JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW HAMILTON WRIGHT- MARIE UNIVERSITY AT 1C! JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW THE MACMIIXAN COMPANY NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO DALLAS ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TORONTO Fug/, the Sacred Mountain JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW BY HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE AUTHOR OF "AMERICAN IDEALS, CHARACTER AND LIFE' Xfcfo ffotfe THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1914 All rights reserved Copyright, 1913, and 1914, by The Outlook Company. COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1914. Norfaoot) Iprrsa J. S. Gushing Co. Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. T "A L ^j I C \ UrU f"; s\^ TSUNEJIKO MIYAOKA INAZO NITOBE EIJIRO ONO "WISE COUNSELORS AND LOYAL FRIENDS r '12! > JB. *>/_|[ CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. THE POINT OF VIEW 1 II. TIJE BACKGROUND 8 III. THE GENIUS OF SHINTO 25 IV. IN TIME OF CHANGE 43 V. PRICE MARKS AND VALUES .... 61 VI. EAST AND WEST 75 VII. THE STREETS OF TOKYO 89 VIII. VILLAGE HOMES AND PEOPLE .... 104 IX. HOLIDAYS IN KAMAKURA 116 X. KYOTO, THE ANCIENT CAPITAL . . . 132 XL NIKKO, THE " SUNNY SPLENDOR " . . . 152 XII. THE INLAND SEA 167 XIII. AT PORT ARTHUR 182 XIV. THE JAPANESE HAND 190 XV. THEATERS AND PLAYS 201 XVI. PILGRIMS AND SHRINES 220 XVII. COUNT OKUMA 237 XVIII. A JAPANESE PRIME MINISTER ON JAPAN . 246 XIX. THREE STAGES OF INTERCOURSE . . . 269 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Fugi, the Sacred Mountain . . . Frontispiece FACING PAGE Pagoda at Nikko 22 A Bice Field 38 Hostess and Visitor .62 Smiling Childhood 70 In Harvest Time 110 Good Friends 116 The Children's Meal 130 The Golden Pavilion in Winter .... 148 A Famous Shrine at Nikko 156 The Cryptomeria Avenue at Nikko . . . 166 A Characteristic Landscape ..... 180 A Bit of Garden 192 A Shinto Priest and Attendants .... 222 The Great Buddha 234 Count Okuma, the Prime Minister .... 242 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MOKKOW CHAPTER I THE POINT OF VIEW No attempt is made in this book to describe in detail the Japan of to-day as the traveler sees it in its schools, industries, banking, administra- tion, army and navy organization and activity; reports of the changes and developments of the last sixty years may be found in an increasing literature of information. It is a story of such dramatic interest, of such striking contrasts, of such rapid changes of external occupation, methods of work and habits of life, that it has found many recorders. Never before in historic times has the trans- formation of a civilization been accomplished with such intrepid intelligence or with such efficiency. Japan has changed occupations, tools and methods, 2 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW and these changes have a significance for the world which is only beginning to be seen. The world has known Japan barely sixty years, and has assumed that the Japan of tw T enty-five hundred years has been superseded by the Japan of To-Day. It is true that the changes of sixty years have not only brought the country into active relations with the world but have created a kind of common dialect through which the Western races are learning something about the Japanese ; but it is far easier for the West to understand Japanese skill than Japanese character, Japanese industry and sagacity in practical affairs than Japanese art, the Japanese facility in adaptation than the persistency and power of the Japanese genius. Modern Japan is old Japan turning its attention to business and arming itself, as its neighbors were arming themselves while it was in seclusion. There is no new Japan ; there is an old Japan expressing itself in the language of modern in- dustry and science. These remote people who used to be months distant in point of time are now ten days from the THE POINT OF VIEW 3 Pacific coast and two weeks from New York. They have become our neighbors, and having come into the same neighborhood it is of immense importance that we should know what manner of people they are. Their occupations, ways of doing things, the external forms of their life, are immensely interesting, but these things are im- portant chiefly as they contribute to our knowledge of the character of the people behind them. The real question is not "what do the Japanese do and how do they do it," but "of what spirit are they and for what do they care most?" In becoming our neighbors and adopting many of our customs and tools the Japanese have not changed their character. Even when a people modifies its ideals it does not change its essential nature ; it takes a new road to a different destina- tion, but it follows the new way with the courage and energy or the timidity and lassitude with which it pursued the old path. The contribution of a race to the common fund of faith, ideas, knowledge, art and manners which we call civilization is always a matter of the 4 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW spirit : if it takes a material form, like an inde- structible road, a temple, a statue, an aqueduct or bridge, its chief value lies in its disclosure of the genius which fashioned it. The individuality of a race is in its genius, and whenever it gives to the world its own original gift itself it gives its genius in some form. The Japan of To-Day is the Japan of Yesterday, and the Japan of To-Mor- row will be the Japan of To-Day. The Daimyo has given place to the practical statesman, the Samurai has been succeeded by the professional man ; the teacher, the banker ; for the moment and for years to come there will be much disturbance and confusion in Japan ; but the old heroic tem- per has already flashed out on fiercely contested fields. The old stoicism is seen in the spirited resolution with which Japan endures the ill-con- cealed assumption of superiority on the part of the West, the old patience of conscientious crafts- manship reveals itself in the passionate eagerness for education and the heroic persuit of it in loneli- ness and exile ; while those who fail to find to-day, in many forms and in many men, the ancient THE POINT OF VIEW 5 chivalry which was the soul of Bushido, have barely touched the hem of the garment of the Japanese spirit. To know this spirit is a matter of immense im- portance to the modern world in which Japan will play a conspicuous part. What manner of man is the Japanese ? Is he the unscrupulous schemer with a gift for dissimulation in whom some people in the West see a dangerous foe in the future ; or has he a high ideal for his country, a pas- sionate aspiration to be a leader in the awakened East, to interpret the East to the West, to win a place among the Great Powers, not for ag- gression but for the furtherance of those things which make for the peace and prosperity of the world ? The answer to these questions is to be found in the spirit and character of the Japanese people, and the spirit and character are to be sought in their reflection in the vital landscape of Japan, in its attitude toward nature and religion, its social habits, its tastes and recreations, its historic ideals, the qualities of body and mind formed by its 6 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW long historic discipline, its instinctive reaction under the stimulus of new conditions. They are to be found, too, in its strength rather than in its weakness, in its constructive ability and habit. The weaknesses and defects of a people retard its development but do not indicate its direction nor afford material for sound judg- ment of its potential growth and power. That Japan needs criticism is obvious to any one who knows the institutions and present life of the country ; that the Japanese are criticizing them- selves is characteristic of a people who are eager not only for education but for the results of educa- tion. But what Americans need is not criticism of Japan but knowledge of its spirit and temper. The source of anti-Japanese feeling in this country is not so much race antagonism as ignorance of Japanese history and character. In view of the immense importance of the relations between the East and the West in the near future this ignorance on the part of many men of official position is in the last degree dangerous to the prosperity of and well-being of the modern world. THE POINT OF VIEW 7 In dealing with Japanese laborers in this country we are dealing not with individual immigrants, but with a powerful government and with a nation as sensitive and self-respecting as our own nation. To know the genius of the Japanese is not an imaginary obligation born of an altruistic tempera- ment ; it is a plain duty imposed by common sense ; to urge courtesy and intelligent considera- tion in dealing with them is as far removed from sentimentalism as knowledge is from ignorance. In this book the attempt is made to convey an impression of the genius of the Japanese people, not by definition nor by characterization, but by making clear its reflection in the vital land- scape of the country. The genius of a people eludes the direct search for it, but reveals itself in shops and fields and homes more clearly than in universities and courts. And this is especially true of a people whose government has been religious, whose religion has been governmental, and whose whole organized life has been like a garment woven out of the substance which it clothes but does not conceal. THE BACKGROUND FIFTY-SIX years before Commodore Perry en- tered the bay of Yeddo and set a tidal wave of change in motion there appeared in Japan one of those men of pictorial genius who paint history instead of writing it and confer on the time in which they live a kind of graphic immortality. Old Japan was intensely conventional ; society was rigidly arranged in tiers, like the dolls which Japanese girls place in the order of rank ; the Emperor and Empress at the top in regal apparel, and below them, in diminishing splendor, the stages of descent to the servants. Customs had the authority of law ; were, indeed, the laws that bound all classes together, kept each class in its place and held the nation in a picturesque but inviolable order. Art, in various forms, had be- come a language used with exquisite skill and with 8 THE BACKGROUND 9 many delicate modulations of accent and shiftings of emphasis, and conveying a group of impressions ample in the opportunities they offered to sensitive feeling and craftsmanship, but sharply limiting the artist in subject and manner. In this orderly rule of a classicism essentially different from ours in point of view and in method, but like it in emphasis on regularity and emotional reticence, came the first Hiroshige, like Victor Hugo among the classicists, or Walt Whitman among the poets bred in the New England tradi- tion of ethical selection and conformity to English verse forms. Fortunately for Japan and for us this realist among the classicists was more deeply interested in the movement of life going on before him than in the practice of the older painters; to his contemporaries he had what we should call the journalistic sense, which the true classicist never has : the sense of those human values which stand out in bold, often crude relief, and convey the feeling for life that makes pictures and books what we of the West call human docu- ments. 10 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW The Japanese cared little for Hiroshige's sketches because their departure from the traditions, and their effective but quick, rough vigor seemed like an intrusion of vulgarity in a field in which the most exquisite order had reigned with almost undisputed authority. When foreigners, free from the artistic preconceptions of old Japan, saw the sketches of Hiroshige they recognized at once their graphic power and their immense human interest ; accustomed to regard etchings, although printed from a metal surface, as original works, they were not confused by the fact that these striking pictures were prints from original draw- ings ; and foreign appreciation has opened the eyes of the Japanese to the unsuspected importance of a neglected painter. The series of fifty-two prints of the Tokaido are now highly valued and increasingly difficult to secure because of their historical as well as their graphic interest. The Tokaido was the most famous road in Japan ; it was the highway between the two capitals, Kyoto and Yeddo or, as it is now called, Tokyo. THE BACKGROUND H This Eastern Sea Road runs along the eastern shore, often within sight of the Pacific, the moun- tain ranges to the west rising across level rice fields or little farms every foot of which is under cultivation, and one sees everywhere the patient and indomitable industry of the people tirelessly at work. Until 1868 this ancient road was the avenue of communication between the Mikado or Emperor, and the Shogun, between the divinely appointed head of the nation and its real ruler. Its course was once marked by long rows of pine trees as the roads in France are often defined as far as the eye can reach by long lines of poplars. The Japanese are an active people and the road life of the country is animated and picturesque even to-day when the main highways are paral- leled by railroads. In the old days, as in England in the days of the stagecoach, the life of Japan could be seen in panoramic variety and completeness on the high- way. All sorts and conditions of people were moving in endless procession from city to city. Handsome palanquins carried and concealed people 12 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW of wealth and rank, while inexpensive bamboo conveyances were at the service of the poorer classes. Decorated but very uncomfortable carts performed the same service for those of the most exalted station, while pack-horses and pedestrians crowded the road. Then as now the majority of travelers walked or ran in close-fitting smocks like those worn by English farm laborers and hostlers in Shakespeare's time. There were heavy packs on their shoulders, or long poles with tubs balanced at either end. In the Tokaido prints the whole active life of old Japan unfolds like a panorama, and the story of its industry, frugality and cheerful discipline is graphically told. Its w r ays and means of trans- portation are supplemented by inns, tea houses, shops. These places of rest and refreshment were simple and inexpensive. No one was in haste ; time had no commercial value and the journey of life was free from the tyranny of clocks. Even to-day, when many modern habits have boon adopted, the Japanese cannot be driven faster than their natural speed. One of the charges THE BACKGROUND 13 brought against them is that they often fail to keep the time condition in contracts. When this happens it will generally be found that a Japanese has yielded to persistent urging and has substituted the date demanded by a foreigner for the date suggested by himself. Walking at their own pace, with frequent stops for a little talk and very little cups of tea, these patient, cheerful working people were capable of extraordinary feats of endurance. To-day the Kurumya, or jinrikisha man, will run hour after hour with little evidence of fatigue, and will turn a smiling face when he gives you a hand at the end of the journey. The foreign traveler on the Tokaido, if there had been such, would have found endless interest in the busy, moving industrial life of old Japan ; but his attention would have been arrested from time to time and his progress stopped by companies of armed men before whom the road emptied itself of all other travelers. They wore two swords, one long and one short, were protected by armor, and guarded some powerful Daimyo or noble, 14 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW possibly a prince ; and as they approached lesser folk drew to the side of the highway and waited at respectful attention until the procession had passed. They were dark, fierce looking figures in their strange armor. In these companies of armed attendants one caught a glimpse of the feudal system, which for generations was as highly organized in Japan as it had been in Europe in the Middle Ages. There was plenty of humor among the plain people on the Tokaido, and the rivalries of inns, tea houses and shops gave variety to the journey ; but when an armed company appeared the discipline which kept Japan rigid in ancient molds was instantly apparent in the attitude of profound respect and the smiling face always turned toward those in authority. The Japanese may have learned courtesy and the habit of being pleasant at the point of the sword ; but now that the sword is sheathed they have not forgotten these delightful arts of advanced civilization. There were still more important travelers on the Tokaido ; embassies from the Shogun to the Mikado and from the Mikado to the Shogun THE BACKGROUND 15 passed and repassed on the ancient highway, and brought into view the foundation on which the political and social order had rested since the twelfth century. Before that date, as to-day, the authority of the Mikado or Emperor was supreme. He was not only the ruler of the nation ; he was the father of the Japanese people. The first of the long line of men who have ruled Japan, the Land of the Rising Sun, was a descendant of the sun goddess, the central figure in the Japanese pantheon. For Japanese history, like all other early history, began in religion ; and primitive religion is always poetry. Our early history, authentically recorded, was a great adventure of faith, aspiration, and dar- ing. The earliest history of the Japanese, mytho- logical and legendary, was a great romance. The Creator and the Creatoress or Creatorex to manufacture a word met on the Floating Bridge of Heaven and fell in love at sight, and, with the spear which they thrust into the sea, they created the group of islands - three thousand and more in number which lie along the eastern coast of 16 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW Asia for nearly twelve hundred miles. Many of these islands are important chiefly because they are dangerous to navigators; of the fifty-two or three millions who populate this archipelago the vast majority live on four islands. This island world was created by volcanic activity and there are still nearly fifty active volcanoes to remind the Japanese of their geological history. Lest they should forget, the islands experience about fifteen hundred earthquake shocks every year, or an average of about four a day. The vast majority of these vibrations are gentle re- minders of forces not yet brought under govern- ment control ; they are not dangerous, but they are disturbing, and familiarity with them does not breed contempt. At intervals of forty or fifty years there is a great catastrophe, involving heavy loss of life and property. Twenty-two years ago, on a clear, quiet autumn morning with no warnings in sky or air, in the twinkling of an eye, nearly twenty thousand people were instantly killed or subsequently died from injuries received as the result of a shock that scattered wreckage through THE BACKGROUND 17 the central section of the main island, and changed the aspect of the country. This habit of vibration has compelled a certain adaptation of domestic and religious architecture. The houses are built of wood, and are generally low ; nails are not used, and a severe shaking leaves the structure practically uninjured, while the movable partitions and walls, if one may use a word which suggests stone or brick or cement to describe slides of oiled paper make escape easy. The stone walls of castles are given a curvature which secures stability and gives pleasure to the eye ; while the five-story pagodas, which have sur- vived many earthquakes, contain a heavy piece of timber like a great mast which is hung from the top and rests on a pivot and, in case of shock, sets the structure automatically swaying with the earth. The primitive Japanese attributed these disturbances to the restlessness of the great fish on which the islands rested. The sea is never absent from the Japanese consciousness; it is the source of much of their prosperity and of some of their greatest dangers ; 18 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW for the coasts in certain sections are exposed to destructive tidal waves. These great waves gener- ally accompany earthquakes; though sometimes the disturbances are far out at sea. Seventeen years ago the ocean swept a long stretch of coast on the northeast along which a trolley line now runs, destroyed practically every structure for a dis- tance of more than a hundred and fifty miles and drowned thirty thousand people. During the late summer and early autumn the islands are visited by storms of terrifying intensity. Nature in Japan is quick-tempered and passionate, and underneath the smile with which the Japanese faces life there is a deep sense of the tragedy of things. Japanese music is always minor and the stories that are dear to the people rarely lack the tragic element. The physical environment of the Japanese has developed a race not indifferent to danger, but facing it with stoical courage and irrepressible energy of mind and body. Nature is passionate and willful in Japan, but never commonplace ; there are nearly five hundred mineral springs in the islands, many of them hot ; THE BACKGROUND 19 there are glens among the mountains down which streams of hot water pour, and these steaming rivulets cover the rocks with ferns and moss of exquisite delicacy and in tropical profusion ; while the effects in winter, when the snow is on the ground, create the illusion of fairyland. The rivers are not large, but they are numerous, and the currents of many of them are impetuous ; there are many rapids, rushing with passionate haste through striking mountain landscapes. If one looks for the traditional but largely mythical Oriental calm in Japan he will find it only around the lakes, which have a tranquil loveliness human- ized by the Buddhist temples on the shore, and in certain lights a beauty as deep and delicate as the genius of Japanese art. The arable land on which more than fifty million people live is not larger than the state of New York, and every foot of this small area is cultivated with skill and tireless energy. The Japanese have a native genius for dealing with the soil, and of late years they have reenforced this combination of instinct and experience with the 20 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW most thorough scientific study. In the countries which have come under their control, Korea, Southern Manchuria, Formosa, the government has established laboratories in which soils are analyzed and experiments with different crops made. The sea also dominates Japan in the matter of climate. Over a stretch of territory twelve hun- dred miles long there are, of course, climatic dif- ferences as marked as those which exist between Maine and Florida. The Black Current, the Gulf Stream of Japan, flow r s northward from the Southern China along the entire eastern coast of the islands and moderates the extreme cold but produces great dampness. There is a proverb in Tokyo that it is "warmer by the thermometer and colder by the overcoat." The mercury rarely falls very low, but the chill in the air is often intense and penetrating. It is colder in winter and warmer in summer than in England, and there is double the waterfall of that country ; the air is deficient in ozone. There are many beautiful days in Japan and the climate is not THE BACKGROUND 21 dangerous; but it leaves many things to be desired. The autumn months are often delightful. The eleventh day of February is the Japanese Fourth of July ; on that day in the year 660 B.C., about a hundred years after the founding of Rome, the Emperor Jimmu Tenno ascended the throne now occupied by the 122d Emperor. Tradition declares that he was the direct descendant, in the fifth generation, of the Sun Goddess ; if a sober historian had been at hand he would probably have recorded the fact that the first Emperor was the leader of a body of invaders who had come from the opposite coast of Asia, landed on the south of the main island and conquered the people to the north. Other streams of immigration poured into the islands, some of these invaders coming from Korea and, ultimately, from Siberia. The racial ancestry of the Japanese is in doubt; the latest opinion inclines to the theory that there is Malasian, Mongolian and possibly Caucasian blood in their veins. The field of surmise is so wide that they have not escaped the suspicion of connection with the Lost Tribes ; beyond this, 22 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW speculation cannot go, and the Japanese are fortunate in having a problem which will probably keep students of ethnology busy for many genera- tions. The Ainus, or people in possession of the islands when the invaders landed, are now as negligible in the development of the country as the Indians in the United States. At the beginning of the Christian era China, India and Korea were well advanced in the arts of civilization and there was intermittent communica- tion between the countries separated by the China and Yellow Seas. About three hundred years later the Japanese received a definite intellectual impulse from China through Korea, and the effect was much the same as that produced by the impact of the classical culture on the mind of Western Europe in the sixteenth century. The Japanese genius for assimilation, so dramatically effective during the last sixty years, went to school to China and eagerly studied Chinese laws, cus- toms, manners and art ; the spirit of the nation was deeply stirred and its quick and vigorous intelli- Pagoda at Nikko THE BACKGROUND 23 gence energized and directed by the discoveries and achievements of its more advanced neighbor. There is a difference of opinion among experts with regard to the beautiful and characteristic curves of the roofs of the temples and palaces in Japan, and no one can now decide whence those strikingly effective lines were drawn ; but the pagodas distinctly show Chinese influence, and the early statues in wood at Nara and elsewhere indicate contact with Korean art. Four hundred years later another foreign in- fluence entered Japan ; Buddhism came originally from India and, with its vague, all-embracing philosophy, its doctrine of submission and re- nunciation, its emphasis on the passive virtues, its imposing explanation of the Universe, and its comfortable code of conduct for this life, entered deeply into Japanese thought. "The educational value of Buddhism in Japan," writes Dr. Nitobe, "cannot be overestimated. It did not stop in its activities with things spiritual. Its influence penetrated and permeated all the ramifications of our national life. It touched 24 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW the very fountains of thought and set a-flowing new currents of ideas. It sobered the light- hearted nature worshipers. It furnished a new interpretation of ancestor worship. It invented a new vocabulary. It gave rise to new arts, trades and crafts. It initiated a new polity of government. It changed the whole social struc- ture." In the eighth century it had become the religion of the state. It had the genius of the Hegelian philosophy ; unlike Mohammedanism, which has never taken root in Japan, it was so tolerant that it devitalized other religions by making room for them in its own flexible and expansive system. Buddhist and Shinto gods live on amicable terms in the same temples, and in private houses the shrines of the two faiths were found side by side, Shinto taking possession of the happy events of life birth, thanksgiving and festivals of joy ; and Buddhism becoming associated with the sad events of life, and especially with death. CHAPTER III THE GENIUS OP SHINTO JAPAN has accepted its religious faith from other races, as Europe and the Americas have accepted Christianity from the Hebrews, China and parts of Asia have accepted Buddhism from the Hindus, and large sections of the Nearer East and of Northern Africa have accepted Mohamme- danism from the Arabs ; but Japan has one faith which is not only indigenous but highly charac- teristic of the spirit of the people, the genius of the state and the power of the laws. Shinto, the Way of the Gods, the worship of ancestors, is in its essence essentially Japanese. Every Japanese is a Shintoist in his sense of obligation to and rever- ence for his ancestors. For generations his an- cestors have reverenced their ancestors and cele- brated their anniversaries by "paying visits to their graves, offering flowers, food and drink, 25 26 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW burning incense and bowing before their tombs/' and this attitude toward those who have gone before and made ready for his coming by their toils, achievements; sacrifices and sorrows is instinctive with him. It has been the bond which has bound not only his family but his nation together; it has made the Japanese one great family, with the Emperor at the head. It is a sublime affirmation of immortality, of the un- broken continuity of the Japanese people living or vanished from the world. "When I was a student in London," writes Professor Hozumi, a distinguished scholar of to- day, "I once went to the Lyceum Theater to see Henry Irving play Hamlet. I indeed admired the performance of that famous actor ; but when it came to the ghost scene, I was struck with an impression that our actors would perform it in a different way. Hamlet, as represented by Irving, appeared to me as constantly showing signs of fear and dread, not only on account of the horrible story told by his father's ghost which is but natural but for the ghost itself. A Japanese THE GENIUS OF SHINTO 27 actor, if he were to act the part of Hamlet, would certainly show strong marks of love and respect towards the father's spirit, mingled with the feel- ing of sorrow and sympathy for his father's fate, and of horror and anger at the 'foul and most unnatural murder.' He would perhaps try to embrace the phantom instead of parrying, as the great English actor did. . . . Ghost scenes are not uncommon in Japanese theaters ; and when the ghost appears to the parents, sons, daughters, friends or lovers, those who meet it never show signs of dread, but those of joy for the meeting, mingled perhaps with sorrow or sympathy." There is a tradition that a distin- guished English actor playing the part of Hamlet was so overcome with terror at the supernal majesty of the ghost that he forgot his lines ! Shinto is no longer a religion ; it is a profound national sentiment. It never was a religion, properly speaking ; but nature worship was com- bined with it to satisfy the cravings of primitive worshipers. It has no founder, no creed, no theology, no sacred book; it was a practice or 28 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW discipline of love and gratitude, of remembrance and of patriotism. The Shinto shrine, in its integrity, is a simple structure of wood, un- decorated, with a mirror standing on the altar symbolically enforcing the Greek maxim : "Know thyself." The most famous shrine in Japan is that of the Imperial Ancestors at Yamada in Ise, in which the Divine Mirror is housed. An American has said of it : "There is nothing to see in Yamada, and what there is to see is not seen." The shrine is a mere shelter for the spirit ; it is taken down every twenty years and exactly re- produced. For many generations every Japanese felt it his duty to visit the Great Shrine at least once. The genius of Shinto is national and patriotic ; it has no explanation of the mystery of the universe to offer its believers, no code of ethics to impose on them. It has created myriads of deities, but they have been outside the life of men, more or less vivid personifications of natural forces ; its only contact with reality has been its multi- tudinous apotheoses of men. It has taught one THE GENIUS OF SHINTO 29 deep and vital truth; the unbroken continuity of a people, the immortality of a race. It has fastened thought on life arid banished death in our sense of the word ; in the older thought of Japan there were no dead ; the nation through all generations was indivisible and indestructible. Shinto was patriotism in its most comprehensive terms, plus naturalism ; it had the tremendous motivity of the one, and the moral ineffectiveness of the other; it deified men without preliminary examination ; it demanded for admission to the company of the gods that a man should be an ancestor ; credentials of character were not asked. He who came to the shrine borne on the prayers or worship of descendants entered without challenge. And those who so easily joined the gods as easily returned to the places once familiar to them. From the 13th to the 15th of July each year they were welcomed in their old homes and temples. Houses and shrines were swept and garnished; the little lacquer tables on which Japanese meals are served were covered with offerings of food; 30 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW in humble homes these offerings were spread on the matting, protected by the leaves of the lotus. Fresh water was provided and tea served in ex- quisite cups and bowls. During three days the departed came back, silent and invisible, but indubitably real, and found the whole land and all hearts open and waiting for them, and the symbols of service and remembrance at hand wherever they went. Torches lighted them their way, fires were kindled on the shores of the sea the spirits always came back over the sea on banks of rivers, and the beautiful lanterns of the Festival of the Dead guided the returning spirits to their homes. So, in the old days, Japan re- newed its allegiance to those from whom it had received country and home, and all things were theirs again. On the night of the third day, when the voiceless farewells were spoken, little boats of straw, laden with food and messages of love, were set afloat on lake and river and sea, a tiny lantern at the prow and incense at the stern. "Down all the creeks and rivers and canals," writes Mr. Hearn, "the phantom fleets go glimmer- THE GENIUS OF, SHINTO 31 ing to the sea; and all the sea sparkles to the horizon with the lights of the dead, and the sea wind is fragrant with incense." Such a faith as this, renewed by daily worship, for there is a shrine in every house in Japan, is not only a living source of poetry, it is & national sen- timent of tremendous energy. Those who have vanished are neither dead nor forgetful ; they watch over Japan and guard its homes ; daily they are thanked for the blessings of field and home, and daily they give out of their vast abundance. They are objects of love and reverence, not of dread and fear. One who seeks the soul of Japan will find it in Shinto, the most penetrating influence in Japan and the source of its strength. It has fatal limita- tions, but it is not too much to say, as Hirata said : "Devotion to the memory of ancestors is the mainspring of all virtues. No one who discharges his duties to them will ever be disrespectful to the gods or to his living parents. Such a man also will be faithful to his prince, loyal to his friends, and kind and gentle to his wife and children. 32 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW For the essence of this devotion is indeed filial piety." Mr. Hearn reports that when he was teaching if a group of Japanese students had been asked their dearest wish nine out of ten would have replied, "to die for His Majesty the Emperor"; and the stone shrine behind the noble lighthouse on Monument Hill at Port Arthur, under which rest the ashes of twenty-two thousand Japanese soldiers and before which stand groups of men and women with bow r ed heads, eloquently bears witness to the vitality of Shinto. The names of those heroes are preserved on little tablets in houses all over Japan ; and on Kudan Hill, in Tokyo, in a great new temple, their names and the names of their comrades who died on land and sea, shine down on the Emperor and the great officers of the Imperial Court when they go once a year to thank them in the name of Japan, and to venerate a devotion to ruler and countiy which welcomed death as a friend. The Japanese word for government throws clear light on the vital importance of ancestor worship THE GENIUS OF SHINTO 33 in the Japanese system : literally translated it means "affairs of worship/' and the phrase "the unity of worship and government" was in con- stant use, Professor Hozumi tells us, by the earlier writers on politics; the old law books contain minute regulations regarding ritual ; and great affairs of state, like declarations of war and the signing of treaties, are formally reported to the Great Shrine at Ise ; as to compare great with small matters deaths in a family among our ancestors were immediately communicated to the bees. At the conclusion of the war with Russia the Emperor went in person to the Great Shrine to give thanks on behalf of the nation ; and Ad- miral Togo, returning from his victory in the Battle of the Japan Sea, took the entire fleet to the Ise Bay, and with all his officers, three bat- talions of marines with arms and a thousand men without arms, conducted a great ceremony of thanksgiving. Ambassadors and officials going abroad on important missions or returning, are expected to go to the shrine of the Imperial Ancestor immediately after they are received 34 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW in audience by the Emperor. On the 4th day of January in each year the Emperor receives from his Ministers a report of the condition of the shrine at Ise, and this ceremony marks the begin- ning of the New Year. In the Constitution promulgated by the Em- peror on the llth day of February, 1889, the an- niversary of the founding of the Empire by Jimmu Tenno and observed as a national holiday through- out Japan, the basis of the Imperial authority and the unity of the Japanese people are une- quivocally declared to rest on ancestral worship. The Preamble of the Constitution reads : " Hav- ing, by virtue of the glories of Our Ancestors, ascended the throne of a lineal succession un- broken for ages eternal ; remembering that Our beloved subjects are the very same that have been favored with the benevolent care and affectionate vigilance of Our Ancestors, and desiring to promote their welfare and give development to their moral and intellectual faculties;" and in the Imperial Address on the occasion of the promulgation the Emperor used these striking phrases: "The THE GENIUS OF SHINTO 35 Imperial Founder of Our House and Our other Imperial Ancestors, by the help and support of the forefathers of Our subjects, laid the founda- tion of Our Empire upon a basis, which is to last forever;' 7 and closed the address with the solemn invocation : " May the Heavenly Spirits witness this our solemn oath." In the Imperial House Law, promulgated on the same day, not only the Imperial authority but the rules governing the Imperial House are repeatedly and explicitly declared to have been received from the Imperial Ancestry, and to constitute a sacred national in- heritance. Admiral Togo, like General Nogi, never failed to ascribe the Japanese victories in the great war to the Emperor and his ancestors, and in acknowledging the receipt of the news of the de- cisive defeat of the hostile fleet on the Japan Sea the Emperor closed his dispatch with the signifi- cant words: "We have thus been enabled to answer to the Spirits of our Ancestors." These phrases go to the very heart of Japanese political and social organization. The Emperor receives his authority as an inheritance from a 36 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW divine ancestor; the Imperial government has been both theocratic and patriarchal ; and this government has now become, by the voluntary act of the Emperor, Constitutional. The spectacle of an absolute Monarchy, founded on divine right in the absolute sense of the words, voluntarily becoming constitutional, has never before been seen in history and is a dramatic illustration of the flexibility of the Japanese system and of their genius for adaptation. It was made possible by the freedom of Shinto from creeds, ritual, dogmas, codes and ecclesiastical authority. It is a principle, not an arbitrary method ; a foundation, not a superstructure. No one can understand Japan unless he studies the nature arid influence of ancestor-worship. It not only expresses the Japanese genius and spirit ; it ex- plains also the reverence in which the Emperor has been held for more than two thousand years. He has been not only the descendant of the Sun Goddess and, therefore, semi-divine ; he has been also the head of the great family, of which every Japanese is a member by blood relationship. THE GENIUS OF SHINTO 37 Moreover, from the twelfth century to the Resto- ration in 1868 the Emperor was invisible to his subjects ; his person was too sacred to be looked upon save by the few who served or guarded him. The eighth century was a kind of Augustan age in Japan. Nara had become the permanent home of the Emperor and, therefore, the capital of the Empire. Chinese culture and the spread of Buddhism, which had become the state religion, fostered the gentler qualities of the people, their love of beauty, of nature, of art ; it inspired the building of temples of impressive size and magnifi- cent decoration ; the opening of schools and uni- versities; increasing intimacy of social inter- course ; the writing of poetry, which became a kind of national passion ; the activity of women in social life and in literature ; richness of dress and luxury in habits and manner of life; it evoked the mellow resonance of temple bells carrying the quiet of pine groves and the spirit of meditation into the busy streets of cities and the fields where men and women worked in cheerful industry. f> \2. 