Stratford-on-Avon, where I saw a stirring drama called _Tel-el-Kebir, or
the Bombardment of Alexandria_, in which Sir Beauchamp Seymour had a
hand-to-hand conflict with Arabi Pasha. Mr. Lawrence, the spirited
actor-manager, informed me afterwards, when I congratulated him on the
performance, that it was always popular, and that he had played it
twenty-three times in one day at Nottingham Goose-Fair. In reply to my
objection that it took at least an hour, he said that of course they cut
the dialogue, and only had the combats and the bombardment. I
remembered, too, his remarks when called before the curtain at the end
of his season; he enlarged on the dignity of the actor’s profession, and
how essential it was that he should be a gentleman, saying, in
conclusion; “‘Ow, I harsk, could a chimney-sweep (if there’s a
chimney-sweep present I beg ’is pardon), but ’ow could ’e act the part
of a prince or a nobleman? ’E could not do it, my friends; ’e’s not ’ad
the hedjucation.”
[Illustration: PREPARING THE RICE-FIELDS]
The fine days at this season were perfectly glorious; hot enough to give
an inkling of what it would be like in the full blaze of summer, and yet
with a taste of spring’s freshness left in the air. They were
interspersed with too many wet or uncertain days, but, with the garden
close by, I managed to waste very little time. The first lotus leaves
were just coming up in the ponds and the irises blossoming round the
water’s edge, the azalea bushes were covered with flowers, and the tips
of the pale green maple boughs were tinged with rosy pink. When the
pouring rain had begun to drip through my sketching umbrella, and I was
driven in-doors, there was no lack of society. O Kazu San, a plain
little thing with brown velvet eyes, and the rest of the girls were
never tired of looking at my belongings, thumbing my sketch-books, and
asking me endless questions; and though I was sometimes irritable, their
good-humor was unlimited. This unvaried good temper is itself annoying,
when the foreigner feels that it is not the result of sympathy, but
because he is regarded as a strange animal, not to be judged by the
rules which govern the conduct of civilized people. At last Matsuba told
me that he had found a place, “top side,” with plenty of azaleas, and
rooms where I could stay. It was a small Buddhist temple called
Tennenji, once very popular but now almost deserted, which stood on the
hill-side beyond the rice lands, and somewhat above the swarms of
mosquitoes which haunt the marshy shores and the lagoons of Lake Biwa.
Ji means a Buddhist temple--at least
[Illustration: MY ROOMS AT TENNENJI]
[Illustration: BUDDHA AND HIS DISCIPLES, TENNENJI]
that is one of its meanings--and tennen means “produced by nature.” The
name itself suggested peace and quietness and repose, and these I found
in that delightful place, always seen in my mind through a rosy haze of
azalea blossom.
A granite sign-post where the little temple path turns off from a track
through the rice-fields tells all who can read it that the temple is
dedicated to the five hundred Rakkan (disciples of Buddha), and their
gilded and lacquered effigies sit in long tiers round one large building
within the court-yard; beyond this is the Hondo, where the principal
altars are, and where the services are performed at daybreak by the old
priest who has sole charge of the establishment. My room was a little
annex of the Hondo, quite apart from the living-rooms of the family, and
open on two sides to the air. The angle of my veranda projected over the
fish-pond, and on the right and the left stepping-stones led down from
it into the garden, a small patch of level ground, with a pine-clad
hill-side rising sharply beyond it. Just at the foot of this hill there
was a rocky projection, covered with an undergrowth of azaleas, and
spotted with statues of Buddha and his sixteen principal followers.
These were rudely carved of the natural stone; with their growth of
lichens and mosses they looked as old as the rocks themselves, and were
hardly to be distinguished from them at a little distance. Several stony
zigzagging footpaths, mere tracks through the bushes and pine-trees, led
to the top of the ridge, from which one looked down on fertile valleys
enclosed by more pine-clad ridges, and to the westward on the great
shining plain of Lake Biwa, its lagoons, islands, and distant mountains.
Many times I walked to the top of this hill, sometimes in the clear
brilliant moonlight, when the delicate pinks and reds of the azaleas
were hardly visible, and only their honeysuckle scent made me conscious
of their presence, and when all the world would have been silent but
for the incessant chorus of myriads of frogs which came up from the
rice-fields below.
