The Japs at Home

Front matter

THE JAPS AT HOME BY. TSE SAME AUTHOJl. Second Edition. ON THE CARS AND OFF; being the Journal of a Pilgriinagu along the Queen'9 Highway to the East, from Halifax in Nova Scotia to Victoria in Vancouver's Island. Beautifully Illustrated. WARD, LOCK & BOWDEX, Ltd. CONTENTS. THE JAPS AT HOME. CHAP. pAGE I. Street Life in Yokohama 1 II. In Yokohama, a Week Later .... 13 III. The Temples of Shiba 22 IV. The Maple Club and its Dancing Girls - 31 V. Christmas Day in Yokohama - - - 40 VI. New Year's Eve in Japan - - . - 43 VII. The New Year Festival in Japan ... 49 VIII. Japanese Firemen 71 IX. Japanese Wrestling 76 X. Seeing the Giant Feed 84 XI. Sir Edwin Arnold at Home in Japan - - 89 XII. The Plum Trees of the Sleeping Dragon - 102 XIII. At Nagasaki 112 XIV. Japanese Women 121 XV. What TnE Japanese themselves think of Women 129 XVI.

Curio Shops and Curio Stalls - . - 138 XVII. At a Japanese Funeral 151 XVIII. Japanese Novels 156 XIX. The Opening of the Japanese Exhibition at Tokyo (Ueno) 165 XX. The Martyrdom of a Missionary - . . 174 XXI. To Kobe, for the Mikado's Naval Kevievv - 178 XXII. Kyoto during the English Royal Visit - - CONTENTS. CHAP. PAGE XXIII. Down the Rapids with the Duke of Connaught 197 XXIV. Danjuro and the Japanese Theatre - - 205 XXV. Tea Houses and Tea Gardens - - - 214 XXVI. The Golden Shrines of Nikko - • - 222 XXVII. " English as She is Spoke " in Japan - - 235 XXVIII. Theatres and Variety Shows in Japan - - 243 XXIX. A Nation at Play 249 XXX. Publishing a Book in Japan .... 258 XXXI. An Artist's Home in Japan .... 267 XXXII. Shaking off the Dust 271 BITS OF CHINA I. Shanghai 279 II. Shanghai — The Native City .... 290 III.

Hong Kong - 300 IV. Hong Kong in Race Week .... 310 V. Canton -----... 320 VI. Macao, the Exile Home of Camoens - - 333 VII. The Chinaman Abroad THE JAPS AT HOME FIFTH EDITION : TO WHICH ARE ADDED FOR THE FIRST TIME SOME BITS OF CHINA. HY DOUGLAS SLADEN, AUTHOR OF "ON THE CARS AND OFF," etc. WITH a Collotype portrait of tbe author, ANU ©nc IbunOreO Jllustrations. LONDON : WARD, LOCK & HOWDEN, LIMITED WARWICK HOUSE, SALISBURY SQUARE, E.C. NEW YORK AND MELBOURNE. 1895. [All rights reserved.] this book is BY SPECIAL PERMISSION ©ctucatet* to il.K.II. TIIE DUKE OF COXNAUGUIT AND STR \T1IKAKN, K.U.; TWO CHAPTERS IN WHOSE VISIT TO JAPAN TUK Al'TllciK HAS THE PLEASURE OK GIVING. IN THE KOLLOWING PAGES. NOTE The cover represents a geisha {singing girl) returning by night, in her riksha, along the banks of the Sumida-gawa, the river of Tokyo.

Preface

. This volume contains all that was in the first four editions of " The Japs at Home," with the addition of seven chapters of " Bits of China," picked up during a brief sojourn among the Celestials. These chapters are illustrated with numerous pictures by a brilliant Japanese artist. In my former Preface I wrote : "In my months of wandering about the streets and lanes of Japan, I kodaked with camera and pen a few phases of Japanese life, which I here present that you may see the Japs at home as I saw them. " These chapters have perhaps a chance of being fresh, for they were composed, not by the midnight oil, but by the midday sun — literally. " These notes, forming a horary rather than a diary, constitute the subject matter of my book, which pretends no more than to give my impressions of Japan and the Japs.

