Japan in history, folk lore and art

Front matter

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REFERENCE LIBRARY OF | HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY |

2 Pike STREET, Boston

Preface To The Edition Of 1906

WHEN, in 1895, Formosa became part of their empire, the Japanese found a peak higher than Fuji; so they named it Niitaka, the New High Mountain. War with China over, a greater task confronted: them. Now that their publie school army has defeated the illiterate Russians, there rises a still higher national ideal. Like Niitaka, it is within. This new edition tells the story of

Preface

a

In this contribution to the Riverside Library for Young People, I have told more about Kioto than about Yedo. I have sketched in outline the Japan of ages rather than of our own age. While political history is the chief theme, my aim has been to show how and why the Japanese see and think as they do. The adoption of Western civilization changes the outer, but does not greatly modify the inner man. Believing also that what the dignified historians write is only part of a people’s true history, 1 have sought, from their customs and folk-lore, as well as from the interpretation of their artists, material with which to brighten the narrative. Fact and fiction, however, are presented in separate chapters.

No writer on Japan can fail to acknowledge deep obligations to that noble band of English students, Messrs. Satow, Aston, and Chamberlain, who have made such profound researches into the

Vili PREFACE ancient Japanese language and literature. To them and to Captain Brinkley, the scholarly editor of the “Japan Mail,” I heartily acknowledge much obligation. To my many Japanese friends who ‘from time to time assist me, and especially to the members of the Historical Society of the Imperial University of Tokio, who have honored me by membership in their body, I owe much, and herewith offer my grateful thanks.

It is one of the good signs of the times that the Japanese are now studying their own history according to the methods of science, with truth as the end in view. God speed them!

Contents

DOVUMMINAPAM EP ic ee ele . WHO ARE THE JAPANESE? . «© . . Tue Mornine or Ristnc-Sun Lanp . . THe JAPANESE STORY OF CREATION .

ORIGIN OF THE ARTS . x ; _

How THEY LOOK AT THE WORLD os Tue MrikApDO AND His SAMURAI 4 EH

Chapter I. Where Is Japan?

WHERE is Japan, and how does it lie on the surface of the globe?

With the aid of the steamship and railway, we may answer by saying that Fuji Yama is about sixteen days from New York, or twelve from San Francisco. Or, from the other point of view, we may say that Japan lies in the Pacific Ocean east of China and Corea, in latitude between Newfoundland and the West Indies; that is, the Japanese climate is very much like our own.

Japan is one of the many archipelagoes in the Pacific Ocean. The number of islands under the sun-flag is nearly four thousand. To inclose the space within the ocean-square thus occupied, we must draw our lines on the globe from the point at latitude 50° 56’. Here our pin, or the surveyor’s stake, is driven in at the most northern end of a shima, for that is the Japanese word for island, called Araito. This land formerly belonged to Russia. It is in the old chain or group called the Kuriles, or “‘The Smokers.” Japan from top to bottom is a line of voleanoes. The hot inside of the earth has here a row of vents in the shape of great mountains like funnels turned upside down. From their ‘holes at the top, as out of tall foundry chimneys, gas, fire, smoke and ashes escape from the interior of the earth.

Did you ever see the shell of an awabi, as the Japanese call the haliotis, or sea-ear? One may compare the shape and nature of the country to the awabi. The living creature beneath the perforated shell is able through its roof-holes to communicate with the outside world, and make its presence and power known to its prey. The line of apertures reaches along the top from the apex to the bottom level of the shell. So all Japan is a great shell or crust of rock and earth, through which the steam, gas, fire, and lava burst forth at times, just as the tentacles of the awabi leap and twirl through its shell. When, for any reason, one or more of these vents are closed, and the voleanoes become dormant, great earthquakes which twist or wrinkle the skin of the globe, or eruptions, which are boiler-explosions on a vast scale, are sure to happen. Even the rock crust and the granite caps of mountains, unable to imprison the hot subterranean gases, are blown high up in the air.