[Illustration: HIKONE AND LAKE BIWA, FROM THE HILLS BEHIND TENNENJI]
In the daytime the whole of the wood was lively with cicadæ, who kept up
a constant and irritating clatter, but then there was the delight of
finding new flowers, or making the acquaintance of old garden friends in
their own homes. A little damp gully just behind the bamboo grove was
full of deutzia bushes in blossom, and under them grew a clump of pale
pink lilies (_Lilium krameri_), which seemed to me the loveliest flowers
I had ever seen. The priest at Tennenji was so anxious to have some of
my work that I made a drawing of these for him; it hangs among the
temple treasures, and may be a surprise to some wandering foreigner, who
will little expect to find any European traces in such an out-of-the-way
spot. The family, consisting of Sokin the father, O Shige San the
mother, and Takaki, a son employed in the office of police at Hikone,
soon
[Illustration: AZALEAS ON THE ROCKS, TENNENJI]
[Illustration: THE POEM]
adopted me as a friend, and did all they could to make me comfortable.
Takaki had received a modern education (they teach English in the Hikone
schools, as you find out from the small boys, who shout A B C after you
in the streets); but he had not got beyond the word “Yes,” beginning
every sentence with it and then lapsing into Japanese. We made many
excursions together, he, Matsuba, and I, strolling down to the town
after dinner and looking in at the theatres and shops.[A] O Shige San
was great at cooking, and took delight in providing me with new and
strange forms of food every evening; for breakfast and lunch I ate what
European food Matsuba could provide, and as flour and whiskey could be
bought, and a cow was slaughtered in Hikone every Saturday, I did not do
badly; you can get the necessary sustenance in a shorter time on foreign
“chow,” but when work was over and I had taken my hot bath and exchanged
my suit of flannels for a cotton kimono, it was amusing to sit on the
floor and speculate on the composition of the dishes which she brought
me, trying with the aid of a dictionary to find out what they really
were, and to acquire a taste for “daikon.”[B] Among her successes were
eels cooked in soy, broiled fish, and bean curd “à la brochette”; young
bamboo shoots, chrysanthemum leaves fried in batter, and lily bulbs
boiled in sugar were eatable; but a sausage made of rice and herbs, and
some of the quaint vegetables, were simply nauseous. In one of my
water-colors there was a large group of leaves, round ones with a dark
hole where the stem goes in, commonly known as the “foreground plant,”
and I noticed one afternoon to my disgust that these had been cut; the
boiled stalks were given to me at dinner that evening, and I never
tasted anything more unpleasant. When the various dishes had all been
brought in and arranged round me by the priest or Takaki, O Shige San
would appear and kneel in front of me, keeping my sake cup and rice bowl
filled, and watching with intense anxiety my expression as I tasted each
compound, and at the end of my dinner would remark that I had eaten
nothing, and that Japan was a dirty, ugly country, to which I always
replied that I had feasted, that England was dirty and ugly, but that
Japan was a beautiful country. Such is Oriental politeness. Then Sokin
came in with his pipe and pouch and little fire-box, and, after taking a
cup of sake with me, sat and smoked and conversed, or brought out the
tea things of his lamented patron, Ii Kamon no Kami, and made me a bowl
of powder tea with all the correct ceremonies. The Cha-no-yu is not to
be confounded with ordinary tea-drinking. It is an elaborate form of
entertainment which cannot be appreciated by an uneducated foreigner;
every movement is regulated by laws known to the initiated, and the
conversation is confined to some object of art, or poem produced by the
host. The kettle, water-bowl, and other utensils should all have some
historic or artistic interest, and the cup from which the mixture is
drunk is usually an example of archaic pottery. The rules of the game
have not been altered for about two centuries, though there are various
schools which differ as
[Illustration: WHITE AZALEA BUSH, RAKU-RAKU-TEI, HIKONE]
to minor details--whether the whisk with which the drink is stirred
should afterwards be laid on the seventh or thirteenth seam of the
matting, and things of that sort, which seem of infinitely small
importance to the ignorant, but make a vast difference to the
connoisseur. Our love of tobacco was a great bond of sympathy, although
after trying each other’s pipes we both preferred our own. The old man,
who knew that I did not like to be watched while painting, would sit in
his little room and gaze at me as I worked in the garden or among the
stone gods on the hill-side, and when he saw that my pipe was out, would
fill another for me and bring it out with a box of matches, making this
an excuse to look over my shoulder for a few minutes, and to have a
little conversation.
