Part 13

=June 30.=--A good day’s work. In the evening there was a dinner where met all the botanists of Tokio. One or two could not come, but there were 18 men there. Seemingly foreign food is greatly appreciated--certainly there were more courses than the laws of health allow. It was amusing to note knives slipped furtively down after they had touched asparagus when their owners noted me holding a spike aloft in bare fingers--but otherwise the company behaved and looked much as a similar set of people would look anywhere. The sky, seen out of the windows, was the most astonishingly blue I have ever seen. The soft velvety depth of it suggested the impossibility of stars gleaming on its surface (as they usually do at night), they would have been drowned. The brilliant blueness like that of a cornflower or a solid mass of cornflowers that had flung off their colour into the surrounding air, till every particle for miles, each separate and distinct, was blue. Usually the sky seems a flat or a dome-shaped sheet of colour over us, to-night it was a solid vapoury mass of quivering blue particles--indescribable, but thrilling as an electric shock, and as unforgettable. After we had dined we talked, until I suggested Dr. _H----_ should give us a piece of _Nō_ recitation; he studies its peculiar singing-like declamation and renders it well. Then others sang, and I was convulsed by “Home, Sweet Home,” sung by one of the young lecturers, “to prevent me feeling home-sick.” His rendering of it was intensely funny, but his voice was pretty good. Afterwards he sang a long Japanese battle song. We left at 9.45, and some of us, I fear, will be ill after that dinner.

=July 1.=--An uneventful and solitary day’s work. Professor _F----_ too ill to come. I only suffered spasmodic anger from an outraged digestive mechanism, and continued my usual occupations, and dined with the Sh----s in the evening. The little Japanese girl I have mentioned as staying with her is pretty nice. Alas, to-morrow she is going to be put into foreign dress! She is going to marry Prince _S----_, however, who is very pro-English, and as she will be much about the court, is compelled to wear it by that sad decree of the Empress.

I heard one good story of a little English girl who went home after having spent all her early years in Japan. In the train between Southampton and London she was much interested with the outlook, the sheep particularly fascinating her, and she called on her mother to admire them: “Look, what a lot!” “Why, here is another!” “There, mother, look, look!” she kept exclaiming, when a benevolent old gentleman said, “Why are the sheep so interesting, little girl? Haven’t you seen a sheep before?”

“Of course I have,” she answered, drawing herself up; “of course--we have _two_ in the Zoo in Tokio.”

=July 2.=--Fossil-cutting all morning--I seem to be followed by misfortune, for the boy who works the engine has been away all this week, and my scientific colleague here only one afternoon! However, I keep at it, and slides are slowly accumulating, with a few nice things in them.

=July 3.=--Fossils in the morning and lunch at the Goten; Professor _S----_ jolly and talkative, and a great pleasure to meet. Professor _F----_ came in the afternoon, and we did a lot of looking through slides. There are a number of pretty little things among the fossils that puzzle us completely.

=July 5.=--There was a luncheon party with some nice neighbours to-day, and while we were there some strolling Japanese singers came to the door, and we gave them a few sen and watched them. There were an old woman and a young woman, both good-looking, and with the quaint huge round hats of their class, the young man wore a battered European-style hat--a jarring note, that was repeated in the little girl’s hat, red stockings, and European shoes. It is always the men and the children who wear the horrors of civilisation.

The child danced, clumsily and heavily with her feet, but moving her little body in all kinds of ways with wonderful grace and agility, and a strength in holding difficult curves; her hands too, so prettily shaped, were carefully posed and moved, now rigid, almost bending back, and now swiftly fluttering; she had an old gilt fan, which she opened and manœuvred, but her round pretty face was absolutely set. There was a haunting suggestion of bedraggled beauty in it all, beauty that had once adorned a noble’s palace and had been cast into the streets, and from soft white _tabi_ and silk robes had taken to tight cotton gowns and old red stockings, with a hole showing above the down-trodden heel of a shoe.