The little Greek children in old times were

WHERE IS JAPAN? 3 told that Jupiter confined the giants under voleanoes, and that earthquakes were caused by their writhing, but the Japanese children think that a great underground catfish makes the mischief in their country, and that no one can stop his floundering but the god Kashima.

Since the Japanese, in 1875, exchanged their half of Saghalin for all the Kuriles, they have called them Chishima, or the Thousand Islands.

Araito, the northernmost tip of the Mikado’s empire, is a little to the west of Cape Lopatka in Kamtschatka. To mark the most eastern point of Japan, we must stick a pin on the map at longitude east 156° 32’. The Japanese now use our system of latitude and longitude for surveying and navigation. They are thus able to locate within a few yards on the great earth’s surface the position of a moving ship ora thatched cottage. Looking through the lines of a spider’s web stretched across the end of a theodolite, they can measure the precise distance from plumb-bob to stake-centre, and fix the exact spot over the centre of a copper bolt driven in the rock. This mark of the national frontier is in the island of Shimushu at 156° 32’.

To find the most southerly point of the Mikado’s domain, we follow the meridian down to the tiny island of Haterma, whose tip end south is at 24° 06’. Close to it the island of Yonakuni pokes its rocky nose above the waves. Here, also, on the end nearest Formosa, at longitude east 122° 45’, is Japan’s most western extremity.

So Japan lies between the Russian territory of Kamschatka and the biggest of the Chinese islands, Formosa. If we inclose the space within the four points we have described, we shall have a quadrangle of over four million square miles ; or a little more, in water, of the space occupied by the land comprising the United States. In this ocean surface, however, the actual territory covers only less than 150,000 square miles, that is, about one twenty-sixth of the whole. The land is to the water as one letter in the alphabet. Japan and the two Dakotas are about the same in size, say 150,000 square miles.

Or we may say the Japanese domain looks like a ruler laid slantwise on the map between Kamtschatka and Formosa. In this long and narrow strip, stretching from northwest to southeast between the Russian and Chinese territory, the space, roughly measured, is twenty-two hundred miles long and five hundred miles wide, and the land occupied is one seventh of the space.

On most of our school maps of Asia, the Japanese Archipelago is represented as, relatively, about the size of a caterpillar lying on the pumpkin of Asia. Or, if Asia be a ship, Japan is the rudder. Indeed, glancing from north to south, we may thus make an appropriate picture, in our mind’s eye, of this land of tea, silkworms and

WHERE IS JAPAN? 5 silk. We may look upon the rounded coast of China as a great teapot, with its spout pointing towards the headless butterfly or silk-moth of Corea; while the mainland of Japan appears as a monstrous silk-worm with its head at Kiushiu, spinning out of its mouth a great, glistening thread of islands stretching down to Formosa. Indeed, while the literal meaning of the name Riu Kiu is “sleeping dragon,” the native name is Okinawa, or “long rope.”

In the geological ages of the world, there was probably an extended causeway of land or mountain ridge from Kamschatka to Formosa. By the action of the ocean waves, continued during long ages, this ridge has been broken into large and small islands. Along the whole eastern length of the empire there rushes like a millrace a river of indigo blue in the sea. This is the Kuro Shiwo, or the black current, which flows from the Philippine Islands past Japan and across to North America. With the first peopling of J apan, and possibly of our continent, this oceanriver had, as we shall see, ssmething to do.

Here, then, is a country stretching between the Tropic of Cancer and the latitude of Labrador, with most of its people crowded in the parallels that include the region between New York and Florida. The people are civilized, polished in manners, with writing, arts, literature, a long history, and a dynasty or line of emperors older than any succession of rulers on earth, unless possibly that of the popes. They have a written constitution, representative government, and the modern appliances of war and peace, with steam engines, electric telegraphs, printing presses, and many other modern things. They now look into a future which they expect to share with Europe and America. They no longer turn to China for ideas and principles. Having entered the brotherhood of the nations of Christendom, the Japanese is the most promising of Asiatic peoples.

