Impressions of Japan

Preface

The object I have had in view in writing these pages has been not merely to give a description of my journeys through Japan, but to put on record some impressions of the development of the Japanese.

The changes which that country has undergone during the last decade have been so rapid and radical, that it would have been impossible within the limits of a single volume to give any adequate idea of their number or nature, for many of the topics touched on would require a volume to themselves.

The greatest change of all seemed to have taken place in the country's Art, which twenty years ago was its chief and most distinguishing glory ; and I have tried to show the reasons for that deterioration. In so doing I have brought out the differences between town and country life, and hope that by so doing I may lead those among my readers, whose good fortune it is to visit Japan for themselves, to penetrate beyond viii PREFACE

the modern life of the city into the remote country places, where the pristine life of old Japan still survives.

I have to tender to Mr. Max von Grunelius my grateful thanks for furnishing me with a number of photographs, which have served to make the series of illustrations more complete. Without them many essential features of land and life must necessarily have been omitted.

G. H. R.

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. THE NATURAL BEAUTIES OF THE

COUNTRY I

Chapter I The Natural Beauties Of The Country

" As in strange lands a traveller walking slow, In doubt and great perplexity, A little before moon-rise hears the low

Moan of an unknown sea ; And knows not if it be thunder, or a sound

Of rocks thrown down, or one deep cry Of great wild beast ; then thinketh, • I have found A new land, but I die.' "

— Tennyson.

To land in a strange country, far away from your own land, possibly without friends, unknown, ignorant of the surroundings and the pleasures to come, is in itself a charm. But to land in a country, the fame of which has so often been written ; the certain knowledge that now at last the opportunity has arrived to inspect personally what you have read ; to form ideas and compare them with the incomplete picture you have drawn from books ; to judge the people and form an opinion of the country — makes life a pleasure. Approach Yokohama : when the ship is yet outside the bar she is surrounded by junks of every description, filled with men and women in novel garments. Hear their strange tongue ; see their smiles and happy faces ; watch the town as the steamer draws nearer, everything each moment becoming more distinct — in all this there is a charm, an inexpressible charm one must feel, because one has read and heard so much about the country. Ideas are formed about many countries ; an imaginative picture of the people is drawn in the mind — their ways and customs. Often the written description of the place has given you the wrong impression ; the crash comes, and a heartrending fall is in store, if on landing the imagination has carried you too far ; a sickening feeling of despair creeps over you, such as is experienced if an ideal is crushed, an affinity is not what she appeared to be — the feeling a man may experience who is married and finds his wife faithless, or whose trusted friend plays him a scurvy trick — in all these cases one loses faith in one's fellow-beings. So also may a man who forms ideas about a country be disappointed, should that country not come up to his expectations, and if he is.

YOKOHAMA 3

he will probably never allow that any good or natural beauty ever existed there, because his mind has received a blow, his ideals are crushed — ideals which possibly never existed except in his imagination.

I formed ideas of Japan before I ever intended to visit the country ; ideas too, which, though at the time they seemed too high, now when I look back and compare them with the impressions I gathered whilst I was there, seem to me not half good enough. Thus one is often carried away by an imaginative mind ; but about Japan no ideas can be correctly formed in advance. Until one has been there, no ideals can be placed high enough to do the country credit.

Imagine a steamer slowly gliding into port surrounded and followed by hundreds of boats picturesque in build, with sails of a novel shape, and filled with people in dresses one has only read about, or possibly seen as European ladies' dressing-gowns, colours of such a vivid shade that an artist's brush would hardly dare represent them in their true tint on canvas, even as he would shun to do credit to an eastern sunset when the whole sky is ablaze with every colour of the spectrum, crimson fading into orange, and yellow again waning into total darkness. No artist, if he wishes to remain popular, dare depict such light effects as are here to be seen ; if he did, few would admire his work as being natural, while thousands would slander him for reproducing on canvas what no man ever saw — and why ? Because the eye, though it can see such colouring in nature itself, cannot retain the image of such an effect, and so, though the rendering may be correct in every detail, it appears too vivid because the mind has forgotten what the eye really saw.