Yesterday the Ministry resigned--and the commercial people are on the verge of revolt against the fearful expenditure on army and navy, while the country is so poverty-stricken. I could weep with Hearn over this country, and the hats they wear are enough to start me off!

I have read every word of the cross-examination and trial of Bethell over the Korean matters; you have probably heard of it at home; in many ways I feel that the Japanese use their catch phrases, “love of country”--“love of Emperor,” as cloaks for unscrupulous behaviour public and private, just as our county councillors seem to lose private honesty in dealing with public affairs. The Japanese have 20,000 troops active in Korea, and cannot keep order--my only surprise is that any Koreans submit at all without decent open warfare; they were not conquered, but tricked and coerced into having their Government absolutely controlled by the Japanese Government. Were I a Korean I should at least demand to be properly conquered. Yet, of course, from the point of view of world politics Japan must control Korea, only--God pity the Koreans who have themselves a spark of “love of country” or “love of Emperor.”

=July 6.=--A solitary day’s work--on the way home I called to inquire after Mrs. _M----_, who has been in bed for about a month, and I noticed that the ceiling of their big drawing-room is all of satin, _embroidered_ with huge flowers and life-size peacocks and other birds. One can only think of the cost of it, and deplore that it was not put as hangings where one could admire the work.

I had to go by tram to-day, as the bicycle is in hospital, and noticed such a quaint sign over a shop. Most of the very funny ones have been gradually weeded out by thoughtless people informing the owners of their eccentricity, so that the streets are not nearly so entertaining as they were years ago.

This I saw, however:--

“Au Klnds wool are sell in her.”

I also noticed “Fruit’s Shops.”

How lazy a bicycle makes one, it feels a serious imposition to have to walk 2 miles of city road, though the Tokio streets do not seem to get any less entertaining because I am accustomed to them.

=July 7.=--We had a fine afternoon, so I did a little tidying up in my garden. During these many days of heavy rain the leaves have grown luxuriantly, but the flowers have quite ceased to come out in a world where they are only drenched with unkind torrents instead of being kissed by the warm sun they will get if they wait a few weeks longer. My four little lawns, altogether no bigger than a billiard table, are now like a jungle, and I planted them so few weeks ago. It is very pretty to watch the little side paths, where the moss and lichens and liverworts seem to grow every day; the small paths where O Fuji-san (my maid) does not walk are now quite green--more aged-looking than paths a hundred years old with us. The little stone lantern I bought the day of the paeony flowers, is also green, with a faint haze of centuries over it! It is the lovely greenness of Tokio that marks it out from every city I have seen before. To-day, bicycling along the road above the moat, I could well have believed myself far in the country, with the high green grass on the steep banks of the moat and the grey-green pines growing above and shading it. The green and the grey and the blue that lies in and over this city, blue in the sky and blue in the gowns of every one; grey on the tree trunks, the moats, and the houses; green everywhere there is foot-hold for a moss plant, are a harmony that thrills one’s very soul.

=July 9.=--Work till 5.30, and then dinner at 6, with Professor _S----_. This was arranged to suit Professor B----, from New Zealand, who goes to bed at 8.30 or so. Professor _O----_, the seismologist, and Professor _T----_, the anthropologist, were also there. It was, of course, a “foreign style” dinner, and was done with great magnificence. Professor B---- talked with almost no comments from any one, but the conversation was never dull.

Professor _S----’s_ garden was more of a dream than ever,--lit with stone lanterns and with a few red roses among the green, the moon being in a watery mist, and we turned the light down, and listened to the bell-like tones of a little “Bell insect,” hanging in a 2-inch cage in the garden. The note was slightly muffled, but musical, penetrating, and sad--one of those notes that act as an “Open Sesame” to the gate of emotions--that is, I should say, to some people’s emotions. Professor B---- had the insect under a “scientific scrutiny” for a whole minute, and then produced his note-book, and the light was turned up while he wrote down his observation that the noise is made by the rubbing of the wings where they slightly overlap.