As the summer came on and the weather got hotter the insects became more
and more numerous; there were splendid butterflies and dragon-flies in
the daytime, swarms of fire-flies over the rice-fields at night, and
unfortunately many others which bit at all hours, flying things, and
things which mosquito-curtains could not keep out. The Japanese house
has no separate rooms for living and sleeping; when bedtime comes quilts
are brought in and laid on the floor, and, if necessary, a
mosquito-netting of thick green gauze is slung over them from the four
corners of the apartment. The natives use a small wooden pillow, with a
depression for the neck to rest in; I never could manage this, but after
a time I succeeded in sleeping well with coats or another quilt rolled
up for a bolster.
Certain paragraphs about me in the local papers brought a good many
visitors to the temple to see what I was doing, among them a gentleman
who was introduced to me as the best singer in Hikone, and a little
conversation and whiskey induced him to give me some specimens of his
art--songs of the Buddhist and Shinto priests, and others
[Illustration: THE BAMBOO GROVE, TENNENJI]
which might be described as popular airs. To foreign ears they were
quite devoid of melody, and his elaborate vocalization only produced
sounds which were disagreeable and harsh, or else ludicrously inadequate
to the efforts they cost him. My friend, who appeared to be an all-round
æsthete, spent a good part of the afternoon in arranging a big bronze
jar of azalea boughs and a hanging vase of irises, curling the leaves
and snipping off any stray shoots which did not conform to the
fish-scale arrangement (sakana no uroko no kata) which he was trying to
make.
The family were very busy all through this month with their crop of
silk-worms, which required incessant care and feeding. I was taken to
see them first in an outbuilding when they were just little black
specks; as they got older the air of this shed did not suit them, and
they were moved into the Hondo, where they flourished and grew with
astonishing rapidity under the eye of the Buddha, and devoured the
baskets of chopped mulberry leaves as fast as they could be prepared.
The caterpillars were huddled together on mats hung one above another in
a framework; a netting of string was spread over each mat so that the
whole mass could be lifted and the débris cleared away with very little
trouble. When they had ceased to grow, and began to stand on end, waving
their heads in the air after the idiotic fashion of silk-worms who want
to spin, they were picked off and put in little nests of straw or
bundles of brush-wood, which soon became a mass of soft yellow cocoons.
It was an anxious time for O Shige San, for a considerable part of her
income depended on the crop of silk; the cocoons are worth about thirty
yen a koku, a measure rather less than five bushels.
The pond under my veranda was full of carp and baby tortoises, which
hurried up to be fed as soon as they saw me leaning over the rail; the
old tortoises were more shy, and I only saw them on very hot days,
sunning themselves on the stones, and they slipped into the water with a
flop if I attempted to get near them. I caught one on a patch of sandy
ground, after watching its struggles to cover up the hole in which it
had just laid some leathery-looking white eggs. These days brought out
the snakes too, some of them very big, and all unpleasant to look at,
but quite harmless. There is only one venomous snake in the country, a
small brown beast called “Mamushi”; the other sorts are not ill-treated,
indeed, they are considered lucky, but this is always killed and
skinned, and a medicine is prepared from its dried body.
It would have been easy to dream away months here, but the wise
regulations of the Japanese government, foreseeing that the traveller
might be tempted to neglect his duties and become a mere loafer, forced
me to return to Kōbe and get a new passport, so I had to say good-bye to
my friends, and the Rakkan with the lichen-covered azaleas, still gay
with crimson flowers which trailed round their feet, and the terrace
where every evening I had watched the sun setting over Biwa, and to
descend once more to the railway and the commonplace.