Imagine again hearing these people talk, the quaint sounds that come to our ears unaccustomed to the language, the patter of their busy feet, encased in wooden sandals, on the narrow decks of their boats, the sails differing in colour from anything to which we have been accustomed, and filled with wind which gently propels the boats, rocked to and fro in the wash of the steamer. In the dim distance the town of Yokohama with its frontage of hotels and European built houses ; behind them, and scarcely visible, the smaller native houses of the Japanese ; soon even the jinrickishas can be seen racing down the Bund, which faces the sea to the pier, to await the arrival of the visitors, all anxious for a fare, ready to fleece the stranger at the first opportunity ;

THE PEOPLE 5

and even farther in the remote distance the most wonderful mountain in the world, that sacred worshipped mountain, the snow-clad peak of Fujiyama standing out clear against the cloudless blue sky, so blue as to be almost transparent. The steamer glides nearer and nearer until she casts her anchor, and the natives scale the ladder, all ready to turn an honest penny by carrying passengers' luggage.

Land there and see the streets, the bustle of busy people, small children with babies strapped to their backs, narrow streets with picturesque houses and tiled roofs, men rushing about bareheaded, women in their kimonos walking more sedately ; no noisy trams, waggons, or motor cars, no noise except that caused by the talk of the people and the gentle rattle of the rickishas. Imagine all this, and you have the view of Yokohama.

Fancy yourself for the first time in a strange land where everything is novel. You see a new race of people who have different manners and customs from your own, people who are smaller in stature than what you have been used to, clad in costumes brilliantly coloured that you have only previously pictured in your imagination ; you will see jinrickishas — small carriages drawn by men instead of animals — you have only heard about, houses you have read about and longed to see. The word house is hardly descriptive of what they really look like. Small, low, flat-roofed, one-storied houses with picturesque roofs, sometimes overgrown with plants, and windows made of latticework covered with oiled paper, through which, if you are of a destructive disposition, you can put your finger with ease. You will see rows of wooden shoes and sandals standing on the doorstep ready to serve their owners when they come out again ; people walking about the streets with large yellow paper umbrellas open, to keep the sun or rain off them.

Form an imaginative picture of all this in your mind. Get into a rickisha with a coolie instead of a horse to draw the carriage, imagine yourself being pulled through the streets where everything is novel and quaint, shops exhibiting wares you have longed to possess : you become fascinated. Imagine yourself being pulled up hills in this small vehicle. Glance around and see the plants and flowers, the hills fresh with spring foliage, the people in costumes your imagination has merely pictured, colours such as you hardly dared think of. You are alone in your carriage, and so have no one to draw your attention from what you are seeing, and, being alone, you can think — your

THE RIVERS 7

undivided attention can be fixed on what you behold. See the people in the fields working with a will — both sexes, all ages ; dart in your carriage through villages, the shops hung with sign-boards variously coloured, houses with flags bearing the sign of the sun — the national emblem ; out into the fields again or through a wood, a brook of clear, gentle, running water on one side, trees and blossoms on the other ; and so you can travel for miles, each hour, each moment even, affording you new pleasures ; every minute you fancy you are face to face with the most wonderful piece of scenery you have ever seen. Days seem to pass so quickly that you can barely concentrate your mind on any individual thing. One day you dart in a rickisha through streets and lanes, over hills and down dales ; another day you find yourself seated in a flat-bottomed boat rushing down streams, with the banks on either side one mass of colouring. At Arashiyama the hills on either side of the river in spring are covered with cherry blossoms, and later in the year their place is taken by trees of azaleas, all colours ranging from white to mauve and mauve to red, and here and there the red of the maple leaf, which in autumn turns to bright copper.

The river lends itself to all manner of excitement. Charter a flat-bottomed boat with three or four men and shoot the rapids; to see the boat shooting round corners every moment one fancies it must be dashed against the rocks, but so clever are the steerers that an accident is a rarity. The bottom of the boat creaks and bends as she rushes down with the stream. No two bits of scenery are alike, at every turn a picture more beautiful than the last comes into view. In some places the water is only a few inches deep, but the impetus the boat receives coming through the rapid places takes it even over places where the water is conspicuous by its scarcity. The river Fujikawa is navigable for more than forty miles, and in just over four hours we traversed it, starting from Yokaichiba and landing without stop at Iwabuchi ; at one moment only the white top of Fuji is visible in the distance, then again shooting round another bend the whole mountain stands out in full glory. It takes the men four days to tow their boat up stream again. Hundreds of men can be seen towing their boats up with ropes, bending double under the strain, and at nights they are forced to fasten their crafts and seek shelter along the banks. The tariff for a trip down the river is five yen, which is equivalent to about ten shillings — it makes one ask oneself how these people live, on what

LIGHT EFFECTS 9

they subsist. In all it takes four men five days to go down and up again, five days of hard work, work almost verging on slavery, and each man earns in those five days two shillings and sixpence. Their staple food is rice, and on that and biscuits, with occasionally a piece of fish, they seem to thrive. One seldom beholds a half-starved creature, such as one sees in England ; their clothes are always neat, never in rags ; whatever clothing they have on, though it may be scanty, is neatly girdled and tidy.

