full Circle,--in

Chinese, Yen-Man."

2. "All that in human life and conduct which is according to the laws

of the Universe."

3. "The lives of patriots, and the teachings of those who have given

pure maxims to the world."

4. "Filial Piety, and the doctrine of its teachers. Vainly the books

of Confucius were burned during the Shin dynasty; they are translated

to-day into all the languages of the civilized world."

5. "Ethics, and scientific truth."

6. "Both evil and good are eternal, said a Chinese sage. We should read

only that which is good."

7. "The great thoughts and ideas of our ancestors."

8. "For a thousand million centuries truth is truth."

9. "Those ideas of right and wrong upon which all schools of ethics

agree."

10. "Books which rightly explain the phenomena of the Universe."

11. "Conscience alone is unchangeable. Wherefore books about ethics

based upon conscience are eternal."

12. "Reasons for noble action: these remain unchanged by time."

13. "Books written upon the best moral means of giving the greatest

possible happiness to the greatest possible number of people,--that is,

to mankind."

14. "The Gokyō (the Five Great Chinese Classics)."

15. "The holy books of China, and of the Buddhists."

16. "All that which teaches the Right and Pure Way of human conduct."

17. "The Story of Kusunoki Masaskigé, who vowed to be reborn seven

times to fight against the enemies of his Sovereign."

18. "Moral sentiment, without which the world would be only an enormous

clod of earth, and all books waste-paper."

19. "The Tao-te-King."

20. Same as 19, but with this comment. "He who reads that which is

eternal, _his soul shall hover eternally in the Universe._"

IV

Some particularly Oriental sentiments were occasionally drawn out

through discussions. The discussions were based upon stories which I

would relate to a class by word of mouth, and invite written or spoken

comment about. The results of such a discussion are hereafter set

forth. At the time it took place, I had already told the students of

the higher classes a considerable number of stories. I had told them

many of the Greek myths; among which that of Œdipus and the Sphinx

seemed especially to please them, because of the hidden moral, and

that of Orpheus, like all our musical legends, to have no interest

for them. I had also told them a variety of our most famous modern

stories. The marvelous tale of "Rappacini's Daughter" proved greatly

to their liking; and the spirit of Hawthorne might have found no

little ghostly pleasure in their interpretation of it. "Monos and

Daimonos" found favor; and Poe's wonderful fragment, "Silence," was

appreciated after a fashion that surprised me. On the other hand,

the story of "Frankenstein" impressed them very little. None took it

seriously. For Western minds the tale must always hold a peculiar

horror, because of the shock it gives to feelings evolved under

the influence of Hebraic ideas concerning the origin of life, the

tremendous character of divine prohibitions, and the awful punishments

destined for those who would tear the veil from Nature's secrets, or

mock, even unconsciously, the work of a jealous Creator. But to the

Oriental mind, unshadowed by such grim faith,--feeling no distance

between gods and men,--conceiving life as a multiform whole ruled by

one uniform law that shapes the consequence of every act into a reward

or a punishment,--the ghastliness of the story makes no appeal. Most of

the written criticisms showed me that it was generally regarded as a

comic or semi-comic parable. After all this, I was rather puzzled one

morning by the request for a "very strong moral story of the Western

kind."

I suddenly resolved--though knowing I was about to venture on dangerous

ground--to try the full effect of a certain Arthurian legend which I

felt sure somebody would criticise with a vim. The moral is rather

more than "very strong;" and for that reason I was curious to hear the

result.

So I related to them the story of Sir Bors, which is in the sixteenth

book of Sir Thomas Mallory's "Morte d'Arthur,"--"how Sir Bors met his

brother Sir Lionel taken and beaten with thorns,--and of a maid which

should have been dishonored,--and how Sir Bors left his brother to

rescue the damsel,---and how it was told them that Lionel was dead."

But I did not try to explain to them the knightly idealism imaged in

the beautiful old tale, as I wished to hear them comment, in their own

Oriental way, upon the bare facts of the narrative.

Which they did as follows:--

"The action of Mallory's knight," exclaimed Iwai, "was contrary even

to the principles of Christianity,--if it be true that the Christian

religion declares all men brothers. Such conduct might be right if

there were no society in the world. But while any society exists

which is formed of families, family love must be the strength of that

society; and the action of that knight was against family love, and

therefore against society. The principle he followed was opposed not

only to all society, but was contrary to all religion, and contrary to

the morals of all countries."

"The story is certainly immoral," said Orito. "What it relates is

opposed to all our ideas of love and loyalty, and even seems to us

contrary to nature. Loyalty is not a mere duty. It must be from the

heart, or it is not loyally. It must be an inborn feeling. And it is in

the nature of every Japanese."

"It is a horrible story," said Andō. "Philanthropy itself is only an

expansion of fraternal love. The man who could abandon his own brother

to death merely to save a strange woman was a wicked man. Perhaps he

was influenced by passion."

"No," I said: "you forget I told you that there was no selfishness in

his action,--that it must be interpreted as a heroism."

"I think the explanation of the story must be religious," said

Yasukochi. "It seems strange to us; but that may be because we do

not understand Western ideas very well. Of course to abandon one's

own brother in order to save a strange woman is contrary to all our

knowledge of right. But if that knight was a man of pure heart, he

must have imagined himself obliged to do it because of some promise

or some duty. Even then it must have seemed to him a very painful and

disgraceful thing to do, and he could not have done it without feeling

that he was acting against the teaching of his own heart."

"There you are right," I answered. "But you should also know that the

sentiment obeyed by Sir Bors is one which still influences the conduct

of brave and noble men in the societies of the West,--even of men who

cannot be called religious at all in the common sense of that word."

"Still, we think it a very bad sentiment," said Iwai; "and we would

rather hear another story about another form of society."

Then it occurred to me to tell them the immortal story of Alkestis. I

thought for the moment that the character of Herakles in that divine

drama would have a particular charm for them. But the comments proved I

was mistaken. No one even referred to Herakles. Indeed I ought to have

remembered that our ideals of heroism, strength of purpose, contempt of

death, do not readily appeal to Japanese youth. And this for the reason

that no Japanese gentleman regards such qualities as exceptional.

He considers heroism a matter of course--something belonging to

manhood and inseparable from it. He would say that a woman may be

afraid without shame, but never a man. Then as a mere idealization of

physical force, Herakles could interest Orientals very little: their

own mythology teems with impersonations of strength; and, besides,

dexterity, sleight, quickness, are much more admired by a true Japanese

than strength. No Japanese boy would sincerely wish to be like the

giant Benkei; but Yoshitsune, the slender, supple conqueror and master

of Benkei, remains an ideal of perfect knighthood dear to the hearts of

all Japanese youth.

Kamekawa said:--

"The story of Alkestis, or at least the story of Admetus, is a story

of cowardice, disloyalty, immorality. The conduct of Admetus was

abominable. His wife was indeed noble and virtuous--too good a wife for

so shameless a man. I do not believe that the father of Admetus would

not have been willing to die for his son if his son had been worthy. I

think he would gladly have died for his son had he not been disgusted

by the cowardice of Admetus. And how disloyal the subjects of Admetus

were! The moment they heard of their king's danger they should have

rushed to the palace, and humbly begged that they might be allowed to

die in his stead. However cowardly or cruel he might have been, that

was their duty. They were his subjects. They lived by his favor. Yet

how disloyal they were! A country inhabited by such shameless people

must soon have gone to ruin. Of course, as the story says, 'it is sweet

to live.' Who does not love life? Who does not dislike to die? But no

brave man--no loyal man even--should so much as think about his life

when duty requires him to give it."

"But," said Midzuguchi, who had joined us a little too late to hear

the beginning of the narration, "perhaps Admetus was actuated by

filial piety. Had I been Admetus, and found no one among my subjects

willing to die for me, I should have said to my wife: 'Dear wife, I

cannot leave my father alone now, because he has no other son, and his

grandsons are still too young to be of use to him. Therefore, if you

love me, please die in my place.'"

"You do not understand the story," said Yasukochi. "Filial piety did

not exist in Admetus. He wished that his father should have died for

him."

"Ah!" exclaimed the apologist in real surprise,--"that is not a nice

story, teacher!"

"Admetus," declared Kawabuchi, "was everything which is bad. He was a

hateful coward, because he was afraid to die; he was a tyrant, because

he wanted his subjects to die for him; he was an unfilial son because

he wanted his old father to die in his place; and he was an unkind

husband, because he asked his wife--a weak woman with little children

--to do what _he_ was afraid to do as a man. What could be baser than

Admetus?"

"But Alkestis," said Iwai,--"Alkestis was all that is good. For she

gave up her children and everything,--even like the Buddha [_Shaka_]

himself. Yet she was very young. How true and brave! The beauty of

her face might perish like a spring-blossoming, but the beauty of

her act should be remembered for a thousand times a thousand years.

Eternally her soul will hover in the universe. Formless she is now; but

it is the Formless who teach us more kindly than our kindest living

teachers,--the souls of all who have done pure, brave, wise deeds."

"The wife of Admetus," said Kumamoto, inclined to austerity in his

judgments, "was simply obedient. She was not entirely blameless. For,

before her death, it was her highest duty to have severely reproached

her husband for his foolishness. And this she did not do,--not at least

as our teacher tells the story."

"Why Western people should think that story beautiful," said Zaitsu,

"is difficult for us to understand. There is much in it which fills

us with anger. For some of us cannot but think of our parents when

listening to such a story. After the Revolution of Meiji, for a time,

there was much suffering. Often perhaps our parents were hungry; yet

we always had plenty of food. Sometimes they could scarcely get money

to live; yet we were educated. When we think of all it cost them to

educate us, all the trouble it gave them to bring us up, all the love

they gave us, and all the pain we caused them in our foolish childhood,

then we think we can never, never do enough for them. And therefore we

do not like that story of Admetus."

The bugle sounded for recess. I went to the parade-ground to take

a smoke. Presently a few students joined me, with their rifles and

bayonets--for the next hour was to be devoted to military drill. One

said: "Teacher, we should like another subject for composition,--not

_too_ easy."

I suggested: "How would you like this for a subject, 'What is most

difficult to understand?'"

"That," said Kawabuchi, "is not hard to answer,--the correct use of

English prepositions."