38 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW The Emperors began about that time to delegate their power to able ministers, and the opportunity which this relaxed grasp afforded was skillfully used by a family of energetic and capable men, the Fujiwaras, who so shrewdly emphasized the divinity of the Emperor that he became too sacred to deal with such gross matters as politics and government, and they relieved him of these re- sponsibilities. There was an element of moral and physical relaxation in the Xara period which was not without disastrous results ; but it left the Japanese a highly civilized people, with a lasting devotion to the arts of painting, architecture, landscape gardening and poetry, and with an ingrained refinement of taste and manners. Meanwhile the energies of the Fujiwaras, the active rulers of the country, were declining, the Emperor was in seclusion, and a new and more vigorous family were gaining power in the North and East. Eight hundred years ago Yorirnoto, the head of a powerful clan, established himself in the town of Kamakura and, in the name of the Emperor and acting as his executive, founded a THE GENIUS OF SHINTO 39 dynasty of rulers who held their place until 1878. The new leader was called the Shogun, or General, and he and his successors scrupulously observed the formalities which guarded the sanctity of the Emperor's authority and person. From that time until fifteen years after Commodore Perry opened the closed doors of the Empire, Japan had two rulers : the Mikado, who lived in splendid seclu- sion, and the Shogun, who carried on the govern- ment with the most careful regard for the forms which surrounded the Imperial power, but himself possessed of its substance and using it to develop a system of military feudalism as a protection for his authority. The Shoguns bound theDaimyos, or great nobles, to their cause by many ingenious ways ; and a powerful class of fighting men gathered around these great nobles, as the knights gathered around the great nobles during the Middle Ages in Europe. The Samurai, or armed companions of the Daimyos, became the typical figures of a new age in Japan ; an age not devoid of art activity but the emphasis of which rested on courage, loyalty, 40 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW endurance ; an age of heroes rather than of artists. The Samurai had great qualities, and the story of their ideals is beautifully told in Dr. Nitabe's "Bushido " ; one of the most illuminating books yet written on Japan. Men took on Spartan virtues in those days and women did not lag behind them. Japan still smiled ; smiled the more persistently indeed ; since one must always wear a pleasant face in the presence of one's superiors ; but it developed an invincible Stoicism and a passionate loyalty. It bore a discipline of obedi- ence and devotion upon which rest its extraordi- nary modern achievements in war, in government and in education. A literature of heroism, partly legendary and partly historical, came into exist- ence ; and centuries later, in the after-glow of this feudal age, the long devotion of the Forty-seven Ronins became the most popular tale in Japan ; and the little graveyard in Tokyo, in which they are buried, has been a shrine to which pilgrims have come in multitudes for two hundred years. Between the Mikado in his palace in Kyoto and the Shogun in his palace in Tokyo, or Yeddo as it THE GENIUS OF SHINTO 41 used to be called, embassies bearing splendid gifts passed and repassed on the Tokaido, and the fiction of supreme authority voluntarily delegated and exercised with constant deference to the Imperial will was magnificently sustained. In his relations with the Mikado the Shogun was all humility, tempered with adroit sagacity ; toward his fellow Daimyos, who might combine to overthrow him, he was an astute politician. He compelled them to live under his eye in Tokyo half the year ; and when they went to their castles or estates for the other half year his agents went with them. In some cases members of Daimyo families were left in attendance upon the Shogun as hostages to fortune. The Shogunate passed from one family to another until the beginning of the seventeenth century, when it came into the hands of the Toku- gawa house, which gave Japan able rulers who greatly added to the power and effectiveness of their office. The last of the Shoguns resigned his power in 1868, and the Emperor resumed his ancient authority. This event, which the Japan- 42 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW ese call the Restoration, was hastened by the opening of the countiy from without, but would have come about sooner or later as the result of a revival of interest in the earlier history of the country and a deepening conviction that the dual government was not only an anachronism but a violation of Japanese tradition and an impairment of the Imperial rights and dignity. Embassies between two sovereign powers no longer pass and repass on the Tokaido. The Emperor lives in palace grounds which once belonged to the Shogun, and the capital of the Shogunate has become the capital of the Empire. CHAPTER IV IN TIME OF CHANGE WHEN the Japanese, emerging from their seclu- sion of two hundred and fifty years, began, about the middle of the last century, to read history and familiarize themselves with the attitude of the West toward the East the story was far from reassuring. It was ominous in its reports of con- quest and commercial ambition, and sinister in its prophecies of danger to the independence and dignity of a country which had never borne the yoke of foreign rule. We hear from time to time about a Yellow Peril which is coming in some remote future, but nothing is said about the White Peril which has hung over Asia for centuries. Western aggression in India, Burmah, Siam, China, Thibet, Persia, is not a vague possibility of the future ; it is a tragic fact ; and, while Western rule had not been established in Egypt nor the 43 44 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW "strangling of a Nation," as Mr. Schuster has called it, accomplished in Persia, the stoiy had a sinister meaning for the alert-minded Japanese who became acquainted with it for the first time sixty years ago. Nor did the fact that in some cases this foreign rule was beneficial relieve the story of its ominous suggestion. There was once a school of theolo- gians in New England who insisted that in order to attain the highest Christian grace one must be willing to be damned for the glory of God. This doctrine may have been a counsel of perfection, but it never became popular; it demanded too much of human nature. And it is too much to expect of a nation that it shall welcome foreign rule, even for its own good. To the West Asia has been for centuries a happy hunting ground for territory, political power, and trade opportu- nities ; and well-dressed, well-bred gentlemen, deco- rated with orders, have sat around tables in London, Paris and Berlin, and arranged the affairs of Asia and divided its territory without so much as saying "by your leave" to the Asiatics. IN TIME OF CHANGE 45 This habit of dividing and distributing the estates of living nations as if the coroner had already sat on them has gone on so long that any kind of protest from Asia has come to be regarded as an impertinent disturbance of what is called the balance of power. If Persia objects to having her fate decided by Russia and England without even a formal invitation to be present at the conference, then Persia must be firmly reminded that her own interests demand foreign rule. This procedure fails to meet the requirements of Robert Louis Stevenson's maxim, "be good yourself and make others happy." It is so much easier to be happy yourself and make others good ! Moreover, the first intimate contact with the West was not a kind to reassure the thoughtful Japanese. For many centuries the Islands were secluded, not by design but by distance and by the rudimentary conditions of ship building and navigation. About 1300 that daring, adventu- rous Venetian, Marco Polo, visited Japan, and, on his return to Europe, gave a highly imaginative report of the wealth of the country ; its temples 46 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW and palaces were roofed with gold ! Thus early began the misconceptions of the Japanese which persist to this day. Foreigners were sometimes wrecked on the coasts, and in course of time irregular commercial rela- tions were established by Portuguese and Spanish traders. Dutch traders also succeeded in ob- taining a foothold in the country and retained it, though in a very limited way and under very humiliating conditions, through the period of seclusion which followed. It is not necessary to recite the events which preceded the enforcement of the policy of rigorous suspension of intercourse with the rest of the world nor to refer to disputed points. The story may be briefly told : in 1549 Francis Xavier, one of the ablest and most devoted leaders of the Society of the Jesuits founded by Loyola years before, landed in Japan, was received with great cordiality and began an active and aggressive work ; preaching, teaching, building churches and hospitals, and powerfully appealing, by a rich and elaborate ritual, to the aesthetic as well as to IN TIME OF CHANGE 47 the religious sensibilities of the people. The new faith made rapid progress and speedily gained a strong foothold in the country. Its converts were largely from the most influential classes and in- cluded some of the most powerful nobles, princes, generals and officials of high rank. The Jesuits were followed by other orders, including the Dominicans and Franciscans; it seemed as if these ardent and able priests would convert the nation. But they had not only a passionate conviction that they were the teachers of the only way of salvation ; they had also the Western sense of superiority ; they became covetous and arrogant. It was a militant age and they were militant preachers. In thirty-two years there were more than two hundred churches in Japan and it was claimed that the converts were numbered by the hundred thousands. The later story is confused, but there was lack of toleration on both sides. Buddhist temples were destroyed and Buddhist priests killed. The government began to be suspicious of the 48 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW movement, and its suspicions were confirmed by the Portuguese and the Dutch, who warned the authorities that the aim of the Spanish teachers was political, and that the subjugation of the country would follow the further propagation of the foreign faith. They enforced their position by telling the story of the Armada and of recent events in the Netherlands. There is no reason to doubt that the Japanese government believed that it was face to face with a widespread conspiracy against the in- dependence of the country and, after the manner of the times in Europe as well as in Asia, its hand fell on the foreign priests and their converts with crushing power. There were local revolts, but after a period of terrible persecutions all foreigners except the Dutch were expelled from the country, Christianity was destroyed root and branch with a ruthless hand and existed only in secret in the constancy of a few believers in the South, Japan was closed to the world, the Japanese were for- bidden to leave the country on pain of death, ships were limited in size so as to make foreign IN TIME OF CHANGE 49 voyages impossible, and to receive a letter from abroad was a capital offense. The doors were locked and bolted against the world ; so ended the first chapter of Japanese relations with the West. For two hundred and fifty years Japan was free from war and developed a society ruled by rigid conventions, which prescribed the most minute details of manner and life. But toward the end of the eighteenth century foreign vessels began to be seen in Japanese waters. In 1797 the American flag appeared for the first time in the harbor of Nagasaki ; whalers found their way to the most remote waters ; ships were occasionally wrecked in the Sea of Japan ; and in the United States demands began to be made that Japan should be compelled to come into friendly relations. During the Presidency of John Quincy Adams, and, later, during that of Andrew Jackson, these demands became insistent. Various attempts were made by Americans and English to open communications with the Japanese government, but they were all unsuccessful. Meantime the whaling industry had become very important; 50 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW the opium war had opened China to foreign trade; the discovery of gold in California had given a strong impulse to trade and travel on the Pacific, and a plan to run a line of steamers from San Francisco to Hong Kong made the establish- ment of a coaling station on the Japanese islands a matter of prime importance. Commodore Perry had long believed that under proper conditions access to the government of Japan could be secured, and he was commissioned to take charge of an expedition for that purpose. A fleet of four men-of-war sailed from Norfolk on the 24th of November, 1852, and entered Yeddo Bay on July 8, 1853. Its arrival awakened great curiosity, and the shores of the Bay were crowded with people. Commodore Perry had a definite plan and he carried it out courteously but firmly; he refused to conduct negotiations through the Dutch, who had kept a precarious foothold in Nagasaki, or through the Chinese, but insisted on dealing directly with the Japanese government, arid after many delays consent was reluctantly obtained for the delivery of a letter IN TIME OF CHANGE 51 from the President of the United States to the Emperor of Japan. After the delivery of this letter the American fleet withdrew ; with the intimation that it would return to receive the answer. The closed door was now ajar, though it had not yet been opened ; the American Commodore succeeded because to an adequate show of force he united the most scrupulous regard for Japanese feeling and con- vinced the Japanese government that the inten- tions of the United States were not only peaceful but friendly. The expedition placed the government of the Shogun, with whom the Americans had dealt and whom they very naturally supposed was the Em- peror, in a very difficult position. National sentiment was setting strongly toward the Em- peror, and the Shogun's power was already seriously undermined ; on the other hand, it was quite evi- dent that Japan was in no condition to maintain her isolation by armed resistance. The Shogun took counsel with the Daimyos, and they declared, almost to a man, against opening the country. 52 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW The Shogun was now between the upper and the lower millstones ; facing a revolt on the one hand and an invasion which the country was powerless to resist on the other. He chose the policy that seemed safest for the immediate future, and preparations were made for defense. Forts were built, deep-toned bells were melted and trans- formed into cannon ; practice with foreign fire- arms became the order of the day ; and the country, which distrusted all foreign intentions, prepared to defend its independence. AVhile these warlike preparations were going on the Shogun was fortunate to escape from an impossible posi- tion by death. On the 13th day of February of the following year, 1854, Commodore Periy returned with a larger squadron. After many preliminaries, in- cluding the hospitalities in which the Japanese happily combine formality with cordiality and graciousness, and the interchange of presents which has accompanied all transactions in Japan since the beginning of time, a treaty was signed, by the terms of which peace and amity were estab- IN TIME OF CHANGE 53 lished between the two countries, certain ports were opened to American ships and provision made for shipwrecked sailors, American Consuls were permitted to reside in the country, and various other privileges were granted Americans. This radical departure from the policy of two and a half centuries created great excitement throughout the country, which was divided into two parties : one favoring foreign intercourse and one determined to resist it. The latter declared that in making a treaty opening the country the Shogun had exceeded his powers, and that no treaty was binding until it had been ratified by the Emperor. The United States and Japan were fortunate in the spirit of fairness and breadth of view of Commodore Perry, who recognized not only the high degree of civilization reached by the Japanese but respected their rights as a nation at a time when they were not in condition to enforce those rights. They were equally fortunate in the selec- tion of Mr. Townsend Harris as the first diplo- matic envoy from this country to Japan. A man 54 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW of ability and courage, a prominent citizen of New York, to whom the city owes the foundation of the college which bears its name, Mr. Harris had the patience, tact and good will essential in dealing with an alarmed and sensitive people. He so completely won the confidence of the Shogun's government that he became later its trusted adviser in foreign affairs. He negotiated additional treaties which greatly enlarged the concessions to Americans, and as a result similar treaties were made with European nations. Japan was now open, under certain conditions, to the world ; but the shock to Japanese traditions and institutions w r as great ; it was like a major operation of the most serious nature and the dis- turbance of long existing conditions was revolution- ary in its suddenness and intensity. An unsettled period followed ; foreigners were attacked in a num- ber of instances and the Shogun was powerless to protect them. The situation was rendered almost impossible by the existence of the dual government which foreigners did not understand and which formed an element of almost hopeless confusion. IN TIME OF CHANGE 55 In 1862 the first embassy left Japan on what was really a tour of discovery. The people had been taught that Western peoples were unfriendty barbarians ; the members of the embassy found themselves the guests of powerful nations, re- ceived everywhere with the utmost respect and courtesy. They were welcomed in every capital as friends with a hospitality of which they had not dreamed. The strength of Japan has always been an inward strength ; the nation has had an indomitable spirit ; it has been housed, not without beauty and even splendor, but outward Japan seems fragile to a foreigner. The embassy saw for the first time the impressive buildings of the West and realized the power of its armaments. They returned convinced that only one policy was possible to Japan : the establishment of friendly relations with the Western nations. But the countiy was not persuaded to accept this policy until, as the result of attacks on foreign- ers, the overwhelming superiority of Western ships, arms and military methods was demon- strated by the destruction of Shimonosiki. In- 56 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW ternal dissensions culminated in a brief civil war. Another Shogun had died and the office came to a man who accepted it with the greatest reluctance ; he was destined to be the last of the Shoguns. The Mikado also died and was succeeded by his son, then in his fifteenth year, who was destined to be one of the greatest Em- perors in the history of the country and one of the greatest rulers of modern times. In November, 1867, the Shogun surrendered his authority to the Emperor. Some disorder followed, but was suppressed. In 1869, Tokyo became the capital of the empire, and the stage w r as set for the most remarkable transformation scene in the long drama of history. In the same year the Emperor took what has been called the charter oath, in the form of five ar- ticles, promising the establishment of a deliberate assembly and the decision of all measures by public opinion, the study of the principles of social and political economics, disregard of absurd usages, the administration of impartial justice, and declar- ing that knowledge should be sought wherever it IN TIME OF CHANGE 57 might be found throughout the world. Ancestor worship was the key to the life of Old Japan; the search for knowledge is both the secret and the master passion of New Japan. In the reorganization of the nation the next great step was the surrender by the Daimyos of their feudal rights. In a striking memorial to the Emperor they said : "The place where we live is the Emperor's land, and the food which we eat is grown by the Emperor's men. How can we make it our own ? We now reverently offer up the lists of our posses- sions and men, with the prayer that the Emperor will take good measures for rewarding those to whom reward is due and take from them to whom punishment is due." The Samurai to the number of about 450,000 surrendered their swords. Feudalism was de- stroyed by a single blow. By way of preparing the country for constitu- tional government local assemblies were estab- lished in 1878 ; and ten years later, in 1889, in fulfillment of his promise, the Emperor promul- 58 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW gated a constitution and took a solemn oath to govern the country under its limitations. Mean- while the reorganization of the nation under the leadership of a ruler of courage and foresight, aided by a group of able and patriotic men, was transforming administrative methods, education, the judicial system, currency, banking and business, the organization and equipment of the army and navy, and methods of transportation. There is no mystery in this transformation of a nation within the brief period of two generations ; the secret lies in the discipline of a thousand years, in the thoroughness of organization which made it possible to direct the energies of a nation as if it were one person, and in the passion for education made effective by habits of self-denial, tireless patience and persistent courage. In every school in Japan there is a copy of the Imperial Rescript of Education issued in 1891, which is read at all important public ceremonies, the audience standing in reverent attention. It is one of the group of State papers which have guided and expressed the development of Modern IN TIME OF CHANGE 59 Japan ; in its definition of the ideals of the nation of to-day it is a key to the spirit which animates the most aspiring Japanese : Know Ye ; Our Subjects : Our Imperial Ancestors have founded Our Empire on a basis broad and everlasting, and have deeply and firmly implanted virtue. Our subjects, ever united in loyalty and filial piety, have from generation to generation illustrated the beauty thereof. This is the glory and the funda- mental character of Our Empire and herein also lies the source of Our education. Ye, Our sub- jects, be filial to your parents, affectionate to your brothers and sisters ; as husbands and wives be harmonious, as friends true ; bear yourselves in modesty and moderation; extend your benevo- lence to all ; pursue learning and cultivate the arts, and thereby develop intellectual faculties and perfect moral powers ; furthermore, advance public good and promote common interests ; always respect the Constitution and observe the laws ; should emergency arise, offer yourselves 60 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW courageously to the State ; and thus guard and maintain the prosperity of Our Imperial Throne, coeval with heaven and earth. So shall ye not only be Our good and faithful subjects, but render illustrious the best traditions of your Forefathers. The way here set forth is indeed the teaching bequeathed by Our Imperial Ancestors to be observed alike by Their Descendants and the subjects, infallible for all ages and true in all places. It is Our wish to take it to heart in all reverence, in common with you, our subjects, that we may all thus attain to the same virtue. CHAPTER V PKICE MARKS AND VALUES MR. F. HOPKINSON SMITH, who has redis- covered Venice for many Americans, has said with great emphasis that the City of the Doges should be entered for the first time in the early morning or the late afternoon, and he has gone so far as to urge travelers who find themselves about to arrive in full light of day to leave the train and wait at some outlying station for the hour which not only poetizes but reveals the Venice of the great painters. For neither cities nor men are really seen when they are seen at their worst; and the atmosphere which modu- lates tones and softens lines is as much a part of the picture as the structure of the landscape. There is vital truth as well as shrewd observa- tion in the maxim, "The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." In 61 62 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW the appraisement of character, whether personal or national, we search for values, not for prices. As a matter of fact, the greatest services to civil- ization have incalculable values, but bear no price mark. No one ever thought of paying Lincoln for his sublime patience, or Phillips Brooks for his equally sublime faith. Nor has any attempt ever been made to put a price on the service which Holland rendered in the War for the Liberation of Humanity. It is easy to make a large collection of American price marks, to add them together and to set down the result as the value of American civiliza- tion. Our critics have brought together an ap- palling mass of statistics about divorce, homi- cide, lynchings, railway accidents, defalcations, and blatant vulgarities of many kinds, and pub- lished the sum total as a definition of America and the Americans. And in many cases these statements have been records of fact. The trouble has been that, while they have been true, they have not been the truth. These critics have arranged the price marks very skillfull}', PRICE MARKS AND VALUES 63 but the values have wholly escaped them. The ability to understand a people is not so much a matter of temperament as of spirit and character, plus broad intelligence. Among foreign observers who have commented on the Americans, Mr. Bryce holds an enviable primacy, not because he has been blind to the serious defects of Ameri- can society, but because he has the faculty of vision as well as of observation and has seen things in the large as well as in detail. In his conclusions facts close at hand have not obscured more significant facts at longer range. And Mr. Brownell's "French Traits" has the same illuminating quality; any tourist can see Paris, but the foreigners who see France are few. There is a maxim which one who attempts to interpret the mind of a foreign people, or to re- port conditions in a foreign country, should make the law of observation: "Neither to laugh nor to cry, but to understand." When unscientific human nature stands for the first time in the presence of new conditions, of strange peoples, of novel truth, its impulse is to deride or ridicule, 64 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW or to fall into a panic and shout " Dangerous !" In our own time, when the fundamental law of growth, which men of prophetic mind have dimly discerned for generations, was clearly defined a generation ago, it met with anathemas from one group of earnest people and with derisive shouts from another; and the generation which heard the cries of alarm and chorus of laughter which greeted the appearance of "The Origin of Species" lived to hear a leader of the spiritual life declare that the explanation of the social and economic conditions of the world as the results of a process of evolution came just in time to save many of the most thoughtful men and women from despair. The music of Wagner, the plays of Ibsen, the idea that human conditions are a vital part of any intelligible and workable theory of economics, have passed through the same experience. De- rided and denounced at the start, they have be- come part of the accepted order of things, neither fulfilling all the prophecies of ultimate evil made by their opponents nor all the predictions of ultimate good made by their sponsors. PRICE MARKS AND VALUES 65 The foreigner in the country village is an ob- ject of suspicion if not of insult. In parts of Japan remote from cities he is a center of popular interest, and, like a celebrity on the golf course, speedily finds himself followed by a "gallery" eager to examine his dress and curious to know what he is doing. It must be added that while this "gallery" is very curious, it is friendly, and never intentionally offensive. A bow and a smile go a long way in Japan. In America a Chinaman appearing in his native dress in the streets of a remote village is likely to find the boys more sportive than polite ; and not long ago a little Japanese lady, whose modesty and evident refinement ought to have protected her in any civilized country, was a target for rotten fruit at the hands of young hoodlums in a street hi San Francisco. Emerson, to whom fear was unknown, and derision an attitude of mind as extinct as chain armor, defined a friend as one who makes us do what we can. The idea of friendship as a kind of amiable blindness is as misleading as the idea 66 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW that love wears a bandage over its eyes. The great service of friendship, as of love, is through clear-sightedness to help us bring out the best that is in us. One would far better find his own way than follow a blind guide. The friend who always reflects our moods and confirms our judg- ment of ourselves is more dangerous than an enemy ; for the truth is a tonic even when it is flung at us as a missile, and commendation which we do not deserve fastens attention on the weak- ness which it attempts to conceal. Americans have suffered little from flatterers and have had slight experience of being pleasantly discussed by their neighbors ; but the discipline of mis- representation and criticism has probably tem- pered what once promised to be a very monoto- nous habit of self-appreciation. Unfair criticism is irritating, but it is more wholesome than flattery. If the student of a nation is neither to laugh nor to cry, but to understand, he must approach a foreign country as a friend ; for sympathy is the only key that unlocks the door to character, to truth, to art, or to life. The popular opinion, PRICE MARKS AND VALUES 67 derived from the practice of small or malicious minds, that criticism is a kind of organized fault- finding, is as far from the truth as were some old-time fathers who believed that corporal punishment was the only form of parental disci- pline. A very small mind can see a blemish on the character of a great man, but only greatness can recognize greatness : and Goethe's correction of the cynical maxim that no man is great to his valet is a side light on the qualifications of the true critic. The test of friendship is willingness to inflict pain when pain is a step towards health ; and truth is the only sure foundation on which friendship can rest. If truth-telling becomes a kind of recreation, as it did in the case of Matthew Arnold, it may lose a little of its force of appeal, but it remains an incentive, and in the long run its service survives the momentary pain it in- flicts. The friend of a nation is neither a flatterer nor a mere recorder of pleasant impressions; he is one who tries in all sincerity and sympathy to discover the truth and to tell it in simple loyalty to the best of which a people is capable. 