The light effects, the most wonderful of nature's arts, coming down these rivers are always changing, no two moments are they the same. A cloud may for a moment obliterate the sun, thereby making the scene look cold, the rush of water and its accompanying roar appear more noticeable ; the flowers seem to have lost much of their splendour, they, too, look as if they required something to instil fresh life into them ; until suddenly the sun will burst out again, casting his warm and brilliant light on the surroundings, illuminating the scene and making everything look even more beautiful than it did before. The shadows, which when the sun was veiled had disappeared, now cast long streaks of darkness over the water, and give out those wonderful contrasts of light.

The lines of Shelley, when he describes how everything mingles together, come back to one as one sits gazing at the surrounding beauty, intent only on the present, unheeding the future —

" The fountains mingle with the rivers, And the rivers with the ocean."

And when he describes nature and her wonders, as only a poet can, in the lines —

*' See the mountains touch high heaven And the waves clasp one another,"

one is left to one's reverie until suddenly roused by the shrill cry of the boatman as he rounds a corner — a cry like that of a Venetian gondolier — warning an upcoming boat lest the two should collide ; but beyond that cry of warning and the sound of rushing water an absolute peace reigns.

On our tour down the Fujikawa we accommodated a little Japanese lady, the wife of the hotel manager at Yokaichiba, with a place in our boat. The pangs of fear this poor little lady experienced were amusing to behold ; she hardly dared raise her eyes from the bottom of the boat, where she remained squatting on her heels for more than four hours. Whenever a dangerous passage presented itself, or the boat shot

To face p, 10

2. A MOUNTAIN TORRENT.

RIVER FUJIKAWA 11

more rapidly than usual over boulders, our little friend bowed herself in prayer to Buddha, chanting to herself the whole time. The gratitude she showered on us, when we reached our destination, for accompanying her down the river was touching ; a prince could not have received greater homage than we received. To be of service to a Japanese is a supreme pleasure.

For three weeks we travelled inland, with no one but a Japanese coolie to accompany us ; he acted as spokesman and interpreter, wherever his deficient knowledge of the English language permitted of such a thing. He was also luggage man in chief, and carried the stores for three weeks, whilst at the rate of a shilling a day he hired the services of any coolie he could find to shoulder the small amount of baggage we took with us. The wage this man received was seventy-five sen per diem, equivalent to about one shilling and sixpence, and, after being paid two evenings in succession, he asked whether we minded keeping the rest for him until the end of the three weeks. He paid his own lodging bill, food, everything, and subsisted for three weeks on three shillings ; his excuses for not requiring payment every day were that his pockets were not large enough to hold so much money, and that three shillings was ample for his requirements during the period for which we had engaged him. I believe he considered himself a young Croesus when at Gotemba we parted and he received the twenty-eight shillings and sixpence balance due to him.

Most days we walked about fifteen or twenty miles, no horses or rickishas being available anywhere in the interior of the country. Fortunately we halted at places like Lake Shoji, where European food to a certain extent was obtainable, and so we were enabled to replenish our provision basket, which at times ran very low. Sometimes we had to write a few days ahead to larger towns asking them to forward bread to some small place where we contemplated staying the night, because to obtain bread in the interior is almost an impossibility.

By walking through the country we were enabled to admire and see its beauties much better than had we gone by train, and to admire the flowers and the wonderful tints of the trees, which varied in colour from yellow to copper. The hillsides were at times covered with cherry blossoms, which, at a distance, made the country look as if it were enveloped in snow, or as if the trees were covered with hoar-

THE VILLAGES 13

frost, and on approaching the scene the sun's rays cast a warm glow over the light pink blossoms and made the hills look as if they were blazing with a colour, indescribably soft and beautiful in tone.

To pass through small villages without in many cases a single shop, villages to which few Europeans ever found their way, was extremely interesting, not only to ourselves, but, from the apparent amusement of the villagers, interesting to them also. They all rushed out of their houses to see the travellers ; an electric spark seemed to pass through the community whenever we approached, informing it of visitors. The children used our legs as bridges, to their immense enjoyment, and amused themselves by darting in and out of our lower limbs, whilst the taller generations would be so struck by our heights that they would measure theirs against us ; sometimes with outstretched arms they could not even reach our heads. It makes one often think that small things please small minds, but if a pigmy is seen walking down Piccadilly, or a Chinaman crossing Trafalgar Square, are they not also the centre of amusement .? People stand still to look at them, and the street arabs probably mock them in derision, the midget for his minute stature and the Chinaman because he wears a pigtail. In Japan they look upon you as a curiosity, but are not so ill-bred as to mock either your height, or what seems to them even more curious, your fair hair.