=July 10.=--The last day’s lunch at the Goten, and a lot of work of one sort and another got out of hand. Collecting plant-material, etc., takes more time than one would think. The fossil lab.-boy is ill again, and fossils are hanging fire a little, for I can’t do more than three things at once.

=July 12.=--Writing all morning; the weather is glorious, and the rainy season seems to be pretty well over, and has been a record one. The rain came at the right time, lasted the right length of time, and was cool instead of “steamy hot,” as it often is--we cannot be too thankful for these mercies. Even as it is, the inside of my writing case and the whole of my shoes and straps are covered with blue mould.

I paid several calls in the afternoon--my neighbours are off to the mountains first thing to-morrow morning--lucky people! How I wish I could feel free to do the same, instead of grinding over these old fossils. Soon Tokio will be empty of all the sane people who inhabit it in the winter.

As I am writing I hear the tune of “Auld Lang Syne” set to Japanese and sung lustily. It is one of the favourite foreign tunes among the Japanese, and many sing it without knowing it isn’t Japanese, I believe.

=July 13.=--I was in the garden with Professor _F----_ for the first time this year. We were getting some gymnosperm material, and found a brilliant green frog sitting in the sunshine on a brilliant green leaf. He told me he would be brown on a barky branch, so I picked the frog up and put him on the curve of a broad brown branch, and, sure enough, the webs of his feet went quite brown in a minute, and his back went a much darker, duller green, but we couldn’t wait to see him all turn brown, it took too long.

=July 14.=--Absolutely alone all day. The engine and fossil boy and Professor _F----_ are all ill again, and the other people not visible. I felt more than a little ill myself, and my bicycle was so bad it had to go into hospital. A very grey day--and in the evening torrents of rain fell from the heavens, and I began to feel inclined to weep also, when Mrs. _F----’s_ little daughter came round to ask me to go in to dinner, as the weather was so depressing. Eastern life has its share of compensations.

=July 15.=--At 11 I started my work, and took some micro-photos, and I am also seeing about chemical analysis of nodules, covering glasses of great size for fossil slides, printing of photos, artificial cultivation of _ginkgo_ prothallia (and the wretches insist on going mouldy, like my boots), collecting of gymnosperm material, and half a hundred other things that are pulling me in as many directions as the points of a compass for a universe of six dimensions. Why I was such an ass as to undertake both fossil and recent work, I can’t imagine--one must go to the wall.

Coming home late to-day (Professor _F----_ turned up about 3.30), I passed through the road to a temple where there was a children’s festival, along whose sides were rows of gay little stalls with all manner of bright things to tempt the children, who throng in holiday attire. I never saw more children and fewer elders, and all the children were so bright, and, excepting for the crude, almost savage decorations in their hair, so prettily dressed. The various toys and eatables are indescribable, all brilliant and all ridiculously cheap, from half of a farthing up to a penny or so being the normal prices. Among the eatables were little brown germinating beans, with long white rootlets sticking out, then there was a special stall for a kind of clear seaweed jelly, which was squeezed into a glass cup through a bamboo squirt.

Very decorative little stalls were arranged with brilliant seaweed and shells, and one man did quite a lively trade cutting up small wriggling living fish. That is one thing about eating raw fish, it should be alive to be really good. As you may imagine, I have not yet tested it. Then there is the man that “pops” sugary beans over a charcoal fire, and makes a delicious noise with his shaking grid-like box. The dealer of live red crabs attracts a crowd, and the crabs crawl up the sides of his cage as he pours water down on their backs. Though why any one should buy the crabs, I don’t know, for they are less than 2 inches from toe to toe. One boy I met had a lovely toy--a great dragon-fly, 6 inches across the wings, eagerly flying attached to a red thread--but alas! I soon saw it was real.

All the sentimental nonsense that is written about Japanese love of animals is simply not worth the paper it is written on, and as for their treatment of horses! In England I would go up and beat a man myself that I only pass quickly here, with a prayer for his horse.