I have not wittingly asserted anything which is not a fact, and when I make an unsupported assertion only state it as my impression. The sojourner among a secretive people cannot easily do more. Preface. " I have also, as was natural for an impressionist, written for the most part in the lighter vein, but ridentem dicere verum quid vetat." To this I must add that though in " The Japs at Home " I have given as faithful a picture as I could of Japan as it was before the war, I cannot allow this, the first edition published since, to pass without confessing that if I were writing the book now I should write it from a much more serious standpoint. The valour, extraordinary ability, and eivilizedness with which the Japanese carried on the war against their gigantic rival, and the unwarranted coercion by two of the first-class Powers to which they have had to submit, make me regret that I did not devote my book to an advocate's presentment of the greatness of Japan instead of treating the country from the point of view of the pleasure-pilgrim. DOUGLAS SLADEN. Authors' Club.

Chapter I. Strkkt Like In Yokohama

Yokohama, December 1st. THE first spare moment off shipboard one jumps into a "jinrikisha" to go round the Japanese town. There is a considerable latitude in the spelling of the word, the above being that adopted by the guild of jinrikisha men on their tariff card ; but for brevity I shall often use the shortest form yet attained by the word — riksha. The prices charged by the jinrikys, or kurumayas, are rather shocking to the trades union estimate of the value of labour. You can drive an hour in a riksha drawn by one man for sevenpence-halfpenny, and he will wait an hour for twopence-halfpenny. In snowy or stormy weather he may claim 50 per cent, extra. If you prefer to hire by distance, and enjoy the privilege of having been born a Japanese, you can go half a mile for three-halfpence and a mile for threepence, though it must be admitted that no properly constituted riksha boy would take such a pittance from a European.

On the other hand, the Japanese currency is so much depreciated that you are only paying 75 to 80 per cent, of the nominal price ; and it is only in demoralised places like Yokohama that the riksha guilds venture to charge such high prices. Even in Nagasaki, Europeans who know their way about can get a riksha for a whole day at a fraction under eighteenpence, and a Japanese, in country towns which are uncorrupted by foreigners, would not pay more than a shilling a day. I wish I had kept one of these riksha guild tariff cards. B They are fine specimens of " English as she is spoke " in Japan. One soon whirls past the dwarf avenue of typical winter flowering Japanese trees, which divide Negeshiyama, the European town, from Shighio, the native town, and a minute or two afterwards is in the Benten Dori, one of the two native streets in which Europeans do most of their shojDping, the Honcho Dori being the principal.

In Japan Americans are always reckoned as Europeans, and all the Western nations together frequently regarded as English. Before we went very far down this street, on this memorable first afternoon in Japan, we came upon a human water-cart, who apparently does duty in Japan for the perforated ship's boiler dear to bumbledom in London. His apparatus consists only of two long cylindrical wooden pails, suspended from ★ STAR HOUSE * BUMBOAT To/aWhnbier |h /leals dt dll dourer BRA:s)r^|N £», hL [Onoi.ocko Jcf)iiMO No I fel 4>^ /ASit SIGN OVER A JAPANESE PUBLIC-HOUSE. the flat shoulder rod acclimatised in Australia by the Chinese, and provided each with a long spigot plugging up a hole in the bottom. When he is ready, he pulls up this plug stick, and the water gushes out. I kodaked him : he evidently understood photography, for his face betrayed an anxiety to be equal to the honour.

One has not to go far in Japanese-town to come across some variation of English. "Curio-dealers" may possibly have observed a vacillation in U's and N'sin their patronesses' letters. The Star Hotel, by "Bumboat Tom," is evidently considered an irresistible attraction to the Anglo-Saxon sailor, while Brantwein is added in a corner to include the balance of the Gothic race. And one has not to go far for a specimen of English as what Max Miiller calls an agglutinative language — " Nipponekidemugaiseya, railwaysteamships, cointhings'dealtt'here " this last all in one word. One dealer oilers his European patrons — DEALER AND MANUFACTURER OF TORTOIES PLU WORK LAGUER WARE AUD CUIOS And this is an hotel sign — MOON HOUSE Wines and Liguors ul im COFFEE UND THE REST A URAN A B. MISAWA And now, if Max O'Rell gauges rightly the stage at which newspapers expect one to form an estimate of a country, as I have just begun to go down the first Japanese street, I suppose I ought to " size up " Japan.