Sometimes in June swamps of lotus flowers can be seen, not planted so that each colour is separate from the rest, but en masse, the whole a wonderful piece of colouring, thousands of blossoms all out at one time, hardly two colours exactly the same, people standing in the midst of them weeding them out or picking the flowers to send to the larger towns for the market. The colours of the kimonos stand out against the softer tones of the lotus flowers, the pickers mostly with a soft piece of linen tied gracefully round their heads, after the fashion of a Dutch cap, to shelter them from the heat of the sun and to keep the perspiration from dropping into their eyes. Every one seems busy, running about as if he had the work of the world on his shoulders ; and whilst the women and children pick or sort out the flowers, the men carry buckets of manure to cultivate the ground, or transport cans of water from the wells and water the plants. I think I can truthfully say that I never, during my whole stay in Japan, saw a man idle. Sometimes in the towns one may see a beggar, but he is so old and infirm that work would be impossible.

TEA-HOUSES 15

At some of the larger places, where tea-houses are prominently placed along the roadside, can be seen those wonderful arbours of wistaria, purple and white blossoms hanging down in masses from the trellis-work above ; sometimes whole verandahs surround the houses, literally covered with this magnificent flower. To sit underneath one of these arbours and admire the surrounding country is enchanting ; no sun can penetrate the trellis-work on account of the masses of flowers, and later, on account of the covering caused by the thickly-grown leaves. Under these bowers one can sit all day watching the streets with their interesting people passing, or the gardens magnificently laid out and wonderfully well kept. It is almost impossible to find a weed on the grass, or an ugly twig on a tree. The tea-house keeper probably takes a morning constitutional with his family round his garden, to see whether the night has brought out anything to ofl^end the most critical, and if so, that offending twig or weed is plucked up and thrown away where it can never again make itself objectionable.

At one tea-house, called Gammon-ga-fuchi, where the gardens are perhaps finer than anywhere else in Japan, I took no less than twelve photographs, all different, and each looking as if it might have been a portion of an enormous park, whereas in two minutes you could walk over the whole " estate." So artistically are these arranged, with their diminutive hills, planted with tiny shrubs in many cases a few inches only in height, but perhaps hundreds of years old, and their toy temples and small stone torii^ an exact representation of the real temples at Nikko, that one almost imagines oneself in some palace grounds.

When I visited Gammon-ga-fuchi I was fortunate enough to fall in with a party of Japanese who had walked out from Nikko along the bank of the Daiya-gawa, and were having a picnic at the tea-house. I asked whether I might take their photograph, and, in return for a promise of a copy to some of their leaders, was entertained in a most lavish manner. Nothing could have exceeded the hospitality I received from these comparatively poor men, manufacturers and artisans. Beer, bottle after bottle, was brought, in which they insisted on drinking my health. I was forced to partake of their cakes and sweetmeats ; they insisted on my smoking their cigarettes, and endeavoured to make me understand their language. What other nation would treat a stranger in this way }

LAND OF FLOWERS 17

The names given to Japan are numerous, but it is still impossible to find one that embraces the whole charm of the country — the Land of Flowers, the Land of the Rising Sun, and many others — but none of them convey to one's mind all that one feels about the place. The country is a garden of colour, whether flowers or leaves, but so also is the country the land of the rising sun ; both appellations are correct, and still in each there is something wanting.

Ask European residents in Japan how they like the country and what they think of the people .? Personally, I seldom heard a foreigner say anything in favour of either. But then one must realise that Japan has much sameness, much want of variety ; one place is more or less like another, one piece of sea as blue as its neighbour, and one garden barely differs from the next one. To a person who only spends a short time there the monotony is not felt, because there is always something novel to notice and be interested in ; but to a person who has lived many years in Japan, and who has gone over to the country with the intention of settling there for some length of time, the monotony is apparent, probably because he remains very much in one place and never travels about in search of interest. The average resident has hardly been further than a few miles from the town he lives in. He puts it off, thinking he can always go to such-and-such a place, or else he accumulates the holiday allowed him every year by his firm for three or five years, and comes home to Europe again to see his friends. These residents have probably less to say in favour of the people than in favour of the country, but then that is probably owing to a feeling of jealousy, because they find it hard to compete with them in trade, on account of the people's dishonesty, and in art, because they themselves have not such a fine feeling of what is artistic. They attempt to imitate the arrangement of the Japanese houses and find it a hopeless task, they want to arrange fans on their walls, and discover that whichever way they turn them they look stiff and ugly, whilst a Japanese in a few moments in his own house would arrange those same fans in such a way that no one could find fault with the arrangement.

