quaint forms which are loved by all artists, especially by the Japanese;
and near Suma, wherever the wiry grasses had got a foothold among the
sand, the shore was gay with scarlet lilies. The botanic name of this
flower, which is really more like an amaryllis than a lily, is _Nerine
japonica_. Its Japanese name is not so easy to determine, for wherever I
went it had a different one; some of these names are shiwata-bana,
teku-sari, chiridji, and ushino-ninniku (cow-garlic), but I think the
commonest is higambana (equinox flower), and the best, for its opening
marks the change of the season, the beginning of the end. It is
probably because of this that, beautiful as it appears to European eyes,
to the Japanese it is a flower of ill omen, associated in their minds
with death and decay, and never used in art or in floral arrangements.
The children, indeed, gather great armfuls of it; but they never take it
inside their homes; the great bunches they have collected are either
scattered among the family tombstones or left to wither on the
foot-paths. They seem to like picking it because its juicy stem snaps so
easily, and often amuse themselves as they sit by the road-side by
breaking the stalks half through, leaving them hanging in regular
joints, much as our children make dandelion or daisy chains. Near a
little graveyard set down among the rice-fields the flowers grew in
great profusion, making a gorgeous splash of brilliant color as a
foreground to the gray stones, the yellowing grain, and the pale blue
distant hills. The rice was ripening fast, and flocks of
[Illustration: LILIES BY THE SHORE, SUMA]
rice-birds flew hurriedly across as they were chased from field to field
by shouting boys. I wish I had made a sketch of a Japanese scarecrow;
there were plenty of them about, and I never saw one without laughing;
they were full of quaint humor and invention, and the little birds
seemed to enjoy them as much as I did. They recalled the remark of a
stranger in a fly-haunted parlor in South Carolina, where a small
clock-work windmill revolved in the centre of the table. I asked whether
it drove the flies away, and the owner replied,
[Illustration: A GRAVEYARD AT SUMA]
“At first it scared them some, but now they come in to ride round on
it.” The shore was always full of life and activity; bronzed fishermen,
naked except for a narrow white loin-cloth, were launching their boats
or hauling them ashore, towing along the beach, pulling up nets, or
chanting as they rowed their heavy craft, standing up and pushing the
long bent oars with a forward jerk, in the same way that a gondolier
works. The smaller sailing-boats are all rigged with the simple oblong
sail which is so often shown in Japanese drawings, made of narrow strips
of cotton cloth loosely laced together; the larger ones have a jib and a
jig-sail as well.
[Illustration: HILLS BEHIND KŌBE]
Futa-tabi, Maya-san, and the other hills which rise behind Kōbe are as
well worth seeing as the shore, full of picturesque walks; the country
at the back of them, commonly called “Aden” by the foreign residents, on
account of its barenness, is a curious waste of disintegrating granite,
seamed and furrowed by the heavy rains, where only some scrubby bushes
find a precarious foothold on the shifting soil. Coolies from the
neighboring villages come and cut these for firewood, and carry the
heavy fagots for miles to earn a few halfpence. In Arima, one of the
hill villages, there are hot ferruginous springs where hundreds of
people go to bathe; but the arrangements are not so primitive as those I
saw at Yumoto; the baths and dressing-rooms are private enough for the
shy foreigner. There is so much iron in the water that you come out of
it covered with a red deposit which takes some days of washing to
remove. On this excursion, as my boots were in hospital, I tried
Japanese foot-gear--thick cotton socks and straw sandals; they were very
light and comfortable at first, but after a time I was conscious of
every little pebble I trod on, and I got back to Kōbe with a good deal
of pain and many blisters. Foreigners who have often worn them get
hardened between the toes, and many good walkers and mountaineers use
them habitually; heavy boots are an encumbrance when not on your feet,
and though the straw sandals are quickly worn out, a few extra pairs are
no serious addition to your baggage.
On the 6th of October I had finished my drawings among the pines and the
sand hills, and a new passport had come, which gave me permission to
wander for three months longer through the provinces near the Tokaido,
so I bid farewell to my good friends and the comfortable club-house in
Kōbe, and Matsuba once more left his wife and family to follow my
fortunes.