In our day and generation Japan has shot into notice like the flowering century-plant among the nations. Within the memory of young men now living, the country seemed as closed, inactive, repellant, and unpromising as the fat and thornyleaved aloe, that quietly stores up starch within and prickles without. Now, having burst into splendid bloom and captivating color, and its inner riches revealed, Japan charms the world.

We have answered the question, Where is Japan? in the terms of geography and astronomy. If now we ask the Japanese poets the same question, they will reply that theirs is the Country Between Heaven and Earth, the Land Where the Day Begins, Sun-Rise Kingdom, House of the Morning, Sun Land, Sun’s Nest, Country Within the Boundaries, or Kingdom of Peaceful Shores. These are the names found in Japanese poetry and romance.

WHERE IS JAPAN? 7

As for the shape of it, they tell us it is the Country of the Eight Great Islands, the Dragonfly Kingdom, the Outspread Islands which remind one of the stepping stones in a garden-path, the Castellated Fortress Island, Fertile Plain of Sweet Flags, the Beautiful or the Princess Country. Politically, Japan is the Mikado’s Empire, or the Country Ruled by a Dynasty of Heavenly Rulers.

CHAPTER It.

WHO ARE THE JAPANESE?

Wuen the imperial census-takers completed their count on the 31st of December, 1890, it was found that there were 40,072,000 people in Japan. We must think of them, the Japanese, as a nation numbering over forty millions.

Three fourths of the inhabitants live on Hondo, or the main island. Of the remainder, five millions, or over one eighth, dwell on the next largest island, called Kiushiu, or The Nine Provinces. In Shikoku, the Island of the Four Countries, live about three millions. The northern islands, called the Hokkaido, or Northern Sea Circuit, are not so thickly settled, for in them all together we find only a third of a million of souls.

In the old way of enumeration, they made a rough census by counting houses, or smoke-holes in the roof, reckoning five people to a house. Now, and since 1872, they count noses, and souls. There are nearly eight million houses, and they, like the people who live in them, are mostly thickly massed in central Japan. Here, where the soil is fertile, the climate good, and the country has been long occupied, we find towns and

WHO ARE THE JAPANESE? 9 villages as close to each other as beads on a rosary, while the cities are large and numerous. In Yezo, however, one may travel many leagues through the country without seeing either house orman. On every square mile of central Hondo there are four hundred and sixteen people, but in the islands of the Northern Sea region only seven. The average for all Japan is two hundred and sixty-six, which makes this eastern empire about as well filled with people as Italy, but not so thickly populated as China proper. There is, however, plenty of room in Japan for more people, since the ratio of inhabitants to the square mile is nearly one half that of Belgium or Saxony.

Fifty per cent of the population are Farin and live in villages and hamlets. No matter how far away the fields which they cultivate are from their homes, the countryfolk dwell in houses which are grouped together, and a farmhouse standing by itself is rarely seen. After the agricultural classes, in numbers, come the trading people, and next the mechanics.

The people are divided into three grades, — nobles, gentry, and commons. The two upper classes comprise two millions, while the common people number thirty-eight millions. All subjects of the Emperor have equal rights before the law ; but this has been the case only since 1889, and _ under the new constitution. The Eta people, who numbered half a million, and were once looked upon as outcasts, and not better than beasts, are now citizens. Even the Buddhists did not admit the Eta to religious privileges or membership. One honorable exception was seen in the Shin sect, whose priests and people, to their everlasting honor, treated them fairly.

Up in the north, in Yezo, there are about fifteen thousand aboriginal people called Ainu, who have bushy beards and hair and straight eyes, like Europeans.

In the Riu Kiu islands, in the extreme south, the people are a little different from most of the Japanese, and the language they speak is not so correct or polished as that of the people on the large islands. All these are subjects of the Mikado. Excepting the Ainu speech, there are not those variations in the language, as spoken in all the four thousand islands of the empire, which. are found in China. Properly speaking, there are no dialects.