"In the study of English by Japanese students,--yes," I answered. "But

I did not mean any special difficulty of that kind. I meant to write

your ideas about what is most difficult for all men to understand."

"The universe?" queried Yasukochi. "That is too large a subject."

"When I was only six years old," said Orito, "I used to wander along

the seashore, on fine days, and wonder at the greatness of the world.

Our home was by the sea. Afterwards I was taught that the problem of

the universe will at last pass away, like smoke."

"I think," said Miyakawa, "that the hardest of all things to understand

is why men live in the world. From the time a child is born, what does

he do? He eats and drinks; he feels happy and sad; he sleeps at night;

he awakes in the morning. He is educated; he grows up; he marries; he

has children; he gets old; his hair turns first gray and then white; he

becomes feebler and feebler,--and he dies.

"What does he do all his life? All his real work in this world is to

eat and to drink, to sleep and to rise up; since, whatever be his

occupation as a citizen, he toils only that he may be able to continue

doing this. But for what purpose does a man really come into the world?

Is it to eat? Is it to drink? Is it to sleep? Every day he does exactly

the same thing, and yet he is not tired! It is strange.

"When rewarded, he is glad; when punished, he is sad. If he becomes

rich, he thinks himself happy. If he becomes poor, he is very unhappy.

Why is he glad or sad according to his condition? Happiness and sadness

are only temporary things. Why does he study hard? No matter how great

a scholar he may become, what is there left of him when he is dead?

Only bones."

Miyakawa was the merriest and wittiest in his class; and the

contrast between his joyous character and his words seemed to me

almost startling. But such swift glooms of thought--especially since

Meiji--not unfrequently make apparition in quite young Oriental minds.

They are fugitive as shadows of summer clouds; they mean less than they

would signify in Western adolescence; and the Japanese lives not by

thought, nor by emotion, but by duty. Still, they are not haunters to

encourage.

"I think," said I, "a much better subject for you all would be the Sky:

the sensations which the sky creates in us when we look at it on such a

day as this. See how wonderful it is!"

It was blue to the edge of the world, with never a floss of cloud.

There were no vapors in the horizon; and very far peaks, invisible on

most days, now-massed into the glorious light, seemingly diaphanous.

Then Kumashiro, looking up to the mighty arching, uttered with

reverence the ancient Chinese words:--

"_What thought is so high as It is? What mind is so wide?_"

"To-day," I said, "is beautiful as any summer day could be,--only that

the leaves are falling, and the semi are gone."

"Do you like semi, teacher?" asked Mori.

"It gives me great pleasure to hear them," I answered. "We have no such

cicadæ in the West."

"Human life is compared to the life of a semi," said Orito,--"_utsuzemi

no yo_. Brief as the song of the semi all human joy is, and youth. Men

come for a season and go, as do the semi."

"There are no semi now," said Yasukochi; "perhaps the teacher thinks it

is sad."

"I do not think it sad," observed Noguchi. "They hinder us from study.

I hate the sound they make. When we hear that sound in summer, and are

tired, it adds fatigue to fatigue so that we fall asleep. If we try to

read or write, or even think, when we hear that sound we have no more

courage to do anything. Then we wish that all those insects were dead."

"Perhaps you like the dragon-flies," I suggested. "They are flashing

all around us; but they make no sound."

"Every Japanese likes dragon-flies," said Ivumashiro. "Japan, you know,

is called Akitsusu, which means the Country of the Dragon-fly."

We talked about different kinds of dragon-flies; and they told me of

one I had never seen,--the Shōro-tombo, or "Ghost dragon-fly," said

to have some strange relation to the dead. Also they spoke of the

Yamma--a very large kind of dragon-fly, and related that in certain

old songs the samurai were called Yamma, because the long hair of

a young warrior used to be tied up into a knot in the shape of a

dragon-fly.

A bugle sounded; and the voice of the military officer rang out,--

"_AtsumarÉ!_" (fall in!) But the young men lingered an instant to ask,--

"Well, what shall it be, teacher?--that which is most difficult to

understand?"

"No," I said, "the Sky."

And all that day the beauty of the Chinese utterance haunted me, filled

me like an exaltation:--

"_What thought is so high as It is? What mind is so wide?_"

V

There is one instance in which the relation between teachers and

students is not formal at all,--one precious survival of the mutual

love of other days in the old Samurai Schools. By all the aged

Professor of Chinese is reverenced; and his influence over the young

men is very great. With a word he could calm any outburst burst of

anger; with a smile he could quicken any generous impulse. For he

represents to the lads their ideal of all that was brave, true, noble,

in the elder life,--the Soul of Old Japan.

His name, signifying "Moon-of-Autumn," is famous in his own land. A

little book has been published about him, containing his portrait. He

was once a samurai of high rank belonging to the great clan of Aidzu.

He rose early to positions of trust and influence. He has been a leader

of armies, a negotiator between princes, a statesman, a ruler of

provinces--all that any knight could be in the feudal era. But in the

intervals of military or political duty he seems to have always been

a teacher. There are few such teachers. There are few such scholars.

Yet to see him now, you would scarcely believe how much he was once

feared--though loved--by the turbulent swordsmen under his rule.

Perhaps there is no gentleness so full of charm as that of the man of

war noted for sternness in his youth.

When the Feudal System made its last battle for existence, he heard the

summons of his lord, and went into that terrible struggle in which

even the women and little children of Aidzu took part. But courage and

the sword alone could not prevail against the new methods of war;--the

power of Aidzu was broken; and he, as one of the leaders of that power,

was long a political prisoner.

But the victors esteemed him; and the Government he had fought against

in all honor took him into its service to teach the new generations.

From younger teachers these learned Western science and Western

languages. But he still taught that wisdom of the Chinese sages which

is eternal,--and loyalty, and honor, and all that makes the man.

Some of his children passed away from his sight. But he could not feel

alone; for all whom he taught were as sons to him, and so reverenced

him. And he became old, very old, and grew to look like a god,--like a

Kami-Sama.

The Kami-Sama in art bear no likeness to the Buddhas. These more

ancient divinities have no downcast gaze, no meditative impassiveness.

They are lovers of Nature; they haunt her fairest solitudes, and

enter into the life of her trees, and speak in her waters, and hover

in her winds. Once upon the earth they lived as men; and the people of

the land are their posterity. Even as divine ghosts, they remain very

human, and of many dispositions. They are the emotions, they are the

sensations of the living. But as figuring in legend and the art born

of legend, they are mostly very pleasant to know. I speak not of the

cheap art which treats them irreverently in these skeptical days, but

of the older art explaining the sacred texts about them. Of course such

representations vary greatly. But were you to ask what is the ordinary

traditional aspect of a Kami, I should answer: "An ancient smiling man

of wondrously gentle countenance, having a long white beard, and all

robed in white with a white girdle."

Only that the girdle of the aged Professor was of black silk, just such

a vision of Shintō he seemed when he visited me the last time.

He had met me at the college, and had said: "I know there has been a

congratulation at your house; and that I did not call was not because I

am old or because your house is far, but only because I have been long

ill. But you will soon see me."

So one luminous afternoon he came, bringing gifts of

felicitation,--gifts of the antique high courtesy, simple in

themselves, yet worthy a prince: a little plum-tree, every branch and

spray one snowy dazzle of blossoms; a curious and pretty bamboo vessel

full of wine; and two scrolls bearing beautiful poems,--texts precious

in themselves as the work of a rare calligrapher and poet; otherwise

precious to me, because written by his own hand. Everything which

he said to me I do not fully know. I remember words of affectionate

encouragement about my duties,--some wise, keen advice,--a strange

story of his youth. But all was like a pleasant dream; for his mere

presence was a caress, and the fragrance of his flower-gift seemed as a

breathing from the Takama-no-hara. And as a Kami should come and go, so

he smiled and went,--leaving all things hallowed. The little plum-tree

has lost its flowers: another winter must pass before it blooms again.

But something very sweet still seems to haunt the vacant guest-room.

Perhaps only the memory of that divine old man;--perhaps a spirit

ancestral, some Lady of the Past, who followed his steps all viewlessly

to our threshold that day, and lingers with me awhile, just because he

loved me.

III

AT HAKATA

I

Traveling by kuruma one can only see and dream. The jolting makes

reading too painful; the rattle of the wheels and the rush of the

wind render conversation impossible,--even when the road allows of a

fellow-traveler's vehicle running beside your own. After having become

familiar with the characteristics of Japanese scenery, you are not apt

to notice during such travel, except at long intervals, anything novel

enough to make a strong impression. Most often the way winds through

a perpetual sameness of rice-fields, vegetable farms, tiny thatched

hamlets,--and between interminable ranges of green or blue hills.

Sometimes, indeed, there are startling spreads of color, as when you

traverse a plain all burning yellow with the blossoming of the natané,

or a valley all lilac with the flowering of the gengebana; but these

are the passing splendors of very short seasons. As a rule, the vast

green monotony appeals to no faculty: you sink into reverie or nod,

perhaps, with the wind in your face, to be wakened only by some jolt of

extra violence.

Even so, on my autumn way to Hakata, I gaze and dream and nod by

turns. I watch the flashing of the dragon-flies, the infinite network

of rice-field paths spreading out of sight on either hand, the slowly

shifting lines of familiar peaks in the horizon glow, and the changing

shapes of white afloat in the vivid blue above all,--asking myself how

many times again must I view the same Kyūshū landscape, and deploring

the absence of the wonderful.

Suddenly and very softly, the thought steals into my mind that the most

wonderful of possible visions is really all about me in the mere common

green of the world,--in the ceaseless manifestation of Life.

Ever and everywhere, from beginnings invisible, green things are

growing,--out of soft earth, out of hard rock,--forms multitudinous,

dumb soundless races incalculably older than man. Of their visible

history we know much: names we have given them, and classification. The

reason of the forms of their leaves, of the qualities of their fruits,

of the colors of their flowers, we also know; for we have learned not

a little about the course of the eternal laws that give shape to all

terrestrial things. But why they are,--that we do not know. What is the

ghostliness that seeks expression in this universal green,--the mystery

of that which multiplies forever issuing out of that which multiplies

not? Or is the seeming lifeless itself life,--only a life more silent

still, more hidden?