Japan is, after all, Japanese. Every one you meet does not speak English, and the coolies, at any rate, do not wear " boxer " hats, though there is a marked inclination, in the Japs of very humble surroundings, to combine the English man's hat and boots with a Japanese costume, a white " boxer " of the Noah's Ark pattern being the favourite, rain or shine. With the exception of European hats and coarse European shoes, the lower order of Japanese for the most part adheres to the national garb ; and the ladies of the higher classes are rapidly returning to it. I find Japan much odder than the shoemakers' bazaar at Athens, funnier even than the great bazaar in Constantinople — the Turk is so preternaturally grave ; and one does not wish him to be anything else, for he only laughs when he is angry or contemptuous.

Japan is perhaps more characteristic and queerer than Ceylon, but Ceylon has the advantage in colour. Whatever THE AUTHOR IN JAPAN. its woods in spring and the lacquer of its temples may be, Japanese streets are neutral-tinted. One does not get the glorious reds and greens of the old tiled roofs and broad plantain leaves of Colombo, nor even the bright blues of China. I think Japan might be almost disappointing if it were not for the Henry-Irving-in- Hamlet legs of the coolies. With their picturesque tunics and spinet legs, they look as if they had been resurrected from the pictures of Perugino or Pin turicchio. They are varlets, slippered loons, as arrant as ever came out of the Middle Ages : they make the whole place mediæval. In fact, I doubt if one could give an Englishman a better idea of unadulterated Japan than by recommending him to go to the National Gallery and study the fifteenth century pictures, or to recall the old-fashioned booths repro duced in the pasteboard "Old London" at South Kensington, with their open fronts and pillbox insides, their grotesque wares and overgrown grotesque signs, their beetling roofs and projecting timbers.

Their puniness to modern ideas, and their utter picturesqueness are parodied by the thousand in Tokyo and Yokohama. And the jerkins and trunk hose are there to match, not to mention quite a goodly number of bow and-arrow shops, and suits of armour exposed for the curio hunter. One of the first things which struck me in the native town was the resemblance between life in Japan and life in Italy. The Japanese are the Italians, as the Chinese are the Germans, of the East. In Shighio one can see the double of the poor Florentine, wrapped in his round cloak, who stands sunning himself on the Lung' Arno, because he is too poor to have even a scaldino at home. I have already seen almost the identical cloak in a thick winter kimono of wool, or chocolate-coloured leather. The scaldino, the charcoal finger-brasier, which is the sole comfort of the poor Italian, has its exact counterpart in the more expensive hibachi ; the rag and bone and old metal shops of the Mercato Vecchio and its purlieus are first cousins to the humbler curio shops of Japan ; and the masses present the same curious contrast of penurious economy with shift lessness.

They, too, are a laughing, light-hearted people, feeling life of so little worth or prospect that death has no terrors. They, too, to the very lowest, are Nature's gentlemen in their manners, but treacherous, revengeful, and shifty in their bargains. They, too, are born artists, and have all the indolence of the artistic temperament so strongly that, without feudal influences, they produce nothing great as they did in the old days. The poor rather remind one of the Italian poor in appearance — clothes apart. And though their languages have no connection whatever, philologically, the same liquid note belongs to the genius ol both. Such words as Tokio, Kioto, Yokohama, Nara, Hako date, would sound as natural under the blue winter sky of windy Tuscany as under the clear December skies of blusterous Japan.

The Japanese, to the very lowest, have charming manners — a polish like their incomparable lacquer, and said by old European residents to be no deeper, though as difficult to chip through. Those who have had business dealings with both nations infinitely prefer the Chinese to the Japanese. The Chinese nibble, but they never repudiate. According to the English merchants in Yokohama, the Japanese gives an order, and when it is completed repudiates it if he has any object in doing so. It is hard to pin a Japanese down in a bargain. He will never commit himself, and woe be to you if you go on trust, so say the oldest residents. A Chinaman's word is good enough, though the poor John's fingers are hght. The Japanese does you wholesale, so says the merchant, and so says the sea captain, and so says the Press in the privacy of hotel bars and crowded streets.