The Japanese are quite different from the Coreans and Chinese in stature and appearance. A thousand people suddenly gathered at random from the streets of Seoul or Peking, and a thousand gathered in London and New York, would probably show averages of stature the same. The Japanese, however, are not so tall as people in America and Europe. They are undersized; the average height of the men is 5.5 feet, and that of

WHO ARE THE JAPANESE? 11 the women 4.5 feet; but among the mountaineers, boatmen, and occasionally in the cities, one may see a man six feet or over in height; while the wrestlers are gigantic in size and weight. All varieties of fat and lean people are noticeable. The children are usually plump and rosy-cheeked. The boys are active, and the young girls pretty.

Some one has called the Japanese “the diamond edition of humanity.”’

Unfortunately for the Japanese, he is not proportionally developed, yet the cause of his short stature may be removed. The upper half of his body is of proper length, but the lower portion is shorter than it ought to be. In perfectly formed human beings—and indeed in the average — the - measurements up and down from the centre of the body are the same. Not so with the inhabitants of Dai Nippon. In the Japanese army, of twelve hundred men measured by the surgeons, it was found that there was a difference of over an inch between the upper and the lower parts of the body.

The doctors say that, besides improper or badly cooked food, the chief cause of shortness in the lower limbs is the custom of sitting long on the knees and heels. Until recently, chairs, sofas, stools, and rockers were unknown in Japanese houses. People carried their sitting apparatus with them, as snails are said to travel with their houses on their backs. They made folding chairs out of their legs by using their hams and their heels, tucking their feet under them. Beginning in their childhood, they were able, even when grown up, to sit for hours in this position without having their legs go to sleep. In this way, and in the lapse of ages, the circulation of the blood in the lower limbs becoming more or less stagnant, the legs of the whole nation perceptibly shortened.

The Chinese bind the feet of their women in order to make them as small as the hoofs of a gazelle. The Japanese have never practiced footbinding ; yet without knowing it they have been shortening their legs, and subtracting the fraction of a cubit from their stature.

When foreign people go into the houses of the Japanese to visit them, they politely try to sit down on their knee-bones and ankles. Pretty soon they have to give it up, apologize, and then © stretch out their legs ungracefully on the matting. They invariably fall asleep at the wrong end. While their heads are wide awake, their feet will not wake up. Nowadays the people put something between themselves and the floor. The fashion of furnishing the house with chairs, settees, and high tables is increasingly common.

In thinking of Japan and the Japanese, one must not think of China and the Chinese. The two countries and people are too widely different in many ways to be compared. China is ten

WHO ARE THE JAPANESE? 13 times larger than Japan, and her area greatly exceeds that of the United States and Alaska, while all the territory of Japan is not very much more than half of our one State of Texas. The Chinese empire has probably ten times as many people as the Japanese. China has an older civilization and has been more original, Japan being for centuries the pupil of the Middle Kingdom. The tongues of the two nations have little or no connection with each other. In language, customs, government, history, character, and temperament, the two people are quite as different as are Russians from Englishmen.

The Japanese do not smoke opium, do not bind the feet of their women, nor wear queues or “ pigtails.” They seem to be in mind half way between European and Asiatic people. Perhaps their greatest work and most brilliant career are yet before them. The Japanese seem called upon to reconcile Eastern and Western civilizations, to interpret to Asia the meaning of European ideas and institutions. Many wise men think the Pacific Ocean is yet to become the arena of the greatest triumphs of the human race, as the Mediterranean once was, as the Atlantic is now. If so, since Japan holds the key of the Pacific, her future may be far more brilliant than the past. Certainly the promise to the Sun-land is that of a new sunrise.

The Japanese do not lack in reverence for their own country. To them it is the Honorable Realm, the Land of the Gods, the Country of the Holy Spirits, the Kingdom that Endures for Aye, the Everlasting Great Japan, created first of all, and rising out of the waters of chaos; they call the oldest part of their beautiful land the Island of the Congealed Drop. Of this we shall read in their own story of creation.

Chapter III. The Morning Of Rising-sun Land

LyINnG out in the ocean, at the ends of the earth from Europe, and, in the day of small boats, far enough from China, and near only to Corea, by whom was the land we call Japan first discovered?