But a stranger and quicker life moves upon the face of the world,

peoples wind and flood. This has the ghostlier power of separating

itself from earth, yet is always at last recalled thereto, and

condemned to feed that which it once fed upon. It feels; it knows;

it crawls, swims, runs, flies, thinks. Countless the shapes of it.

The green slower life seeks being only. But this forever struggles

against non-being. We know the mechanism of its motion, the laws of

its growth: the innermost mazes of its structure have been explored?

the territories of its sensation have been mapped and named. But the

meaning of it, who will tell us? Out of what ultimate came it? Or, more

simply, what is it? Why should it know pain? Why is it evolved by pain?

And this life of pain is our own. Relatively, it sees, it

knows. Absolutely, it is blind, and gropes, like the slow cold

green life which supports it. But does it also support a higher

existence,--nourish some invisible life infinitely more active and more

complex? Is there ghostliness orbed in ghostliness,--life within life

without end? Are there universes interpenetrating universes?

For our era, at least, the boundaries of human knowledge have been

irrevocably fixed; and far beyond those limits only exist the solutions

of such questions. Yet what constitutes those limits of the possible?

Nothing more than human nature itself. Must that nature remain equally

limited in those who shall come after us? Will they never develop

higher senses, vaster faculties, subtler perceptions? What is the

teaching of science?

Perhaps it has been suggested in the profound saying of Clifford,

that we were never made, but have made ourselves. This is, indeed,

the deepest of all teachings of science. And wherefore has man made

himself? To escape suffering and death. Under the pressure of pain

alone was our being shaped; and even so long as pain lives, so long

must continue the ceaseless toil of self-change. Once in the ancient

past, the necessities of life were physical; they are not less moral

than physical now. And of all future necessities, none seems likely to

prove so merciless, so mighty, so tremendous, as that of trying to read

the Universal Riddle.

The world's greatest thinker--he who has told us why the Riddle cannot

be read--has told us also how the longing to solve it must endure, and

grow with the growing of man.[1]

And surely the mere recognition of this necessity contains within it

the germ of a hope. May not the desire to know, as the possibly highest

form of future pain, compel within men the natural evolution of powers

to achieve the now impossible,--of capacities to perceive the now

invisible? We of to-day are that which we are through longing so to

be; and may not the inheritors of our work yet make themselves that

which we now would wish to become?

[1] _First Principles_ (The Reconciliation).

II

I am in Hakata, the town of the Girdle-Weavers,--which is a very tall

town, with fantastic narrow ways full of amazing color;--and I halt

in the Street-of-Prayer-to-the-Gods because there is an enormous head

of bronze, the head of a Buddha, smiling at me through a gateway. The

gateway is of a temple of the Jōdō sect; and the head is beautiful.

But there is only the head. What supports it above the pavement of the

court is hidden by thousands of metal mirrors heaped up to the chin

of the great dreamy face. A placard beside the gateway explains the

problem. The mirrors are contributions by women to a colossal seated

figure of Buddha--to be thirty-five feet high, including the huge lotus

on which it is to be enthroned. And the whole is to be made of bronze

mirrors. Hundreds have been already used to cast the head; myriads will

be needed to finish the work. Who can venture to assert, in presence

of such an exhibition, that Buddhism is passing away?

Yet I cannot feel delighted at this display, which, although gratifying

the artistic sense with the promise of a noble statue, shocks it still

more by ocular evidence of the immense destruction that the project

involves. For Japanese metal mirrors (now being superseded by atrocious

cheap looking-glasses of Western manufacture) well deserve to be called

things of beauty. Nobody unfamiliar with their gracious shapes can feel

the charm of the Oriental comparison of the moon to a mirror. One side

only is polished. The other is adorned with designs in relief: trees or

flowers, birds or animals or insects, landscapes, legends, symbols of

good fortune, figures of gods. Such are even the commonest mirrors. But

there are many kinds; and some among them very wonderful, which we call

"magic mirrors,"--because when the reflection of one is thrown upon a

screen or wall, you can see, in the disk of light, _luminous images of

the designs upon the back._[1]

Whether there be any magic mirrors in that heap of bronze ex-votos I

cannot tell; but there certainly are many beautiful things. And there

is no little pathos in the spectacle of all that wonderful quaint

work thus cast away, and destined soon to vanish utterly. Probably

within another decade the making of mirrors of silver and mirrors of

bronze will have ceased forever. Seekers for them will then hear, with

something more than regret, the story of the fate of these.

Nor is this the only pathos in the vision of all those domestic

sacrifices thus exposed to rain and sun and trodden dust of streets.

Surely the smiles of bride and babe and mother have been reflected in

not a few: some gentle home life must have been imaged in nearly all.

But a ghostlier value than memory can give also attaches to Japanese

mirrors. An ancient proverb declares, "The Mirror is the Sold of the

Woman,"--and not merely, as might be supposed, in a figurative sense.

For countless legends relate that a mirror feels all the joys or

pains of its mistress, and reveals in its dimness or brightness some

weird sympathy with her every emotion. Wherefore mirrors were of old

employed--and some say are still employed--in those magical rites

believed to influence life and death, and were buried with those to

whom they belonged.

And the spectacle of all those mouldering bronzes thus makes queer

fancies in the mind about wrecks of Souls,--or at least of soul-things.

It is even difficult to assure one's self that, of all the movements

and the faces those mirrors once reflected, absolutely nothing now

haunts them. One cannot help imagining that whatever has been must

continue to be somewhere;--that by approaching the mirrors very

stealthily, and turning a few of them suddenly face up to the light,

one might be able to catch the Past in the very act of shrinking and

shuddering away.

Besides, I must observe that the pathos of this exhibition has

been specially intensified for me by one memory which the sight of

a Japanese mirror always evokes,--the memory of the old Japanese

story _Matsuyama no Kagami_. Though related in the simplest manner

and with the fewest possible words,[2] it might well be compared to

those wonderful little tales by Goethe, of which the meanings expand

according to the experience and capacity of the reader. Mrs. James has

perhaps exhausted the psychological possibilities of the story in one

direction; and whoever can read her little book without emotion should

be driven from the society of mankind. Even to guess the Japanese idea

of the tale, one should be able to _feel_ the intimate sense of the

delicious colored prints accompanying her text,--the interpretation

of the last great artist of the Kano school. (Foreigners, unfamiliar

with Japanese home life, cannot fully perceive the exquisiteness of the

drawings made for the Fairy-Tale Series; but the silk-dyers of Kyōto

and of Ōsaka prize them beyond measure, and reproduce them constantly

upon the costliest textures.) But there are many versions; and, with

the following outline, readers can readily make nineteenth-century

versions for themselves.

[1] See article entitled "On the Magic Mirrors of Japan, by Professors

Ayrton and Perry," in vol. xxvii. of the _Proceedings of the Royal

Society_; also an article treating the same subject by the same authors

in vol. xxii. of _The Philosophical Magazine_.

[2] See, for Japanese text and translation, _A Romanized Japanese

Reader_, by Professor B. H. Chamberlain. The beautiful version for

children, written by Mrs. F. H. James, belongs to the celebrated

Japanese Fairy-Tale Series, published at Tōkyō.

III

Long ago, at a place called Matsuyama, in the province of Echigo, there

lived a young samurai husband and wife whose names have been quite

forgotten. They had a little daughter.

Once the husband went to Yedo,--probably as a retainer in the train

of the Lord of Echigo. On his return he brought presents from the

capital,--sweet cakes and a doll for the little girl (at least so the

artist tells us), and for his wife a mirror of silvered bronze. To the

young mother that mirror seemed a very wonderful thing; for it was the

first mirror ever brought to Matsuyama. She did not understand the

use of it, and innocently asked whose was the pretty smiling face she

saw inside it. When her husband answered her, laughing, "Why, it is

your own face! How foolish you are!" she was ashamed to ask any more

questions, but hastened to put her present away, still thinking it to

be a very mysterious thing. And she kept it hidden many years,--the

original story does not say why. Perhaps for the simple reason that in

all countries love makes even the most trifling gift too sacred to be

shown.

But in the time of her last sickness she gave the mirror to her

daughter, saying, "After I am dead you must look into this mirror every

morning and evening, and you will see me. Do not grieve." Then she died.

And the girl thereafter looked into the mirror every morning and

evening, and did not know that the face in the mirror was her own

shadow,--but thought it to be that of her dead mother, whom she much

resembled. So she would talk to the shadow, having the sensation, or,

as the Japanese original more tenderly says, "_having the heart of

meeting her mother_" day by day; and she prized the mirror above all

things.

At last her father noticed this conduct, and thought it strange, and

asked her the reason of it, whereupon she told him all. "Then," says

the old Japanese narrator, "he thinking it to be a very piteous thing,

his eyes grew dark with tears."

IV

Such is the old story.... But was the artless error indeed so piteous

a thing as it seemed to the parent? Or was his emotion vain as my

own regret for the destiny of all those mirrors with all their

recollections?

I cannot help fancying that the innocence of the maiden was nearer to

eternal truth than the feeling of the father. For in the cosmic order

of things the present is the shadow of the past, and the future must be

the reflection of the present. One are we all, even as Light is, though

unspeakable the millions of the vibrations whereby it is made. One are

we all,--and yet many, because each is a world of ghosts. Surely that

girl saw and spoke to her mother's very soul, while seeing the fair

shadow of her own young eyes and lips, uttering love!

And, with this thought, the strange display in the old temple

court takes a new meaning,--becomes the symbolism of a sublime

expectation. Each of us is truly a mirror, imaging something of

the universe,--reflecting also the reflection of ourselves in that

universe; and perhaps the destiny of all is to be molten by that

mighty Image-maker, Death, into some great sweet passionless unity. How

the vast work shall be wrought, only those to come after us may know.

We of the present West do not know: we merely dream. But the ancient

East believes. Here is the simple imagery of her faith. All forms

must vanish at last to blend with that Being whose smile is immutable

Rest,--whose knowledge is Infinite Vision.

IV

OF THE ETERNAL FEMININE

For metaphors of man we search the skies,

And find our allegory in all the air;--

We gaze on Nature with Narcissus-eyes,

Enamoured of ourshadow everywhere.

WATSON.