[Illustration: A BAMBOO YARD AT MAIBARA]
Our destination was Maibara, a little town on Lake Biwa, not many miles
from Hikone. As I passed it by rail I had noticed that the flooded
fields on the margin of the lake were covered with a blue-flowered
water-plant, a good foreground to the blue water and the distant
mountains, and I hoped for blue skies to complete the picture, but they
came only at rare intervals. On a piece of waste
[Illustration: BLUE WATER-WEED]
ground near my tea-house a travelling theatre had been erected, a
structure of bamboo poles with mats hung over them, which was not
calculated to keep an audience dry, and not once during my stay were the
company able to give a performance. The manager occupied the room next
mine; he was an excellent performer on the samisen, and a pious man
withal. Every morning from seven till half-past he said his prayers,
repeating in a monotonous singsong voice a sentence which sounded to me
like “Ya ya yura no,” and tapping two blocks of wood together to keep
time. He belonged to the Shingon sect of Buddhists.
[Illustration: THE TRAVELLING THEATRE, MAIBARA]
The prayer formula of the Monto sect, one of the most popular and
powerful, owning the great Hongwanji temples which are found in all
large towns, is, “Namu Amida Butsu,” while the followers of Nichiren, as
they beat their drums, murmur constantly, “Namu myōhō renge kyō.”
We soon became good friends, the manager and I, and he spent many hours
in my room drinking tea, looking at my sketches, and in such
conversation as my rudimentary knowledge of the language permitted, but
unfortunately I never had an opportunity of seeing him act. When I left
he presented me with a printed cotton towel in an ornamental wrapper,
and I gave him a penny black-lead pencil, and we parted with mutual
expressions of esteem. I had other visitors too: the station-master and
the chief of police wanted to see my pictures, and Takaki, O Shige San,
and little Kazu, with the brown velvet eyes, came over from Hikone to
call on me, and arranged to meet me at the Nagahama matsuri. This annual
festival takes place in the middle of October, and seems to be a
gathering-ground for all the country-side. In many respects it was very
like a country fair in England, but the main event on all the three days
is the perambulation of large triumphal cars, called yama, on which
companies of children give dramatic performances. I was fortunate in
having a brilliantly fine day, and as I bowled along the five miles of
level road from Maibara in a kuruma with two good runners, I passed
troops of people in holiday attire, old peasants, gayly dressed young
girls, and wandering friars with huge bamboo hats that looked like
bushel baskets. The town was gayly decorated with flags and with
lanterns bearing the device of the city, and crowds were pouring into it
by road and rail and boat; for Nagahama is a busy port at the northern
end of Lake Biwa, and a regular service of steamers runs between there
and Otsu, at the southern end. This mixture of things ancient and
modern in Japan always seems amusing, especially when, as in Nagahama,
there is not much of the modern. The row-boats which came in with their
loads of passengers were of unvarnished wood, decorated with black
patterns on the bows, and, except the police and the railway officials,
I saw very few men in European dress; there certainly were no women in
anything but their own becoming costume, and I was the only foreigner in
the town. My landlord had been thoughtful enough to engage a place for
me in a tea-house opposite which the yama stopped and gave a
performance: all the partitions had been removed, and the floor, divided
into squares by low movable railings, was covered with family parties
who had brought their own cushions and provisions.