Savages who have no letters, and therefore make or keep no written history, cannot tell their own story, or remember the time when anything long ago happened. Even their traditions are usually worthless after a few generations. They melt away like dream stuff into the infinite azure of the past.

Who were the aborigines, or the people who lived before history was written, in Japan? Who came first of all into the lonely islands in which no baby had yet cried ?'* This question even scholars cannot now answer.

Most probably they were men of the Malay race who drifted up from the south. From Formosa, or still further below in the Philippines or the Malay Archipelago, there is the swift, darkcolored river flowing in the ocean called the Kuro Shiwo, of which I have already spoken. Even without sails or oars, but by simply floating in this great Gulf Stream of the Pacific, men could reach southern Japan. Perhaps, during as many centuries as the present world counts in her age, this stream has been gradually peopling Japan as well as America. Many things indicate that the Japanese have Malay blood in their veins. Many of their ancient customs, their tattooing, their dances, their comedies and mask entertainments, their superstitions and methods of war, their ancient head-hunting raids, point to a Malay origin. Certainly the Japanese are a mixed race. Another strain of aboriginal blood flows from the Ainu, who once inhabited central and northern Japan. Dark-skinned, more or less hairy in their bodies, straight-eyed, bushy-haired, they were hunters and fishermen. Though now a mere remnant, living in Yezo as mild and peaceable savages and bear-worshipers, they once bravely — resisted the Japanese, who by degrees conquered and subdued large masses of them within the boundaries of the empire. In time they have become peaceable tillers of the soil, and good subjects of the Mikado. The native histories show that as the Japanese waves of conquest pushed farther north, just as the white man pushes the Indian before him, the free Ainu were raiding savages. They plundered the civilized farmers and destroyed their houses and crops, only to be conquered and reduced to quiet obedience to the laws. In this way, all the Ainu of Hondo in time became, by mixture of blood and the arts of civilization, true Japanese.

To this day the Ainu names of the lakes, rivers, mountains, and great landmarks, from the Strait of Tsugaru down to Kioto, linger beneath the later Japanese terms. An American child can read all over the United States, and even in the place of the original thirteen colonies, the Indian names of places long since occupied by our fathers. As before Boston was Shawmut, and before the Hudson River was Shatemuc, and behind Salem was Amoskeag, so under the pronunciation of the Chinese characters and Japanese names we find the tell-tale Ainu word. Before ever a man with a hair-pen, and with “ India” ink rubbed up with water on a stone, began on mulberry or bamboo paper to write the letters spelling Fuji Yama, the Ainu had named it the Throne of Fire.

The Ainu probably came into the Japanese islands from the north, where the mainland and

Saghalin are quite near each other.

Still further yet, in this England of the East, before some Asian William the Conqueror came over from the Normandy of Corea, were still other folks than Malay and Ainu. Between Corea and Kiushiu, there are islands which are like stepping-stones to help boatmen from sunset to sunrise. This is just where the southern points of the two countries bend nearest each other. On the Sea of Japan, as we go further north, the coast lines of the two kingdoms become concave and get farther apart, until, near the southern point of Siberia, they again approach. The current, which on the ocean side sweeps northward past Japan, flows on the Asian or Corean side southward. This would make easy passage for the Highlanders, or seacoast men of Manchuria, who pointed their prows southeastward towards the land over which the sun rose and morning broke.

So, by sailing straight toward the rising sun, both the southern Corean and the northern Tartar would easily reach Japan. Long before they set foot on shore, they would see the green mountain wall over which the sun rose. No wonder they called the new land Nippon, sun-root or sunrise ; more fully, Nihon Koku, or Country Over Which the Sun Rises. Yet even these are names which ~ began to be used only after Chinese characters came into use in Japan. Most ancient is the pure Japanese, Hi-no-moto, which means The Root or Source of the Light, or The Country where the Day Begins. No realm has so many names as the Mikado’s, or names more beautiful ; but the oldest of all, variously pronounced, points to the lips of a people coming from the west.