68 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW Japan is probably to-day the most misunder- stood country in the world. Its achievements are matters of history ; but its spirit, its aims, and its character have been as variously inter- preted as if it had never expressed itself in re- ligion, in art, or in action. Its most dogmatic interpreters are those who have never seen it. They seem to have divined its secret purposes and uncovered its most subtle plots. In their overwrought imaginations it is a group of islands in whose harbors vast fleets are being secretly constructed, with almost superhuman rapidity and skill, for the conquest of distant continents. The fact that it has fought only twice with foreign nations in nearly three centuries, while the lists of wars in the West during the same period fill pages of history, and that both these wars were fought to preserve what it believed to be its national integrity ; that it is heavily burdened with debt and staggering under the weight of a taxation which its splendid patriotism alone makes bearable ; that the one policy on which the people as a whole insist with increasing vehe- PRICE MARKS AND VALUES 69 mence is the reduction of the expenses of govern- ment ; that it lies exposed to attack from a power which fights without money, and waits and watches with Asiatic patience while it advances like a glacier ; that the Japanese people are eager for the opportunity of commercial development and are persuaded that peace is vitally related to that development ; that they are facing prob- lems more difficult than those which confront any other people these facts have no weight with those valiant journalists and politicians who ciy aloud and spare not, and whose prophe- cies of approaching war fill the Japanese with amazed incredulity. From this group the Japanese learn that they are a warlike nation, swiftly and secretly arming to subdue the peaceful and sluggish Americans. From another group they learn that they are a race of poets and artists, to whom war is hateful and business an interruption of the peaceful contemplation of beauty; that they live in a country in which the cherry trees are always in bloom, and the men of affairs are always writing 70 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW poems to spring; that the strife for excellence in the composition of tanka is the only kind of competition known in the country ; that the lotus blooms perennially in their happy land and that life is a happy dream of ease and devotion to the service of art. This also fills the Japanese with amazement ; for while they love the cherry tree, they know that its bloom is as fleeting as a breath from fairyland ; and that while their hands have lost none of their ancient cunning, and fashion delicate and exquisite works of art with the skill born of generations of training, and that the instinct for form and color is part of the heritage of the humblest worker, the nation toils unceas- ingly with meager natural resources but with indomitable patience ; and that while the love- liness of Miyanoshita, Nikko, Nara, and a hun- dred other landscapes remains inviolate, black smoke pours from lofty chimneys over many ancient cities ; that education tends even too strongly toward technical expertness ; and that the determination to master the methods of ap- Smiling Childhood PRICE MARKS AND VALUES 71 plied science and meet the competition of the West in practical achievement without fear or favor has become almost too strong among their young men. Japan has passed through several stages of what may be called world-opinion. When it first emerged from its seclusion of more than two centuries, its life, in its outward aspects, had a patriarchal simplicity and an idyllic charm ; and the poetry of its ancient feudal system and of its old faiths and popular festivals captivated the imagination of the West, and a kind of Pierre Loti atmosphere enfolded it as the home of poets and artists and lovers. And the West lost its heart to Japan, and idealized it with the ease and freedom made possible by great distance and very superficial knowledge. Then came the war with Russia, and the reve- lation of Japanese patriotism and of a military genius and efficiency which astonished the world. And straightway Japan became the mother of heroes and the home of fighters, to whom war was not only a matter of inward loyalty and an op- 72 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW portunity of sublime courage, but a science, the most unimportant detail of which had been mas- tered in advance ; and a great wave of admira- tion for a heroic and splendidly trained nation passed over the world. When the smoke drifted away from the battlefields of Manchuria, Japan was revealed as a Power of the first class, with a navy and an army of extraordinary efficiency ; and the West realized that a new force had ap- peared in the Far East and that incalculable changes were coming, which would modify con- ditions which Europe had comfortably taken for granted were permanent. The artists and poets had become expert fighters. Realizing, as did the Germans after their triumphs of a generation ago, that a powerful nation must have great resources, the Japanese turned to commerce and manufactures and be- came formidable competitors, and the working class began to emigrate to countries where higher wages were paid. Soon there was a rift in the lute. The Japanese began to hear less of their achievements and more about their faults. The PRICE MARKS AND VALUES 73 venerable Chinese cashier story began its travels in America ; and was innocently accepted; by people who did not understand his expertness in dealing with the perplexing currencies and complicated exchange of the Far East, as a wit- ness to the prevalence of dishonesty in Japan; the politeness of the Japanese, of wiiich much had been said, became an evidence of insincerity. Will some one explain why the peoples who have not the time or the inclination to be polite agree that the polite nations are insincere ? France will sympathize with Japan in this experience. Through these changes of opinion with regard to their character it may be suspected that, while the Japanese have changed many of their habits, occupations, tools, and methods of education, they are the same people whom the West idealized a generation ago ; and that if they had qualities worthy of admiration then, they have qualities worthy of admiration now. They have become practical; but they still love the cherry tree and WTite poems to it ; they are developing great business activity, but they continue to paint 74 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW with almost unrivaled delicacy and precision ; they support a strong army and navy, but both are kept in high efficiency for defensive purposes. In a word, they are like other nations : they have great qualities and they have the defects of their qualities. They are entitled to fair, intelligent, and discriminating interpretation. CHAPTER VI EAST AND WEST "AND never the twain shall meet," says Kipling. But they have met ; they are meeting every hour in numberless places and ways. These words are written in an old Chinese city; but the morning newspaper which has just been laid on the table of the reading-room of the hotel prints half a column report by cable of devastating floods in Ohio and Indiana, with details of the loss of life and property at Dayton and Colum- bus ! One is brought here by an American loco- motive in an American Pullman, and finds half a dozen Americans waiting at a finely appointed station to take the Trans-Siberian express south. There is a cash register at the cigar-stand. This is one of the distributing centers of the bean- raising country, and there are great piles of bean- bags waiting to go to Dairen and thence to 75 76 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW America. Incidentally it is worth noting that not long ago there was vociferous complaint that the Japanese were creating a monopoly of this trade and taking much profitable business out of American hands. The same complaint came from the English ; they investigated, and dis- covered that the monopoly was not artificial, but was being secured by quicker wit and greater adaptation to local conditions. The Japanese were not content to deal with the local merchants, nor were they dismayed by the accommodations offered by Chinese inns in remote villages ; they went boldly into the back country and bought beans on the ground where they were raised. The English discovered the secret of the Japanese monopoly, adopted the same methods, and are now becoming monopolists themselves, to the sorrow of the Japanese, who for a time had the business of exporting beans well in hand. This is an illuminating example of a whole class of criticisms of the Japanese and of the explanations which lie on the surface if people will take the trouble to study local conditions. EAST AND WEST 77 The American who came to Japan to get away from America, and found a stove made in Peek- skill on the wharf in Yokohama, had a very com- mon experience ; and so did the American family who brought a large supply of American standard remedies and toilet luxuries with them, and found all these things in a case in the first hotel in which they lodged in Japan. There are, of course, many localities into which foreign con- veniences have not penetrated, and in which the foreigner awakens a somewhat embarrassing at- tention ; but the large towns in which the stand- ard articles of foreign use cannot be found are few. Of course there are many who will tell you that these evidences of contact with the West are misleading, and that the ancient East remains unchanged and unchangeable. These are the people to whom Mr. Kipling's phrase which pref- aces this chapter embodies a fundamental fact in the histoiy of the race, and one which only dreamers and idealists will challenge. It is a picturesque theory, and M. Pierre Loti has very 78 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW plainly expressed his hope that it will never be refuted by changed conditions. Lord Beacons- field made very effective use of the "Asian mys- tery/' intimating that the Oriental mind is im- penetrable to the less subtle Occidental intelli- gence, and that Asia has a secret which is hidden from Europe and America. And many Western minds have yielded to the spell of the East so completely that they have surrendered their individual quality and made a vain effort to effect in a day a change of type which it has taken cen- turies to define. When Mohini, one of the earliest and the most interesting of the Indian teachers w T ho have come to America, was asked to describe the methods by which an inquirer might become a follower of the faith he held, he discouraged the attempt by saying, in effect, "You have your path, we have ours; our path is not for you." When he was told that the Christian faith had been tested and found wanting, he replied that no one had or could exhaust the possibilities of the Christian religion. EAST AND WEST 79 It was the wise answer of a wise teacher, and the word "path" was significant of the differ- ence between the men of the East and the men of the West. They are not different in kind, but in experience ; there is no secret which the East holds to the exclusion of the West. They have traveled in different paths for many centuries; they have lived under different skies, in different climates; they have been surrounded by differ- ent landscapes ; environment and, for many generations, a radically different heredity have colored the very texture of their minds, so that the differences between their languages are sig- nificant of the differences in their ways of think- ing. An Oriental will say frankly that his chief difficulty in understanding an Occidental is not a matter of language but a mode of thought ; and the Occidental will tell you that, difficult as an Eastern language is to a student from the West, the real difficulty is deeper : it is a differ- ence in the way of thinking. There is a funda- mental truth at the base of Lander's poetic phrase, "We are what winds and fountains make 80 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW us"; and natural conditions as divergent as the sublime solitudes of the Himalayas, the volcanic islands on which the Japanese have lived for perhaps three thousand years, the broad fer- tility of the prairies of the Central West in America, have left deep impressions on the im- agination and in the physical character of many generations on both sides of the globe : and the obvious differences of aspect which not only the landscape, but the dress, habits, occupations and bearing of the East and West reveal even to the eye of the careless tourist are the outward and visible signs of inward and invisible differ- ences of ideals, standards of life, and interpre- tations of the mystery of the world. When the largest allowance is made for these differences, they still remain, so far as the nature of the men who reveal them is concerned, super- ficial ; they are differences of environment, not of original structure ; they tell a story of roads rather than of men, of long divergent paths rather than of divergent orders of travelers. The world is not large ; and if the paths which EAST AND WEST 81 traverse it are long enough ; they inevitably strike into parallel lines or run together. Differences of environment and of racial ex- perience have created an Eastern and a West- ern temperament ; an Eastern way of looking at life and the world and a Western way ; but the human spirit is one and the same in both hemispheres, and there is no kind of knowledge possessed by one from which the other is debarred by racial incapacity from understanding. The two sides of the globe form a complete circle ; the seas which once seemed almost impassable barriers have now become highways of easy communication. This view is a radical depar- ture from the traditional attitude of the old-time trader and the old-time diplomatist ; but, how- ever unwelcome it may be to those who hold that the East is the natural dependency of the West and the normal sphere for Western control, it is the view which has long been held by men of vision in the West ; and, what is far more im- portant, it is the view which the East is holding with increasing energy and clearness of purpose. 82 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW The Englishman who said that things had come to such a pass in Japan that a foreigner could no longer strike a Japanese without serious danger of being sent to jail bore unwilling testimony to the radical change which is taking place in the East. It ought to be added that the Japa- nese have never been patient under the treat- ment which too many Chinese have received in their own cities at the hands of some foreigners less civilized than the people whose hospitality they have brutally abused. The story of West- ern dealings with China is not pleasant reading for the man to whom Christian civilization means the diffusion of the Christian sense of justice, of courtesy, and of brotherliness ; and it is a story with which it is to be hoped the Chinese will not become familiar until its harsh selfish- ness has been softened by memories of a later friendliness. The feeling that the races are so far apart that the East can understand no West- ern language but a kick, or a blow of the fist, is the root of much of that Western brutality which inevitably evoked Eastern ferocity. EAST AND WEST 83 Many who have had business dealings with Eastern peoples and have lived among them for long periods of time have so deeply imbibed this feeling that they regard any other view as evidence of ignorance of the Eastern character. Practical men will tell you, they say, that it is idle to deal with the East on a basis of good will and a common human nature. The Eastern nature, they will assure you, is so different from the Western nature that no real understanding between them is possible. Years ago a foreigner long resident in the East was riding on a famous old highway in Japan, when he met one of the most powerful Daimyos coming with a large company of retainers from the opposite direction. For centuries a Daimyo had had the right of way in Japan ; other travelers waited respect- fully until he had passed. This foreigner was warned by his companions of the danger of forc- ing a passage through the company of armed men who were escorting their feudal lord. He replied, "I know the Orientals" and rode straight to his death at the hands of one of the 84 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW retainers whose chief he had wantonly insulted. He did not know the Orientals, and he paid the penalty which ignorance often exacts. And there are many who live in the East and do not know the East. A clear-sighted observer, as the result of recent travel, said that the smoking rooms of foreign hotels and foreign clubs are places to avoid if one wants to know the East. There are many open-minded and high-minded men in the great company of foreigners who live in the East for business purposes, especially among the Americans, who have never been accustomed to govern the East men who represent their country at its best ; but there are many who assume to know the Orientals because they live among them, and forget that there is a vast difference between access to knowledge and knowledge itself, and that a blind man may live fifty years in a house and know only the shape of its furnishings. One may get much trustworthy information in smoking rooms if IK; knows how to distinguish between those to whom the East is only a busi- EAST AND WEST 85 ness opportunity and the Oriental only a possible purchaser, and those to whom the East is half the world and the Oriental a fellow human being who is the more interesting because his mental processes are less direct than our own. On the other hand, one may carry from smoking rooms a mass of ignorance, prejudice, and stupid in- tolerance sufficient to stock a good old-time book of American impressions by an old-time European observer of the type whom Cooper satirized. There are foreigners living in all parts of the East who not only live in the East but with it, and who enter into human as well as business relations with the Orientals. To these observers the idea of a permanent barrier, an impassable gulf, between the two great divisions of the human race is a mischievous invention of those who see only the superficial differences and have not learned that under what Dr. Nitobe has called the institutional mind there is a common human mind which makes it possible for all men not only to understand but to trust one another. Those who were fortunate enough to hear the 86 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW eloquent tribute which Sir Andrew Fraser paid to the nobility and loyalty of the Indian char- acter on his retirement from the government of the most turbulent province in India will not forget its convincing frankness, and were not slow to discover in the spirit of the veteran British proconsul the secret of his knowledge of the Indian temperament and attitude of mind. For men evoke the spirit they express, and the heart of a race opens to those who approach it, not with distrust and suspicion, but as members of the same great family. There are industrious farmers who see their own fields clearly, but never see the landscape ; and there are men in the East who know the local business con- ditions, but who never get so much as a glimpse of the vital conditions, the intellectual move- ments, the spiritual stirrings in the souls of those among whom they have their home but with whom they do not live. Those to whom every difference from the conditions and habits of the localities from which they came is an evidence of inferiority never understand an}' country, not EAST AND WEST 87 even their own. Mr. James has said shrewdly that a true cosmopolitan must know something even of his own country ; for this, he might have added, is the beginning of knowledge of the world. The world gains its interest largely from variety; and the differences which bring out the range of human resources and art ought to be welcomed at a time when many influences seem to be working to produce an uninteresting monotony of dress and habit. The most disas- trous thing which has happened in Japan is the adoption of the German cap ! It has blighted the small boys and overshadowed the older ones. The endeavor of the East has been to identify unity with uniformity ; the problem of the West is to discover unity in variety. Between the two hemispheres there are radical and manifold differences, but there are deeper resemblances. The past has emphasized the differences and kept East and West apart ; the future will emphasize the resemblances and bring them together. There are great obstacles to be overcome ; obstacles so great that without that imagination which is 88 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW the prime quality of statesmanship and of great commercial enterprise they seem insurmountable ; but those whom time has separated time can reunite. There are no obstacles which right feeling, generous treatment, and, above all, un- deviating justice, cannot remove. CHAPTER VII THE STREETS OF TOKYO To a visitor from the Far West, Tokyo pre- sents two possibilities of interest which are in- exhaustible : opportunities of getting thoroughly lost, and an almost unlimited element of novelty. One can easily lose himself in London, if he chooses his section of the old town intelligently; but he has ways of finding himself: Baedeker offers him a map which may be understood with- out a college education, or he may inquire of a resident who, if he happens to be a Cockney, will make any kind of an education a vain and foolish thing. In the East End of London the man who has lost himself may not understand the information which is given him ; in Berlin or Paris, in a similar plight, he faces the opposite peril ; it is astonishing how many Germans and Frenchmen do not understand their own 89 90 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW languages when those languages are spoken by non-resident Americans. There is, however, this difference between the European cities and Tokyo : in Europe you make an effort to gain information, in Tokyo you do not even make the attempt. If you happen to be near a tram line, you can take a car and the chance of being carried to a familiar locality; or if there is a jinrikisha on the horizon, you can probably give the quick-witted 'ricksha man the name of some building or section which you remember. But getting lost in Tokyo is not a reflection on your intelligence or your sense of direction. If you drive to distant quarters of the city, you will often hear your "runner" inquiring the way ; indeed, so narrow, numerous, and con- fusing are the little lanes in many sections that you wonder that even a man whose business it is to find his way should be able to go victo- riously through the maze. Tokyo did not begin as a city; for many cen- turies the marshy ground on which it stands was THE STREETS OF TOKYO 91 the seat of a group of thirteen or fifteen fishing villages, separated by considerable distances. These villages, as distinct as the old villages which have merged into London, are now indis- tinguishable to the foreigner, though he soon learns the names of the principal wards into which the city is divided, and which, to the resi- dent, have not only definite historical associa- tions but in many cases distinct characteristics. The population is well beyond two millions, and the vast number of one-stoiy shops and houses cover a space out of proportion to the number of people who live or work in them, and one can walk fifteen miles in one direction and ten or twelve in the other without getting a out of town." There are a few broad thoroughfares, and there are many localities marked by temples or parks or buildings which the visitor soon learns ; but there are vast sections of the city which present no salient features and in which one may wander with a careless foot and never arrive anywhere. If the visitor has formed that most necessary habit to one who wants to know 92 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW places or people in the world, the habit of walk- ing, it will not trouble him that he cannot read a sign nor understand a word that is written or spoken. He is in a city which is not only orderly but friendly; a city across which a woman can ride in a jinrikisha at night unattended and unmolested. Tokyo is not beautiful, though it has locali- ties of great beauty ; parks of great age and of a mysterious and impressive charm. Modern Japan is finding in its ancient temple grounds parks which have a quality distilled by time, which no skill of the landscape artist can over- take and capture by the swift methods of to-day. It is possible successfully to hasten mechanical processes, but not to produce artificially the results of the process of growth. Pine trees will not put on the semblance of age at the bidding of the expert ; antiques are successfully manu- factured in many places in Europe and the East, but large out-of-door effects depend on Nature, and Nature refuses to be hurried. Tokyo has inherited breathing-places which the city could THE STREETS OF TOKYO 93 not create out of hand. From these temple grounds often rise those long flights of ancient stone steps up which uncounted pilgrims have passed to temples venerable with age and almost hidden by the overhanging branches of trees as old as themselves. In no city is there a feature of the landscape more interesting and impressive than the great wall of the palace grounds around which Tokyo has built itself as if for defense ; a wall nearly two miles and a half long, overhung with wide- spreading, low-reaching pine branches which are reflected in a thousand elusive and changing lights in the still waters of the moat. In these large features Tokyo has the interest of a novelty so radical that it is doubtful if it ever quite fades even from the sight of the for- eigner who has made the old town his home. Novelty sometimes lies in degree of difference from the things to which one is accustomed ; in Tokyo it lies not in degree but in kind. To the remark of an American who knew Europe well, that " there is only one dinner in the world, and 94 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW that came from Paris," Charles Dudley Warner replied, "If you had been in China, you would know that there are two dinners in the world." There is a vast difference between a city of solid magnificence like Budapest, or of brilliant im- mensity like Paris, and a mushroom town on the frontier ; but they belong to the same type, and the crude beginning may strike into noble lines of structure as time, the ripener of the raw and the civilizer of the primitive, passes. But between the Occidental and the Japanese city there is a fundamental difference of outline and of detail. If one is to know cities, it is more important that he should know r the "mean streets" than the thoroughfares; if he is to know a people, he should familiarize himself with the details of their life quite as thoroughly as with their form of government. And the details of life in Tokyo are endlessly interesting. It can be seen to great advantage from the jinrikisha, or kuruma - a conveyance of modern origin, devised by an American, but now so characteristic of Japan THE STREETS OF TOKYO 95 that most people take it for granted as a vehicle of long descent. One will look in vain for it, however, in the vivid and very human pictures of old-time road life in the Tokaido prints. Seated between its big wheels one has many of the ad- vantages of walking without its fatigue. He is wholly in the open air ; as much so as the pedestrians who make the narrow street a place of exciting dangers of collision and of hair-breadth escapes. He moves faster than they, but he has no carriage-sense of separation from them; and they look upon him, not as a superior person, but as a man in a hurry. In old Tokyo, or Yeddo, as the city was called in the days when the Shogun made it his capital and the Mikado was, so to speak, enshrined in Kyoto, you would have found wide spaces given over to the residences of the great Daimyos, or feudal lords, and the work and trade of the city crowded into narrow quarters. You would have met these powerful nobles riding through the streets attended often by a company of two- sworded Samurai and followed by servants bear- 96 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW ing their traveling equipment. They had come perhaps from a long distance, stopping at famous inns or tea houses by the way ; and if you met them you waited respectfully until they had passed. To-day the great noble is distinguish- able from the rest of the population only by the practiced eye, and the Samurai are university professors, bankers, men of the professions and of affairs. In the old days the Daimyos lived in ample grounds at a distance from one another, pro- tected by walls and gates. The great Red Gate of the University of Tokyo was once the entrance to one of these semi-fortified houses. To-day the busy city has filled the intervening territory between these " seats of the mighty" with a vast variety of little shops. So many are the shops that one wonders how they are supported. If every family keeps a shop, where do the customers come from ? This, however, is in the parts of the city in which the poorer people live, and in the majority of the shops only articles in daily use arc found. The shop is often a kind of by- THE STREETS OF TOKYO 97 industry; the man of the family has some oc- cupation which supports, or largely supports, the family, and the shop is a venture of fortune, managed often by the woman or women of the family. This gives the shops a friendly, domestic atmosphere, often more conducive to conversa- tion than to business ; indeed, sales seem a matter of small interest to many shopkeepers; and, save in the neighborhood of foreign hotels, Japan is delightfully free from that pressure to buy which becomes almost intolerable in some coun- tries. Even in the better class of shops it is difficult for a foreigner to discover the resources of the place ; for the most beautiful goods are often out of sight and are produced only in re- sponse to requests. The courtesy of the attend- ants does not depend on the purchasing atti- tude ; the unproductive shopper is received as politely as the most profitable purchaser. In the old days Japanese ladies did not go to the shops; the shops w r ent to them. The beautiful fabrics were displayed in the privacy of homes, as, in Europe, in feudal times, costly silks and 98 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW satins from the Far East were spread before the eyes of eager ladies in isolated castles. In the district of the small shops, business is practically conducted out-of-doors ; the shop opens directly on to the street, and the stock lies under the eye of the customer. Indeed, the street becomes one continuous shop, separated into divisions only by the big signs which are suspended from the roof at the sides. Fruit, vegetables, shoes, toys, household utensils, china, curios, lanterns, umbrellas, wooden things of many kinds, are spread out in great profusion, and the street is full of bustle and movement. The effect is often highly picturesque, and the color as vivid as in the fruit shops in the streets of Naples. In the shops where cloth is sold there is a matted platform on which, in chilly weather, a hibachi is sending out a heat which is welcome even to a hardy people accustomed to a low temperature. There is a little row of sandals in front, and the tiny place has an air of cleanness, order, and thrift. The old-time fair survives in great vigor in THE STREETS OF TOKYO 99 Japan, and there are nights when certain streets are given over to the display, in little booths or on the roadbed, of curios, cups and teapots in be- wildering variety, artificial flowers, toys, flowers, bushes, and flowering plants. The street is lighted by hundreds of lanterns, and, to the visitor at least, has the unfading interest of the old-time spectacular East. The fair is open by six o'clock, and the entire street is given over to it save a little lane in the middle through which a jinrikisha or kuruma may pass with many cries of warning from the kurumaya, and there is much good-natured getting out of the way by the crowd of idle spectators or the practiced purchasers seeking bargains. There are also markets where fish, eggs, vege- tables, and fruit are brought in from the Bay and the country. Fish is one of the staple articles of diet among all classes of people, and is found not only in great variety but of an excellent quality. The market, on a canal not far from the Bay, announces itself unmistakably to the visitor, and the carts and carriers that stream 100 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW away from it distribute its products to the little shops in all parts of the city. One of the most familiar figures in the streets is the seller of fish, carrying wooden pails at the ends of the pole on his shoulder, and announcing his approach by a familiar cry. The vegetable markets are scenes of great activity, and many familiar edibles are found in them, with some not so familiar the chief of these being the immense white radish called the daikon, of a very agreeable taste but of an infamous odor. As one goes along country roads he often sees long rows of daikon hanging between trees or from the fronts of farm build- ings. On orthodox Japanese tables meats are almost unknown ; in private houses where for- eigners are entertained in the foreign fashion, and in hotels, the meats are, as a rule, notably good. Apples, pears, peaches, strawberries, are reenforced, so to speak, with persimmons, oranges, grapes, figs. One of the minor industries of Tokyo is the baking of the sweet potato, dear to the poorer children, who spend their coppers for it as American children spend their nickels THE STREETS OF TOKYO 101 for candy. There are said to be more than a thousand potato ovens in the city. Good, whole- some food is within reach of the very poor; a box of rice, pickles, and dry fish, tastefully put up, can be bought at a railway station for three cents. There are many characteristic cries in the quieter streets and one hears them especially at night when traffic and travel have died down. The voice of the vender of a preparation of macaroni of which the people are specially fond has an appetizing sound between ten and eleven, when a late hunger craves recognition ; the seller of tales and ballads offers a pleasant refuge for the wakeful ; but best of all for the sleepless is the note of the masseur's little pipe. You have only to open a window or push back a slide and light, skillful hands will soon bring on a delightful drowsiness. Is there any other city in which sleep is peddled in the streets? In former times this profession was confined to the blind a form of class privilege to which the most zealous reformer could hardly take exception. 102 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW Seen at night from a tea house on one of the hills, the million lights of Tokyo twinkle like a constellation, and as one goes through the streets he is ready to accept the "Arabian Nights" as veracious history. If he has the good luck to be out on a night when a light snow has fallen, he will see an Oriental fairyland. At times he will meet young men, in the thin- nest of w r hite garments, running at full speed from temple to temple through the cold night, to be met by a shower of colder water as they arrive, and then to hasten on to another cold bath at the next temple. This ceremony of puri- fication was accomplished in more primitive times without clothing; these fleeing figures are less noticeable under modern regulations, but it is doubtful if they are more comfortable. Sometimes, if a gate or door stands open, one may get a glimpse of one of those charming gardens which enshrine silence and privacy in the crowded capital. In the morning school children throng the streets with serious faces but with willing hearts, for in Japan the schools have acquired THE STREETS OF TOKYO 103 the art of being interesting. The usual dress of the girls is modified both for study and for play ; the boy is condemned to wear the ugly German cap. Occasionally one meets a Buddhist or Shinto priest, and sometimes a funeral passes him in the street. Buddhism has come to be associated with death in the minds of the people at large, and formerly the Buddhist priests almost uni- formly officiated at funerals; to-day Shinto funerals, generally of important people, are often seen. The funeral procession is pictorial and often impressive. Flower standards, lanterns, and great masses of flowers give the moving line of figures, many of them in white, color and brightness ; for in Japan death is largely robbed of its gloomy associations. Cages are often carried and opened during the ceremonies, and the birds fly away singing a very beautiful piece of symbolism. Japanese life is saturated with symbolism ; if one understood all that lies back of the sights and sounds seen and heard in the streets of Tokyo, he would uncover many of the secrets of the Japanese spirit. CHAPTER VIII VILLAGE HOMES AND PEOPLE THERE is a quaint picture of a little Japanese village, snow-bound, by that very human painter, Hiroshige, that gives one a sense of remoteness from the rush of action, of a kind of aside in the vehement talk of the world, very engaging to one who is entangled in the tumult of Tokyo, or still hears in the distance the clang of New York, the "central roar" of London, or the sharp staccato of Paris. The fragility of the little group of houses is emphasized by the weight of snow which rests on them, and the three or four people who move about convey a sense of the noiselessness with which the business of life is being transacted that day in those little houses shut in from the weather by sliding screens of rice-paper. The little hamlet is folded away from the world in that "tumultuous privacy of 104 VILLAGE HOMES AND PEOPLE 105 storm" which Emerson loved in Concord, where the solid house, standing four square among the trees, was a visible symbol of New England grip on the material as well as the spiritual realities. One can imagine the quiet of the library to which the mind of the Orient always found ready access, and one can rebuild the cheerful fire before which on winter nights the solitary Thoreau found congenial comradeship in the boys who were quick to recognize his intimacy with birds and animals and his command of the secrets of wood- craft. In these little Japanese houses there is no master of philosophy sitting by a cheerful fire, but there are men and women who accept the simplest conditions of living without a murmur, and there are children in whom cheerfulness is not only inbred but inwrought; who seem to be born under a cheerful star, and who have been trained to bear pain with fortitude and to endure hardship with a smile. It is not true that in Japan babies never cry, any more than it is true that in Japan flowers have no perfume ; 106 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW but it is true that crying is rarely heard in the Japanese home. To the question why babies cry so little in that countiy the significant answer was made, "We teach our children to be patient" ; a form of education rarely found, it is to be feared, in American homes. Those little houses which Hiroshige loved to paint are so fragile that fire or flood consumes them with appalling rapidity ; but the shock of the earthquake, which is a daily occurrence in some parts of the country, leaves them practically uninjured. One Japanese writer has described his country as "vibrant" ; and when one remem- bers that the daily average of earthquakes in the Empire is four and a half, the adjective takes on scientific accuracy ; and the ancient myth that the islands rest on a fish which sometimes tires of its position seems a reasonable explanation. The foreigner who comes from cities piled high with massive structures of granite and marble is struck at once in Japan by the fragility of the houses of the people who work with their hands, and is quite likely to rush to the conclusion that VILLAGE HOMES AND PEOPLE 107 as are the houses so are the people who live in them. We of the West write our histories on the surface of the earth with heavy hands, and imagine that bulk of material is the register of civilization ; and when a Hindu or Japanese comes our way and shows no interest in our sky- scrapers, we are amazed at his lack of apprecia- tion, and do not understand that he has other standards of civilization. In Hiroshige's village the walls of the houses are translucent, and at night, seen from a dis- tance, they look like a cluster of great lanterns. They have only two or three rooms, are quickly built and easily repaired, and cost less than a hundred dollars. As a rule, they have no furni- ture beyond a chest of drawers; the larder is often stocked, but it hangs in baskets from the ceiling. The beds are rolled up and put out of sight in the daytime. In some houses there is a square opening in the floor in one of the rooms, in which the fire-box stands, and there the food is cooked. The laundry is done out-of-doors; in some localities a stream of hot water flow r s 108 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW through the village. The food is largely fish, of which there is great abundance; rice, which is the principal product of the country; and vegetables from the little fields which are part of every farm and surround every village. Fore- most among these is the daikon, a long white radish of evil odor but not unpalatable, and greatly valued as a digestive corrective of a diet which is heavily weighted with starch. There is some variety of color, but uniformity of style, in the dress both of men and women. The kimonos of the poorer people do not change with the fashion nor even with the season ; as it gets colder, more kimonos are put on. The men who work in the fields and in the cities look very like the men of the same class who ap- pear in Shakespeare's plays ; they wear a kind of smock, or blouse, generally blue in color, with trousers of the same material, which fit the leg like the old pantaloon. It is a more service- able dress for work than ours, and much more artistic. Straw sandals, sometimes with a divided foot-covering, but often without it, protect the VILLAGE HOMES AND PEOPLE 109 feet ; and in rain or mud a raised wooden sandal lifts the wearer above the slush. Apparently; babies are never left at home in the houses of the poorer people, but are carried on the backs of their mothers or of the older children ; and a good many men share this duty. On cold days the hibachi, or fire-box, in which coals of charcoal glow, is placed on the floor; but the house is never warm in cold weather. There is probably no really warm Japanese house in Japan ; warmth is matter of clothes, not of artificial heating. This is true only of the houses built in the Japanese fashion ; houses built in the foreign fashion are numerous among the Japanese of fortune, especially those who enter- tain foreigners, and many of these are not only substantial, but very comfortable in the matter of temperature. But in Japanese houses of all grades, and in Japanese hotels, heat is a matter of choice ; if you wish to be warm you must bring the warmth with you. Out-of-doors in wet or snowy weather the man of the little farm or village house wears a large 110 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW straw hat which looks very like a big bowl, and a nondescript waterproof garment of straw which the farmers and men of the mountains have worn for centuries. Indoors, on wet days, the women devote themselves