I

What every intelligent foreigner dwelling in Japan must sooner or later

perceive is, that the more the Japanese learn of our æsthetics and of

our emotional character generally, the less favorably do they seem to

be impressed thereby. The European or American who tries to talk to

them about Western art, or literature, or metaphysics will feel for

their sympathy in vain. He will be listened to politely; but his utmost

eloquence will scarcely elicit more than a few surprising comments,

totally unlike what he hoped and expected to evoke. Many successive

disappointments of this sort impel him to judge his Oriental auditors

very much as he would judge Western auditors behaving in a similar

way. Obvious indifference to what we imagine the highest expression

possible of art and thought, we are led by our own Occidental

experiences to take for proof of mental incapacity. So we find one

class of foreign observers calling the Japanese a race of children;

while another, including a majority of those who have passed many years

in the country, judge the nation essentially materialistic, despite the

evidence of its religions, its literature, and its matchless art. I

cannot persuade myself that either of these judgments is less fatuous

than Goldsmith's observation to Johnson about the Literary Club: "There

can now be nothing new among us; we have traveled over one another's

minds." A cultured Japanese might well answer with Johnson's famous

retort: "Sir, you have not yet traveled over my mind, I promise you!"

And all such sweeping criticisms seem to me due to a very imperfect

recognition of the fact that Japanese thought and sentiment have been

evolved out of ancestral habits, customs, ethics, beliefs, directly

the opposite of our own in some cases, and in all cases strangely

different. Acting on such psychological material, modern scientific

education cannot but accentuate and develop race differences. Only

half-education can tempt the Japanese to servile imitation of Western

ways. The real mental and moral power of the race, its highest

intellect, strongly resists Western influence; and those more competent

than I to pronounce upon such matters assure me that this is especially

observable in the case of superior men who have traveled or been

educated in Europe. Indeed, the results of the new culture have served

more than aught else to show the immense force of healthy conservatism

in that race superficially characterized by Rein as a race of children.

Even very imperfectly understood, the causes of this Japanese attitude

to a certain class of Western ideas might well incite us to reconsider

our own estimate of those ideas, rather than to tax the Oriental

mind with incapacity. Now, of the causes in question, which are

multitudinous, some can only be vaguely guessed at. But there is at

least one--a very important one--which we may safely study, because a

recognition of it is forced upon any one who passes a few years in the

Far East.

II

"Teacher, please tell us why there is so much about love and marrying

in English novels;--it seems to us very, very strange."

This question was put to me while I was trying to explain to my

literature class--young men from nineteen to twenty-three years of

age--why they had failed to understand certain chapters of a standard

novel, though quite well able to understand the logic of Jevons and

the psychology of James. Under the circumstances, it was not an easy

question to answer; in fact, I could not have replied to it in any

satisfactory way had I not already lived for several years in Japan.

As it was, though I endeavored to be concise as well as lucid, my

explanation occupied something more than two hours.

There are few of our society novels that a Japanese student can

really comprehend; and the reason is, simply, that English society is

something of which he is quite unable to form a correct idea. Indeed,

not only English society, in a special sense, but even Western life,

in a general sense, is a mystery to him. Any social system of which

filial piety is not the moral cement; any social system in which

children leave their parents in order to establish families of their

own; any social system in which it is considered not only natural but

right to love wife and child more than the authors of one's being;

any social system in which marriage can be decided independently of

the will of parents, by the mutual inclination of the young people

themselves; any social system in which the mother-in-law is not

entitled to the obedient service of the daughter-in-law, appears to him

of necessity a state of life scarcely better than that of the birds of

the air and the beasts of the field, or at best a sort of moral chaos.

And all this existence, as reflected in our popular fiction, presents

him with provoking enigmas. Our ideas about love and our solicitude

about marriage furnish some of these enigmas. To the young Japanese,

marriage appears a simple, natural duty, for the due performance of

which his parents will make all necessary arrangements at the proper

time. That foreigners should have so much trouble about getting married

is puzzling enough to him; but that distinguished authors should write

novels and poems about such matters, and that those novels and poems

should be vastly admired, puzzles him infinitely more,--seems to him

"very, very strange."

My young questioner said "strange" for politeness' sake. His real

thought would have been more accurately rendered by the word

"indecent." But when I say that to the Japanese mind our typical novel

appears indecent, highly indecent, the idea thereby suggested to my

English readers will probably be misleading. The Japanese are not

morbidly prudish. Our society novels do not strike them as indecent

because the theme is love. The Japanese have a great deal of literature

about love. No; our novels seem to them indecent for somewhat the same

reason that the Scripture text, "For this cause shall a man leave his

father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife," appears to them

one of the most immoral sentences ever written. In other words, their

criticism requires a sociological explanation. To explain fully why our

novels are, to their thinking, indecent, I should have to describe the

whole structure, customs, and ethics of the Japanese family, totally

different from anything in Western life; and to do this even in a

superficial way would require a volume. I cannot attempt a complete

explanation; I can only cite some facts of a suggestive character.

To begin with, then, I may broadly state that a great deal of our

literature, besides its fiction, is revolting to the Japanese moral

sense, not because it treats of the passion of love per se, but

because it treats of that passion in relation to virtuous maidens, and

therefore in relation to the family circle. Now, as a general rule,

where passionate love is the theme in Japanese literature of the best

class, it is not that sort of love which leads to the establishment

of family relations. It is quite another sort of love,--a sort of

love about which the Oriental is not prudish at all,--the _mayoi_, or

infatuation of passion, inspired by merely physical attraction; and its

heroines are not the daughters of refined families, but mostly hetæræ,

or professional dancing-girls. Neither does this Oriental variety

of literature deal with its subject after the fashion of sensuous

literature in the West,--French literature, for example: it considers

it from a different artistic standpoint, and describes rather a

different order of emotional sensations.

A national literature is of necessity reflective: and we may

presume that what it fails to portray can have little or no outward

manifestation in the national life. Now, the reserve of Japanese

literature regarding that love which is the great theme of our greatest

novelists and poets is exactly paralleled by the reserve of Japanese

society in regard to the same topic. The typical woman often figures

in Japanese romance as a heroine; as a perfect mother; as a pious

daughter, willing to sacrifice all for duty; as a loyal wife, who

follows her husband into battle, fights by his side, saves his life at

the cost of her own; never as a sentimental maiden, dying, or making

others die, for love. Neither do we find her on literary exhibition as

a dangerous beauty, a charmer of men; and in the real life of Japan

she has never appeared in any such rôle. Society, as a mingling of the

sexes, as an existence of which the supremely refined charm is the

charm of woman, has never existed in the East. Even in Japan, society,

in the special sense of the word, remains masculine. Nor is it easy

to believe that the adoption of European fashions and customs within

some restricted circles of the capital indicates the beginning of such

a social change as might eventually remodel the national life according

to Western ideas of society. For such a remodeling would involve the

dissolution of the family, the disintegration of the whole social

fabric, the destruction of the whole ethical system,--the breaking up,

in short, of the national life.

Taking the word "woman" in its most refined meaning, and postulating

a society in which woman seldom appears, a society in which she is

never placed "on display," a society in which wooing is utterly out of

the question, and the faintest compliment to wife or daughter is an

outrageous impertinence, the reader can at once reach some startling

conclusions as to the impression made by our popular fiction upon

members of that society. But, although partly correct, his conclusions

must fall short of the truth in certain directions, unless he also

possess some knowledge of the restraints of that society and of the

ethical notions behind the restraints. For example, a refined Japanese

never speaks to you about his wife (I am stating the general rule),

and very seldom indeed about his children, however proud of them he

may be. Rarely will he be heard to speak about any of the members of

his family, about his domestic life, about any of his private affairs.

But if he should happen to talk about members of his family, the

persons mentioned will almost certainly be his parents. Of them he will

speak with a reverence approaching religious feeling, yet in a manner

quite different from that which would be natural to an Occidental,

and never so as to imply any mental comparison between the merits of

his own parents and those of other men's parents. But he will not

talk about his wife even to the friends who were invited as guests to

his wedding. And I think I may safely say that the poorest and most

ignorant Japanese, however dire his need, would never dream of trying

to obtain aid or to invoke pity by the mention of his wife--perhaps

not even of his wife and children. But he would not hesitate to ask

help for the sake of his parents or his grandparents. Love of wife and

child, the strongest of all sentiments with the Occidental, is judged

by the Oriental to be a selfish affection. He professes to be ruled

by a higher sentiment,--duty: duty, first, to his Emperor; next, to

his parents. And since love can he classed only as an ego-altruistic

feeling, the Japanese thinker is not wrong in his refusal to consider

it the loftiest of motives, however refined or spiritualized it may he.

In the existence of the poorer classes of Japan there are no secrets;

but among the upper classes family life is much less open to

observation than in any country of the West, not excepting Spain. It

is a life of which foreigners see little, and know almost nothing, all

the essays which have been written about Japanese women to the contrary

notwithstanding.[1] Invited to the home of a Japanese friend, you may

or may not see the family. It will depend upon circumstances.

If you see any of them, it will probably be for a moment only, and

in that event you will most likely see the wife. At the entrance

you give your card to the servant, who retires to present it, and

presently returns to usher you into the zashiki, or guest-room, always

the largest and finest apartment in a Japanese dwelling, where your

kneeling-cushion is ready for you, with a smoking-box before it. The

servant brings you tea and cakes. In a little time the host himself

enters, and after the indispensable salutations conversation begins.

Should you be pressed to stay for dinner, and accept the invitation,

it is probable that the wife will do you the honor, as her husband's

friend, to wait upon you during an instant. You may or may not be

formally introduced to her; but a glance at her dress and coiffure

should be sufficient to inform you at once who she is, and you must

greet her with the most profound respect. She will probably impress you

(especially if your visit be to a samurai home) as a delicately refined

and very serious person, by no means a woman of the much-smiling and

much-bowing kind. She will say extremely little, but will salute you,

and will serve you for a moment with a natural grace of which the mere

spectacle is a revelation, and glide away again, to remain invisible

until the instant of your departure, when she will reappear at the

entrance to wish you good-by. During other successive visits you may

have similar charming glimpses of her; perhaps, also, some rarer

glimpses of the aged father and mother; and if a much favored visitor,

the children may at last come to greet you, with wonderful politeness

and sweetness. But the innermost intimate life of that family will

never be revealed to you. All that you see to suggest it will be

refined, courteous, exquisite, but of the relation of those souls to

each other you will know nothing. Behind the beautiful screens which

mask the further interior, all is silent, gentle mystery. There is no

reason, to the Japanese mind, why it should be otherwise. Such family

life is sacred; the home is a sanctuary, of which it were impious to

draw aside the veil. Nor can I think this idea of the sacredness of

home and of the family relation in any wise inferior to our highest

conception of the home and the family in the West.