These Coreans and other Asiatic mainlanders settled along the coast of Kiushiu and of Hondo, at Idzumo, at Wakasa, and in the land bordering these great bights in the coast, near Oki Island and at Tsuruga Bay. Here is the heart of the _ country, and the key of Japan. The centre and - narrowest part of the main island is along the coast of Wakasa. It is a place in Japanese history like the “Saxon Shore” in Great Britain. As on the sand of the English strand so often gritted the keels of the Angles and Saxons, so here the Asiatic men from the west beached their boats.

Then began the delights of hunting and war in their new home, until they were well scattered throughout the area of the islands. Probably in their numbers, influence, methods, and results of conquest, they were much like the Saxons. While many of the aborigines of Malay and Ainu blood were slaughtered, the majority were spared, and large intermixture by marriage took place. Language and customs were modified, and became more uniform. Probably until near the time of the Christian era, the people were almost entirely

-. hunters and fishermen, and tribal wars rather than peace were the rule. This was the stone age of Japan; and its relics in the form of arrow heads, and rude tools and patterns, and shell heaps, can be found as often and as easily as in America. Now, among these piratical or colonizing expeditions, which at various times came from the Asian mainland, was one of special interest to us. For this we must look much further to the south.

Across the bay from the province of Satsuma, in which the pretty crackled and decorated pottery is made, is the province of Ozumi. Here, probably, one set of invaders landed and grew to be a powerful tribe. After several generations and many victories, these brave people began to expand their domain. Starting out to conquer all Kiushiu they succeeded, and then, reaching the region of Osaka by boat, they established themselves in the centre of Hondo. The province now called Yamato became their seat of government. They rapidly reduced the surrounding tribes to submission, and, before many generations had passed, the centre and southwest of the archipelago was under their nominal control.

The men of this clan or house of Yamato were not only very brave and capable, but they were better disciplined, and had superior war material and resources. It is probable, also, that their weapons were of iron, while those of their enemies were of copper, bone, and shell. The Yamato men cultivated the soil, and could thus lay up large food supplies, while the men they conquered depended wholly upon hunting and fishing. |

We now know another secret of the success of the Yamato men. It lay in the superiority of their religion, or possibly their craft in the pollitical use they made of it. It is not likely that they possessed writing, but they had a liturgy or ritual. They worshiped their ancestors, and made gods of their most famous or useful men when deceased. The man who made farming more successful, the earth more fertile, or who introduced a new article of food; or the one who skilfully healed diseases or averted a pestilence ; who invented pottery, or a more effective tool or weapon, or a new utensil or decoration, — was honored during life, and after death was worshiped. To their chief they paid something like divine honors even when living. His house was a temple, or sacred dwelling place, which they called a Miya, and its occupant Mikado, or Awful Habitation. Possibly, however, the word “ Mikado” means Honorable Gate, for in Japan the gate is often nearly as magnificent as the house. In this, these primitive Japanese were like their Tartar relatives, the Turks, who call their government, after the palace entrance, the Sublime Porte. So, also, the Egyptians spoke of their ruler as Pharaoh, which probably conveys the same idea. We all know that the Iroquois Indians were Men of the Long House.

These Yamato men employed religion as a help to complete conquest. They captured, a. we may say, the beliefs of the islanders, whom they conquered, by coupling on to the aboriginal cult their own theory as to the origin of themselves, their ancestors, their chiefs, and the Mikado, Like a locomotive that draws after it a long train of freight cars, so the Kami or Mikado religion drew to and after it all else in the country.

Thus, making an engine of their doctrine for crushing their enemies and riveting their chains, they taught that they were descended from the heavenly gods, and that their ancestors had originally come down from heaven. Their Mikado being a son and representative of the celestial deities, all men must obey this Son of Heaven, or suffer death. The subdued people were taught that their ancestors were only earth-born kami or gods. The earthly gods must obey the heavenly, and their children be loyal to the Mikado. Both by their fierce soldiers and by their teachers and priests, by better weapons and fighting and superior dogmas, the Yamato tribe became the chief of all Japan. To this day, the people call their emperor Tenshi, or Tenno, which means Heavenly Son or King.