to home industries to the making of matting and of rope, to spinning and weaving. The house is kept with the greatest neatness; and while the surroundings are some- times very objectionable, cleanliness reigns su- preme within. In Japan the bath is a national institution, and provision is made for it every- where at a nominal expense. Foreigners who bring the tradition of the cold bath with them and regard warm water as a compromise with effeminacy, soon discover that the hot bath, which is universal in Japan, seems specially adapted to the climate and has a kind of medicinal value. Those travelers from the West who bring their national habits and traditions with them, and refuse to follow the customs of the country, soon discover that the Japanese seem to possess a superior knowledge of their own country ; though a few never reach this advanced stage of VILLAGE HOMES AND PEOPLE 111 enlightenment, and decline to recognize differ- ences in climate which, if ignored, sooner or later have their revenge. The thermometer in Japan needs interpretation almost as much as the language of the country; it rarely registers a very low temperature, but it often produces the effect of a veiy low temperature. The climate is, in fact, like Japan itself, a kind of middle term between the East and the West ; the extremes are not great, but the dampness generates a penetrating chill in winter and a disheartening humidity in summer. It is very like the English climate carried to excess. It is not an unwholesome climate, though its lack of stimulus compels foreigners to take a slower pace than at home. The sun is the central heating plant in Japan, and in selecting a site for a house exposure to the sunshine is the determining factor. The rooms into w r hich the morning sun pours its rays are soon warm, and the genial temperature con- tinues until a cloud shuts out the light and heat. The "poor man's furnace," which so aptly de- 112 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW scribes the Lungarno in Florence on which idlers and beggars bask, describes also the sides of the roads and streets in Japan which lie within the glow of the sun ; and the difference between sunlight and shadow is almost as marked as in Italy on wintry days. In the little houses of the poor there is at least one room which is matted ; this is raised a foot or more above the level of the street; and a row of wooden or straw sandals await those who are going out or coming in ; for in the palace or the humblest house the foot-covering worn in the streets never touches the soft and scrupulously clean matting. The floor in a Japanese house is not only a place to walk on but to sit on, and, often, to use as a table. The kettle is always simmering on the hibachi, or fire-box, and the good old song which directs Polly to "put the kettle on" has no meaning in a countiy in which the kettle is always in service. It sometimes gives a touch of domesticity to the little room which serves as an improvised chapel for a Chris- tian service. The Japanese who returns from a VILLAGE HOMES AND PEOPLE 113 visit to Europe or America will tell you that the first sound which gives him a vivid sense of home is the clatter of the wooden sandals on the plat- form of the station as he leaves the train. He will also tell you that there are sounds which always recall his childhood : the sound of the wooden screens which are pushed back when the house is opened to let in the morning, the soft whish of the long feather duster with which the housemaids greet the day, and the hiss of escap- ing steam from the kettle. In the little village home life is very simple and housekeeping is reduced to first principles. Fresh fish, often eaten raw and regarded as a delicacy even by the gourmet, rice, beans in many forms, and other vegetables, furnish the staple diet, with many small cups of tea ; if the head of the family is a laborer or a mechanic, he is off early, for his hours are long and his wages are meager; and the children are soon noisily clattering along the road to the long, many- windowed schoolhouse which is as characteristic of the Japan of to-day as the long flights of stone 114 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW steps climbing to temples hidden among the trees are of the Japan of yesterday. Every child old enough to study books has a little bundle neatly wrapped in gayly colored cloth, for bundles are never carried in paper wrappings in Japan. If you go into the school, the children will pay no heed to } r ou until their attention is called to your presence ; then they will all rise and bow gravely to you in perfect unison. The teachers will tell you that they delight in coming to school and need no urging to be studious. In old days they would have grown quietly into acceptance of the state of life in which they were born ; to- day the more ambitious and capable may go far on the road to education ; for the expense of college and even of university education is in- credibly small to one accustomed to the American scale. Eighty dollars a year will carry the frugal boy through college. There may be few books in the little house, although books are cheap ; but newspapers are read eveiywhere by all sorts of people, and the little village; is no longer isolated ; it talks politics VILLAGE HOMES AND PEOPLE 115 and knows what is going on in Tokyo. Its houses are fragile and easily erased from the face of the earth. Of the million people who once lived in Kamakura there are practically no visible traces save a group of temples. The houses have van- ished. But while the houses of Pompeii have survived the race that lived in them, the Jap- anese have come to greatness, though the fragile houses that sheltered their childhood have left no trace behind. Their strength has been and is in their habit of filial reverence and service, their disciplined capacity of endurance, their skill in applying ideas to life. CHAPTER IX HOLIDAYS IN KAMAKURA CHRISTMAS is beginning to find recognition in Japan, but New Year's inaugurates the great popular holiday. Its celebration is preceded by an amount of work which rivals the toil involved in preparing for Christmas at home. The business of the country comes almost to a standstill, while accounts are made out and settled, balances struck, the bills of the trades- men paid, and obligations of every kind dis- charged. The old year washes its hands, so to speak, before it welcomes the new year; and Japan starts on January first with a clean page. The exchange of presents is universal, as is the exchange of good wishes in the form of cards of various kinds, many of them of delightful artistic quality ; for arrears of friendship are settled as no HOLIDAYS IN KAMAKURA 117 punctiliously as arrears of money. Friends who have removed to new localities, or have drifted apart, or have lost touch with one another, re- knit the severed ties, and all Japan becomes a household, as it was in the early days. The Post-Office Department is brought to the verge of despair by the unusual strain on its resources, and the mails fall into most incon- venient arrears. The nation is still in mourning for the late Emperor, and many festivities are shorn of their gayer aspects ; but the burden of mail distribution was not perceptibly lightened ; for the Japanese, who are punctilious in the ob- servance of the amenities of social life, sent cards to their friends explaining why the usual mes- sages of remembrance and good will were not dispatched ! The fact that everybody would understand if congratulatory cards were not winged for their customary flight did not absolve these polite people from the customary courtesies. New Yorkers who are fond of recalling the good old times when a man could know the whole town, so to speak, sometimes lament a growth 118 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW which has made the pleasant habit of exchanging New Year's visits impossible. Forty years ago it was still possible to meet men with a look of determination on their faces and a long list of addresses in their pockets, making their way by carriage or car, or on foot, from Washington Square to Forty-second Street, bent on renew- ing old acquaintances and recalling old-time associations. It was a day of much running to and fro, of too much eating of attractive in- digestibles, and sometimes of drinking too many glasses of wine ; but it was a pleasant survival of the colonial city which began at the Battery and ended at the City Hall ; and there were few who followed the ancient custom who were not persuaded that it was a habit which originated when New York was a Dutch village. But most new things in the Far West are old things in the Far East, and the exchange of visits between friends is a custom of immemorial antiq- uity in Japan ; and gentlemen in ceremonial dress, attended by a secretary or servant, are seen going about town even in a season of national mourning. HOLIDAYS IN KAMAKURA 119 The Capital is shorn of its picturesqueness of decoration this year ; but in smaller communities the festival, while less brilliantly dressed, so to speak, does not lack its customary holiday as- pects, and the friendliness of the vacation is more in evidence among small shopkeepers and poorer people than among the well-to-do. For New Year's in Japan is a vacation even more than a holiday. The schools are closed for a week ; and for three days there is cessation of business. On the fourth day men meet in the offices and shops and exchange experiences, and say to one another, "Now business begins again"; but, as a matter of fact, business does not take itself very seriously for a week. In Kamakura by the sea the narrow streets are still, a w r eek after New Year's Day, more given over to sociability than to affairs. As one looks down them they seem more like lanes for rustic festivity than for buying and selling. In front of every house or shop tall rods of bam- boo in leaf, or tall branches of pine, are set up, and the street has the appearance of a road 120 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW through the woods. The decoration is symbolic, as most things are in Japan; the pine standing for vigorous age, and the bamboo, with its smooth joints, for uprightness. Across the front of the shop or house a rope or cord, the sign of delimi- tation or ownership, is stretched, and from this slips of white paper flutter in the wind. These are the ancient symbols of purification, and keep out evil spirits. The same symbols flutter on the fishing-boats drawn up on the beach. Over the gates of entrance to little courts or to larger grounds a knot of rope twisted from right to left to express thankfulness, a bit of fern, of lobster, and an orange, are often seen ; the fern signifying by its many branches the fruitfulness so evident in the Japanese streets as well as in the well-worked fields ; the lobster the hope that one may live to be as bent by age; and to the initiated the message of the orange reads "from generation to generation." In Japan the family is the unit of society, and the worship of ances- tors is a very natural projection into the future of the passion of filial loyalty and devotion which HOLIDAYS IN KAMAKURA 121 has been one of the finest products of Japanese history and one of the deepest sources of the strength of the nation. Nowhere else in the world are the children more in evidence than in Japan. They form a little audience whenever the foreigner ap- pears, and study his dress and movements with naive interest; as a rule they are courteous and ready to smile on the slightest provocation. It is true that in certain localities they sometimes call after the foreigner with offensive epithets which he does not understand, but this is not common, and the expression of ill will never goes beyond words. An automobile rushing through the narrow streets of a village scatters terror far and wide, but it seems to be a terror not without its pleasure ; for the whole village turns out en masse, and the children, once out of danger, laugh and cheer, and a kind of camaraderie of the road is established. On New Year's Day every girl has a new kimono, and the little children and babies are fairly ablaze with color; and the narrow streets 122 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW become a gay kaleidoscope of brilliant little figures. They are full of these fascinating little people, running to and fro and filling the air with shouts and laughter. All Japan seems to give itself over to battledore and shuttlecock; every child has a new equipment for the sport, and the older children enter into it as heartily as their youngest kindred. The battledores are gay with color ; on many of them are raised figures gor- geously attired. As one goes about the village he feels that he is present at a family festival, and everybody is kin to everybody else. There is no Santa Glaus in Japan ; but the kindly spirit which presides over New Year's seems to have a pleasant word and a remembrance for man and maid, for master and servant, for those who have fulfilled the symbolism of the lobster and for those who are keeping the promise of the orange. The images of the gods are not forgotten, if the figures in the Buddhist and Shinto temples may be loosely described as gods. On every altar there are little gifts of rice, the chief source HOLIDAYS IN KAMAKURA 123 of wealth in Japan; and the orange, which also grows abundantly, is not lacking. In earlier times one of the conventional gifts was fish; and to-day every gift between friends is accom- panied by a little token of folded paper with a shred of dried fish. When the sun shines in Japan, a January day has a genial warmth; and on New Year's Day the sky was full of light, the air had the kindly touch of April, and all the village world was out-of-doors. The long, straight road that leads from the sea to the ancient temple of Hachiman, standing on a hill at the end of the stately avenue of pines, was thronged with people and gay with children. The open place before the doors of the temple was merry with party-colored little figures and noisy with the whir of the sacred pigeons which fly about the temples here as they fly about St. Mark's in Venice. Some of the children were led to the open places before the altar and bowed low be- fore the sacred images, but to the greater num- ber they seemed playgrounds. The only hilarious person who crossed our 124 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW path in this season of festivity was a man whose gayety almost reconciled one to his excessive indulgence in sake. He was overflowing with politeness. He explained that he was a stone- mason who had a new job with a foreigner, that he liked foreigners, and was so happy in his good fortune that he had gone too far with the bowl. He spoke very strongly of the historical interest of Kamakura ; foreigners, he said, could not be supposed to know the thousand stories that made almost every tree and stone in the town memo- rable, but that the Japanese should be ignorant of these things filled him with rage. When last seen he was walking over the long bridge to Enos- hima, voluble with local patriotism. It is sig- nificant that in Japan when a man loses control of himself he often overflows with good nature and politeness. But the Japanese show no lack of interest in their own history, and travel in large numbers to all parts of the islands to visit the places as- sociated with great persons or events. Kama- kura has been full of strangers many of them HOLIDAYS IN KAMAKURA 125 university students during holiday time; and it may be suspected that for many of them the temples are interesting chiefly from an artistic or historic point of view. Kamakura is a village to-day, with many Japanese summer villas; but eight hundred years ago it was the capital of East- ern Japan, with a population, so the tradition runs, of half the size of that of Tokyo. Here the foundations of the system of feudalism, which gave Japan a great discipline of order and obe- dience, were laid by Yoritomo, the first of the long line of Shoguns, who made the Emperor so much a divine person that he could not exer- cise the functions of government, and who con- tinued to relieve him of that responsibility until the Restoration in 1868. The town has had a dramatic history; it grew from a fishing village into a great capital ; it has been the scene of as many factional contests as Perugia or Verona ; it has been sacked and burned and shaken by earthquakes and swept by tidal waves ; and now it is a beautiful refuge from the heat and noise of the cities and from the cold of the ex- 126 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW treme north. Its story reminds one of Frank Stockton's reformed pirate, who forsook murder and pillage and spent his old age knitting tidies ! But the old age of Kamakura is an old age of achievement, of stirring history, and of a ripe and beautiful serenity. The last hour of the old year was commemorated by very distinct shocks of earthquake by way of reminding the town that great age is not exempt from agitating experiences. The framing of verdure in which Old Japan is set gives Kamakura a background of the depth and richness found only in veiy old countries. The narrow lanes on which the houses stand are walled by bamboo fences, often so thickly woven that the dust cannot sift through, and securing a privacy less oppressive but not less complete than the privacy of brick and stone in other countries. Over these screens of light wood the pines lean in friendly familiarity, and hedges of evergreen give tone to the long street of pale bamboo rods. Every temple is set in an oasis of green and approached by long flights of stone steps, now so much a part of the landscape that HOLIDAYS IN KAMAKURA 127 they seem more like the handiwork of nature than of forgotten builders. Of old Kamakura little remains save the temples, and one may begin turning the pages of its ancient history by passing under the torii at the end of the long, bustling business street and climbing the old moss-grown steps to the Temple of Kwannon, the Goddess of Mercy. At the door he will wait a moment to look over the town at his feet, half hidden even on New Year's Day in fresh and tender green, and at the quiet sea. The colossal image stands in a darkness only slightly dispelled by the dim light of candles raised aloft by a primitive device of pulleys, in the vague glow of which one sees the dull gleam of the gilded lacquer figure and a great face vaguely eloquent with age and worship. On a low hill not far distant stands the Daibutsu, or Great Buddha, probably the greatest work of art in Japan. In a country which has produced such a host of delicate craftsmen, and fashioned so many things of exquisite beauty on a miniature scale, this figure emerges like the creation of a 128 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW more daring genius. It is not simply a colossal figure, a mass of bronze towering above the mass of green in which it stands ; it is a great work of art, not only in scale but in subtle mastery of surfaces and in harmony of proportions. Mr. La Farge has said that it is not "a little thing made big, like our modern colossal statues ; it has always been big, and would be so if reduced to life size." Accustomed as Western lovers of art are to associate great statues with distinction of individuality, vitality of expression, energy poised on the verge of action, as in the impressive Moses in Rome, the indomitable Colleoni in Venice, the marching Sherman in New York, the powerful Lincoln in Chicago, the Great Buddha seems at first not only alien in feature but vague and elusive in expression. One must see the figure many times and learn to approach it from the Oriental point of view before its sweet and noble beauty reveals itself. Our great statues are of powerful men arrested for a moment in mid-action ; this is the figure of one who has passed beyond action ; for whom the experience HOLIDAYS IN KAMAKURA 129 of thought, of feeling, of doing the whole process of living, in a word lies far behind and has become matter for meditation. Passion has been subdued, knowledge mastered, the whole nature harmonized ; and out of the storm of life Buddha has emerged into a great calm and is sunk deep in brooding meditation. A fathomless silence enfolds the great figure, and a wonderful sweet- ness lies in the tenderly molded lips ; perfect knowledge has bred perfect charity, infinite patience has been born out of pain, and in the all- embracing comprehension of eternity all frailties and follies are buried fathoms below memory. Mr. Basil Chamberlain, who has written about Japan with breadth of knowledge, has well said : "He who has time should visit the Daibutsu re- peatedly ; for, like Niagara, like St. Peter's, and several other of the greatest works of nature and of art, it fails to produce its full effect on a first or even on a second visit ; but the impression it produces grows on the beholder each time that he gazes afresh at the calm, intellectual, passion- less face, which seems to concentrate in itself 130 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW the whole philosophy of Buddhism the triumph of mind over sense, of eternity over fleeting time ; of the enduring majesty of Nirvana over the trivial prattle ; the transitory agitations, of mun- dane existence." Nothing is known of the maker of the Great Buddha save his name ; and for him, as for Shakespeare, there is no need of any other record save the autobiography of a noble work of art set up in a splendid temple about eight hundred years ago. Tidal waves have twice swept away its shelter, and it stands now under the open sky, a group of pine trees gathered about it, and in a silence broken only by the murmur of the wind among the pine needles. The eyes, which are of pure gold, are looking down and nearly closed ; they have seen the whole spectacle of life, and nothing remains save the illumination of thought. The figure rests in the repose of eternity, but it is full of power ; the folds of the robe it wears have the quality of the Greek draperies they are without weight. One has the fooling that the Groat Buddha could rise and go down the HOLIDAYS IN KAMAKURA 131 ways of the world, if he chose ; but all that is long passed. There is a wooded hill not far away from which one looks down on the head and shoulders of the Buddha, rising out of a sea of foliage like some great figure of a prehistoric age surviving a submerged world. On the other side of the hill Fujiyama shines between the branches of the pines. "The trees rustle and wave behind it, and the light dances up and down the green boughs with the wind ; it must move but there is no change, and it shall sit forever." In its presence irritation, anger, fear, have no place ; it is the incarnation of the peace beyond death. The birds fly about it and settle on its vast shoulders undisturbed. Kamakura is not overshadowed by its age nor subdued in spirit by the brooding figure among the trees ; its streets are full of the sounds of life, and in holiday time it is resonant with the merry cries of children and, in spite of earth- quakes, one finds it a happy setting for a new act in the drama of life which has been so long played in its streets and homes and temples. CHAPTER X KYOTO, THE ANCIENT CAPITAL So far as the Emperor is concerned, Tokyo is a modern capital only forty-five years old, while Kyoto holds the Imperial tradition of nine hundred years. Toward the old palace the eyes of all Japan will turn when the one hundred and twenty-second Emperor is crowned with ancient ceremonies. To Kyoto armies of pilgrims have journeyed for centuries past from all parts of the Empire ; for Kyoto, with more than a thousand temples, is the Rome of Japan. It is also a city of arts and crafts where from time immemorial workmen have been artists as well. It has its Imperial University, its Doshisha (the growing Christian university), its schools of many kinds, its interesting mu- seums, its beautiful and fascinating shops. The city became the Imperial capital at the 132 KYOTO, THE ANCIENT CAPITAL 133 beginning of the tenth century. For nearly a hundred years the Court had been at Nara, distant an hour and a half by rail to-day. The influence of China and Korea during that period had deeply influenced Japanese life and art. It was an age of temple-building, not unlike the age of cathedral-building which had begun in Europe, and many beautiful structures rose in grounds that were later to become great parks. The Japanese are masters of live wood, to recall a phrase which was applied to sculptors in Flor- ence in Dante's time, and both in structure and in decoration wrought marvelous effects with a material which we regard as perishable. An American was once admiring a Buddhist temple and lamenting that it was built of such fragile material. "By the way," he said to the Japanese friend who was with him, "how old is this temple?" "Over twelve hundred years," was the reassuring reply. Images of Buddha in great numbers were cast in bronze and other metals, and many schools were founded. It was an Asiatic Renaissance 134 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW which gave Japan the impulse of the most ad- vanced and varied culture of the Continent ; it softened the rigorous ideals and habits of the people, and in the end brought a relaxation of energy and activity that was Asian rather than Japanese. "We do not hear of the soldiers of that time," writes Dr. Nitobe; "we hear only of monks and nobles. Instead of war-drums stirring us to imitate the actions of the tiger, were heard the tranquil tones of temple bells. In place of steel armor and weapons rustled Chinese silks and brocades. Literature, though it retained some signs of rugged, pristine vigor, began to show signs of feminine fastidiousness. Priests and nobles vied in writing love poems and ama- tory epistles. It was indeed a golden age of poetry, and if it lacked manly vigor it certainly showed elegant finesse, both in sentiment and diction." Coincident with this softening of manners and devotion to the arts there was a decline of vigor of administration ; the grasp of the functions of government by the Emperor relaxed, and the KYOTO, THE ANCIENT CAPITAL 135 direction of public affairs fell more and more into the hands of the ambitious and able Fuji- wara family, who, with great political skill, in- vested the Emperor with such divinity that he was lifted high above political tasks and duties. Whether the Emperors accepted divine honors in place of earthly power gladly or by force of circumstances, no one knows ; but the device was marvelously skillful and was more or less successful for a thousand years. The vigorous temperament of the Japanese finally reacted against the refined but demoral- izing lassitude of the Nara period, and at the end of the ninth century, and under the direction of a forceful Emperor, the Court was removed to Kyoto and the hand of a rigorous ruler was felt in many directions. This reassertion of Imperial authority was brought to an end by the death of the Emperor, and another and more prolonged period of declin- ing moral and political vitality set in and lasted until the first Shogun, Yoritomo, assumed the Imperial functions while scrupulously observing 136 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW the forms of deference to the Emperor, made Kamakura the real capital of Japan, and laid the foundations of the feudal system which was to last until the middle of the last century. During this long period Kyoto was the home of the Emperor and the center of the artistic activity of the Empire. It was also a city of luxury and pleasure, and the tea houses which line the river and, at night, give it the air of a festival continue the tradition of easy morality created long ago a tradition which it shares with Paris and Vienna. Kyoto has been the Mecca of hosts of pilgrims for hundreds of years, but they seek various shrines and worship gods as different as Aphrodite and Dionysus. It is as easy to understand the intense local devo- tion of the half million people who live in Kyoto as it is to understand the love of the Parisians for a city which has not only a civic consciousness but the architectural unity of a city, the expres- sion of a civic ideal which has created an organic unity ; most cities in this country are aggregations of houses. KYOTO, THE ANCIENT CAPITAL 137 Kyoto has a long history ; traditions of re- ligion, government, and art, which are the heri- tage of every citizen, make it the most Japanese of cities. Its narrow streets, overhung in sum- mer with awnings, its brilliant shops, its palaces and temples, give it unfailing interest for the visitor from the West, w r ho finds himself fas- cinated by its contemporary life and under the spell of its rich and stirring history. It lies in an amphitheater of encircling hills, on which in the season there is a blaze of color, but from which in winter icy winds sweep the great open places of the city. Two rivers flow through the plain on which Kyoto stands, and bring the freshness and vitality which running streams always sug- gest to the imagination if not to the senses. If pleasure has built its palaces along the river, religion has taken the hills for its own, and tem- ples, shrines, and monasteries with ancient and tranquilly beautiful gardens give the old capital an air of deep repose. The silence of the temples and grounds seems to be distilled from their antiquity, so potent is it and so protecting ; for 138 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW the most delicate and beautiful things of the spirit are blighted by noise and perish if they fail of privacy and quietness. Temple gardens are not gay with flowers, though the lilies lie tranquil on the surface of the little lakes approached by winding paths and crossed by bridges which in- vest the familiar arch with a new picturesque- ness. The massing of foliage that obliterates the signs of limitation and boundary, the vistas that convey the sense of space and relation, the skillful use of line and living thing, of springing bridges, solid ground, and glancing water, are expressions of a love of nature as deep as the craftsmanship is subtle and dexterous. There is none of the "smart" brightness of the new garden ; none of the riotous splendor of color of some English and French gardens ; none of the shadowy seclusion of Italian gardens which diffuse and defeat the sunlight as the English garden welcomes it. There is, instead, the art that makes small spaces significant of the breadth of nature, and evokes out of age not decay but ripeness and the sense of the patient continuance KYOTO, THE ANCIENT CAPITAL 139 of beautiful things. In the gardens of some of the smaller temples and monasteries life seems to be set forever in the key of meditation, and the tumult of activity which fills the West seems like a wanton intrusion on the eternal silence in which the soul finds itself. In the group of temples which look down upon the city from the hillside none is more character- istic and beautiful than the Temple of Chion-in, founded at the beginning of the thirteenth cen- tury by a priest famous for his absorption in prayer to Amida, in whose boundless mercy there is a sure hope of salvation. The main building in this group is a fine example of classical Buddhist architecture. It rises above a succes- sion of terraces, is approached by long flights of stone steps, and is framed in a great mass of foliage lofty cryptomerias, bending pines, and maples that blend in a blaze of color in autumn. Climbing the steps up which multitudes of pilgrims have made their way for many genera- tions, passing the imposing gateway and the little pond and a statue of Kwannon, the familiar 140 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW and beloved goddess of Mercy, one reaches at last the broad esplanade on which the temple stands. Farther up the hills, in its massive belfry, hangs one of the great bells whose deep tones, mellow and resonant, seem to be always floating over the rice-fields and carry the thought of an- cient and spiritual things into the heart of the busy city. Entering the Buddha Hall, on the left, through a porch with elaborate carvings of storks, ele- phants' heads, flowers, and fantastic animals never seen on land or sea, past the great bronze water basins shaped like the lotus and the bronze incense burner, one comes into a nobly propor- tioned room dominated by a gilded figure of Amida sitting on a mass of lotus leaves and liter- ally enshrined in golden adornments that hang from the ceiling in splendid profusion. At the side of the shrine a priest taps a drum with a steady, monotonous hand and repeats the sacred name in an unchanging voice. Some one has said that there is nothing in a Buddhist temple but a drum, and that the drum is empty ! It KYOTO, THE ANCIENT CAPITAL 141 is easy, however, to understand the detachment of mind induced by this rhythmical repetition of sound in the pious devotee, and its hypnotic effect over the formal worshiper to whom the temple is little more than a place of traditional resort. But the real center of interest is the main temple, on the right. The cool winter sunlight lies brightly on the open court in which the water from beautiful bronze lotus-flower foun- tains is gently falling. The great porch bears on the angles of its roofs those terrifying demons which in Japanese shrines are of the kindred of the demons that leer over Paris from the heights of Notre Dame ; Buddhas of gentle mien stand at the corners, with bronze wind bells. To pass from the low-toned world in the high light of a winter's morning into this temple is to come into a golden immensity, a shining mag- nificence. No trace of tawdriness strikes a false note in a room whose vast dimensions soften the golden spaces and blend them in a tone that transmutes what might be barbaric magnificence 142 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW into a rich and mellow splendor. The effect of space between the pavement and the roof, which is supported by golden pillars of immense girth, is reproduced nowhere but at St. Mark's in Venice, and there the stretches of mosaic sub- due the splendor which in this temple is un- clouded. In all this golden magnificence the Japanese restraint is apparent ; between the austerely simple exterior and the glory of the interior there is no dissonance ; for simplicity may express itself in gold as truly as in wood. The great altar is the center of this wonderful decoration ; around the dais real dwarfed pine trees grow in great vases, and immense lotus blooms of gilded metal are grouped. A covered passage leads to another building in which examples of the famous seventeenth- century artist of the Kano school are treasured. Many of the painted slides have been blurred by time ; golden backgrounds have become dull and figures and landscapes have grown dim ; but much remains to interest the lover of Japa- nese painting. The blossoming plum branches, KYOTO, THE ANCIENT CAPITAL 143 the graceful white storks, the white heron rising on outspread wings, bear witness to the delicate skill and feeling of the Kano school ; and one is quite ready to believe that the elusive outlines of a sparrow on one of the panels are only the shadow of a bird that was painted with such fidelity that when the last stroke was laid on the wood it flew away. In another room there is a cat from the same hand of such startling verisimilitude that real cats arch their backs when they pass it ! As one passes through the gallery or outer rooms he sees, through the spaces between the slides that have been pushed back, charming garden views ; and from a terrace a little higher up the hill, one comes suddenly on a view of the city spread over the plain, and the rivers which flow together and the circle of hills that enfold it. The pilgrim, whether secular or religious, must choose his temples if he is to see Kyoto in the richness of its history and life, but he must not omit the Kiyumizu-dera, a venerable and fa- mous shrine which hangs, by the help of massive 144 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW piles and scaffolding, on the steep hillside on a series of terraces, and faces the gorge with a great balcony. The temple is not beautiful, but is wonderfully framed, and might well be the seat of the goddess of Nature, so deep seem its attachments to the landscape, so interblended with branching trees is it, and so enchanting are the vistas which open from its great balcony. One has the sense of being aboye the world and yet intimately a part of it as he looks down into masses of foliage that seem to invite him to leap into their cool recesses. This suggestion became so potent at one time that the frequency of sui- cides led to the closing of the balcony. It has long been the custom of the Emperor of Japan to announce each year a subject or subjects for poetic competition. Two years ago more than thirty thousand poems were sub- mitted dealing with the Crane and the Pine, two symbols dear to the Japanese imagination. Not long ago the present Emperor selected "The Shrine Among the Cryptomeria" as the theme for poetic activity, and this woodland temple, KYOTO, THE ANCIENT CAPITAL 145 rising among the tree tops, may well have sug- gested this charming theme. Time and worship have been working together for centuries to en- viron this temple with paths that run away from the world into quiet places, with memorials, lesser shrines and pagodas. It is a little world in itself built by hands that served nature as joy- fully as they served religion. There are splendid temples of the Hongwanji sect of Buddhists which are thronged with visi- tors and speak of present faith rather than of tradition and history, and there are more ob- scure shrines approached through long, impressive avenues and surrounded by gardens steeped in "silence and slow time." One of these is Kuro- dani, which seems to watch over the city, enfolded itself in ancient quietness. Flowering trees over- shadow the garden paths, a deep-toned bell stirs the silence from time to time like a stone dropped in a pool, but the waves of sound sink into a deep stillness. Curious pine trees stand near the temple, one of which has been trained on a trellis to take the shape of an open fan ; a famous 146 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW warrior hung here his sword and armor when he turned from strife to peace and became a monk. Seven hundred years ago, the story runs, this redoubtable soldier seized an enemy, whose rank he demanded to know. The request was denied, and the veteran fighter tore off the hel- met of his foe, to find that it concealed the boyish face of the son of a former commander. He sheathed his sword and begged the boy to go. But the boy refused, and insisted, as a matter of honor, on being killed. Finding his entreaties vain and hearing others approaching who had no scruples, the older man cried out, "If thou art overtaken, thou mayest fall by a more ignoble hand than mine. thou Infinite One, receive his soul," and dispatched the boy, as he was bound to do by the fighting code of his time. At the end of the war the