There was inevitably among the stalls one for second-hand odds and ends. These I examined carefully, for it is just at such times one can get lovely curios very cheaply. This time I got a tiny double figure, most delicately carved, and an old carved horn comb.

=July 16.=--My “At Home” day--and therefore, of course, pouring in torrents. When I get to the level ground below the Botanical Gardens I found the road under 2 feet of water. Fortunately there were _kurumas_ waiting to ferry one across, and I got in one, and had a man to carry my bicycle on his shoulders. It was serio-comic to see the houses with 2 and 3 feet of water in them, and clothes hung up out of reach of the dirty flood. The channels between the houses are deep, and I saw several people waist high, with a pole, feeling their way. To think that less than six hours’ rain made that flood, and that it is in the _city_ of Tokio, and that it happens every few weeks in the summer, fills one with surprise. How can they put up with it? It only means the deepening of the channel of the little stream which drains the district--but men and women tuck up their skirts and wade a quarter of a mile up to their knees, and those whose houses the water invades place what they can of their goods out of its way--and probably the last thing any one of them would do would be to grumble at the City Council.

I bought some peaches coming back, they are now in season, and in Tokio more than in any place I know it is a case of “gather ye roses while ye may.” They were very big, soft, and glowing crimson, and cost one halfpenny each. When we cut them the stones separated perfectly, and the rich blood-red flesh stained one’s lips and fingers with its juice. In buying fruit and vegetables the only Chinese character I know is of great use, it is that for “Mountain,” and is used for piles of cucumbers or trios of peaches, and I can read “one mountain cost 10 sen,” or whatever it may be that a cucumber mountain costs.

By the way, it may interest you at home to know that a pile of four cucumbers costs 3 sen, which is exactly 3 farthings the lot. Are you surprised that I eat boiled cucumbers with white sauce? It is at home a vegetable we could not often indulge in, with cucumbers 1s. each, but here, where all things are ridiculous prices, being either too dear or too cheap, I have the power to indulge in this delicate dish.

Eggs are funny things here; they get dear in the summer, just when the man in _Punch_ finds his hens begin to lay. Here the extreme heat enervates the hens for a couple of months in the summer.

=July 17.=--A long solitary day’s work till the late afternoon, when Professor _F----_ came, and we did a little “joint work”--it is beginning to be almost farcical; however, without him I should never have got on at first, so it is all right.

=July 18.=--Work till 2, when a party of provincial botanists came to the laboratory, and I met once more the Mr. _O----_ who was kind to me at Okoyama in my second tour, as funny and as amusing as ever, with his twinkling black eyes and mobile eyebrows, that so incongruously reminded me of “the silk-worm moth eyebrows of a woman.” At 3 I left the party, who had, of course, to see all the sights of the Institute, among which was the “Fossil Lab.”

=July 19.=--At 6.30 I got up to go and see the “Morning Glories,” huge brilliant convolvulus flowers, which are specially cultivated in a number of gardens in a part of the town near Oyeno Park. We went to about a dozen gardens, and saw many of the flowers, though it is still a little early in the season. The flowers are trained in pots to grow round light bamboo frames, and are specially cultivated to be very large. Each morning at ten o’clock all the flowers that have bloomed that day are picked off, so as to ensure the next day’s blooms shall not be deprived of any nourishment. The bells are very large and extremely brilliant, blue, purple, magenta, all the possible intense shades of each. The flowers are almost a little crude, some verging on vulgarity in their flaring tones. Many of them are delightful, and some so large they are said to reach 8 inches or so across a single bloom; such huge ones I did not see, but what I saw made it possible to believe in the bigger ones.

