I GO TO JAPAN
THE Admiral’s prognostications were correct. We met such heavy seas
passing Cape Flattery that the ship seemed to be trying to turn turtle.
We were unable to sit on deck from that day until the day that we
sighted Japan, and once we had to heave-to for eighteen hours. The worst
of the weather being so terrible was that the Captain was unable to
execute the Company’s instructions to take us to see the Aleutian
Islands, which only whalers know, and drop some stores there for
shipwrecked mariners.
But on that December morning, when we found ourselves in smooth water
and soft, summery temperature off the flat-topped hills of Japan,
surrounded by the billowing sails of countless junks, the very first
vessels we had seen since Cape Flattery faded out of sight, we felt
rewarded.
The East, the Far East, which I had heard “a-calling” all my life, was
right within my grasp. In a few hours’ time I should be standing on the
shores of fanciful and mysterious Japan, able to remain there as long as
I chose, for we had no fixed plans. We were just drifting on—drifting
through our lives—drifting across the world. My heart beat high; I might
have written nothing but a few books of verse which hardly anybody read,
but, at any rate, I had gone half round the world, and if I wished to
stay and dream for the rest of my life in the East, who was to say me
nay?
Whatever the causes, the effect was to give me the subject for which I
had been waiting to make my position as an author. From the day that I
published _The Japs at Home_, I shed my label of the “Australian Poet,”
and became known as the author who has been to Japan.
I even enriched the English language with a word—_Japs_. It had long
been in use in America, but no one had ventured to put it into a book in
England. Some thought it was undignified; some thought that it would
incense the Japanese. I not only put it into a book, but on the cover of
a book, which has sold a hundred and fifty thousand copies. Only to-day
I discovered that Japan’s great poet, Yone Noguchi, and the Japanese
publicist, T. G. Komai, use it in their books, which are written in
English.
I had, in Montreal, bought a No. 1 Kodak—a novelty in those days—and
with it I took several hundred photographs in Japan—it was from these
that Fenn, the artist, of McClure’s Syndicate, afterwards drew his
illustrations for my articles, which were reproduced in the earlier
editions of the book. The “Kodaks” not only served as the basis of the
illustrations, they made a most admirable journal for me to write from.
I commenced Kodaking and taking notes from the hour that we entered the
harbour of Yokohama, and kept it up without flagging till the day that
we left Yokohama for San Francisco. It was to those snapshots with
camera and pencil that my books on Japan owed the lively touches which
gave them their popularity.
We were a winter and a spring and a summer in Japan—for all except six
weeks which we spent in China. I paid most of my hotel bills in Japan by
writing my _Handbook to Japan_ for the Club Hotel Company.
In Japan we spent our entire days in sight-seeing. If we were not going
over interesting buildings (and I over Yoshiwaras), temples, castles,
baths or tea-houses in marvellous gardens—we were wandering about the
streets or the country in our _rikishas_, dismounting when there was
anything to photograph or examine or purchase. The _rikisha_ is a most
convenient way of getting about for a person who is making notes,
because he can write as he goes along, and pull up as often as he likes
when there is anything which needs his attention. Also, your
_Jinrikisha_ boy, if you choose carefully, speaks enough English to act
as an interpreter, and, from having taken foreigners to the sights so
often, is usually a tolerably efficient guide. Besides which, it is a
novel, pleasant and exciting method of locomotion.
We hired the best two _rikisha_ men we could hear of by the week, and
never regretted the extravagance. They were always there when we wanted
them, and in a very few days grasped exactly what we wished to do and
see. One was called Sada and the other Taro.
It was in this way that I acquired my knowledge of the Japan which can
be seen on the surface, and which is all that the average foreigner
wishes to see, and gave myself one of the three or four subjects with
which my name is identified.
We spent the first month in Yokohama, a much-maligned place, for it had
in those days an unspoiled native town at the back of the settlement,
and its environs were charming, whether one went towards Negishi or
towards Ikegami: I found enough to keep me hard at work for a month.
On the last day of the year we went to Tokyo. We had a reason for that;
we wished to see the great fair in the Ginza, which is one of the most
typical sights of Japan. Savage Landor, who had been in Tokyo for some
time, wrote that we must on no account miss it, and he took rooms for us
in the Tokyo hotel—which the Japanese called _Yadoya_, “the hotel.”
The Tokyo hotel was an experience: it had originally been the _Yashiki_
or town-house of a feudal prince, in the days when the Shogun reigned at
Tokyo. It had a moat (into which Miss Lorimer, who accompanied us on all
our travels, fell on the first night we were there, but which
fortunately contained more mud than water), and stood in an angle of the
outer works of the castle.
Just below it, small craft made a port of the outer moat of the castle:
in its courtyard carpenters were using up the large amount of waste
space which there is in a _Yashiki_ by nailing fresh rooms on to the
Daimio’s house, to make the hotel larger. It could not be called
anything but nailing on, because it was made of wood and paper, and was
not properly dovetailed into the existing building, but simply tacked
on. We learnt many upside-down notions by watching the builders and
carpenters, who did most things inside-out or upside-down, according to
our notions. Also the Japanese manager, the Abè San who was murdered a
few months ago, borrowed my clothes to have them copied by a Japanese
tailor, and the waiters wore their European clothes over their native
dress, and wriggled out of them behind a screen as soon as a meal was
over. If you called them at such a moment, whatever your sex, they might
come forward with their trousers half on and half off. The Japanese have
their own ideas of conventions between the sexes.
Wandering through that fair at the Ginza took one into the very heart of
Japan: it is held to enable people to settle their debts before New
Year’s Day.
Apart from the obituary parks of Shiba and Ueno, Tokyo is not reckoned
rich in temples, though it has a few very famous temples in the suburbs,
and more than a few within a short excursionary distance. But Shiba and
Ueno—and especially the former—present an epitome of Japanese life, art,
scenery and history.
It is difficult to imagine anything more beautiful than Shiba, though
the Japanese have a proverb that you must not call anything beautiful
till you have seen Nikko. The fir woods in which it stands are on a low
ridge commanding an exquisitive view of the Gulf of Tokyo, and in this
wood are embosomed the mausolea of most of the earlier Shoguns of the
Tokugawa House, which came to an end this winter with the death of the
abdicated Shogun. Each mausoleum has a beautiful temple beside the tomb.
The presence of so many temples has led the Japanese to exhaust their
landscape art on Shiba with lake and cherry-grove and cryptomeria. Such
natives as do not go there for religion are attracted by the pleasure
city, with its famous tea-houses, like the Maple Club, its shows, and,
above all, by its dancing. Here you may see the _No_-dance, the
_Kagura_-dance, and some of the best Geishas.
But the chief charm of Shiba to me was its absolute Orientalness
compared to the rest of Tokyo.
No sooner are you inside the great red gateway of the temples than you
are in the world of fairy-tales. For temple after temple opens up before
you, low fantastic structures, on which Oriental imagination has run
riot in colour and form. You are bewildered by the innumerable
courtyards of stone lanterns, the paraphernalia of drum-tower and
bell-tower, fountain and dancing-stage, which surround them. You are
sobered by the dark groves between the temples, which contain the tombs.
Temple and tomb are thronged by streams of dignified natives, some come
to worship and some to see the sights. Here you will find a service
going on, with white-robed priests kneeling on the mirrored floor of
black lacquer, for which you have to remove your boots. Outside the
actual temples the shows are in full blast, and picnicking proceeds
everywhere. All the Japanese are in their native dress. Gay little
musumes and gorgeous geishas flutter before you. The grand tea-houses
offer fresh visions of the Orient with their Geisha dances and their
fantastic gardens.
Ueno has the added charm of a large lake, covered with lotus-blossoms in
summer.
At no great distance from Shiba is the Shinagawa Yoshiwara, which, for
fantastic beauty, surpasses anything in Japan. With these and the water
life of the Nihombashi, and the life of the poor going on all day in the
streets—for the poor Japanese takes the front off his house all through
the day to air it—I should have found good occupation for my notebook
and camera for years.
If we had not been urged by other foreigners, I do not know when we
should have left Tokyo. And we saw little enough of them except at
meal-times, or when we went to the Frasers (Hugh Fraser was British
Minister of Tokyo, and husband of the well-known author, Mrs. Hugh
Fraser, Marion Crawford’s sister), or the Napiers. The Master of Napier,
the Lord Napier and Ettrick, just dead, was his First Secretary. But at
meal-times they talked so much of Easter at Miyanoshita, and the
cherry-blossom festival at Kyoto, and the annual festival at Nikko, and
the Great Buddha at Kamakura, and the sacred shrines of Ise, that we
fortunately felt obliged to visit them.
Miyanoshita, the favourite holiday-resort of the Europeans in Japan, is
high up in the mountains. The valley on the right of the long ridge
which leads up to it in spring is ablaze with azaleas and flowering
trees. It, itself, is perched on a mountain-side, above a densely-wooded
valley. Exquisite walks can be taken from it, such as the trip to
Hakone, the beautiful village which stands on the blue lake at the foot
of Fujiyama, in which the immortal grace of the great mountain is
reflected whenever the sun or moon is above the horizon. Miyanoshita is
equally famous for its mountain air and its mountain baths. The boiling
water, highly impregnated with sulphur, is brought down in bamboo pipes
from the bosom of the mountain to deep wooden baths sunk in the floor of
the hotel bathing-house. Life here is one long picnic: the energetic
take walks, the lazy are carried in chairs over the hills: people fly
here for week-ends in spring, and from the heat and damp of the summer.
Its great rival is Nikko, another mountain village, embosomed in shady
groves, with woods full of wild hydrangeas. In June Nikko is crowded for
the festival of Toshogu, the deified founder of the dynasty of Shoguns,
which was ended by the revolution of 1868—the principal festival of
Japan, inaugurated with the grandest procession to be seen nowadays, in
which all who take part in it wear the ceremonial dresses of three
hundred years ago.
Nikko has the two most beautiful temples in the magic land—those of
Iyeyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa dynasty, and his grandson,
Iyemitsu. Here you see the most perfect lacquer and carving in all
Japan. And their courtyards are exquisitely terraced on the
mountain-side. Here, too, besides these and other glorious temples,
there are the added charms of scenery, a foaming sky-blue river, running
beneath the sacred scarlet bridge, and between the avenue of Buddhas,
commons of scarlet azalea, and thickets of wild wistaria.
Having seen Nikko, the sacred city of the Shoguns, one must needs see
Kyoto, the city of the Mikados, and Nara.
For seven centuries prior to the revolution in our own day, Kyoto was
the capital of the Mikados. Here they lived like gods behind a veil,
only penetrated by the hierarchy: they never left the palace gates
except in a closed palanquin: they added little but tombs to the city,
and their tombs were never shown. But the Shoguns, who ruled in their
name, and others great in the land, adorned Kyoto with some of the
greatest and most interesting temples in Japan, such as the temples of
the Gold and Silver Pavilions, the two Hongwanji temples, the temple of
the Thirty-Three Thousand Images, and the chief temple of Inari the
Goddess of Rice. And it being the ancient capital, we found the city
full of old prints and curios, and the old-fashioned pleasure resorts of
Japan.
Kyoto was a city of the pleasure-seeker of old time, as capitals are
wont to be. It has wonderful tea-houses in the city; its temple grounds
are like permanent fairs; and within a _rikisha_ drive is Lake Biwa, one
of the most exquisite lakes in the world, whose shores exhibit the
_chefs d’œuvres_ of the Japanese landscape-creator. Nothing could be
more exquisite than the temple grounds on the shores of Lake Biwa.
Of the many old-time festivals of Kyoto, the most famous survival is the
Miyako-odori, or cherry-blossom festival, held every year, when visitors
flock to Kyoto to see the cherry-groves in full blossom. The feature of
the festival is a wonderful ballet, for which the best dancers in Japan
gather in Kyoto. Even the Duke and Duchess of Connaught came to Kyoto
for it, when they were in Japan. We stayed for a long time at Yaami’s
when they were there, and when the Duke learned from Colonel Cavaye, his
private secretary, that I was a journalist, he gave me permission to
accompany his party to any function or expedition which I wished to
describe. The most interesting of them was the shooting of the rapids of
the Katsuragawa, some miles from Kyoto, where thirteen miles of
cataracts are negotiated in huge punts, built of springy boards. As we
were buffeting down the rapids, the Duke told me that our present King,
then Prince George of Wales, had said that shooting those rapids, and
the baths of Miyanoshita, where you have natural hot water in wooden
boxes sunk in the floor, were the two best things in the world.
In Kyoto, an antique city on a broad plain, embosomed in hills, capped
by temples, one has the very essence of old Japan. We stayed there a
long time, absorbing an atmosphere which may soon pass away, never to
return.
Within a day’s _rikisha_ drive of Kyoto is Nara, with its
thousand-year-old treasury of the most notable possessions of the
Mikados, and its glorious temples, and its sacred deer-park, and its
acres of scarlet azalea thickets.
We visited all; we visited the two great cities of Osaka and Nagoya,
with their magnificent castles, and Kamakura, with its gigantic Buddha
and its ancient monasteries. We visited all the most famous cities and
points of scenery in Japan; and the pleasure of our visit was heightened
by our going away to China for six weeks in the middle of it, because
when we came back our eyes were far keener to observe and to appreciate,
while we had the knowledge acquired in our former visit to guide us.
We were truly sorry to leave Japan. I should be quite content to be
living there still; but if we had remained there, Japan would not have
taken its part in my development as a writer, for though I should
doubtless have compiled a book or books about Japan, they would have
been sent home as the productions of an amateur, and very likely have
had such difficulty in finding a publisher that they would have been
brought out in some hole-and-corner way, instead of my selling _The Japs
at Home_ in the open market, and thereby laying the foundation of my
career as a travel-book writer.
Japan supplied me with the material for several books, not counting the
handbook which I wrote for the Club Hotel—_A Japanese Marriage_, next in
point of sales to _The Japs at Home_; _Queer Things About Japan_, which
sold best of all my books in guinea form; _More Queer Things About
Japan_, which I wrote with Norma Lorimer; _When We Were Lovers in
Japan_, a novel which was originally published under the title of
_Playing the Game_; and _Pictures of Japan_; while I have written
countless articles and short stories about the country.
I had almost forgotten that I had a book—my _Lester the
Loyalist_—published in Japan. Though it only contained about twenty
pages, it took two months to print. How the result gratified me, I wrote
in _The Japs at Home_.
“I forgot all the delays when I saw the printed pages, they were so
beautiful, and really, considering that Mr. Mayeda was the only man in
the establishment who could read a word of English, the printing was
exceedingly correct. The blocks had turned out a complete success,
though, of course, the proofs of the covers did not look as well as they
would when mounted and crêped.
“The Japanese have a process by which they can make paper crêpe
book-covers as stiff as buckram.
“‘Well, Mr. Mayeda, how did your little boy like the stamp-book you
mended up for him so beautifully?’ I asked one day.
“‘Ah! it is very sad; he has gone to hell. But the little boy, he has
loved the stamp-book so that he has taken it to hell with him. It is on
his _grave_, do you call it?’
“Mr. Mayeda was thinking of what the missionaries had told him when he
was learning English.
“A few weeks more passed. Mr. Mayeda brought us the perfect book. He was
so flushed and tearful that I poured him a couple of bumpers of
vermouth, which he drank off with the excitement of an unemployed
workman in England when he makes a trifle by chance, and spends it right
off on his beloved gin.
“‘Is anything the matter, Mr. Mayeda?’ I asked.
“‘It is so sad. My other little boy has gone to hell, too. And I am so
poor, and I have to keep my wife’s uncle, and my father is very silly,
and so I get drunk every night.’
“The books he had brought were exquisite. The printing was really very
correct, and the effect of the long hexameter lines, in the handsome
small pica type, on the oblong Japanese double leaf of silky
ivory-tinted paper, every page flowered with maple-leaves in delicate
pearl-grey under the type, was as lovely as it was unique.
“The block printings on every single leaf were done by hand—the leaf
being laid over the block, and rubbed into it by a queer palm-leaf-pad
burnisher.
“The covers were marvels of beauty, made of steel-grey paper crêpe,
ornamented, the back one with three little sere and curled-up maple
leaves drifting before the wind, and the front one with a spray of maple
leaves in all their autumn glory and variety of tints, reproduced to the
life.
“Across the right-hand end of the sprig was pasted a long white silk
label in the Japanese style. The good taste, the elegance, the colours
of this cover, fairly amazed me.”
Our visit to China was taken at the instigation of friends in Japan, who
made an annual trip to the Hong Kong races. I cannot say that it
interested me as much as Japan; but we only had time to visit Hong Kong,
Shanghai, Canton and Macao, and of these, Canton alone was absolutely
Chinese. Canton is as typical a Chinese city as one could desire—supreme
in commerce, a hot-bed of Chinese aspirations. But it is very poorly off
for fine old buildings; it is more interesting for its huge water
population, living in long streets of boats, and for the wonderful
gardens of some of its merchants.
Macao is chiefly interesting as a very ancient outpost of Europe in the
East, old enough for Camoens to have lived and written his immortal
Lusiad there in the sixteenth century. It has little to call for the
attention of the stranger, except nice old gardens with huge
banyan-trees, and gambling hells, where you learn to play _Fan-tan_. It
only flourishes as an Alsatia for rogues outside of British and Chinese
jurisdiction.
Shanghai is a fine European town, with luxuries and conveniences, for
which Hong-Kongers sigh, and a most picturesque walled native town,
which contains one of the most beautiful tea-houses in the East.
Hong Kong is a gay city, because it is so full of British naval and
military officers. It is also rather a beautiful place, having a
mountain right over the town, which is the sanatorium and summer-resort.
I met many old schoolfellows there, who took care that invitations
should be sent to us for all the Service festivities, which are so thick
at Race-time. And they also told me what to see in Hong Kong and Canton
and Macao.
But, knowing that I was only to be in China for a month and a half, I
made no effort to ground myself in knowledge of everyday China, but gave
myself up to enjoying the gaieties and tropical luxuries.
China thus had no effect on my literary development. Our stay there was
a mere holiday, at which I had a fresh and exhaustive round of military
and naval festivities.
The island of Hong Kong is not a good place for studying the Chinaman,
except as an employé of the Englishman.
On our return from China to Japan we were fascinated by the almost
tropical beauty of the Japanese summer. There was also a good deal of
British gaiety, for the Fleet had moved just before us from China to
Japan.
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