remorseful warrior withdrew to the Kurodani Temple and became a monk. No lovelier place for peace and penitence could be found than the garden of this temple. Many of the temples stand among trees on the hillsides ; the Imperial Palace, surrounded KYOTO, THE ANCIENT CAPITAL 147 by spacious gardens and inclosed by plastered walls with upright beams, is in the northern section of the city, not far from the river. In a sense, as in Tokyo, the city seems an adjunct to the larger spaces surrendered to the Palace. Many of the temples are approached by wide avenues with stone and bronze lanterns, with striking torii, or gateways; great trees guard the seclusion of the sacred places. But one may go to the Palace quarter by tram car, although for a thousand years the Sovereign was a semi- divine person and lived in deep seclusion. One of the most attractive features of Japan is the absence of those oppressive piles of masonry which exhibit the wealth of the West but seem to bury its soul under a crushing materialism. In Japan, on the other hand, the houses of ruler and of people seem very fragile ; they are low in structure and built largely of wood, and the towns are often swept by devastating fires. The resources of the nation have been in the character and spirit of its people rather than in iron and stone. Japan is not unprotected by the devices 148 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW of modern science, but its strength still lies in the intense patriotism, the daring courage, and the power of intelligence which is brought to bear on all the problems of life. The nation has an immense inward capital, and those who see in her great possibilities of development will hope that in applying the science of the West to the practical needs of the country she will escape the confusion of the values of civilization which bewilders and misleads the West. These impressions are deepened as one goes through the Palace in which the one hundred and twenty-second Emperor will presently be crowned. In line and structure the building is severely simple. In summer the wide halls and rooms, devoid of furnishings and with glimpses of quiet woods and enchanting gardens, suggest a delightful coolness; but on a bright wintry day the Spartan frugality of decoration drives one back on the traditions which invest royalty in Japan with a dignity which external splendor is powerless to convey. The hall in which the Emperor will be crowned KYOTO, THE ANCIENT CAPITAL 149 shows great roof-beams, and is bare of furnishings save the throne in the center, and that is in striking contrast to the elaborate and gorgeously colored throne, with its entanglements of dragons, on which the Emperors of the Ming dynasty in China sat for generations. It is a simple but beautifully inlaid chair covered with white silk draperies. On either side are lacquered stands on which are laid the ancient symbols of Imperial descent and authority the sword and jewel ; the mirror is kept in the Imperial shrine at Ise. The open court on which this room opens be- comes part of the Palace in great ceremonials. The doors which shut the hall from the court are lifted, and on the eighteen steps which lead down to the court formerly stood the eighteen grades into which the officials of the Government were divided ; while in the court, rank on rank, were those whose nobility or position gave them the right to stand in the presence of the Emperor. When in court and hall, in ancient costumes and with ancient ceremony, the Emperor shall be enthroned and the Imperial insignia placed in 150 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW his keeping, the fortunate spectator will see the history of the Empire pictorially illustrated in the splendid spectacle. There are other palaces in Kyoto much more splendid ; the Nijo Palace, built three hundred years ago by leyasu, one of the most powerful of the Shoguns, is a fortress without and a golden dream of fairyland within, with an audience hall of magnificent proportions and design ; but the Summer Palace, in which the Emperor sometimes lives, while not without in- terest to lovers of art, is a very simple structure, with a garden of a highly conventional type. Art and pleasure are popular interests in Kyoto, and temples, museums, shops, and tea houses are on a scale of profusion and of beauty which suggests that the old city is, in these re- spects, still the capital of the Empire. Its popu- lar festivals are prodigal of color and gayety, and dancing is seen in the time of the cherry bloom with elaborate and permanent staging. The work of the craftsmen in metal, ceramics, on delicate fabrics, on hand looms, has apparently lost none of the conscientious delicacy and ex- KYOTO, THE ANCIENT CAPITAL 151 quisite integrity of the days when time had no commercial value in Japan. He who sees only beauty and pleasure in Kyoto, companies of pil- grims wandering from temple to temple, and an air of easy-going festivity, will repeat the blunder of the traveler who thinks that Paris is given over to gayety until he discovers that it is the most industrious city in the world. He should visit the Imperial University, the Doshisha, the well-housed and admirable schools, the museum and hospital, the shops and workrooms in which the traditions of ancient skill are passed on to the toilers of to-day. Those who think of the Orient as the home of gilded idleness and of the West as the home of tireless industry are confusing work with noise and productiveness with activity. In patient and uncomplaining industry China and Japan have nothing to learn from the West. CHAPTER XI NIKKO, THE "SUNNY SPLENDOR" IN the old days pilgrims in Japan went to Ise as pilgrims in England once went to the shrine of Thomas a Becket in Canterbury,, as the more adventurous went to the Holy Land, as to-day the pious Mohammedan goes to Mecca. To the Japanese no place is so sacred except the Great Shrine at Izumo, which is regarded as the oldest existing shrine of the Shinto faith. There the kami, or gods who watch over Japan, have their special abode and are most effectively approached, and thither streams of pilgrims still flow from all parts of the Empire. The two shrines are con- secrated to the Sun Goddess, the divine ancestress of the Emperor ; they preserve the severe simplic- ity of pure Shinto architecture, and the ancient ceremonials are maintained in their primitive integrity. These shrines are not only the center of the original Japanese religious cult, they are NIKKO, THE " SUNNY SPLENDOR" 153 also the symbols of the Mikado tradition which runs through Japanese history and unifies it and is the pillar around which all the institutions of the country have been built. In a real sense the Emperor has been not only the semi-divine ruler of Japan but the head of the family of which all Japanese are members. His authority has been supreme ; there have been revolts headed by rival members of the Imperial family, but there has never been a popular revolt against an Em- peror; and in the long history of a dynasty so ancient that all other dynasties are parvenus com- pared with it, the supreme and final authority of the Emperor has never been questioned. During the thousand years of administrative su- premacy of the Shoguns the Government was carried on in the name of the Emperor, and the most powerful Shogun never ventured to act save by the authority of an Emperor who lived in seclusion and was protected only by a tradition. But no army has ever so completely guarded a ruler as the Imperial tradition, wrought into the very fiber of Japanese life, guarded the Emperor. 154 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW Ise is the seat of this tradition and the point of contact between the Japan of to-day and the Japan of two thousand years ago ; it has been also the meeting-place of the living and the dead. To its shrines the Emperor has gone in person generation after generation to invoke the presence and aid of his ancestors, to announce important events, and to give thanks for national victories. The shrines are simple to the point of bareness; they are taken down every twenty years and re- placed on alternate sites. The setting of the buildings is impressive, and many beautiful memorials of the past have gathered about them ; but the shrines are the perishable symbols and shelters of tradition as old as the Empire. At Nikko, on the other hand, the tradition of the Shogunate, which is already a receding memory, is preserved in shrines of striking richness of design and color. Ise is on the southeastern coast, not far from the Pacific ; Nikko is north- west of Tokyo and has a different climate. There is a proverb which reads: "Until you have seen Nikko, do not say splendid!" And if the view NIKKO, THE "SUNNY SPLENDOR" 155 of the mountains and river from below the famous red lacquer bridge is not counted among the "three great sights," it is because Japan is so rich in beautiful views. The proper approach to the town is through the avenue of cryptomerias, gi- gantic trees which attain a girth of eighteen or twenty feet and a height of a hundred feet and more ; the shafts rising straight and symmetrical and reminding one of the towering sequoias of California. This noble avenue, originally forty miles in length, was the gift of a Daimyo who was too poor to enrich the shrines, but who, like many another great donor, builded better than he knew. Nature came to his aid and has made an approach to the shrines more impressive than gates of gold or bronze or lacquer. The traveler is likely to make his approach to Nikko by the less impressive, but more con- venient way of the railway station, where he will be put into a kuruma and drawn up the long, narrow street lined with little shops, which is not only the thoroughfare of what one of the guidebooks happily describes as the "long, thin 156 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW town/' but is much the larger part of the town ; the hotels at the top of the hill and the temples across the river form another community. The brawling river, which sometimes has tragic moods, rushes through the gorge and loses itself among the hills below. Twelve years ago, after torrential rains had undermined the slope of an extinct volcano covered with trees, a landslide plunged down the slope with thundering velocity into Chuzenji Lake and sent a vast flood of displaced water surging over a precipice, and thence, roaring like a devouring dragon, down the narrow channel of the river. The earth trembled with the shock ; the ominous prophecy of a dark, suffocating morning, which had sent hosts of people to the temples, was fulfilled in the few tense, appalling moments during which the swirling mass of water rose suddenly up the banks of the river and swept into its current tea houses, trees, everything that stood in its path. The children, dismissed from one of the schools by a head master who yielded to his forebodings of disaster, had barely crossed the lower bridge when the torrent swept the three /I Famous Shrine at Nikko NIKKO, THE "SUNNY SPLENDOR" 157 bridges out of its path and hurled the shattered fragments on the little plain below, where massive bowlders still evidence the irresistible power of the flood. It was a terrifying moment; with every indication of the final catastrophe. The plunge of the torrent past the town "was hysterically synchronized by every electrically charged wire in the town, and by every temple bell and sus- pended gong within the sacred grove." The temples standing in the ancient groves on four great terraces on the hillside were fortunately be- yond the reach of the devouring flood. There is a line of age-worn stone Buddhas sitting in ancient silence along the river bank at a little distance above the town ; in their long brooding on the unst ability of worldly things and of human fate they never looked upon a more appalling display of the forces that play with the impotence of men than on that autumnal morning. The maddened river, which took no thought of sacred things, swept some of the stone figures from their bases, wrecked a beautiful temple standing in a lovely garden, sent its fragments and the 158 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW whirling stone Buddhas crashing against the sacred red bridge, lifted it as if it were a child's toy ; hurled it against the other two bridges, and scattered their fragments along a hundred miles of shore. The destruction involved not only life and property but the landscape itself, on which it has left ineffaceable scars. But Japan is familiar with volcanoes, earth- quakes, and devastating storms, and knows how to bind up wounds with kindness, rebuild with patience, and go forward with courage ; and Nikko is still, as its name indicates, a "sunny splendor." The splendor is always there ; but the sun is not always in evidence, for rains are abundant and often torrential. By way of compensation, the landscape has depth and richness of coloring, and living green spreads itself like a garment over every exposed surface of stone or wood. Looking up the gorge from the bridge which spans the river below the sacred red bridge, the landscape is enfolded in mountains, with ravines in which ferns lead a life of riotous beauty and groves of impressive trees suggest that nature has NIKKO, THE "SUNNY SPLENDOR" 159 adopted the scale of the mountains for living as well as inanimate things. The great girth and mass of the trees, which seem planned to guard sacred places, are softened and humanized, so to speak, by the rich profusion and delicate beauty of the flowers which spring in radiant carelessness out of every bit of earth, however exposed, as if the soil held an inexhaustible wealth of beauty which it was eager to spend on every comer. If Perdita had been born in Japan instead of in an imaginary Bohemia, she would have made a rosary of the flowers in Nikko, from the plum blossoms which "take the winds of March with beauty," through the months of the cherry, the wistaria, the azalea, clematis, and iris, to the crimson maples which set the hillsides ablaze when the golden weather comes in autumn. At Ise the Imperial tradition is enthroned and the very air is charged with loyalty to the dynasty which, after the lapse of more than two thousand years, rules from the throne in the person of the one hundred and twenty-second Emperor. At Nikko the tradition of the Shogunate and the 160 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW curious dual government of Japan is preserved in a group of gorgeous temples and shrines ; but it is a tradition which is fast receding into the past. The last of the Shoguns surrendered his power to the Emperor in 1S6S ; and died in retirement in Tokyo last year. Ise enshrines a living power with the fine simplicity of the Shinto faith ; Xikko guards a memory with the splendor through which Buddhism, the most characteristic of the Oriental religions, expresses its mystical meaning. The first Shogun, Yoritomo, the head of a powerful clan, established his power late in the twelfth century, scrupulously invoking and acting under the authority of the Emperor. Shogun succeeded Shogun for eight hundred years ; but in all that time, and when the actual authority was entirely in their hands and the Emperor was living in seclusion in a palace in Kyoto, no Sho- gun ever ruled save under Imperial commission. AVhcn the Mikado was practically powerless, so far as arms and men were concerned, his authority was still supreme in Japan ; and, while the Shogun ruled, the Emperor reigned, and in ceremony and NIKKO, THE "SUNNY SPLENDOR" 161 public action of every kind the Imperial supremacy was scrupulously recognized. There never were two Emperors in Japan, one ecclesiastical and the other temporal ; there was always one Emperor, and the Shogun was his executive representative. The Shogunate passed from one family to another until, two hundred years ago, it became the possession of the Tokugawa family in the person of leyasu, one of the ablest of the long line of rulers of Japan. His memory 7 and that of his grandson, lemitsu, have given Nikko its prestige as a sacred place. It is said that travelers go to Nikko and leave the temples unvisited as tourists go to England and avoid the cathedrals ; but in a very real sense the temples are Nikko. They stand in what some one has called a striking "recessive beauty," building behind building, with long, shaded avenues and flights of stone steps slowly and meditatively ascending the slope of the hill in the foreground. There is an inexhaustible rich- ness of detail in the temples, a beauty of delicate workmanship in the fashioning of hidden or minor 162 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW parts which is characteristic of Japanese craftsman- ship and gives every visit the interest of exploration and discovery ; but the spell lies in the large im- pression, the sense of composition of the complete picture. The temples, daring in color without and within, have become as much a part of the land- scape as the trees and the moss-grown stones and monuments ; and the tone of the hillside is marvel- ously rich. A subdued splendor lies softly veiled over the whole as if nature had been enriched, not by embellishment from without, but by a subtle emanation from within. That it is a strange and alien beauty does not repel ; it rather draws the visitor from the farther world into an intimacy never quite complete, but for that reason stimu- lating and awakening. Such lavish blending of black, white, and red, of bronze, gold, and lacquer, has for one trained by Western examples and practice a certain power of excitement akin to the restlessness which seems to issue from the cathe- drals at Sienna and Pisa. But if one is ready to welcome beauty in strange forms and combinations, the groves of Nikko are NIKKO, THE "SUNNY SPLENDOR" 163 as wonderful in their way as the great open, high- lighted spaces in which the Greek temples are set. The blaze of color in the depths of the green woods seems at first like an intrusion of audacious artifice into the silent, shadowy places where colors ought to be low and quiet. It is, however, one of the laws of life which the open-minded pilgrim dis- covers that no shrine is wholly unconsecrated by truth, nor is any without subtle and deep relations with race and soil and sky. The shrines at Nikko are as splendid in color as the Greek temples were glorious in line and structure, in marvelous harmony with light and shadow; they have the same reality of relation to faith and history. Seen again and again, they do not cease to be strange, but they are no longer alien. They speak of things which are part of the history of all peoples : of the mystery of things, of unseen presences, of inexplicable experiences, of courage bred by disaster, of winged hope mounting through the clouds ; but they use a different language. Dead rulers are not buried in the temples at Nikko as they are buried in Westminster Abbey, 164 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW as they were buried in St. Denis, in the silence and sanctity of a place in which their subsidence into the universal impotency is an appeal for mercy; they have their places, not beside the eternal gods, but in their august companionship ; they share the reverence of worshipers with the gods them- selves ; they are not wholly divine, but they are so far from mortality that they are prayed to rather than prayed for. It is their power which the splendor of the shrines expresses rather than the majesty of the religion under whose sheltering roof they are laid to rest. In the nature of things, therefore, the temples at Nikko must lose much of their sanctity as time goes on ; but they will gain deep interest as historical monuments and as examples of ancient architecture. They are, for the most part, Buddhistic in form and embellish- ment, though the motives which they express are essentially Shintoistic, and since the establish- ment of Buddhism they have been under Shinto control. The buildings are low; deep shadows are cast by the wide, overhanging eaves ; great trees enfold NIKKO, THE "SUNNY SPLENDOR" 165 and guard them, not only from the profane tumult of the outer world, but from the glare of light ; and one gradually becomes conscious of the subtle harmonies of foliage, sloping roof, golden door, and glowing porch, and of the atmosphere which subdues and enfolds the hillside in a soft splendor of tone. The two men whose memory is enshrined at Nikko were fighters whose swords commanded their fortunes, and who have striven, by the radiant memorials they decreed for themselves, to fortify their greatness against the assaults of envious time. They have adroitly built their fame into the structure of religion itself ; but they remain parvenus among the gods. In the rich mass of details which bewilder the visitor he will imagine that in the carved dragon heads that decorate the gates, the fighting white dragons, and the gilt dragon heads that bear up the curving roof of the gate of the second temple court, the spirit of these masterful men is expressed. Around the two memorial shrines at Nikko other temples have gathered until a great community 166 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW of shrines has grown up, with a bewildering mass of adjuncts : torii, open courts, pillars, lanterns, fountains, gardens; the grave, sweet tones of the bronze bells seem to gather and express the deep quietness and ancient splendor so wrought upon by the hand of time that white and black and red lacquer in gate and temple and golden doors and gorgeous ceilings are subdued into harmony with the gloom of mighty trees and the shadows of mountains. But Nikko is more beautiful than its temples, and its enchanting walks take one to more sacred places. The paths that follow the river lead to wild, rocky gorges, with intermediate cascades, and at the end the roar and spray of a waterfall ; those that climb the mountains open vistas of wide-spreading plains, and, if your ambition is backed by walking power, you can gain the prize of all Japanese mountain-climbing a glimpse of Fuji, white and solitary against the horizon. Or you can rest at ease and look at the hills from the bridge and be content. The Cryptomeria Avenue at Nikko CHAPTER XII THE INLAND SEA AT the first glance the map of Japan, like that of Switzerland, looks very much like a geo- graphical puzzle so much country is in the air, so to speak. As in Switzerland, it is not the area, but the altitude, which complicates the geography ; with the further confusion of vast and irregular lines of seacoast. Not content with thousands of miles of exterior coast, Japan has an Inland Sea which is, to the visitor at least, a beautiful and baffling mystery. From the hills behind Kobe, on one of those days when the last veil is not lifted from the face of the world, it has the mystery and allurement of a sea in fairyland. Through the soft mist, luminous with sunlight, a myriad sails are flitting, coming from one knows not what strange harbors, bound to one knows not what strange ports with unpronounceable names. As 167 168 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW the mist shifts, now revealing and now concealing the fleet of boats on pleasure or on business bent, the picture has all the delicate suggestiveness of Japanese painting, which leaves the student largely to his own devices. But the Inland Sea is not a school 'for painters nor a summer sea for pleasure-seekers ; it is a serious ocean of immense service to commerce. It is a waterway of nearly two hundred and fifty miles almost in the center of Japan ; on the west is the shore of the mainland, if that word may be used to designate the island which is the heart of Japan ; on the east is the island of Shikoku, with channels to the Pacific at either end ; and at the south is the island of Kyushu, the home of so much stirring history and of so man)' of the heroes of Old and the leaders of Modern Japan. But these words merely draw boundary lines, and the mysteiy of the Inland Sea is in the islands that rise out of its depths or lie on its surface like fragments of a wrecked continent. The Japanese count them into the thousands; and one is ready to believe that geography has out- THE INLAND SEA 169 stripped mathematics in this world in which land and water seem almost interchangeable. The Japanese pilots, who have doubtless been familiar with the complications oi Japanese chess from their youth up, find their way as if by instinct through channels between islands so small that they seem to serve no purpose but to form a marine puzzle. Tremendous forces were once at play rather than at work here, and many of the islands tempt one to believe that the volcanic energy which gave the Empire its form and shape was in a blithesome mood here some day a million years ago. There are larger islands of mountain- ous lift and contour, and there are a myriad small islands of every shape save those that are familiar, and of every imaginable size. These tiny islets are not content to spread at ease on the level water ; they often rise to ambitious heights, sometimes green with foliage, sometimes gray and ominous rocks of fantastic form. The charm of the sea lies not alone in the picturesque lines and colors of these bits of land sown, so to speak, on its surface, but in the ever changing landscape 170 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW from which one emerges at points where there seemed no opening, to escape into other landscapes through channels which elude the untrained eye of the landsman. Even the frugal and hardy Japanese, to whom odds and ends of land which most races would count mere geographical refuse are challenges to skill and work, find some of these islands too small or too precipitous for occupation ; but on ever}- available island little houses cling to the sides, and, if there is room enough, villages of aquatic farmers half fishermen and half farmers dot the shores, and fishing boats and trading junks spin the webs of commerce from island to island. In pleasant w r eather the Inland Sea is enchanting ; in all weather it is a highway for trade and travel, not only from point to point within its protecting shores, but from the ports in China and farther away ports with names that bring the sights and sounds of the Far East with them, as the East India ships of the old times at the docks of New England seaports brought the odors of the far-away Orient spices to boys seeking adventure on half holidays. THE INLAND SEA 171 The ideal exploration of the Inland Sea is by yacht if means and fair weather conspire to make a vacation happier than a "Roman holiday," for this sea has enchantments that demand leisure and a mind indifferent to time and dates. But for the democracy of travel, denied these special privileges, there are very comfortable steamers which traverse the sea in about twenty hours, and are supplemented by boats of lighter draught which make their way through the shallow channels between the islands. If one is in search of rest and can take it in the Japanese way, he will find it in little inns in little communities with unpronounceable names. He will not escape Hiroshima, with its castle and charming garden; and at Miyajima he will find himself at one of the shrines of beauty in Japan, an enchanted island, rocky and wooded, and so sacred that formerly births and deaths were forbidden a prohibition so drastic that it could not be enforced even in Japan. Miniature valleys, green and inviting, run down to the sea and make charming background for the inns and tea houses 172 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW which provide for the entertainment of pilgrims, and for the little houses of the fishermen and carvers of images who make up the working popu- lation. There are no dogs on the island, but there are impertinent and noisy crows, and the deer are as numerous and tame as in the park at Xara. The temple or temples had a wide reputation for magnificence centuries ago ; but to-day the most striking feature of the religious uses of the island is the torii which rises out of the sea, and is one of the "things Japanese" most widely used on post- cards and for decorative advertisements. By moonlight, when the piles on which the temples rest are obscured or suffer a sea change, there are few views in the world that take greater lib- erties with the imagination. A veiy pretty and symbolic tradition declares that the fire on a small shrine on a hill near the center of the island was lighted by the famous sage Kobo Daishi and has never gone out. The Strait of Shimonoseki, at the end of the Inland Sea, separates the main island from the island of Kyushu, and, with its framing of hills, THE INLAND SEA 173 reminds one of the Bay of Naples ; on a bright morning, when the sunlight lies on curving shore and wooded height, and flashes and sparkles from the face of the water broken into a thousand sur- faces by the currents that rush from sea to sea, the loveliness of the landscape, with the life and color of the sea pulsing through it, has the freshness and vitality of a new-made world. The tall chimneys and big, ugly buildings in one locality convince the most enthusiastic lover of a landscape which is yet to be adequately celebrated that business has had time to intrench itself at the western gateway of Japan. Not far away are secluded temples almost hidden by ancient pines which seem mutely to protest against an intrusion which they are powerless to avert. History, both ancient and modern, has been enacted here on a great scale, and Old Japan lives in dramatic traditions of " old, unhappy, far- off things, and battles long ago." In the little shops one finds queer little dried and polished crabs with strange markings for sale. They are brought from the eastern shore and are called chieftain or 174 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW dragon's head. Once upon a time, so the story runs, two powerful clans were at war, one of which was led by a warrior of such resistless daring and skill that the opposing clan was annihilated. As the slain or drowning men sank in the water their spirits assumed these strange shapes, and the fury or agony of the death struggle is visible in the faces and on the backs of the crabs. The superstition is a curious survival of the impression made on the minds of the common people by the fierceness and ferocity of a fight which became a synonym for the courage of despair and the cruelty of maddened victors. Japan was well supplied with Emperors at the time : two were in retirement, and two, who were boys of six or eight, were claimants of the throne, each supported by a fighting clan. After various vicissitudes, one of the Imperial boys was taken for safety to the island of Kyushu. The fugitives were pursued and overtaken by their enemies in the strait not far from Shimonoseki, and one of the fiercest naval battles in the history of Japan was fought with a desperation which has THE INLAND SEA 175 invested it with the fascination of a kind of ele- mental fury. If tradition is to be trusted, twelve hundred vessels were engaged in fierce hand-to- hand conflicts. The Emperor Antoku the "little Emperor," as he is affectionately called, a boy of six was in one of the vessels of his supporters, the Taira clan, whose vessels were crowded with women and children. These vessels were very small, and the men fought at short range with spears and swords and bows and arrows. The battle was a series of fierce duels, and abounded in dramatic incidents which story- tellers and painters have embellished with imagi- nary as well as real horrors. At the critical moment, when the losing clan, outnumbered by their foes, were fighting with the desperation of those who are bent only on exacting the highest price for their lives, one of their lead- ers turned traitor and went over to the enemy. The "little Emperor" was accompanied by his mother and several ladies of the Court, with the imperial regalia. The traitor made this known to the leader of the victorious clan, who instantly 176 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW formed a plan to isolate the vessel which carried this precious party and capture it. When it became clear that the battle was lost and that they were to fall into the hands of the victorious clan, the Emperor's mother seized the sacred sword and plunged into the water. The boy Emperor, who did not understand the confusion about him, asked the Court lady who was his attendant why they did not go to the palace. Telling him that they were going to a very beautiful palace, she took the child in her arms and sprang into the sea with him. The tragedy, which made a deep and painful impression on the people, is commemo- rated by a monument on a ledge of rocks in the channel. The sword was recovered many years afterward, and is reverently preserved in a temple on the hillside, from which one looks down on the water in which it sank. During the troubled times that followed the opening of Japan to the world the strait was the scene of one of those outbursts of old-time antago- nism against foreigners which were inevitable incidents in a change of the policy of nearly three THE INLAND SEA 177 centuries. The Shogun had signed a treaty of amity with the United States, but the Court of the Mikado was still bent on keeping up the historic policy of seclusion, and there were many adherents of this policy among the Daimios or feudal chiefs. Among these was the Daimio of Choshu, who threw up batteries on the shores and put vessels of war on guard. In June, 1863, acting on his own initiative, or possibly at the instigation of the anti-foreign party that sur- rounded the Mikado at Kyoto, this Daimio fired on a small American trading ship. No damage was done, but later a French gun- boat sustained serious injury and a Dutch ship of war, attempting to pass through the strait, was subjected to a heavy fire from the Daimio 's vessels and batteries, and vigorously responded. The Shogun 's government was powerless to enforce the treaty which it had signed, and an American man-of-war that lay in the harbor of Yokohama was promptly sent to the scene of action, where a French frigate shortly joined her. These vessels, acting independently, silenced some 178 . JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW of the batteries and sank several ships. The hostile acts of the Daimio of Choshu were dis- avowed by the Shogun, but claims for damages were promptly made ; and, although the Shogun's treasury was on the verge, if not over the edge, of bankruptcy, and the American vessel had es- caped without injury, an indemnity was secured by the American Minister. The Shogun was un- able to force his powerful subordinate to comply with the demand of the foreign governments that the strait should be cleared of obstructions, and what has been called the "Shimonoseki Expedi- tion," consisting of sixteen English, French and Dutch war vessels and one steamer chartered for the occasion by the United States, was sent to the strait. It speedily reduced the forts to silence by a vigorous bombardment, which in- cidentally inflicted serious injury on many people who were innocent pawns in a losing game played by a recalcitrant Daimio who did not know that he was measuring strength with the combined power of the West in alliance with scientific methods and forces, of which Japan had just be- gun to have some knowledge. THE INLAND SEA 179 The foreign Powers had cause for irritation, and a display of force was probably necessary to bring an ignorant and obstinate Daimio to a recognition of the fact that Japan was no longer closed to foreign intercourse ; but their treatment of the Shogun's Government was neither intelligent nor fair. The foreign governments failed to recognize the difficulties which the Shogun faced in the con- fusion of a revolutionary period forced upon the country by foreign interference, and they exacted an indemnity of three million dollars for damages and expenses ; of which the United States, France and the Netherlands were to receive one hundred and forty thousand dollars for actual damage sustained; the remainder was to be divided between the four Powers which united in the expedition ; twelve thousand dollars had already been collected by the American Minister for imaginary damages suffered by the American vessel first fired upon. It was not a creditable transaction to the foreign governments which took part in it, and it is a great satisfaction to remember that public sentiment in the United States con- 180 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW demned the share taken by our Government, and in 1883 Congress returned to Japan the amount received as indemnity. This fund, amounting to nearly eight hundred thousand dollars, was ex- pended in building the great breakwater in the harbor of Yokohama, which not only affords protection against the furious storms which sweep the coast during the semitropical summer, but is a permanent memorial of the friendship of the United States for a country \vhich it took the great responsibility of opening to the world. All this happened fifty years ago, and one sees in the wide landscape to-day only evidences of a "far-flung battle-line" of international trade relations. The latest historical event of impor- tance was the signing of the treaty of peace between Japan and China in 1895 in a tea house surrounded by flowers, on the hillside overlooking the westward channel. In a room in which pleasant luncheons are pleasantly served Li Hung Chang and Prince Ito held many conferences, and finally agreed upon terms of peace between two countries which have so many interests in common that they must THE INLAND SEA 181 come into very close relations in the near future. There is perhaps no other place in Japan in which one gets such a keen sense of the international relationships of modern Japan and of the ex- pansion of its rule. Well-appointed and attractive steamships sail every day across the channel to Fusan, the southern port of Korea, ten hours distant across the channel ; lines on the maps sweep the seas north and south from the entrance to the strait and bring within the vision the coast- lines of Asia and of groups of islands in the mysteri- ous distance of the Pacific ; while American and European "liners" at anchor in mid-stream bind the ends of the earth together in the community of mutual interests and common activities which predict the greater neighborliness of the future. CHAPTER XIII AT PORT ARTHUR PORT ARTHUR was surrendered to General Nogi on the second day of January, 1905 ; only nine years have passed since the terrible siege ended, and the shouts of "Woolah! Woolah!" piercing the clouds of smoke, shot through with sudden lightning, that hid the forts on the surrounding hills, were met by the shouts of " Banzai ! Banzai ! " from the battalions climbing the paths to death and victory. And yet to one who visits the battle fields the struggle seems as old as the Trojan War ; its appalling severity, the sweep of the battle- line and its horrors, seem to remove it to a remote past. Across the narrow sea the wounds it left are still fresh, the places it made vacant are un- filled ; but to those who come from the West it is like the other nightmares of war from which the world long ago awakened. 