In some of the gardens there are many other beautiful things to be seen, one in particular was almost like a museum of precious things. There were open rooms in it, with the flowers arranged according to the best artistic styles, with valuable dwarf trees and curios placed beside them; there were three old _kakemonos_ I should have loved to possess. In this garden also was a wonderful collection of landscape stones, arranged as islands on flat porcelain trays filled with water. It was indeed a case of bringing the mountain to Mahomet--perfect rocky scenes, with gleaming waterfalls made by streaks of white quartz. The innumerable lovely stones--from an inch to a foot high--represented perfectly, enchantingly, all types of grand, beautiful, natural scenery. The one I liked best was (even in Japanese things my fancy usually hits on the most expensive) just a thousand yen in price!

An old man, apparently master of the garden, came up and talked to us, he was curious to see a foreigner so interested in stones, and wished to hear which I liked best, and so on. I wished I could speak fluently with him, he was just the type of character that seems to be dying out, and that is so rich in interest and quaint wisdom and remote culture. His deep wrinkles and keen light eyes were so attractive. I wished I had gold to spend in that garden, he and I would enjoy the good old Japanese way of spending several days over selecting the treasures. He had a pretty little piece of carved white jade among his flowers, six inches long and an inch high--a foil for a dark foliage arrangement, £20 it cost, he said, and he didn’t lie as to its worth.

This is the first nursery garden I have been in that seems to be the creation of an _old_ artistic Japanese, it was indeed charming.

Afterwards we lunched in Oyeno Park, and then I went a round of calls on my bicycle, then home to have two friends to tea, and a view of copies of old Japanese prints: half a chapter I forced myself to write in the evening sent me to sleep.

=July 20–24.=--An uneventful week of work, all the Institute seems asleep, and Professor _F----_ only came an hour or two for some of the days till Friday, when we worked very hard.

=July 25.=--The cycads in Tokio won’t flower, and it is a long way to go to the places they are reported to grow, so that when I heard they were to be found in Yokohama, I went off at once by an early train to visit the various gardens where they are said to be found. There were two female trees and a male, but they were not very healthy; still, as the Tokio ones refuse to bloom, and as I need them, they will be visited by my pilgrimages.

What a hideous influence is the “foreign” style at Yokohama, where red brick warehouses and treeless streets covered with a pall of smoke remind one of the “advance” made by modern Japan. Fortunately the plague spots are not very extensive, one needs to go but a very little way to find beauty again, but I shudder for the future when moss-grown walls and green hedges shall have been ousted from the cities, as they are from ours.

=July 26.=--I got up at 6 to go to Boshu after more cycads, as the temple, Awajinja, is reported to have fine ones. The sail down the coast in the little steamer was very pleasant. It took seven and a half hours, but we passed very pretty scenery, and for some time seemed out of sight of land in a sea dotted with innumerable white-sailed fishing-boats. In the middle of the day many of the fishers were taking a siesta, the square sail lowered so as to lie along the boat and form an awning, under whose shade they slept.

When we neared the coast, it required but the smallest imagination to picture myself in a savage country, for over the rocks ran and scrambled dark brown men, stark naked, not even the proverbial string of beads to adorn them. They had long bamboo poles in their hands, which they waved like savage spears, and gave them a truly wild aspect.

After landing I bicycled about 8 miles to the temple, and found splendid male flowers on the cycads, but no female. Last year there were lots of female. It is too bad, this year seems to be so unfavourable for the seeds.

I put up at a little hotel near the sea, and after six went down for a bathe. The coast was perfect, shelving rocks sloping out to sea, with little bathing coves and sheltering rocks, and, as I imagined, perfect solitude. But, of course, in this out of the way place I had been noticed, and before I was in the water a minute a crowd of women and children had collected. Nothing I could do or say would drive them away, and so I had to get out and dress under the fire of their eyes and criticisms. In their long-drawn country tones they kept up a running commentary, “Ooā--how white she is!” “Is she married?” “Why does she wear a dress in the sea?” “How old can she be?” “Perhaps twenty years.” There was no escape from nearly fifty people forming a cordon but 3 feet away from me; if I had fled they would have followed; so I dressed as leisurely and as unconcernedly as if I were at home, and gravely buttoned the little buttons of my bodice and put on my stockings while I returned the compliment and made a searching examination of them.