[Illustration: LAUNCHING A BOAT]
My heart was filled with covetousness as I saw the fine old lacquer
bento boxes which they produced after carefully removing many silk
wrappings. There are twelve yama in the town, each owned by a different
guild or society, the members of which teach the children their parts,
provide dresses for their play, and accompany the yama on the festival
days. The cars are huge things, taller than most of the Japanese houses,
and quite fill up the
[Illustration: LAKE BIWA WITH FLOODED RICE-FIELDS, NEAR MAIBARA]
narrow streets; they are built on solid wooden wheels, and are dragged
about by strings of coolies, the young men of the guild dancing and
shouting in front of them, waving fans by day and lanterns after dark to
direct the coolies’ movements, while the older members follow in
white-curtained carts. The wood-work around the stage is lacquered, gold
and black and red, with elaborate brass ornaments, and the pagoda-like
roof which covers it is of burnished gold, surmounted with a dragon or
phœnix or other mythical animal. The part behind the stage is enclosed
with hangings, Chinese embroideries, Persian rugs, or silk brocades, and
two of them had fine pieces of Flemish tapestry, which must have come
over with the Dutch centuries ago; the buxom ladies and knights in armor
looked odd, and yet pleasantly familiar, and my heart went out to the
expatriated strangers, so lonely amid that Eastern crowd. In front of
each stage hung a bunch of “gohei,” the twisted strips of white paper
which are the universal emblem of the Shinto religion, the only simple
things among the masses of gorgeous color, and they seemed to give the
key-note to the whole; for Shinto is, above everything else, an
ancestor-worship, a religious respect for the country and for the men
whose heroic deeds still inspire its people, and the short dramas which
the children acted were all founded on old stories--how Yoritomo’s son
sacrificed his life to save the young Mikado, and other well-known
motives from Japanese history. The boys were admirably trained and
beautifully dressed; they rolled their eyes and grimaced in exactly the
same way as their elders of the profession, and the crowd vigorously
applauded their facial contortions. In one company there was a little
mite of two years old; he had not to speak at all, only to cry out once
or twice, but he knew his part as well as the rest, and always looked up
at his boy father at the right moment. During the afternoon I walked
round the town, first to the Buddhist temple, the great hall of which
was crowded with people sleeping, eating, and praying, and then up the
long avenue leading to the Shinto temple of Hachiman. It was lined with
stalls and booths for refreshments of all kinds, with conjurers,
purse-trick men, lucky wheels, quack-medicine vendors, and so on, and
near the big granite torii and lanterns were the market-gardeners with
dwarf pines, oranges laden with fruit, camellias, and other trees. One
had nothing but orchid-plants, none of them, unfortunately, in flower. I
joined a large circle of spectators who were watching a scriever, which
is, I believe, the professional name for the artists who draw on the
flag-stones; this one had no pavement, so he prepared an even ground by
sprinkling some light gray sand over the dusty road; his colors were
bags of black, white, red, and blue sand; from one of these he took a
handful, and drew his design by letting the powder run from his closed
fist in a line which varied in thickness as he tightened or loosened his
grasp. He wrote or drew in this way with wonderful rapidity as he
squatted on the ground, and he talked all the time, obliterating each
drawing as soon as he had finished it. I watched him draw a figure of a
girl, and he began by putting down the spots of the pattern on her
kimono with blue, then added the shadow lines of the dress, relieved it
here and there with white, sketched the face and hands in red, and
finally added a bold outline in black, which completed the picture, thus
working in that reverse way to our natural instincts which you so often
notice in this land of Topsy-turvydom.
As evening approached, all the yama began to collect in the square in
front of another Shinto temple, where the great Hachiman car with
colossal swords, and the Mikoshi, a shrine carried about on men’s
shoulders, were already placed. In the river on one side of this square
many boats were moored, spread with rush mats and with the red blankets
which have become so common in Japan, and in them people were
picknicking; over the bridge which crossed it the unwieldy structures
were dragged from the town by shouting crowds; each in turn gave a final
performance in front of the temple, and was then drawn aside to make
room for the next. This began at half-past five, and it was eleven
o’clock before the last of
[Illustration: ONE OF THE “YAMA” AT THE NAGAHAMA MATSURI
From a printed programme sold on the street]
them had been ranged with the others to the right of the temple steps.
As night came on they were covered with big lanterns, the stages were
lighted by lamps in glass shades, and attendants with candles on long
sticks illuminated the face of each little actor while he was speaking.