182 AT PORT ARTHUR 183 Never had a great historic siege a more mag- nificent setting. Gibraltar stands in a wider and softer landscape ; but Port Arthur might be the shrine of Hachimon, the God of War. The harbor, hidden from the sea by hills crowned with forts, has an entrance so narrow that two ships sunk bow to stern would block the channel ; the mountains sweep in a great circle around the horizon, and within this arena lesser hills crowd one upon the other. Nine years ago every summit was a vol- cano whence death blazed and thundered, and all the horrors of modern war reenforced by science fell with crushing weight on the army of assailants. On a clear spring day, under bright skies, with men at work in the valleys, it is hard to realize the drama that was enacted on this peaceful stage less than a decade ago ; but an hour in the military museum, a walk or drive from one battlefield to another in landscape in which every hill was carried by storm, brings back the clamor of armies and the roar of batteries. To the Japanese Port Arthur stirs the blood as Gettysburg stirs the blood of the American ; it was the scene of the 184 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW most decisive battle in his history, of the most heroic achievement of his people. To him the sacrifice is so recent that the pain is still poignant ; to the American the victory was so significant that the vastness of personal loss and sorrow are hidden by the historic results of the conflict. The aspect of the landscape conveys a sense of the desperate valor and skill which dis- lodged the Russians from a fortress which they regarded as impregnable. If it had been planned for defense by a military strategist, it could hardly have been made more difficult of capture by an invading army. Every movement of approach for miles around can be seen ; and the searchlights from the hills swept the valleys night after night during the siege, and not a man could advance unseen unless he dug his way through the earth. And every way of attack was swept by a merciless fire of artillery. The famous skill of the Russians in fortification, which at Sevastopol kept the allied armies of England and France at bay for nearly a year, had piled fortress above fortress, and in- trenched eveiy hill with every kind of modern de- AT PORT ARTHUR 185 fensive rampart and weapon. Every kind of cannon swept attacking parties at a distance ; ma- chine guns swept their ranks with fearful precision as they drew nearer ; and every hillside was under- mined and planted with explosives which by the pressure of a foot sent the torn bodies of men flying in the air, and was covered with lines of barbed wire through which deadly currents of electricity took men unaware and felled them as with invisible clubs ; while wire entanglements which lacerated in fatal meshes waited for those who stepped into hidden pits. To the Japanese who stormed those hills one after another during the summer and autumn of 1904 it must have seemed as if nature itself were in alliance with the Russians ; for not only were the summits of the hills fiery volcanoes, but, as they climbed, the earth under their feet burst open and death issued from the ground itself. The military museum shows little of the pageantry of war, but much of its horror. The building itself bears the scars of battle, for two great fissures through the walls mark the track 186 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW of bombs ; while dismantled guns, iron shields perforated by bullets, broken swords, torpedoes, shells of every kind and size, stained bayonets, vividly recall charges and countercharges. The deadly instruments of defense and the means of avoiding them are placed side by side ; the terrible live wires and the great shears by which they were cut, with bamboo sticks fastened to the handles to make them non-conductors. This work fell to the engineers ; but there w r as so much of it to be done that the infantry were taught how to do it. Imitation entanglements were constructed, and the engineer showed the infantry how to cut the wires, while another group followed and sawed off the stakes. There are the deadly hand-grenades filled with dynamite which were thrown into the trenches as the men advanced, and there are the nets in which they were caught. The most impressive witness to the desperate and obstinate courage of the besieged and the besiegers is the mass of ruins on the hill where North Fort stood. This fort commanded all its approaches, and the Japanese literally dug their AT PORT ARTHUR 187 way into it. They tunneled into the hill, blew up an angle of the bastion, and for thirty days fought like madmen in the narrow gallery, which was often piled high with the bodies of the dead. When the Russian sappers descended into the counter-tunnel with which they endeavored to check the Japanese advance, they tied ropes to their ankles and asked their comrades to draw up their bodies after they had been killed ! The men on both sides of this historic siege fought with desperate valor, but with this decisive difference : many of the Russian soldiers did not know where, under whom, or for what they were fighting. They simply obeyed orders and went to death like dumb animals. The Japanese soldiers, on the other hand, were like members of a great family defending their homes. They knew their officers ; they were often told what they were expected to do and why; they were ready to join any "sure death" expedition; they drank the farewell cup of water on the eve of battle not only willingly but joyfully, for duty has the weight of a mountain, runs a Japanese proverb, 188 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW and death has the weight of a feather. And they died as if they were under the very eyes of the Emperor. They were told that their lives be- longed to their commander, and that, if necessary, he would not hesitate to sacrifice them, and they were eager to offer their lives as a sacrifice to their country. "Our battalion," wrote one commander to another, "is about to make an assault, expecting its own annihilation. I hope that you also will assume the offensive." A note written by a Russian commander and found on a battlefield contained these words: "The Japanese army knows how to march but not how to retreat. Once they begin to attack a position they continue most fiercely and obstinately. ... A retreat may sometimes be made useful. But the Japanese always continue an attack irrespective of the amount of danger. Probably the Japanese books of tactics make no study at all of retreating !" This intense patriotism, this joy in death for the Emperor, who is the incarnation of Japan, is a spirit which was evoked but not created by the war fought in Manchuria nine years ago. AT PORT ARTHUR 189 Whoever fails to take account of it misses the secret of the nation's strength, the inspiration of its achievements. The Russians did not know the tremendous force they unconsciously liberated ; that indomitable spirit; backed by scientific education and equipment, will keep Japan secure in spite of its narrow resources and the grave dangers of its position. There are two monuments to the heroic men who died on the hills about Port Arthur. One commemorates nearly fifteen thousand Russian soldiers ; to whose spirits, on the day of dedication, General Nogi read a beautiful address an in- cident which probably stands alone in the history of war. The other is a massive memorial light- house on Monument Hill, and behind it is a stone shrine under which rest the ashes of twenty-two thousand Japanese soldiers. There groups of Japanese may be seen paying reverence to the spirits of the dead. As they bow before that shrine they are reverencing, not only the spirits of their heroes, but the spirit of their nation. CHAPTER XIV THE JAPANESE HAND IN the old pictures of Japan the artists were even more deeply concerned with the enduring beauty of form and foliage than with the brief and fleeting bloom which touches the landscape with a loveliness almost visionary in its fragile charm, and then dissolves like a luminous cloud and vanishes into thin air. On the screens in the temples and palaces one sees everywhere the shapes and colors which in all seasons dominate the landscape and have become the symbols of Japan the pine and the bamboo. The ex- quisite sensitiveness of the Japanese artist is matter of universal knowledge ; it is susceptible of faithful reproduction and has been reported by prints and photographs without number; but the vitality with which the pine and bamboo are painted, the living energy of stroke and line, 190 THE JAPANESE HAND 191 elude all attempts to report them. It is easy to record the form of things, even when the form bears the touch of the ultimate perfection of work- manship ; but the life of the work of art is as mysterious and elusive as the life which flows from Nature herself, and the most skillful repro- duction cannot convey it. The genius of the Japanese artist is most ap- parent when he is dealing with conventionalized forms, and the old life of Japan in all its aspects was rigidly conventional. The relentless and searching discipline to which the older artists were subjected, and which put them in command of the grammar of art before they began to speak through it, had much to do with their ease and freshness within the limitations imposed upon them by tradition; but they were saved from barren imitation, from mechanical repetition, by their artistic genius; for genius is always free however few may be its tools and however limited its materials, because it is always the energy of personality. The Japanese hand is one of the most signifi- 192 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW cant facts in Japan ; it explains many things which are characteristic of the country ; it is both a history and a prophecy. It has been shaped by a national habit, and it is the sen- sitive tool of a race brain. Like the dyer's hand ; which Shakespeare found significant, it shows what the Japanese have been doing for many centuries. It is as unlike the big, poten- tial, unlined hand of the untrained races as the faces of rudimentary peoples are unlike the faces of highly cultivated peoples. The Japanese hand has been shaped by ancient industry, by the use of weapons, and by the dis- cipline of art ; it is sinewy, flexible, sensitive. To the casual onlooker the art of self-defense, which the Japanese call jiu-jitsu, seems like a rather confusing system of bodily movements ; it is, in reality, the working out of an idea, of a series of carefully devised movements to render an enemy helpless. The jiu-jitsu training does not begin with the arms and legs ; it begins with the brain, and rests on psychology. It is an esoteric art, THE JAPANESE HAND 193 and its successful practice depends on the action of the brain quite as much as on the action of the muscles. It is a skill of the mind rather than of the body. It is one of the various expressions of a char- acteristic of the Japanese with which those who would like to understand them and those who must compete with them would do well to see clearly : the endeavor to set skill against force and intelligence against mass. That part of the world which uses its eyes discovered this secret of Japanese efficiency during the war with Russia ; that part of the world which does not use its eyes and learns only through experience will discover this characteristic as the scope of Japanese activity widens in the world. The Japanese are dangerous competitors, because they have a passion for work and because their hands and brains are on intimate terms. It has been said that the rank of a man or of a race in civilization is measured by its application of ideas to life ; which is another way of saying that the further a race advances in general devel- 194 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW opment the more does it match its brain against its body and put intelligence in place of force and habit. If this is a true measure of civiliza- tion, the Japanese have gone far, for they are deliberately bringing intelligence to their aid in dealing with limited resources. Germany has been giving the modern world a striking illustra- tion of the immense service of education in devel- oping the resources of a nation, of the great advan- tages in competition of the industries which have taken science into partnership. Japan has learned much from Germany, but she has one gift which has been denied the Ger- mans she has the artist's hand. In the divi- sion of gifts and aptitudes which make all countries contributors to the work and life of the world the light hand has gone to the Japanese. They seem to be born with the brush in their hands ; they not only paint with it, they write with it. In Japan, as in China and Korea, calligraphy is not only a medium of communication, it is an art. Beautiful examples of chirography are shown side by side with beautiful pictures. THE JAPANESE HAND 195 When he is dealing with foreign models and methods, the Japanese often goes woefully astray, and his blunders in using foreign architecture and decoration show how definitely his artistic instinct rests on knowledge, and how great a place education has had in giving his hand pre- cision, sureness, a lightness of judgment, and a sensitiveness to weight, which have long since passed into flesh and bone. For when he is dealing with the materials and forms with which he is familiar, the Japanese has almost unerring taste and skill. He uses wood as the Greeks used marble ; and gives its perish- ability, so to speak, the imperishable touch. Some of the temples, whose great columns have the massiveness of stone, convey the sense of space, of majesty of structure, of the cathedrals ; there are temples in Kyoto which have the golden vastness of St. Mark's. For the most part, however, the artist in Japan has worked on smaller surfaces, with fewer materials. He has so charged small things with genius that they have taken on greatness ; he 196 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW has so well learned the art of vitalizing details that, like the scientist, he can convey the whole tree from a leaf or a branch. He gets the effect of mass without invoking magnitude, and puts skill in the place of force. In studying the artistic expression of Japanese life in its entirety, one is continually reminded of the Greek maxim that divine things go on light feet, and recalls the happy phrase which is a good definition of art : "The full weight of thought without any weight of expression." Now r here has art more to say of the genius of a people than in Japan ; nowhere is its significance as a language of the spirit more obvious. Not since the eloquent marbles of the Greeks passed from the open air into the museums have things fashioned with the hands had more to say for a people and about a people than in Japan. In many countries art has been the language of the cultivated ; in Japan it has been the vernacular. Those who could not speak it understood it. It was not an accomplishment, a dexterity ac- quired by practice. Its development of form was THE JAPANESE HAND 197 largely influenced from without, but the native aptitude, the vigilant and victorious patience, the sense of color, mass, relations, have their sources in the Japanese mind and heart. The arts of China and Korea have left their impress on Japan as the art of Greece left its impress on the Italy of the Renaissance, and that, in turn, imparted its impulse to Europe and America. There has been no absolutely original art since the first forms were shaped and the first colors mixed in prehistoric times ; there has been a long progression as original in its points of departure, its fresh perceptions of higher uses, its free handling of old materials, as the earliest ventures of primitive craftsmen. Japan owes much to other countries ; an indebtedness which she shares with the rest of the world ; but what she has taken she has made her own by individual skill and by insight into the potentialities of its beauty and use. Even a casual acquaintance with the pottery of Japan as it is shown in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts makes one aware of the general diffusion of taste and skill among 19S JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW the people ; the subsoil of artistic feeling, so to speak, under the art activity of the country. The test of the presence of that feeling among a people is not the appearance of a group of artists of genius, but the touch of beauty on common things ; the familiar uses of beauty in homely ways and in daily occupations. It is of the very essence of art that it should suggest the whole in the part, and that under its hand detail should gain the dignity and significance of the whole. This is the secret of the best Japanese art ; its power lies not in what it says but in what it suggests. The slender bamboo bending in the wind, the adventurous pine leaning over the sea, have the vital energy which carries the imagination into wide landscapes. The great mass of Fuji is always in the background even when but a faint line indicates its presence, or when it is invisible. In his gardens the Japanese artist shows his skill in making detail do the work of mass. The area of the garden is often very small, but the sense of space is rarely missing. The grouping of trees THE JAPANESE HAND 199 and shrubs, the massing of flowers, the softening of hard surfaces by water, the winding walks of stones, conceal boundaries and borrow space from the landscape and sky. In a Japanese garden in the heart of a city there is a delicious sense of seclusion, of remoteness from ugly and noisy things which may be within a stone's throw. The little garden, with its feeling of detachment and isolation in crowded populations, of peace in the center of movement, of freedom of range within very narrow bounds, is a triumph of skill over limitation. These miniature gardens with their tiny trees, ponds, bridges, and walks have all the charm of nature ; they seem like real landscape reduced in scale. The trees are not dwarfed ; they give no impression of nature interfered with and out- raged ; they are perfect in form and line, as if nature were playing with children. There is a parable in this game of skill which the Japanese play with obstinate materials and fixed limits. If art has the power of suggesting the whole in the detail, it has also the power of lessen- 200 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW ing the weight of mass by dissolving it, so to speak, in beauty of detail, of imparting to the oppressive burden of stone the relief of tender line and gentle molding. The spirit of the Western world is likely to be crushed under appalling piles of masonry unless art puts its shoulders under these great burdens and carries them without stress or strain. The Japanese have learned the secret of setting skill against force, of invoking art to create space, of giving perishable things the permanency of beauty. The Western world, which needs im- mense structures, may find in art deliverance from the tyranny of mass, and redeem the hard surfaces of the architecture for business purposes by giving the architect the freedom of the artist. CHAPTER XV THEATERS AND PLAYS IN Japan the theater is not the pastime of the leisure class; it is a very democratic form of amusement. The exterior of the playhouse is gay with flags and brilliantly colored announcements which to the foreigner convey no news, but con- tribute to the festive decoration. The "theater street" is a mass of waving, floating, streaming color a kind of glorified Coney Island. Tea houses and moving-picture shows in which Ameri- can life is portrayed in "scare lines," as in our yellow journals, flank the playhouse or playhouses, and the street is full of curious people from the country, eager to see what the gay city has to offer them. One would like to know what impressions of America are carried to remote farmhouses from the pictorial representations of dashing cowboys firing promiscuous revolvers, sheriffs in antique 201 202 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW suits of rusty black or arrayed like picturesque cutthroats, hairbreadth adventures with stolen locomotives and airships, and love scenes of the free-and-easy kind in which rigid propri- ety is humanized by careless disregard of con- ventions. The gay exterior of the theater belies its inward solemnity, for tragedy is popular, and tragedy on a Japanese stage has no pity for the emotions ; it spares no detail of horror. People whose stoicism calms them in the face of danger and whose cheerfulness survives earthquakes and tidal waves seem to find in the tragedy both occasion and justification for tears. Declamation is as characteristic of the Japanese as of the French stage, and in Japan is even more a matter of convention than in France. The theater is a spacious building and provides for the comfort of its patrons during the time, long or short, of the performance. The space which we call the orchestra is filled with little compart- ments, matted and separated from one another by low partitions, a foot or more in height. In THEATERS AND PLAYS 203 these boxes are families or parties of friends, sitting, of course, on the floor. The hibachi, or fire-box ; in the center contributes a little heat during the months when, to a foreigner, a Japanese theater is a decorated ice-box, and enables the party to cheer itself with many cups of tea ; luncheon is brought as a matter of course, and between the acts there is much sociability and merriment. In its way the Japanese theater is as rational and comfortable a place of entertainment as a provincial German theater. It is a place of friendly amusement, inexpensive and informal ; it is not a setting for a social function. There is a gallery, also divided into boxes, with a few cheaper seats at the rear. Here the foreigner who finds sitting on the floor impossible is provided with a chair. The audience, like the audiences in Shake- speare's time, is spared the infliction of what the managers call music. The plays are often effect- ively though not lavishly staged ; and the stage is reenforced, so to speak, by two long, narrow passages that run on either side of the audience 204 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW to the back of the house and serve as extensions of the stage when, at some critical point, the play demands a rescue. The sound of two pieces of wood struck together, like the three strokes in the French theater, is followed by the withdrawal of the curtain and the disclosure of a second curtain on which the name of the chief actor appears. In the days of the older drama, as in the early English theater, women did not appear on the stage, and the playwriters drew their materials largely from history and tradition, as did Shake- speare and his contemporaries. The manner was serious and the plot was often gruesome ; the dis- tinction between tragedy and melodrama was practically obliterated. The virtues of self-denial and self-sacrifice, the sense of honor which, al- though highly conventionalized, often led to tragic heights, furnished abundant dramatic material. Whoever has seen on the Japanese stage the struggle in a Samurai's breast between his passion- ate affections and his absolute loyalty to his feudal lord has seen the tragic power of the older Japanese drama. THEATERS AND PLAYS 205 The playwriters of to-day, like the story- writers, are making serious, though not always successful, attempts to dramatize contemporary life and manners. The plays often deal with motives and situations developed or created by conditions which are so peculiar to Japan that the foreigner is not in a position to compare the Japa- nese actors with actors in other countries. On the stage, however, the stoical immobility which foreign observers think they find in many faces as the result of centuries of schooling in self -repres- sion gives place to a mobility of feature which reminds one of the little masks in which Japanese humor delights ; while the vivacity of action suggests the Latin temperament and tradition. The Japanese actor plays with his features and makes incredible combinations with them. Foreign plays are becoming more familiar to Japanese audiences and there is a growing interest in Shakespeare. Convention rules supreme in the "No" plays, the dramas of the aristocratic class as the plays in the theater are the recreation and delight of the 206 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW masses. These plays, which are as characteristic of old Japan as the Greek tragedies were character- istic of Athens, seem at first so remote from modern interests and habits that they are almost unintelligible to the foreigner. He gets no help from the rigidly conventional rules to which the acting conforms. More than two hundred and fifty texts of Xo plays have been preserved, and a little study of the few translations that have appeared explains their appeal to the Japanese imagination and reveals their poetic and human quality. They are essen- tially lyrical, and have more in common with the operas than with the plays of the Western stage. Those whose familiarity with Japanese literature gives their opinion authority regard the poetry of Japan as the most original and characteristic art of the Japanese, the most distinctive expression of their genius. The No dramas were written before the sixteenth century and antedate the Shakespearean age in England ; many of them were contemporary with Chaucer. After six hundred years they arc the most elaborate poetic form which Japan has produced. THEATERS AND PLAYS 207 The theaters in which these plays are given are smaller than other theaters and of a different construction. They are much more like the thea- ters which Shakespeare knew than the theaters of to-day. The stage is square and is projected into the auditorium, so that the spectators sit on three sides of it, as they did in the sixteenth- century theaters in London ; but the platform is reserved entirely for the actors. It is covered by a curved roof supported by columns of beauti- fully grained wood. There is a space between the stage and the audience which is open to the sky ; the platform on which the play is presented is smooth and resonant, and the actor stamps from time to time in a way which seems to have no relation to the play and yet is not without sig- nificance. The No is imbedded so deep in Japa- nese tradition and habit that a foreigner can hardly hope to get more than an outline impression of the meaning it has for a native audience ; a meaning which is conveyed largely by suggestion. The vigorous stamping, which seems entirely irrele- vant, is one of the oldest survivals in the No, and 208 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW recalls a story as famous in Japanese mythology as the story of Idun in the Norse mythology, and very like it in significance. The Sun-Goddess, Amaterasu, angry at an affront put upon her by her mischievous brother, hid herself in a cave and left the world in darkness. The gods tried, by various devices, to induce her to return ; but their efforts were unsuccessful until one of them invented a dance which was executed over a great inverted cask. The unusual sounds produced awoke the curiosity of the offended deity, and she came out of the cave, bringing light and joy with her. This tale uses the motive of the story of Pandora's box, but reverses the sequel. It is the hollow sound of this symbolic dancing which the audience hears when the actors stamp with what seems to be meaningless vigor. This very simple feature of the No is significant of the play and its hold on the Japanese imagina- tion ; it is like a bit of drama played at the front of a vast stage, the stage of Japanese history. It is an incident which recalls and expresses the THEATERS AND PLAYS 209 spirit of a civilization. It is incrusted, so to speak, with a mass of associations, and through it, as through a window, the audience looks out on a vast landscape. It creates an illusion in an audience which brings to its rich suggestiveness the knowledge that builds the music from the keynote, and surrenders itself with delight and is held spellbound, and often deeply moved, by acting which seems to the onlooker monotonous and artificial. The Japanese sees the play in focus; the foreigner sees it without perspective. The words, the acting, and the music are alike alien to us ; to the Japanese they are as a mother tongue. Through the most intelligent translation one gets but a blurred impression of a form of art intensely individual and characteristic of a different civilization. The stage on which these plays are presented is uncurtained and is approached by a passageway leading from the greenroom on the left of the stage, which is shut off by a curtain. At regular dis- tances along this passage three pine trees are placed, and a conventionalized pine tree is painted 210 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW on the wall at the back of the stage. The wood of which the stage is built is unpainted and unstained, and is beautifully polished. The actors approach the stage with slow and measured steps, pausing at each of the three pine trees. There is practically no action, but every motion has a meaning and is unalterably fixed by ancient and rigid convention. Motion, either of the body or of the hands, is the chief medium of expression, and motion is confined within very narrow limits. There are no women on the stage, and the men who take the feminine parts wear masks of a strictly conventional form : the aristocratic type of face frozen, so to speak, into immobility. These masks, seen in museums, present a narrow, white face, with eyebrows painted on the middle of the forehead. No en- deavor is made to conceal the artificiality of the expressionless face ; on the contrary, the ribbons which attach it arc often distinctly visible. The beauty of the stage is entirely in the har- mony of tones of wood ; the pine trees are the only decorations ; there is no scenery. The THEATERS AND PLAYS 211 setting of the play is even more bare of effects which catch the eye than was the stage which Shakespeare knew; and, like that stage, scenic backgrounds are supplied by descriptions, often of exquisite beauty. Japanese art of almost all kinds assumes intelligence and sympathy in those to whom it appeals ; the complete effect is secured by cooperation. The artist makes the suggestion, and the imagination of the auditor or student fills in the outlines. The fan is in constant use in the No play, and in every position it is really part of the text ; the audience understands every motion as readily as Mr. Jefferson's audi- ences used to understand Rip Van Winkle's score on the shutter of the tavern. It may express a great emotion or it may be used as a cup to convey water from a stream to one who needs it. The actors are gorgeously costumed in harmony with the roles they assume. The plays are old, and the costumes are contemporaneous with them and have the richness of the feudal age. They are voluminous, and the heavy materials of which they are made, with embroidery or 212 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW brocades, would make violent action impossible if convention permitted it. The No play suggests both the Elizabethan and the Greek play, and at many points reminds one that the human mind in all ages obeys the same laws and develops along kindred, if not identical, lines. On the No stage the chorus plays very much the same role that it did on the Greek stage. Before the play begins the chorus comes in and sits on the right of the stage. The men are robed in low tones of blue and gray, and the impassive figures, for the most part motionless, contribute to the color scheme, which is artistic and restful. While the members of the chorus are silent their fans lie before them, closed ; when they sing, the fans are raised to an upright position. As in the Greek plays, the chorus are intermediaries between the actors and the audience, reporting events which are taking place, commenting on the actors, interpret- ing their emotions, advising them what to do or to avoid doing. The No plays are Court operas, but to the THEATERS AND PLAYS 213 foreign auditor the music is as perplexing as the language. There are those who declare that no Japanese art is more characteristic and impressive than their music ; there are others who hold that music in Japan is an art that was arrested in the early stages of its development and remains in a primitive condition. The experts must decide the matter ; to the non-expert a good deal of the singing is unintelligible from the standpoint of language or of music, and there are outcries which to Western ears seem like the survivals of afar-off barbarism. On the other hand, striking effects are produced when the biwa is used to accompany the singing or chanting of some old tale of feudal times. The musicians in the No play use four instru- ments : three different kinds of drums and a flute. The monotony of the drums is broken by sudden notes of the flute, and the players break their vocal silence from time to time with sharp cries which are in the last degree discordant. The singing voice seems curiously and artificially produced by an alarming distention of the throat and 214 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW suppression of breathing. It must be added that the music, strange and inharmonious as it sounds, is a product of the age which created the plays, and is an integral part of them. The No plays are given in theaters built for the purpose in Tokyo, Kyoto, and a few other places, and are followed with deep interest by very intelligent audiences, who not only under- stand the allusions imbedded in the text, but know how every movement should be made and every syllable should be inflected or intoned. The audience is not limited to people of rank, wealth, and leisure; the reorganization of society in Japan has drawn many representatives of the older classes into the masses, and men of very lowly occupation often show traces of inherited refinement of manner and taste. The plays are seldom more than one hour long, but they are presented in groups, and a performance which begins at nine in the morning holds an audience in the matted compartments until three or four in the afternoon. The little charcoal fires take the chill out of the air and give THEATERS AND PLAYS 215 the auditorium a friendly atmosphere ; between the plays luncheons are eaten, tea is made, and there is a cheerful hum of talk. The contrast between the stateliness of the stage and the pleasant domesticity of the theater is dramatic. The play itself is lacking in dramatic construc- tion and the interest which comes from action and climax ; it is more like a story told in high relief than in terms of dramatic movement and sequence. There may be only two or three actors ; there are rarely more than six. The chief character is usually on a journey in search of some person or to keep a vow or to perform a duty, and the journey takes the audience to some famous locality, which is described at great length. Ghosts and priests haunt the stage and there is more or less moralizing about filial obedience, duty, the uncertainty and brevity of life, and the need of the stoical or religious philosophy which makes one superior to the mutations of fortune and the accidents of condition. In her admirable book on "The No" Miss Marie C. Stopes, with the aid of Dr. Sakurai's 216 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW scholarship and literary skill, presents translations of three of these plays which may be taken as representative. In one, "The Maiden's Tomb," Unai, a young girl, is loved by two men of equal gifts, and on the same day receives from both letters declaring their devotion. Unable to decide between them, and fearing the resentment of the rejected suitor, her father declares that she shall marry the better marksman. This, un- fortunately, adds to the maiden's perplexity ; for the arrows of the rivals pierce the same wing of the same bird a mandarin duck, whose fidelity to its mate is a synonym for devotion in Japan. The tragic ending of the trial of skill so oppresses the girl that she drowns herself ; and the rivals, overcome with remorse and grief, kill each other at her tomb. This somber tale is told by the ghost of the girl to a priest on his way to the capital. It is early spring, and the village girls are gathering herbs. The ghost, in the form of a young girl, mingles with them, and after they have gone tells her pathetic story to the priest. Why a girl whose only offense was THEATERS AND PLAYS 217 her loveliness should suffer torment is not ex- plained, and the comfort which the priest offers has about as much cheer in it as a small charcoal fire in a great room on a winter's day : "If only thou wouldst once but cast away The clouds of thy delusions, thou wouldst be Freed from thy many sins and from all ills." Many prose passages weigh down the poetic diction in these plays, and much of the poetry is prosaic; while the perplexity is deepened by the use of such artificial verbal devices as "pivot words" words of "two significations which serve as species of hinges on which two doors turn, so that while the first part of the poetical phrase has no logical end, the latter part has no logical beginning. They run into each other, and the sentences could not possibly be construed." To this discouraging statement, how- ever, Mr. Chamberlain, one of the highest authori- ties on things Japanese, adds that these "linked verses" pass before the reader "like a series of dissolving views, vague, graceful, and suggestive." With the naivete of Chaucer they combine 218 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW something of the mystical, subtle, rhythmical quality of the Symbolists. Their complexities are as puzzling to an Occidental as the intricacies of "go," which is a kind of Oriental fugue on the Western game of draughts raised to the nth power. There are, however, shining lines in these old plays and bits of description so happy in their freshness that they bring joy even to those into whose speech the play in its entirety may be transposed but cannot be translated. There are charming passages in Mr. Aston's " Japanese Literature" : "On the four seas Still are the waves ; The world is at peace. Soft blow the time-winds, Rustling not the branches. In such an age Blest are the very firs, In that they meet To grow old together." In "The No" these exquisite lines are quoted: "The waters flow, the flowers fall, forever lasts the spring. THEATERS AND PLAYS 219 The moon shines cold, the wind blows high, the cranes do not fly home. The flowers that grow in the rocks are scarlet, and light up the stream. The trees that grow by the caverns are green and contain the breeze. The blossoms open like brocade, the brimming pools are deep and blue." In the "Robes of Feathers" these lines, chanted by the chorus, are very freely rendered into English verse : " Dance on, sweet maiden, through the happy hours! Dance on, sweet maiden, while the magic flow'rs Crowning thy tresses flutter in the wind Rais'd by thy waving pinions intertwin'd ! Dance on ! for ne'er to mortal dance 'tis giv'n To vie with that sweet dance thou bring'st from heav'n : And when, cloud-soaring, thou shalt all too soon Homeward return to the full-shining moon, Then hear our pray'rs, and from thy bounteous hand Pour sev'nfold treasures on our happy land ; Bless ev'ry coast, refresh each panting field, That earth may still her proper increase yield !" CHAPTER XVI PILGRIMS AND SHRINES THE Japanese often tell you that they are not a religious people ; and in a certain sense this is true. They are certainly not a " God-intoxicated " people, like the Hindus, from whom they received Buddhism and the profound philosophy and cul- ture which came with it and which have deeply influenced their life and thought. Never wholly indifferent to the speculative attitude of Buddhism, the Japanese have been more critical and practical than the Hindus. The modifications of doctrine and practice which Buddhism has undergone in Japan have been significant expressions of the Japanese mind and spirit ; they have been in the direction of simplification. The ills and burdens of life have not rested so heavily on the active Japanese temperament ; while the Japanese have not feared death, life has not seemed undesirable. 