Should there be grown-up daughters in the family, however, the visitor

is less likely to see the wife. More timid, but equally silent and

reserved, the young girls will make the guest welcome. In obedience to

orders, they may even gratify him by a performance upon some musical

instrument, by exhibiting some of their own needlework or painting, or

by showing to him some precious or curious objects among the family

heirlooms. But all submissive sweetness and courtesy are inseparable

from the high-bred reserve belonging to the finest native culture. And

the guest must not allow himself to be less reserved. Unless possessing

the privilege of great age, which would entitle him to paternal freedom

of speech, he must never venture upon personal compliment, or indulge

in anything resembling light flattery. What would be deemed gallantry

in the West may be gross rudeness in the East. On no account can

the visitor compliment a young girl about her looks, her grace, her

toilette, much less dare address such a compliment to the wife. But,

the reader may object, there are certainly occasions upon which a

compliment of some character cannot be avoided. This is true, and on

such an occasion politeness requires, as a preliminary, the humblest

apology for making the compliment, which will then be accepted with a

phrase more graceful than our "Pray do not mention it;"--that is, the

rudeness of making a compliment at all.

But here we touch the vast subject of Japanese etiquette, about which

I must confess myself still profoundly ignorant. I have ventured thus

much only in order to suggest how lacking: in refinement much of our

Western society fiction must appear to the Oriental mind.

To speak of one's affection for wife or children, to bring into

conversation anything closely related to domestic life, is totally

incompatible with Japanese ideas of good breeding. Our open

acknowledgment, or rather exhibition, of the domestic relation

consequently appears to cultivated Japanese, if not absolutely

barbarous, at least uxorious. And this sentiment may be found to

explain not a little in Japanese life which has given foreigners a

totally incorrect idea about the position of Japanese women. It is not

the custom in Japan for the husband even to walk side by side with

his wife in the street, much less to give her his arm, or to assist

her in ascending or descending a flight of stairs. But this is not

any proof upon his part of want of affection. It is only the result

of a social sentiment totally different from our own; it is simply

obedience to an etiquette founded upon the idea that public displays of

the marital relation are improper. Why improper? Because they seem to

Oriental judgment to indicate a confession of personal, and therefore

selfish sentiment For the Oriental the law of life is duty. Affection

must, in every time and place, be subordinated to duty. Any public

exhibition of personal affection of a certain class is equivalent to

a public confession of moral weakness. Does this mean that to love

one's wife is amoral weakness? No; it is the duty of a man to love his

wife; but it is moral weakness to love her more than his parents, or

to show her, in public, more attention than he shows to his parents.

Nay, it would be a proof of moral weakness to show her even the _same_

degree of attention. During the lifetime of the parents her position

in the household is simply that of an adopted daughter, and the most

affectionate of husbands must not even for a moment allow himself to

forget the etiquette of the family.

Here I must touch upon one feature of Western literature never to be

reconciled with Japanese ideas and customs. Let the reader reflect

for a moment how large a place the subject of kisses and caresses and

embraces occupies in our poetry and in our prose fiction; and then

let him consider the fact that in Japanese literature these have no

existence whatever. For kisses and embraces are simply unknown in Japan

as tokens of affection, if we except the solitary fact that Japanese

mothers, like mothers all over the world, lip and hug their little

ones betimes. After babyhood there is no more hugging or kissing. Such

actions, except in the case of infants, are held to be highly immodest.

Never do girls kiss one another; never do parents kiss or embrace

their children who have become able to walk. And this rule holds good

of all classes of society, from the highest nobility to the humblest

peasantry. Neither have we the least indication throughout Japanese

literature of any time in the history of the race when affection

was more demonstrative than it is to-day. Perhaps the Western reader

will find it hard even to imagine a literature in the whole course of

which no mention is made of kissing, of embracing, even of pressing

a loved hand; for hand-clasping is an action as totally foreign to

Japanese impulse as kissing. Yet on these topics even the naïve songs

of the country folk, even the old ballads of the people about unhappy

lovers, are quite as silent as the exquisite verses of the court

poets. Suppose we take for an example the ancient popular ballad of

Shuntokumaru, which has given origin to various proverbs and household

words familiar throughout western Japan. Here we have the story of two

betrothed lovers, long separated by a cruel misfortune, wandering in

search of each other all over the Empire, and at last suddenly meeting

before Kiomidzu Temple by the favor of the gods. Would not any Aryan

poet describe such a meeting as a rushing of the two into each other's

arms, with kisses and cries of love? But how does the old Japanese

ballad describe it? In brief, the twain only sit down together _and

stroke each other a little._ Now, even this reserved form of caress is

an extremely rare indulgence of emotion. You may see again and again

fathers and sons, husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, meeting

after years of absence, yet you will probably never see the least

approach to a caress between them. They will kneel down and salute

each other, and smile, and perhaps cry a little for joy; but they will

neither rush into each other's arms, nor utter extraordinary phrases of

affection. Indeed, such terms of affection as "my dear," "my darling,"

"my sweet," "my love," "my life," do not exist in Japanese, nor any

terms at all equivalent to our emotional idioms. Japanese affection is

not uttered in words; it scarcely appears even in the tone of voice: it

is chiefly shown in acts of exquisite courtesy and kindness. I might

add that the opposite emotion is under equally perfect control; but to

illustrate this remarkable fact would require a separate essay.

[1] I do not, however, refer to those extraordinary persons who make

their short residence in teahouses and establishments of a much worse

kind, and then go home to write books about the women of Japan.

III

He who would study impartially the life and thought of the Orient

must also study those of the Occident from the Oriental point of

view. And the results of such a comparative study he will find to

be in no small degree retroactive. According to his character and

his faculty of perception, he will be more or less affected by those

Oriental influences to which he submits himself. The conditions of

Western life will gradually begin to assume for him new, undreamed-of

meanings, and to lose not a few of their old familiar aspects. Much

that he once deemed right and true he may begin to find abnormal and

false. He may begin to doubt whether the moral ideals of the West are

really the highest. He may feel more than inclined to dispute the

estimate placed by Western custom upon Western civilization. Whether

his doubts be final is another matter: they will be at least rational

enough and powerful enough to modify permanently some of his prior

convictions,--among others his conviction of the moral value of the

Western worship of Woman as the Unattainable, the Incomprehensible,

the Divine, the ideal of "_la femme que tu ne connaîtras pas,_"[1]--the

ideal of the Eternal Feminine. For in this ancient East the Eternal

Feminine does not exist at all. And after having become quite

accustomed to live without it, one may naturally conclude that it is

not absolutely essential to intellectual health, and may even dare to

question the necessity for its perpetual existence upon the other side

of the world.

[1] A phrase from Baudelaire.

IV

To say that the Eternal Feminine does not exist in the Far East is to

state but a part of the truth. That it could be introduced thereinto,

in the remotest future, is not possible to imagine. Few, if any, of

our ideas regarding it can even be rendered into the language of the

country: a language in which nouns have no gender, adjectives no

degrees of comparison, and verbs no persons; a language in which,

says Professor Chamberlain, the absence of personification is "a

characteristic so deep-seated and so all-pervading as to interfere even

with the use of neuter nouns in combination with transitive verbs."[1]

"In fact," he adds, "most metaphors and allegories are incapable of so

much as explanation to Far-Eastern minds;" and he makes a striking

citation from Wordsworth in illustration of his statement. Yet even

poets much more lucid than Wordsworth are to the Japanese equally

obscure. I remember the difficulty I once had in explaining to an

advanced class this simple line from a well-known ballad of Tennyson,--

"She is more beautiful than day."

My students could understand the use of the adjective "beautiful"

to qualify "day," and the use of the same adjective, separately, to

qualify the word "maid." But that there could exist in any mortal mind

the least idea of analogy between the beauty of day and the beauty

of a young woman was quite beyond their understanding. In order to

convey to them the poet's thought, it was necessary to analyze it

psychologically,--to prove a possible nervous analogy between two modes

of pleasurable feeling excited by two different impressions.

Thus, the very nature of the language tells us how ancient and how

deeply rooted in racial character are those tendencies by which we must

endeavor to account--if there be any need of accounting at all--for

the absence in this Far East of a dominant ideal corresponding to

our own. They are causes incomparably older than the existing social

structure, older than the idea of the family, older than ancestor

worship, enormously older than that Confucian code which is the

reflection rather than the explanation of many singular facts in

Oriental life. But since beliefs and practices react upon character,

and character again must react upon practices and beliefs, it has

not been altogether irrational to seek in Confucianism for causes as

well as for explanations. Far more irrational have been the charges

of hasty critics against Shintō and against Buddhism as religious

influences opposed to the natural rights of woman. The ancient faith

of Shintō has been at least as gentle to woman as the ancient faith

of the Hebrews. Its female divinities are not less numerous than its

masculine divinities, nor are they presented to the imagination of

worshipers in a form much less attractive than the dreams of Greek

mythology. Of some, like So-tohori-no-Iratsumé, it is said that the

light of their beautiful bodies passes through their garments; and the

source of all life and light, the eternal Sun, is a goddess, fair

Amaterasu-oho-mi-kami. Virgins serve the ancient gods, and figure in

all the pageants of the faith; and in a thousand shrines throughout

the land the memory of woman as wife and mother is worshiped equally

with the memory of man as hero and father. Neither can the later and

alien faith of Buddhism be justly accused of relegating woman to a

lower place in the spiritual world than monkish Christianity accorded

her in the West. The Buddha, like the Christ, was horn of a virgin;

the most lovable divinities of Buddhism, Jizo excepted, are feminine,

both in Japanese art and in Japanese popular fancy; and in the Buddhist

as in the Roman Catholic hagiography, the lives of holy women hold

honored place. It is true that Buddhism, like early Christianity, used

its utmost eloquence in preaching against the temptation of female

loveliness; and it is true that in the teaching of its founder, as

in the teaching of Paul, social and spiritual supremacy is accorded

to the man. Yet, in our search for texts on this topic, we must not

overlook the host of instances of favor shown by the Buddha to women of

all classes, nor that remarkable legend of a later text, in which a

dogma denying to woman the highest spiritual opportunities is sublimely

rebuked.