Each month has its descriptive blossom. The plum blossoms come out at the end of January and last into March, even before many trees show signs of shooting, and give one such wonderful impressions of the beauties of the hillsides, that one imagines what it must be (when all the trees are covered with

CHERRY BLOSSOMS 19

leaves. At times the plum trees are few and far between, which makes them all the more beautiful, their large, snow-white petals shining in the light of a wintry sun.

April brings out the cherry blossoms, when the whole nation makes holiday and turns out to admire the colour. Tokyo and Kioto have long avenues where there are no other trees and no other blossoms. Standing at one end and looking down the line one sees nothing but the wonderful soft tones of these flowers. Occasionally one finds a cake stall along the side of the road with an old woman under a gigantic paper umbrella selling her sweetmeats ; sometimes one comes across an open space of ground, where seats are placed at the expense of the town, and on which the Japanese sit crowded together admiring the wonders of nature. On a specified day every man, woman, and child turns out to see this sight, and practically to worship what they see. The young children are told legends about their forefathers many hundreds of years ago. Each year they are told the same story and yet each year they listen with open mouth and bated breath to the same deeds of heroism ; they commit it to memory, and when they have children of their own, relate the same story, so that the legends never die.

One of the salient features of Japanese life are these annual festal days, when the whole population turns out, and every child has a small branch of cherry blossom. In the larger towns the geisha perform the wonderful cherry dance, as it is called, where every girl, with a perfect branch of those wonderful flowers, dances in unison with her fellow-dancers. There is never a hitch or a forgotten step ; the kimonos are of most extravagant colours, and yet colours that blend and harmonise with the blossoms and the surrounding scene. Sometimes fifteen or twenty of these little girls dance together ; each turn is studied with unending patience ; one can hardly see any individual step because their movements are so slow and graceful ; one can only see and admire the movement as a whole.

Towards the end of April and beginning of May the wistarias begin to take the place of the cherry blossoms ; every tea-house and garden has its arbour hung with masses of flowers, and the surrounding hills are covered with azalea trees luxuriant with the softness of their colours.

One month the banks of a river will be pink with cherry blossoms and the next white and mauve with thousands of azaleas. So quick are the changes that

CHRYSANTHEMUMS 21

there is never an interval when the country looks bare and devoid of colour.

June will see the fields covered with irises ranging from white to scarlet, every colour of the spectrum almost, and still each so perfect in tone that none can be called hard ; acres upon acres of flowers such as the imagination of man can hardly picture, thousands and tens of thousands of flowers forming a carpet over the fields. These again are superseded by the large peony, which is mostly white, though in China, where it is grown in great abundance, almost any colour can be seen, even black. The average peony has a diameter of six inches, and sometimes the plant grows to a height of several feet, covered with blooms.

Thus each month has its own particular flower until the autumn comes and changes the leaves of the trees from green to brown and brown to yellow. The maple leaf, red in spring, turns a bright copper, and that tree, dotted as it is amongst the more subdued colours of the autum tints, relieves the whole.

Towards the end of October the greatest show of flowers comes into season, the flower for which, above all others, Japan has made a name — the chrysanthemum. Banks, tier above tier, of these wonderful flowers can be seen in Tokyo. The Mikado gives an annual garden f6te every year at Akasaka, to which he invites the society of Japan to witness the show ; it is probably the finest in the world. At Dangozaka, also in Tokyo, the plants are one mass of bloom, and many have several differently coloured flowers growing from the same root, the result of many years' patience and careful grafting. Some are larger than soup plates, the petals forming a complete semicircle ; others, with petals curving inwards, resemble an enormous ball. Every colour and every shape of flower imaginable is displayed there. Sometimes all the buds except one are nipped, and instead of hundreds, and even thousands, of flowers blossoming on one plant, only one will be left, but that one a triumph in size, the horticulturist's pride. These flowers last well into November, the finest flower in Japan and the last of the year. It heralds the winter ; with it the leaves begin to fall, the trees become bare, rain and snow follow in the footsteps of sunshine and flowers, disease and unhappiness take the place of health and joy. The flowers and green trees and all the pleasures that accompany them can remain only in the memory, whilst the short bleak days and cold nights of a winter, shorter, but not very different from our own, are bound to run their accustomed course. Every-