The rain came down in torrents as I left the temple, and continued to do
so all the day, but there was plenty that was amusing to be seen from
the carriage window. The people were busy putting out their young rice
plants, and the fields were full of men and women working in mud and
water half-way up to their knees, and wearing their “kasa” and straw
coats, oiled paper, rush mats, or other contrivances to keep off the
rain. It is surely the dirtiest and most laborious form of agriculture;
the work is almost entirely done by manual labor with a spade and a
heavy four-pronged rake, though I occasionally saw a cow
[Illustration: SUNSET OVER LAKE BIWA, FROM TENNENJI]
or a pony, with a little thatched roof on its back to shoot off the
rain, dragging a sort of harrow through the mud. As soon as the spring
crop of barley or rape-seed is garnered and hung up to dry, the ground
is trenched with the spade, and water is turned over it until it has
become a soft slush, which is worked level with the rake. The young rice
plants, grown thick together in nursery patches, are pulled up when the
fields are ready for planting, their roots are washed, and they are tied
in bundles, which are thrown into the mud and water; then the men and
women wade in, untie a bundle, and set the seedlings in lines by just
pressing them with their fingers into the mud. They do this wonderfully
quickly, and can plant eight or nine in a row without moving from their
places; when the field is all planted it looks like a pond with a
delicate green haze over it. The dividing banks are planted with beans
or other vegetables, so that not a yard of ground is wasted. This was
the 18th of June, the beginning of the “dew month,” a period full of
discomforts for the traveller, and especially for the landscape-painter.
[Illustration: PLANTING RICE]
[Illustration: A SPRING FLOWER--JIRO-BO]
THE TIME OF THE LOTUS
[Illustration: PLATYCODON GRANDIFLORUM, “KIKYO”]
THE TIME OF THE LOTUS
The damp heat of the Japanese summer, which is so trying to human
beings, encourages all vegetation to grow with surprising luxuriance and
rapidity; the buds of yesterday are flowers to-day, and to-morrow
nothing is left but the ruin of a past beauty, making the painter’s
struggle most arduous just when he has least energy to contend with
nature. The young bamboo shoots come up like giant asparagus, growing so
fast that one can almost see them move; some of them are cut and eaten
while young and tender, and those which are allowed to grow to large
poles are used for every imaginable purpose. They are made into
water-pipes and flower-vases, barrel-hoops and umbrellas, baskets and
hats, scaffolding-poles and pipe-stems, fans and delicate whisks for
stirring the powdered tea--more things, in fact, than I could enumerate
in a page. The bamboo is surely the cause of much of the clever
constructive work of the Japanese; for though it will do most things
with proper treatment, it will not stand being handled like ordinary
timber; its peculiar qualities have to be considered, and every way in
which they use it is artistic and good. This is the large species which
grows to twenty or thirty feet high; there are many dwarf kinds, which
clothe the hills with green, and are used only for making fences and
such like.
[Illustration: AUKATUM LILIES AND BOCCONIA ON THE HILLS NEAR NIKKO]
The general aspect of Japan during the summer months is a harmony in
greens, the dark pines and cryptomerias striking the lowest note of a
scale which culminates in the
[Illustration: A FIELD OF LILIES, OFUNA, NEAR KAMAKURA]
brilliancy of the rice-fields--the most vivid green I know. There is
more variety of color in those districts which are not irrigated, such
as that round Kamakura, where the light sandy soil grows a great many
kinds of vegetables, sweet-potatoes, melons, tomatoes, beans, and big
patches of auratum and longiflorum lilies, the bulbs of which are
exported. The lily is not one of the flowers which the Japanese
themselves particularly admire, nor do they often use it for decoration.
In this, as in most other matters, there are recognized rules of taste,
and the man is considered
[Illustration: SEVEN BEAUTIFUL FLOWERS OF LATE SUMMER
1. Susuki 2. Kikyo 3. Asago 4. Shion 5. Omnia-Meshi 6. Kiku 7. Hagi
Drawing by Teshoto Hario]
an ignoramus who does not know the right thing to like. I was walking
one day at Yoshida with a Japanese artist, a remarkable man who was
engaged in making a series of steel-engravings, half landscape and half
map, of the country round Fuji, and called his attention to a splendid
clump of pink belladonna lilies growing near an old gray tomb; but he
would not have them at all, said they were foolish flowers, and the only
reason he gave me for not liking them was because they came up without
any leaves. When we got back to our tea-house he took my pen and paper,
and showed me what were the seven beautiful flowers of late summer--the
convolvulus, the name of which in Japanese is “asago,” meaning the same
as our “morning-glory;” wild chrysanthemum; yellow valerian; the
lespedeza, a kind of bush clover; _Platycodon grandiflorum_, a
purple-blue campanula; _Eulalia japonica_, the tall grass which covers
so many of the hills; and shion, a rather insignificant-flowered aster.