(They only have to hold their tongues on paper.) In fact, their good-natured account of the Japs' way of doing business reminds me of an Oxford friend who was being "hauled" by the College Dean for some breach of academic rules. He, of course, had some perfectly glib and natural explanation. He was never taken aback. " No, Mr. J.," said the Dean triumphantly, " that won't do this time ; you told me the exact opposite last term." "I know I did," was the unabashed reply, "but that was a lie." I knew that that man would prosper. At the present moment he is an editor of a great London newspaper, and I expect before many years to see him a shining light in the British Parliament — of course in the ranks of the party of respect ability. There are odd sights at every corner in Japan. His Majesty's mail is carried by postmen in blue serge bicycle club costumes, with knee breeches and white cotton gloves, but frequently no shoes or stockings.

To make up for this, they invariably wear solar topees on their heads, though the Japanese do not use sun strokes. But the queerest crew I have seen for many a day are parading about in Lincoln-green togas and limpet-shaped hats that look like extinguishers. I ask my jinrikisha man, who prides himself upon his English, who they are. He answers in his terse way, for he deals in only one part of speech — nouns — " church people," and I have to be contented. They look like a lot of king crabs. We pass a small temple, but I will not pause to describe it, as there is sure to be an epidemic of temples in subsequent chapters. The mention of church people and temples reminds me that it is Sunday. The Jap even keeps Sunday in a way. There are more people idle than on other days, and the upper class Japanese make a holiday of it.

So do many of the Chinese, who go up to Tokyo by rail (second class, not third), CHURCH TEOPLE. gorgeously attired in apple-green and sky-blue brocades and white silk stockings, smoking cigars of the largest size. The Japs observe Sunday as they wear a European hat, because it stamps them as a superior class. They would keep the Jews' Sabbath, too, if it was " smart " enough. It isn't due to the missionaries, for whom they have the most undisguised contempt. The well-bred Japanese shudder to think of missionaries, while the poorer class do not keep the Christian Sunday at all, but go on trading as usual, though they may possibly feel grateful for a day on which Christian shops are shut, and Christian buyers driven to the counter of the unbeliever (as we are literally, in jinrikishas, to-day).

Even odder than the postman is the keysmith, with a beautiful brass-bound cabinet containing his tools, fringed with a regular pawn-shop of old keys. His cabinet has delightful little drawers. Every specimen of the Japanese cabinet-maker's work has these drawers in all sorts of out-of the-way places, which fly open and close in the most un expected manner. These tool cabinets, especially those which are made by workers for their own use, are veritable works of art, and seldom obtainable by foreigners. None of the men look as if they wore anything but hose on their legs, which are far more suggestive of a Christian's legs before he puts on his trousers than after. The Benten Dori, though a fair street to shop in, is not a very interesting one for native life. It is desperately anxious to be European in its clientele, though owned ex clusively by Japanese.

So it has a P/V/eow-English (is not this very word a corruption of TJtmwess-English ?) signboard over every door, and asks Christians a Jewish rate of profit. But to-day an ancient native, quite a Japanese Seneca, with a shaven head and wrinkled cheek, and a neglige Roman senatorial dress, has strayed in, and is jesting gravely with a friend. We stop to take a sun picture of him (to this day I remember the dreary Latin hexameter poem I had to write when I was at Cheltenham, on "Photography," under the classical alias of Sol Pictor), and then say to the jinrikisha man : — " You go better street : more Japanee." He rattles us off at a hand gallop (and there is a good deal of rattle in a galloping riksha) to the street where most of the native theatres are. I won't describe them now ; there is sure to be an epidemic of theatres, too, in subsequent chapters.

This street is also fuller of native life than any other, for here they do their lounging. All along the street, carrying funny little Jap babies in hoods upon their backs, are big sisters or young mothers — one can never be very sure which, in Japan — for the Japanese mature like rabbits, and don't look grown up until they are grandparents. One hardly ever sees a grey-headed man in Japan. It is such a queer, contradictory, upside down sort of country, that very likely producing a moustache is a mark of middle age, and a full beard a sign that one is approaching the term of man. The Japanese are no more hostile to the idea of " bustle " than their so-called more civilised sisters but lately were. I notice a very fine one on a woman washing the steps of her dwelling, and that dwelling only the humblest type of Japanese shop, with its tiny open front, and its almost total absence of stock, veiled by paper slides and banners of dark blue ship's canvas, ornamented in white with cabalistic designs which may be letters of the alphabet.