In the eleventh chapter of the Sutra of the Lotus of the Good Law, it

is written that mention was made before the Lord Buddha of a young girl

who had in one instant arrived at supreme knowledge; who had in one

moment acquired the merits of a thousand meditations, and the proofs of

the essence of all laws. And the girl came and stood in the presence of

the Lord.

But the Bodhissattva Pragnakuta doubted, saying, "I have seen the Lord

Sakyamuni in the time when he was striving for supreme enlightenment,

and I know that he performed good works innumerable through countless

æons. In all the world there is not one spot so large as a grain of

mustard-seed where he has not surrendered his body for the sake of

living creatures. Only after all this did he arrive at enlightenment.

Who then may believe this girl could in one moment have arrived at

supreme knowledge?"

And the venerable priest Sariputra likewise doubted, saying, "It may

indeed happen, O Sister, that a woman fulfill the six perfect virtues;

but as yet there is no example of her having attained to Buddhaship,

because a woman cannot attain to the rank of a Bodhissattva."

But the maiden called upon the Lord Buddha to be her witness. And

instantly in the sight of the assembly her sex disappeared; and she

manifested herself as a Bodhissattva, filling all directions of space

with the radiance of the thirty-two signs. And the world shook in six

different ways. And the priest Sariputra was silent.[2]

[1] _See Things Japanese_, second edition, pp. 255, 256; article

"Language."

[2] See the whole wonderful passage in Kern's translation of this

magnificent Sutra, _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xxi. chap. xi.

V

But to feel the real nature of what is surely one of the greatest

obstacles to intellectual sympathy between the West and the Far East,

we must fully appreciate the immense effect upon Occidental life of

this ideal which has no existence in the Orient. We must remember what

that ideal has been to Western civilization,--to all its pleasures

and refinements and luxuries; to its sculpture, painting, decoration,

architecture, literature, drama, music; to the development of countless

industries. We must think of its effect upon manners, customs, and

the language of taste, upon conduct and ethics, upon endeavor, upon

philosophy and religion, upon almost every phase of public and private

life,--in short, upon national character. Nor should we forget that

the many influences interfused in the shaping of it--Teutonic, Celtic,

Scandinavian, classic, or mediæval, the Greek apotheosis of human

beauty, the Christian worship of the mother of God, the exaltations

of chivalry, the spirit of the Renascence steeping and coloring all

the preëxisting idealism in a new sensuousness--must have had their

nourishment, if not their birth, in a race feeling ancient as Aryan

speech, and as alien the most eastern East.

Of all these various influences combined to form our ideal, the classic

element remains perceptibly dominant. It is true that the Hellenic

conception of human beauty, so surviving, has been wondrously informed

with a conception of soul beauty never of the antique world nor of

the Renascence. Also it is true that the new philosophy of evolution,

forcing recognition of the incalculable and awful cost of the Present

to the Past, creating a totally new comprehension of duty to the

Future, enormously enhancing our conception of character values, has

aided more than all preceding influences together toward the highest

possible spiritualization of the ideal of woman. Yet, however further

spiritualized it may become through future intellectual expansion,

this ideal must in its very nature remain fundamentally artistic and

sensuous.

We do not see Nature as the Oriental sees it, and as his art proves

that he sees it. We see it less realistically, we know it less

intimately, because, save through the lenses of the specialist, we

contemplate it anthropomorphically. In one direction, indeed, our

æsthetic sense has been cultivated to a degree incomparably finer

than that of the Oriental; but that direction has been passional. We

have learned something of the beauty of Nature through our ancient

worship of the beauty of woman. Even from the beginning it is probable

that the perception of human beauty has been the main source of all

our æsthetic sensibility. Possibly we owe to it likewise our idea of

proportion;[1] our exaggerated appreciation of regularity; our fondness

for parallels, curves, and all geometrical symmetries. And in the long

process of our æsthetic evolution, the ideal of woman has at last

become for us an æsthetic abstraction. Through the illusion of that

abstraction only do we perceive the charms of our world, even as forms

might be perceived through some tropic atmosphere whose vapors are

iridescent.

Nor is this all. Whatsoever has once been likened to woman by art or

thought has been strangely informed and transformed by that momentary

symbolism: wherefore, through all the centuries Western fancy has

been making Nature more and more feminine. Whatsoever delights us

imagination has feminized,--the infinite tenderness of the sky,--the

mobility of waters,--the rose of dawn,--the vast caress of Day,--Night,

and the lights of heaven,--even the undulations of the eternal hills.

And flowers, and the flush of fruit, and all things fragrant, fair,

and gracious; the genial seasons with their voices; the laughter of

streams, and whisper of leaves, and ripplings of song within the

shadows;--all sights, or sounds, or sensations that can touch our love

of loveliness, of delicacy, of sweetness, of gentleness, make for us

vague dreams of woman. Where our fancy lends masculinity to Nature,

it is only in grimness and in force,--as if to enhance by rugged and

mighty contrasts the witchcraft of the Eternal Feminine. Nay, even the

terrible itself, if fraught with terrible beauty,--even Destruction, if

only shaped with the grace of destroyers,--becomes for us feminine. And

not beauty alone, of sight or sound, but well-nigh all that is mystic,

sublime, or holy, now makes appeal to us through some marvelously

woven intricate plexus of passional sensibility. Even the subtlest

forces of our universe speak to us of woman; new sciences have taught

us new names for the thrill her presence wakens in the blood, for

that ghostly shock which is first love, for the eternal riddle of her

fascination. Thus, out of simple human passion, through influences

and transformations innumerable, we have evolved a cosmic emotion, a

feminine pantheism.

[1] On the origin of the idea of bilateral symmetry, see Herbert

Spencer's essay, "The Sources of Architectural Types."

VI

And now may not one venture to ask whether all the consequences of this

passional influence in the æsthetic evolution of our Occident have been

in the main beneficial? Underlying all those visible results of which

we boast as art triumphs, may there not be lurking invisible results,

some future revelation of which will cause more than a little shock to

our self-esteem? Is it not quite possible that our æsthetic faculties

have been developed even abnormally in one direction by the power of a

single emotional idea which has left us nearly, if not totally blind

to many wonderful aspects of Nature? Or rather, must not this be the

inevitable effect of the extreme predominance of one particular emotion

in the evolution of our æsthetic sensibility? And finally, one may

surely be permitted to ask if the predominating influence itself has

been the highest possible, and whether there is not a higher, known

perhaps to the Oriental soul.

I may only suggest these questions, without hoping to answer them

satisfactorily. But the longer I dwell in the East, the more I feel

growing upon me the belief that there are exquisite artistic faculties

and perceptions, developed in the Oriental, of which we can know

scarcely more than we know of those unimaginable colors, invisible to

the human eye, yet proven to exist by the spectroscope. I think that

such a possibility is indicated by certain phases of Japanese art.

Here it becomes as difficult as dangerous to particularize. I dare

hazard only some general observations. I think this marvelous art

asserts that, out of the infinitely varied aspects of Nature, those

which for us hold no suggestion whatever of sex character, those

which cannot be looked at anthropomorphically, those which are

neither masculine nor feminine, but neuter or nameless, are those

most profoundly loved and comprehended by the Japanese. Nay, he sees

in Nature much that for thousands of years has remained invisible to

us; and we are now learning from him aspects of life and beauties

of form to which we were utterly blind before. We have finally

made the startling discovery that his art--notwithstanding all

the dogmatic assertions of Western prejudice to the contrary, and

notwithstanding the strangely weird impression of unreality which

at first it produced--is never a mere creation of fantasy, but a

veritable reflection of what has been and of what is: wherefore we

have recognized that it is nothing less than a higher education in art

simply to look at his studies of bird life, insect life, plant life,

tree life. Compare, for example, our very finest drawings of insects

with Japanese drawings of similar subjects. Compare Giacomelli's

illustrations to Michelet's "L'Insecte" with the commonest Japanese

figures of the same creatures decorating the stamped leather of a cheap

tobacco pouch or the metal work of a cheap pipe. The whole minute

exquisiteness of the European engraving has accomplished only an

indifferent realism, while the Japanese artist, with a few dashes of

his brush, has seized and reproduced, with an incomprehensible power

of interpretation, not only every peculiarity of the creature's shape,

but every special characteristic of its motion. Each figure flung from

the Oriental painter's brush is a lesson, a revelation, to perceptions

unbeclouded by prejudice, an opening of the eyes of those who can see,

though it be only a spider in a wind-shaken web, a dragon-fly riding

a sunbeam, a pair of crabs running through sedge, the trembling of a

fish's fins in a clear current, the lilt of a flying wasp, the pitch of

a flying duck, a mantis in fighting position, or a semi toddling up a

cedar branch to sing. All this art is alive, intensely alive, and our

corresponding art looks absolutely dead beside it.

Take, again, the subject of flowers. An English or German flower

painting, the result of months of trained labor, and valued at several

hundred pounds, would certainly not compare as a nature study, in

the higher sense, with a Japanese flower painting executed in twenty

brush strokes, and worth perhaps five sen. The former would represent

at best but an ineffectual and painful effort to imitate a massing

of colors. The latter would prove a perfect memory of certain flower

shapes instantaneously flung upon paper, without any model to aid,

and showing, not the recollection of any individual blossom, but the

perfect realization of a general law of form expression, perfectly

mastered, with all its moods, tenses, and inflections. The French

alone, among Western art critics, seem fully to understand these

features of Japanese art; and among all Western artists it is the

Parisian alone who approaches the Oriental in his methods. Without

lifting his brush from the paper, the French artist may sometimes,

with a single wavy line, create the almost speaking figure of a

particular type of man or woman. But this high development of faculty

is confined chiefly to humorous sketching; it is still either

masculine or feminine. To understand what I mean by the ability of

the Japanese artist, my reader must imagine just such a power of

almost instantaneous creation as that which characterizes certain

French work, applied to almost every subject except individuality,

to nearly all recognized general types, to all aspects of Japanese

nature, to all forms of native landscape, to clouds and flowing water

and mists, to all the life of woods and fields, to all the moods of

seasons and the tones of horizons and the colors of the morning and

the evening. Certainly, the deeper spirit of this magical art seldom

reveals itself at first sight to unaccustomed eyes, since it appeals

to so little in Western æsthetic experience. But by gentle degrees it

will so enter into an appreciative and unprejudiced mind as to modify

profoundly therein almost every preëxisting sentiment in relation to

the beautiful. All of its meaning will indeed require many years to

master, but something of its reshaping power will be felt in a much

shorter time when the sight of an American illustrated magazine or of

any illustrated European periodical has become almost unbearable.