220 PILGRIMS AND SHRINES 221 There have been little anxiety to escape from the "wheel of life," great interest in grappling coura- geously with the difficulties of existence, and less eagerness to elude them. The vast plains of India have given the Indian imagination a sober coloring and fostered a meditative or brooding habit of mind ; the island climate and the environ- ing variety and beauty of the sea, while they have evoked an undertone of sadness in the Japanese mind, have stimulated the love of action, awakened the spirit of mutual aid, and invigorated the will. The foreigner who studies Japan finds that, except in the use of the hand, the Japanese have less facility than he expected, and greater ability ; they learn less easily and more thoroughly. In the end Japan becomes to him an incarnation of will, and presents, in that respect, a dramatic contrast to India. People of the West are in the habit of thinking of the Far East as the home of races of homogene- ous civilization, and of the Orientals as men of a single type. As a matter of fact, the differences between the Eastern peoples are as great as those 222 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW between the Western races ; as great, for instance, as the differences between the Italians and the Finns. India is a geographical term, and carries with it none of the implications of race unity and race consciousness which enrich the words Eng- land, France, and Germany, and make them sig- nificant of concentrated energy and power. Immense significance attaches to the fact that Japan is the one thoroughly organized country in the Far East. Indeed, it is not too much to say that, with the possible exception of Germany, Japan is the most thoroughly organized country in the modern world. If this had not been true, the extraordinary readjustment of the nation in all departments of its life during the last sixty years would have been impossible. A highly centralized government and a disciplined people have made possible a marvelous unity of purpose and of action ; and Japan has brought to her task the concentration and steady persistence of a powerful personality. In national as in individual experience there are none of those brilliant accidents which seem PILGRIMS AND SHRINES 223 to be miraculous ; the great achievement is always rooted in the miracle of growth under law. Behind modern Japan is the old Japan of rigid discipline and trained obedience, the Japan of the resolute will. The emphasis of interest and endeavor has rested, not on meditation as the method of solving the problem of existence, but on courageous action ; not on individual escape from the burdens or ills of life by asceticism, but on the subordination of the individual to the State impersonated by the feudal chief or the Shogun or the Emperor. It has become a convention to describe Ameri- cans as practical and caring supremely for money. As a matter of fact, they are not only sensitive to appeals of sentiment, but are subject to sudden moods of emotion in which material interests are thrown to the winds. The Japanese are reported to the world, and are in the habit of speaking of themselves, as intensely practical. For nearly two generations they have concentrated their energy on practical problems ; but they are pri- marily both an artistic and a sentimental people - when honor is involved nothing else counts with 224 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW them; not only money but life and death are matters of supreme indifference. They are active by temperament, they are peculiarly sensitive to the appeal of sentiment, and these facts must be taken into account in any endeavor to determine the influence of religion in their life. They have not been given to specula- tion on the ultimate problems of existence, nor have they formulated elaborate creeds ; but re- ligion has been as much a part of the daily habit of life among them as among the Italians ; it has been inwrought in their history, organized in their institutions, and practiced in every family. Their traditions declare that they are descended, not from demigods, but from gods ; their Emperor is the Son of Heaven ; the shrine of the Imperial Ancestors is not only the most sacred place in Japan, but has been the very heart of the national system ; temples and shrines are almost numberless throughout the Empire ; one is hardly ever beyond the sound of the deep- toned bells in the temple grounds ; and there was an altar in every home in old Japan. So far as PILGRIMS AND SHRINES 225 outward conformity to religious observance is concerned, the Japanese have been a very religious people ; but in the sense of being saturated, so to speak, with religious feeling and absorbed in religious contemplation, they have not been religious. Religion has been as much a matter of state ritual as of private experience. In the cities and villages, hidden among the hills, one is always coming on shrines and temples many of them simple to the point of bareness, some of them splendid in design and decoration. Many of the people are Buddhists ; all are Shin- toists. There is no collision of creed between the two faiths. Shinto is now restored to something of its primitive simplicity, but there was a time when Buddhism had almost taken possession of its temples and worship. It never was a religion, strictly speaking, but it was anchored deep in the hearts of the people, and enough nature worship was added by the priests to satisfy worshipers who craved concrete images and richer altar furnishings than a simple mirror. One did not need to go far in old Japan to find a friendly god ; 226 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW Buddhism was brought down from the clouds and humanized to meet daily needs, and Amida, " Lord of measureless light and life," opened a way, through faith, to paradise. There were hosts of local deities, and ever}'' little village had its patron or neighborhood deity ; while the Rice-god and the Fox-god are always accessible to rustic wor- shipers. There were also shrines of national interest in Japan and temples of great reputation ; and the Japanese, although shut in upon themselves for two hundred and sixty years, have always had the mental alertness which humble rustic people in most countries lack, and the curiosity about the world which goes with it and fills people with a desire to travel. They are, moreover, nature lovers and avail themselves of every opportunity to enjoy themselves out of doors. In cherry- blossom time the whole country is en fete, and a contagious intoxication of joy in the world is in the air. Religion has taken on a picnic form and has become associated with the pleasures as well as the pains of life. This has been especially true PILGRIMS AND SHRINES 227 of Shinto, which has made faith in immortality a working creed ; men worship the living, not the dead; and ancestor worship necessarily involves the existence of ancestors who, although invisible, are still alive in the same sense in which their worshipers are alive; their conditions have changed, but life goes on without interruption. "We say and think that we believe in death," writes Okakura, "but all the while this so-called death is nothing else than a new life in this present world of ours led in a supernatural way." He illustrates what this has meant in practice by tell- ing us that when the father of a family begins a long journey the part of his room that is raised above the level of the floor becomes sacred to his memory until his return ; each day the members of the family gather in front of it and express their love in words and gifts. During the terrible war with Russia, when hundreds of thousands of families were represented in the field, there was no house in Japan in which some mother, wife, or sister was not practicing this simple and tender rite of remembrance for the son or husband or brother in 228 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW peril. And if he died, there was no change of mental attitude towards him ; he had only gone on a longer journey from which he would not return. He was still in the world, but he was no longer visible, and daily reverences and offerings were made to him as before. On Kudan Hill in Tokyo there is a great shrine dedicated to those who have died in defense of their countiy. Their names are inscribed on long rolls hung on the walls, and Dr. Nitobe tells us that one may hear widows teaching their children that their father's spirit dwells there, though invisible. "Look well ! He is there. Do you not see him?" Here, surely, is a very simple but wonderfully impressive recognition of that invisible world in which all active religion lives ; and whatever may be the fact to-day, yesterday this sense of immortality was universal. ^Tiile for the people at large Buddhism has been associated with death until the recent revival of Buddhistic activity, Shinto has been the com- panion of joy ; for generations children have played in the sunny spaces before the shrines, PILGRIMS AND SHRINES 229 and village festivals have marked the months and years, and gayety and laughter have made sacred places familiar and happy. For many generations pilgrims have been familiar figures in Japan and the pilgrimage a kind of national habit. In former times appren- tices ran away on pilgrimages, were helped on the way by friendly shelter and food, and were for- given when they returned. Whatever inconven- ience their unexpected absences caused was canceled by their piety; the religious end justi- fied the unbusinesslike means. But the Japanese are a social people and make their pilgrimages in company. In the streets and spacious temple grounds of Kyoto one meets groups of country people carrying flags and going from shrine to shrine. They have come from villages and hamlets all over the country. In the summer, when work on the farm slackens and the thoughts of the peasant farmers turn to recreation, they arrange pilgrimages as American farmers plan visits to relatives and friends, excursions to the State capital, to Washington, or to more 230 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW distant points. The love of travel is not less ardent in Japan than in this country, but it is less ambitious, and there is less money to spend. The religious motive is more obvious and general than here ; but travel and religion are not dissociated in this country, as the almost numberless conven- tions, conferences, and meetings, attended by hosts of people, show. The modern American pilgrim discards the old-time discipline of the pilgrimage ; he does not travel to mortify or discipline the spirit ; he goes to some distant gathering to gain the warmth of fellowship, to recover a waning enthusiasm, to reinvigorate his spirit of devotion. He also goes because he expects to have " a good time." The pilgrim in Japan is impelled by the same motives, plus the appeal of patriotism. Many of the places to which he goes are not only sacred but historical. Japan is a small country with a long history, and legends, traditions, and heroic or dramatic incidents add human interest to almost every locality in the country. There are certain stories which live in the hearts of the nation and PILGRIMS AND SHRINES 231 are part of the education of every child, and the places where these stories are localized, so to speak, draw pilgrims in endless procession. The graves of the Forty-seven Ronin in the little ground of the Temple in Tokyo and the great shrine of the Imperial Ancestors at Ise have been lodestars for generations. The shrine on Monu- ment Hill at Port Arthur, under which rests the ashes of twenty-two thousand Japanese soldiers, is already a place of pilgrimage, and there are few more impressive places in the world. The man who does not instinctively pay his reverence to the heroic dead there must be lacking not only in religious feeling but in normal human impulse. In the mind of the Japanese pilgrims religion, patriotism, the love of travel, and the picnic spirit all find place, and no scales are delicate enough to weigh them one against the other. The pilgrimages from the small communities are made up of those who go at their own charges or of those who have been chosen as representa- tives of the localities which send them to offer a collective worship, the expense of these semi- 232 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW official pilgrims being paid by the villages which they represent. The pilgrims are poor, frugal, and self-denying, and their expenses are almost invisible to the naked American eye. Living out of doors in inclement weather is no hardship to people accustomed to working in the rice fields. They are lightly dressed in tight-fitting cotton trousers and shirts, with a loose jacket, often caught in a girdle. They wear broad- brimmed hats of coarse straw, and their feet are protected by straw sandals ; they carry staves of wood, and a bell is usually attached to the girdle ; their light luggage is divided into two bundles, one carried on the back in a small piece of matting on which they sleep at night. One of the company carries a flag on which appears the name of the province or locality from which they came. They do not scruple to use the railways, on which third- class fares are very low ; but they are accustomed to walk, and they make long journeys on foot with moderate fatigue and much pleasure by the way. They climb mountains and repeat their prayers at lonely shrines ; even Fuji, which has an altitude PILGRIMS AND SHRINES 233 of more than twelve thousand feet, does not daunt them, and to worship at the little shrine beside the apparently extinct crater gives a kind of satis- faction which going to the Holy Land gave the pilgrims of the thirteenth or fourteenth century in Europe. At Nikko, Nara, Kyoto, and Ise, the ancient centers of religion, they may be found in crowds. In some remote and lonely places shelters are provided for them, while in towns or around the older temples small, inexpensive inns are ready to receive them. So are hosts of little shops, and at festival seasons long lines of out-of-door stalls display photographs, postal cards, souvenirs, and trinkets. Many of these are catchpenny devices ; for in Japan, as in all parts of Christen- dom, the worldly-wise turn piety to account for business purposes, and sinners prey on saints. The devotions of the pilgrims are brief ; and, if the shrine is old and historic, when their prayers are ended they are promptly taken in hand by an attendant, who intones the story of the place as monotonously as if he were a guide in an English cathedral, but with much more vocal energy. 234 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW Recitation in Japan has very little in common with the normal use of the voice ; it shows skill in voice production, but it is too artificial to please the Western ear. The auditors listen intently, and what they cannot accept as fact they receive as legend, for they have not reached the barren stage in the evolution of the critical temper in which nothing counts except facts ; they are still philosophical enough to know that there is often far greater truth in some legends than in many facts. The little traveling parties are very social, much given to friendly talk, and never long sepa- rated from their small pipes, which yield only a few whiffs and then go out ; demanding a more patient attention than the restless Occidental would give to any pleasure. They are largely independent even of the little, inexpensive inns which keep open house for them. Kara, which was the capital of Japan during a period notable for the culture of the arts and of manners, is a park filled with temples and with thousands of stone lanterns, with great trees and The Great Buddha PILGRIMS AND SHRINES 235 wandering deer ; it has what may be called a town attachment, but it is itself a great park to which pilgrims come from all parts of the Empire. On the third day of February water is taken from the sacred well, and a torch race through a long gallery brings together a host of pilgrims. The runners wear thin white garments and seem to carry their torches with reckless disregard of danger; but accidents never happen, because they are miracu- lously protected from fire ! A large temple with an unusually difficult name, approached by a long flight of stone steps, is lifted high against the crest of the hill, and on the festal night it is a lu- minous mass of lanterns. The scene on that night is a page torn out of the "Arabian Nights." The long slope, heavily overhung by ancient trees, is crowded with people seated in little groups and wonderfully picturesque in the high light and dark shadows of lanterns above and around them. They sit on the ground, chatting, and drinking tea and eating a frugal picnic supper. All Japan is there ; it is a kind of national picnic. However much or little the miraculous efficiency of the 236 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW sacred water appeals to them, the occasion is full of simple pleasure for them. For centuries the pilgrimage has been a vacation, a means of popular education, and a social habit in Japan. The student of the Far East discovers that most devices which he has been taught to believe are Western inventions have been in use in the Orient for hundreds of years, including warming pans, chafing dishes, revolving book- cases, and exchange professorships. The vacation excursion was old in Japan centuries before regular roads were built in England and the daring experi- ment of running regular lines of stages inaugu- rated ; and peasant farmers were picking up all kinds of information which could be turned to account at home. For the Japanese, unlike his Hindu neighbor, but very like his English and American brother, does not separate the business of religion from the business of living. CHAPTER XVII COUNT OKUMA IN repose Count Okuma's face seems immobile and of a type not uncommon in Japan among elderly men of wide experience and high standing. It is full of strength, with a suggestion, not of sadness, but of great sobriety of feeling, the feeling which is distilled out of a large knowledge of life. If Orientalism means passivity, acceptance, the fatalism which teaches a man to bear his fate rather than to shape it, Count Okuma's face is not Oriental. Nor, for that matter, are typical faces anywhere in Japan. There are Oriental traits in the Japanese character and Oriental ways of thinking in the Japanese mind ; but not even Holland has shaped itself and fashioned its fortunes more definitely than has Japan. It represents as distinctly as Germany or England or the United States the active will, the mind 237 238 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW which projects itself on external conditions and modifies or reconstructs them. The Japanese mind shows no trace of that Oriental sluggishness which the West has agreed to regard as charac- teristic of the East ; although it may appear later that this languor was the reaction of the first long-sustained effort of the race to realize its possi- bilities of development. Whether temperamental or temporary, it was never characteristic of a people who were intensely alive even when they were shut off from the w r orld in an enforced seclu- sion. The tea ceremony, which was a social ritual in old Japan, was a skillful device to quiet a people w r hose mind and nerves were dangerously active. Count Okuma is a man of the old order with a modern mind ; he is not only without fear of radical changes, he has always welcomed them. He is halfway through his seventh decade ; but his years seem to have brought him accumulated impulse rather than depletion of intellectual force. He says frankly that he intends to live a hundred and twenty-five years, and he has intimated his COUNT OKUMA 239 expectation of attending the funerals of some of his contemporaries of reactionary tendencies ; and when one talks with him it is easy to take him at his word. For his face becomes wonderfully animated and expressive and his eyes are keen with vitality. It is easy to understand the delight with which he is always heard on the plat- form. He is a master of the art of being intimate with his audience which is the secret, not of political oratory, but of the highest quality of public speaking. His personality flows through his words and gestures, his eye glows with life, every faculty is brought into action, and his audience ripples with applause and laughter. The moment he begins to speak it surrenders itself to sheer enjoyment, for no man understands his countrymen better, nor has a larger command of the resources of that language of the hour which is not simply a matter of words, but of common knowledge of the mood of the moment, of feelings which lie near the surface. He knows to a nicety how to temper seriousness with humor, logic with irony, fact with sentiment. So vital is Count 240 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW Okuma's temperament, so animated and expressive is his personality, that it is a delight to hear him speak even if one does not understand a word he says. It used to be said that men waited in the lobby of the House of Commons to hear the tones of Mr. Gladstone's voice even when his words were indistinguishable. What may be called the vibration of a great personality gave them a moving quality ; something of this quality flows through Count Okuma's speech. He was born in the south, though he belongs neither to Satsuma nor Chosu, the two powerful clans which have given modern Japan so many able leaders in the army and navy and in civil administration. It is a conviction of the Japanese that able men are born of able mothers. Count Okuma's mother was a woman of notable charac- ter and intellect, and one of the finest traits of his nature has been his passionate devotion to her and to her memory. He was fifteen years old when Commodore Perry forced his friendly way into Japan and gave an outward impulse to an inward movement which had been quietly gather- COUNT OKUMA 241 ing momentum in the country. His father was in command of fortifications about Nagasaki. The drama of modern Japan has been completely un- folded under the eyes of Count Okuma, and he has lived with the country during the entire period of its transformation. His preparation for this radical change lay in his spirit rather than in his education ; for he was brought up in the old way. He studied the Chinese classics as Japanese schoolboys had done since the eighth century ; an education which was definitely literary, though the Japanese genius and temperament greatly modified it. But an education which cramped men of imita- tive mind did not hamper a man of original mind ; moreover, there was in the Chinese classics much that was liberating, and the revival of inter- est in these ancient writings had inaugurated a new epoch in Japan before Commodore Perry opened the doors to Western science and to material activity. In the air of the new age Count Okuma, who has never been abroad and has been too busy to learn a foreign language, held his 242 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW mind open and saw early and clearly the readjust- ment of institutions, laws, and social life through which Japan must pass if she was to find her place in the modern world and keep her national integ- rity. Bred in the customs of old Japan, Count Okuma is a modern man in his openness of mind, his readiness to rest in the stability of the law of progress rather than in immobility of institutions. He is a born Progressive ; for Progressivism is not a matter of to-day or to-morrow ; it is a view of life as old as the first man who looked forward rather than backward and who saw that life and movement are inseparable. Count Okuma has had a large place in the public life of Japan. He has been Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Finance, and he is now, for the second time, Prime Minister ; but he has been a man of ideas rather than an administrator, a popular leader rather than a successful politician. He has always spoken his mind with great frankness, as he speaks it to-day, and he has never practiced the traditional reticence of the Oriental statesman ; a man of strong Count Okuma, the Prime Minister COUNT OKUMA 243 popular instincts and of the democratic temper, he has been frank and outspoken to a degree which has been unusual in the East, and not always politic. This quality, and the instinctive feeling that he is sympathetic with the aspirations of the people, have made him at times the most popular man in Japan, while his frankness in criticism of popular tendencies has made him at times the most unpopular man in the country. One secret of his strength lies in his apparent in- difference to the attitude of the moment ; he is the friend, not the servant, of his people. Years ago, during one of his periods of un- popularit}^ a bomb was thrown into his carriage, and he w r as so seriously injured that his life was saved only by the amputation of a leg. After the death of the assassin, w r ho committed suicide - so the story runs flowers were placed on his grave on those days when the Japanese specially remember their dead ; and the suspicion that the bomb-thrower might have belonged to a group of anarchists led to surveillance and to the discovery that the flowers were placed on the grave by the 244 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW man whom the assassin had attempted to kill, and who feared that others might be deterred from paying him the usual respect dear to Japanese traditions. Count Okuma has the love of flowers and trees which make Japan one of the three most beautiful countries in the world, and his gardens are a source of delight to him, as they are to the guests whom he so hospitably welcomes. There are two houses in his ample grounds a foreign house and a Japanese house. He works and entertains in one house and lives in the other. To the stranger from the West there is no more hospitable house than his, nor is there a more interesting personality in the Far East. Japan is often described as a kind of middle term between the East and West ; and perhaps as much as any one in the country Count Okuma incarnates that idea and fulfills that function. His roots are in the soil of the East, but he lives in the modern world as naturally as if he had been born in the farthest West. He is one of those large-minded men now appearing in all nations who share what COUNT OKUMA 245 Dr. Butler has happily called the "international mind," who are the interpreters of race to race, and who are destined to play a great part on the stage of the modern world. It was highly charac- teristic of him, when all Japan was deeply stirred by the anti-Japanese legislation in California, to call a conference of American missionaries and Japanese Christians and others at his house, and in a brief and very impressive address tell them that such differences can be finally settled neither by law nor by diplomacy, but by religion. It seemed to many like a counsel of perfection beyond the reach of a generation still blinded by ignorance and race prejudice ; but those who faced the fundamental issue knew that it was that simple truth which is the practical wisdom of to-morrow. CHAPTER XVIII A JAPANESE PRIME MINISTER ON JAPAN 1 THE most obvious fact about modern Japan is its newness. Of course there are other new countries, America being the foremost ; Germany as an empire is new, and Italy as a kingdom is new. But Japan is new in a deeper sense ; the changes here have been more radical. In the West newness means some form of renewal in a new birth. In politics, art and society there are differences between the peoples of Teutonic and the peoples of Latin blood, but these differences are comparatively superficial ; all these peoples have drunk at the same wells ; they have felt the influence of Greek and Roman civilization, of medieval thought and of Christianity. There are differences among these peoples, but the dif-~ X A conversation stenographically reported and re- vised by Count Okuma. 246 PRIME MINISTER ON JAPAN 247 ferences are not radical. Japan, on the other hand, has felt the influence of China and India, and has developed social and political institutions fundamentally divergent from those of the West, so that Japan is new in a sense in which Germany and Italy are not new. Of course there were at one time or another new countries in the East as well as in the West ; the empires of Genghis Khan, of the Ottoman and of the Mogul, were once new. We are prone to regard the recent rise of Japan in the same light as that of these Eastern empires, but there is a radical difference that must not be overlooked. These Asiatic empires were created as the result of the ascendency of one man ; Japan has risen as a nation. The other Asiatic empires rose by force from within, broke the bands which linked them, and, like a great accumulation of water, broke the dam and deluged the countries they conquered. Japan lived in an isolation not without its good effects, for the Japanese lived a happy, undisturbed, artistic life ; what finally awoke it from its long repose was not the rise of one man or of many men, but an impulse which 248 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW came from without, first from America and then from other nations. The impetus which created a new nation came largely from without. Since the first breaking away from the ancient policy of seclusion sixty years ago Japan has gone through three transformations of ideas and institu- tions, and the reconstruction has shown itself in three different ways : and it has now entered upon a fourth period of transformation. In the first period the Japanese people broke away from their old customs, radically changed their political organization, and created the united empire. In the second period they were engaged in making the modern state, both internally and in its external relations with foreign powers ; the latter process involving the abolition of exterritoriality and the gaining of tariff autonomy. The objections to both these changes strongly held by the foreign powers were reasonable, for at that time the laws of Japan had not been codified and were not known to foreigners. In this period social and administrative reforms were rapidly carried out, and the abolition by treaty of exterritoriality PRIME MINISTER ON JAPAN 249 and the gaining of the power to make her own tariff laws secured the perfect independence of the country in 1893. The third period was marked by two wars very closely related, for the war with Russia was the logical consequence of the war with China. These wars greatly widened the mental horizon of Japan, and tested its military and diplomatic ability. Ages had passed since the country had been at war, and these two wars revealed its strength and gave it self-consciousness. Long before the opening of the country, in fact during the entire Middle Age, the Japanese people were kindly disposed towards foreigners at a time when the authorities were pursuing the policy of isolation and of antagonism. When Commodore Perry came, anti-foreign feeling sud- denly grew very strong, and throughout the entire country sentiment was antagonistic to any intercourse with foreign peoples. Patriotism then took a new form ; devotion to Japan meant reso- lute antagonism to foreigners. This anti-foreign feeling had been fostered by the Dutch, who had 250 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW long been in commercial relations with the Japa- nese ; in order to keep the Japanese market to themselves the Dutch spread many evil reports about other Western countries, declaring that if these countries brought religion to Japan it was for the purpose of gaining political power, and if they endeavored to foster commerce it was to take wealth out of the country. When Commo- dore Perry came, the Japanese people remembered these stories and regarded his coming as another attempt to make an entrance into the country for selfish purposes. Townsend Harris, fortu- nately, was the type of man who disarmed suspicion ; the Japanese Government found him sincerely friendly. They discovered that he was both frank and generous, that America had no predatory purpose ; the members of the Govern- ment at that time were well informed about foreign matters, and the advisers of the Shogun who was then ruling, as a result of this knowledge, saw no danger in opening the country for foreign intercourse, but great danger in any attempt to carry still further the old policy of seclusion. PRIME MINISTER ON JAPAN 251 The Daimyos were not well informed about external sentiment and harbored suspicion of foreigners, and joined the Emperor then only nominally ruling in an attempt to prevent foreign intercourse. The Shogun Government favored the abandonment of the old policy and the opening of Japan to the world. Both parties were right and both were wrong. The Shogun party was right in advocating opening the country, but its policy was based on a feudalism which violated the best tradition of the nation, the tradi- tion of the supreme authority of the Emperor. The Emperor's party was wrong in its endeavor to continue the policy of exclusion, but right in holding that the supreme power in Japan rested in the hands of the Emperor and not in those of his delegate, the Shogun. The result of the struggle politically was the fall of the Shogun and of feudalism, but his policy of opening the country to foreign intercourse survived his fall. The Emperor's party was mistaken in upholding the policy of seclusion, but right in its policy of concentrating its influence on securing the resto- 252 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW ration of power to the Emperor. This meant not only the opening of Japan to the world but the unification of Japan. The leaders of the new regime saw immediately that these two principles or policies were in accord- ance with world programs and in harmony with world tendencies which Japan could not arrest and should not try to arrest. To guide the nation wisely there was need by these leaders not only of knowledge of Japan but a knowledge of conditions throughout the world, and the phrase in the Imperial rescript on education to "seek knowledge wherever it might be found throughout the world," as well as the further phrase that in the light of this knowledge outworn custom should be set aside, defined the new policy. In the endeavor to carry out this policy a large group of foreign experts were invited to assist the Government, and there were at one time nearly eight hundred such advisers in the schools, the mint, in shipping and commercial affairs ; and a large number of students were sent abroad. The conception of patriotism was now greatly broadened ; heretofore PRIME MINISTER ON JAPAN 253 it had been negative in that it meant hostility to outsiders, now it began to be constructive and meant an ardent endeavor to secure for Japan whatever was good in ideas or institutions in other countries in order that Japan should have all the light it could gain from Western experience. Buddhism had always been the State religion, and everybody was expected to belong to some Buddhist sect. When the census was taken, every one was asked to what Buddhist sect he belonged, not so much for the information gained, but to assure the country that there were no followers of Christianity. Under the new order religion was made absolutely free. Under the old order class distinctions had been very rigid and exacting ; they were now largely leveled, and enlightened democracy gained ground rapidly in all walks of life, and in all fields of endeavor the assimilation of Western endeavor was pursued with great ardor. After Japan learned more of the Western nations it discovered, to its great regret, that great dis- crepancies existed between its claims as an in- 254 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW dependent country and the treatment accorded it by the great Powers. This discrepancy was most evident and exasperating in the insistence by those Powers on the right of exterritoriality and the denial to Japan of the power to regulate her own tariff. Japan discovered that it was not wholly independent and sovereign ; that it was not dealing on equal terms with the rest of the world ; and the Japanese people were wounded in their feelings by the discovery that Japan was treated as an inferior Power on a level with Turkey and Persia. Patriotism took a new form, and concentrated itself on gaining complete autonomy in legal and tariff matters, and the whole energy of the nation was focused in the endeavor to gain these rights as the means of raising the country to the level of Powers of the first rank. The Japanese people realized that their laws were imperfect and incomplete and that foreigners had good ground for criticism, so they set about revising the laws so that foreigners might feel perfectly safe under them. They discovered that many of their customs were regarded by the PRIME MINISTER ON JAPAN 255 West as outlandish, so they began to modify them. They discovered that their social usages were dis- tasteful to the West and were regarded as ex- pressions of an inferior civilization, and accordingly there was haste to bring them more or less into harmony with Western standards. There was a period of great haste to introduce foreign customs and manners in the court, in government offices, and in social circles. Sunday was made a legal holiday. The court adopted foreign dress, though it was very distasteful to the persons highest in authority. The latest fashions were promptly received from Paris, dancing was introduced, balls became popular, the study and use of the English language were much encouraged, and there was even talk of Government aid in the