If she were to turn round I should probably be confronted with a row of jet black teeth ; for the Japanese husband, who is jealous, considers it his only safeguard to render his wife repulsive to other men by making her mouth a Gehenna. Close by they are building a house (which will presumably be " somebody's" house) of black mud, on a very airy frame work. The beaver makes a better job of it ; but, on the one hand, he does not expect his handiwork to be upset by an earthquake any day, and, on the other, he does expect it to keep out the elements. Besides, it must be necessary to build things cheaply in Japan. I can't form the wildest guess as to what the poor Japanese lives on. There are forty millions, and one can gauge the rate of wages by the fact that one can, as I have already said, go half a mile in a riksha for three-halfpence, and buy a cabinet three feet high with half a dozen drawers and two sets of folding doors, for a couple of shillings !

Yet every one is dressed well, and every one seems able to afford to pass a whole day at the theatre when he chooses, and to spend threepence-three-farthings on doing it, tco. And all the business done is in the pettiest sums, and not too often at that. I give it up as to how they make their living, but the old resident growls out: "Make their living, and a jolly good living, too, the scoundrels! You've no idea how well off they are." Which I am free to admit. For vegetables, the poorer classes hover between the seaweed stall and the radish-hawker. Other forms of green grocery are included in the business, but quite under a bushel compared to this mammoth radish — the daikon. The Japanese are very fond of it, but the Europeans of course pronounce it rank, as they would anything that was at once large and cheap, and relished by the natives.

The loads these poor fellows will carry on their shoulders are astonishing. I bought a palm tree when I got back to the hotel, four or five feet high, in a pot of earth a foot and a half square, which the hotel boots could hardly carry upstairs. The flower-seller was carrying two of these, and a camellia and half a dozen other large flowers to boot. For one of these enormous shrubs, in quite a handsome fancy wooden pot, I gave him only half-a-crown ; and only sixpence for the camellia. And I suspect that the hotel guide made him pay a pretty good brokerage out of this. The odd Jap lanterns are a great industry in the streets, The boys who paint them are hardly bigger than English babies; but then, infants are very precocious in Japan. Every five minutes you meet some queer little slip of mortality, with its little arms tucked, in characteristic Japanese fashion, each up its own sleeve, and with its thoughts devoted to the nation (or perhaps marriage).

How unwilling we are to turn our human horses' heads towards home. We feel as if we could stay out all night in this new earth (which has a very hazy idea, if any, of any heaven, new or otherwise). It looks even more like a willow pattern plate than it did from the deck of the ship. The Japanese seem to have borrowed everything. We know that they borrowed one kind of pottery from Corea and another from China, both now conquered and centuries behind them ; that they borrow every conceivable article from the civilisation of the West ; that they borrowed then very alphabet from China. It seems as if they had borrowed their scenery, too, from China. The very fish hawkers carry out the national idea, by borrowing a couple of yen (dollars) one morning to buy a load of fish, which they have to pay back the next with the inconsiderable interest of twenty-five sen (cents) — about 5000 per cent, per annum.

However, the coolies at any rate are very Japanese, with their crested tunics and cinque-cento legs. Nothing could be more Japanese than one I met, with his queer thatched stall balanced on his shoulder, and the innate brightness of this people, high and low, shining in his expression. His mate was carrying a couple of piles of boxes and baskets slung from his shoulder staff, as milkman used to carry their pails in London, before they grew proud by making too much money out of their shares in water companies, We hurry home past the Cricket Ground, which the English, as irrepressible as their own sparrows, have en grafted on the Land of the Rising Sun ; past the head quarters of the Ken or district, and the General Post Office (every public building with a gilt conventionalised rising sun proclaiming its Imperial connection) ; past the huge consulate, over which waves the flag on which the uncon ventionalised sun never sets ; past the custom house wharf, the celebrated English Hatoba, and along the Bund to tho hotel.