Psychological differences of far deeper import are suggested by

other facts, capable of exposition in words, but not capable of

interpretation through Western standards of æsthetics or Western

feeling of any sort. For instance, I have been watching two old men

planting young trees in the garden of a neighboring temple. They

sometimes spend nearly an hour in planting a single sapling. Having

fixed it in the ground, they retire to a distance to study the position

of all its lines, and consult together about it. As a consequence, the

sapling is taken up and replanted in a slightly different position.

This is done no less than eight times before the little tree can be

perfectly adjusted into the plan of the garden. Those two old men are

composing a mysterious thought with their little trees, changing them,

transferring them, removing or replacing them, even as a poet changes

and shifts his words, to give to his verse the most delicate or the

most forcible expression possible.

In every large Japanese cottage there are several alcoves, or tokonoma,

one in each of the principal rooms. In these alcoves the art treasures

of the family are exhibited.[1] Within each toko a kakemono is hung;

and upon its slightly elevated floor (usually of polished wood)

are placed flower vases and one or two artistic objects. Flowers

are arranged in the toko vases according to ancient rules which Mr.

Conder's beautiful hook will tell you a great deal about; and the

kakemono and the art objects there displayed are changed at regular

intervals, according to occasion and season. Now, in a certain alcove,

I have at various times seen many different things of beauty: a

Chinese statuette of ivory, an incense vase of bronze,--representing a

cloud-riding pair of dragons,--the wood carving of a Buddhist pilgrim

resting by the wayside and mopping his bald pate, masterpieces of

lacquer ware and lovely Kyōto porcelains, and a large stone placed on

a pedestal of heavy, costly wood, expressly made for it. I do not know

whether you could see any beauty in that stone; it is neither hewn nor

polished, nor does it possess the least imaginable intrinsic value.

It is simply a gray water-worn stone from the bed of a stream. Yet it

cost more than one of those Kyōto vases which sometimes replace it, and

which you would be glad to pay a very high price for.

In the garden of the little house I now occupy in Kumamoto, there are

about fifteen rocks, or large stones, of as many shapes and sizes.

They also have no real intrinsic value, not even as possible building

material. And yet the proprietor of the garden paid for them something

more than seven hundred and fifty Japanese dollars, or considerably

more than the pretty house itself could possibly have cost. And it

would be quite wrong to suppose the cost of the stones due to the

expense of their transportation from the bed of the Shira-kawa. No;

they are worth seven hundred and fifty dollars only because they are

considered beautiful to a certain degree, and because there is a large

local demand for beautiful stones. They are not even of the best class,

or they would have cost a great deal more. Now, until you can perceive

that a big rough stone may have more æsthetic suggestiveness than a

costly steel engraving, that it is a thing of beauty and a joy forever,

you cannot begin to understand how a Japanese sees Nature. "But what,"

you may ask, "can be beautiful in a common stone?" Many things; but I

will mention only one,--irregularity.

In my little Japanese house, the fusuma, or sliding screens of opaque

paper between room and room, have designs at which I am never tired of

looking. The designs vary in different parts of the dwelling; I will

speak only of the fusuma dividing my study from a smaller apartment.

The ground color is a delicate cream-yellow; and the golden pattern

is very simple,--the mystic-jewel symbols of Buddhism scattered over

the surface by pairs. But no two sets of pairs are placed at exactly

the same distance from each other; and the symbols themselves are

curiously diversified, never appearing twice in exactly the same

position or relation. Sometimes one jewel is transparent, and its

fellow opaque; sometimes both are opaque or both diaphanous; sometimes

the transparent one is the larger of the two; sometimes the opaque is

the larger; sometimes both are precisely the same size; sometimes they

overlap, and sometimes do not touch; sometimes the opaque is on the

left, sometimes on the right; sometimes the transparent jewel is above,

sometimes below. Vainly does the eye roam over the whole surface in

search of a repetition, or of anything resembling regularity, either

in distribution, juxtaposition, grouping, dimensions, or contrasts.

And throughout the whole dwelling nothing resembling regularity in

the various decorative designs can be found. The ingenuity by which

it is avoided is amazing,--rises to the dignify of genius. Now, all

this is a common characteristic of Japanese decorative art; and after

having lived a few years under its influences, the sight of a regular

pattern upon a wall, a carpet, a curtain, a ceiling, upon any decorated

surface, pains like a horrible vulgarism. Surely, it is because we have

so long been accustomed to look at Nature anthropomorphically that

we can still endure mechanical ugliness in our own decorative art,

and that we remain insensible to charms of Nature which are clearly

perceived even by the eyes of the Japanese child, wondering over its

mother's shoulder at the green and blue wonder of the world.

"_He_" saith a Buddhist text, "_who discerns that nothingness is

law,--such a one hath wisdom._"

[1] The tokonoma, or toko, is said to have been first introduced into

Japanese architecture about four hundred and fifty years ago, by the

Buddhist priest Eisai, who had studied in China. Perhaps the alcove was

originally devised and used for the exhibition of sacred objects; but

to-day, among the cultivated, it would be deemed in very had taste to

display either images of the gods or sacred paintings in the toko of

a guest-room. The toko is still, however, a sacred place in a certain

sense. No one should ever step upon it, or squat within it, or even

place in it anything not pure, or anything offensive to taste. There

is an elaborate code of etiquette in relation to it. The most honored

among guests is always placed nearest to it; and guests take their

places, according to rank, nearer to or further from it.

V

BITS OF LIFE AND DEATH

I

_July_ 25. Three extraordinary visits have been made to my house this

week.

The first was that of the professional well-cleaners. For once every

year all wells must be emptied and cleansed, lest the God of Wells,

Suijin-Sama, be wroth. On this occasion I learned some things relating

to Japanese wells and the tutelar deity of them, who has two names,

being also called Mizuha-nome-no-mikoto.

Suijin-Sama protects all wells, keeping their water sweet and cool,

provided that house-owners observe his laws of cleanliness, which are

rigid. To those who break them sickness comes, and death. Rarely the

god manifests himself, taking the form of a serpent. I have never seen

any temple dedicated to him. But once each month a Shinto priest

visits the homes of pious families having wells, and he repeats certain

ancient prayers to the Well-God, and plants nobori, little paper flags,

which are symbols, at the edge of the well. After the well has been

cleaned, also, this is done. Then the first bucket of the new water

must be drawn up by a man; for if a woman first draw water, the well

will always thereafter remain muddy.

The god has little servants to help him in his work. These are the

small fishes the Japanese call funa.[1] One or two funa are kept in

every well, to clear the water of larvae. When a well is cleaned, great

care is taken of the little fish. It was on the occasion of the coming

of the well-cleaners that I first learned of the existence of a pair of

funa in my own well. They were placed in a tub of cool water while the

well was refilling, and thereafter were replunged into their solitude.

The water of my well is clear and ice-cold. But now I can never drink

of it without a thought of those two small white lives circling always

in darkness, and startled through untold years by the descent of

plashing buckets.

The second curious visit was that of the district firemen, in full

costume, with their hand-engines. According to ancient custom, they

make a round of all their district once a year during the dry spell,

and throw water over the hot roofs, and receive some small perquisite

from each wealthy householder. There is a belief that when it has not

rained for a long time roofs may be ignited by the mere heat of the

sun. The firemen played with their hose upon my roofs, trees, and

garden, producing considerable refreshment; and in return I bestowed on

them wherewith to buy saké.

The third visit was that of a deputation of children asking for some

help to celebrate fittingly the festival of Jizō, who has a shrine on

the other side of the street, exactly opposite my house. I was very

glad to contribute to their fund, for I love the gentle god, and I

knew the festival would be delightful. Early next morning, I saw that

the shrine had already been decked with flowers and votive lanterns.

A new bib had been put about Jizō's neck, and a Buddhist repast set

before him. Later on, carpenters constructed a dancing-platform in the

temple court for the children to dance upon; and before sundown the

toy-sellers had erected and stocked a small street of booths inside the

precincts. After dark I went out into a great glory of lantern fires

to see the children dance; and I found, perched before my gate, an

enormous dragon-fly more than three feet long. It was a token of the

children's gratitude for the little help I had given them,--a kazari, a

decoration. I was startled for the moment by the realism of the thing;

but upon close examination I discovered that the body was a pine branch

wrapped with colored paper, the four wings were four fire-shovels,

and the gleaming head was a little teapot. The whole was lighted by a

candle so placed as to make extraordinary shadows, which formed part of

the design. It was a wonderful instance of art sense working without a

speck of artistic material, yet it was all the labor of a poor little

child only eight years old!

[1] A sort of small silver carp.

II

_July_ 30. The next house to mine, on the south side,--a low, dingy

structure,--is that of a dyer. You can always tell where a Japanese

dyer is by the long pieces of silk or cotton stretched between bamboo

poles before his door to dry in the sun,--broad bands of rich azure, of

purple, of rose, pale blue, pearl gray. Yesterday my neighbor coaxed me

to pay the family a visit; and after having been led through the front

part of their little dwelling, I was surprised to find myself looking

from a rear veranda at a garden worthy of some old Kyōto palace. There

was a dainty landscape in miniature, and a pond of clear water peopled

by goldfish having wonderfully compound tails.

When I had enjoyed this spectacle awhile, the dyer led me to a small

room fitted up as a Buddhist chapel. Though everything had had to

be made on a reduced scale, I did not remember to have seen a more

artistic display in any temple. He told me it had cost him about

fifteen hundred yen. I did not understand how even that sum could have

sufficed.