I noticed that some versions of the seven flowers differed from his; a
large-flowered mallow is often substituted for the last he named. There
are doubtless different schools which hold strong views on the subject,
but on the morning-glory and some others they are evidently agreed. The
auratum lily is a common wild flower in the hilly districts, and boiled
lily bulbs are a favorite vegetable, but I could not find out which was
considered the best variety for the table. O Shige San told me that it
was a red lily; I looked in vain for any of that color in their gardens.
The cottages in the country round Kamakura are thickly thatched, and on
the top of the thatch is laid a mass of earth held together by iris
plants, which form a roof-crest of spiky green; near them in July there
often were large hydrangea bushes covered with balls of blossom, the
young flowers a pale yellow-green, changing as they grew older through
bright blue to purple.
On the 9th of July the heat drove me from Europeanized Yokohama to the
hills. I left the train at Utso-no-miya, a little town which has been
financially ruined by the railway--for every one formerly stayed a night
there instead of travelling straight through--and was delighted to find
myself once more in thoroughly Japanese quarters. It was a wonderful
moonlight night, and I wandered round the town in kimono and clogs,
watched the people, and was stared at by them, climbed the steps to the
big Shinto temple, and
[Illustration: HYDRANGEA BUSH, TOTSUKA, NEAR YOKOHAMA]
gazed over the plains flooded with pale light, and thoroughly enjoyed
myself.
[Illustration: UNDER THE CRYPTOMERIAS AT NIKKO]
There is a railway now to Nikko, and most people rush up there without
seeing the glorious avenue of cryptomerias--described so well in Loti’s
_Japoneries d’Automne_--which line the old road for miles and miles. I
sent my boy and my baggage by rail, and went myself in a kuruma with two
good runners. The road is sadly out of repair in some places, but the
splendid old trees remain, and young ones have been planted where winds
and age have thinned their ranks. It is not like an ordinary avenue with
the trees planted some yards apart; these are so close together that the
trunks have often joined at the base, and I noticed one lot of seven big
trees all grown together at the bottom into a mass that must have been
eight or ten yards long. The road is sunk between the high banks on
which the trees grow, and it must be gloomy enough on such a night as
Loti experienced. Here and there it opens out into a village street,
with abundance of refreshment booths for the pilgrims who still make the
journey on foot.
Nikko itself is a long, steep street, leading up to a rushing mountain
torrent in a rocky ravine, which is crossed by two bridges side by side.
One is an ordinary wooden structure, used by all the world; the other,
which is of red lacquer, with black supports and brass ornaments, is
only opened for the Emperor and his family to pass over. Beyond them the
hills rise, covered with cryptomerias, among which are concealed the
great mortuary temples of Ieyasu and Iemitsu, founders of the great
Tokugawa Shogunate that lasted for two centuries. Marvellous as these
mausolea are, they make no effect in the distance; it is only when you
get close to them, wander about in their successive court-yards, and
examine the lovely details of wood-carving, lacquer, and gilding, that
the wonder of them strikes you. The tombs themselves are plain bronze
pillars, and are reached by long flights of granite steps, green and
gray with mosses and lichens, which lead up under the dark masses of
foliage behind the temples. After passing through all the glories of
color and elaborate workmanship in the preliminary temples their final
peacefulness and simplicity are very striking.
Nikko in the summer is full of foreign ladies and children; the Emperor,
too, has a country-house there, where some of his large family spend the
hot months. I saw the arrival of two little princesses, with a crowd of
nurses, tutors, and officials. They were funny little things, about
three or four years old, not as pretty as most Japanese children, but
dressed in the most gorgeous colors. The red lacquer bridge was opened
for them, decorated with “gohei”--the strips
[Illustration: A LITTLE TEMPLE AT NIKKO]
of white paper which are used so largely in the Shinto religion--and in
the middle of the bridge there was a little table with offerings of food
on it, where the children stopped and made their obeisances to the manes
of their ancestors as they passed over. All the priests of Nikko turned
out in gauze vestments of many colors, Buddhist and Shinto equally
anxious to do honor to the descendants of the gods.
[Illustration: KIKIFURI, NEAR NIKKO]