After the lunch we got to-day at the hotel, we were determined to make up with the admirable cuisine for our long period of dieting against the return of sea-sickness on the qualmish waters of the Pacific, while it indulged in what Canadians call " winter pastimes." THK JAPANESE THOMAS COOK. Dinner over, the younger and more frivolous members of our party went off to kill time — since they were really down right sorry to lose each other, and had to say good-bye in an hour or two — in a way so regardless of its being the Sabbath, as to remind me of a fellow-passenger I had when I went round the Cape of Good Hope to Australia. As his name betrays, he was a Hebrew. I met him one Sunday afternoon going down the companion stairs. " Where are you off to, Mr. Cohen ? " I enquired, for the afternoon was lovely.

" I am just going to 'ave a game of poker with two or three Christians." I didn't feel like " seeing " him after this. When they went off with malice prepense, as the law hath it, I came up into our sitting-room overlooking the bay, to muse and ask myself if it were really possible that I was in the land of marvels, the most artistic in its heaven-sent way since Greece lost the art. It was nearly nine o'clock when I came up, and from the beautiful Omaha, the United States corvette, which reminds me of an old-fashioned frigate with her graceful fiddle-bow, and of a passee belle with her retention of graces out of date in the present severe tailor-made fashions in ships, came the musical American bugle call. As I am writing, I hear the tinkle of " two bells," and the discharging of the nine o'clock gun.

Looking out from the window I see, crisp and black in the moonlight, the lofty spars of the beautiful ship. How lovely is the pure, clear Japanese night following the shining Japanese day, unrivalled for photography (as, by-the-bye, one hears of every country, except those of Northern Europe). I can see every ship in the harbour, and so still is the water that the reflection of the steamers' lights seems to bridge the whole space from the ships to the shore.

Chapter II. In Yokohama

A WEEK LATER Yokohama, December 8th, ' \A7"E have been in Yokohama a week to-day, so I feel that * ' I must chronicle some more of my impressions ere the strangeness of the country loses its edge. It was a good place to land : for nearly every one who goes to Japan via America docs land here — chiefly, perhaps, from its vicinity to Tokyo, the capital of the country. Besides, it is the principal foreign colony, and one can get excellent accommodation to recruit after the voyage, and a good many wrinkles about travelling in the interior. It was a great relief, after the close quarters on board the old chartered boats which run from Vancouver to Yokohama (the ocean greyhounds of the C. P. R. were not ready when these lines were penned), to find one's self in the Club Hotel, with its fine hall and great, airy rooms, which had once been the quarters of the Yokohama Club.

Very novel and strange if was to sit down to a regular French lunch of many courses, served by a crowd of spindle-legged Japanese, in their picturesque dark blue tunics and hose, who (most of them) could not speak a word of English, and took their orders by the numbers on the menu. " Boy, bring me some No. 1." Very funny we thought the shuffling noise they made as they ran about the floor, dragging their straw sandals by their big toes. As I said in the last chapter, lunch over, we, like every body else that has ever landed in Japan, ordered rikshas right off, and drove away to the Japanese town. On our way we passed the " Hatoba," where we had landed, called in popular parlance the " English Hatoba." Landing in Japan is most entertaining. The moment a ship drops anchor she is surrounded by a flotilla of the queer little native boats, propelled with one oar by half-naked Japanese, who swarm up on the ship's deck, sucking in their breath and bowing to the ground as soon as they are on board.

Nobody patronises them but the Asiatic passengers. Saloon passengers go off in the hotel launches, which in a few minutes, threading their way through the swarming native craft, land you close by the custom house. Your luggage is carried up by a swarm of coolies. How quaint they looked the first time one saw them, in their tight hose and tunics, made of the universal dark blue cotton, ornamented in the back with some brilliant device in white or red. The coolie who carried up our hand parcels looked like a walking advertisement of the Waterbury watch. Most of them were barefooted, all of them were bare-headed, perspiring, and smiling. Japanese smile from the day they begin riding on their sisters' backs to the day on which, to use a fine Buddhist phrase, they " condescend to die." Close to the Hatoba is the division between the native and European cities.