When the six gorgeous yama with their attendants and gayly dressed
performers were all drawn up in line against
[Illustration: SOME HATS AT THE NAGAHAMA MATSURI]
a background of solemn cryptomerias, with an excited crowd dancing and
waving lanterns in front of them, the spectacle was more beautiful than
any words of mine can suggest. In spite of the excitement, I saw only
one quarrel; a young man, in order to get nearer to the stage, had
pushed past a big coolie, who had evidently taken as much saké as he
could carry, and for a few seconds I thought there would be a fight; but
a bystander pointed out to the indignant man that the youth had to get
nearer because he was short-sighted and wore spectacles, and peace was
at once restored. On the way back to our tea-house, where my friends
from Tennenji had dined with me, we passed a street full of stalls, with
pipes and pouches, cheap jewelry, hair-pins and combs, and many other
knick-knacks suitable for presents. I wanted a few of them, and found
that O Shige San was a talented shopper; she had her limit, ten sen, and
usually succeeded in getting the article for that sum, whatever the
original price might have been. As I wandered round early the next
morning I found that the yama had already been moved to their stations
in various
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE GARDEN, SEIGWANJI]
streets, and were being cleaned up in preparation for the day’s
performances. The town is studded with tall fire-proof go-downs, in
which the precious vehicles are safely stored during the rest of the
year.
Near Maibara there were large orchards of persimmons with
brilliant-colored fruit, which, as Andrew Marvel says of the oranges,
“hang like gold lamps in a green night.” They were particularly
beautiful in the well-designed garden of Seigwanji, where I made some
sketches. It is a fine example of a temple garden, and some massive
evergreen oaks form an impressive background to the gray stones, the
carefully trained pines, and the trimly clipped shrubs; but except for
the persimmons, a few reddening maple leaves, some late blooms of
platycodon, and the scarlet berries of a little ardisia, it was all
green and gray.
[Illustration: MINIATURE PAGODA IN THE TEMPLE GARDEN, SEIGWANJI]
In the cottage gardens near Suzukawa, a little station on the Tokaido to
the south of Fuji where I made a short halt late in October, I began to
see some chrysanthemum flowers; they were not particularly fine or
effective, but I found plenty to paint there, and wished very much that
the days and my remaining weeks in Japan were not getting so short. The
village lies behind a range of sand dunes, which are overgrown with
ancient pines, and beyond them is the shore of Suruga Bay, a grand
expanse of gray volcanic sand, called by the Japanese Tago-no-ura,
where fishermen are always hauling at nets in lines of naked brown
figures against the blue sea, or wandering back in groups across the
sands in long dark-blue coats, with pale-blue and white handkerchiefs
tied over their heads, carrying their nets and parcels of fish wrapped
in straw. At my tea-house, the Koshuya, I reaped the result of their
labors, and got excellent dinners of red or gray tai, lobsters, and huge
prawns, cooked by a man who was a real artist and took a pride in his
profession.
The first really fine chrysanthemums I saw were in Yokohama, when I got
back there early in November; I was disappointed to find that they were
in temporary sheds put up to protect them from rain and sun, and not in
masses out-of-doors, as I expected to see them; but they were
excellently grown, and in the softened light of the oil-paper shades
their colors showed to great advantage. The plants are treated much as
they are with us, raised in pots from cuttings taken in the spring, and
encouraged with plenty of manure until the buds are formed; before
flowering they are removed from their pots and planted out in bold
groups of color in the beds which have been prepared for them. Some
plants are reduced to a single stem, on which only one enormous blossom
is allowed to develop; these are generally arranged in a line, with each
flower stiffly tied to a horizontal bamboo support, and the effect is
very sad; but the excellence of the gardeners is best shown in growing
large bushes, which have been known to carry as many as four hundred
flowers of medium size, all in perfect condition, on the same day. An
English gardener who had visited every show within reach of Tōkyō,
including the Emperor’s celebrated collection in the palace grounds,
told me that he had seen no individual blossoms equal to the best dozen
or so at a first-rate London exhibition, but that these great plants
with their hundreds of flowers were
[Illustration: A CHRYSANTHEMUM SHOW AT YOKOHAMA]
triumphs of horticulture. The most curious examples of
chrysanthemum-growing were to be seen in the Dangozaka quarter of Tōkyō.