There were three elaborately carven altars,-a triple blaze of gold

lacquer-work; a number of charming Buddhist images; many exquisite

vessels; an ebony reading-desk; a mokugyō[1]; two fine bells,--in

short, all the paraphernalia of a temple in miniature. My host had

studied at a Buddhist temple in his youth, and knew the sutras, of

which he had all that are used by the Jōdō sect. He told me that he

could celebrate any of the ordinary services. Daily, at a fixed hour,

the whole family assembled in the chapel for prayers; and he generally

read the Kyō for them. But on extraordinary occasions a Buddhist priest

from the neighboring temple would come to officiate.

He told me a queer story about robbers. Dyers are peculiarly liable

to be visited by robbers; partly by reason of the value of the silks

intrusted to them, and also because the business is known to be

lucrative. One evening the family were robbed. The master was out

of the city; his old mother, his wife, and a female servant were the

only persons in the house at the time. Three men, having their faces

masked and carrying long swords, entered the door. One asked the

servant whether any of the apprentices were still in the building;

and she, hoping to frighten the invaders away, answered that the

young men were all still at work. But the robbers were not disturbed

by this assurance. One posted himself at the entrance, the other two

strode into the sleeping-apartment. The women started up in alarm,

and the wife asked, "Why do you wish to kill us?" He who seemed to be

the leader answered, "We do not wish to kill you; we want money only.

But if we do not get it, then it will be this"--striking his sword

into the matting. The old mother said, "Be so kind as not to frighten

my daughter-in-law, and I will give you whatever money there is in

the house. But you ought to know there cannot be much, as my son has

gone to Kyōto." She handed them the money-drawer and her own purse.

There were, just twenty-seven yen and eighty-four sen. The head robber

counted it, and said, quite gently, "We do not want to frighten you.

We know you are a very devout believer in Buddhism, and we think you

would not tell a lie. Is this all?" "Yes, it is all," she answered.

"I am, as you say, a believer in the teaching of the Buddha, and if

you come to rob me now, I believe it is only because I myself, in some

former life, once robbed you. This is my punishment for that fault,

and so, instead of wishing to deceive you, I feel grateful at this

opportunity to atone for the wrong which I did to you in my previous

state of existence." The robber laughed, and said, "You are a good old

woman, and we believe you. If you were poor, we would not rob you at

all. Now we only want a couple of kimono and this,"--laying his hand on

a very fine silk overdress. The old woman replied, "All my son's kimono

I can give you, but I beg you will not take that, for it does not

belong to my son, and was confided to us only for dyeing. What is ours

I can give, but I cannot give what belongs to another." "That is quite

right," approved the robber, "and we shall not take it."

After receiving a few robes, the robbers said good-night, very

politely, but ordered the women not to look after them. The old servant

was still near the door. As the chief robber passed her, he said, "You

told us a lie,--so take that!"--and struck her senseless. None of the

robbers were ever caught.

[1] A hollow wooden block shaped like a dolphin's head. It is tapped in

accompaniment to the chanting of the Buddhist sutras.

III

_August_ 29. When a body has been burned, according to the funeral

rites of certain Buddhist sects, search is made among the ashes for a

little bone called the Hotoke-San, or "Lord Buddha," popularly supposed

to be a little bone of the throat. What bone it really is I do not

know, never having had a chance to examine such a relic.

According to the shape of this little bone when found after the

burning, the future condition of the dead may be predicted. Should the

next state to which the soul is destined be one of happiness, the bone

will have the form of a small image of Buddha. But if the next birth

is to be unhappy, then the bone will have either an ugly shape, or no

shape at all.

A little boy, the son of a neighboring tobacconist, died the night

before last, and to-day the corpse was burned. The little hone

left over from the burning was discovered to have the form of three

Buddhas,--San-Tai,--which may have afforded some spiritual consolation

to the bereaved parents.[1]

[1] At the great temple of Tennōji, at Ōsaka, all such bones are

dropped into a vault; and according _to the sound each makes in

falling_, further evidence about the Gōsho is said to be obtained.

After a hundred years from the time of beginning this curious

collection, all these bones are to be ground into a kind of paste, out

of which a colossal statue of Buddha is to be made.

IV

_September_ 13. A letter from Matsue, Izumo, tells me that the old

man who used to supply me with pipestems is dead. (A Japanese pipe,

you must know, consists of three pieces, usually,--a metal bowl large

enough to hold a pea, a metal mouthpiece, and a bamboo stem which is

renewed at regular intervals.) He used to stain his pipestems very

prettily: some looked like porcupine quills, and some like cylinders of

snakeskin. He lived in a queer narrow little street at the verge of the

city. I know the street because in it there is a famous statue of Jizō

called Shiroko-ō,--"White-Child-Jizō,"--which I once went to see. They

whiten its face, like the face of a dancing-girl, for some reason which

I have never been able to find out.

The old man had a daughter, O-Masu, about whom a story is told. O-Masu

is still alive. She has been a happy wife for many years; but she is

dumb. Long ago, an angry mob sacked and destroyed the dwelling and the

storehouses of a rice speculator in the city. His money, including a

quantity of gold coin (_koban_), was scattered through the street.

The rioters--rude, honest peasants--did not want it: they wished to

destroy, not to steal. But O-Masu's father, the same evening, picked up

a koban from the mud, and took it home. Later on a neighbor denounced

him, and secured his arrest. The judge before whom he was summoned

tried to obtain certain evidence by cross-questioning O-Masu, then a

shy girl of fifteen. She felt that if she continued to answer she would

be made, in spite of herself, to give testimony unfavorable to her

father; that she was in the presence of a trained inquisitor, capable,

without effort, of forcing her to acknowledge everything she knew. She

ceased to speak, and a stream of blood gushed from her mouth. She had

silenced herself forever by simply biting off her tongue. Her father

was acquitted. A merchant who admired the act demanded her in marriage,

and supported her father in his old age.

V

_October_ 10. There is said to be one day--only one--in the life of a

child during which it can remember and speak of its former birth.

On the very day that it becomes exactly two years old, the child is

taken by its mother into the most quiet part of the house, and is

placed in a mi, or rice-winnowing basket. The child sits down in the

mi. Then the mother says, calling the child by name, "_Omae no zensé

wa, nande attakane?--iute, gōran._"[1] Then the child always answers

in one word. For some mysterious reason, no more lengthy reply is

ever given. Often the answer is so enigmatic that some priest or

fortune-teller must be asked to interpret it. For instance, yesterday,

the little son of a copper-smith living near us answered only "Umé"

to the magical question. Now umé might mean a plum-flower, a plum,

or a girl's name,--"Flower-of-the-Plum." Could it mean that the boy

remembered having been a girl? Or that he had been a plum-tree? "Souls

of men do not enter plum-trees," said a neighbor. A fortune-teller this

morning declared, on being questioned about the riddle, that the boy

had probably been a scholar, poet, or statesman, because the plum-tree

is the symbol of Tenjin, patron of scholars, statesmen, and men of

letters.

[1] "Thy previous life as for,--what was it? Honorably look [or,

_please_ look] and tell."

VI

_November_ 17. An astonishing book might be written about those things

in Japanese life which no foreigner can understand. Such a book should

include the study of certain rare but terrible results of anger.

As a national rule, the Japanese seldom allow themselves to show anger.

Even among the common classes, any serious menace is apt to take the

form of a smiling assurance that your favor shall be remembered, and

that its recipient is grateful. (Do not suppose, however, that this

is ironical, in our sense of the word: it is only euphemistic,--ugly

things not being called by their real names.) But this smiling

assurance may possibly mean death. When vengeance comes, it comes

unexpectedly. Neither distance nor time, within the empire, can offer

any obstacles to the avenger who can walk fifty miles a day, whose

whole baggage can be tied up in a very small towel, and whose patience

is almost infinite. He may choose a knife, but is much more likely

to use a sword,--a Japanese sword. This, in Japanese hands, is the

deadliest of weapons; and the killing of ten or twelve persons by one

angry man may occupy less than a minute. It does not often happen that

the murderer thinks of trying to escape. Ancient custom requires that,

having taken another life, he should take his own; wherefore to fall

into the hands of the police would be to disgrace his name. He has made

his preparations beforehand, written his letters, arranged for his

funeral, perhaps--as in one appalling instance last year--even chiseled

his own tombstone. Having fully accomplished his revenge, he kills

himself.

There has just occurred, not far from the city, at the village called

Sugikamimura, one of those tragedies which are difficult to understand.

The chief actors were, Narumatsu Ichirō, a young shopkeeper; his wife,

O-Noto, twenty years of age, to whom he had been married only a year;

and O-Noto's maternal uncle, one Sugimoto Ivasaku, a man of violent

temper, who had once been in prison. The tragedy was in four acts.

Act I. _Scene: Interior of public bathhouse. Sugimoto Nasaku in the

bath. Enter Narumatsu Ichirō, who strips, gets into the smoking water

without noticing his relative, and cries out,_--

"_Aa!_ as if one should be in Jigoku, so hot this water is!"

(The word "Jigoku" signifies the Buddhist hell; but, in common

parlance, it also signifies a prison,--this time an unfortunate

coincidence.)

_Kasaku_ (terribly angry). "A raw baby, you, to seek a hard quarrel!

What do you not like?"

_Ichirō_ (surprised and alarmed, but rallying against the tone of

Kasaku). "Nay! What? That I said need not by you be explained. Though I

said the water was hot, your help to make it hotter was not asked."

_Kasaku_ (now dangerous). "Though for my own fault, not once, but twice

in the hell of prison I had been, what should there be wonderful in it?

Either an idiot child or a low scoundrel you must be!"

(_Each eyes the other for a spring, but each hesitates, although things

no Japanese should suffer himself to say have been said. They are too

evenly matched, the old and the young._)

_Kasaku_ (growing cooler as Ichirō becomes angrier). "A child, a raw

child, to quarrel with _me!_ What should a baby do with a wife? Your

wife is my blood, mine,--the blood of the man from hell! Give her back

to my house."

_Ichirō_ (desperately, now fully assured Kasaku is physically the

better man). "Return my wife? You say to return her? Right quickly

shall she be returned, at once!"

So far everything is clear enough. Then Ichiro hurries home, caresses

his wife, assures her of his love, tells her all, and sends her, not to

Kasaku's house, but to that of her brother. Two days later, a little

after dark, O-Noto is called to the door by her husband, and the two

disappear in the night.