introduction of Christianity. It was the period of extreme Occidentalization, of mere mimicry of the West, not without its absurd features; but it was the expression of an earnest desire to adopt the best that the West could give Japan, so that the country could put itself in such a position that the world would recognize it in no 256 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW sense inferior to the other great nations. Through this apparently flippant attempt to transform society customs, primarily to secure treaty re- vision, the Japanese people gained a deeper knowledge of the principles which underlie Western civilization. The people of the country began to read Western books, and gained an insight into Western life and ideals. They began to get acquainted with the principles of civil life and constitutional government, and to ask for a larger share in influencing the policy of the country. Mill, Spencer, and Darwin were eagerly read, and the philosophy of evolution took hold of many Japanese thinkers. The spread of these ideas was an obstacle to Christianity, but the interest in fresh ideas gave the missionaries a still wider opportunity to disseminate their faith. There were many people who thought Japan was on the very verge of being Christianized. Public education was widespread, and the number of middle schools greatly increased. We look back on those days with amusement at the haste to adopt Western customs, but the PRIME MINISTER ON JAPAN 257 great motive which prompted it gained its end. The treaties were revised, exterritoriality was abolished, and tariff autonomy was conceded. America had never objected to these demands of Japan; but England, having a greater num- ber of residents in Japan and much larger busi- ness interests, was naturally more reluctant, but finally signed the treaty first, America already having given her assent. The other Powers speedily followed the example of these two coun- tries, and in 1894 one great object on which the heart of the whole nation, from the Emperor down, was set, and towards which all its energies were directed, was accomplished. But in the same year, almost in the same month, the third period of transformation began. At the very time that the telegram came from London reporting the revision of the treaties, telegrams came from China and Korea report- ing that the situation in the two countries was getting more critical. The British Ambassador in Peking tried to reconcile these differences, but the Chinese Government contemptuously 258 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW declined to accept the concessions made by Japan and continued to pour troops into Korea in violation of the treaty. Western ideas were then widely circulated among members of our parliament, and if the war with China had not come when the question of treaty revision was settled there would have been further develop- ments of popular rights and of administrative reforms. The country greatly needed a breathing-spell, but that was denied by the outbreak of the war ; the attention of the country was diverted in a new direction, and patriotism took on a more aggressive form. The war with China was ended by the treaty signed at Shimonoseki ; a treaty in every way honorable to Japan, whose demands were not in any way exorbitant. But Russia, Germany, and France joined forces and deprived Japan of the fruits of her victory; for the sake of peace in the Far East these Powers declared that Japan must not take any territory in Liao- tung peninsula. Under the conditions Japan was powerless, but felt deeply injured ; she PRIME MINISTER ON JAPAN 259 "swallowed her tears," to use a Japanese phrase, and kept silence. Within three years these three great Powers were calmly taking to themselves great sections of China. When the Boxers rose against the foreigners, the Japanese Government refused to intervene, and the Japanese said to themselves, "The Powers have invoked this punishment ; let them settle the situation among themselves." But on the earnest advice of England and America that something should be done to prevent further bloodshed, Japanese troops joined the European forces in China. What Japan did is known to the world, which does not, however, understand what that rebellion would have been had Japan not aided in its suppression ; it was so near that an army could be poured in. After the Boxers had been suppressed Europe and America with- drew their armies ; but Russia, which during the disturbance had sent in a large army and oc- cupied Manchuria, although repeatedly urged to do so, refused to withdraw its troops. Eng- land, America, and Japan repeatedly asked 260 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW Russia to retire its forces, but under various pretenses the Russians remained in military occupation of Manchuria. The United States advocated the open door in Manchuria, and all the Powers agreed except Russia, which always closes the doors. Russia even tried to exclude foreigners already resident in Manchuria, and there must be missionaries in Manchuria who still have passports that direct that the holder should stop preaching. The world recollects the history of the war that followed and how it ended. It was not surprising that America and England were sincerely and emphatically with Japan. They desired what Japan desired. One reason of Japanese success in the war was the lesson which had been taught it by the training of outside oppression in the need of uniting for self-defense and self-respect. Patriotism could no longer be passive ; it had to become positive and active, and, in a sense, aggressive. The sense of injustice which Japan felt when the fruits of her victory over China were taken from her created aggressive patriotism, and this pa- PRIME MINISTER ON JAPAN 261 triotism was greatly increased by the war with Russia. The people of the country were very- disappointed with the result of the two wars; they believed that the damage inflicted on Russia was much greater than it really was, and they looked for material compensation from that country, and were bitterly disappointed when they did not get it. The economic results were in many ways dis- astrous. As long as Japan was conscious of its deficiencies and eager to learn, there was great desire for progress, but the results of the two wars made the Japanese suddenly self-conscious ; they had beaten two big fellows and they thought that they could beat anybody. The victory was attributed not only to military and naval ex- cellence, but to moral superiority. Bushido be- gan to be very widely talked about ; a moral system with many virtues, but not adapted to the twentieth century. Admiration for the he- roes of the war brought them into great promi- nence in other fields. The financial drain of the war made it necessary to raise duties on imports, 262 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW and in consequence prices in general were raised, and the cost of living rose with them, bringing serious distress. Believing that the rise of the country to a place among the great Powers was due in part to the educational system, the pedagogue intensified that system until it was cast in grooves, and whatever was not in accord with it was regarded as dangerous. From the lowest to the highest school there was a chronological order which led the youth up step by step and left little room for originality or individual in- struction. This is the weakness of State educa- tion. Intelligent people know very well that the mind cannot be compressed into an iron frame, and that the moment such a frame is made there will be minds which cannot be so cramped and will revolt. Men who devise these frames know their weakness and show it in the fear they manifest of contrary opinions. The Government watches new ideas of individualism, of cosmopolitanism, of Socialism, of every form of political and social heterodoxy. In spite of this, dissenting opinions are in the air, and al- PRIME MINISTER ON JAPAN 263 though the authorities know that it is idle to attempt to destroy ideas by suppressing them, they go on with the mistaken policy of trying to do so, with the result that the more they attempt to suppress ideas the more the ideas spread. While the attempt is being made to identify patriotism with a very narrow conception, ideas fundamentally antagonistic are being brought in from Europe. The Japanese people are getting tired of the kind of narrow patriotism demanded of them, and are showing signs of fatigue moral, political, and educational. I have said that, whether in the codification of laws or in the change of institutions, the Japa- nese have always been pulled from without ; they have not worked from inward impulse, but under outward pressure. They have been pulled to a height for which they were not in- ternally prepared. If outside pressure had not been so strong and so continuous, the best thing for the Japanese would have been a pause in order that they might look around and see where they were. Such a pause was denied them, and they 264 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW are still going forward with makeshifts devised as necessity dictates. We are mistaking temporary devices for eternal plans. The men who started the forward movement of new Japan have died or aged, and the young men who have taken their places were born and brought up in times of great pressure and did not get the mental and moral training which the best circumstances would have given them. They were schooled in the admiration of a system rather than of its spirit. Hope lies in the fact that we are now r conscious of the situation ; we know that we are standing at the parting of the ways. We have been arti- ficially raised to a height, and to reach it we have resorted to all kinds of stimulants, and fatigue has ensued. This is shown by universal dis- satisfaction ; in no field is this more manifest than in politics ; in four months there have been three ministries, there have been mobs ; no Cabinet changes have ever been watched with such interest by the people as those of recent months. The powerful party of the Seiyukai, led by the late Prime Minister, Marquis Saionji, PRIME MINISTER ON JAPAN 265 has been disrupted. When such a disruption of a great party occurs in a country like the United States with long party experience, it is not surprising that it should occur in a country of such limited political experience as Japan. I have no desire to compare men still young in political experience with veteran statesmen like Mr. Roosevelt, but the circumstances that made Mr. Ozaki secede from the Seiyukai were at bottom very much like the circumstances that caused Mr. Roosevelt to leave the Republican party. Any party too long in power is likely to breed corruption. In education, too, there is universal dissatis- faction, as evidenced in the approaching creation of a central committee for educational revision. In finances people are clamoring for a reduction in taxes, and military expenditures are studied with a view to economy. A reform movement is on foot to extend the franchise. There is no field of thought or activity in Japan in which there is not dissatisfaction. If a generation means a period of thirty years, 266 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW only two generations have passed since Japan started out on its new development ; and what has been done in two generations; with all the mistakes made, gives reason for confidence and hope. The mistakes are instructive if the suc- cesses of the past do not arouse within us the pride which goes before disaster, but in which not a few of my countrymen indulge. With a little pause for reflection we can continue in the course marked out for ourselves. As far as mental capacity is concerned, I believe our race does not show inferiority. Western philosophy can be translated into our language, and we can understand whatever the West has written or thought. In learning and art we can enjoy whatever the West enjoys ; and there seems to be no fundamental difference in the intellectual ability of East arid West. I am speaking of individuals ; how far we can raise the general national standard of thinking, of feeling, and of acting is another question. I am not with- out hope that in the next forty years, which will complete the century of Japan's joining the PRIME MINISTER ON JAPAN 267 comity of nations, we shall have attained, not the same level with the West, because the West is also progressing, but a level not far removed from the level of the West, and which will bring us on more equal terms with the West than at present. The saving elements in Japan will be the de- velopment of popular life and of education. In public life that development will take the form of a fuller understanding of party government. I have myself at one time formed and led a po- litical party, and the great service of a new party under Prince Katsura is as a step in general progress. Prince Ito formed the Seiyukai as a re- sult of close study of constitutional governments abroad ; he considered parties necessary organs of public opinion. Prince Katsura is forming a new party, not as a logical consequence of a scientific theory which he holds, but as demanded by existing conditions. Whatever the motives behind the organization of new parties, they are to be welcomed because they effect the education of the people at large ; they show a deeper in- terest of the public in questions of national 268 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW polity. In education a more enlightened and less rigid system should be introduced. These two reforms will eventually aid the country in realizing its highest hopes. So far all the move- ments in Japan have been directed by the Gov- ernment. Our Constitution, unlike that of other countries, was conferred on us by our ruler, and progress of every kind has been initiated by the Government. Even the expression of public opinion through the press has been encouraged by the Government ; while I was connected with the Government I assisted in the creation of half a dozen newspapers. Political parties were and are still largely recruited by people who served in Government. In other words, in every department of social and political activity the initiative has thus far come always from the Government ; but, thanks to its educative in- fluence, people are coming to know and feel their own power. The formation of political parties will hasten the education of the people, and through education alone can the general uplift of the nation fully express itself and secure for the country the most lasting results. CHAPTER XIX THREE STAGES OF INTERCOURSE AN American, who will always be remem- bered by his friends as incarnating a genius for friendship, was living in lodgings in the old street in London in which Franklin stayed, when he received word that one of the most interesting men of his generation was coming to England for the first time a writer who made American history as interesting as a story of adventure, and to whom the history of England was as familiar as the years of his childhood. The two friends met on the landing-stage when the steamer docked, traveled to London by the first train, drove to the lodgings of the host, dined and talked as two friends will talk when all the conditions make intimacy not only agree- able, but inevitable. The guest was restless, however, and soon re- 269 270 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW minded his host that it was his first night in the Old World, and that he was eager for exploration. They started out late in the evening ; the street was quiet, the "central roar" had died down into a hoarse murmur. The two men walked swiftly to the Embankment ; a low moon hung over the river, the Surrey side had the look of a Whistler etching, and a vast brooding silence hushed the uproar of the age and steeped the city in the atmosphere of the past. Leaning for a moment over the parapet, the older man cried, "Is this the Thames?" his great frame shaking with emotion ; and then, catching a glimpse of Westminster Palace, he seized his friend by the arm and swept him impetuously along toward the great pile of buildings in which the past and present greatness of England is enshrined. All night they hurried, breathless and excited, from point to point in the old town ; coming home at dawn exhausted not so much by physical fatigue as by emotional strain. For the guest it had been one of those adven- tures of the spirit which are so intense that for THREE STAGES OF INTERCOURSE 271 the moment they seem to drain the very springs of life; for the host it had all the excitement of a new reading of an old book. It was not an approach to a strange civilization, a sudden and dramatic contact with a novel order of things ; it was a night of recollection, it was a home coming. The interest lay not in the strange- ness, but in the familiarity of it all. After long absence, filled with study of old places and ances- tral associations, the man of the New World had come back to his own and taken possession of the playground of his childhood. Few people realize that w r hen the West first saw Japan it not only saw a country radically different in manner and way of life from the world with which it was familiar, but an ancient civilization, of a very high order, which had been completely developed, largely in isolation. Much had been received from the continent of Asia, but what had been taken had been modified, adapted, and refashioned by a genius for assimi- lation which is at the same time intensely in- dividual and tenacious. 272 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW Okakura puts these two elements of the Japa- nese spirit cogently and clearly: "Our sym- pathizers have been pleased to marvel at the facility with which we have introduced Western science and industries, constitutional govern- ment, and the organization necessary for carry- ing on a gigantic w T ar. They forget that the strength of the movement which brought Japan to her present position is due not less to the innate virility which has enabled her to assimi- late the teachings of a foreign civilization than to her capability of adopting its methods. With a race, as with an individual, it is not the accu- mulation of extraneous knowledge, but the real- ization of the self within, that constitutes true progress." Asia has sent almost as many streams of in- fluence into Japan as Europe has sent into this country, and Buddhism and the spirit and thought of the Chinese classics have penetrated and colored Japanese life as the divinations and discoveries of the genius of the Greek and Hebrew have entered into and shaped the view of life of the Western world. But to the eye Japan, lying half a day's journey from Asia, is almost as differ- ent from China and India as from Italy and England. Until her awakening, which was has- tened by Commodore Perry, but in no sense dependent on him, Japan shared the lethargy which lay on China and India. The nation slept in "the night of Asia," but long before the hand of the American knocked at the door the sleeper had begun to stir and the morning light was coming in at the windows. That lethargy did not, however, mean an arrest of civilization ; it meant the preservation of a type of civilization complete in itself. Whatever the immediate outcome may be, the significant fact is that when the Western peoples saw Japan for the first time sixty years ago they saw a completely developed civilization of a type that was entirely novel to them. The West had seen strange peoples in many stages of social evolution, from the lowest forms of savage life to the highest forms of semi-barbaric life. In Japan it found a people who had gone 274 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW to the end of the path which they had followed for twenty-five hundred years. In India and China the West had come face to face with an antiquity beside which its oldest experiences were matters of yesterday, but in both countries the line of normal development had been interrupted and broken again and again. In both countries it found races whose genius long ago made rich contributions to the common stock of knowledge and will make still greater contributions in the future, but whose territory had been invaded again and again, whose history was largely the story of the in- cursions of aliens who brought with them differ- ent types of mind, strange customs, novel forms of social order, and who, by superior organiza- tion or a more aggressive temper, sooner or later became the governing races. Japanese history, on the other hand, has been the record of a practically uninterrupted racial life. The islands which constitute the Empire of Japan have not only never been conquered, they have never been invaded. The Emperor THREE STAGES OF INTERCOURSE 275 now reigning is the one hundred and twenty- second of his dynasty; the development of the life of the people, whatever its limitations and defects, has been uninterrupted by disturbance from without. It has been deeply influenced by Asiatic ideals and conventions; but the foreign ideals and manners which have found acceptance by the Japanese have made their way by persuasion, not by arms. Japan differs radically from the other coun- tries of the East in its possession of a sensitive national consciousness and of a thorough and minute social and political organization. In this respect it stands in striking contrast to other Oriental countries. So far as the feeling of racial unity and the consciousness of sharply defined national aims and interests are concerned, India and China have been mere geographical terms, conveying no such group of ideas, convic- tions, and mental habits as the words Italy, France, or England conyey. Japan, on the other hand, has as keen a sense of its individuality, so to speak, as any Western nation ; and in point 276 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW of thoroughness of organization stands beside Germany. The immense significance of this fact has not yet been recognized in the West. These facts bring into view the unique con- ditions which the West found in Japan sixty years ago : a fully developed civilization, completely realizing its type, and preserved intact by free- dom from foreign interference during the earlier centuries of its history and by isolation during the later centuries. The sudden unveiling of this ancient and intensely individual civilization in the ultimate stages of its growth was a novel experience in the history of the world and can never be repeated. The coming together of Japan and the West was the most dramatic instance in history of sudden acquaintance between nations, and at the beginning it was a case of love at first sight. It is true that there was a widespread protest in Japan against the abandonment of the old policy of seclusion an outbreak of passionate loyalty to the old order. The Shogun's rule was already undermined in 1853, but his ad- THREE STAGES OF INTERCOURSE 277 visers were better informed with regard to the strength and resources of the nations which de- manded certain privileges of hospitality and trade in the Empire than are the advisers of the Emperor. The Daimyos as a class counseled resistance, and efforts were made to put the country in a position to defend itself. Forts were hastily built, lessons were given in the use of foreign arms, and in the ardor of patriotic devotion beautiful bronzes and sonorous temple bells were melted and recast into cannon. The ancient antagonism to foreigners was fanned into a flame, songs of derision and of fiery appeal for resistance ran through the country, as songs that voice the feeling of an hour will run with the wind in times of great excitement. In dealing with the Shogun Commodore Perry supposed he was dealing with the supreme author- ity in the Empire ; and if the power of the Sho- gun had not been seriously impaired it is prob- able that the treaty with the United States would have been accepted, not without protest, but without serious resistance. But that power had 278 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW been greatly shaken, and the Shogun's authority to make a treaty with a foreign Power was sharply challenged. His advisers at Yeddo were allied with a losing cause, but they understood the crisis through which Japan in its relations with the outside world was passing better than the advisers of the Emperor at Kyoto. They had seen the ships of the foreign fleets and had met the representatives of the foreign governments, and they became convinced that successful re- sistance was impossible. This conviction was deepened by the events of the fourteen years that followed Commodore Perry's landing, and found final expression in an address to his sup- porters made by the last Shogun in 1867, in which he said : "It appears to me that the laws cannot be maintained in face of the daily extension of our foreign relations, unless the Government be conducted by one head, and I propose, there- fore, to surrender the whole governing power into the hands of the Imperial Court. This is the best I can do for the interests of the Empire." Thus ended, in 1868, after some complications, THREE STAGES OF INTERCOURSE 279 the extraordinary dual government which had existed for centuries, and the young Emperor assumed the executive functions of government. He was a man of great ability and an open mind ; and he was fortunate in being served later by a group of statesmen who, like Okubo and Ito, not only accepted the new order of things, but cour- ageously began the reconstruction of the Gov- ernment of the Empire and the study of foreign methods. After a stormy period of resistance and dissension, a brave and wise Government not only reversed the ancient policy of seclusion, but, by a comprehensive scheme of national education, by means of embassies sent to the West and by the invitation of large numbers of foreign teachers to Japan, dissipated the old- time prejudice and dislike and created a wide- spread interest in Western ideas and ways. A wave of enthusiasm for Western learning and methods swept over the country and carried the movement for change and reconstruction to unwise and even comic extremes. The Japanese opened their minds and hearts to the West, and 280 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW the reaction against the past was so extreme that for a time it seemed to threaten the integrity of the Japanese spirit and genius. Old things of priceless value were neglected, while new things unworthy the imitation of a highly civilized and artistic people found favor on all sides. When the Japanese saw the West, they gave their minds and hearts to it. With the cultivated travelers from the West who first saw Japan and gave direction to the earlier opinion about that country, it was also a case of love at first sight. The first impressions were, as a rule, that the world had recovered a kind of lost art ; that a strange and exciting form of beauty had been unveiled and a delicately shaded and finely tempered way and manner of life brought to light. " There must be something lacking, or something very harsh," wrote Lafcadio Hearn, a in the nature to which Japan can make no emotional appeal. The appeal itself is the clue to a problem ; and that problem is the character of a race and of its civilization." THREE STAGES OF INTERCOURSE 281 The country had the charm of novelty; it had also the striking effectiveness of presenting itself in broad contrast to the West; to the superficial observer the Japanese did everything in a spirit of contradiction ; they began to read books at the bottom of the last page, they ob- stinately pulled the plane towards them instead of pushing it away, they turned the key the wrong way in the lock, they painted, instead of writing, their letters. In a hundred ways they reversed the methods of the West. The language set all familiar modes and rules at defiance ; to "pick up a working vocabulary" was a waste of time unless one could learn "to think backwards, to think upside down and inside out." It was a new world on which the early West- ern travelers looked, and there was the excite- ment of discovery about it, the sensation of shock. There was also, for those who had eyes to see and were not village-minded, the novel charm of a life penetrated by an artistic instinct that gave coherence to manners, customs, ways of doing things. The surface of life disclosed 282 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW an inward richness of ideas and ideals which had become regulative and vitally expressive as the result of the long process of "silence and slow time." Art had filtered down through occupa- tion until it had touched work at a thousand points and made industiy a matter of craftsman- ship, and created standards of taste which had long ceased to need definition because they had become instinctive. However one might protest against specific aspects of that life, one could not fail to recognize its quality and texture its wholeness, so to speak. The ways of living and the manners of the people were of the substance of their character. They were cheerful, courteous, gentle ; bolts and locks were practically unknown ; family interests tempered and subdued individual in- terests to the uses of the larger social unit ; the poor were cared for as a matter of course by their more prosperous relations. The people were simple in their habits ; there were great nobles, but great fortunes were few. Things of common use were as beautiful in their way as the treasures THREE STAGES OF INTERCOURSE 283 of art in temples and palaces. A study of the Japanese pottery in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and of the tools used in the handicrafts in the Peabody Museum in Salem for the com- pleteness of which this country owes a lasting debt of gratitude to Mr. Edward M. Morse - not only reveals the quality and forms of Japa- nese art, but shows that art was the language of the people, and not the dialect of a group of artists. The first contact of the West with Japan was so full of intellectual excitement that the early travelers in the newly opened country were swept off their feet ; so to speak, and reported the discovery of a wonderland. The strange- ness instantly arrested attention, while the ripe- ness and beauty of an old and completely de- veloped civilization, w r hich fitted the people like a garment woven out of their innermost thoughts, captivated the eye and the imagination. The West lost its heart to Japan. "What are we to do ?" asked a Japanese of an American. "When you first saw us, you loved 284 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW everything Japanese. You said we were a nation of artists and gentlemen. Then we came under your influence and tried to Westernize our coun- try, and you began to lose your liking for us. The more we have become like you, the less you have cared for us, and now you seem to hate us." The statement was too dramatic, but there was a considerable element of truth in it. The courage and skill of Japan in a war in which it appeared to be matched against a foe of im- mensely greater resources, not only revived in- terest in the Japanese, but furnished ground for a new kind of admiration and respect ; the artists and gentlemen had revealed the mastery of the skill of the soldier, and a hand of steel within the glove. The early enchantment was, in the nature of things, evanescent ; the veiy strangeness which was at first a source of attraction was certain, when novelty wore off and old tastes and habits reasserted themselves, to become a source of separation. Two civilizations cannot come to- THREE STAGES OF INTERCOURSE 285 gether without irritation and painful adjust- ments. Moreover ; Japan ceased to be a mu- seum, a country outside the activities of the modern world in which an archaic and artistic civilization was preserved for the study of West- ern peoples. It entered the area of commercial struggle and became an able and ambitious competitor. It had to be taken into account also as a highly organized nation, trained in the use of Western weapons and with a powerful army and navy at its command. Its appearance in this new role was not a matter of regret to Americans, whose interests in the Far East were comparatively negligible, while their ignorance of that section of the globe was almost ideally complete. For the majority of Americans the battle in the harbor of Manila was the beginning of their acquaintance with Far Eastern geography. To the so-called great Powers, accustomed to decide the fortunes of the East in London, Berlin, Paris, or Vienna, the appearance of an Oriental Power was as unwelcome as it was unexpected, and diplomatists whose intelligence was illumi- 286 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW nated by imagination were quick to see that the appearance of Japan marked the beginning of the end of the era of division of territory and exploitation. Japan is paying the price of emerg- ing from seclusion and ceasing to be the happy hunting-ground of collectors and literary im- pressionists. The beauty remained, but the spell was broken, and there was an inevitable reaction ; deep- seated instincts protested, ancient habits of thought reasserted themselves. Then followed the psychological struggle which is involved in the coming together of two strong nations. When nations approach one another, the past rises in protest ; ancestors who have been in their graves for centuries are once more in arms. "You have been transported out of your own century," writes Lafcadio Hearn, "over spaces enormous of perished time, into an era forgotten, into a vanished age back to something ancient as Egypt or Nineveh. That is the secret of the strangeness and beauty of things, the secret of the thrill they give, the secret of the elfish charm THREE STAGES OF INTERCOURSE 287 of the people and their ways." And he reminds us that if we could live for a time in the "beauti- ful vanished world of Greek culture" we could not be at home in it because we could not change our identities. The process of coming together, which is the char- acteristic feature of the present stage of civilization, shows these stages distinctly traceable in large out- line. Open-minded foreigners who live in Japan will tell you that they have passed through three stages in their attitude toward the county and people: admiration for and delight in "things Japanese"; followed by dislike of and repulsion from the habits and ways of the society about them ; then a discriminating and intelligent re- gard for fundamental Japanese qualities, pleasure in the temper and spirit of the people, in the gen- ius of the country. The first attitude is an un- conscious and instinctive response to an impres- sion ; the second is an instinctive assertion of an antagonism of race ideals and standards ; the third is an independent judgment formed as the result of observation and reflection. 288 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW The interest in a civilization is deepened as this process goes on, and out of the unshaded brightness followed by the obscuring darkness the landscape finally emerges ; revealed as much by its shadows as by the light that unveils it and the atmosphere that softens its harsh outlines and subdues its overtones. In their attitude toward the West the Japanese have been passing through these three stages. There was always a group of uncompromising defenders of the old order in Japan, to whom Western methods and manners were not only alien but repugnant, and to whom the preserva- tion of the older civilization was a patriotic duty. The tragedy of change has weighed heavily on men and women of this temper. Townsend Harris once gave expression to the fear that we had inflicted serious injury on Japan by inter- fering with an ancient idyllic civilization ; to many Japanese that apprehension has deepened into a settled conviction. But Japan paid little heed to this protesting minority ; the nation, recognizing clearly the conditions of the modern THREE STAGES OF INTERCOURSE 289 world, set out resolutely to secure those condi- tions. The oldest nation of unbroken history in the world went bravely back to its youth, took its place once more in school, and with marvelous persistence carried into effect the great maxim of the Emperor Mutsuhito to seek knowledge wherever it may be found throughout the world. If it did not lose its heart to the West, it gave the West its whole mind. It was swept from its moorings for a time by its determination to se- cure for itself the fruits of Western science, or- ganization, and practical efficiency. In the ex- citement of that first contact with the West the imitation was carried so far that Japanese sobriety of taste and nice sense of the fitness of things gave place to absurdities of dress and manners. Japan has been peculiarly hospitable to foreign ideas and teaching, but her genius has been virile and persistent ; she has taken much from Asia, but she has modified and adapted for her use what she received from India and China. In her eagerness she accepted, with little discrimi- nation, all that the West had to give her either 290 JAPAN TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW good or bad, and there was much that was bad. Then came the inevitable reaction, and to blind admiration succeeded critical and often cynical analysis of Western thought and ideals. In education, manners, and art there was a reaction toward old and characteristic ideals and methods. Japan began to see the defects of Western civil- ization and to draw back from its materialism in art and decoration and national ideals, its lack of discipline, its haste and indifference to those small courtesies which give life the charm of art. The Japanese have always been great in dealing with small things ; the back of the lacquered box is always as delicately finished as the front or cover. This reassertion of the Japa- nese spirit has shown again the persistency of that spirit, and has fortunately come in time to save the individuality of a country, to Anglicize or Americanize which would impoverish civiliz- ation ; but it has reawakened many old antag- onisms and given new vigor to dying prejudices. Through these stages the East and the West THREE STAGES OF INTERCOURSE 291 are both passing. To the fascination of strange- ness has followed the repulsion of strangeness, and that, in turn, is being followed by clear and discriminating judgment ; impression was suc- ceeded by prejudice, and now prejudice is giving way to intelligent comprehension. T HE following pages contain advertisements of books by the same author or on kindred subjects. BY THE SAME AUTHOR American Ideals, Character and Life Cloth, i2tno, $f.^o net ; postage extra This volume is composed of lectures delivered in Japan by Mr. Mabie in the spring of 1913. A candid and yet sympathetic por- trayal of Americans and their country written by one who has for years been held in high regard in the educational and literary world is certain to be of peculiar interest to every citizen. Such a book is American Ideals, Character and Life. 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