The long hilly street is bordered on each side with gardens enclosed
with high bamboo fences, and in every one, by paying three rin, you
could see groups of life-size figures mainly covered with chrysanthemum
leaves and flowers. They represented scenes from history, the drama, or
Buddhist mythology, and were constructed with frame-works of bamboo,
inside which the flower-pots were concealed, the shoots being brought
through the openings and trained over the outer surface. The heads and
hands were made of painted wood, and swords and other accessories were
added to make them more life-like; the draperies of living leaves and
flowers were skilfully arranged in large folds, and, as in most of the
popular shows, they depicted the costumes of Daimio and Samurai of the
past. At each entrance I was given a sort of play-bill, a roughly
printed broad-sheet with a wood-cut and a description of the different
groups, serving as an advertisement of the gardener’s establishment. One
of the finest places for autumn colors is the large garden behind the
arsenal in the Koishikawa quarter, laid out by a former Prince of Mito
as a quiet retreat for his old age. It covers several acres, and is
certainly very beautiful, with its lakes and islands, solemn groves and
shrines; but it is silent and deserted; the people are only admitted by
a special permission; and I liked better the maples which line the banks
of the Taki-no-gawa near Oji, where crowds were quietly enjoying
themselves, sipping tea and saké as they sat in front of the tea-houses
and gazed down on the trees, or strolling along in picturesque groups
under the crimson canopy of foliage. The little river glides along with
barely a ripple, and it reflected all the glory of the leaves which
stretched over it in sprays of scarlet and gold, reminding me of a
Japanese poem, “I wish to cross the river, but fear to cut the brocade
on its surface.” Another poem, dating from the time when it was
customary to present silk or cloth to the Shinto gods instead of the
“gohei,” which now serve as a symbol, shows the national admiration of
the autumn leaves: “This time I bring no offering; the gods can take the
damask of the maple-trees on Tamukeyama.”
There are many other trees in the rich flora of Japan which are as gay
as the maples, though no others which show as great a variety of color;
the dark leaves of the tulip-tree turn to a rich cadmium yellow, and the
icho (Salisburia) is covered with pale gold, while many of the shrubs,
grasses, and herbaceous plants with bright and varied tints help to
relieve the solemn everlasting green of the pines and cryptomerias which
clothe the eternal hills.
And so in a blaze of glory the Japanese year ends; but long before these
last leaves have fallen the camellias are once more in flower, and
continue until the plum blossom comes in February, a connecting link in
the chain of beauty and flowers which encircles this happy land. One of
my last days in Tōkyō was spent in showing my drawings to the students
of the Uyeno School of Art, where Professor Okakura, the president, who
combines with a good knowledge of Western art a great reverence for that
of his own country, is attempting with no small success to keep up the
artistic tradition, and to revive those artistic industries which were
falling into decay. He had invited artists of other schools, some of
whom had studied in Paris and Rome, but I was most interested in the
remarks and questions of the purely Japanese students, and in their
eagerness to discover any motive, besides the reproduction of nature, in
work so different from their own.
At the Asakusa matsuri they were already selling emblems suited for the
new year--the rice-rake to scrape
[Illustration: THE ARSENAL GARDEN, KOISHIKAWA, TŌKYŌ]
together dollars; the rice-bag, daikon, and red tai, suggestive of good
fare; and the target with an arrow in the bull’s-eye, meaning, “May you
hit the mark!” arranged round a mask of the goddess of fortune; and with
a stock of these to bring me good-luck, I sailed away on the 10th of
December across the dreary and flowerless Pacific.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: LYCHNIS GRANDIFLORA, MISAKA-TOGE]
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FOOTNOTES:
[A] Before I left Tennenji he wrote in one of my sketch-books the poem
inscribed above in Japanese characters. The reading is, “Yukuri no
Omi no midzu-umi no fukaki kokoro wa chiyomo chigiran,” and it may be
roughly translated thus: Deep as the water of Lake Biwa, my heart has
been ever true and changeless since chance brought us together.
[B] “Daikon” is a large kind of white radish, which is boiled and cut
in strips and served as a savor with every meal; it is very tough, and
both the smell and the flavor are repulsive. A well-known Yokohama poet
has written some verses on the subject, which show a great knowledge of
culinary French, and a rooted dislike to the vegetable which is shared
by most foreigners. It commences in this way: