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Title: Glimpses of Japan and Formosa
Author: Harry Alverson Franck
Release date: June 25, 2026 [eBook #78946]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: The Century co., 1924
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78946
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GLIMPSES OF JAPAN AND FORMOSA ***
GLIMPSES OF JAPAN
AND FORMOSA
[Illustration: A pilgrim of Koya san with full equipment of staff, bell,
begging-bowl, pilgrim’s specified pack, and all the rest]
GLIMPSES OF JAPAN AND FORMOSA
BY
HARRY A. FRANCK
AUTHOR OF “FOUR MONTHS AFOOT IN SPAIN,” “ZONE POLICEMAN 88,” “TRAMPING
THROUGH MEXICO,” ETC., ETC.
WITH SOME KODAK SNAPSHOTS BY THE AUTHOR
[Illustration: Logo]
THE CENTURY CO.
NEW YORK & LONDON
Copyright, 1924, by
THE CENTURY CO.
Printed in U. S. A.
ILLUSTRATIONS
A pilgrim of Koya-san, with full equipment of staff,
bell, begging-bowl, pilgrim’s specified pack, and all
the rest _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
The American-like main street of Sapporo, capital of
Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan proper 16
A street-lamp, a mail-box, and an American-copied
baby-carriage before a shop of Sapporo 16
The old Ainu chief who threatened to crown me with a
plow 17
The younger Ainu chief of another village, in ceremonial
garb 17
An Ainu who has come into close contact with Japanese
civilization 32
An Ainu girl of the younger, unmustached generation 32
The older Ainu women of the primitive tribe of northern
Japan have flaring blue tattooed mustaches—but they
are almost invisible to the camera 33
Preparing to propitiate the gods, and the neighbors, in
favor of a new building in Hokkaido, where religious
custom remains even if architecture changes; this
ceremony seems always to take place at sunset 33
An Ainu working in his front garden 36
Ainus mending their fishing utensils 36
A typical Ainu hut—and kodak-shy Ainu children
scrambling for coppers 37
In the American-like north island of Japan a Shinto
shrine or a Buddhist temple here and there is almost
the only touch of Oriental architecture 37
The sacred red lacquer bridge at Nikko 44
A quiet corner of the temples of Nikko 45
A Shinto priest (if the word fits) of Nikko 48
The tomb of Iemitsu, founder of the Nikko shrines, and
the holy of holies of its great group of temples,
photographed only by stealth 48
Not a palace garden, but the entrance to a house of
prostitution in Tokio’s Yoshiwara 49
The front of a Yoshiwara house in Tokio, with the usual
advertising features of large framed photographs of
the inmates, two of whom appear in person behind the
railing, one hiding behind a newspaper rather than be
photographed. The sign reads “3-yen two-storied
natural inn” 49
Approaching the great Buddha of Kamakura, which stood
through the earthquake of September 1, 1923 52
Thus the great Buddha gazed down through the ages with
what strikes the Western beholder as indifference to
the woe or weal of puny mankind 53
Venders of food and religious trinkets line with their
shops the shaded walks of the island of Enoshima 60
The leglessness of Japanese houses! A corner of our room
in the Japanese hotel at Kozu 61
The façade of a moving-picture theater in Nagoya 61
Farming in Japan rice-fields is a great life—if you
don’t weaken 64
A Japanese woman enjoying her pipe and the seascape at
Toba 64
Little girls of Yamada-Isé dressed in a riot of color,
topped by hats of real flowers, for the
twenty-one-yearly rebuilding festivities 65
A peasant woman of Japan up to her knees in work 65
Residents of Yamada-Isé garbed for the cart-drawing
festival. Brilliant colors characterize the clothing;
the torn-paper “duster” is a frequent Shinto motif 80
Inside the grounds of the Naigu, most sacred of all the
Shinto temple groups of Japan, all pilgrims purify
themselves by washing in the sacred river before
proceeding to their devotions; photography is strictly
forbidden 80
A small section of the long line of rope-pullers
returning with a sacred timber from the river to the
temple rebuilding 81
At last the sacred timber itself, wrapped in grass mats
to prevent any injury, came creaking and grinding
around the corner of a narrow, winding street 81
Though cremation is much more common than burial, a
Japanese cemetery bears no small resemblance to one of
our own 84
Within the grounds of the finest of Koto’s temples 84
Hundreds of semi-sacred deer roam at will about Nara and
vicinity, recalling the sacred bulls of India 85
The entrance to the ever-higher temples of Nara 85
The _basha_ is still the most rapid and aristocratic
means of conveyance in many parts of Japan 88
Some of my fellow-pilgrims on the climb to Koya-san; it
is as usual to hire women carriers as men in this part
of Japan 88
No small number of pilgrims to the sacred mountain climb
by the exertions of others 89
Pilgrims—in real life lawyers, doctors, dentists,
business men of Japan’s second largest city—climb
Koya-san with all the customary accoutrement, led at
the end by the young Buddhist priest who took me in as
guest 92
Women pilgrims arriving at the entrance to the miles of
temples, tombs, and the like on Koya-san, a point
beyond which, up to half a century ago, no member of
the fair sex was allowed to pass 92
Two pilgrims to Koya-san 93
The shrine in our garden at Beppu 93
Descending, satisfied pilgrims sometimes suggest the
knights of ancient days 96
Beggars along the ascent to Koya-san have all sorts of
schemes to attract attention, and charity 97
Three Buddhist novices and a temple bookkeeper, my
guides, philosophers, and friends during my stay
there, bid me farewell to Koya-san 100
Pilgrims descending from a train on their return from
Koya-san 100
Dotombori, the theater and “movie” street of Osaka 101
Osaka Castle is perhaps the most impressive in Japan 101
In building a Japanese bridge the first thing needed is
a compact framework of bamboo tied with vines 108
Making paper from mulberry-leaves by spreading the
sheets on boards out in the blazing sunshine of
southern Japan 108
Stripping off the _kozu_, or mulberry-leaf paper, when
dry; among other things it is used in making Japanese
parasols 109
Bringing in the sheaves from a Japanese rice-field 109
Japanese threshing usually consists of beating the heads
of bundles of grain on a round stone 112
After it has been winnowed by the wind and swept up, the
rice or other grain is spread out on grass mats to dry
in the sunshine 112
The never-failing picturesqueness of Miyajima 113
After all, this is almost all there is worth while at
Miyajima nowadays 113
There are no rickshaws on the island of Miyajima; hence
we had to trust even our most precious belongings to a
_ninguruma_, or baggage-cart 120
A view of Beppu, famed for its hot springs, at the head
of the Inland Sea, on Kyushu, southernmost island of
Japan proper 121
A Shinto monument, with the famous watering-place of
Beppu in the background 121
A peasant’s house near Beppu, with hot water for bathing
and heat for cooking perpetually furnished by nature,
there being a live volcano near at hand 128
The terraced hills of Kyushu are even more remarkable
than those of the main island 128
A glimpse of Nagasaki through the loggia of a hilltop
temple 129
A stream which languishes through Nagasaki furnishes a
drying-place for new parasols 132
A glimpse of Kagoshima, southernmost city of Japan
proper, with its island volcano of Sakurajima in its
splendid harbor 133
A memorial in the park of Kagoshima to the old-fashioned
men who perished in the Satsuma rebellion, an attempt
to halt the restoration and keep Japan closed to the
outside world 140
The workhorse saddles of Kagoshima are gaily decorated
in red and gold 140
Government House at Taihoku, capital of Formosa 141
One often wonders if the Japanese have not made the
streets of Formosan cities too broad for its tropical
climate 141
The business streets of Taihoku and other modernized
cities throughout Formosa are lined by shady and more
or less cool arcades 144
Japanese field-day in the streets of the Formosan
capital 144
Formosan ladies of the well-to-do class 145
It takes a sharp eye to tell the country women of
Formosa from their husbands and brothers, since there
is almost complete equality of garb and work 145
The Japanese build Shinto shrines in every Formosan town
of importance, but they have made little progress in
making Shintoists or mikado-worshipers of the
inhabitants 160
The Chinese type of temples and demon-propitiating are
still dearest to the hearts of the Formosans 161
Formosan school-girls waiting for classes to begin in an
ancient temple of Confucius which the Japanese have
turned into a school 176
After all, girls are girls, whether they go to school in
Ward No. 1 or in a former temple of Confucius in
Formosa 176
A group of reassembled Formosan classmates in a small
interior town, ranging now in social scale from
shopkeepers to professors in the capital 177
All the Japanese have left of the old city walls of
Formosa is here and there an ancient gate for
decorative purposes 177
A well-to-do Formosan family in a typical upper-class
railway carriage, identical with those of Japan 180
In third class there are usually several Formosan
country women with a striking head-dress suggestive
of, yet on close examination quite different from,
those of the ladies of Japan 180
To our Western eyes the women of Formosa are seldom
striking beauties 181
Baby rides in Formosa much as he does in Japan 181
A Formosan funeral 188
After the low, squat ones of China, the Japanese
rickshaws of Formosa seem lofty not merely in price 189
Flowers on their way to an ancestral temple 189
The Japanese furnish excellent school accommodations
throughout Formosa, at least to their own children 192
Japanese boys on their way to school in southern Formosa 192
The Japanese say that they themselves cannot distinguish
the reformed head-hunters of Formosa from their own
country people. But for the teacher and two children
in the front row these are all of the wild mountain
tribes, the tallest man and his little boy in front of
him being both in the first grade 193
Former head-hunters more or less domesticated during
years of labor in the camphor camps of the Japanese 193
A typical house of the savages of Formosa, built in a
coast city as a lodging for those who can be induced
to visit it 208
The savages and head-hunters of the Formosan interior
build their homes of slate, sometimes filled in with
slabs of wood and other stone 208
A semi-domesticated couple from the head-hunting tribes 209
It is typical of wild tribes the world over that the
women do all the carrying and most of the other hard
work 209
Young braves of a wild Formosan tribe, whom he who cares
to keep his head might do well to avoid meeting far
from the protecting Japanese overlords 224
A Japanized woman from the mountain-dwelling tribes of
Formosa 225
One might not think to look at her that her father
probably had a dozen or more trophies in his
slate-built skull-cupboard 225
GLIMPSES OF JAPAN AND FORMOSA
I
All the way across the Pacific we mused on the probability of getting a
glimpse of Japanese family life—not of mere inns or wide-open
lower-order hovels, but of the unexpurgated interior of a real Nipponese
home. The chance came quickly and unexpectedly, on our first day in the
country. One of those fires which rival earthquakes in strewing with
disasters the history of this flimsily wood-built land had just erased
one of the three or four hotels of Tokyo that welcome foreigners—at
least foreigners of the table and chair habit. Luckily for us; for, had
the mishap been postponed a fortnight, the likelihood of seeing all our
worldly goods, lugged thither with much mental and financial effort,
ascend in smoke, would have been excellent. It was lucky, too, that the
refugees from the chaotic ruin had filled its former rivals to
overflowing; for thereby not only did we escape the legal banditry which
they have the reputation of practising upon those who fall into their
hands as clients, but we realized our pent-up desire.
One of my few letters of introduction to the island empire did the
trick. The addressee himself lived far from his office, but one of his
subordinates requested—or consented, at a flicker of the superior’s
eyebrow—to be permitted to offer us temporary asylum in his mean and
dishonorable abode. Not that the solution was reached at once, just like
that, in an easy, offhand American manner. The Japanese mind does not
work that way. To begin with, there was an interminable session with the
telephone, actually manipulated by a boyish underling, under the
dictation of the seated man of standing. Yet, though fully half the
audible end of the conversation consisted of the endless repetition of
“Moshy-moshy”—which seems to be an abbreviation of something
corresponding to “Pardon your dishonorable servant for presuming to
exist, but have the honorable kindness to deign to listen to the
miserable noises which I shall now convey to your august ear through
this most disreputable and unethical mechanical contraption”—and though
the instrument was of as antiquated form, and the telephone system of
Japan is as deeply imbedded in the postal and telegraph department of
the Government, as in France, it was noticeable that it performed its
ends with what would there be considered vertiginous and incredible
efficiency.
Just where the hour or two went between this confirming of my
information regarding the plenary condition of Tokyo’s surviving hotels
and the actual offer of temporary refuge no one with mere American
experience could fathom, nor one without generations of schooling in the
intricacies of Japanese etiquette explain. As to the similar length of
time which elapsed between that epochal decision and its physical
accomplishment—do not housewives, even of our own often too swift-moving
land, require time to prepare themselves and their dwellings for the
fitting deception of unexpected but “highly distinguished” guests?
The mean and dishonorable abode proved to be a most delightful and
thoroughly Japanese dwelling set in its own spacious garden, at half an
hour’s dodging by “motor-car” from the modernized heart of Tokyo. So far
so good. But other difficulties quickly beset our path. Should, for
instance, “highly honorable” guests commit the uncleanly Western
barbarism of shaking hands in response to the welcoming antics of the
entire galaxy of hosts,—women, children, servants, as well as the now
lordly master himself,—who were wiping with their brows the matted
threshold a high step above us? Should the removal of one’s dishonorable
footwear and the performance of whatever might be the proper
gesticulations of greeting be simultaneous—ambidextrous, so to speak—or
consecutive, and, if the latter, in what order? What, if any, should be
the reputable means of concealing the sudden discovery that, presuming
upon its customary invisibility in one’s own scheme of life, one had
been so careless as to permit a humble nether garment to reach a state
incompatible with the publicity to which it is frequently subjected in
Japan? Certainly one must, at least, flinging aside all etiquette,
Oriental or Western, dash after that two-year-old member of the family,
who, still dishonorably shod, set off on a sudden scamper through the
frail house, in imminent possibility of racing unchecked through one of
its paper walls, the while clamoring for his overdue bath, board, and
bed in a manner not customarily used toward a chance host in any land.
Things move with a certain Oriental leisureliness even in Japan; but the
time came when, after a supper that night that might have been less
deliberately an attempt to be European, and baths which were not
particularly noted for their privacy, piles of quilts were at last
spread upon the spotless straw matting of our large second-story chamber
and cylindrical bean-bags lay ready to receive our weary heads. Beyond a
miniature gorge the darkness was sprinkled with hundreds of the lights
of Tokyo; to our ears came across the intervening gardens the mild night
noises of Ushigome-ku, one of the most populous wards of the densely
populated Japanese capital, the subdued scraping of wooden _getas_ most
conspicuous among them; surely we could not complain of delay or lack of
thoroughness in the granting of our wish for a glimpse of home life in
Japan.
II
As a matter of fact, while it is picturesque at a distance of space or
time, actual living in the flimsy toy houses of Japan is far from
convenient to one “raised” in Western fashion. It is glorious to be able
to nudge one’s neighbor during a performance of “Madame Butterfly” and
hoarsely to boast, “I once lived like that”—I am, of course, speaking of
the stage-setting, not of the story—but it is equally inglorious to
forget for a moment the frailty of paper walls and thrust a hand through
one of those sliding _shoji_. To be able—and expected—to run about
indoors on bare or stockinged feet, leaving all the dust or mud of the
street—and, from Tokyo down, one or both are rarely lacking in Japan—at
the threshold has an Elysian sound, a suggestion of speckless Golden
Stairs and noiselessly flitting angels. It is an unusual Westerner,
however, who does not feel his dignity swiftly evaporating when deprived
of his customary footwear. Nor is it merely his shoes which are _de
trop_ in a Japanese house; for ideal convenience he should leave his
legs, too, at the door. The awkward school-boy’s difficulty in disposing
of his hands and arms is mild indeed beside that of the Occidental guest
faced with the problem of what to do with his superfluous lower limbs on
the cushion-scattered matting of a Japanese room. In flowing kimono it
is bad enough; in trousers, which custom decrees shall retain the
suggestion of a crease, it is disheartening. It is all very well, of
course, to be able to tuck beds in a closet during the day, to have a
room uncluttered by furniture, but the total lack of drawers, shelves,
or hooks leaves Japan the original land for hanging things on the floor.
More troublesome still to us of an ungregarious race is the utter
absence of seclusion in Japanese dwellings. Since that initiation in
Tokyo we have inhabited a score of them, mainly inns and public
hostelries; and of the petty annoyances of life, of which Japan has her
share, even as other lands, perhaps the most exasperating, certainly the
most wearying, is the impossibility of sometimes being alone. No wonder
so many Japanese turn Shinto or Buddhist recluses and retire to temple
or monastery—though even for them there is little genuine seclusion. The
romantic paper walls have very slight capacity for deflecting sound. Let
the man four rooms removed from you in a native inn turn over in his
sleep, and you spring awake ready to do battle with an intruder. Let a
pair of fellow-guests engage in one of those interminable conversations
which seem to be the most frequent toward midnight and beyond, and a
megaphone could scarcely increase the din.
The Japanese are not a noisy race. Verbal strife is rare, domestic
quarrels all but unknown, or at least inaudible to the outer world; the
streets, usually innocent of paving, give back dust rather than uproar;
the gentle-voiced temple bells of all Japan could not equal the din of a
single belfry-hung copper kettle of South America. Yet, if all else
fails, at least the omnipresent servant can be relied upon to shorten
one’s springless slumber. Besides the paper-covered _shoji_ forming the
walls of the room itself, there are the heavier sliding walls of the
house itself, usually of solid boards, occasionally of glass. No human
power can induce house or inn servant to close these before one has
fallen asleep; all the studied cruelties of the Orient could not coax
her to leave one of them ajar during the night, nor to refrain from
opening with a mighty slamming and stowing them away in their daytime
box on the house corners at the first peep of dawn. From that moment on,
if not, indeed, during the brief night itself, one’s most private
chamber is never wholly one’s own. Soft-footed servant-girls patter in
and out on every possible provocation, often with none at all, shoving
aside the semi-transparent _shoji_ not only without a “by your leave”
but without a suggestion of warning, magnificently oblivious to even a
complete state of nudity on the part of the possibly somewhat modest
inmate. Would one bathe? A maid will make every effort to assist at the
disrobing; a “bath-boy,” if not a domestic of the just then still less
welcome gender, must needs force his way in to lend a helping hand
during the ablutions, while the common tub is all too likely to contain
already a denizen or two, smiling a welcome to the hesitating new-comer.
Fortunately the temperature of a Japanese bath, as unendurable to the
Occidental as the quilt of arctic thickness with which he is expected to
cover himself on the most breathless summer night, furnishes an
inoffensive excuse for preferring a spigot and one of the wooden
half-buckets scattered about the flooded floor.
Though the equipment of Japanese hostelries of the native type does not
include dining-rooms, let not the humanity-weary guest fancy that his
meals at least may be taken in delicious solitude. From the moment when
he claps his hands thrice to announce the arrival of appetite, a
serving-maid, if not two or three of them, will be always with him, now
touching face to mat as she places before him on the floor a more or
less edible dish, the rest of the time sitting on her heels within arm’s
length, with the inscrutable face of a bronze Buddha, yet watching with
eyes that catch every faintest suggestion of a _faux pas_ his
inexperienced wielding of the untractable chop-sticks, that she may
report his barbarianisms later to a cachinnatory kitchen. Constantly, on
every side, one has the sense of being but a thin paper sheet removed
from other beings, those ubiquitous human beings with which all Japan
teems, so that in street or train, on country road or mountain trail,
almost nowhere can the traveler escape for a brief moment, when the
Occidental mood is upon him, from the fellow-mortals with which the
island empire is so overcrowded. And through it all lurks the burden of
his superfluous legs, the necessity of squatting when he would sit, and
the subconscious worry as to where shoes should be worn and where
removed, intensified rather than lightened in those scattered
establishments for the wanderer ranked as “semi-foreign.” We shall never
regret, I am sure, our stay in Japan; but we were often thankful that it
was to be only a brief stepping-stone to China, where tables and chairs,
and beds and hooks, and less ephemeral footwear would again be found
among the stage properties of life.
III
I ought really not to say a word about Japan, I suppose, with only six
weeks of scurrying to and fro in it. “Old-timers” of the former
treaty-ports, to say nothing of the more experienced ones of the
interior, would be scathing at the suggestion that so brief a stay could
give the slightest food for thought. But “old-timers” the world over
rarely deign to pour out on paper their own distilled wisdom, and such
bits as are conversationally dropped by those who have spent at least
half a lifetime in an alien land often suggest that their few immediate
trees have long since cut off any clear view of the woods. At any rate,
though China was our real goal, there seemed no good reason to dash
blindly past the still interesting, if better known, empire which
adjoins it to the east; and, once there, no serious harm can be done by
recording a few fleeting impressions.
I am quite willing to have charged to the brevity of our sojourn the
notion that Japan is sometimes overrated,—that Matsushima and Toba are,
to be sure, pretty, pine-clad clusters of islands, but in no way
superior to scores of similar, yet rarely mentioned, scenes of our own
broad land: that the Inland Sea is beautiful, yet no more so than many a
stretch of water along our northern border which has not had its tithe
of publicity; that Enoshima is, after all, a commonplace handful of
earth with some trees and caves and shrines on it; that Miyajima really
consists of a single _torii_ picturesquely set only partly above high
tide—and of absurdly high prices for unpleasing accommodations; that
many a sea-flanked strip of sand, viewed undignifiedly through the
outspread legs, is as genuine a “bridge of heaven” as Ama-no-hashidate.
Yet to say that and cease would be to leave the falsest of impressions.
A wrathful Englishman we ran across within the shadow of the giant
Buddha of Kamakura voiced the conviction, born of a two months’
commercial struggle with its often exasperating people, that “Japan is
nothing more than camouflage, clever publicity, the deliberate spreading
abroad of false notions.” In certain moods it would be easy to agree
with him. With the exception of France, and perhaps of Italy, Japan is,
partly by chance, partly by design, the most advertised country on the
globe; and much preinformation leads inevitably to swollen
anticipations. But once the heat of experience has shrunk these to
normal size, once the traveler realizes that it is delicacy of detail
which he must look for, that intensive cultivation of all they have is
natural, almost inevitable to the crowding people of this constricted
island nation, his disappointment will lessen, perhaps disappear. It is
surely to his credit rather than otherwise that the little brown
_Nihon-jin_ makes the most of his opportunities, and not particularly
reprehensible to have sung, or caused to be sung, to the world praises
of what to him are beloved and genuinely peerless scenes. For the
Japanese truly and frankly loves the beauties of nature. He has a
scenery-worship as well as an ancestor-worship, and his lack, in the
great majority of cases, of a point of comparison sometimes leads to the
veritable adoration of places, scenes, and vistas which for the world at
large are commonplace. At his worst he is an improvement upon those of
some other lands who spend their energies in decrying the paucity of
attractions in their native habitat, treating nothing as worthy of
enthusiasm that is not separated from them by sea or frontier. And, when
all is said and done; if even the mammoth outdoor Buddha looked absurdly
small in comparison with its world-wide fame, and the canal-boat trip
through a tunneled mountain proved a school-boy’s wonder; whatever else
Japanese may seem petty and overdrawn, there is always Fujiyama—except
on those many days of the year when he chooses to veil his peerless face
in the clouds.
IV
One need not go to the records of her patent-office to confirm the
wide-spread impression that the Japanese mainly imitate. Merely to skim
through one of the phrase-books so carefully compiled to give the casual
traveler all the words and phrases except those he will really need is
to unearth ample evidence on this score. Philologically speaking, if one
may convict on such slight testimony, the Japanese language is visibly a
hodgepodge, a _potpourri_, an _ollo podrida_; in other words, a mess. I
cannot carry the curious reader back to their gleanings from the
Malaysian fields from which perhaps they sprang, from the Yemishi, or
“hairy Ainu,” whose place in the sun they usurped, nor yet do more than
repeat the common knowledge that they fish new words from the Chinese
classics far more freely than we of the West help ourselves to a needed
tidbit of Latin or Greek. But their later history can be sketched with a
handful of words chosen almost at random from one of these simple
vocabularies-for-travelers, words which bring back to mind the days when
the Portuguese, the Dutch, then the English-speaking races, and finally,
in restricted fields, the Germans and the French spread out linguistic
displays for their choosing.
[Illustration: The American-like main street of Sapporo, capital of
Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan proper]
[Illustration: A street-lamp, a mail-box, and an American-copied
baby-carriage before a shop of Sapporo]
[Illustration: The old Ainu chief who threatened to crown me with a
plow]
[Illustration: The younger Ainu chief of another village, in ceremonial
garb]
Could, for example, a fat volume on “Japanese Cleanliness through the
Ages” say more than does the fact that their word for “soap” is
“_shabon_”? The Portuguese brought it, of course, and they did not
“discover” Japan for the Western world until exactly half a century
after Columbus sighted the West Indies. To this day “_pan_” remains the
Japanese word for “bread”—or for the horrible dough-balls which their
semi-Europeanized cooks occasionally perpetrate. If the Lusitanians
brought them the Western substitute for rice, they were repaid by
carrying back tea, which in the Portuguese tongue is to this day known
by the Japanese—or Chinese—word “_cha_.” Reminders of the two and a half
centuries during which a dozen Dutch traders, imprisoned on a little
swampy island in their westernmost port, were the only white men
permitted to come into contact with the Nipponese are still scattered
through the speech of the masses. The children of Nagasaki still call
Europeans indiscriminately “Orando-san” (Mr. Hollander); it would
probably be unearthing no scandal to conclude that the _tabako_ and
_beeru_ so generously stocked throughout the island empire came from the
same source. At length came the Americans, and the English, with their
ships and railways, and all the complicated paraphernalia of modern
civilization—and one inquires one’s way to the _suteishon_, perhaps to
ask the uniformed coolie who is lighting a _rampu_ there for a _matchi_
with which to incinerate one of the miserable _maki-tabako_ inflicted
upon its people by the Japanese Imperial Government Tobacco Monopoly.
It is a rare Japanese even to-day who uses a _hankechi_ in place of a
wad of soft native paper; and though _aisukuriimu_ now and then offers
to minister to a parched and dusty throat, it may be better on the whole
to await one’s return to Philadelphia. The letter _l_ is for the
Japanese tongue the greatest stumbling-block in Western speech; hence
one is warned that predatory mosquitos may cause _marariya_, that the
train is about to enter a _tunneru_, that there is not a _hoteru_ in
town, but only Japanese inns. Newboys occasionally announce their
ability to supply the “Mairu” as well as the “Taimusu”; in the first-
and second-class waiting-room of important stations may be found, in a
cover with large embossed gold letters, the “REGURATIONS” of the
Imperial Government Railways.
German, say those who should know, is sometimes heard in barracks and on
drill-field, localities with no welcoming smile for the foreigner, and
here and there it has left its impress upon the schoolroom; but the
casual traveler will be more likely to run across it in the realms of
physicians and druggists, should misfortune turn his attention thither.
In a land where virtually all others interested in attracting a foreign
clientele announce themselves in what purports at least to be English,
the native leech with the excuse for his presumption of a visit to
Germany, or of a Berlin correspondent, calls himself a “Praktische Artz”
and his establishment an “AugenundohrenheilAnstalt.”
When the desk-man of a Japanese inn comes to obliterate his legs and bow
his head on the more or less spotless matting of the room assigned you
and discovers to his horror that you cannot write—in the crippled
hieroglyphics with which he is familiar—the information demanded by the
ever-inquisitive police, he still declines to believe that the printed
questions on the tissue-paper register in his hand are worse than Greek
to you. Many a time I have had a hotel “boy” give up hope of making me
understand some verbal remark, only to see him triumphantly jot it down
for me in his irrational ideographs, or invisibly write it with a finger
on his open palm. A Chinese or Korean would no more catch the meaning of
his spoken word than I, but they would almost certainly recognize its
conventionalized picture; therefore why should not also this other
_gwai-koku-jin_, or “outside-country man”? A roughly drawn square means
a mouth or opening, an entrance or an exit, to all three races, though
their respective verbal terms for it may be utterly devoid of
similarity—merely to mention one example among thousands.
Travelers in at least as good a position as I to know have reported the
Japanese excellent linguists. My own brief experience implies quite the
contrary. The study of English is obligatory in the higher schools, yet
I have rarely found even a square-capped, beskirted university student
capable of understanding three consecutive words of my native tongue, or
of comprehensively pronouncing half a dozen nouns. I looked in vain for
any improvement in this respect since I first wandered through Japan a
score of years ago. If there is any, it is among the higher officials of
those government departments or large industrial enterprises where it is
indispensable, and with whom the average traveler rarely comes in
contact. Among the rank and file, even of the educated, with mild
exceptions in favor of what were once treaty-ports, there are now and
then unexpected oases of comprehension, but almost never anything
dependable. I am quite ready to admit myself in error, but I carried
away the impression that the average American school-boy retains more
French or German from a two-year course than does the newly graduated
Japanese youth from his five or six years of English.
The comparison is, I hasten to admit, not entirely fair. An Oriental
language is far more widely separated from our own than is any of the
important tongues of Europe. If the Japanese student struggling with
English finds his way beset with as great difficulties as I found mine
in attempting to piece together a minimum vocabulary of Japanese, it is
small wonder if he loses heart. Probably he is as much dismayed by the
incredible brevity of our tongue as we are by the redundant elaboration
of his. To be informed that our brief “I” becomes in Japanese
_watakushiwa_ is likely to be even more disheartening than the mere
necessity of turning one’s thinking topsyturvy and attempting to assert
that “Watakushi no tsuma wa hoteru no Shimonoseki ni des-ka”—“Me of
dishonorable wife in the nominative case hotel of Shimonoseki in is
question mark.” For like some other Orientals the Japanese have the
charming custom of pronouncing their grammatical distinctions and
quotation-marks along with the rest of the sentence.
It is partly their policy of “Japan for the Japanese” that makes them so
backward in speaking a tongue which they strive so assiduously to teach
themselves, for though they constantly emphasize the necessity of
knowing the most wide-spread Occidental language they refuse to hire
more than a handful of foreign teachers. The teaching of English is,
with almost negligible exceptions, left to natives who could not, though
starvation stared them in the face, make themselves understood in a New
York quick lunchroom. For one thing English or American teachers demand
several times the pittance paid Japanese pedagogues—Lafcadio Hearn is
not the only man to learn that the granting of Japanese citizenship
reduces the beneficiary to the Japanese scale of salaries—with the army
and navy eating the lion’s share of the national revenues. Strange as it
may seem, too, bashfulness is a noticeable Japanese characteristic,
though in groups and in predicaments where no one speaks English the
difficulty is made several times worse by many thinking they can.
However, I must admit that I wandered over all Japan, from the primeval
forests of the thinly inhabited north island to the southernmost town of
Formosa, on nothing but a faulty phrase-book, more than once passing a
full week without meeting a fellow-Caucasian, yet saw and procured all
there was to see or procure which was worth a little persistence. But it
was not always a simple task. The Japanese lack completely that
quickness of comprehension under difficulties which flowers best perhaps
in Spanish-speaking peoples. Pronounce the commonest of his words a
score of times, and if your pronunciation is in the slightest degree
faulty he will stare blankly at you until doomsday. His own speech being
utterly devoid of gestures, those simple motions which carry the
tongue-tied traveler far in many another country convey to him no
meaning whatever. Pick up an egg and a frying-pan, pretend to break the
former into the latter, light a match under it, and make the elsewhere
universal sign for eating by feigning mastication, and you will
unquestionably succeed in gathering the entire village as an amazed and
intently amused audience to your strange outlandish antics, but under no
circumstances will a single bystander guess that you harbor an innate
desire to partake of a pair of fried eggs. This characteristic is so
ingrained that all the pointing in the world will never call the
attention of your auditor to the near-by object you are attempting to
indicate, though it may cause him and the throng which quickly gathers
behind him to examine with meticulous care your outstretched finger. The
kingpin of all possible misunderstandings in attempting to wrestle with
this more than alien tongue, however, is the difficulty of
distinguishing “yes” from “no.” Ask your waiter, “Is there no bread?”—or
shall I play upon the popularity of the day and say “bananas”?—and his
violent nodding of the head, accompanied by a very positive “Hai!” which
the phrase-book translates as “Yes,” may cause you to wait long in vain
before you discover that what he really meant was, “Yes, you are
perfectly right; there is no bread.”
V
My impression that Japan is only a little country after all somewhat
evaporated during a visit to its slightly known northern island. This
was no doubt partly due to the almost Oriental leisureliness of Japanese
trains, and it is perhaps as much the long day’s ride from Tokyo to the
northern end of the main island as the uninviting aspect of the steamers
which set one across to Hokkaido that causes the overwhelming majority
of visitors to confine themselves to the well-beaten track from Nikko to
Nagasaki and miss a region amply worth while.
Beyond beautiful Volcano Bay with its smoking cones lies quite another
Japan, inconspicuous on the world map yet of a surprising vastness.
Hakodate, the chief landing-place, burdened with that silly Japanese
rule forbidding photography within modern cannon-shot of fortifications
which the most slow-witted of spies could easily find some other means
of picturing, calls for nothing more than the unavoidable halt of an
hour or two. But on the long day’s journey northward from there to
Sapporo one’s coming is already rewarded. Though May will soon be half
gone, it is cold enough for an overcoat, and the Imperial Government
Railways are still heating their trains. Low huts, with heavily thatched
or rusty-tin roofs, held down by scores of stones that testify to the
occasional violence of storms, hug the ground closely, in a way unknown
in the main island. Instead of rice-fields, the rich black soil is given
over mainly to corn and potatoes, corn shocked as it is in the United
States, as weatherbeaten cones of it that have stood through the long,
arduous winter still testify. Now and again the train rumbles for an
hour or more along the very edge of this or that magnificent bay,
through collections of miserable huts, with thatched fishing-boats and
millions of herring split in two and hung on lines to dry in the sun,
and millions more in heaps and bales ready for shipment. There is a
genuine Japanese atmosphere, not to say scent, about these clusters of
toilsome poverty, though certainly there is little of that cleanliness
which the mind habitually associates with the Japanese.
But these familiar touches, like the rare glimpse of an aged wife with
unsightly blackened teeth, are merely the reminders of the old
well-known Japan which give contrast to the real Hokkaido. New England
landscapes of hills, then low mountains dabbled with snow, finally big
white patches beside and below the track, succeed one another as the
train struggles inland. At length come rugged, snowcovered peaks rising
into the clouds; before long all the mountains in view, more than can be
counted on the fingers of both hands, are blanketed with snow, great
fields of which lie in the hollows far below us. Yet, as I have already
said, May was well along. It required a distinct mental effort to keep
in mind that this was still Japan.
Lower down again there was a profusion of wild flowers, though the buds
did not seem so far advanced as they are along our northern border on
the same date. There came whole hours of primeval forest, with at most a
rare patch of clearing, then broad vistas of charred stumps and the
primitive conditions that go with them, finally some square-cut
cultivated fields, but these only in the dead-flat lands, as if there
were far too much room available to trouble with hilly ground. On the
whole, the fields, though still small to the American eye, were ten
times the size of those of Japan’s main island. Also there was much
plowing with shaggy horses, instead of mud-wading men and women with
hoes, goodly herds of cattle grazing here and there—in short, a
landscape in which a rural American from our Northern States would have
felt almost at home.
Yezo, as the island which the Japanese, for some political reason, have
renamed Hokkaido is still best known to the outside world, has never
kept pace with the rest of Japan. Though the primitive Ainus were
reduced to serfdom at least a dozen centuries ago, the north island was
an almost unknown wilderness even when the Japanese resumed their
intercourse with the outside world in the middle of the last century. A
plan to make it an independent fief of the crumbling Tokugawa shogunate
at the time of the imperial restoration having been bloodily upset a
year later, various schemes of government under an executive appointed
from Tokyo finally crystallized in 1886 in an independent
administration, with Sapporo as the capital. To the already American
aspect of the landscape were added, through the initiative of the first
governor, charged with the task of colonizing the island, a group of
American agricultural experts, who brought with them machinery, seeds,
trees, and other aids of a similar nature. To-day Hokkaido produces, for
instance, an ample supply of American apples for all Japan—and incoming
travelers must hand over to courteous but stern custom officials the
last remnants of this fruit in their possession, though a case of
oranges or a month’s supply of raisins pass duty-free.
It was these same American experts who laid out the capital, Sapporo,
thereby wholly depriving it of the picturesqueness of genuine Japanese
towns and giving it the spaciousness, convenience, and solidity of an
American city. Its wide, squarely intersecting streets—a hundred and
sixty feet from wall to wall, if you must have statistics—have not
merely sidewalks but rows of trees to delimit them from the roadway that
is the common battle-ground of pedestrians and vehicles in the rest of
Japan. Lawns and lawn-mowers, men shingling the roofs of clapboard
houses, even government barracks built in similar fashion, elms and
maples in lieu of the rugged and distinctive Japanese pine-tree, the big
campus of an agricultural college copied after that of Massachusetts,
with a snow-capped mountain background to its broad baseball, track, and
tennis field, are but a few of the reminders of Sapporo’s origin. Even
the women have almost abandoned the elaborate and costly coiffure of
their southern sisters, and dress their hair in American fashion. Paper
walls are all but unknown; baby-carriages—but what gain are these in a
land where children come so thick and fast that every perambulator seems
to hold twins, to be indeed evidently designed for them, while a still
later arrival dozes on the propeller’s back? With its big fruit-stores,
its self-sufficient, well-supplied people, an extent seeming to belie
its mere half-century of age, Sapporo looks almost a transplanted bit of
our own land, for all the rickshaws racing noiselessly through its wide
streets and notwithstanding some of the unfortunately still Japanese
personal habits of many of its inhabitants—and by the same token it does
not, of course, offer the mere traveler a tithe of the interest of
almost any village of the real Japan.
Beyond Sapporo lies nearly the whole island, wonderful plains of black
loam soil almost as flat as our prairies, now stretching from the
distant sea on one hand to faintly delimned ranges of snow-capped
mountains on the other, now filling some vast basin between whitened
rival ramparts which merge in either direction into the horizon. The
great valleys now and again pinched out between brown hills littered
with charred stumps, growing gradually into heavily wooded mountains,
with many a snow-capped peak more massive and well nigh as symmetrical
as Fujiyama itself, yet thus far doomed to fameless isolation. Big
rivers brought down thousands of fresh-cut logs, whole acres of which
gathered in placid back-waters. But the fertile plains always soon came
again, now with wigwam-like stacks of hop-poles recalling Bavaria in
spring,—Sapporo beer is famous throughout Japan,—now mile after mile of
fields completely flooded, though plainly not destined for rice, with
plowing horses and their drivers wading thigh-deep in the cold mud and
water. It was a land like the richest sections of Illinois or Kansas;
yet gangs of women were piling up great logs, a score of them supplied
the motive-power of a primitive, singsong pile-driver, and half-starved
fisher-folk still battle for existence along the coast. It seemed as if
the few inhabitants, accustomed for countless generations to the crowded
struggle for existence farther south, were mentally incapable of taking
advantage of the wide and fertile opportunities all about them, of
casting out the centuries-old sense of inequality they brought with them
and enjoying the fulsome prosperity of ample elbow-room.
There are signs everywhere that the Japanese Government is doing its
best to turn Hokkaido into a cleared and settled land. A hundred
telegraph or telephone wires, on half a dozen rows of posts, parallel
the track, not to mention an important power line; pine, or at least
evergreen, nurseries cover a sloping hillside here and there; much
forest has recently been denuded and burned, with somewhat less wasteful
methods than those in vogue before the spreading sugar-fields of Cuba.
But of all the obstacles its people set against the laborious efforts of
the Government more nearly to equalize the density of population of this
great north island with the rest of the empire, the dread of battling
with the rigorous climate stands first. The man of Japan is not on the
whole adaptable. He hesitates at the limits of heat and cold to which
his frail type of architecture and his thin, flowing garb are unfitted;
he is, by temperament, no pioneer, but resembles those militant birds
that prefer to settle down in the warm, well-feathered nest built by
some other species. If he goes to a new and undeveloped land, it is, by
choice, as an economic hanger-on, as shopkeeper or official, rather than
to do his share in the rude labor of reducing the primitive to the
cultivated. No one, I believe, has ever accused the Japanese of
laziness; it seems to be rather his inherent dread of the primeval, of
great unpeopled spaces, that leaves Hokkaido, large and fertile enough
to support in unaccustomed style a third of the people of all Japan,
with a scattered population barely one fifth that of the city of Tokyo.
VI
But things are progressing, if slowly, in the general direction of
official desires. Asahigawa, for example, north of the geographical
center of the island, in what was at the beginning of the present
century an unpeopled wilderness, is already a “whale of a town,”
spreading for miles across the floor of a splendid valley, with a great
row of snow-clads all along its far eastern horizon. There is scarcely a
typical Japanese building in it, only a Shinto shrine or two, hardly a
_shoji_ or a tiled roof. Yet the spirit of Japan has in no way been lost
in the transplanting. That courteous yet subtle something which tells
the foreigner that he is welcome as a visitor but as nothing more, that
seldom spoken yet ever-sensed insistence on “Japan for the Japanese,”
are as evident here as in the most crowded portions of the main island.
[Illustration: An Ainu who has come into close contact with Japanese
civilization]
[Illustration: An Ainu girl of the younger, unmustached generation]
[Illustration: The older Ainu women of the primitive tribe of northern
Japan have flaring blue tattooed mustaches—but they are almost invisible
to the camera]
[Illustration: Preparing to propitiate the gods, and the neighbors, in
favor of a new building in Hokkaido, where religious custom remains even
if architecture changes; this ceremony seems always to take place at
sunset]
Surely, too, the public ceremonies I chanced upon were strictly
national. It seemed to be dedication day for new buildings, a propitious
phase of the moon perhaps; and at least half a dozen unfinished
structures scattered about the town, still in their two-by-four skeleton
form, were preparing to receive the blessings of the gods. The gangs of
carpenters simultaneously left off toward five in the afternoon the work
of erecting and took to raising instead, with a plethora of amateur
assistance, various symbolic contrivances at the tops of the structures.
First to be placed were five big upright banners, respectively red,
saffron, white, green, and purple in color. Then there arose a central
support bearing a small mirror—unfailing symbol of Shintoism—and a
fantastically misshapen doll god in a red bib. A rude platform having
been laid across the joist high up under this improvised chapel, and
various other minor preparations being concluded, there gingerly
ascended the sagging ladder a Shinto—priest, I suppose we must call him,
for want of a more exact term. His shaven head, topped by a sort of
mitered cap from which undulated what seemed to be the old Tokugawa
head-dress, its projecting tail-like afterpiece apparently made of
window-screening, his brilliant green robe and purple sash, and
variegated minor decorative paraphernalia, gave him an appearance
strikingly out of keeping with the generally matter-of-fact Asahigawa
style of architecture and costume. It was much as if an actor in a
Shakspere rôle had suddenly emerged in full costume among a Broadway
crowd.
While the owner of the new structure and a dozen of his assistants or
male relatives sat down on their heels along the improvised platform,
high above the increasing throng in the street below, the Shinto
functionary set up beneath the banners several little conventionalized
houses or shrines of baked clay. Of the numerous antics in which he
indulged during the succeeding half-hour the most conspicuous was the
frenzied shaking of one of those bundles of white paper strips on a
handle, like a feather-duster or fly-dislodger, that abound in Shinto
shrines, apparently for the purpose of driving off the host of evil
spirits which might menace the new building. Finally he sprinkled
everything and every one within reach with a sprig of pine branch dipped
in a bowl of what may have been mere water, but which more probably was
_sake_, the rice wine of Japan. With that his fee seemed to be earned,
though he remained long enough to grace the beginning of the last act of
the ceremony before speeding away in a rickshaw to the next skeleton
structure in need of his administrations.
The now large and jostling throng in the street below was plainly, and
quite naturally, most interested in the final formality. From his point
of vantage high above, the now broadly smiling proprietor held up a
wooden ticket, made a speech which the crowd applauded with increasing
evidence of pleasure and approval, then flung the token to the
multitude. My subsequent discovery that it was exchangeable for a silk
kimono accounted for the applause and the wild scramble for its
possession that forthwith took place in the dust-deep street. Various
less valuable and more perishable gifts followed, after which came a
deluge of presents for every one. All the men on the platform began
tearing open veritable bales of bonbons, those heavy white dough-balls
inclosing a sort of jam, which take the place of candy in Japan, and
took to flinging them in great handfuls in all directions. Fully a
quarter of an hour the bombardment lasted, the several hundred townsmen
of both sexes, of every age and social standing, engaging in a
good-natured but riotous battle for possession of the tidbits. The
purpose evidently was to make sure that every person within sight
received a present, that he might vouchsafe the new building his
blessing or good will, for when I showed no eagerness to engage in the
scramble, one of the flingers made it his special task to throw bonbons
at me until I had accepted one. The “housing crisis” is as acute in
Japan as in the rest of the civilized world. If the country has no
grafting contractors and labor-leaders—and rumor says it has—there seems
to be at least the appreciable obstacle of dispensing in religious fees
and community gifts a sum about equal to the cost of each unboarded
building.
VII
The chief interest of the average casual visitor to Japan’s north island
is, no doubt, in the remnants of its primitive people, the “hairy Ainu.”
A cluster of them dwell in the outskirts of Asahigawa; there are
scattered Ainu villages along the farther reaches of the Hokkaido coast,
and here and there in the forested mountains. Subservient now to their
conquerors as are our own Indians, their customs and even their language
have taken on many things from the Japanese. In theory the mikado’s
Government acts the rôle of altruistic guardian over the scanty twenty
thousand of these aborigines which its records claim still survive, in
Yezo, in the scattered Kuriles, and in the Japanese half of the once
Russian island of Karafuto, or Saghalien, still farther north. There are
no cases listed, however, of these helpless wards’ amassing pianos and
automobiles from natural resources discovered on their reservations.
Driven, if admittedly faulty historical records be accepted as veracious
evidence, from their once solid foothold on the main island of Japan to
the nooks and crannies of its frigid neighbors during the more than
twenty-five centuries since their slant-eyed foes came upon them from
somewhere to the south, the Ainus have lost completely their former
rugged power of physical resistance to such aggression.
[Illustration: A typical Ainu hut—and kodak-shy Ainu children scrambling
for coppers]
[Illustration: In the American-like north island of Japan a Shinto
shrine or a Buddhist temple here and there is almost the only touch of
Oriental architecture]
[Illustration: An Ainu working in his front garden]
[Illustration: Ainus mending their fishing utensils]
The experienced traveler gradually learns that outward appearances are
often deceitful; hence there is perhaps no proof of anything in the fact
that the Ainu, even the defeated dregs of the race which survive to-day,
are much handsomer specimens of the human family, at least to Western
eyes, than their conquerors. The women, to be sure, are mainly
slatterns, as is so often the case among primitive peoples, particularly
those under the domination of what we fondly call civilization. But it
was hard to realize that these sturdy, upstanding men, not merely more
powerful but far more comely than the average Japanese, are little more
than children in intellect. What seems to have been a sincere effort to
educate a picked group of Ainu youths in Tokyo ended with an even more
sudden relapse into savagery than was ever the case with our
Indian-school graduates.
Such Ainu villages as I visited were outwardly distinguished mainly by
the superimposed layers, like incredibly thick rows of shingles, of the
thatch covering their roofs; that and earth floors, rubbish heaps, and a
generally un-Japanese shiftlessness. Their clothing has almost
completely succumbed to Japanese, or Japanese-Western, influence, even
to the greater or less absence thereof on what, to Occidental races,
would be embarrassing occasions. The features are blunt, the nose almost
as negroid as that of lower-class Nipponese, but the eyes are unslanted
and full-lidded, quite as we of the West expect eyes to be. As to their
far-famed “hairiness,” the older men, to be sure, have patriarchal
beards—the younger, disliking perhaps the notoriety which this feature
has brought upon the race, are commonly smooth-shaven—and their sturdy
bare arms and legs are generously adorned with black hair. But I have
seen as goodly displays in American gymnasiums, and it is mainly their
contrast to the effeminate-skinned Japanese that has given them their
reputation for undue hirsute adornment. The children of Japan, in fact,
and even uncultivated adults in their naughty moods, often greet any
visitor of Caucasian race with the contemptuous term “_keto-jin_,” or
“hairy foreigner.”
It is not the beards of the men but the magnificent mustaches of the
women that will surprise the average traveler. It has long been the Ainu
custom, now somewhat dying out, to begin decorating early in life the
upper lip of the girls with a crude tattooing of what seems to be
kitchen soot, treated later with some native concoction which gives it a
bluish tint, so that by the time her early marriage-day comes the maid
is adorned with a blue mustache having the flourishing upturned ends
cultivated by the Italian dandy and giving her a dashing air somewhat
out of keeping with her sex and the life of drudgery before her. Other
decorations of a similar nature are now and then perpetrated on other
parts of the body, notably a miniature Vandyke on the lower lip. While
the custom may be merely fantastic in youth, it becomes hideous in old
age. Like the young men, the women who have not yet outlived the sense
of shame seem to resent this most notorious of their features and can
with difficulty be induced to withdraw a corner of a garment from across
their mouths when facing a stranger or a camera.
The Ainus live mainly by fishing and hunting and are noted for their
valiancy, particularly for the feat of killing the savage brown bear of
Yezo with a knife, or with bow and arrows. Crude sledges, scarcely large
enough for half-grown children, leaning against their huts indicate that
they are not house-bound during the long rigorous winters. Some of the
chiefs who can afford it are said still to indulge in polygamy; the race
has plainly a greater dread of soap and water than of fleas and ancient,
fishy smells; the Ainu’s greatest desire in life is reputed to be a
copious supply of Japanese _sake_, a craving which their
self-constituted guardians make no frantic efforts to curb.
I might still have departed from Hokkaido with a lingering doubt of the
inherent savagery of the Ainu in spite of the wide-spread testimony to
the contrary, but for my last encounter with him. I had been sauntering
for an hour or two about one of his villages, stalking for
photographs—for a mixture of superstition and childish cupidity
engendered by hurried, kodak-armed tourists has made the tribe somewhat
camera-shy. A magnificent specimen of fully adult and hirsute manhood
was almost on the point of falling into my trap when a sound between a
grunt and a shriek from a rather surly boy whom I had not been able to
shake off caused me to glance around. Down one of the sandy lanes
serving as streets came striding the village chief—for such I had found
him to be shortly after pilfering his likeness by a simple ruse. Having
this already, I had no special interest in watching his approach, and
turned back to my still uncaptured quarry. Suddenly I beheld the chief,
physically a mighty man still for all his huge bush of almost snow-white
hair and beard, scowling upon me with his broad nose all but touching my
face and his liquid black eyes blazing. Exactly what was the cause of
his quite evident displeasure there was no means of knowing, for though
he was speaking voluminously in a voice which any orator might have
envied, it was not even in Japanese, and no stray word gave me an
inkling of the subject of his discourse.
All at once the notion seemed to strike him that I had no intention of
complying with his wishes, whatever they were. With a sudden short,
shrill scream which instantly betrayed the savage, he dashed off a few
paces and caught up the first manly weapon within reach, which chanced
to be nothing more or less than a complete wooden plow! Raising this
above his head in one powerful hand, he sprang toward me with a shriek
of uncontrolled anger and a contorted expression of rage such as no
doubt scores of the big brown bears of his native mountains had beheld
during the last moments of their existence.
The part of wisdom, of course, would have been frankly to take to my
heels. But there are few things more difficult for the average Caucasian
than openly to show fear of an opponent of an admittedly inferior race,
particularly when a score of persons of that race are peering out
through the doors and walls to behold his discomfiture. Moreover, I was
busily engaged in seeing that my kodak be returned to its case before
serious harm came to it. I stood where I was, therefore, instinctively
turning my back to catch the expected blow where it would do me the
least damage—and when I looked up again my howling savage was
brandishing the plow over my head, yet somehow hesitating to bring it
down upon me. The taming influence, no doubt, the forced repression of
centuries of stern Japanese rule, the ability to glimpse the
consequences, with which long generations of vicarious contact with the
ruthless justice of civilization had tinctured his savage soul, stayed
his hand. Denied the privilege of completely following his instinct, he
was helpless. From the roaring savage he became an angrily shrieking
child. The plow he still grasped in his mighty right hand, but its end
rested on the ground. With his left he caught the lapel of my coat in a
grip which mere yanking never would have loosened. But when I gave him
what school-boys of my day called the “thumbtwist,” he grunted with the
sudden, unexpected pain, released his hold, and, though still bellowing
in his magnificent oratorical voice, watched me walk away without
following.
VIII
There is, perhaps, no good reason why the stranger should be often
astounded, rather than merely amused at the contrasts of Japan. Any
nation, particularly so far removed and individualistic a nation,
hedging itself round for more than two centuries with a Chinese wall of
seclusion, then suddenly emerging into the sunlight of to-day and making
frantic efforts to overtake its modernized fellows, could not but
present a similar spectacle. Yet I confess myself still not immune to
shocks of this nature. To stroll from the mammoth wrestling pavilion of
Tokyo, with its wholly un-Occidental pastime, throng, contestants, point
of view, to the commonplace field a gunshot distant where a group of
Japanese youths in baseball uniforms were defeating at our national game
a similar group from one of our own universities, was like stepping
across a thousand years of time in a single stride. Side by side there
travel, carouse, and worship men of whom one seems no farther removed
from us either in garb or mentality than a Frenchman, while the other
might that very moment have stepped forth from a _daimyo’s_ train in the
“Cipangu” of Marco Polo. In the heathenish interior of an Asakusa
temple, most popular with the rank and file of all Tokyo’s myriad places
of worship, there pause to toss a copper coin into the enormous grated
hopper, to clap their hands thrice and call the wandering attention of
the gods to their prayers, even to buy tissue-paper charms written by a
Buddha-faced priest, men in faultless Broadway attire who have spent the
day in modern offices between telephone and stenographer. Under the
fantastic garb of a wandering pilgrim, with his jingling bells and his
prayer-written staff, is often concealed a doctor or a lawyer of Western
training, with perhaps a fluent command of English.
Among the cabin-passengers on the Nippon Yusen Kaisha liner that brought
us across the Pacific was a brilliant young Japanese who had been
teaching the intricacies of a medical specialty in one of the oldest and
most famous of our universities. Outwardly, at least, nothing remained
of his Orientalism except a hint of foreign accent in his English, and
his telltale eyes. Even his point of view on matters large or small
seemed that of the American colleagues he had left behind. On the dock
at Yokohama he was met by his future wife, properly chaperoned,
shrinking subserviently within her modest kimono and pillow-like _obi_.
The pair bowed solemnly to each other at some two yards’ distance, he
moderately, she almost to the stone flagging; then as he stalked away
she clattered behind him in her wooden clogs, lugging his American
hand-bag.
[Illustration: The sacred red lacquer bridge at Nikko]
[Illustration: A quiet corner of the temples of Nikko]
Our passage had been enlivened also by a naval engineer from one of
Japan’s great government shipyards, who was returning from two years of
study and observation among those of America and Europe. He was to have
remained a year longer, but both his father and his fiancée had suddenly
died. I visited him one day at his home in Tokyo, one of those frail
little houses of the capital set in its quaint, inevitable garden. His
latest European garb had been altered only by the removal of his shoes;
but an elder sister kowtowed profoundly at his curt, quick command and
hurried away, to prostrate herself before us on the matted floor a
moment later with a tray of tea and sweetmeats.
He would be going away in a few days, I suggested, to the naval base to
which he was attached?
“As soon as I have arranged my marriage,” he replied.
“But,” I said, “your fiancée is no longer living?”
“Ah, yes, that one died,” he answered, in an expressionless monotone,
“but my sister has picked out three other girls for me to choose from,
and in a few days I will decide....”
“And the marriage?”
“In about three months, as soon as everything is prepared. You see, my
father having died, I have become the head of the family, and I must
marry quickly.”
IX
Were facetiousness toward so solemn a people permitted, one might say
that the Japanese are imitators at top rather than at bottom. The nation
has apparently almost no notions of its own in the matter of head-dress;
but certainly no one can accuse it of copying its footwear from
extraneous sources. Fortunately the “derbies” and “bowlers” which topped
off kimonos and European garb alike a decade or two ago seem to have
passed into the limbo befitting such eyesores; but the foreign
adaptations that have taken their place are little less incongruous. A
group of Japanese males in their native costume, to which three out of
four of them still cling more or less unalterably, and wisely, look as
if they had been suddenly beset by a whirlwind in a foreign land, and
had borrowed for the return journey whatever head coverings their hosts
could spare them. Fedoras, caps, slouchy felts, particularly, now that
summer was spreading northward across the empire, stiff straw hats,
loomed forth on every hand—or head. Is it because the Restoration caught
them with nothing between the fantastic hair-dress of _shoguns_ and
_samurai_, still retained in a modified form by their hog-fat wrestlers,
and the parasol-like sun- and rain-shades of the peasants, that most of
the nation copies with such poor success our Western styles of
head-dress? Personally I much prefer the bareheaded tooth-brush
pompadour or closely clipped pates of most boys and of no small number
of men of old-fashioned or indifferent attitude. The distinctly national
feminine coiffure, too, never covered with anything but a parasol or an
umbrella, helps to save the situation.
The two-toed human biped, reminiscent of the primitive horse, the
cloven-hoofed mortal who shuffles his way in many millions through the
islands of Japan is, however, unknown in all the rest of the round
world. No other race has had the genius—to use a polite word—to evolve
that cross between a stocking-foot and a foot-mitten, the great toe
separated from the rest, which rounds off Japanese bare legs,
irrespective of sex. Beneath this may be seen every manner of makeshift,
always gripped by the independent great toe,—wooden clogs of many shapes
and sizes, _getas_ ranging from flat boards to veritable stilts that
raise the wearer a foot above the ground in the rainiest muddy weather,
matted-topped sandals of wood, slippers—if a mere sole with a V-shaped
cord as upper may be so called—for house wear, of a score of different
forms and materials, slippers for the hallways, others for certain
unmentioned chambers, special rubber slippers for the bath-room, crude
straw _waraji_ for pilgrims and peasants, worn-out examples of which lie
strewn along any traveled road, varied and special footwear for every
time, place, and occasion.
In the old days when this was all, when man, woman, or child stepped
instinctively in or out of his multifarious sole-protectors with
unhesitating ease, it was a mere question of knowing the intricate
etiquette of footwear. But now, with Western shoes wide-spread among the
men and making headway among school-girls, there is often physical labor
involved in the Japanese persistence in his peculiar footwear habits. At
the “semi-European” hostelry where we sojourned for a week in Kyushu,
southernmost island of Japan proper, the sub-manager laced or unlaced
his shoes thirteen times in showing us our Japanese quarters. No wonder
the island empire is the favorite dumping-ground for congress gaiters!
[Illustration: A Shinto priest (if the word fits) of Nikko]
[Illustration: The tomb of Iemitsu, founder of the Nikko shrines, and
the holy of holies of its great group of temples, photographed only by
stealth]
[Illustration: Not a palace garden, but the entrance to a house of
prostitution in Tokyo’s Yoshiwara]
[Illustration: The front of a Yoshiwara house in Tokyo, with the usual
advertising features of large framed photographs of the inmates, two of
whom appear in person behind the railing, one hiding behind a newspaper
rather than be photographed; the sign reads “3-yen two-storied natural
inn”]
The Nipponese take extraordinary care to keep their feet off the ground.
Even the peasants, market-women, boys and girls whose weather-toughened
supports have never been subjected to the effeminate niceties of the
toed-sock-foot, almost invariably wear at least straw _waraji_ out of
doors. Pleasing custom, and a wise one, too, in a land where nothing
that may enrich the land is wasted. But I believe I am giving no proof
of extraordinary perspicacity in asserting that to her footwear is
largely due the poor roads and the abominable streets of Japan. Her
people are not great believers in pavements; they can easily hobble and
scrape through life on their clumsy stilts without them. If it rains—and
there are weeks on end when it does, indeed—until the shoe-clad
foreigner cannot stir out of doors without covering himself to the
ankles with paste-like mud, the native merely steps into higher and
higher _getas_ and stumps serenely on. In the classic speech of recent
years, “he should worry.” Before it fell in a crash one Saturday noon
there was scarcely a square yard of street even in Tokyo that was not
deep in dust or deep in mud, according to the weather. The municipal
fathers had recently threatened to spend forty million yen toward giving
the capital a modern pavement. If the threat is made good, now that the
opportunity for general improvement is so excellent, Tokyo will no
longer seem Japan, for dust and mud are as national as _getas_ and
kimonos. When a stretch of Japanese street becomes really impassable, a
few loads of sea-shore stones are spilled into it—to the still greater
discomfiture of the shoe-shod foreigner.
At least one class of Japanese profits by this atrocity of streets and
roads. Scores of what would be pleasant strolls, were there anything fit
to stroll on, must be abandoned, to the advantage of the rickshaw-man.
If he had no such allies, it is doubtful whether this human horse of the
Orient would not already have passed from the stage in Japan, for there
his constantly increasing demands have made him almost a luxury. To be
jogged about Tokyo for a short day of sight-seeing or shopping costs
even the initiated ten or twelve yen, which is almost half as bad as if
it were American dollars. No extraordinary reward in these times,
perhaps, for a hard day’s toil. Let us not, however, in our fairness to
the physical toiler, lose sight of the fact that it is what he
accomplishes, not how greatly he exerts himself, which counts; and your
rickshaw-man moves you from place to place but little faster than you
could walk, and not much more comfortably.
Personally, I found riding in a _kuruma_—which is a politer, more
ladylike Japanese word for rickshaw—an unpleasant, almost a humiliating
experience, as if I were being impressed with the notion that the man
trotting in the shafts before me was more sturdy than I—which in Japan
at least he usually wasn’t. Or my mind harked back to the origin of this
unseemly means of conveyance, to the American—we admit we are an
inventive nation—missionary who, half a century ago, converted—in
addition, we trust, to many parishioners—a baby-carriage into a means of
giving his invalid wife an occasional outing. Even the glistening wire
wheels and the plump pneumatic tires to which the contrivance has since
advanced cannot blot out that unmanly derivation.
Perhaps it is true also that no rickshaw-runner survives his tenth year
in the profession, but as some of those I have ridden behind were
plainly over fifty, and the speed of the majority in Japan by no means
killing, I found this no great contributing cause of my displeasure in
rickshaw riding. But often the choice is narrow,—a mud bath, a coating
of dust and perspiration, a small and ancient type of tram-car with a
floor as muddy or dusty as the street outside and inevitably packed
beyond any American conception, possibly a limping, asthmatic,
purse-flattening exile from our most popular automobile factory, or—the
spider-mannered _kuruma-ya_, sitting on his own dashboard, awaiting a
victim. The miniature member of our family became instantly fond of
“widin’ man,” fortunately, for his walking was still limited; the
unofficial head thereof recognizes the rickshaw’s domestic convenience,
in spite of her constant dread that the runner’s reputedly brief span of
life will end between the shafts sustaining her; but I, the minority,
prefer stretching my legs to cramping them.
X
It is nearly a score of years now since the many private “iron roads” of
the island empire were combined under a cabinet minister, yet when all
is said and done the Imperial Government Railways of Japan are a
refutation of an almost universal experience elsewhere, that trains will
not run properly under government ownership. Perhaps it is the
combination of religion and patriotism of which Shintoism seems to be
concocted, the semi-deification of the mikado and all his belongings;
perhaps it is due to mere habit, or racial temperament; the fact remains
that government ownership and employment do not mean carelessness and
neglect, indolence and waste, in Japan. One has, to be sure, the
impression, at sight of the swarms of men and boys in the dull-blue
railway uniform, that the system is over-staffed; but nothing, one
recalls, is more plentiful in Japan than human beings. If improvement
and extension languish a bit, there are reminders that the railways,
like schools and many another ward of the mikado’s Government, must
often be content with modest rations, that its favorite sons, the army
and navy, may lose none of their sturdy corpulence.
[Illustration: Approaching the great Buddha of Kamakura which stood
through the earthquake of September 1, 1923]
[Illustration: Thus the great Buddha has gazed down through the ages
with what strikes the Western beholder as indifference to the woe or
weal of puny mankind]
A narrow gauge is not conducive to reckless speed; the Japanese
express-train that covers a mile in two minutes congratulates itself on
a feat, while the locals that fulfil most of the promises, nearly always
to the minute, of a bulky national time-table consume an incredible
amount of time both at stations and between them. But few sports in
Japan are far beyond the reach of rail, and the risk to life and limb is
negligible. The adolescent squeal of the European-copied locomotives may
be annoying to Americans, who will probably regret that the two
car-length cushions on either side in first- and second-class are better
suited to squatting on one’s heels or stretching out at full shoeless
length than to ease in viewing the passing landscape; one may question
the Japanese conception of certain indispensable conveniences, but such
as he conceives them they are always in order. Diligent scrub-women at
the terminals are no more so than the train-boy, in no way related to
the commerce-minded nuisance of the same name in our own land, who come
hourly to sweep out the carriages with but slight disturbance to its
occupants, and several times a day to mop them. All cars are
smoking-cars; there is no division by sex even of wash-rooms. But in
what other land does the guard, whom we would call conductor, uncover
with a regal bow as he enters to announce the regretful necessity of
troubling the honorable passengers to display their respectable tickets,
or pause to rearrange a rug over a sleeping traveler and to set aright
the shoes, clogs, sandals, _getas_, and slippers scattered along his way
through the train?
The experienced traveler rarely brings his lunch with him on a Japanese
railway journey; he knows that he will find frequent and fresher
supplies along the way, and at prices no higher than in his own street.
Prices can sprout wings in Japan quite as easily as elsewhere, but it
may be due to a frowning government that the wide-spread custom of
considering travelers by train temporary prisoners, to be mulcted during
the confinement of as great a portion of their financial solvency as
possible, has not yet taken root there. In the very likely event of
there being no dining-car, with tolerable European meals of four or five
courses at a scant seventy cents each, there is a system of station
venders more frequent and more dependable perhaps than anywhere else in
the world. Never does a train halt at a place of any importance that the
singsong cry of “O-bento!” does not call attention to green-capped
youths marching up and down the platform offering for sale all that a
reasonable traveler can demand in the way of food and drink.
It is conceivable that the foreigner may not at once take kindly to the
“honorable _bento_,” the staff of life of Japanese travelers; but with
persistence he will come to endure and even to relish it. Two fresh
wooden boxes tied together with a paper ribbon contain the collation,
which is uniform in cost,—forty _sen_, the half-cents of Japan,
everywhere now, since the war,—and almost so in contents and quality. On
top clings a paper napkin and a paper-sealed pair of chop-sticks, the
virginity of the latter assured by their being but half split in two,
with—such is the Japanese genius for unexpected little details!—the
inevitable toothpick tucked between them. The larger box contains hot
boiled rice, all a native cares to eat at one sitting and more than the
normal American can. The several little compartments of the other hold a
piece of fish—fortunately not usually raw, as the Japanese like
it—perhaps a bit of meat, some slices of cold potato, a cut of sweet
omelet that is most likely of all Japanese viands to appeal to the
average Western taste, two or three unknown vegetables, some boiled, the
others pickled, perhaps some brown beans to give one chop-stick
practice, and a shaving of red ginger to lend the rest seasoning.
Variations on this menu, according to the locality and the things each
place is famed for, are pickled lily- or lotus-root, black mushrooms,
bean-curd, shrimps, steamed eel, edible seaweed, sliced octopus, and
even stranger sea-foods.
If all this does not suffice, one may summon other wearers of the green
cap. There is the tea boy, the hot milk boy, fruit sellers, venders of
rice-cakes, of the dough-ball sweetmeats of Japan, of wood-wrapped
native jams, of California raisins, a trifle cheaper than at home, a
hawker of cigarettes, periodicals, beer, and more doubtful
thirst-quenchers, perhaps even an incongruous purveyor of near-bread and
sandwiches. Hot boiled milk in bottles holding a scant glassful is
expensive; tea, on the other hand, is almost given away. For eight
_sen_, a bare four cents, the boy furnishes an earthenware tea-pot with
cover and handle, crudely glazed, like the tea-cup that goes with it,
and fills it with hot water from his traveling buffet—furnishes
everything, in fact, except tea, in lieu of which the purchaser finds
merely a sack-inclosed handful of leaves that do the water no harm if
one prefers to throw them out and add real tea of one’s own, some
bouillon cubes, or whatever individual taste suggests. Most traveling
Japanese deceive themselves into believing that this tasteless hot water
is really their indispensable beverage. The stranger cannot but wonder
how all this can be supplied at so slight a price, and why the pot and
cup cannot be retrieved at some other station. They never are, however,
but, like the _bento_ boxes and all the rest of the waste which Japanese
travelers cast under the seats, and never out of the window, they are
periodically swept up by the train-boy and dumped as the train passes
over some river or arm of the sea. Where these are shallow, one may see
thousands of broken tea-pots and cups heaped up at the bottom. Thus, for
a yen at most, a rugged appetite can be tamed into submission for
several hours. To be sure, the Imperial Government Tobacco Monopoly
cigar, which may sometimes be had to top off with, sadly belies even its
misspelled Spanish label; but one may be so fortunate as still to have
left a few of the fifty genuine smokes which the Japanese customs
generously allow the traveler to bring into the country with him—and
what boots it to worry about to-morrow?
To-night, however, is a more serious matter. All the horrors of the
American so-called “sleeping-car” are as nothing compared with the
bitter tragedy in many acts of a night spent in one of the poor
imitations thereof that ramble up and down Japan. The natives, I
believe, find little fault with them, and there is no reason that they
should be remodeled to fit the few foreigners who might use them. For it
is mainly a question of fit, so far at least as the Anglo-Saxon is
concerned. By day second class differs from first only in the color of
the upholstery, and perhaps a bit more companionship. But not only is
the normal second-class berth built to Japanese specifications; the
so-called “large size” ones are merely wider, which is very slight
advantage to the full-length man. Granted, however, that he has
succeeded in stowing himself away, there are other inconveniences. The
Imperial Railways being narrow-gauge, it is inevitable that some portion
of the average Western anatomy shall more or less continually protrude
into the aisle. The flimsy curtains that satisfy the atrophied sense of
privacy of the Japanese are always half open for one cause or another;
there is no real dressing-room; if one is so daring, dexterous, and
determined as to disrobe inside a berth, where the retention of a
tooth-brush means overcrowding, one must resort to the customary
Japanese custom of hanging one’s clothes on the floor—and the only floor
available is that of the aisle. Worst of all, perhaps, the sleeping-car
of Japan is never really that but a day-coach with furnishings which
runs at night. The lights blaze unabated; short-distance passengers
stalk in or out of the car at every station and chatter and smoke
incessantly between them; trainmen are constantly marching through, and
never fail to slam the four or five noisily sliding doors; at every halt
brazen-voiced youth walk back and forth along the platform outside
insistently repeating the name of the station—in short, there is even
less likelihood of a bit of sound sleep than in a Japanese inn.
First class ought to be better, but it is not unlikely to be worse.
Yokels along the way, or in third class, are curious to see the rare
personage who travels thus, and the magnificence about him; the scarcity
of occupants makes it the favorite rendezvous of the train-crew as
work-, play-, or catnapping-room; the other half of the same coach is
not infrequently the dining-car and all-night café; and the train-boy
will die at his post rather than permit a window to stay open for an
instant on the hottest night. Old travelers who know the ropes often
make their night trips in first class without taking a berth. Their
sleeping-place is the same that it would be with a berth-ticket, in some
ways all the better for not being made up—and there is a saving of seven
yen.
It is perhaps natural that “boys” in hotels and on trains have no
realization of the advisability of quieting down toward midnight in a
land where the most courteous seem to have no respect for the sleeper,
where even husbands habitually wake their wives or children at any hour
of the night on the flimsiest provocation. A nation accustomed since
time immemorial to paper walls, overcrowding, and uncomfortable
substitutes for beds probably is not conscious of the value of long,
sound slumber. The passing foreigner who sees ill-slept faces all about
him and notes the tendency to nap by day whenever a chance offers
realizes that a wise people should be as insistent on restful sleep as
in avoiding dyspeptic food and unhealthful eating habits. Our impression
is that the Japanese are careless in both these respects.
XI
Along Broadway complaints have been heard during recent years of the
almost dishonest brevity of some plays. Of all the things that may be
said against theatrical performances in Japan, that would be the most
unreasonable. I pride myself on a certain amount of endurance, in any
good cause, but I confess to a kindly feeling toward that Tokyo friend
who did not take me to the “Meiji-za” until the show was half over. Not
that it was so far beyond me, or that I am incapable of appreciating,
even of enjoying at times, things wholly foreign to our American point
of view; but even Fred Stone, I fancy, would begin to grow wearisome if
he cavorted about the stage almost incessantly from two until midnight.
[Illustration: Venders of food and religious trinkets line with their
shops the shaded walks of the island of Enoshima]
[Illustration: The leglessness of Japanese houses! A corner of our room
in the Japanese hotel at Kozu]
[Illustration: The façade of a moving-picture theater in Nagoya]
By the time we had checked our shoes in one of the adjoining
tea-houses—for to do so at the door of the theater itself means a long
and severe struggle to recover them—and were shown to a box six inches
deep and furnished with cushions and a tray of tea, most of the crowded
house had already had four and a half hours’ worth of the admission fee.
For most of them it was supper-time, and scores of men and boys flitted
back and forth along the “aisles,” level with the tops of patrons’
heads, serving meals contained in lacquered boxes, the inevitable tea,
and white vase-like bottles of warm _sake_. Unshod and experienced, they
caused little or no annoyance, especially to an audience accustomed to
see actors often enter or leave the stage by these same polished wooden
runways. In the gently sloping balcony the rice-fed multitude, gathered
in family groups in similar square, shallow, mat-floored inclosures,
piled about them the plentiful waste of their lunches without for a
moment letting their attention waver from the stage.
Unchaperoned not merely by a Japanese but by one capable of appreciating
and mitigating a foreigner’s difficulties, the performance would have
been as meaningless and unintelligible to me as a baseball game to an
Englishman. But a few well-chosen words of explanation now and then
disclosed as many unsuspected fine points as pass unnoticed by a novice
at a Spanish bull-fight. The one thing the Japanese actor must avoid
above all others, it transpired, was “acting,” in the Western sense. The
more nearly, apparently, he acts like a normal, genuine, every-day human
being, the lower he is rated in histrionic ability. There are, to be
sure, topical farces and the like in modern Japan; but the national
drama, patronized by the great mass of the recreation-seeking, and
offering the greatest stage fame, consists of little more than endless
elocution, accompanied by certain stilted actions cut and dried for
centuries, any deviation from which diminishes by just that much the
player’s applause. His every step, gesture, and inflection is
stereotyped by age-long custom and repetition, and his highest goal is
to approximate as nearly as possible those steps, gestures, and
inflections which won the undying fame of some bygone king of the stage.
That does not mean, however, that the Japanese actor has no chance to
develop and display personal advantages. The more nearly, for example,
he can make his voice sound like an enraged giant imprisoned in the pit
of his stomach the greater will be the uproar that greets the conclusion
of one of his speeches. He is given, too, frequent opportunities to
imply by facial expression alone the thoughts that are supposed to be
passing through his mind, which are often expressed at the same time by
a sort of Greek chorus of three or four men dimly seen behind wooden
bars in a kind of raised box on one side or the other of the stage, who
declaim in a curiously unrhythmic rhythm as they pick at native
instruments. The _koto_ and the _samisen_, by the way, are not the last
word in musical contrivances, but I confess to a decided preference for
Japanese “music” over American “jazz,” and for much of her theater to
the unsuccessful striving for originality which often afflicts our own.
There is a reminder of the three thumps which announce the raising of
the curtain in France in the beating together of two sticks of wood so
hard that they have almost the resonance of bell-metal, faster and
faster, until it reaches a deafening crescendo, which constitutes the
signal for the next act in Japan. There is lacking the perfect
imagination of a Chinese audience, which makes a property-man in black
or coolie-blue invisible, or the stick on which a new moon is raised
above the cloth horizon quite in keeping with the poetic spirit of the
drama; but the scenery is decidedly elementary, and many conventions
which strike the Western visitor as ludicrous pass quite unnoticed. Not
merely do the actors often make their entrance or exit along the raised
aisles through the audience, declaiming as they come or go, but bands of
them, representing the _samurai_ of rival _shoguns_, now and then wage
pitched battle far out on these passageways, to the seeming peril of the
lacquered rice-dishes of auditors beneath them. If a wall or a fence is
indicated in the scene, only the gate or door, standing in dignified
isolation, is actually in evidence, and must be carefully opened and
closed whenever a character passes through it. There is something
curiously incongruous between such medieval contrivances and the
ultramodern revolving stages of the best Tokyo theaters, on which a
group of actors, suddenly coming to the end of their scene, relapse into
motionlessness and are spun around in plain sight of the audience until
the next group and setting are disclosed and put into action.
But these after all mainly mechanical differences are not the chief ones
between the Japanese and American stage. It is more surprising to find
that the two corner-stones of our theater, novelty and the sex appeal,
are wholly unnecessary to the Nipponese playwright. “Old stuff” pleases
best, even in the “movies.” Month after month, year after year, one
might almost say century after century, the Japanese playgoer is content
to witness the same dramas, to follow with breathless interest some
national legend, some event in the history of the island empire as well
known to its every school-boy as is Washington’s crossing of the
Delaware to us. He is not merely satisfied; he prefers these ancient
tales, dressed in the elaborate costumes of shogunal days, ruled by the
curious morality of long ago, when parents slew a beloved son for some
intangible point of honor, and suicide was considered, under certain
circumstances, the height of virtue. The Japanese is decidedly not a
demonstrative race, yet the suppressed sobs and blowing of noses of the
“Meiji-za” audience all but drowned out the stentorian, cavernous voices
of the actors at the climax of a scene between a self-doomed father and
his infant son, though every native present had heard the story a
hundred times.
[Illustration: Farming in Japan rice-fields is a great life—if you don’t
weaken]
[Illustration: A Japanese woman enjoying her pipe and the seascape at
Toba]
[Illustration: Little girls of Yamada-Isé dressed in a riot of color,
topped by hats of real flowers, for the twenty-one-yearly rebuilding
festivities]
[Illustration: A peasant woman of Japan up to her knees in work]
The same themes suffice for the now fairly numerous Japanese
motion-picture producers. The old familiar kimono-clad figures, whitened
faces, and well-tried situations all but monopolize the posters before
“movie” houses. As on the speaking stage, the rare female rôles are most
often played by men; in the few cases where they are not, the women
never under any circumstances give the slightest reminders of the appeal
of sex. The result is that when, to fill out its program, the cinema
flashes an American or a European picture on the screen, this unfailing
motif fairly shrieks at one from the very first foot of film. The
traveler from the West is suddenly astounded by the realization of the
omnipresence of this appeal in the dramas, good and bad, high and low,
of our own land. What would have been at home the most innocent of
flirtations, the purest youthful love-story, becomes all at once, sensed
in the curiously tense atmosphere of the Oriental audience about one,
the height of indecency. If the film is of the type the Westerner would
regard in his home land as mildly risqué, a burning sense of shame
surges up his spine; he feels an all but overwhelming desire to rise and
shout to the now gaping audience that it is completely misunderstanding,
to hurry back home and demand that laws be framed to forbid the
exporting for the amusement of peoples so utterly different from
ourselves of screen-stories which cause them completely to misjudge us,
to the appreciable widening of that gulf between nations that so much
largely futile effort is being made to narrow.
Misunderstandings of this sort, however, are inevitable. Honest Japanese
themselves admit that they are no models for the average of other
nations in relations between the sexes, but with them there is almost no
indication of this fact on the surface. Nor is this hypocrisy; it is
age-long custom, and temperament, for they are above all things
outwardly undemonstrative. For a man and woman to shake hands, to take
an arm, fills the untraveled Japanese with amazement; for husband and
wife to exchange the most perfunctory of kisses in public at parting or
greeting is more scandalous than in holy Zion City itself. Even to show
such signs of affection to one’s children where others may see is
extremely bad form.
“Do Japanese man and wife never kiss?” I asked one of my Tokyo
acquaintances.
“Never!” he replied, with an amazement at the question that showed
through his habitually expressionless face. “Of course,” he added a
moment later, with the air of a man who would be truthful at all costs,
but with the cynical smirk of one treading lewd ground, “they sometimes
do, but only in the privacy of their chamber.”
It was this same man who, more familiar with the speech of England than
with our own, explained that the only outward manifestation which
distinguishes a geisha from her more respectable sisters is “too much
swank.” Certainly her public manners and personal appearance give no
other indication of her calling. Japan’s very _yoshiwaras_, these walled
and sternly policed restricted districts of her larger cities, are
outwardly models of propriety; the big framed photographs of the
inmates, displayed to attract passing clients, invariably show them as
properly attired as the most circumspect of dowagers. It may be that the
frank, casual disclosure of what in Western lands commonly remain hidden
charms, in the public baths and the naturally rather disclosing garb of
Japan, makes the Japanese callous to any such incitements.
XII
The undoubtedly many attractions of the island empire for the mere
traveler are, unfortunately, greatly offset by the high cost of living
there. The rapidity with which letters of credit are depleted turns
almost to naught the well nigh frantic efforts of such publicity
agencies as the diligent Japan Tourist Bureau to attract visitors. Two
or three years ago those who cater to and depend upon the passing
foreigner comforted themselves with the thought that his scarcity was
merely a temporary aftermath of the World War. Now that he still fails
to come in appreciable numbers, there is dismay in such quarters, though
it is characteristic of the Japanese temperament to assert that “the
increase is gratifying.” Word has drifted to the ear of many a
prospective tourist that life is unreasonably expensive in Japan, or he
hears proof of that fact in crossing the Pacific and goes on to China
without landing, or cuts to a fraction the time he planned to spend in
the mikado’s realm. If even Americans feel that way about it, one can
easily imagine the sensations of those from war-impoverished lands with
a feeble currency.
Some of this raising of prices is justifiable; much of it is not. The
Japanese working-man has recently won a wage commensurate with a citizen
instead of a serf, and the consumer must take care of it. But the war
engendered the profiteer there as elsewhere; it left behind newly rich
to set bad examples and crowd the heels of their more honest brethren; a
great increase in taxes has popularized the pastime of seeing how much
of them can be passed on to the next man. Then there is what a Tokyo
editor calls “expensive face-saving.” In olden days the Japanese “saved
face” in other ways; it is no doubt in keeping with the general
westernization of their standards that the modern method of doing so
should be by ostentatious extravagance. The ordinary Japanese business
man who would keep up with the procession and not give his colleagues
and his clients the impression that he is hovering on the verge of
insolvency must waste much money on mere show. Completely separate
wardrobes for the four seasons, often European as well as native style,
are indispensable. When he entertains his friends or customers he can
scarcely invite them to his home, not so much because of domestic
seclusion as because it is the fashion to have such gatherings in a
tea-house, where geisha-girls may be summoned to serve or dance. Not
only do the more famous of these expect an opera-singer’s fee, but the
_chaya_ itself has boosted its prices to the new-rich level. Then there
is the very serious matter of tipping. In the United States this vicious
importation from Europe has swollen almost beyond recognition of its
origin, but the extra fees exacted there are mere flea-bites compared
with the _chadai_, or “tea-money,” of Japan. On the amount of it depends
the reputation for importance of the giver, and it is a common failing
to wish to impress the world with one’s importance. The Japanese of any
standing who puts up in a native hotel, for example, and is handed a
bill for twenty yen at the end of a three-day stay, is expected to send
at least half that amount as a tip to the proprietor, to give another
five yen to the maid who brought his food and kept his room in order,
and generously to remember the bath-boy and the shoe-man. “Is there any
other country,” asks the irate editor, “where such a ridiculous custom
as tipping to eighty per cent of the bill prevails?”
All this, of course, is reflected in general prices. But what has
particularly aroused the wrath of travelers is the almost universal
Japanese custom of expecting the foreigner, particularly the Caucasian
visitor, to pay higher prices for the same things than the native.
Perhaps this is merely an extension, almost flattering, of the notion
that one pays according to one’s importance. The fact remains that the
American and the European are sometimes frankly and naturally, more
often surreptitiously, made to pay more than the Japanese, a custom
which ignorance of the language, among other things, makes it next to
impossible to combat. In some cases this, too, is justifiable. An
American staying in a native inn is likely to require more attention, to
call for stranger foods, to be more careless with the floor-matting than
the Japanese guest—and he is almost certain to be ignorant of, or to
scorn, the native custom of exorbitant tips. But the overcharging is not
confined to justifiable cases; among those who habitually come into
contact with foreign travelers it has become a fixed habit, and has
spread to a considerable extent to the rank and file. I have already
mentioned the high cost of _kuruma_-riding. In the slang of the
rickshaw-man and his class, a foreigner is a _kane-mochi_, a “possessor
of money,” in other words, a rich man, and whenever it is possible he is
treated accordingly. Wherever he moves, except by the government
railways or the strictly public means of conveyance, the tourist has the
feeling that his money is being taken away from him with unjust
rapidity; whenever he stops he is likely to be quickly impressed with
the nation that it is better for his financial constitution to move on
again.
It is not the Japanese alone who are to blame for this baiting of the
visiting traveler. The score of more or less foreign hotels throughout
the country which cater especially to such clients have been joined
together in a price-fixing association, mainly by the efforts of the
typically American manager of the most pretentious of them, situated in
a busy “treaty-port.” In the best few of these the virtually uniform
charges are not entirely out of reason; but to come upon a run-down or
poorly constructed and badly provided member of the association, far
from the beaten track, only to be confronted by the same inflated rates,
is likely to turn one’s attention once more to the train schedule. It
would perhaps be unfair to suspect that the typical American hotel man
above mentioned resorted to a manœuver time-honored in his native land
in order to remove an incentive for travelers to desert his own
ostentatious and necessarily high-priced establishment for more modest
ones in out-of-the-way places; but the Japanese, for all his reputation
for cleverness and foresight, is often dense.
There are many Americans, to be sure, who would not consider the foreign
hotels of Japan high-priced, though they might express dissatisfaction
at what they get for their money. But I am one of the firm believers in
travel for persons of modest means, and not merely for the wealthy or
those shielded from financial worries by an expense account. There are
many who can, and should, and do go to see foreign lands, who still
cannot, will not, and should not continually pay at least six dollars a
day for a place to sleep and three heavy meals which they often do not
wish to eat—plus constant increases for bottled water, for many services
that should not be regarded as extras, for clever manipulations of the
stated daily rate, and the high tips expected at their departure by a
long line of more or less useless servants. Yet there is often no choice
but to patronize the sometimes flea-bitten members of the hotel
association or stay at home. One may not have the courage, or even the
ability, to live in Japanese inns, and even these have in many cases
caught the hint and greet the foreigner with “special rates,” on the
pretense that they are furnishing him with silk- instead of
cotton-covered _futons_, and “European food,” though they are as
ignorant even of the appearance of the latter as a Tennessee mountaineer
is of Japanese viands. Their own overreaching is depriving those who
long to do business with him of the patronage of the modest traveler,
and the immodest are too scarce to bring them a livelihood.
All that has saved some of these ill-advised exotic hostelries from
disaster is an increasing Japanese patronage. Men who have been abroad
sometimes prefer to live in foreign style, or at least to show their
families a sample of it; some find it cheaper to pay the high rates and
low tips of these establishments than the low rates but high tips
expected of “persons of importance” in native hotels; the war-rich make
them new forms of ostentation and overrun some of them with their geisha
parties. Hence it is a rare dining-room that does not contain a few men
faultlessly European from the neck down, audibly enjoying their soup,
tea, or toothpick in Japanese fashion or striving to conceal their
chagrin at the unadaptability of wives still distinctly native in garb
and manners. For if the Japanese smile at our clumsiness with the
chop-sticks, we recover the amusement with interest among the native
sojourners in these so-called European hotels. Daintily kimonoed ladies
clutching forks upside down in the wrong hand, grasping the body of a
tea-cup for fear the handle to which they are unaccustomed will prove
too frail, paring their fruit backward with what is to them a clumsy
knife, unconsciously trying to draw their feet up on their chairs—and
often succeeding—the while avoiding the eye of inwardly wrathful though
outwardly imperturbed husbands, enliven many a meal. That their mishaps
are not confined to the detested public place of eating is suggested by
the unfailing anecdote of those traveled Japanese who are given to
admitting personal discomfiture of how they fell out of their first bed.
It is as much as anything the commonplace atmosphere and stereotyped
menus of these exorbitant imitations of Occidental hotels that make one
inclined to hurry through Yokohama, Nagoya, Kobe, even temple-rich
Kyoto, and spend such time as one can afford in smaller and less
sophisticated places. There—almost anywhere off the one well-beaten
track, in fact—one must endure the unconscious bad manners of a race
which, for some unexplainable reason, always quickly gathers about a
foreigner, though a hundred others have passed within a fortnight, and
giggles childishly at him if he speaks, though the study of his language
is compulsory in every higher school and, except that his eyes do not
squint, his appearance is scarcely a whit different from many of the
gigglers themselves. But there are compensations, in glimpses of
unsophisticated corners, unadvertised bits of picturesqueness,
semi-survivals of customs that carry one back to the days, not yet
nearly a century distant, when to wander in a land now as safe as any on
the globe would have been to lose one’s head forthwith by order of some
wrathful _daimyo_. Nor does one ever tire of seeing the velvety Japanese
landscape, its rugged misshapen pines, its terraced hillsides, and its
crazy-quilt rice-fields cut up into absurd little patches so carefully
tended that there is hardly a weed in the whole country, or of the
laborious, uncomplaining, mud-wading men and women who spend their lives
in them. Fields pink with Chinese clover that is to be plowed under to
enrich the soil change to white stretches of daisies doomed to the same
undignified end as one rambles southwestward; otherwise, there is a
picturesque sameness which nevertheless does not grow wearisome.
XIII
It was by mere lucky chance that I happened down to Yamada-Isé on the
very day her great celebration began. In theory, as I understand it,
Shinto shrines are rebuilt every seven years; in practice, at least in
this most venerated center of the cult, as sacred to millions of
Japanese as Jerusalem, Mecca, or Benares to men of other faiths, some of
the holy edifices are actually reconstructed, and new ones added, every
twenty-first year. In the springtime, when sap and pilgrims are on the
move, one may expect to find many of the trains of Japan crowded, but I
had certainly not looked forward to fighting my way amid such throngs as
poured with me down to this chosen terrestrial abode of the gods that
watch over the island empire. There had been no warning, so far as I was
concerned, that another twenty-one years had passed and that the
generation-separated festivities were again on the point of beginning.
The multitude which disgorged through the station exits was a mere
handful compared to the endless welter of humanity that already surged
along the few streets of the little city, a city as far removed in some
respects from westernized Kobe or Yokohama as the moon. Yet every train
that arrived as long as I remained was packed beyond anything we of the
Occident would believe possible. Pilgrims, devout and otherwise, nearly
all in strange, fantastic garb, eddied back and forth through the town,
while the keepers and employees of inns, of eating- and drinking-places,
of shops crammed with displays of the myriad queer trinkets sold to the
pious in holy places, raced up and down along the edges of the human
stream frantically shouting the merits of their establishments or their
wares. It was not difficult to believe the naïve assertion of the
home-made local guide-book that “the occupation of the people of Yamada
is to feed peacefully upon pilgrims.”
Some of the latter sat on the polished floors of the wide-open anterooms
of inns, tending their dusty and weary feet; the overwhelming majority,
however, had confined the physical exertions of their pilgrimage to the
purchase of a railway ticket. In the overcrowded, paper-walled
hostelries, in some cases on the train itself, they changed their
every-day garb for curious costumes supposed to fit the occasion, until
one might have fancied a mammoth outdoor fancy-dress ball was under way.
Many of the townspeople were already similarly decked out, with a
certain uniformity that still did not preclude individual touches. There
was, too, a quaint and apparently unwitting mixture of the ancient and
the modern,—caps of to-day topping off bizarre kimonos of _samurai_
times, the familiar Japanese imitation of a thermos bottle riding on the
hips of youths garbed in a way that might not have been out of place
here a thousand years ago.
In the midst of all this maelstrom of incongruity, a bare two minutes
from the station I came upon what I took to be the nucleus of the
festivities, but which proved later to be but a small detail of them.
From a narrow side street there suddenly emerged upon the principal
artery of the town, to the accompaniment of an uproar of strange music
and a babel of orders and warnings, the ends of two mammoth ropes,
grasped, first by two men in strange attire, then by two rows of little
girls, crowded as closely together as they could walk, dressed in
combinations of flowers and brilliant clothing quite beyond the power of
mere man to describe, and singing a chorus of un-Occidental rhythm.
Behind them came scores of little boys, then larger girls, youths of
ever-increasing size, and finally, the ropes seeming to have no end, two
long lines of men, all in wondrous garb, all chanting weirdly as they
advanced tugging at the big rolls of hemp. At last, when the head of the
procession was already out of hearing, there came creaking and grinding
around the corner, with the assistance of sturdy young men excitedly
applying great wooden levers, a very Juggernaut of a car, its two
mammoth wheels some two feet thick and so weighty that they crushed like
eggs the stones from the sea that had been strewn along the way, the
body so ponderous that it suggested a moving house. High up on this was
a float, a fantastic scene taken from Japanese legend, with several
living figures posing as motionlessly as the jolting and swaying of the
cart permitted, and with as many mechanical assistants, in incongruous
working clothes, performing unknown labors in half-concealed corners of
it.
But it is time to explain. The holy city of Yamada and its environs,
location of the two great shrines of Isé, are divided into twenty-one
wards or sections. At the time of the rare rebuilding festival each of
these must, by ancient custom, furnish a cart to bring up from the two
near-by rivers the timbers to be used in the reconstruction. These are
specially selected _hinoki_, a sturdy cousin of the pine or spruce,
felled in the mikado’s private forests amid elaborate religious
ceremonies, in order that they may be properly consecrated, then floated
down the rivers with similar formalities. So great is the reverence for
this sanctified wood that the mammoth logs are commonly wrapped in reed
mats to prevent the slightest injury, and arrive in Yamada thus
protected. The shrines themselves, dedicated to the divine ancestors of
the mikado, principal gods of the Japanese people, are so sacred that
carpenters engaged upon them are said to be required to bathe and put on
spotless white garments before coming to work, and to discard either
wood or clothing on which falls a drop of blood or other stain incident
to their labor.
But custom and century-old tradition have made the wheeled contrivances
furnished by the wards much more than mere timber-hauling carts. The
different sections vie with one another in constructing mighty vehicles,
in surmounting them with elaborate tableaux, in providing music and the
like to accompany them. Long before it is time actually to go down to
the rivers for the logs the twenty-one processions set out for a round
of the little city, some invisible master of ceremonies preventing
collisions. The wards are small; the vehicles must be drawn entirely by
man-power; hence every family is required to send at least one member to
assist in the pulling. Many a household reports intact, decked out in
the requisite costumes, and prepared to spend the day and the night, if
necessary, in tugging at the ropes with Japanese patience.
[Illustration: Residents of Yamada Isé garbed for the cart-drawing
festival. Brilliant colors characterize the clothing; the torn paper
“duster” is a frequent Shinto motif]
[Illustration: Inside the grounds of the Naigu, most sacred of all the
Shinto temple groups of Japan, all pilgrims purify themselves by washing
in the sacred river before proceeding to their devotions; photography is
strictly forbidden]
[Illustration: A small section of the long line of rope-pullers
returning with a sacred timber from the river to the temple rebuilding]
[Illustration: At last the sacred timber itself, wrapped in grass mats
to prevent any injury, came creaking and grinding around the corner of a
narrow winding street]
The darkness which fell upon the long May day increased rather than
lessened the festivities. From my hilltop lodging the whole region
pulsated with weird music, groaned with the straining of mammoth wheels
over sea-stones, flickered far and wide with fantastic paper lanterns.
When I descended once more to the town almost every one of its narrow
streets was blocked by a cart and all that went with it. Directly behind
each vehicle now was a band or orchestra, if words so inaccurate to the
occasion be allowed. They consisted of rectangular, flower- and
silk-bedecked, canopied affairs on tiny wheels, in which the score of
musicians seemed to be sitting, but inside which they were really
walking. In some cases these were all women, in others all men;
sometimes the genders were mixed; a few venturesome wards even sought to
carry off the palm with more or less trained bands of shy and awkward
children.
Every ten yards or so each cart halted, the great tapering lines of
rope-holders fell into the position of “at rest,” and the musicians
struck up queer yet enlivening noises on their dull-toned drums,
metallic-voiced bars of wood, and misplaced fiddle-strings. During the
halts as well as the advances the living figures of the float-tableaux
strove to hold their poses, hour after hour. Not a few of these
groupings suggested real artistic ability. I was particularly taken with
a scene of olden times in which a woman, garbed and rice-powdered to the
exact likeness of a wax figure preserved from shogunal days, knelt on
the floor of the car, while two men decked out to perfection as
two-sword _samurai_ of the old swash-buckling era stood on either side
of her. It was some time before I realized that they were living
persons, so unblinking was their expression, so nearly motionless their
bodies even during the pitching and swaying of the ponderous cart. One
of the pseudo-_samurai_ in particular had been given a pose that seemed
physically impossible for any length of time—until I made out a loop of
fine wire with a padded bottom sustaining his outstretched right arm.
Even with that assistance he was displaying a patriotism or a civic
spirit quite beyond any I ever hope to attain.
How far into the night this rivalry continued I cannot say, for I am one
of those unfortunates who require a certain amount of sleep even on
extraordinary, twenty-one-yearly occasions. Certainly, unless dreams
deceived me, Yamada did not once during the night fall wholly silent,
and with dawn the festivities again steadily increased in volume. The
carts had gone down to the rivers, but the ever-growing throngs of
pilgrims were taxing the capacity of the town and completely swamping
its transportation facilities. Tram-cars, automobiles, horse-drawn
_bashas_, rickshaws raced back and forth along or beside the wide new
gravel-strewn highway between the inner and outer shrine, four miles
apart, and still the overwhelming majority were forced to stump out or
back in their curious and clumsy footwear.
The distant Naiku shrine was best worth the visiting, in its great
mountain-base park amid immense trees considerably resembling redwoods,
the more accessible of which were protected by split-bamboo jackets to
prevent the aggressively pious from stripping them of the bark that is
reputed to be a protection against evil spirits. The unpainted shrines
of _hinoki_ wood, set back within inclosures shut off from the general
public, were of a primitive, undecorated style said to represent the
purest and oldest form of Shinto architecture. Here and there gleaming
new shrines, and inclosures of the same white wood, had already been
erected, and a few matting-wrapped logs from the imperial forest lay
awaiting similar use. Every one of the swarming pilgrims, of high or low
degree, who crossed the sacred bridge into the shaded grounds paused to
kneel at the edge of a clear little river and purify himself before
proceeding farther into the holy precincts. Such is the absence of
fanaticism, or at least of intolerance, in the faiths of Japan that the
foreigner may mingle freely with believers, getting physically as near
the gods as they, without once catching a hint of resentment. Neither my
own ablutions at the sacred river, though from a somewhat different
motive than theirs, nor my purchase of a copper’s worth of beans for the
sacred horse—which closely resembled the rather overfed and underworked
buggy-steed of a Kansas farmer—aroused more than a slight, fleeting
attention from my fellow-pilgrims.
When I returned from island-studded Toba by a stroll through
Futami-no-Ura, with its far-famed sacred rocks connected by a rope
bridge, the last act of the timber-hauling was reaching its height. Up
the long, sloping road from the river, where they had been loaded with
religious rites, came the carts. Their now dust-covered and perspiring
rope-clutchers strained toilsomely through the narrow Yamada streets,
the girls and many of the younger boys fallen out along the way. There
was grim determination in the faces of the sturdy youths, who were
mainly left now, to finish the task, that their wards might not be
discredited. When at last the carts themselves appeared they had been
stripped of all the fanciful decorations of the night before—tableaux,
floats, silken drapery, the following clusters of musicians were all
gone; the mere vehicles, bare as a wrestler girded for the contest,
ground crushingly over the loose stones, each laden with one massive
_hinoki_ log. Clouds of dust half hid them and the struggling pullers,
even in the blazing sunshine; scores of the solemn little sword-bearing
policemen of Japan lined the way along which they were to pass, to hold
back the multitudes from pressing too closely upon the sacred timbers,
to prevent, as far as possible, irreverent foreigners from photographing
them, so sacrosanct are they and the shrines that are built from them.
As each cart groaned into the hallowed precincts—this time the Geku, or
outer shrine, on the edge of Yamada town itself—the entrance was barred
from behind it even to the reverent throngs, and none but Shinto
functionaries and local or visiting notables were permitted to follow it
to its final goal.
[Illustration: Though cremation is much more common than burial, a
Japanese cemetery bears no small resemblance to one of our own]
[Illustration: Within the grounds of the finest of Kyoto’s temples]
[Illustration: Hundreds of semi-sacred deer roam at will about Nara and
vicinity, recalling the sacred bulls of India]
[Illustration: The entrance to the ever-higher temples of Nara]
For a full week the same scenes were to be enacted daily, and it is
small wonder if the inhabitants of holy Yamada-Isé surreptitiously heave
a sigh of relief when their strenuous labors are over and the town has
settled down again to feed peacefully upon the pious, who will arrive
constantly but in less overwhelming multitudes during the coming
twenty-one years.
XIV
It was fitting that a pilgrimage to Koya-san should follow my
unexpectedly well-chosen visit to Yamada-Isé. As the latter is the holy
of holies of Shintoism, so is the sacred mountain-top of Koya, also
situated on the southernmost peninsula of the main island, perhaps the
most venerated center of Buddhism in Japan. This time there was no
special occasion to swell the pilgrim ranks, but the less accessible
sanctuary enjoys a constant popularity, and almost as great a one as its
rival over the mountain range to the east. I was, therefore, far from
alone at any time during the journey, even though I had abandoned the
less mobile two thirds of my family in delightful Nara.
For those moderately accustomed to walking uphill it is three hours’
steady climb from the railway to the hallowed summit of Koya-san. Before
long the flat, dusty, rice-growing plain gives way to rugged foot-hills,
then to real, if not especially lofty, mountains, up which clambers a
more than well-worn trail that is almost a highway. Along this lower
stretch those who grew weary of their burdens could pick up a porter at
will, and to suit any load, for they range from eager boys of eight to
powerfully legged men who have made carrying a life’s work. The carriers
are of both sexes, too, and the frequent sight of a haughty man of
wealth, easily recognizable for all his pilgrim garb, burdened only with
a fan and a towel, and followed by a sun-browned woman bowed half double
beneath his baggage, kept one reminded that this was Japan. Here also
those who can climb only by the exertions of others engage their
_kagos_, a cross between a traveling-chair and a hammock swung on a
single bamboo pole. But the gods are evidently not kindly disposed
toward those who thus ease their pilgrimage without just and sufficient
cause, and I passed many—the ailing, the lame, the blind, tottering old
women—who were taking no chances of thus jeopardizing celestial favor.
The typical pilgrim garb of knee-length kimono, inner sleeves ending in
a kind of fingerless glove, brilliant sash, white drawer-stockings and
straw sandals, a huge woven-reed hat, on the chest a wooden alms-box
inscribed with Chinese characters, with a sack to hold donations of food
below it, a formally folded pack on the back, a bell, a kind of scepter,
and a rosary in one hand and a long staff topped by jingling rings in
the other, was frequently seen in its entirety, and did not always cover
one who actually lived on alms, though the genuine pilgrim is expected
in theory to do so. But modifications of this get-up, ranging all the
way from slight variations to full European attire, were to be seen in
the almost unbroken lines of climbing and descending Japanese. Here a
pilgrim’s smock and a coolie’s straw head-shade—one or both of them
stamped with intricate characters indicating each temple
visited—disguised a merchant or a dentist from near-by Osaka, a doctor
of Tokyo, the principal of one of Japan’s important higher schools.
Women in full Japanese dress, their skirts drawn high about their bare
legs in the frank and natural manner of the country, their faces still
waxen with rice-powder in spite of their flushing exertions, more likely
than not disfigured with the clumsy gold teeth so general in Japan as to
be almost the rule, strained their way upward with a difficulty that
would have evoked laughter from their laborious country sisters, did not
the barriers of caste and an inexpressive temperament prevent it. A
short-haired widow, a plump and comely nun, who, in her black garb and
closely clipped head, might easily have been mistaken for a man, an aged
peasant with a deep sorrow in his eyes, a man and woman of wealth
fulfilling some vow made in time of stress—the wife, of course, plodding
in the rear, as the social standing of the sex requires—city youths and
school-boys making the pilgrimage a combination of lark, duty, and
mountain excursion—there is no class or age or condition in Japan that
was not represented. Descending, satisfied pilgrims sometimes suggested
yeomen suddenly stepping forth from the days of King Arthur; now and
again a _kago_ came down bearing an inert, white-faced man for whom the
exertion of the climb had been too much.
[Illustration: The _basha_ is still the most rapid and aristocratic
means of conveyance in many parts of Japan]
[Illustration: Some of my fellow-pilgrims on the climb to Koya-san; it
is as usual to hire women carriers as men in this part of Japan]
[Illustration: No small number of pilgrims to the sacred mountain climb
by the exertion of others]
The entire ascent was well-, indeed over-supplied with the indispensable
requirements of travelers,—food, drink, and even lodgings. Sometimes the
open-front shops lined unbrokenly both sides of the way, until it seemed
a city street; there was not a single projecting point, not a solitary
place of vantage along it, that did not have its tea-house with an
ever-spreading view of the world below. This was splendidly wooded in
the steeper portions, fantastic with patchwork rice- and wheat-fields
wherever cultivation was possible. A river serpentined through the
middle distance; a rugged and in places bare range of hills formed the
horizon. Here and there lay a compact little town, but a Japanese
village pitched on a mountain-side is disappointing, because, while an
almost unbroken green usually surrounds it, there are no red, or maroon,
or old-rose tile roofs to contrast with this, but only dull-gray ones,
which with time blend almost imperceptibly into the landscape.
For several miles, more than half-way up, and so distinct in limits as
to suggest that they were forbidden elsewhere, the pleasure of the climb
and the view were ruined by scores of horribly diseased beggars along
the roadside, creatures as dreadful as any to be seen in China or India,
and many times more conspicuous, for they were the first I remembered
meeting anywhere in the country. It is the Japanese way to thrust
infirmity out of sight; in Japan, unlike the rest of the Orient, begging
is not only frowned upon but is neither customary nor often necessary;
but here foreign visitors are few and piety quite ready to assist in the
support of the helpless. Leprous women with babies already rotting from
the same disease, men plainly far beyond the assistance of medicine,
children with hairless scalps and great suppurating sores where skin
should have been, horrors that one would avoid any effort to recall,
writhed and gurgled appeals in the sun-scorched dust, or trailed
whiningly after each passer-by.
Most of the pilgrims, no doubt with a certain amount of the self-seeking
which distinguishes almsgiving by the pious the world over, took care to
toss something to every one who asked, for which purpose every shop
along the way offered, for slightly more than their value in modern
money, stacks of old copper coins, worth a fourth or an eighth of a
cent. Only a man of wealth could have afforded any real relief to the
scores after scores of unfortunates, and I made the error of trying to
pick out a few of the more deserving cases. For no sooner had I dropped
ten _sen_, equal to an American nickel, into the hand of a mother of
three leprous children than the word of the extraordinary benefaction
spread from end to end of beggars’ row. Every mendicant thereafter who
was still able to walk, even on hands and knees, stuck to my heels long
after his precinct had been left far behind, and I quickly became known
all over the mountain-side as the eccentric and wealthy foreigner who
gave _ju sen_ at a throw.
Japan seems to have no tramps in the American sense, but her pilgrims
take the place of them. The youth—and even the unyouthful—who suddenly
feels the call of the road has only to slip into some fantastic garb,
clutch a handful of jingling bells, and set off for some famous shrine
or temple. If he is more than a “gay cat” by nature and the wandering
life proves the one above all others he prefers, he may remain
perpetually on a pilgrimage. He who openly “panhandled” or halted at
houses to demand, tramp fashion, a “hand-out” or a “set-down” would
quickly catch the unwelcome attention of the omnipresent Japanese
police. But let him grasp a tinkling staff at his waist, and he may
safely and permanently appeal to charity anywhere without even the
exertion of opening his mouth. Far be it from me to assert that this
ruse is widely practised, but few people are more persistent travelers
within their own land than the Japanese, and by no means all of them are
financially in traveling circumstances.
Not far from the end of the climb I fell in with a group of professional
and business men from Osaka—though it would have been hard to recognize
them as such under their pilgrims’ disguise—led by a young Buddhist
novice who had come a little way down the mountain to meet them. The
latter, for all his priestly garb and manner, was something in the
nature of a hotel runner, and at sight of me he bowed low, rubbing his
thighs Japanese fashion, and asked, with an ingenuous smile, whether I
had chosen a stopping-place. When I answered in the negative, he replied
in his chipped English, as if that fully settled the matter, “Then you
will stay in my temple.”
All Koya-san is a Buddhist sanctuary, without layman inns to minister to
the wants of visitors, and any who spend the night there must put up in
one of the score of monasteries, technically as invited guests. While
these make no actual charges, it is the custom, rarely overlooked, to
leave as a donation to the adjoining temple an amount at least equal to
what one would pay in a first-class inn—hence the competition of novice
runners. Japanese are usually assigned to this or that group of priests,
according to the part of the country from which they hail, but
foreigners are fair game for any of them, and the first to establish
contact with such a windfall becomes henceforth his undisputed host. I
had no choice, therefore, as well as no other desire, than to accept the
proffered hospitality.
[Illustration: Pilgrims—in real life lawyers, doctors, dentists,
business men of Japan’s second largest city—climb Koya-san with all the
customary accoutrement, led at the end by the young Buddhist priest who
took me in as guest]
[Illustration: Women pilgrims arriving at the entrance to the miles of
temples, tombs, and the like on Koya-san, a point beyond which, up to
half a century ago, no member of the fair sex was allowed to pass]
[Illustration: Two pilgrims to Koya-san]
[Illustration: The shrine in our garden at Beppu]
Would that all hotel-runners were as solicitous for the welfare of the
guests they capture as was this girl-faced priest-to-be. From the moment
of laying claim to me until he handed me back my knapsack and bade me
farewell at the beginning of the descent next morning, he never for a
moment relaxed his efforts to anticipate my slightest want. There may
have been a touch of selfishness in his attention, for the Japanese who
longs to learn English is diligent in the pursuit of travelers on whom
to practise; but there was nothing to suggest that his hospitality would
not have been as sincere had I turned out to be one of those rare
visitors to Japan who are neither Orientals nor yet speak what no small
number of Nipponese consider the universal tongue of the West.
From the curious old back gate, main entrance to Koya-san since the
coming of the railway, the ground sloped gently down into a shallow
dish-shaped mountain-top filled with more temples, monasteries, royal
tombs, and similar religious edifices than one could have counted in a
day. Until half a century ago no woman was allowed to pass the first
shrine within the gate, where she must say her prayers and return.
Contact with the modern world has softened much that is still
essentially Japanese, however, and the numerous female pilgrims are now
housed by the priests quite as freely as are male visitors. Shopkeepers,
too, have gradually invaded the once wholly non-secular residence,
lining the broad central street with all the odds and ends that find
sale among pilgrims, and some of them have brought their families with
them, so that the once strictly monasterial aspect of the town has
largely disappeared. I was surprised to learn, also, though perhaps I
should have known it, that during the last few years the Buddhist
priests of Japan have been permitted to marry. My informants all added,
however, that few do so, because there is a conviction that a man with
family cares cannot give his full energies to priestly duties, and those
with ambitions for high place refuse to handicap themselves. As I have a
passing acquaintance with the sternly celibate Buddhist votaries of
other parts of the Orient, it was hard to picture this essential change,
until I recalled that even the Roman Catholic clergy has been deprived
of legitimate family joys, and worries, only since the days of Pope
Gregory VII.
XV
The monastery and temple to which my self-appointed host was attached
did not differ greatly in appearance from any large and high-class
Japanese dwelling, dull and time-worn without, to be sure, but spacious,
pleasing, and comfortable within. Word of the unexpected “distinguished
guest” had evidently gone ahead, for as we turned into the grassless
courtyard six or seven members of this particular group—in other words,
half of it—lined up along the groove of the open sliding wall to bow me
welcome. One of them wore the modern hair-cut and ordinary kimono of the
Japanese layman, and was, as his appearance suggested, no priest or
priest-to-be, but a temporal business manager—“bookkeeper,” my guide,
with his limited English vocabulary, called him—such as attends to the
worldly affairs of each temple. Besides him there were a dozen inmates,
ranging from the head bonze, whose rank made him invisible to casual
visitors, down to my cicerone, latest and therefore lowest in rank of
the several youthful novices. When he had exchanged our shoes for
slippers, these in turn to be abandoned in the polished wooden hallways
at the entrance to the mat-carpeted rooms, and had washed from bamboo
dippers at a sort of sanctified water-trough filled with glass-clear
water from a spring up the hillside, the group from Osaka, three women
among them, and I were shown to cushions in a matted room. The paper
walls of this were decorated with painted bamboo branches, peacocks, and
various species of birds that were no mean examples of the best Japanese
art. Later on, when the other guests had departed, I was assigned to an
adjoining suite of two rooms such as no Japanese inn I have ever
inhabited can boast, and distinctly superior in decoration, size, and
specklessness to the quarters reserved for the royal family in another
monastery, which I was shown later in the day.
[Illustration: Descending, satisfied pilgrims sometimes suggest the
knights of ancient days]
In short, there was nothing about the establishment, except the
close-cropped heads, black robe-like kimonos, and rosaries of the
inmates, to distinguish it from a sumptuous private residence accustomed
to receive frequent guests. The three women, with that indifference to
public exposure characteristic of the Japanese, changed from their
road-worn kimonos to more decorative ones from their bags, merely
turning their backs on us during the process. Boys as wooden-faced as
the serving-lads of any layman inn, and hired in the same way for the
same purpose, brought us the noonday meal with all the requisite
kneeling and bowing of such service. I know not how often Caucasian
visitors come to Koya-san, except that I saw no other foreigners than a
group of Koreans during my whole pilgrimage, but certainly I was the
sight of the town, with inmates of other monasteries constantly calling
on one pretext or another to see this queer fellow and hear his
giggle-producing speech. But there were evidences, too, of real culture,
and certainly hints of European influence had crept in at some time, for
though all the novices escorted me to the bath-room, they did not come
inside to help me into the big square wooden tub of scalding water, or
to pour it over me with the little wooden buckets scattered about the
flooded floor. In fact, they even permitted me, almost without argument,
to bathe before, instead of immediately after, the evening meal, sure
proof of something un-Japanese.
[Illustration: Beggars along the ascent to Koya-san have all sorts of
schemes to attract attention and charity]
But I am getting ahead of the story. Koya-san is strictly vegetarian in
diet, as befits true Buddhists, though visitors often surreptitiously
break this rule by fishing in their knapsacks. I felt no such
inclination, however, by the time we had finished an excellent Japanese
luncheon. Long experience had evidently taught the monks how to live
well in spite of the injunction not to kill any living creature. While
we—ladies and all, of course, though not the inmates—were topping off
the meal with ephemeral native cigarettes, I noticed the men from Osaka
were conferring in undertones with the temple “bookkeeper” and slipping
into his hands a considerable sum of money. Not wishing to shirk my
share, I called one of them aside and asked if this were a “donation” to
cover the meal. No, it was merely for the purchase of a brace of prayers
for their dead fathers and mothers; any donations to the temple in
return for its hospitality could be made when I left. For a moment there
seemed something strangely incongruous in this buying of priestly
mummeries by doctors, lawyers, and merchants from a great city smudged
by belching factory chimneys, some of whom read, and to a limited degree
spoke, English. But do not millions of our own fellow-countrymen also
purchase priestly prayers for their dead fathers and mothers?
I am writing no guide-book; hence I shall not tell in detail of the
great monasteries, temples, “ancestral” and “golden” halls, and what not
that I visited during the afternoon under the guidance of another
“bookkeeper,” eager to improve his scanty and halting English. What
stands out most clearly in memory is the taking of tea in plain but
priceless Satsuma ware with the urbane head priests of several
monasteries, and the private view of a large, newly constructed, yet
strictly old-Buddhist building filled with the chief treasures of all
the temples on the mountain-top,—tapestries, paintings, illuminated
texts, statues, carvings by the famous Unkei, a whole résumé of the
heyday of Japanese art. Then there was the long stroll through the great
cemetery, more than a mile beneath towering _hinoki_ and massive
evergreens of venerable age, in the shaded stillness of which are the
myriad tombs, stone monuments of every size and age, blackened by time
and in some cases decrepit with neglect, of the great men of bygone
Japan,—mikados, _shoguns_, _daimyos_, _samurai_, monks, priests, and
famous heroes. Not that they are all buried here, but it was, and is,
the custom even of the strictest Shintoists among them to provide for a
monument, with perhaps a lock of hair or one of their stray ribs under
it, in the most sanctified Buddhist spot in the island empire.
There is no gain in running the risk of choosing wrong between two rival
faiths; besides, who can say where Shintoism leaves off and Buddhism
begins in Japanese mysticism? Perhaps the intermingling may be best
expressed in the words of one of my traveled friends of Nippon, that
“all Japanese _must_ be Shintoists”—for what is Shintoism, after all,
but an almost chauvinistic patriotism?—but that “there is no reason in
the world why they shall not be Buddhists also, or Christians, or even
Christian Scientists for that matter.” If Christianity can overlook a
certain amount of ancestor-worship among its disciples, as at least one
branch of it seems able to do in the Orient, the statement is hardly an
exaggeration. There is certainly no lack of the outward manifestations
of their religion, be it single or multiple, among the Japanese, yet one
looks almost in vain for any indication of what is referred to in the
West as the “spiritual life.”
The garden variety of Japanese mankind follows the lead of their haughty
nobles and rulers, and those of the rank and file who can do so inter
some portion of themselves in the mammoth cemetery of Koya-san. Behind
the “Hall of Ten Thousand Lamps” at the end of the long, funereal, yet
peaceful avenue is the “Innermost Temple,” containing the remains of
Kobo-Daishi, the China-trained monk who founded this great sanctuary
some eleven hundred years ago, and beside it is the _Kotsu-do_, or “Hall
of Bones.” Through the slatted door of this paper-prayer plastered and
gruesome circular edifice is tossed a bone or a wisp of hair of those
who have not attained the dignity of a monument, or even of a grave, on
the sacred mountain-top, yet who wish to improve their chances in the
next existence by lying, even in part, beside the holy founder of
Koya-san.
The great painting of a hell worthy of the imagination of the most
savage of medieval Christians, with devils gleefully forking naked
sinning souls into the bottomless brimstone pit, and all the rest of the
ridiculous Dante-esque details, which decorates the wall of one of the
smaller temples particularly popular with the rank and file, need not
have caused any great surprise had I recalled how even widely separated
religions are prone to steal their most effective thunder from one
another. What was really more incongruous was to come upon a score of
the younger monks and novices, stripped to slight garb that displayed
their athletic forms to advantage, finishing off their day of university
curriculum on the monasterial tennis-court. In fact, it transpired, the
most modest and retiring of the young recluses in “our” temple was the
tennis champion of all Koya-san. As I may have remarked before, there is
no one like the Japanese to mix casually the old and the new, the
prehistoric with the latest thing of the day.
[Illustration: Three Buddhist novices and a temple “bookkeeper,” my
guides, philosophers and friends during my stay there, bid me farewell
to Koya-san]
[Illustration: Pilgrims descending from a train on their return from
Koya-san]
[Illustration: Dotombori, the theater and “moire” street of Osaka]
[Illustration: Osaka Castle is perhaps the most impressive in Japan]
One would scarcely have recognized these tennis-players, or the rather
diffident youths who squatted about their foreign visitor all that
evening, in the gorgeously attired and self-confident monks and novices
who performed the impressive Buddhist service early next morning. I had
asked permission to attend this, even though it meant being called at
five. It was nearer six when all was ready, and in the meantime I was
graciously granted an audience by the chief bonze of our temple. This
yielded little beyond the giving and taking of politenesses through an
interpreter, and the fact that the chief himself set the rest of the
monastery a bad example in the matter of shaving. I was reminded that of
all the miscellaneous information pumped out of me by the more youthful
of my hosts during my stay what seemed to create the greatest wonder was
the assertion that I, and millions of my fellow-countrymen like me, made
it a practice to shave every day. Had a similar custom prevailed within
the monastery, the faces of the solemn dozen who gathered at length
about the altar in a dimly lighted interior room would have seemed less
out of keeping with their rich and florid robes and their apocalyptical
occupation.
The service lasted for an hour, but as I have no gift for proselyting I
shall make no attempt to explain its inner mysticism. The “bookkeeper,”
who knelt between me and the three other pilgrims who made up the
congregation, mentioned that it was dedicated to the ancestors of all
those present, and through them, I suppose, back to the Kami, the
original gods of the Japanese people. For the first half-hour the dozen
robe-wearers sat motionless on their feet about the four sides of the
barbarically intricate and richly glittering altar, incessantly chanting
responses to the singsong intonations of the head priest, occupying the
central position. The author of these quatrains evidently had not
strained his sinews of originality, for most of them consisted of the
endless repetition of the same few meaningless words. Lest I yield
unwittingly to the soporific effect of this incessant droning, I took to
studying the countless details of the altar. My ecclesiastical learning
is limited, however, and I could find no meaning in, nor even English
words for, any of them, except half a dozen chickens cut out of paper.
What in the name of religion have chickens to do with one’s ancestors?
Reminders of their favorite dish, or their calling, or perhaps their
chief vice, or....
But the dozen gorgeous figures, weary at last perhaps, even though they
were Japanese, of sitting on their feet, rose and took to parading
entirely around the altar. Their stockinged feet made not a sound on the
soft matting, but their chanting never for a moment hesitated, while the
ringing of bells and the striking of cymbals steadily increased, and
more incense clouded the already dimly seen room. The youths, who had
shown a tendency to giggle at the sound of English, or even less
provocation, the day before, refused now to catch a hint of my amusement
at their antics, and continued their march with the solemnity of ancient
stone images. Now and again one or the other of them became for a brief
space the soloist, while the rest of the group chanted the responses.
Toward the end of the ceremony the names of the three Japanese pilgrims
squatting beside me were chanted out one after the other, and they rose
one by one to sprinkle a pinch of incense into a smoldering bowl, and to
receive a package of tissue-paper prayers or indulgences. They were
doing this, whispered my cicerone, in honor of their own individual
ancestors.
Perhaps it is not a bad idea after all, this ancestor-worship, at least
in Japan, where the bygone are cremated instead of robbing the living of
badly needed acreage. Most of us owe the old fellows something, and at
least such ceremonies serve to keep them in mind. Running back through
as much of my own as was awake, I was startled to find that I could only
remember, or at least vizualize into a real being, a single one of my
own departed forebears—since female ancestors count for nothing whatever
in the Orient—and while I felt sure that the old gentleman would keenly
have enjoyed the incense of a good Habana cigar, I could not see
what....
But about that moment, fortunately, the service came to an abrupt end,
and a much more important one, contained in lacquered cups and
rice-bowls, was announced. An hour later the “bookkeeper” pocketed my
donation in so unworldly a spirit as not even to count it, while the
younger of my hosts donned their every-day black robes preparatory to
seeing me off on my journey to the world below.
XVI
A few weeks’ stay among them is, of course, not sufficient time to judge
any people. But there are some things which make themselves as apparent
in days as in years. Perhaps what impressed itself most strongly upon us
were the mistakes we commonly make about the Japanese, false
impressions, which have come to be accepted among us almost as truisms.
Because they have shown themselves clever—“cribber,” one of my Japanese
acquaintances pronounced it, and there seemed something amusingly
significant in this form of the word; because they have shown more than
a Yankee cuteness in copying the point of view and the institutions, the
articles and the trade-marks, of other civilizations—many of us have
hastily concluded that they are a very intelligent people. Because we
hear with wondering interest that they never enter their houses with
their shoes on, that they are always bathing, we think of them as a very
cleanly people. Therefore it was something akin to a shock to us to find
that in the mass the Japanese seem stupid, and that they are by no means
as clean as we fancied.
To give the less important precedence, even their famous mat floors,
untouched by shod feet, are often so dirty that to walk across them
means to carry off a black sole. Frequent bathing is all very well, but
when dozens habitually do so in the same water, Western notions may
suggest quite another descriptive adjective. No wonder a Japanese doctor
startled the medical world a few years ago by the assertion that bathing
is unhealthful! Having in mind the skin-diseases alone that are passed
along in Japanese bath-rooms, he was easily within the bounds of reason.
Not even to mention the unspeakable Oriental manner in which they
fertilize their fields, the “cleanly little Japanese” are more indecent
in public customs than even the Spanish, even more frank about certain
natural functions. But perhaps it is all in the point of view. These
same public bathers consider our hand-shaking a dirty habit, especially
prone to spread disease; they are shocked at the custom of blowing the
nose and carrying the soiled handkerchief along—though not at the
intolerable noses of nearly all small Japanese youngsters, even of the
higher classes.
Quite aside from the difficulties of the language, we had frequent
distinct examples, and the testimony of almost every frank and observing
foreign resident with whom we talked, of Japanese stupidity. The rank
and file at least are slow-witted—or shall I say, in order to be wholly
on the safe side and avoid any false impression of wishing to give
offense, that they are a surprisingly slow-thinking people? They catch
an idea with exasperating sluggishness, by no means as quickly as more
than one “wild” tribe with which I have come in contact. There are
constant evidences of this mental deliberation,—their dragging,
never-ending theatrical performances, for example. Observers in a
position to know assure me that the Japanese are extremely poor
aviators, because their minds will not work with the swiftness required
in such a calling; or they suddenly let go of the controls to “look in
the book and see” what they should do next. In the average interview
their single-track minds run round and round in the same small circle,
and nothing short of a mental earthquake will shake them out of it. With
patience you can get them just so far in their thinking, and then you
run again and again up against a stone wall. No doubt there are cases in
which they make a pretense of this in order to avoid committing
themselves or giving information which they are not sure has been
released by the powers-that-be higher up; but that after all is only
another proof of limited intelligence, since a brilliant people would
find some smoother means of covering the retreat.
But perhaps our experience was limited as to class as well as in time. I
have been assured by men who come into contact with Japanese in high
places that these are unusually sharp-minded men, who at the same time
admitted that the masses are stupid even by the standards of our own. I
have heard this from several reputable sources; I have had a few hints
of it myself. But I have yet to meet a dozen Japanese men whom I can
vizualize as worthy opponents across a conference-table of even our own
homespun diplomats and statesmen. Is there perhaps something in the
Japanese form of government which brings the more brilliant men to the
top more often than in our own; or is there naturally a wider gulf
between the masses and the bright few? In this connection one recalls
that the really oblique eye, which most of us assumed to be universal in
Japan, is almost rare; and this is said to be the mark of the patrician,
of the aristocratic, intelligent handful which built up Japan on the
broad base of the heavier featured, the racially quite different,
plebeian, gullible millions.
[Illustration: In building a Japanese bridge the first thing needed is a
compact framework of bamboo tied with vines]
[Illustration: Making paper from mulberry-leaves by spreading the sheets
on boards out in the blazing sunshine of southern Japan]
[Illustration: Stripping off the _kozu_, or mulberry-leaf paper, when
dry; among other things it is used in making Japanese parasols]
[Illustration: Bringing in the sheaves from a Japanese rice-field]
Of course it is partly their long-winded Japanese formalities that give
the impression of mental inertness. Unless they have lived long abroad
they cannot understand our abrupt way of asking or giving directions or
of making arrangements. They prefer the circuitous route of
ultra-politeness—or ultra-deviousness; they accuse us of being
“fire-engines” because we expect a ten-word instruction to be
interpreted in less than that many minutes. It is really, I suppose, the
long set forms in which they must address one another, their endless
honorifics, that take much of the time and the energy which might
otherwise express itself in mental alertness. Greetings and farewells of
the most casual, meet-on-the-street kind are interminable, accompanied
by innumerable low bows at strictly fixed intervals. A formal
conversation reminds one of a Broadway musical comedy of some years back
in which a foreigner talked incessantly for ten minutes, at the end of
which the “interpreter” informed the audience that “He said, ‘Yes.’” We
got the impression, too, that it is difficult to hold the average
Japanese to the point, whether because of a naturally wandering
attention or the custom of making mental side excursions into recesses
to which the Westerner is never admitted.
As to that far-famed Japanese courtesy, it was, of course, in constant
evidence. Groups of a dozen or a score of men often stood on railway
platforms bowing to a departing friend in exact unison, like a field of
wheat over which strong gusts of wind are passing, until the train
carried him out of sight. Leave a native inn and you will have the whole
personnel bobbing up and down at the threshold and wishing you until you
are out of hearing a continued life of ease and prosperity—provided you
have remembered every one in your parting distributions. Yet, like some
of the European nations famed for their politeness, theirs is largely a
courtesy of forms rather than a genuine consideration for the rights and
convenience of others. There is often much more real courtesy among
peoples who take fewer pains to show it outwardly.
I have mentioned the complete disrespect for the sleeper, whether in
train, inn, or home. The street manners of Japan are not on the whole
good; when it comes to public conveyances they are almost barbaric. The
same man who has bowed himself nearly to the ground a score of times in
parting from the kowtowing group of friends on the platform will not
have the slightest compunction in stretching out across four seats and
letting three fellow-travelers stand for a hundred miles. As far as our
observations carry, the giving up of a place to a woman is unheard of;
even if she has a baby on her back she has been so well trained to take
second place that astonishment would overwhelm her if the rule were
broken. It is a rare foreign visitor, I am sure, who has not had the
humiliating and probably anger-producing experience of entering some
important establishment, or one announcing itself grandiloquently in
English, not only to find no one with the slightest knowledge of that
tongue, but to have the entire staff leave its typewriters and desks and
come to laugh at him, as at some ungainly creature escaped from the zoo.
This form of rudeness is so common in Japan as to suggest that it is not
recognized there as such, any more than is their frank, incessant
staring; but it is one of the things that is most likely to leave
resentment in the soul of the traveler long after he has departed. I
wonder what habits of our own offend, entirely “unbeknownst” to us, the
visitor to our own land. As to the silly giggling that often besets the
Japanese when they hear, or particularly when they attempt to speak, our
tongue, we should not forget that under their skins they are as timid
and self-conscious as any civilized race on earth.
On the other hand it would not be difficult to make up quite a long list
of the good qualities of the Japanese. Their unbounded patience might
head it—though that has also the germs of vice in it. Rarely indeed is a
Japanese visibly angry; to show wrath or impatience is the height of
ill-breeding, as with several other Oriental peoples; which perhaps is
why the Westerner who complains about anything, who even asks to have
the slightest custom altered, is more or less secretly ranked as “queer”
or of low social standing. Many a passing traveler forgets this, to his
and his country’s disadvantage. They are a remarkably uncomplaining
people; there is said to be no profanity in the language—which is enough
in itself to make the national pace slow. Their quietness is as pleasing
as is their almost complete lack of jewelry. They certainly have none of
the indolence of so many Oriental races—unless the multitudes of monks
and bonzes squatting in motionless contentment in temples and
monasteries is evidence of it. They certainly are not expansive, be that
a fault or a virtue; life on the whole is very solemn to the Japanese,
and only once in a blue moon does the visitor meet one with a suggestion
of the saving sense of humor. A joke goes a very long way without
exploding, and except among those who have traveled abroad it is quite
likely never to reach its goal. Not only is life itself no joking matter
with them; I can recall no people, either in frock-coats or loin-cloths,
that takes itself, its customs, and its institutions more seriously.
Even the children have little fun in them. Young or old they are a
disciplined people, in great contrast to their near neighbors, the
Chinese, to the Latin-American, who keeps constantly recurring to my
mind in this connection, and to a large extent to us Americans. That
this may be due as much to temperament as to centuries of training was
often suggested. The striking difference of deportment between our, I
believe, quite normal American small son and Japanese children of
similar age was constant evidence on this point. While he showed endless
curiosity at everything about him, and incessant inventiveness in
satisfying it, or in amusing himself with whatever chanced to be
available, the kimono-clad youngsters in trains or street sat hour after
hour without speaking or playing, almost without moving, their minds
apparently wholly dormant. A nurse-maid could have taken care of ten of
them more easily than of one of him. Yet it is not, I feel sure, because
they are unduly suppressed, but because they are born that way.
[Illustration: Japanese threshing usually consists of beating the heads
of bundles of grain on a round stone]
[Illustration: After it has been winnowed by the wind and swept up, the
rice or other grain is spread out on the grass mats to dry in the
sunshine]
[Illustration: The never-failing picturesqueness of Miyajima]
[Illustration: After all this is almost all there is worth while at
Miyajima nowadays]
Though their code of morality deviates considerably from our own, we did
not find the Japanese, for all the assertions one hears to that effect,
particularly in the East, especially dishonest, or at least no more so
than the average of most races. The time-worn statement so often quoted
as evidence of their untrustworthiness, that even in their own banks
they find it necessary to use Chinese cashiers, is mainly nonsense. I
know of no American or European bank in the Far East that does not
recruit its personnel chiefly among the Celestials, and I am sure it is
not because of their extraordinary honesty. Japanese banks, on the other
hand, even in China, choose by far the majority of their employees from
among their own people. It is quite true that one soon learns not to
intrust the development of important films to Japanese photographers,
finding by sad experience that they are very likely to fade a few weeks
later even if they seem well done at the time, and that any unusual
successes among them may shortly afterward appear for sale on
news-stands, or in the pages of Japanese periodicals. It is equally true
that Japanese factory imitations of either their own once excellent
products or of foreign wares are prone to prove great disappointments.
But let us be charitable and believe that this is due to Western notions
too hastily swallowed to be thus far properly digested, as well as to
their great anxiety to gather quickly the large sums demanded by their
gluttonous army and navy, under the perhaps mistaken impression that
only their armed strength will save them from domination or complete
absorption by Western nations.
XVII
Persons in a position to know something about the subject tell us that
Japanese husbands are “almost all” unfaithful. I take it that they refer
to those who can afford to be; certainly the great mass of haulers and
carriers, of mud-wading rice-growers, would scarcely have the time or
the means to indulge in extramarital relations. The facts seem to be
that rather a large number of men of means maintain two and even three
households, usually in at least a pretense of ignorance of each other;
and that the almost government-owned _yoshiwaras_ in every city of size
are prosperous, while questionable hotels abound from end to end of the
empire. Part-Japanese women we met asserted that they would under no
circumstances marry Japanese men, not even to gain high rank, alleging
that the average native husband is not only maritally untrustworthy but
treats his wife brutally—whatever that may mean. As some of these ladies
had already stuck it out bravely to the beginning of middle age, we are
forced to give their testimony due weight. Yet there is certainly little
active outward evidence of all this, but the appearance of model
propriety everywhere—except in one notorious respect.
Even the cynical traveler comes to the conclusion that, for all the
striking differences between their ways and our ways, the Japanese are
really civilized—until he sees a man in faultless European attire,
carrying a portfolio that suggests he may be a cabinet minister, calmly
take off everything except his scanty underwear and change to a kimono
in a first-class car occupied by ladies. Among men somewhat lower in the
social scale, yet far enough above the brute to know better, personal
exposure often reaches the incredible. It may be pleasant in summer to
wander across town or the length of an empire in bath-robe and slippers,
but there are times and places that the unconcealed human form is out of
place. I am no prude, and I realize that in some matters we
English-speaking people are secretive to the point of silliness; but
certainly in this respect the Japanese are as much at fault in the other
direction.
Their unseemly exposure or behavior is, to my mind, another form of
discourtesy to woman, another evidence of her unimportance in the
Japanese scheme of things. For, however often they may assure us that we
misjudge because we do not understand, we of the West—I think I may
safely make the statement general—do not admire the Japanese conception
of the position of women. While one of that sex is to a large extent the
power behind the throne of a mad mikado, and there is considerable
copying, at least outwardly, of Western manners among the profusion of
nobility, the wealthy, and the traveled, to the overwhelming mass of the
nation a wife seems still to be merely a married servant. I shall not
soon forget the half-horrified, even though subtle, expression of
astonishment of our Tokyo host because my wife had not stayed up to tuck
me into bed when I returned from a theater toward midnight. I have no
choice but to judge from his manner that Japanese wives always do. In
Japan a woman is trained never to sit down until all the men present
have done so; and with a Westerner suddenly introduced into a Japanese
household the variance of custom in this respect is likely to result in
a standing-match. This relative position is maintained all down the
line; the men are always first. Again it may be only a difference in
point of view; even the Japanese woman would consider it highly immodest
to precede her husband or a male relative. Nor am I sure where the
greatest wisdom prevails,—in Japan, where they spoil the men, or in the
United States, where we do our best to spoil the women. Adversity,
however, is said to be beneficial to the character, and Japanese women
are almost superhuman in maintaining a cheerful demeanor and a smiling
countenance under any and all circumstances.
The Japanese have so often been called “Oriental Prussians” or “Germans
of the Orient” that we found it amusing to trace evidences of similarity
between the two races. These are, to tell the truth, rather numerous.
Both countries have—unless one of them has lost it since the World War—a
docile, hard-working population accustomed to little individual thinking
in political matters, ruled by a powerful oligarchy of overlords with a
very warlike past and traditions. Like the Germans, the Japanese might
use the word “_kriegen_” interchangeably as “to obtain” or “to make
war”; both fought their way to the top—or to wherever they are to-day.
In both countries the military man considers himself, and strives, not
infrequently by rudeness, to make others consider him, the lord of
creation. Both are forced to resort to emigration or expansion to ease
the over-pressure of a prolific population and of excess energy within
their borders. Both are a disciplined people; in both countries what
seem to us questionable methods are used to twist the gullible mass mind
into the shape which best suits the ruling class; both are likewise
given to another form of propaganda in the hope of increasing their
national stock abroad; both indulge in what we might frankly call
spying, though they may think it merely gathering useful information
about their neighbors. Every Japanese, like every German, is potentially
a spy—or shall we merely say an agent?—of his government wherever he may
be; for you may be sure that any slightest item of information of
interest to that government which he may run across will be duly
communicated to it. With both nations patriotism seems to be above mere
personal morals; in the ancient Japanese language “government” and
“worship” were the same word.
One might continue picking up likenesses, on minor as well as on
important matters. As in Germany, a man or a woman stands at military
attention holding a flag at a prescribed angle whenever a train passes a
grade-crossing. The same unhilarious conscript soldiers, and haughty
officers who do not often deign to return their exaggerated salutes,
their bullet heads emphasized by close-cropped hair, overrun both
countries. Students in uniform caps, a great prevalence of thick
eye-glasses that are reminders of the similar intricacy of their printed
pages—if one took time to hunt out all the resemblances the list would
be endless.
Some of the Germanness of Japan, such as her army and her medicine, is
frankly copied; no small amount of it is unconscious yet perfectly
natural, in view of the considerable similarity in their histories and
their temperament. For, remember, Japan has always been militant, has
always been fighting, if only between her own clans, ever since she took
the islands that now constitute the empire from the Yemishi, or Ainus,
or whoever held them first. Likewise there has never been a let-up in
learning, nor a lack of bravery and similar virtues. We are so
accustomed to speak of the “sudden rise” of Japan that we are prone to
think of the Japanese as did the ignorant Portuguese and Spanish
_conquistadores_ who “discovered” them, as did the bigoted churchmen who
followed those forceful adventurers,—as heathen “gentiles” much like the
Indians of America. Indeed, they probably looked upon these newfound
islands as quite like newly discovered America, or the neighboring
Philippines, as filled with savages whom it was not only their privilege
but their duty to bespoil to the best of their ability, and incidentally
to reduce to the “true faith.” Whereas Japan had been a civilized land
centuries before the Portuguese and the Spanish emerged from
barbarism—and the mere fact that, disgusted with the “true faith”
brought by these rapacious and narrow-minded wanderers, they drove them
out and shut themselves up within their own boundaries for more than two
hundred years is no reason to have supposed that they could not adopt
modern civilization, at least in its more graspable aspects, quickly,
especially as they had long been accustomed to imitate, to take whatever
seemed good to them, from China or Korea or whatever other neighbor had
something to offer. No wonder the Japanese policeman detailed to attend
a Fourth of July celebration in Japanese territory, when he received the
answer to his query as to how long ago this independence that was being
celebrated had been won, greeted it with the Nipponese form of “Good
Lord! Is that all?”
[Illustration: There are no rickshaws on the island of Miyajima; hence
we had to trust even our most precious belongings to a _ninguruma_, or
baggage-cart]
[Illustration: A view of Beppu, famed for its hot springs at the head of
the Inland Sea, on Kyushu, southern island of Japan proper]
[Illustration: A Shinto monument, with the famous watering-place of
Beppu in the background]
But the mere fact that they are so capable of imitation, so able to
profit by the experience of others, is curbing their militant spirit, if
I have not misread the signs. They see the point of recent events; even
their stiff-necked and short-sighted military oligarchy seems to be
coming to realize that they are half a century too late to enlarge their
place in the sun by mere force of arms, that other no less strenuous, if
less bloodthirsty, methods have come, perhaps permanently, to the fore.
Thus though one still now and then sees, or at least feels, the old
_samurai_ spirit among the militarists of Japan, the wish to take the
short cut by force, the frankness of primitive man peering out from
beneath their pride and their superimposed reticence and their rather
stupid politenesses, one has the feeling that the nation perhaps is
getting over it, though it may still have a long way to go. Imitation is
double-edged, however, and let the world turn its back on what it
recently professed to believe is a bygone form of rivalry and there is
but little doubt that the Japanese will be able to execute an about-face
quite as quickly as any other nation. That the old tendency to think
first of a resort to arms whenever national desires are crossed, and
only later to consider wiser counsels, was recently shown in the quickly
wide-spread demand for war with the United States over the Supreme Court
decision on the California land laws and congressional insistence on
curbing the admission of Japanese immigrants.
The popular feeling of Japan toward our own people seems constantly to
swing like a pendulum. As I write, there is considerable anti-American
agitation; a bare year ago there were marked professions of friendship;
the year before that we were in their black books because of some other
now forgotten incident; the American traveler in Japan can no more gauge
the feeling toward him on any given day than he can guess the rate of
exchange between his money and that of Europe. Nor will it often matter
much; at worst the superficial Japanese courtesy may wear thin, their
gift for red-tape gymnastics reach its highest rather than its lowest
ebb. Certainly he will be in no more physical danger than at home, and
his money will always be welcome to the sourest face he meets. When I
first journeyed through Japan, a score of years ago, even the
rickshaw-men were offensively cocky over the defeat of the Russians,
which they considered proof of their superiority over all the white
race. To-day the nation seems to take a somewhat more modest view of its
achievements, though by no means unaware of its progress and, at bottom,
probably just as convinced of its place in the vanguard of mankind, if
something less given to publicly announcing it.
For a time at least there was a strong run of sentiment in our favor, on
account of the international conference on disarmament, the results of
which seem to have been on the whole pleasing to every one except the
militarists—who, it must be remembered, are often the most vocal. The
fact that there has as yet been no reduction in the heavy burden of
taxation under which the nation has long staggered has not made it
possible for the man on the street to hope that there soon will be, and
the belief is wide-spread, even if not freely expressed to strangers,
that what might almost have amounted to national bankruptcy has been
averted by the Washington agreement. Not that the man on the street
gives much thought to the actions of his Government, by our standards,
or considers his personal opinion on national affairs, if he has one, of
any importance. It is said that there is considerable liberalism and
even radicalism under the surface of the placid, mikado-worshiping life
of the Japanese; but in so far as any frequent visible evidence of it is
concerned, all Japan suggests some of the hotels and public
gathering-places of South America, which bear large placards to the
effect that “The discussion of politics is strictly forbidden.” Some of
the editors of native newspapers are occasionally outspoken, notably in
the “Osaka Mainichi,” which at times has the aspect of a really free
press; but these are concerned rather with individual men and very
general issues than openly with the government; and it is significant
that the slightest hint of levity toward the mikado or anything
pertaining to him is frowned upon by all classes.
Undue attention to any subject is prone to enlarge it beyond its natural
proportions. As a nation we have come, with our national tendency for
exaggeration, to think of the Japanese either as supermen or
devils—depending largely upon the part of the country from which we
hail. They are neither, but merely human beings, perhaps a bit superior
to the average, take the world as a whole; of moderate intelligence,
high diligence, strong imitative ability or an unusual capacity to
realize that the experience of others may be worth profiting by; of a
national homogeneity and loyalty equal to that of a well-knit family;
prone, like the rest of us, to be spoiled by too much power over those
they consider, perhaps rightly, their inferiors; with a tradition of
getting things, nationally, by force; extremely distrustful of the
intentions of others; and with the very human trait of trying to put
their best foot forward, even to the extent of an occasional falsehood.
Not easily gauging the psychology of other races, at least of the West,
they are somewhat clumsy with the propaganda they carry on in their own
favor, such as newspapers of their own in English in the Far East, under
the sincere belief that they are compelled to combat by some such means
the hostility of their neighbors and the jealousy of trade rivalries.
Like some other over-sensitive persons and peoples, they want only good
said about them, as if the world might thereby be made to believe that
they are terrestial angels.
We may not like the Japanese; the great majority of Westerners in the
Far East are vociferous in proclaiming that they do not, and certainly
they have some unlikable qualities. But what would we do in their shoes?
Sixty million of them are crowded into a space equal to one of our
Western States, with the sight constantly before them of Occidental
aggression taking virtual possession, even if only in the name of
“protectorate” or “sphere of influence,” of almost all the Orient, and
the realization that they are virtually the only strictly self-governing
nonwhite race on the globe—it is small wonder if they seem over-wary.
Most Americans who are conscious of any opinion at all on the subject
profess to have more liking for the Chinese or the Koreans than for the
Japanese—and I rather think I am one of them. But with our national
trait for rooting for the under dog are we not sometimes given to
squandering our sympathies on weak and whining people and of distrusting
strong, self-reliant races? Perhaps the Japanese are worse than I judge
them to be after a brief sojourn among them; but few civilizations have
equaled them in unity and longevity, in the sense of race loyalty, and a
willingness to sacrifice themselves on the altar of good citizenship—for
all the recent ugly stories of “graft” worthy of anywhere in the West;
and, whatever else they may be, we must give them credit for being
to-day the only self-contained and constructive civilization in almost
half a world of weakness and semi-anarchy.
XVIII
We had left Tokyo before the latest catastrophe overwhelmed her and the
surrounding section of Japan, and threw into greater relief some of her
most striking national traits. Among the stories of the great earthquake
and fire which have been confirmed, perhaps the most astounding to us
was the refusal of the captains of Japanese war-ships and transpacific
liners to rescue the refugees who appealed to them for succor, while
foreign ships near-by were making every effort to save them. But—they
were waiting for orders! The Japanese mind, particularly of the official
class, is not trained to function on its own initiative. Their superiors
seem to partake of some of the divinity of the superior of them all, the
being so sacred that he can only be referred to indirectly and by
inference as “mikado,” the “honorable gate”—behind which he reigns.
Besides, the Japanese are Orientals, and nowhere does the Oriental soul
seem to quiver with anything like the profundity of our own at the sight
of suffering and violent death. The longer one has lived in the East,
provided it has been in actual living contact with its strange peoples,
the less impossible it will be to visualize those stern Japanese
captains in Yokohama Harbor unflinchingly dooming to death under their
very eyes scores of their own race because they considered it their
solemn duty not to take them on board until they had received official
instructions to do so.
That extreme Japanese reticence on questions concerning their own
country, less often adroitly sidestepped than deliberately refused as a
subject of conversation even by those readiest to talk, and inquire,
freely on any other, is exemplified in the secrecy that still prevails
over their losses. We shall never know how many perished in that great
earthquake and fire of 1923 even if the Japanese themselves ever work it
out exactly; we shall particularly remain in all the ignorance in which
they are capable of keeping us as to the amount of damage done to their
navy and their great naval base at Yokosuka. We also might have
attempted—though probably it would not have struck us as worth the
trouble—to keep the results of such a disaster in our own land from the
rest of the world, but we certainly should not have succeeded. We have
no such training in national reticence.
Underneath their protestations of thankfulness for our national and
individual help during their hour of trial, say those who were in close
contact with the Japanese at the time of the catastrophe and immediately
afterward, there was no real gratitude at all; they accepted our help as
something naturally due them, as if we were merely instruments of the
Kami or national gods that watch over them. I am in no position to
confirm or deny this statement, but it is wide-spread enough to be worth
reporting. After all, how genuine is gratitude, East or West? I
certainly can name several races, in both hemispheres, that do not have
a visible trace of it. But it was surely adding insult to injury not
only not genuinely to thank us but to suspect us of the worst motives in
aiding them. Perhaps that is still more typical of the race. Knowing
them even imperfectly it is not hard to imagine them asking themselves
what these foreigners were up to, why they were coming into their
harbors, not only the open commercial ports but into those officially
closed to outside nations, merely on the pretext of wishing to help
their suffering people. Surely there must be some real reason behind
this apparently gratuitous altruism,—a chance in a lifetime to get
secret information about their precious country, possibly even to
photograph those inviolate “strategic zones”, that had turned gray so
many officers assigned to protect them from kodaking tourists—something
up their sleeves, certainly. It needs no comment to show what such a
people would evidently have done under similar circumstances; we suspect
others particularly of what we do or would like to do ourselves.
[Illustration: A peasant’s house near Beppu, with hot water for bathing
and heat for cooking furnished by nature, there being a live volcano
near at hand]
[Illustration: The terraced hills of Kyushu are even more remarkable
than those of the main island]
[Illustration: A glimpse of Nagasaki through the loggia of a hilltop
temple]
It is quite as typical of Japan to find that Tokyo is being rebuilt with
astonishing rapidity, and its complex business of life resuming. But no
less so is the order in which it is being reconstructed. No part of the
destroyed capital has been so artistically, so thoroughly, and so
quickly resurrected as its _yoshiwara_, the official segregated district
out beyond the temple of Kwannon, goddess of mercy and most popular of
all with the Japanese masses. One of the great holocausts of that
horrific first day of September took place there. Hundreds of the women
of the _yoshiwara_ who escaped from the crashing houses and devouring
flames took refuge in a shallow artificial pond, perhaps fifty by thirty
feet in size, within the inclosure, one of the decorative features of
the high-walled precinct about which the courtezans used to place their
tutelary gods and goddesses. There was soon hardly standing-room in it,
and the flames rose ever higher. The water of the pool became tepid,
then hot, then took to boiling. When squads of soldiers and workmen
could get near the place on the following day there was little left but
an enormous caldron of cooked bodies. A granite stone roughly carved
with Chinese characters recalls the tragedy to those who can read them,
but it seems already almost forgotten, though from the stone rises
intermittently the smoke of incense, a tribute perhaps from their
successors to those who so miserably perished there.
But there seems to be no particular difficulty in securing women for
this degrading “necessity” in Japan, any more than in getting right of
way for the rebuilding of the district. The houses in which the new
oiran are housed are among the finest in phenix-like Tokyo, much finer
than the dwellings erected for mere citizens, while the barracks put up
for the homeless are pigsties in comparison. Trees and flowers have been
planted to give the place an air of quiet dignity and respectability;
the streets are straight, broad, and clean, which is more than can be
said of the commercial and industrial part of Tokyo; the houses are
artistically constructed on Japanese-Chinese lines; inside of each of
them is a miniature landscape garden with little altars where each
inmate burns a candle or a lantern to her particular god. Street
peddlers again sing their multifarious wares gaily from brothel to
brothel, flattering the women on their appearance, and showing them how
to improve it with trinkets from their stocks; out in the wide portico
beside the inviting photographs two men sit like spiders, warming their
hands over a _hibachi_ as the night chill advances, and scanning each
passer-by with a furtive eye to business. Those who can get them to talk
on the point will be assured that “business is as flourishing as ever,
perhaps more so, for the women are nearly all new, and all the houses
have agreed upon a flat rate of a yen and a half an hour, so that many a
fine sturdy young fellow has regretfully to leave for lack of
accommodations.”
It was an appalling disaster, that latest of Japan’s misfortunes, in the
front rank of those that have befallen mankind; yet it was not the first
of its kind, not only in Japan but in Tokyo itself, and a people so
familiar with its own long unbroken historical records should have been
at least subconsciously prepared for it. Besides, no small part of Tokyo
ought to have been destroyed, anyway; those noisome old shacks along
dirty narrow streets down near the muddy bank of its alleged river, for
instance, were unworthy of the capital of an enlightened people. Though
it already boasted some quite modern skyscrapers, a considerable portion
of the city was so built that once a fire started it must sweep an
enormous area. For a year an American expert in city planning had been
laying out on paper a new Tokyo, which the disaster will make it so much
more simple to carry out—though I believe no one has been cynical enough
to assert that the earthquake was made to order. Yokohama is gone;
whether or not it is rebuilt, it was only an insignificant little
fishing village when it was first opened to foreign trade in 1859, an
ephemeral thing indeed in the long history of Japan.
A dreadful calamity, there is no question. But I like to dwell on the
comedy rather than the tragedy of life, and the picture that recurs most
often to my mind is not of little children pinned under fallen timbers
and awaiting the licking flames, not that giant cooking-pot of the
_yoshiwara_, but of that haughty English lady living on the bluff at
Yokohama, who was just taking a bath before sitting down to luncheon, on
what must have been a hot and dusty day, when the crash came—and who
promptly tobogganed in her tub down the long slope of the bluff to the
sea-shore, as easily and as unhurt as Minerva riding the waves. I cannot
find absolute court-room proof of the story—ma, si non è vero è ben’
trovato.
[Illustration: A stream which languishes through Nagasaki furnishes a
drying-place for new parasols]
[Illustration: A glimpse of Kagoshima, southernmost city of Japan
proper, with its island volcano of Sakurajima in its splendid harbor]
XIX
Until familiarity dulls the attention, one misses the sight of animals
and of pastureland in Japan except in Hokkaido to the north. Perhaps
there are a few more horses to the square _ri_ in half-tropical Kyushu
than on the long main island, but even there mankind furnishes the great
majority of beasts of burden—and of milch animals, too, one might be so
frank as to add, for Japanese children are habitually, and
unsecretively, suckled long after they can walk and talk. Japan, like
South America, outside the narrow llama-zone, was not supplied by nature
with four-footed assistants. The first horses are said to have reached
the islands from Korea late in the third century of the Christian era,
and they are still far from numerous. With a people doomed to do nearly
all its own hauling and carrying, it is not so strange that the horse is
a kind of sacred animal of Shintoism.
Without horses there was no great reason for roads, and to this day the
Japanese do not fully realize the importance of good highways and solid
bridges, so that the automobile has not been much of a relief to their
horseless condition. Besides, the Government seems to regard this new
contraption from the West as a luxury to be kept out of the hands of the
people, and to be saddled with a staggering proportion of the
tax-returns. In addition to a heavy import duty and all that goes with
it, the yearly licence-fee for an automobile in Tokyo is three hundred
dollars. One might easily suspect a policy of keeping the government
railways free from competition, and be thankful that at least these only
serious means of transportation by land in the empire are being steadily
extended.
The line down the east coast of Kyushu is complete now, except for
twenty miles of the most execrable road extant, linked up by the
ubiquitous, omnivorous, all-suffering Ford. The railway is mainly
tunnels, so frequent in Japan, with wonderfully terraced hills or vistas
of blue tropical waters between them, seas so mirror-clear that it seems
a sacrilege to scratch the surface of them with an occasional steamer.
Along it, too, lies Beppu, landing-place of three shipwrecked Portuguese
sailors in a rowboat half a century after the discovery of America,
where multitudes of Japanese come now to bake or boil, sporting the
naïve garb of Adam and Eve, in the overflow from smoking Aso-san behind.
The peasants of Kyushu were already harvesting their grain in May,
though frogs still croaked in choruses in the flooded rice-fields. Fancy
our farmers working under umbrellas, and tilling their soil at sunset on
Sunday. Above each scattered village along the way still floated in the
wind the huge fish of gaily colored cloth that are put up on boys’
festival day early in May over every house in the empire in which a boy
has been born within the past few years. Its open mouth fastened to a
bamboo pole, and filled with wind, each seemed to be swimming in the air
high above the lowly abodes it honored. They are emblematic of the carp,
it seems, which to the Japanese personifies perseverance, a fighter to
the end, and hence a fitting example or spiritual guardian for the
rising male generation.
Kagoshima, in the far south, was dusty and uninteresting as a city, and
so hot that its people were more indecent in exposure than Hindus. But
the famous island volcano in its harbor gave it a suggestion of Naples,
and the place teems with history. Here, legend has it, the divine pair
which founded Japan landed; or, if you will have none of mythology,
there is the reality of that probably Malay race with paper houses and
no chairs making this the first stepping-stone to a modern empire.
Kagoshima was the first to greet and the last to accept the Occident.
Father Xavier, the Jesuit, set foot here seven years after his
wind-blown fellow-countrymen drifted upon the empire at Beppu; here, not
yet half a century ago, the Satsuma lords made the last stand against
the influx of Western ways that had followed the restoration—a final
rebellion of the old loose-jointed order opposed to strong centralized
government, which ended for the defeated leaders in _seppuku_, a politer
term for _harakiri_. There are statues of these forgiven rebels now in
the hillside park above the town still in their curious shogunal dress.
Only those of retentive memories can recall how many times Kagoshima
town and castle have been destroyed. Usually it was by their own
fellow-countrymen, but England did likewise in 1863, because of the
killing of an Englishman near Yokohama by a vassal of the Satsuma lord.
It was by such outspoken methods that the Western world brought Japan to
her modern knowledge of the rights of foreigners within her borders. And
through it all Kagoshima continued to make its famous Satsuma ware,
looking to the uninitiated like the checked and cast-off crockery of a
ten-cent store, until Kyoto wrested the art from her.
We are apt to forget that Japan did not hermetically seal herself up for
more than two centuries from mere hermit temperament, but because she
had tried the faith and the ways of the West and found them wanting. The
Jesuits were welcomed, and had everything their own way for a long time.
Then came the Franciscans and the Dominicans, aggressive Spanish priests
who refused to recognize the pope’s award of this region of “heathen
gentiles” to their Portuguese rivals; and the bewildered Nipponese
sought in vain to reconcile the practice of deadly quarreling with the
preaching of brotherly love of these strange beings from an outside
world. Finally, in 1600, the Protestant Dutch came, led by the
Englishman, Will Adams, and mutual slander became the order of the day.
Ever more puzzled, the rulers of Japan sent a man to Europe to
investigate these strange things at their source, and after seven years
he came back to report what Japan was already concluding, that
Christianity was vicious and the ways of the West to be avoided. Rumors
of rough doings in the unfortunate New World seem to have drifted in,
too, and brought the astonished realization that this handful of Spanish
and Portuguese friars and traders dreamed of conquering this ancient
empire and of forcing upon it their own corrupt faith, as upon other
“barbarians.” There followed increasing orders for them to retire, and
justifiable, even if too bloodthirsty, punishments for disobedience,
culminating in beheadings and crucifixions which supplied the church
with a long list of martyrs and saints. All foreigners were at length
forbidden to move about in Japan, “for fear that Portuguese would travel
with Dutch passports.” Then finally, in his wrath, the ruling _shogun_
commanded that so long as Japan should be Japan any Christian who had
the temerity to set foot upon it should forthwith lose his head; and for
long afterward his threat was approximately made good. Even books from
the Western world were forbidden, and when, more than a century later,
they were again permitted, it was on condition that they contain nothing
concerning Christianity.
It must have been a dreary life to the handful of Dutch traders who were
allowed to remain, imprisoned on the little flat island of Deshima in
what is now the heart of Nagasaki. Perhaps, being Dutch, they smoked
their pipes contentedly in their sea-level patch of earth, indifferent
to the lure of winding trails climbing away out of the hill-girdled
harbor. About them Nagasaki grew from a mere fishing-village to a center
of commerce with the outside world, though even that did not mean much
by modern standards. The forbidden faith, too, seems to have dug in and
remained, awaiting a more propitious occasion to reassert itself; for of
the seventy-seven thousand Roman Catholics now credited to Japan
fifty-seven thousand are in and about Nagasaki, as against only ten
thousand even in Tokyo. The count is stretched, of course, after the
Catholic-mission custom of crediting the church with a family of five
members whenever one of them is baptized, even though the other four be
non-existent or totally ignorant of the existence of churches; but,
assuming that the fraud is evenly practised, the proportions are
suggestive. No doubt it was by the same intensive methods of census that
the martyrs of the sixteenth century won the reputation of having made
more than a million converts in sixty years. To-day, though there are
about thirteen hundred Christian missionaries of all sects on the field
in Japan, and the Protestants claim almost twice as many converts as the
older branch of the faith, and the Greek orthodox Church nearly half as
many, there is barely one confessed Christian among one hundred and
fifty-eight persons throughout the island empire.
The Nagasaki we saw was dull and considerably down at heel, dusty and
hot and dirty, by no means the busy city even of my first visit early in
the century. Women, repulsive in their rags and soot as beings from the
infernal regions, still load passing ships with coal by handing endless
baskets of it over their heads along steep gangways; and establishments
of the “Madame Butterfly” type may still be found here and there in the
hilly, sometimes flower-scented suburbs. Next year, they say, the
inauguration of a daily twenty-four-hour steamer service to Shanghai
will give the place new life, but in the meanwhile changes in world
routes have left it sad and discouraged. Even the rickshaw-men stop our
American quartermaster in the street to ask, as does the governor,
whether there is not some way of getting American transports to come
there again for coal, instead of putting in through Hyasaki Strait to a
port nearer the mines. The Washington Conference was almost the last
straw, forcing Nagasaki’s great shipyard to give up a mammoth
warship-building contract. Speaking of the conference, there lay in
Nagasaki Harbor at the time of our visit a newly launched
forty-million-yen battle-ship, still in her first red coat of paint,
which was actually and visibly being dismantled—unless, as a cynical
foreigner long resident in Japan put it, they tow the hulk up some creek
and throw their convenient pall of military secrecy about her until she
has been rebuilt. But cynicism, after all, is not the trait most needed
in the world just now. Besides, June had come, the golden-yellow _biwas_
were ripe, and the long rainy season was upon us; it was high time we
pushed on to throttled Korea and topsyturvy China.
[Illustration: A memorial in the park of Kagoshima to the old-fashioned
men who perished in the Satsuma rebellion, an attempt to halt the
restoration and keep Japan closed to the outside world]
[Illustration: The workhorse saddles of Kagoshima are gaily decorated in
red and gold]
[Illustration: Government House at Taihoku, capital of Formosa]
[Illustration: One often wonders if the Japanese have not made the
streets of Formosan cities too broad for its tropical climate]
XX
Had I come directly from Japan proper to Formosa, instead of by way of
several months in China, my impression of its Japaneseness might not
have been so acute. But that interim in the quite different, even though
neighboring, land of Confucius made the changes which its present rulers
have wrought upon the long-Chinese island during the thirty years since
they took possession of it stand out in striking relief. No doubt a
journey in the reverse order, from Japan through Formosa to China, would
have emphasized instead the likenesses between the island and the former
Celestial Empire. For at least in its thickly inhabited western
coastland Formosa is still as much Chinese as Japanese, and the
little-accessible mountainous bulk of the country is a world apart,
where neither of the great nations chiefly concerned in the history of
the island has left many traces.
A cross-wave journey from Foochow through the habitually turbulent
waters of the shallow Formosan channel kept our small Japanese steamer
rolling like the proverbial log, all night and all day, to the very
mouth of Kiirun Harbor. After the often Elysian freedom of life in
China—for the foreigner enjoying the rights of extraterritoriality—the
realization came almost with a shock that I was back in a mikado-ruled
land again. The literal-minded little police officer, for instance, who
kept me courteously but firmly imprisoned on the ship during the two
hours necessary to telephone the “foreign office” in the capital and get
me “special permission” to land, because some _t_ or _i_ in my passport
had not been properly crossed or dotted, called attention to a grave
error in my guide-book. Cameras, he carefully pointed out, are not
merely “regarded with suspicion in Kiirun,” as the red-faced volume had
it, but they are strictly forbidden! In fact, most of his conversation
during that stupid two hours was on this important point. I trust the
ordinarily exact, though often human, compiler thereof will take care in
future not to permit other serious mistakes of this description to sully
his excellent pages. The notion that the writer might have meant the
statement to be mildly facetious could not, of course, have occurred to
a matter-of-fact little Nipponese mind.
Luckily there are fourteen passenger-trains a day to the capital,
eighteen miles inland from Keelung—as in Korea most places in Formosa
have two names, for the Japanese and their neighbors will never agree on
the proper pronunciation of the same ideographs, and _l_ is as great a
bugbear to one race as _r_ is to the other. The weather, too, was kind;
for though this northern and chief port of the island boasts itself one
of the rainiest spots on earth, with some twelve feet of rainfall a
year, there was nothing worse during the hour I waited for the next
train than a sincere promise of rain soon to come. Not that a deluge
would have mattered much; there is very little of interest in Kiirun for
the mere wanderer, except those fourteen trains,—a small bay with a
breakwater, several unphotographable forts, some quite modern streets
lined by brick Japanese-Western hybrid-looking buildings that are both
shops and residences, all closely surrounded by lightly jungled hills,
was all that appeared on the surface before the train sped away with me
still in time to have luncheon in the capital. There are also fourteen
daily trains back from there to Keelung, which somehow suggests that the
capital was purposely built within scampering distance of the coast, an
impression that is enhanced by the discovery that there is a village of
the head-hunting Taiyal tribe within five miles of it.
Taipeh or Taihoku, Japanese capital of Formosa, is often mentioned as
the most modern city in Japan. There was no difficulty in compelling the
Chinese or Formosan inhabitants of the island to tear down wherever
improvements were desirable, whereas the same thing does not quite apply
to the Japanese at home. Physically at least it is nearly all that a
city should be, an astonishing place for the Far East and almost within
the tropics. Spreading over a large area, with wide, well-paved
streets—far too wide and hard, in fact, for this latitude—with fine
parks, splendid government buildings, a great botanical garden out in
the southern suburb, it is indeed in many ways better than most Japanese
cities, and an improvement on no small number of American ones.
Certainly the Chinese quarter has nothing like the filth of the least
dirty of purely Chinese towns and it is probably cleaner than some
tenement districts of New York.
[Illustration: The business streets of Taihoku and other modernized
cities throughout Formosa are lined by shady and more or less cool
arcades]
[Illustration: Japanese field-day in the streets of the Formosan
capital]
[Illustration: Formosan ladies of the well-to-do class]
[Illustration: It takes a sharp eye to tell the country women of Formosa
from their husbands and brothers, since there is almost complete
equality of garb and work]
Yet Taihoku gives one a queer, almost an uncanny feeling, after months
in China; for here all is orderliness in complete contrast to Chinese
disorder on the other side of the channel, a Prussian exactness which
Prussia never attained. Japanese life makes one direct from China feel
very staid and orderly. The Nipponese, it is quickly impressed upon such
a visitor, hate any suggestion of irregularity as bitterly as the
Chinese seem to love it. One wonders that the orderliness, the almost
military discipline of life, does not get even on Japanese nerves.
Formosa has not been under martial law for years, yet military
precision, perhaps unconsciously, reigns everywhere. The “foreign
office,” outwardly courteous and inwardly suspicious of strangers, sent
a graduate of the Middle School to show me about the city, and he was
visibly distressed whenever we fell out of military step—or rather, when
I did. That is the atmosphere of all Taihoku. Even little school-girls,
in their uniform garb, their uniform knapsacks hung just so over one
shoulder, walk like trained soldiers, some in wooden _getas_ that scrape
noisily along the modern macadam, more of them with shoes, the heels of
which strike the pavement with hard Prussian exactness. The very streets
dare not deviate from their fixed course; the bicycles rolling silently
along them seem to steer by the compass; the big foreign horses on which
diminutive, solemn-faced Japanese men bob like manikins jog with formal
punctiliousness; the parks, the botanical gardens are laid out
precisely; one has the feeling that the big fish in their artificial
ponds dare not caper except as provided by law. Every article in the
fine shops beneath the precise shady arcades that flank every business
street has the air of being in its exact place; the very leaves on the
trees that fill the city with such a profusion of vegetation compared
with wood-greedy China seem to hang in a prescribed way; even the
mountains in the near eastern distance look orderly, though that of
course is illusion, for there disorderly head-hunters reign supreme.
With the Nipponese worship of discipline how those head-hunters must
grate on Japanese nerves!
Perhaps those recent months in haphazard China lead me to exaggerate;
but at least the Japaneseness of Taihoku is striking. Uniforms or
European clothes with Japanese modifications cover most men; even the
women are considerably given to more or less Western dress, for the
silken _obi_ and the professional hair-dresser are often out of reach in
these days of inflated prices. But _judo_, which we know better as
jiu-jitsu, and the _samurai_ style of fencing, seem to be the favorite
sports—or, since the Japanese looks upon these games with almost sacred
patriotism, let us call them the chief forms of personal physical
discipline. “Annonei! An-n-no ...” and “So des-ka!”, the “moshi-moshi”
of the telephone-booth, the whistling intake of breath without which the
typical Japanese cannot reflect on the slightest subject, are heard
everywhere. The revered shrine of Taiwan Jinsha, of a branch sect of
modern Buddhists, overlooking a big lotus pond from the base of a wooded
hill in Maruyama Park, might have been brought bodily from Kyoto; the
few Shinto temples scattered about the city exude a Japanese cleanliness
which would be wholly incompatible with a Chinese place of worship.
Rickshaws, commonly the traveler’s first personal contact with any city
of the Far East, are much higher, both in build and price, than in
China. One feels up in the air in them—and correspondingly let down when
the time comes to pay them off. Even the rickshaw-men are all in
uniform,—clean and whole jacket-shirt and trousers, white even to their
mushroom hats, an extraordinary contrast to the cheerful ragamuffins
across the channel. Here the runners are all Formosans, that is, Chinese
immigrants of not more than a few generations back, occasionally
interbred with the aborigines, or sometimes pure “reclaimed” savages who
not long since “were seeking whom they might decapitate,” but who have
left off head-hunting for the less picturesque vice of yen-hunting.
There is nothing in the appearance of any of them, however, to suggest
anything but cleaner, better paid, very much more disciplined Chinese.
Formosans in general seem to be merely domesticated, repressed, quieted,
and more frequently bathed Celestials, with here and there some
aboriginal blood in their veins.
There are no tramways in Formosa, so that the capital is astonishingly
quiet for so large a city; there are said to be a hundred and twenty
thousand Formosans and half as many Japanese in it. Evidently the
rickshaw-men are not allowed to solicit fares, and do so only in low
tones and cautiously, so that after dark they remind one of the slinking
women of the night who prowl the streets in too many of the cities of
the West. This is a contrast indeed to noisy China, where a howling mob
of human horses surges pell-mell down upon every possible client, and
where at least one of them is always shrieking along in the wake of the
foreigner who dares to walk a block. Here, even as they run, they make
scarcely a sound. But they expect at least eighty _sen_ an hour, four
yen a day, and are correspondingly slower than their Chinese
counterparts. The rule is not absolutely fixed, but still it is a rule
in the East that the more you pay a coolie of any calling the less work
you get out of him. Besides, the rickshaws themselves, made of necessity
in Japan, cost from three to five hundred yen, against eighty dollars
“Mex” in Peking, so that the cleaner uniforms and the better-fed bodies
are not the only reasons for the higher charges.
But that is one of the sad things about Formosa under the Japanese:
prices are approximately twenty-five per cent higher than in Japan
itself, and to the traveler from China they are atrocious there. With
all its excellencies, too, there is scarcely a hint of picturesqueness
about Taihoku. The imposing Japanese hotel for foreigners is sumptuous,
but absurd in its charges, distressingly standardized and chiefly full
of emptiness, like so many of Korea and Japan proper. It, too, owes its
predicament largely to that American hotel-man of price-fixing
temperament, for it belongs to the iniquitous hotel association that
standardizes life for the Occidental traveler throughout the Japanese
Empire, and makes living seem a luxury rather than a mere necessity.
XXI
Several trains run day and night the whole length of Formosa, covering
the 257 miles between the northern and the southern port in ten or
twelve hours. Besides, there are branch-lines, and growing extensions
above Keelung and below Takao in the south, while over on the
precipitous east side of the island work is progressing on the system
that before many years will encircle it entirely. But the railway
confines itself everywhere to the edges of the island, like Japanese
control and orderliness, and nowhere penetrates very far into the
magnificent mountainous interior that makes up three fourths of the area
and nearly all the beauty of Formosa.
Against the almost anarchistic background of travel, even by rail, in
the China of to-day, these real Japanese trains were like a return to
the modern world again. One could overlook the meter-gauge, as of Japan
proper, and the screechy, ear-torturing whistles of the locomotives
copied from Europe; for the trains take the time-table seriously;
ticket-collectors uncover and bow at the door even of third class—the
patronage of which is quite possible to the traveler without “face” to
lose and the habit of stretching his money over the greatest possible
distances; the constant watering and sweeping of the car-floors is an
enormous gain over China, where none but a few special first-class
coaches can vie in cleanliness with the cheapest class here, though the
mass of Formosans has not yet by any means reached the Japanese stage of
pulchritude. On the other hand it is not they who strip to scanty
underwear in the first- and second-class coaches.
Whether it is due to fear of the savages beyond or that more desirable
land is plentiful, the hills do not seem to be cultivated even near
Keelung and Taihoku. They are densely green, but with low shrubbery
rather than crops, while rice spreads everywhere across the bottom-lands
where they are not already covered with graves—acres of graves that are
merely green mounds, recalling Korea; graves of stone, horseshoe-shaped,
recalling southern China. Wide roads rather cheaply paved, with
unsubstantial-looking bridges, parallel and cross the track, bearing
bicycles, once in a long while an automobile, above all bullock- and
coolie-carts, which take the place of pole-burdened carriers jogging
along the narrow, winding, stone-flagged trails across the channel.
Here even the fields are orderly, the rows of beans or sugar-cane, of
sweet potatoes and indigo, stretching away in unwavering military lines,
sometimes clear to the distant foot-hills. Discipline is so omnipresent
that even the traveler direct from China soon ceases to be surprised
that there are no riots at stations between those getting on and off the
train, no bullying soldiers and other ticketless persons of influence or
special privileges crowding out honest passengers. Instead the stations
are so exactly alike, so standardized, that one feels sure the
resplendent station-master’s honorable chop-sticks inside are pointed in
such a direction—perhaps northeastward toward Tokyo. The very station
trees are disciplined, in military alignment and trimmed as precisely
alike as the hair of boys in an orphanage. Men stand at petrified
military attention at crossings and switches, a green flag in the hand
toward the approaching train, a red one on the side toward which, by
their gracious permission, it is permitted to proceed.
But out in the country there is some of the picturesqueness of China.
Rags on the ends of fish-poles, manipulated by old women, by broken
grandfathers, by children too young to wield a hoe, or merely by the
wind, do their best to scare away the crop-destroying birds. The
locomotive fronts of water-buffaloes now and then challenge the
screeching trespasser upon their domain, always to think better of it in
time and flounder away through the muddy rice-fields, perfect pictures
of the better part of valor. But at the larger stations men in red caps
wait discreetly, as in Japan, beneath the eaves to carry off the baggage
of travelers who summon them to life, and venders in green caps parade
the platform offering the ubiquitous “O-bento!” and crying other wares
which any one knowing English can, listening carefully, recognize by
ear,—“Matchi! Tabako! See-dare! See-tron! Bee-ru! Aisucureemu!”
Toward the center of the island the main line divides, to come together
again a hundred miles farther on, and that section close along the
barren seacoast is a dreary trip, the dirty low water only rarely
showing a patch of blue far out, a long region covered as far as the eye
can see, or to dismal mountain foot-hills, with cobblestones of all
sizes, only now and then a tiny oasis of thin cultivation among them.
Splendid dikes, made of these same cobblestones held together with wire
netting, protect the right of way against rivers undoubtedly turbulent
in the rainy season. The numerous streams of Formosa are short, but they
all lead merry lives while they last. Tunnels, of which the Japanese
seem inordinately fond, abound; and where else are telegraph-wires so
numerous as in the islands of the Nipponese? It is as if they were
suggestive of a spying disposition.
The south-bound traveler in Formosa comes at length frankly into the
tropics. Banana-groves become numerous; rice and sugar-cane stretch to
the very base of sometimes distant mountains; bamboos wave their plumes
languidly in the tepid air and dispute with palm-trees for foothold on
jungled hillsides that are gashed with precipitous stony watercourses
down which rage torrents in the season of the rains. Geographically,
too, the temperate zone has been left behind; for a sign-board just
below Kagi marks the Tropic of Cancer, which distributes the island
almost equally between the cool and the equatorial divisions of the
earth.
By this time the fair highways with poor bridges have degenerated into
dirt roads that grow rather pathy farther south, though four-wheeled
wagons, with tiny wheels in front and huge ones behind, drawn by
water-buffaloes at their own chosen speed, continue to the end of the
island. Chinese roofs cover the compact villages modestly, as if they
dared not toss their corners so picturesquely aloft as in the land
whence they came. Throughout the island there is but little color—or
odor—compared with China, but there is a certain gaiety in feminine
costumes, varying more or less by districts. These mingle together on
the railway, so that Cantonese women with flowers in their hair, Foochow
field-women with their historic three-dagger head-dress, women from Amoy
and Swatow with their own peculiar notions of propriety in personal
adornment jostle Formosan country women with still other ideas on this
important subject. For a considerable distance through the center of the
island the native women dress their coarse jet-black hair into what
looks like a clumsy imitation of the exaggerated style of Japan, so that
they suggest modest countrified geishas; but the custom is said to be
autonomous, and no daughter of Taiwan so low as to copy from the women
of their unloved rulers.
Below the imaginary line dividing the tropics from the less ardent zone
nearly every one except the Japanese takes to chewing the betel-nut, as
we miscall it. It is really the betel-leaf, from a climbing vine which,
for convenience sake, is often planted beside the areca-palm, the most
slender member of the palm family. The nut of this, together with lime
and sometimes other ingredients, added to the betel-leaves which are the
base and most important part of it, makes up the substance of this
repulsive habit. The gaping mouths of the Chinese are ugly enough under
normal circumstances; when they drivel with betel-juice they are a sight
to go far to avoid. Perhaps it is because the areca-palm and its
affectionate climbing companion will only grow in the tropics that the
people of a small island are geographically divided as to the habit,
though that is not a particularly satisfying explanation.
Persimmons, which the Japanese call _khaki_, papayas and pumalos, those
giant members of the citron family of which strangers do not always grow
so fond as the _geta_-wearing race, abound in southern Formosa. Up and
down the island country women, in the trousers, jacket, and mushroom
hats which make them all but indistinguishable from their husbands,
shovel cobble ballast along the railway. How our “straw bosses” would
shriek with laughter at that, or turn the circumambient air a dense
blue, according to their individual temperaments!
XXII
I have already given it as my humble opinion that the Japanese are not
particularly adaptable. This was impressed upon me once more in Takao,
principal port of southern Formosa and the end of the main line of the
railway. The island is small; American or European visitors are rare;
the “foreign office” in the capital had insisted on showing me special
attention—which of course was not entirely mere courtesy. As I descended
from the train at Takao, the government official who met me turned out
to be one of those charming gentlemen into which the brighter pebbles of
Japanese humanity can be polished under favorable circumstances, who
spoke English perfectly, and who was a Christian into the bargain,
whatever difference that may make. He made the inexcusable error of
mistaking me for a person of importance, and we were soon spinning away
in his high-powered motor-car to the best inn of Takao. It was the
absolutely unchanged Nipponese character of this hostelry which
emphasized the old impression that the people of Japan do not readily
adapt themselves to a new environment. From its arched entrance to the
tiny back garden the principal inn of Takao might have been in the heart
of Tokyo—and in the depths of midwinter. There were the same polished
wooden floors between the step-shelf at the door where one exchanged
one’s footwear for inn slippers; the square, mat-floored room with
almost as large an antechamber to which I was assigned had been as
hermetically sealed as paper _shoji_ and sliding wooden outer walls
could make it. The three or four quilts spread on the floor in the
middle of the room would have been an excellent bed in northern
Manchuria in January; on an early October night in the tropics a sheet
would have been a much more welcome covering than the arctic quilt in
the form of a kimono, the invariable one under which the guest of the
Japanese is forced to smother himself in all climates and latitudes, or
go uncovered. For toward morning there is a mild chill even in southern
Formosa, which the immense mosquito-net all but filling the large room
could not entirely shut out. To say that the inn was Japanese is also
equivalent to mentioning that electric lights blazed throughout it
during the night, glaring fiercely in upon the pseudo-sleeper even
though he may have found some means of turning out the one immediately
over his head.
But if every other suggestion had been lacking, the bath alone would
have proved how thoroughly Japan has been transplanted to this
southernmost point of the empire. The lady of the house herself
conducted me to the place of public ablutions; no respectable Japanese
hostess would leave to a mere servant-maid this courtesy toward a guest
whom the attentions of the government proved a distinguished personage.
She was as comely a young woman as an uncomely race ordinarily produces,
eminently respectable, I am sure, in the Japanese sense of the word,
with a plump baby of the vintage of the previous summer, and a husband
who would certainly not have endured with equanimity any suggestion of
unseemly conduct, from his Nipponese point of view, on the part of his
wife. A shadow projected upon the glazed glass of the bath-room door
showed that it was occupied. I know of ladies who might have turned back
under the circumstances; my Japanese hostess slid the door wide open and
courteously invited me to enter with her.
In the middle of the wet floor, between the big steaming wooden tub and
the small wooden bucket with which he had been rinsing his parboiled
body, stood a young man, a stranger for the night, like myself, as I
gathered from the subsequent conversation. He was clothed in a wet skin
and a welcoming smile. On the wall within reach of him hung a large
towel that would have covered him completely; he might even have turned
his back; but he was too well bred a Japanese gentlemen to indulge in
selfish personal activity while receiving guests, as it were, in a
temporary abode. He bowed courteously to us, begging me with a gesture
and a word to make myself at home, then stood smiling as serenely as if
he had been arrayed in a frockcoat gleaming with the order of the Rising
Sun.
The more old-fashioned and circumspect of American ladies might perhaps
by this time have found some fitting excuse to discreetly withdraw; my
hostess could not, of course, think of subjecting me to such a
discourtesy. She had still to show me where the soap was kept, to
indicate the tub of steaming water, to point to the wooden wash-basins
strewn about the floor and to the cold-water faucets from which to fill
them when I wished to cool my cooked skin, and to imply that all these
things were at my disposal, though it would surely not have required
genius to guess all this without her immediate personal assistance.
Meanwhile she had opened conversation with the gentleman garbed in the
welcoming smile. He had found his chamber comfortable, she hoped, my
scanty knowledge of Japanese told me. He had indeed; and would she be
good enough to have him called in time for the early morning train
south? From this auspicious beginning social intercourse went smoothly
on, through what seemed to be a comparing of the number of friends, or
enemies, lost in the great earthquake, and such other matters as might
come up between a lady and a gentleman at a dinner-table or in a
ball-room. Then at length the dripping guest, having fulfilled the
proprieties by showing no unseemly haste to attend to his own
insignificant affairs in the face of social requirements, strolled
across to the towel-rack, thrust his feet into rubber slippers, bade us
a courteous good evening, and shuffled out into the hallway.
My hostess showed no indication of following, but waited politely for me
to slip off the newly laundered kimono that had been laid out for me
upon my arrival. There was in her manner no suggestion of a Chinese
curiosity to know how foreigners bathe, or whether their skins are that
color all over; such questions she had probably long since solved. She
was merely waiting upon me like an attentive servant, quite as she might
have waited to pour out my beer or to fill my bowl with rice at dinner.
Perhaps she meant to soap my back or.... Luckily her husband looked in
at last, to bow ceremoniously to me and to tell his wife that new guests
had arrived, requiring her attention, if I would be so good as to excuse
her. Nor was this, of course, the trumped-up story of a suspicious
husband, as the sounds of thrice-clapped hands throughout the house
indicated. Truly a Japanese would have felt as completely at home in the
principal inn of Takao as within sight of the moat of the Imperial
Palace; even the charge of five yen for the privilege of lying a few
hours on the floor would have struck him as home-like in its
exorbitance.
[Illustration: The Japanese build Shinto shrines in every Formosan town
of importance, but they have made little progress in making Shintoists
or mikado-worshipers of the inhabitants]
[Illustration: The Chinese type of temples and demon-propitiating are
still dearest to the hearts of the Formosans]
XXIII
Takao by day proved to be a small Gibraltar, with a dredged harbor, a
modern Japanese quarter built mainly on reclaimed land on one side of
the little bay, and on the other a Formosan Chinese town of the
customary toned-down disorder and odors, both soon petering out among
some rather barren hills. Monkeys scamper through the shrubbery on the
tops of these, no doubt pausing now and then on a swaying branch to gaze
down upon the works of their more developed but less care-free
prototypes below; palm-trees here and there stand out against the dense
tropical sky-line; flowers grow in a certain profusion in Japanese
gardens and in the modified jungle beyond the outskirts. Seasons vary
greatly within short distances throughout Formosa, and at Takao the
rains come in July and August, even then only in torrential afternoon
showers, so that for all its two and a half degrees of greater
propinquity to the equator life is less dreary there than in constantly
raining Kiirun.
Steamer-loads of timbers from the forests of Arisan in the heart of the
island were being shipped from Takao for the rebuilding of Tokyo. Under
ordinary circumstances Japan furnishes her own lumber and that of
Formosa goes to China and adjacent lands. The Takao coolies handling it
earn an average of a yen a day; farmers and Chinese in the surrounding
country districts get forty _sen_, an improvement on the home-land of
the latter, who are no doubt glad to escape trouble-ridden China at any
price. It is but a short journey across the Formosan channel from Takao
to Amoy—where returning Chinese, armored with Japanese citizenship
picked up in Formosa, which brings with it the rights of
extraterritoriality, make great trouble for the local authorities; but
that is another story. So, too, is the unoccupied group of unpainted
wooden buildings specially erected to house the prince regent during a
recent two-day visit, which are so sacred that they cannot even be
photographed. Nor, thanks to the dreadful secrecy that hangs over all
fortified zones in the Japanese Empire, can the rather pretty scene
below, with the well-laid-out little modern town at one’s feet, the more
haphazard old one across the blue harbor, from out of which through the
miniature Pillars of Hercules a pathetic little knock-kneed Portuguese
steamer under a Chinese captain was just at that moment hobbling,
recalling that once, three or four centuries ago....
Heito, farther south, is also reached by rail, through
pineapple—“groves,” one is inclined to miscall them—with Chinese
well-sweeps to irrigate the rice-fields bizarre against the background
of an immense wireless station. But even when one has come this far
south there is little more to be seen than a standardized Japanese town
in Formosa—southern Formosa, one might specify, since the mouths of all
the non-Japanese population are ugly with betel-juice. Japanese
school-boys and girls, in their respective uniforms and their unfailing
knapsacks, and in strictly segregated groups, step—one might almost say
strut—through the wide, mildly dusty street in the refreshing early
morning or at sun-baked noon, for the youngest of them is quite
conscious that he belongs to the ruling race in this verdant tropical
isle. Formosan children, too, wear a species of uniform when they attend
school, so that at times it is difficult to tell the two races of pupils
apart at a glance; but the self-sufficient air of the one and the
disorganized, straggling temperament of the others, who seldom march in
formation even to or from school, are alone indicative. Meantime their
respective fathers sit languidly in their shops or diligently wield
brush, pen, or typewriter in the office of the local government, drag
laden carts and jog under pole-balanced burdens through the streets, or
sternly patrol them in police uniforms; their mothers either squat and
haggle in the cement-floored market-place or scrape along the pavement
to and from them in wooden sandals, shuffle in kimonos fairly familiar
with the wash-tub about neat little wooden houses with sliding walls,
shaded by a tree or two and brightened by flowers wherever there is
space for a root to gather nourishment, or huddle in Chinese homes of
mud bricks as uncleanly and uncomfortable as the laws of Japan will
allow—all according to the same racial division. Bicycles and lofty,
pneumatic-tired rickshaws flash not too swiftly past; in the outskirts
sway the more than pencil-slender palms without which the streets and
the floors of the Formosan houses could not everywhere be flecked with
reddish patches of drying saliva.
Other cities up and down the tamed and cultivated western side of
Formosa are much like this one, varying mainly in size. Tainan, the
former capital, still preserves the remnants of a solid old medieval
fort as a reminder of Dutch days, and several mementos of the reign of
Koxinga, the pirate chief. Its neighboring wastes, stretching to the
horizon, are divided into shallow fields in which sea-water evaporates
to what looks more like heaps of whitish sand than like the refined
product that finally emerges from them. Three hundred million pounds of
salt a year are taken from the sea on the western coast of Formosa, and
all of it is consumed in Taiwan or Japan. In all these towns, in all
Formosa, one is struck, as in Hokkaido, with the fact that the Japanese
are not pioneers, that they are officials or merchants, government
employees or petty shopkeepers, exploiters or capitalists, but rarely
tillers of the soil or clearers of virgin woodlands.
Tainan has kept perhaps the most evidences of its Chinese origin, but
Shokwa and Taichu, Shinchiku and Toyen have them also. Here and there an
old city gate transformed into a merely ornamental monument recalls the
Chinese walls that once inclosed all Formosan cities; temples confusedly
dedicated to Confucius, Buddha, and Lao-tze, but really sacred to the
myriad devils of the spirit world, draw hordes of joss-burning
adherents; wailing, garish Chinese funerals plod their way through the
unnaturally wide streets, all the ragamuffins of the town carrying some
form or other of the multicolored paraphernalia that must accompany even
these exiled Celestials to their graves. The Chinese sections of these
interior towns have no more cleanliness or conveniences than the
Japanese have forced upon them. Water-carriers do not slop their way
through them from a neighboring river, as in China, because the new
rulers have put street-hydrants within reach of every household. Of
these and a score of other labor- and disease-saving improvements the
typical Chinese would no doubt say that they throw coolies out of work
and leave their families to starve. Similar noises issued from
bartenders and type-setters when prohibition and the linotype forced
their way into our own land. How false the contention is demonstrated by
the appearance of the Formosan Chinese, well fed and clothed in state
compared to the masses struggling for mere existence throughout the
length and breadth of continental China.
It was in Shokwa that misfortune sentenced me to spend a night in a
Formosan inn, thereby bringing out the sharp contrast between this
miserable type of accommodation and the luxury of Japanese hostelries.
It is true that one surrendered one’s shoes at the foot of the
ladder-like stairway leading upward from the earth-floored shop where
the innkeeper sold some noisome form of food, but there any suggestion
of Japanese influence ended. The shoes were forthwith chucked into a
broken-down cupboard along with the footwear of fellow-guests with whom
one would have been quite satisfied not to mingle so intimately, and out
of which one might be fortunate enough to claw them in the morning. How
many generations of unwashed feet had already mounted the unswept stairs
in the decrepit slippers that were offered to those finicky guests to
whom the feet as nature left them are not sufficient I make no pretense
of knowing.
Along the second-story hallway, so narrow that one unconsciously turned
the shoulders sidewise, were several shallow alcoves, almost entirely
taken up with sections of floor raised about three feet above the rest
and covered with thin straw mats. On each of these Chinese notions of a
bed lay a man and a woman, fully dressed, for it is not a Chinese habit
to disrobe merely to sleep, but in no way concealed by the long-unwashed
counterfeits of curtains that hung limply about the openings. All these
fellow-guests were smoking; most of them were quarreling, or at least
conversing in the distressingly querulous voices of Chinese domestic
intercourse; a few of them were already covered with the uninviting
quilt that in most cases constitutes the sum total of Chinese bedding.
But at least there was no bath-room indecency here—for the excellent
reason that bathing was quite foreign to the establishment and, one felt
instinctively, olfactorily, to the general run of its clients. The
nearest approach to the steaming vat of the Japanese was a clogged sink
off a narrow corner of the narrower stairway, in which dishes, clothing,
slop-jars, proprietor, servants, and guests shared indiscriminately a
fouled faucet. In short, my one night in a Formosan inn almost carried
me back to China.
XXIV
But it is not in her flat, thickly inhabited, modernized western plains
that the traveler looks for anything worth the trouble of coming to
Formosa to see; that lies rather up among the mountain ranges that bound
his field of vision wherever he looks eastward from along the railway.
Before we venture into the hills, however, whence we may never return,
the story of Formosa may be unfamiliar enough to those who have not been
there to be worth the sketching. When the Portuguese first caught sight
of the island they named it in an exclamation of admiration “Ilha
Formosa!” In earlier days the Japanese, too, called it Beautiful Island
(Takasagoshima); later they used the Western term, but finally came back
to the old Chinese title of Taiwan (Terraced Bay), which is the official
name to-day. Of those who inhabit it probably not one in ten thousand
has ever heard the Portuguese name by which the island is still known to
the world at large.
The Chinese “discovered” Taiwan during the Sui dynasty, about six
centuries after Christ. In those days there was no one to dispute
Celestial claims, and for a thousand years China more or less ruled over
it. Then the Spanish and the Hollanders respectively found it worthy of
their attention, and in 1624 the Dutch East India Company took formal
possession. Tradition records that when the Dutch first landed they came
upon a group of Japanese already established in the southern part of the
island and claiming full ownership. Rather than dispute with them, the
Hollanders, harking back perhaps to their school-day memories of the
history of Carthage, modestly asked for as much ground as they could
cover with an ox-hide, on which to build themselves a resting-place.
Perhaps the verb “to cover” is not identical in the two languages; or
possibly international honor was not so perfect during those dark days
as in the present model age. At any rate the Dutch took what must have
been the hide of a dinosaur, or at least of its modern prototype, a
water-buffalo, cut it as the Chinese to this day cut a hide, in one
narrow strip, and inclosed space for the building of Fort Zelandia.
Nemesis overtook the wily Dutchmen, however, in the shape of Koxinga,
and a few months after this piratical son of a Chinese father and a
Japanese mother drove the Hollanders completely off the island there was
scarcely a trace of their forts and “factories,” their schools and
chapels, to show that the West had ever set foot there. Eventually, in a
typically Chinese way, the island came back to China, but from Koxinga’s
death in 1663 to the Sino-Japanese War life in Formosa was one long
period of bloody struggles with the head-hunting aborigines and of
ceaseless rebellion among the Chinese settlers themselves, without
safety for any one anywhere in the island. It is not without interest,
though of no visible importance, that during one of those more than two
hundred troubled years, at about the time Admiral Perry was coaxing and
bluffing Japan to open her doors to the outside world, Formosa was under
American rule.
The present, and to all appearances enduring, status of Taiwan dates
from 1895, when a treaty was signed on a Japanese war-ship in the outer
harbor of Keelung, which forthwith became Kiirun. That part was easy; a
few presents to corrupt Manchu officials, according to the Chinese, and
the wicked deed was done. But the subjugation of the Formosans was
another matter. Enraged by what they considered a cowardly act of the
Peking Government, through its corrupt spokesmen, in turning them over
like chattels to a despised foreign race, they bade defiance to the new
claimants. The Japanese, however, were not dismayed by the general
uprising of “Formosan rebels”; they had been in the ring before and were
still in training. Within a year the Chinese population, commonly called
Formosans, though the self-sufficient mountaineers who have inhabited
the main portion of the island in almost complete independence as far
back as recorded history mentions it seem better entitled to the name,
turned in their arms and acknowledged themselves subdued.
So far so good; but behind these recent immigrants, mainly from Amoy and
vicinity on the neighboring mainland, who had run true to form in
settling on the fertile lowlands along the west coast, lived the Hakkas,
a foot-hill people who had crossed from the continent at an earlier
date. They, too, were used to fighting. For generations they had been
the buffer between the coast dwellers and the savages of the mountainous
interior, and their unremitting efforts to save their heads from
adorning the skull-shelves of the wild tribes had given them experience
in, and perhaps a taste for, warfare. At any rate the Hakkas had become
experts at the chief Formosan pastime. They also could stalk their
enemies night and day along the precipitous border-land. The incentive
to success was perhaps even stronger with them than with the
head-hunting aborigines, for whereas the latter were merely in need of
new skulls to prove their prowess, the Hakkas developed a taste for
savage flesh, under the belief widely current among slightly civilized
races that it is not merely a choice viand but that their own bodies
absorb the courage and the strength of the men they eat. Perhaps, too,
their commissary department was poorly organized or full of corruption
during these border raids. Whatever the origin of the habit, they had
long been accustomed to feast on a savage carcass with relish and
apparently without unpleasant after-effects.
Now they turned their attention around upon the Japanese. An impartial
observer might have foreseen the result. It was modern science against
primitive courage and weapons. General revolt dwindled at length to
local uprisings, the last of which, in 1913, resulting in the beheading,
this time by another type of head-hunters, of nearly a hundred Hakkas.
Since then the foot-hill dwellers have been more or less model citizens,
leaving the Japanese only the task of subduing the real Formosans, the
wild men of the mountains, a chore in which they are engaged to this
day.
Concurrently the efficient little men of Japan got busy in the lowlands
where they had already made their possession effective. They introduced,
at least in theory, the queer notion of general education; they
encouraged agriculture by taking land away from absentee owners and
turning it over in perpetuity to the actual occupants. Two decades of
their industry have brought great changes. The world at large probably
still thinks of Formosa, if at all, as a land of savages and jungles and
high, almost inaccessible mountains. These the island has to this day,
but it has also great modern buildings, fine streets, railways,
motor-bus lines, model schools, and departments of sanitation. Under the
Japanese it has developed from one of the most dangerous to one of the
safest dwelling-places on the globe—so long as one keeps out of reach of
the mountain-bound head-hunters. The contrast between modern comfort and
primitive man still hunting the heads of his neighbors, almost within
sight of each other on any clear day, will no doubt remain the chief
romance of Taiwan for some time to come.
Of late years there has been much more or less loose talk about the
probability—not a few call it the necessity—of some outside power taking
over China, either lock, stock, and barrel, or under the euphonistic
title of “protectorate.” Granting that such a thing were possible, and
after that desirable, in view of the semi-anarchy which reigns to-day
over that vast land, Formosa gives a fairly clear idea of what China
would become under the Japanese, as Indo-China suggests what it would be
under European “protection.” There can be no dispute as to the material
advantages which the Japanese have brought the Formosans; there remains
the question as to whether life as a whole is an existence more worth
living for these forced wards of alien guardians. For one gets the
impression that the Celestial, wherever he may be, loves dirt and
disorder and “squeeze” and constantly fluctuating currencies. Besides is
it not the very confusion of China, even the dangers of banditry and
undisciplined soldiery, which gives it much of its charm, and not merely
the saving sense of humor of the Chinese, their irrepressible
cheerfulness, and their several other un-Japanese characteristics?
XXV
The Taiwan of to-day is a military and commercial outpost of the
Japanese Empire. The visitor who erroneously mistakes it for anything
else exposes himself to surprise if not to disappointment. The Japanese
rule Formosa for the benefit of the Formosans exactly so far, and not a
hair’s-breadth farther, as it is to the advantage of Japan and the
Japanese to do so. Though it may appear otherwise on paper, the
supremacy of the civilian authority is quite nominal, and one constantly
feels the influence of the real military rulers underneath. Let a
dispute on policy arise between these two factors and there is never the
iota of a doubt as to which one will impress its will over the other.
Economically the island is as strictly under Japanese exploitation for
the Japanese as it is politically under the rule of Japanese
militarists.
What are erroneously called Formosans make up the great bulk of the
population of the island. When the Japanese came thirty years ago this
Chinese element, whose connection with the island for the most part
dates back only a few generations, was reckoned at three million; to-day
the “Formosans of Chinese race holding Japanese registration” number
about half a million more than that. The most casual observer cannot but
quickly note that these so-called Formosans are really exiled
Celestials. Their temples, their graves, their superstitions, their
costumes, almost their every point of view toward life or death are
those of China, of the adjoining Fukien coast in particular, modified
only in minor degrees by their longer or shorter sojourn in this
semi-tropical isle. I found no one ready to testify that there are still
in Formosa Chinese or Hakkas of cannibalistic tastes; but few on the
other hand were ready absolutely to deny it. Such things still exist
here and there in China, at least in times of famine. As in China, too,
and by no means confined to the lowest classes, in fact probably less
prevalent, per capita, among them, is the equally unpraiseworthy
practice of living on a wife’s immorality. The Chinese are always
picturesque in their phrasing, and the house in which such things occur
is known among the neighbors as the “half-closed gate,” while the man
who hires out his women is gently referred to as a “guest husband.”
Those Formosan Chinese who can afford the expense involved, or who
cannot otherwise acquire the male heir necessary to carry on their
precious family and the worship of its ancestral tablets, take
concubines. Class distinctions are also much the same as across the
channel; actors, barbers, butchers, chiropodists, funeral musicians and
servants are regarded with contempt, as outcasts whom no respectable
woman will marry. Among countless other details going to show that the
Formosans are merely transplanted Chinese is the fact that they will
tell missionaries who come to work among them what extraordinarily
distinct Chinese they speak, what wonderful linguists they must be to
have learned the miserable language of the speakers so perfectly—and
then turn around to ask the missionary’s teacher what on earth these
western barbarians are trying to say.
[Illustration: Formosan school-girls waiting for classes to begin in an
ancient temple of Confucius which the Japanese have turned into a
school]
[Illustration: After all, girls are girls, whether they go to school in
Ward No. 1 or in a former temple of Confucius in Formosa]
[Illustration: A group of reassembled Formosan classmates in a small
interior town, ranging now in social scale from shopkeepers to
professors in the capital]
[Illustration: All the Japanese have left of the old city walls of
Formosa is here and there an ancient gate for decorative purposes]
I ran across several of the Protestant missionaries, of British
nationality, scattered about Formosa, and one day I chanced upon a
Spanish priest who had been nearly forty years in the island. These two
branches of proselyters were far more in agreement upon the good and bad
effects of Japanese rule than is ordinarily the case on controversial
questions between the two principal divisions of Christianity. The
delight at speaking his native tongue, which he had to a noticeable
degree forgotten, partly accounts no doubt for his greater
picturesqueness of language and the emotion that spread in ripples down
the long white beard of the padre of—but I must not be too specific.
Suffice it to say that he had been stationed in one of the larger
interior cities since some years before the Japanese took over the
island.
He had found all Japanese with whom he had ever come in contact
intellectually slow as compared with the Formosans, even when they were
better educated. Yet the more stupid Japanese always gets any available
government job first, he went on, can rise higher, and is paid from
fifty to eighty per cent. more for the same work than Formosans. Until
quite recently the Japanese man who married a Formosan became himself a
Formosan, but the Formosan woman who married a Japanese did not attain
Japanese citizenship. Japanese life, the padre asserted, is ostentatious
with modern superficial improvements,—roads, schools, hospitals, sewers,
running water, electricity, the telegraph and the telephone—he spoke of
these things with the scorn which the Spanish as a race still feel for
them—but as soon as you dig under the surface of all this.... There is
far more immorality of all kinds than in the old pre-Japanese days.
Merchant ethics are much lowered; Formosan girls of the class which a
generation ago would have been immaculate in social behavior parade the
streets in gay, insufficient garb, most of them ready at anything like
sufficient provocation to give or sell their favors to any male who
longs for them.
I had myself seen no small number of these Formosan “flappers,” girls
above the peasant and coolie class, gaudy and conspicuous in their
numerous hair ornaments, their flower-embroidered silk jackets, and
trousers reaching hardly below the knees—perhaps this was what the padre
referred to as “insufficient”—their silk stockings ending in little
gay-colored cloth shoes. There is scarcely any foot-binding, by the way,
among the younger generation in Formosa; the Japanese do not actually
forbid it, but the southern coast of China, from which most “Formosans”
come, is not greatly given to the custom so nearly universal elsewhere
in the former Manchu Empire. But from personal experience I only knew
that there was more spontaneous gaiety, more freedom of life in the
Western sense, among this new generation of the downtrodden sex. The
padre insisted that I had not delved deeply enough into the situation.
Perhaps I lack the keen Latin flair for such things. There are also in
Formosa, it seemed, many Japanese women of not the strictest morals, but
as they confine their affections to their own race, the priest was
evidently not much worried by them.
Certainly Formosa has made rapid strides for the better in most things
material, he admitted; certainly the Japanese had done away with
banditry and made it safe for any one, whom they are willing shall do
so, to go anywhere in the island—outside the wire fence that incloses
the head-hunters. Even the Protestant missionaries who were there before
the change, often harsh but fairly just critics, in a position to know
whereof they speak, hasten to bring the Japanese that mead of praise.
But “in matters moral and spiritual,” some of them go on, “we fear there
has been no progress”; or, “materially Formosans are undoubtedly better
off under the Japanese; morally they are undoubtedly worse.”
Prostitution, for instance, virtually unknown in polygamous Formosa, was
introduced by the new rulers, as was to be expected, legalized through
the Japanese form of segregation, and “has brought moral disaster to
many of the inhabitants of Taiwan, Japanese as well as Formosans.”
There are more than enough schools in Formosa, the priest went on,
sumptuous ones at that—for the Japanese. There have never been enough
for the Formosans, and wherever it is possible to avoid building new
ones for them they are assigned to old Confucian temples and the like.
Primary schools for the Japanese and the Formosans are separate, but the
Formosan children must learn Japanese, since teachers are forbidden to
give their classes in the “Formosan language,” a Fukien dialect most
nearly resembling that of Amoy. In other words, no Formosan child can go
to a government school unless he can speak Japanese, and henceforth,
according to a new ruling, no more private schools can be opened. There
are still a few tutor schools, but even in these some Japanese must be
taught. The Catholics have given up attempting to have schools for their
parishioners in Taiwan, and in the humble opinion of the Spanish padre
the Protestant missionaries are wasting money on them. It is forbidden
to mention religion in the class-room. The Protestant mission school in
Taihoku is quite an institution, however, and there the Formosan
language is mainly used. But, as in Korea, the knowledge of the old
classics is rapidly disappearing from the island. Missionaries
vehemently assert that a Formosan university is badly needed, because
Formosan youths sent to Japan to complete their education come back
badly corrupted in morals. The Japanese probably have another idea on
the subject, such as,—what is a little looseness of morals compared with
a chance to impress with the greatness of the “mother-country,” to
Japanize, the new generation in Formosa?
[Illustration: A well-to-do Formosan family in a typical upper-class
railway carriage, identical with those of Japan]
[Illustration: In third class there are usually several Formosan country
women with a striking head-dress suggestive of, yet on close examination
quite different from, those of the ladies of Japan]
[Illustration: To our Western eyes the women of Formosa are seldom
striking beauties]
[Illustration: Baby rides in Formosa much as he does in Japan]
Plagues have been wiped out, my Spanish informant continued, but there
is more consumption, and more diseases of the brothel. There are fewer
poor Formosans now than before the Japanese came, but fewer rich also.
Personally I should list this among the improvements, but the priest
gave it as an example of Japanese exploitation. The poor people have
more money in silver or paper under the new order of things, but not so
much in food. Perhaps so, yet one gets the impression that merely the
numerous good trains in which a formerly house-bound population may run
about the island at will tend to make life less drab; and certainly the
number of popular excursions and travels for pleasure bear out the
notion. One of the padre’s bitterest complaints was that all foreigners,
however long they may have been in the island and however altruistic the
labor they may have done for its people, are incessantly looked upon
with suspicion by the Japanese. Every time he left town to visit one of
his out-stations, when he went on any journey whatever, he had to give
the police authorities detailed information as to where, when, and why
he was going; and still they never failed to send spies behind his back
to ask whom he had talked with, what he had said, and so on to the end
of patience. Rumors, which, he had many proofs, were instigated by the
authorities, scared the timid natives away from Christianity; by their
spy methods, by making fun, or worse, of the children who go to church,
they made conversion impossible. Yet the same authorities constantly
assert that there is complete religious liberty wherever the mikado
rules—a yarn for outside consumption.
Certainly there were too many points of similarity between his
complaints and those one hears in Korea to dismiss them all as the false
impressions of an overworked zealot. The mass of the Japanese,
particularly those in official positions, do not look with favor upon
the advance of Western religion, and with it Western notions of
political liberty, in their possessions. On the other hand I have known
Protestant missionaries in Formosa to say that “we question whether any
country enjoys a larger measure of religious liberty than do the
Formosans. Unfortunately, like the people from which they sprang,
indifference to the moral demands of any practical religion are
manifest; often the most ardent devotees of what to them is religion are
the most immoral persons in their districts.”
Some Formosan men adopt the Japanese custom, especially the footwear,
and, being taller and more stately in appearance, look strange indeed. I
cannot recall ever having seen a Korean in _getas_ and kimono. Have the
Formosans forgotten the disgrace of being conquered; do they live
farther enough south to be more easy-going, or was there less of the old
Chinese culture and pride of race among these comparative immigrants, so
that they never did much care that they are ruled by an alien race?
Missionaries and other foreigners, long residents in the island and
familiar enough with its language to know something of the minds of the
people, assert that the Formosans really hate the Japanese, but that the
new generation is so used to them that, thanks to the passiveness, not
to say fatalism, in the Chinese character, they do not actively think of
what life would be without them. Besides, if they are at all in touch
with their ancestral home-land the former Amoy coolies who make up so
large a proportion of the population of Formosa probably prefer some
Japanese exactitude, much as it may grate on their nerves, to being
robbed or impressed into unpaid service by bandits and soldiers across
the channel. Thus, while there is very much of a “Korean question” and,
only two hundred miles south of Formosa, an active “Philippine
question,” there is apparently no longer a “Formosan question.”
Independence, if it is ever considered at all in Taiwan, is evidently
regarded as hopeless, not even worth thinking about.
XXVI
Not merely do the authorities of Formosa look upon all foreigners with
suspicion, but the tendency to impress the island with the greatness of
Japan has led to a marked decline in courtesy toward them. They
habitually treat Caucasians at least as at best unwelcome interlopers.
The racial clannishness of the Japanese stands out with double clarity
in their southernmost island. Bare statistics speak volumes; of the
nearly four million inhabitants credited to Formosa by the latest census
a hundred and seventy-five thousand are Japanese, and only one hundred
and fifty are foreigners—except some thirty thousand non-subject
Chinese. The Japanese have never really allowed foreigners to acquire
land in Formosa, any more than in Japan—queer noises those against the
California land laws under the circumstances—and the naturalization at
least of Westerners is rare and difficult. Politically the Japanese
Empire is like Brahmanism and Judaism among religions—not open to other
people; yet the little brown men complain bitterly if the rule is made
to work both ways.
Not only are they scarce there, but in Formosa the precedence of
Caucasians is exceedingly low. The three foreign consuls were the last
persons presented to the prince regent at the time of his recent visit;
they were the only foreigners invited to meet him, and they were got rid
of before the speech of welcome by the governor-general. I had the
amusing privilege of attending the public reception of a new
governor-general, whom a war-ship had deposited on the island the day
before I landed. Thanks to the fact that national mourning in our own
land made available the formal dress which would otherwise have adorned
our official representative in the island, I was able to run the
gauntlet of Japanese official requirements. In the auditorium of the
imposing foreign-style hotel of Taihoku not a foreigner had a seat, of
which there were several hundred, during the feudal ceremony of welcome,
and no attention whatever was paid to the invited foreign guests at the
atrocious stand-up cold supper—at three yen a plate—which followed. I
could not but note the contrast between this positively ill-bred
treatment and the attentions showered upon foreigners by Chinese
authorities, though the latter in many cases like us no better than do
the Japanese.
Since Japanese consuls in foreign countries have much military
intelligence work to do, it is impossible to convince the authorities
and people of Japan that our consuls confine themselves to the
commercial side of their calling. Even when a duly credited
representative of a Western nation asks for such information as is
commonly shared freely between all civilized countries, the Formosan
government hedges and delays, and Japanese firms follow its lead. All
reports to foreign consuls must go through a long succession of
government bureaucrats for approval; every one is afraid to give the
simplest information for fear the men higher up will not sanction it—and
in Japanese firms and official circles the man higher up is indeed a
being to be dreaded. All such information is subject to censorship, and
to all possible delays at every turn, ending at military headquarters.
Here the heart of the report is invariably taken out of it and the
long-delayed and wholly emasculated reply is sent all the way back
“through proper channels” to the originating bureau to be forwarded. Yet
when some firms once answered a consul direct, the government demanded
and kept the reports! The Japanese are such good copiers themselves that
they seem to be mortally afraid some one will steal their own puny
little ideas. On the other hand the clerk of our consulate in Formosa is
a Japanese—which is enough said.
Japanese coastwise laws secure for Japanese bottoms virtually all
shipping to or from Formosa. The Japanese import tariff applies, of
course, to all the empire, which means that there is a high, in most
cases a prohibitive, duty on all foreign goods coming into the island.
Consequently one rarely sees in its markets anything but Japanese wares,
including many imitations of Western articles. As in Korea, American
residents who are given endless trouble to get shipments through the
customs are asked why they do not at least have their goods sent from
Seattle or San Francisco in Japanese ships, with the hint that this
might save them some of their difficulties. The Formosan cargo open to
foreign ships is very limited, so that rarely indeed does other than a
Japanese steamer call at the island. This is surely short-sighted
policy. If the great transpacific liners, all of which go almost within
sight of Taiwan, touched there the tourist income of Formosa would
increase a hundredfold. As it is, only a brave or a foolish traveler
will take one of the Japanese coastwise steamers to and from the place
to see it, even if he ever finds himself in a port from which they sail.
Little trade can be indulged in by purely foreign firms in Formosa,
unless they have at least an agency in Japan proper. Local firms do not
know English, and they hesitate to run the risk of divulging trade
secrets to outsiders by having such correspondence translated. These
things, in addition to the American hesitancy to sell in the small lots
that are required for such a market, plus the bad packing that seems to
be a general and incorrigible American fault, do not leave much chance
to find your favorite tooth-paste or wearable shoes in Formosan shops.
[Illustration: A Formosan funeral]
[Illustration: After the low, squat ones of China, the Japanese
rickshaws of Formosa seem lofty not merely in price]
[Illustration: Flowers on their way to an ancestral temple]
XXVII
Real enlightenment and emperor-worship are hardly compatible, complains
a missionary in Formosa. He should have had no difficulty in
recognizing, in far less time than he has probably spent there, that for
all its outward garb the government of the island, if not of Japan
itself, is a real shogunate still, a feudal type of thing, in which all
men bow low before their official superiors, in which there is never any
of the hearty frankness of modern life. The slowest-minded people ever
to reach high estate are also the tightest little people on earth;
compared to the Japanese the Chinese are open and aboveboard, as well as
brilliant and overflowing with the sense of humor.
There is no free press in Taiwan; the barriers against one are mainly
secrecy and dictatorship. If the government is concerned, there is
virtually no chance of getting any news, or at least correct news; if it
is outside news, and in the slightest degree concerns the government, a
strict censorship will see that it is not shared with the public. Such
information as one may find in Formosan papers, therefore, is true in
just so far as the government wishes the truth to be known. “It is
undesirable,” said a recent governor-general, “to see in newspapers
comments and criticisms concerning the administration.” No doubt
American politicians often feel the same way about it. The same
mikado-appointed autocrat dissolved a society of Formosans who planned
to introduce governmental reforms, with the placid remark: “To establish
a legislature in Taiwan is against the constitution of Japan, and the
constitution has never been amended. Any movement aiming at the
conclusion of the laws of Japan from this island is against peace and
order. The constitution of Japan allows freedom of speech and the
organization of political societies, _but_ people under a constitutional
government should be moral and gentlemanly in their acts, and it is
accordingly the duty of the state to correct persons who are unable to
take such a gentlemanly and moral attitude.” A number of such persons,
whose lack of gentlemanly morals consisted in attempting to organize one
of the political societies permitted by the constitution, are being
corrected in the big “model” prison of Taihoku, and incidentally
learning to work with their hands instead of their heads.
In other words, though the Japanese have copied the constitutions of the
West, by way of that of Bavaria, those of them at least who are
governing Formosa have no real conception of what a modern free
government with the consent of the governed means. Compare Japanese rule
in their semi-tropical isle with Porto Rico or the Philippines, where
even legislation and the courts are in Spanish! It is rather a pity that
the group of islands not far south of Formosa over which the American
flag still flutters cannot have a sample of Formosan rule to offset
their complaints at their present status, and as a reminder of what may
very easily happen to them if they win that independence for which
certain of their political-minded citizens are clamoring.
But to come back to the complaining missionary and his charge of
mikado-worship. “The Japanese constitution,” he continues, “guarantees
to all citizens religious liberty; how then can the government require
its officials, and every child in its government schools, be they
Formosans or Koreans, to bow down before the picture of the emperor and
to worship him in Shinto shrines? For certainly this is nothing more nor
less than worship, so far as the word has any meaning in English or to
the mere Western mentality, in spite of the clever but ineffectual
explanation that ‘the government declares that all ceremonial
observances which are officially obligatory shall not be regarded as
religious but as patriotic.’”
It is easy enough for a stern government to order men to believe thus
and so, but the human mind is sometimes perverse in its workings.
Shintoism is taught in the schools of Formosa; gleaming new Shinto
shrines are to be found throughout the pacified part of the island; but
I have yet to see a Formosan enter one of them as a voluntary worshiper
or to hear of one who has given his free-will adherence to the Japanese
doctrine. The Chinese type of temples still holds the allegiance of the
great non-Japanese mass of the population; and the majority of us are
inclined to sympathize with them in their choice, even though their
mainly devil-propitiating form of worship may be a lower one than pure
Shintoism.
But is the charge of mikado-worship justified? I took the trouble one
day to ask one of the most intelligent Japanese officials it has been my
fortune to meet, a man educated in the West and with as liberal views as
such officials ever seem to attain, what the more cultured Japanese
thought of the suicide of General Nogi and his wife, that they might
accompany the late mikado to the other world. He showed immense surprise
that such a question could occur to me at all, and promptly assured me
that “every” Japanese considered it a noble act, and one to be emulated.
The house in which this ancient Nipponese sacrifice was committed was
set aside by the government as a national museum, and squads of
school-children were constantly being shown through it when we were in
Tokyo, while their teachers preached to them on the ideal patriotism of
Nogi’s life, and particularly of his death, striving to inculcate into
their plastic minds, probably with considerable success, the same more
than medieval ideas. The authorities are tireless in their attempts to
bring the younger generation of Formosans to the same point of view,
though there is no evidence that these efforts have thus far borne any
fruit.
[Illustration: The Japanese furnish excellent school accommodations
throughout Formosa, at least to their own children]
[Illustration: Japanese boys on their way to school in southern Formosa]
[Illustration: The Japanese say that they themselves cannot distinguish
the reformed head-hunters of Formosa from their own country people; but
for the teacher and two children in the front row these are all of the
wild mountain tribes, the tallest man and his little boy in front of him
being both in the first grade]
[Illustration: Former head-hunters more or less domesticated during
years of labor in the camphor camps of the Japanese]
Not long ago the prince regent of Japan made an official visit to
Formosa, partly no doubt for this very purpose. There were months of
preparation for the “epoch-making” occasion, preparations so intensive
that neither the governor-general nor the government had much time left
for less important matters. The group of buildings on the hilltop above
Takao, of which I have already spoken, were specially constructed for
the housing of the royal visitors. They are of wood, but spacious enough
to accommodate a dozen large families. The prince spent two nights
there, leaving them so sacred that no one else can enter, much less
inhabit them. I had the luck to see translations of articles on the
princely visit as they appeared in Formosan papers, though it was not,
of course, intended that this evidence of the essentially shogunal
character of modern Japan should be given out to the world at large.
Among this mass of evidence unconsciously tending to bear out the charge
that the Japanese consider their supreme ruler virtually a god a few are
especially amusing. For, remember, this was merely the son of the divine
mikado, not yet quite deified himself, I suppose, so that one can only
surmise how much nearer the focus of absurdity matters might have gone
if the sacred emperor had been mentally capacitated to make the visit
himself. One horrified writer reports that the imperial personage
“seemed to be most interested in water-buffaloes and sedan-chairs”! How
that must have broken the hearts of the improvement-showing officials!
Two hundred and seventy police in plain clothes were stationed along the
road by which the prince traveled, but “they hid themselves behind trees
and other things, because the authorities wished them to be so
inconspicuous, if possible, as not to catch the imperial eye at all.” A
long list of instructions were issued to the people of Formosa, a few of
which will give the atmosphere of the occasion quite as fully as the
whole document. The population was ordered:
1. Not to get sick and start an epidemic during the imperial visit.
2. To fly the Japanese flag from every building along the prince’s
route, on penalty of severe punishment.
3. To dress neatly and wear footwear; to take off their hats when the
procession was passing; not to use telescopes or look upon the
procession from up-stairs or any other elevated place—and so on,
into the very depths of the proper conduct of mere man toward his
gods. Obviously unofficial photography would have been almost a
capital offense.
XXVIII
Taiwan is not merely a military and commercial outpost of the empire; it
is also very much of a closed corporation, a greatly exploited island,
“both legally and illegally,” an observing missionary puts it. In the
slang of the day—unless the expression has died of old age since I left
my inventive native land—“exploit is the middle name” of the modern
Japanese. Perhaps he does it even unconsciously, as when he standardizes
the existence of tourists passing through his country and sees to it
that they pay and tip as much as the traffic will bear. All the
important industries of Formosa are government monopolies, and the
second-rate ones are strictly controlled by Japanese interests. Opium
has been a monopoly of the government since 1896, camphor and salt since
1899, tobacco since 1905, and liquors since 1922. Even sugar is
virtually so, though the Hakkas up in the foot-hills still operate crude
sugar-mills of the iron-roller type, propelled by water-buffaloes. “All
these monopolies,” says a government organ, “are for the good of the
public, to check speculation, and to maintain a high uniform quality. As
a matter of fact these monopolies have made considerable revenue for the
government of Taiwan, though that was not the main object in
establishing them.”
Fortunate accident, surely; for we read further on that during the first
year of the newly established liquor monopoly the government lost
1,250,000 yen in liquor taxes—do not burst yet into tears of
sympathy—but gained 5,500,000 yen on the monopoly. An improvident and
impractical people, indeed, to have overlooked such an advantage until
it was accidentally called to their attention! There are some things to
be said in favor of government monopolies, as of most human or divine
contraptions; but the trouble with them, as far as my inexpert
experience goes, is not merely that they offer government officials
strong temptation to peculation, but that each bureau burns with
eagerness to push the sale of its product, however detrimental it may be
to the consumer.
The Government Monopoly Bureau in Taihoku, where nearly all the world’s
supply of camphor is refined, and where the opium smoked on the island
is prepared, is worthy of a visit—provided one can get into it.
Personally I could not gain admission to the opium section, and I have
yet to meet a foreigner who has been more fortunate. I must take on
hearsay also the assertion that the Japanese are stamping out opium
smoking throughout the island.
How China was forced by Western nations to open her ports and markets to
the opium trade is too old and discreditable a story to need repeating.
Chinese immigrants brought the habit to Formosa, and when the Japanese
took over the island a considerable percentage of the Formosan Chinese
were users. The Japanese licensed smokers, provided severe penalties for
those who indulged in the stuff without a license, and fixed a certain
date after which no new licenses would be given out. Even this happy
scheme was probably not entirely an original idea with them. Somewhere
in the East, in a once well-governed province of China, I think, the
authorities long ago provided each opium smoker with a license—in the
form of a board several feet long on which the evidence of his weakness
was set forth in large red characters, and which the licensee was forced
to carry himself, uncovered, to the licensed opium establishment
whenever he wished to smoke, even the most wealthy or influential not
being permitted to let a servant do so. This admirable scheme, doubly
effective in a land where “face” is lost with such poignant regret, has
naturally been allowed to fall into desuetude, like so many excellent
things in China. I will not go so far as to suggest that the idea might
be of use in a land where costly efforts are being made to stamp out the
use of intoxicating liquors, but there is no international copyright on
ideas of government.
The Japanese did not carry things that far in Formosa, but by refusing
new licenses and constantly raising the price of the drug they are
reputed to be doing away with the habit. Unfortunately even officials
cannot deny that cocaine, morphine, and opium products which are more
injurious than the pure stuff are manufactured—in England and the United
States, for instance, as well as in Japan—and smuggled by Japanese into
Taiwan in large quantities.
Tobacco is used by both sexes, almost all ages, and all races in
Formosa. Quite aside from whatever evil effects this dreadful weed may
produce on the physical, mental, and moral system—you can see that I
have been hobnobbing with Protestant missionaries—more money is spent on
it by a people who could easily find a better use for their limited
wealth than on opium at its worst. The Government Monopoly tobacco
factory in Taihoku is a model establishment—though not so much can be
said of the employment of hundreds of very young Formosan girls in
it—hence it is one of those things which the “foreign office” is glad to
show. Two Filipino youths do their best to make the cigars which issue
from it a trifle less deadly than those to be had in Japan proper, but
this is a mere side-line in a land where cigarettes and smoking-tobacco
are an almost universal form of indulgence. Perhaps there is really
nothing suspicious at all in the curious fact that Japanese cigarettes,
which have a hollow mouthpiece that requires them to be made by hand,
can be sold in Formosa at a considerably lower price than the
machine-made cigarette, in which peanut-oil is mixed with the tobacco to
comply with Chinese taste, that are manufactured there for the
non-Japanese Formosans.
Many of the foot-hills of Taiwan are dotted with compact little bushes
that at first glance are interesting only for the regularity with which
they are spaced. Then one is reminded that between nine and ten million
pounds of “Formosa oolong” go to the United States each year, though
most of us supposed that tea is by no means the favorite American
stimulant. Japanese transpacific ships stop at Taiwan for tea in the
season, but just why this important Formosan product has remained merely
a Japanese rather than an official government monopoly does not appear
on the surface. Possibly it is because the Nipponese lack one of the
faculties essential to its preparation, either by an oversight on the
part of their ancestral gods or from overindulgence. At any rate the
official tea-taster of one of the most important Japanese firms, whose
daily chore it is for six months out of the year to sample scores of
tray-loads of tea-leaves raw, infused, and in some strange concoction,
comes from “the Bronix,” to the luxuries of which he retires during the
other half of the year.
Though much coal is mined in Formosa, it is poor and full of sulphur,
which makes it fortunate that unlimited electric power can be developed.
One of the most agreeable trips into the interior under genuine Japanese
control brings one to Lake Candidius, named for a former Dutch
missionary, a beautiful sheet of water at a considerable elevation, amid
delightful mountainous surroundings. A tunnel has been opened which lets
into the lake a mountain stream that raises it sixty feet above its
natural level, and with a drop of a thousand feet in the first two miles
of the outlet it is planned to electrify the whole island. Just now the
scheme is held up for lack of funds, like so many things, excellent and
otherwise, in this expensive after-war world. The Japanese, by the way,
show little respect for the foolish Chinese superstitions of the
Formosans when they interfere with developing the natural resources of
the island. Slowly, too, the Formosans learn, advancing beyond their
continental relatives. The Japanese were digging for water in Taihoku
some years ago, for instance, when the workmen unexpectedly struck gas.
An old Formosan lady naturally supposed that this came from the nether
world, and burned joss before it. It is reported that her startling
experience has cured no small number of persons of being too hasty in
concluding that infernal forces can always be propitiated in the
orthodox manner.
The most valuable resource so far discovered in the great mountainous
interior of Formosa is the immense camphor-trees. One sees them here and
there in southern China, but usually in splendid isolation in a temple
compound, or with a little shrine at the foot of the enormous trunk to
show that the venerable growth is inhabited by benevolent spirits and is
therefore sacred. But no such kindly superstitions spare those of
Formosa from destruction; hence in this case the Japanese have a genuine
monopoly. The production of camphor in Taiwan began two centuries ago,
but it is only under the new rulers that this splendid source of revenue
has been exploited in much more than a desultory manner. To-day Formosa
produces nine of the twelve million pounds of camphor with which the
world is yearly supplied, and Japan proper yields two millions more,
leaving a bare million to be credited to China and to synthetic
processes. Thus it is not difficult to figure out why you are almost
forced to patronize the Japanese, whether you like them or live on the
Pacific Coast, whenever you need moth-balls or an eye-shade, perfume or
a “tortoise-shell” comb.
Let us descend for a moment frankly into statistics and see what becomes
of the world’s twelve million pounds of camphor a year. Official
Japanese records report that it is consumed by:
Celluloid manufacture 6,000,000 pounds
Religious uses 2,000,000 „
Perfumery 1,500,000 „
Drug purposes 1,000,000 „
Other uses 1,500,000 „
In other words, if the Far East were not so devoted to its gods the
price of smelling-salts might be several points lower—if the Japanese
Government chose to have it so.
A visit to one of the camphor stations in savage territory can be
arranged through the “foreign office” of Formosa, as the cheerful
guide-book has it, “for the visitor who is willing to run the risk of
leaving his head there.” Beside the little narrow tracks along which
Formosan coolies push those to whom the loss of a head is no very
serious matter two-bushel bags of camphor-chips, the not unpleasant
smell of which strikes the passing nostrils, lie here and there at the
foot of the steep, narrow paths down which they are carried on men’s
backs to await wheeled transportation. The entire tree is chopped up
with a little hollowed-out ax that makes the chips look as if they had
been dug with a sugar-scoop. Little push-car loads of these come down to
the railway, but a large quantity of the chips are boiled in the field,
at camphor camps consisting principally of several mounds of earth and
mud bricks resembling Chinese brick-kilns, with bamboo pipes for
carrying the water of mountain streams through them, and others for
drawing off the product. This almost colorless camphor oil is put in
tins identical with those in which American gasolene and kerosene come
to the Orient, and is shipped down to the capital. Private companies
engage in the sometimes dangerous work of camphor-gathering, but they
must sell all their product to the government, and not argue the price.
The necessity of protecting the camphor camps from raids by
head-hunters, however, requires a government police force and certain
administrative buildings, so that all of them have a more or less
official character. Down at the Monopoly Bureau in Taihoku the refined
camphor, looking like snow-drifts, or, more precisely, like a lifetime
supply of the purest white sugar on a very damp day, lies in great bins,
and the densely camphorated air is so hard to breathe that one marvels
at the endurance of the Formosan coolies who shovel the stuff back and
forth for hours at a time.
While they are not necessarily monopolies, there are other Formosan
products which are worthy of mention, and other dangers than
head-hunters to dull the pleasures of life in this Beautiful Island of
Somewhere. It is rich in aggressive venomous snakes, for instance. A man
of altruistic tendencies has compiled a big volume filled with colored
copies, as nearly life-size as possible, of all the deadly reptiles so
far discovered by the new rulers, so that even he who cannot read may
recognize them as he runs; and under each is the antidote to be used in
case one is bitten by that particular species. Unfortunately, it is
often a long way between drugstores in Formosa. White ants destroy one’s
furniture, leaving a splendid-looking shell that is as hollow within as
New Year’s resolutions; floods sometimes turn Taihoku itself into a
lowland rival of Lake Candidius. Earthquakes are so common that no one
but the newly arrived or the abnormally timid thinks anything of them.
There are often several a day; nine hundred have been registered in a
single recent year. “I’ll see you after the afternoon shake,” is said to
be one of the fixed forms of rendezvous among the residents of the
island—though they are not strong and frequent enough to save bartenders
one of their principal exertions, as even a brief visit to the cozy
foreign club of Taihoku, redolent mainly of tea export, will
demonstrate. But, then, there would be little reason to travel if the
dodging of untamed motorists were the chief peril the world over.
XXIX
There can be no dispute as to the justice of having named the chief
stepping-stone between Japan and the Philippines “Ilha Formosa.” Even
from the sea it is a beautiful island; no visitors, except those foolish
enough to content themselves with a journey along its tame,
railway-linked western flatlands, will be likely to forget in one brief
lifetime its magnificent interior. Once it has decided, not far inland,
to take to the clouds, Formosa rises very abruptly from the western
foot-hills, range after range of blue mountains, their tops most often
covered with clouds, the highest of them topped with snow in midwinter,
vying with one another in their excited upward climb until they
culminate in Niitakayama, known to the outside world as Mount Morrison.
This giant of the Japanese Empire rears its head, though rarely showing
it to the world below, more than thirteen thousand feet above the sea,
on which it can look down in almost any direction. Many of its neighbors
have an elevation of more than ten thousand feet. Then, as if their
ambition for climbing had suddenly subsided, the ranges drop
precipitously down to where the blue waters of the Pacific lap the
solitary crags beneath. The cliffs on the east coast of Formosa are
reputed to be the most headlong in the world, towering in places a sheer
six thousand feet from the water’s edge.
One extremely narrow valley, between this great central mass of
mountains and the smaller eastern coast range, stretches half the length
of the island, in its central portion, and along this the Japanese are
already completing a section of the government railways. This passes a
few plantations and links together some unimportant towns, but runs
mainly through semi-savage territory. The wild region to the north of it
presents a serious problem to the engineers charged with completely
surrounding Taiwan by rail. There are two trails by which the island can
be crossed, one at the southern end, and another, unsafe without a large
escort, nearly through the middle of it. Several hundred miles of
push-car tracks thrust their way inland in perhaps half a dozen places,
but none of them penetrate very deeply into the precipitous and savage
interior, doubly romantic because it is forbidden territory.
One journey well worth the making is that up Arisan, where great forests
of evergreen trees, some of which are believed to be fifteen centuries
old, are being exploited by means of an exceedingly steep little railway
that brings down mammoth logs for local building and for export. But
wherever the traveler strikes inland he cannot fail to be rewarded by
unusual scenic beauties, and sooner rather than later to run into the
true Formosans. If these wild men have a sense of humor, they surely
laugh at the world below, for they monopolize the invigorating climate
of the mountains, while the despised little people who claim to rule
over them, and, as far as the savages know, all the rest of the
effeminate human race which considers head-hunting too hardy a pastime
for its feeble nerves, must content themselves with the sea-level
plains, even in enervating midsummer. The Japanese forbid travelers to
visit these children of nature on the more or less sincere pretext that
they may lose their heads; the fame of the head-hunters themselves
proves a much more effective ban. It is conceivable that an experienced
and resourceful explorer might escape the net of Japanese police so
solicitous of his welfare, but nothing but good luck, and perhaps a
disarming temperament or a taking way with savages, could save him from
whatever the mountain-dwellers, who would be sure to pick him up soon
after he crossed the guard-line, might choose to do with him.
[Illustration: A typical house of the savages of Formosa, built in a
coast city as a lodging for those who can be induced to visit it]
[Illustration: The savages and head-hunters of the Formosan interior
build their homes of slate, sometimes filled in with slabs of wood and
other stone]
[Illustration: A semi-domesticated couple from the head-hunting tribes]
[Illustration: It is typical of wild tribes the world over that the
women do all the carrying and most of the other hard work]
The hand-cars, by which are moved freight and those few passengers whose
thighs or lack of time will not permit them to furnish their own
transportation, consist of a platform five feet square set on a
four-wheeled truck. For ordinary travelers a box or a bag thrown on this
as a seat completes the arrangements for a journey into the interior.
When a foreigner is captured, however, he has little choice but to
travel “first class,” which means that he rides on one of these same
hand-cars, surmounted by a superstructure of wicker or woven
bamboo-withes, like a sentry-box with a seat, at least trebling the
price of the trip. This has its advantages, though they are scarcely
worth the money. Unless there is another first-class passenger, which
seems rarely to happen, the distinguished victim has the conveyance to
himself. It calls for him as near his inn as the little railway track
will bring it, and at the hour he chooses to be ready; his pushers are a
bit above the average, thanks to the double incentive of a hope of tips
and the preference for the lighter work of passenger over freight
service. When he meets another car he may sit stolidly in his place,
while its lower-class passengers alight and their pushers lift it off
the track, providing it is not laden with a heavy cargo from the hills
that is even more immovable than a first-class passenger.
A single pusher trots one across the first dozen miles of plain, where
the scenes are approximately the same as along the steam
railway,—rice-fields, flooded or waving with ripening grain, according
to the season, water-buffaloes, some of them slowly and ponderously
performing their allotted labors, others leisurely grazing the scanty
grass of grave-mounds and paddy-dikes, probably with a solitary black
bird on their backs, or with a faded and somewhat tattered young
Formosan stretched out at full length, his head equally comfortable on
the neck or the rump of his phlegmatic beast. A village or a cluster of
shops appears now and then, some of them division-points at which the
traveler changes cars and crews—by having his superstructure set over
upon another hand-car propelled by a new pair of legs.
The pushers are all Formosans, quite like any other Chinese coolies in
outward appearance, except that they are better fed and less likely to
be raggedly clothed. But before long the traveler recently from China
will be struck by their taciturnity, their lack of Chinese cheerfulness,
as if they had led a lifetime of repression, or had underneath their
outer obedience a deadly hatred of all alien races, and not merely of
the one ruling over them, which makes them unwilling to enter into
conversation with foreigners beyond the few remarks necessitated by
their calling. In short, they differ from their Chinese fellows across
the channel just as alien-ruled peoples the world over differ from men
who consider themselves independent.
At length the dead level gives way to slopes growing gradually steeper,
with lesser descents between them, down which pusher and all coast at
pleasant speed. The hitherto straightforward track begins to twist and
wind in an effort to find the easiest ascents; there may come a long
bridge of piles and bamboo, with so swift a climb into some town across
the river that even a first-class passenger is expected to descend, and
will have time to explore the place before his baggage has been pushed
around the great circle by which the track mounts to it. Here two
pushers man the car to which his private cabin is transferred, for the
ascents will grow ever steeper, first over increasing foot-hills, then
into actual mountains, while for half-hours at a time only the utterly
dispassionate will fail to get out and walk.
Men and women working in couples push many of the freight-cars and
nearly all the work-trains one passes on the way. Until one is close
upon them it is all but impossible to distinguish one sex from the other
among these country people of lower Formosa, dressed almost exactly
alike, in a loose jacket-shirt, and cotton trousers reaching to the
calves, topped by a mushroom hat of leaves and bamboo splints. With
experience the eye learns that the slightly plumper, the bit less
angular workers, those who swing their hips as they walk and take a
trifle shorter steps, are the female of the species. Somehow one comes
in time to know them by instinct, whether knee-deep in the fields or
trotting in a row of coolies of mixed gender under undulating pole-borne
burdens. Yet one is never ready to wager any great odds on the question
until they are so close at hand that their often comely features and
their distinctly feminine forms leave no ground on which an opponent
would be willing to lay a stake. There is no downtrodden air about these
women, any more than among the country women of Japan. With their sturdy
bodies and uncrippled feet they are on physical equality with their men,
and why should they take a back seat for them? At times they do, but
only where feminine modesty requires it. Here is real domestic
companionship, each car-pusher with his wife as a team-mate, perhaps
with the rest of the family on her back to complete the picture.
Higher still begin the tea-fields, dense low bushes stretching in rather
closely planted rows over hills and ridges, which here and there show
evidences of recent reduction, probably by burning off the former
jungle, from wilderness to cultivation. Somewhere about here, too, or
just over the next high ridge yonder, one will begin to see scattered
members of the mountain tribes. This far down they look anything but
dangerous, rather too tame and over-friendly, in fact. The first one I
came upon was a tattooed old woman who greeted me from beside the track
like a long-absent brother, and had almost to be shaken off by force.
At the first camphor camp where I stopped for the night, in this case
quite a town, with a Japanese sergeant of police and several shops,
there were numbers of head-hunters who had more or less submitted to
civilization. Some of them wore Japanese garb, especially a few women,
who seemed to be keeping house for lonely men from Japan. From such
camphor stations jungle paths strike inland in hardly accessible places,
up slopes where civilized man would never expect to find a trail. These
are difficult for effete shod humanity to follow under the most
favorable conditions; when it rains, as it does often and generously in
the mountains of Formosa, they are almost impossible. But they lead
those who have the persistence and the prehensile capacity to climb them
through magnificent forests, adorned with splendid ferns as big as many
of our northern trees, to isolated clusters of huts that one recognizes
at a glance as the dwellings of “wild” men. In some place these low
shacks are built of rude slabs of wood; more often they are made of
slate, with a smaller hut on stilts near-by in which food is stored.
Probably the men cannot be trusted with food in the house itself while
their women are away working to grow more of it for them. Even as near
civilization as this one begins to run across youths dressed in a single
blanket-like garment, carrying bow and arrows, a huge knife in the half
of a section of bamboo as scabbard hanging at their thighs, who look
easily capable of taking the head of any unwary traveler who ventures
too far outside the protecting sphere of the Japanese.
XXX
The three principal mountain tribes of Formosa are in turn officially
subdivided, for convenience’ sake as much as for any ethnographic
reason, into nine groups, besides one semi-civilized tribe living under
ordinary district administration among the Formosan Chinese and Hakkas.
The latest census, taken partly, I suspect, by absent treatment,
estimates the savages at 131,609, and credits them with living in 670
villages, large and small. It should be borne in mind, however, that
three or four huts in some little, almost inaccessible clearing may
constitute a village in the wild man sense; they do not go in for
metropolises. I have my misgivings about the exactness of that final 9
in the population figures, and particularly of the precise 2999 men—with
2753 women—who are still reckoned as “uncontrolled.” Surely the
enumerators might have found, or “estimated,” just one more man and made
it a round number. However, there are few peoples more meticulous than
the Japanese, and they inform us that 47,015 of the mountaineers are
“under control and residing within administrative districts,” while
78,842 are “under control, but residing outside administrative
districts.” The wisest travelers will probably not take too seriously
the word “control” as applied to this last and latest group.
These tribes, who divide themselves into many clans, between which
fighting and even head-hunting may be legitimate, hold more than half
the island, even without rolling it out level, which would vastly
increase their area. Of the three main divisions, the ferocious Taiyals,
who tattoo themselves blue in the face, are the fiercest, the most
persistent, and the most successful head-hunters; and they hold
approximately the northern half of the wild territory. The others,
perhaps because man grows less energetic toward the south, are more or
less amenable to civilizing influences. Below the precarious trail
across almost the center of the island all except some small groups
about the foot of Niitakayama, who still occasionally perform barbarous
acts, are virtually domesticated; and to-day the Taiyals are the only
consistent head-hunters. With them head-hunting is the most important,
the most glorious thing in life. Their effete southern neighbors engage
mainly in agriculture, legitimate hunting, fishing, and cattle-raising;
but the southern half of the mountainous territory is poor, too rugged
to be arable in most places, yet even without any great amount of timber
except about Arisan and Mount Morrison.
The Ami, through the length of whose district runs the railway on the
precipitous east side of the island, are thought to be the most numerous
of the nine tribes; but as the chaotic territory of the aggressive and
powerful Taiyals has never been fully explored, it is impossible to be
dogmatic on this subject. There are a few groups in the heart of the
Taiyal region who have never come in contact with the outside world,
except by hearsay. But the Taiyal territory is very rich in forest
products; the valuable camphor-trees are probably still more numerous
and immense as one penetrates into the interior; there is said to be
gold—all of which will no doubt eventually be the undoing of these
sturdy children of the wilderness. For while the mere desire to make
good their claim of ruling over it might never lead even the aggressive
Japanese to complete the conquest of Taiwan, the world must have its
moth-balls and perfumes, and the camphor-tree grows too slowly to hope
that the laying out of camphor plantations by the foresighted Nipponese
will save the mountaineers of Formosa from destruction, whether in
warfare or by the slower but quite as fatal method of submitting to
civilization. Slowly but surely the effeminate non-head-hunting world is
pressing in upon them; yearly the guard-line which surrounds them is
shrinking.
For the savages are completely fenced in. The _aiyu-sen_, or guard-line,
is a cleared space, from fifty to a hundred feet wide, climbing over
hill and dale completely around the uncontrolled territory. It is
started by cutting a road along the crest of a mountain, then destroying
the vegetation on either side of this far enough back so that the guards
can see attacking savages in time to defend themselves. This system
dates back to the reign of Ch’ien-Lung, toward the middle of the
eighteenth century, when the Chinese paid tamed savages to protect them
against the others. Corruption grew up, as is inevitable in Chinese
affairs, until the settlers were forced to establish guard-lines at
their own expense, sometimes hiring the irregular troops commonly, and
often erroneously, known in China as “braves,” sometimes doing the
guarding themselves, turn and turn about. Similar things exist in many
parts of the anarchistic China of to-day. There was little and at times
no government supervision, and corruption increased. Those who became
chiefs of the guards protected their own property splendidly but had no
time to bother with that of others. Very little government guarding
remained when the Japanese took over the island. They began by
recognizing and paying the semi-public guards, but as soon as they had
put down the “Formosan rebels” in the lowlands they took over the
corralling of the savages themselves, and now all guards are government
employees, members of the police force.
To-day the guard-line is about three hundred miles long. It is
constantly being changed, as the Japanese conquer new territory in order
to take in more camphor-trees or to punish a district that has grown too
insolent to be endured, so that the savages are gradually but surely
having their holdings reduced. Not infrequently, thanks to the naïveté
of all savages, the Nipponese have reached an agreement with the wild
men as to the advancement or the “rectification” of the _aiyu-sen_;
sometimes they must fight for it.
This last resort is a hazardous undertaking. The abrupt condition of the
mountain fastnesses of the Taiyals in particular is beyond the mere
stay-at-home imagination to picture. There are sheer slopes cut with as
many as eight hundred steps along the guard-line, almost perpendicular
precipices of thousands of feet; sometimes it crosses great chasms by
precarious bridges—there is one suspension-bridge of rattan and wire
more than four hundred feet long. As water must be carried to the tops
of the hills, in sections of bamboo, as well as everything else to be
used by the expedition, the work is not only hard but dangerous, many
coolies having been killed in the past; and the carriers are rarely
volunteers. Hence there is a tithing system by which each village can be
made to supply its quota of workmen, though these are paid good Formosan
wages. Some of the tamer tribes can be made into baggage-carriers, and
there are not a few savages as guardsmen, mostly if not entirely from
the southern part of the island. The weather is as treacherous as the
savages; sudden mist, torrential rain, and what the Japanese at least
consider “bitter” cold, hamper the punitive expeditions. Yet the guards
along the _aiyu-sen_ are fighting somewhere more or less all the year
around.
Except for the commanders, in comparatively safe places, there are now
very few Japanese guardsmen; nearly all of them are Formosans,
island-born Chinese or tamed savages, who, at last report, were paid
from seven to fifteen yen a month, according to grade and length of
service, an allowance during punitive expeditions, and a hundred yen for
their grieving families if they were killed in line of duty. A favorite
scheme has always been, even before Japanese days, to get one savage
village to kill off another by putting a price on the heads taken, thus
making it possible for the skull-gatherers to kill two birds with one
stone, as it were. The Japanese will tell you that this has never been
government policy but that “individual policemen do it, strictly against
orders”—the same excuse we heard in Korea, and from our own pacifiers in
Haiti. Outspoken Nipponese confess that some of the outrageous acts of
the head-hunters, as when they rose one night not many years ago and
slew all the Japanese in a border district, are due to the misconduct of
the Japanese or Formosan guardsmen, particularly the world-wide and
age-old misdemeanor of “fooling with the women.”
As a general rule, given the difference in temperament between the two
divisions, suppression is the policy toward the fierce northern tribes
and development toward the more gentle southerners, though there are
mixtures of the two treatments. The Taiyals are treacherous, like all
true savages, as well as ferocious and brave. These tattooed savages of
the north had long experience with Chinese authorities before the
Japanese came; hence they are adepts at chicanery. They make an
agreement with the Japanese to let them into a new district, and then
attack their camphor-stills, perhaps destroying the whole camp, cottages
and all. When they have been generously filled with _sake_ at some
“savage-station” along the guard-line they have often turned upon their
“benefactors” and carried their heads home as souvenirs of the festive
occasion. There have been some real North American Indian massacres;
they have been known to destroy entire Formosan villages; one battle
with the Taiyals cost 272 casualties among the Japanese and their
assistants—and in savage warfare the dead are far more numerous than the
groaning. When these little misunderstandings become acute, the Japanese
have two ways of clearing them up,—by sending out a punitive expedition
or by blockading the savages, cutting off their right to barter with the
outside world until they come to terms. By this latter method they have
been made to rebuild camphor-stills and cottages, the whole camp
complete.
At very frequent intervals along the _aiyu-sen_ there are gates, a group
of police buildings, and three or four guards. Every fourth or fifth of
these is a “superintendent’s station,” with a Japanese commander, a
doctor, perhaps another official or two. An inspector is in charge of
each group of four or five of these superintendencies; there is, of
course, a telephone system around the entire guard-line. It is only at
these superintendents’ stations that the savages are allowed to barter
with the outside world, and that barter is only permitted on condition
that they obey the instructions of the authorities, furnish reports on
various tribal affairs, and so on. Except for armed expeditions against
them, which are costly in money and often in lives, the only effective
punishment which the Japanese can mete out to naughty savages is to take
away their right to barter their forest products and game for the things
they covet or require. If they are good little children their overlords
give them agricultural implements, seeds, medicine, medical treatment,
and in some cases even allow them guns and ammunition. Neither savages
nor those who live outside the guard-line are allowed to pass it without
a special permit. Even against wild men with slight requirements and
plenty of natural resources, who ought to be able to supply themselves
everything they need, this economic pressure is often sufficient to make
them behave. When it is not, there is nothing to do but “lose face” or
fight.
Head-hunting, like many other sports, is double-edged, and the savages
have long been familiar with the thought of losing their own skulls.
Hence they are very formidable enemies. The Japanese have constructed
bullet-proof, loopholed forts, barbed-wire entanglements, mines, and
wire fences, the latter in some places locally electrified by harnessing
mountain streams; hand-grenades, sometimes mountain- and field-guns, are
used; on the east coast war-ships have occasionally been called upon to
subdue belligerent villages. The electric barriers are widely notorious,
but even those residents not very friendly to the Japanese admit that
they use them to protect themselves, not in the hope of exterminating
the savages whom they have not yet succeeded in subjugating. Besides,
the savages are nobody’s fools. Perhaps one or two of them electrocuted
themselves when the scheme was first introduced, more than a decade ago,
but the burnt child of nature also learns to avoid the fire. Now they
dig holes under the electrified fence, or build bamboo stiles over
it—they are expert bridge-builders, as the many suspension-bridges of
rattan and bamboo which they have thrown across great mountain chasms
and torrential gorges testify—and men in need of heads come over or
under the barrier in the dead of night, or at some momentarily unguarded
spot, armed with rifles, with which they are suspiciously well supplied,
though spears, long curved machete-like knives, and slender bows and
arrows are perhaps more general, and lie in ambush for victims.
But it may be that a more modern method, one that has proved effective
in many another land, will do away with the necessity of using armed
force to complete the conquest of Formosa: drink is doing for the
savages almost as fast as it is for those Americans who cannot bring
themselves to accept prohibition. Among the Taiyals also wood-alcohol is
said to be almost as free as air—except in price and after-effects. It
is rumored that the Japanese are not insisting on complete abstinence in
the mountains, and it would be more or less human if they look not too
severely upon a certain amount of head-hunting among the tribes
themselves, so long as they respect the taboo on those outside the
guard-line. For the thinner the population the sooner the mountainous
territory will be subdued and the greater the amount of it that can be
exploited. The holders of Taiwan promise to set aside reservations for
the savages as they take in more of their estate, and probably on the
whole they are handling the situation as fairly and humanely and
efficiently as we would; as we have, for instance, in Santo Domingo or
the Philippines.
XXXI
There are distinct evidences of blood-relationship between the savages
of Taiwan and the inhabitants of the southern islands of Japan proper.
Japanese who have lived long in Formosa confess that they cannot tell a
head-hunter from one of their own people merely by his features. To
Westerners the mountaineers look almost exactly Japanese, except that
the eyes seem a bit more liquid, a trifle wider open, with that wild
something in them of untamed animals which distinguishes the genuine
savage the world over. Not merely do their features suggest the same
origin as their would-be rulers; they are of about the same size and
build, perhaps a bit larger, thanks to their more open-air life. It is
coming to be believed by many that they and the Japanese are both Malay
tribes which history has driven in different directions. Possibly they
are the same people, who fought their way up from the south, this branch
getting side-tracked and lost among the mountain fastnesses of Formosa
and going, or remaining, wild, while the head-hunting propensities of
the other branch turned to more modern methods. It is a captivating
thought, and would make the “Jap man’s burden” all the more
justified—merely the task of reclaiming his own lost brethren.
[Illustration: Young braves of a wild Formosan tribe, whom he who cares
to keep his head might do well to avoid meeting far from the protecting
Japanese overlords]
[Illustration: A Japanized woman from the mountain-dwelling tribes of
Formosa]
[Illustration: One might not think to look at her that her father
probably had a dozen or more trophies in his slate-built skull-cupboard]
Certainly I had to look twice to recognize that the boys in a frontier
school at one of the advance stations in Taiyal-land, dressed as they
were in uniform kimonos of black and white plaid, were not what they
seemed at first sight, but the sons of men who were recently, and in
some cases probably still are, hunting the heads of their neighbors. In
fact, there was one man among the two score boys who had the right to
wear the hawk-feather of the successful hunter, a sturdy fellow of
thirty, still with that peculiar wild-animal look in his eyes, who was
in the same primary class as his son of six. It struck me that it would
be a more thankful job to try to teach the son, an impression in which
the Japanese teacher, in his pedagogue-gendarme uniform, bore me out.
In the camphor-camps and on the plantations where they accept employment
as the first step toward giving up their chief tribal pastime, the
savages work hard and are docile; those at least who are caught young
learn moderately well in school, and they are on the whole not bad
neighbors. In fact, we should get over the strange notion that because a
man has the hobby of collecting the skulls of his fellows rather than
postage-stamps or “old masters” he cannot also be in many ways quite an
agreeable individual. I know many a man purporting to be civilized with
whom I would much less rather go off on a camping-trip than with the
fiercest head-hunter I have ever seen—once we got on a proper footing as
to the inflated value I put on my own top-piece. It is said that doctors
and teachers can go safely anywhere among them, if they carry proper and
conspicuous credentials, and provided the Japanese will let them. The
visitor who gets permission from, or evades, the government guards and
goes at once to the chief of the tribe, makes himself popular by petting
the children, treating the sick, and other forms of courtesy, until he
has convinced his hosts that he is harmless, has rather a good chance of
bringing his head back to civilization on his shoulders. Yet it is well
not to gamble too recklessly. Though I have no illusions as to the
utility of that portion of my anatomy about the neck, I several times
had the feeling in Formosa that sturdy young men with disconcertingly
piercing eyes and distressingly large knives at their waists were gazing
at it with at least mild covetousness. Yet this may have been merely the
result of a guilty conscience.
In short, they are not bad fellows, once one can overlook their little
idiosyncrasy of gathering skulls that are not yet ripe for the
garnering. They make good chauffeurs, for instance; certainly we all
know chauffeurs who would make good head-hunters, and others whom we
would be delighted to turn over to the innermost tribes of Formosa. I
have already mentioned how no small number of these naïve children of
the mountains have degenerated into rickshaw-runners, though I doubt
whether they sprint between the shafts with anything like the vim that
they did in pursuing or saving a head. Nor should we be too hard on
them; for it is the old, old story,—the women are the cause of all the
trouble. It seems that no self-respecting mountain girl will marry a
youth who has not proved his male prowess by taking a head; and when
life without a companion becomes too miserable to be endured there is
nothing for the most kind-hearted young Taiyal to do but to dig or
bridge his way over the electric barrier, bringing his weapons and his
provisions with him, and wander up and down the border, perhaps for
weeks, until the chance comes to bring home proof of his manhood. True,
a human head is required on every other important occasion in savage
life. A lad not only cannot win a bride but he cannot join the adults in
the tribal “club-house” until he has performed this manly feat; the
savages must have new skulls for the seed festival each autumn, for
without them their gods would not give them good luck during the year to
follow; they need them whenever they hold any religious rite or perform
any of the ceremonies with which life is marked; when a dispute occurs
between members of a tribe the decision goes to the one who first gets a
head; the man with the most trophies in his “skull-shelf” becomes
automatically the chief of his tribe. They have come to consider the
custom indispensable to their existence, just as we do clothing or
automobiles. Yet who can say that if the women did not force them to
make that first start in the evil habit they would ever succumb to it on
the later and less important occasions in life?
What a pity, too, that transportation is so costly and communication
between kindred souls on opposite sides of the earth so difficult!
Otherwise the head-hunters of Formosa might share the same heads with
their brethren in the habit, the _jívaros_ of the upper Amazon, and
either reduce by half the consumption of raw materials or double the
finished product. For whereas the _jívaros_ remove all the bones and
shrink the rest of the head down to the size of an orange, the Formosans
care nothing for the flesh or the most comely face but prize only the
bare, freshly boiled skulls. These are placed before the home of the
proud hunter, upon or in a “skull-shelf,” sometimes a mere straight
counter of bamboo, more often a cupboard made of slate, with a
pigeonhole for each skull, quite like our post-office boxes, so that in
calling upon your head-hunting friend you can tell his importance in the
Taiyal scheme of things just as easily as one of our own countrymen can
see whether or not there is any mail for him at last, without hindering
the postmaster from weighing out sugar or cutting up plug tobacco.
But life has become bitter and drab indeed among some of the tribes of
Formosa, especially near the guard-line, where they are so hard pressed
by unkindly civilization that they have come perforce to be satisfied
with monkey-skulls! I am not in a position to state what kind of wives
these poor degenerates get, but the imagination easily pictures the old
men of the tribe grumbling about the worthlessness of the new generation
and telling the “club-house” that things were not like this in the good
old days when men were men. The Japanese assert that their police or
their troops have at one time or another been through virtually all the
savage territory, in such force as was necessary, and that they have
destroyed most of the “skull-shelves.” Thus monuments of art always
suffer before the ruthless military conqueror! But the more genuine of
the savages insist on starting new collections, and now and then it is
the Japanese themselves who contribute trophies with which they have
parted with the most poignant regret. The different tribes who still
honor the ways of their forefathers continue to exchange heads between
themselves; within the past year there are known to have been at least
three Formosan Chinese heads taken, though the Japanese claim to have
passed this twelvemonth without any such physical loss of face. There is
no record of the savages of Formosa ever having taken a Caucasian head.
It may be that they have heard rumors of recent doings in the Western
world and have decided that such skulls cannot be of any use to them;
or, again, the records may be incomplete, for this is one of the
unkindnesses of man toward man which the victim very rarely has the face
to report to the police.
XXXII
The savages of Taiwan raise excellent tobacco, profoundly scorning the
Japanese Government Tobacco Monopoly Bureau; they make, and both sexes
smoke, bamboo-root pipes, not of the very long, one-piece type so common
among the Chinese, but much like our corn-cob, the bowl upright on a
small stem. Most of them chew betel-“nut.” They are fond of peanuts,
covering the floors of their “club-houses” with the shells; they grow
some rice and more potatoes, and have a way of preserving the tubers for
long periods. Their low houses are thatched but usually built of slabs
of slate, laid flat, with carved beams under the eaves and, out in
front, a wide veranda, or family club-house, floored with slate or flat
stones, very much like the _paepae_ of the South Seas. Their kitchen
utensils are crude, including some shallow iron kettles, such as are
widely used by the Chinese, and they pound their rice or millet with a
wooden pestle in log-made mortars. Furniture is one of the least serious
of their problems, so long as the family “skull-shelf” is kept in good
condition. Children are carried papoose-fashion, and the bearing of
other burdens, also almost exclusively the privilege of the women, is
done on the back, with a “tump-line” or head-strap across the forehead,
like our North American Indians and so many other primitives throughout
the globe. In fact, it is astonishing how many customs are strikingly
alike among wild people of opposite sides of the earth; at times they
seem almost as unoriginal as their civilized brethren.
Even the women of the domesticated Taiyal head-hunters who hang
about the camphor-camps have their faces tattooed in blue, with two
broad bands in long diagonal lines, like symmetrical cat-scratches,
from the corners of the mouth and nose to where they disappear in
the hair near the ears. This makes them look astonishingly like the
blue-mustache-wearing Ainu women at the other end of the Japanese
Empire, though there is probably no relationship except savagery
between the two races. Sometimes there are short marks of tattooing
on the chin, and usually a column of short horizontal lines down the
middle of the forehead. The men and the older boys have a narrow
strip of horizontal blue lines from the hair to the bridge of the
nose, while there are many individual and tribal variations on the
general custom of making pictorial supplements of their faces. When
the time comes that the youth or girl must be tattooed he or she is
laid out on the ground, or on a reed mat, and experts, usually old
women, strike the blue stuff in with a kind of coldchisel and
hammer. The victim is said never to cry out, but the mother or some
other kind friend generally volunteers to sit on him during the
ceremony.
The tribesmen wear plenty of clothing, which they make themselves; for,
unlike that portion of Formosa which the wild men leave to the weaklings
of civilization, it is by no means always midsummer in the mountains.
The men and the boys in most cases wear a single garment from shoulders
to loins; on cold and rainy days they wrap themselves in a rough-woven
blanket that seems to go entirely around them, like the proverbial
barrel of the clothesless bather. Those who have taken a head wear a
hawk-feather in the top of their own, which is sometimes covered with a
cross between a hat and a cap but is more commonly bare, their long hair
done up in various more or less fantastic forms of coiffure, according
to the tribe, individual vanity, and the proximity of festival-time. The
women, including those who come into the camphor-camps, dress in a loose
kind of skirt and a cloak-waist open under the arms, showing the outer
sides of their breasts. Like all habitual mountain-climbers, unburdened
with shoes, both sexes have overgrown and widely separated great toes.
Most Taiyal belles sport necklaces of what seem to be human teeth. Men
and women alike have various ideas of ear-adornment, such as bamboo
tubes thrust through the pierced and stretched lobes, and more or less
universally deck themselves out in other wild-man forms of ornament.
Some of the chiefs and their wives are very resplendent in their court
regalia.
The plains to the south of the magnificent Taiyal territory are less
inducive to independence of spirit, and both land and people peter out
in interest, the far southerners becoming mere farmers, with many
schools now among them. Some become assistant policemen and even rise to
the height of assistant school-teachers, though they must teach only in
the Japanese language and are considered civilized only in so far as
they take on Japanese manners and point of view. There are still some
small wild tribes scattered through the southern half of the island,
but, in the main, pacification has ended there and development begun.
The Paiwan of the extreme south, a more pleasant-looking people than
most of the others, make crudely carved stone images, vaguely resembling
totem-poles. They cradle their children by hanging them in baskets to
vine-ropes swinging from the branch of a tree. Some of them have so far
deserted their old ways as to build split-bamboo houses somewhat like
those of the Japanese, and after a certain schooling are prone to mix
their own garb with that of their conquerors. They make good guardsmen,
but they, too, had until quite recently their “skull-shelves,” of the
pigeonhole variety, and they still have their club-houses, commonly
built high above the ground on bamboo scaffolding.
Over on Botel-Tobago, one of the many small islands off the coast of
Formosa, there is an extremely primitive race called the Yami. But there
must somewhere be an end to everything, and I beg to be excused the
arduous sea-going labor of visiting the Pescadores, the Kuriles,
far-flung Yap, and the Marshall Islands, so recently forced to give
allegiance to the divine mikado, merely to round out this hasty journey
through some of the nooks and corners of the Japanese Empire.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
Page Changed from Changed to
136 vessel of the Satsuma lord. It vassal of the Satsuma lord. It
was by such outspoken was by such outspoken
● Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
● Images without captions use HTML alt text.
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