Part 15

How this country can possibly pretend to be a first-class Power, how it can build warships and drill armies to the blare of trumpets, how it can have a “World’s Fair” in a few years, and invite all the nations to join in its Exhibition, and all the time have hundreds and thousands of lepers scattered about the country, and _marrying_--how they can do this simply passes my comprehension.

In this land of islands why don’t they take one, fenced round by the sea, and isolate the fearful disease? In a generation Norway cleared the country of lepers--but here one may touch one any day. On my way back I saw several beggars, ghastly creatures, kneeling by the wayside, with fingerless hands, all purple blotched. True, it is not so contagious as we imagine it to be, being chiefly hereditary, but that makes it all the easier to stamp out if they will do it.

I am not really afraid (not terrified, at least) for Professor _F----_ (and through him, for myself), but I fear the removal will still further hinder the progress of the fossil work.

=August 21.=--I worked all day at fossils, and was much vexed to find that the powerful heat has brought bubbles in the Canada Balsam of nearly every slide! Botanists alone will understand the tragic significance of this, and they will sympathise and be merciful when I bring the bubbly preparations home!

You at home can hardly understand how hot the sun is, really burning hot, and many of my trays were so placed that the sun has been falling on them all the time I was away, resulting in thousands of bubbles. I discovered it by chance to-day, when I had mounted and examined some, and then left them for an hour where the sun got at them, and I found a thousand minute bubbles in each of the scorching slides. Alack!

=August 27.=--This morning at breakfast, thinking over cones, a question arose in my mind about those of _Cryptomeria_ which I could not settle without a specimen, and which checked my line of thought, so I gave it up and glanced out of the window beside which I was sitting in search of lighter amusement (for there is a nice vine there whose tendrils curl round and round in a very pretty way), and by my hand, growing on the little hedge I had never noticed very specially before, was a _Cryptomeria_ cone! Having associated the _Cryptomeria_ always with the stately giants that surround the temples, I had never associated these green hedges, three feet high, with them, nor did I realise that they could bear cones while so young. It still remains a problem whether perhaps a fairy, listening to my thoughts, had not touched with her magic wand the branch nearest me, so that it produced the cone, for not another was to be found anywhere around.

I gathered it, cut it open, and settling the point I wanted, was able to pick up all the dropped stitches of the argument and carry it on. Fairies are most useful creatures to scientists!

=August 28.=--As my bicycle was once more having a puncture mended, I had to go in the tram, as it is far too hot to walk all the way. In this boiling weather the tram was as full as ever, 50 people where but 20 should be, standing so thickly all down the middle that they were pressed against each other on all sides, and _every window_ and _every ventilator_ and the door all closed! I slammed down two windows, but could not reach the ventilators, as they are so high up; directly I got the chance, I opened a window on the opposite side, but no one else followed the example, though the Japanese seem to feel the heat much more than I do, _when not in a foreign style_ vehicle or house.

Taking this in conjunction with the remarks Japanese have often made to me about the foreigners’ dislike of fresh air, and in conjunction also with numerous other observations of a similar nature, I am forced to conclude that the Japanese, as a nation, are not at all sensitive to bad air. Their houses, built according to the ancient plan, force them, by their construction, to live in ideally fresh rooms, but put them in a foreign house, and everything is hermetically sealed.

=August 29.=--I went into one of the Laboratories to-day, and found four men, three gas burners, and a stove at work, without an inch of window open--it nearly stifled me. I have noticed this Laboratory before, and _never_, all through this scorching summer, have I seen the windows unclasped. It is a foreign style building, of course.

=August 30.=--I got up very early and set off on my bicycle to see the sacred lotus flowers on the great pond near Oyeno Park, but I did not get there in time to see them burst open, for that takes place at sunrise, but the flowers were fresh and fair, still unfaded by the heat of the day when I got to the edge of the water. There must have been several acres of them, with their great leaves overtopped by huge rosy flowers. The purity and radiance of their opaque yet lustrous petals is something I have never seen surpassed in any other flowers, and as they stand up in a rich succession of curves to form a 9-inch bowl, their cumulative effect is magnificent, while in them glows a golden radiance of captured sun-rays. Glorious flowers!

A little island lies in the pond, which is reached by a bridge, and on it is a temple, with shrines standing on it. There those who come to see the lotus worship in their simple way, pulling the temple bell and clapping their hands to ensure that the gods hear the short muttered prayer and put to their credit the half-farthings they bestow. One is always hearing of the lack of religion among the Japanese, but there never was a land with so many shrines and temples. On my way back I passed a shrine under a tree trunk on a crowded thoroughfare. It was only a toy building a couple of feet high, but a workman was busy arranging his offering of dangling white papers. Religion and daily life are mingled here.

=September 2.=--I set off for Hayama, a little seaside place not far from Tokio, hoping to escape this dreadful heat. Though really a very trifling journey, it takes several hours, as the trains are so slow. It lies beyond the well-known Kamakura, and is much more beautiful and open, as it is round the point of the bay, and is mercifully free from most of the crowd that overwhelms Kamakura in summer.

The little hotel I went to stands on a hill among the woods, looking down on the sea; it was beautifully quiet, but it was “foreign style,” and the beds were miserable. I made a most interesting observation very shortly after my arrival: some ants had built the most extraordinary galleries all up the branches of a tree, and they had taken the leaves and rolled them up, and built houses inside them.

Then in some cases they had covered the whole twig over with their sandy houses, and just left little bits of leaves sticking out here and there.[5] I was ever so much interested, and found several plants of the same kind (a species of smooth-leaved holly) with the same thing happening. I fancy it is new to science, and I wish now I had brought down some instruments and reagents to examine it properly, but I brought nothing as I decided I would have one week’s real holiday.

[5] An account of this has appeared in the _Transactions of the Manchester Philosophical Society_, 1909.

It was amusing to find how difficult it was to get anything to fix the specimens and bring them back home. There was only one shop that sold foreign biscuits and so had tins, but they wouldn’t sell or give a tin for love or money. No, they said, they had no tins; of course I did not believe them, and roamed round the shop opening every tin to see what was in it, and I found one that was empty. But they refused absolutely to sell it. They were returning to Tokio, it was the end of the season, and they needed it for packing their own things, and they would not sell it--no, not for a yen. But I grew desperate in the thought of my specimens, probably new to the scientific world, and whose preservation depended on that tin; the man who owned it sat and smiled on his Japanese mats, his _geta_ (sandals) were not in sight, and I knew I could run fast enough to get a start any way. So I took the tin under my arm (a huge square biscuit one it was too) and smiling, explained that I _must_ and would have that tin, and put down 30 sen on his table and said I was just going to take it, and off I went. He didn’t chase me; I suppose he thought it hopeless, and besides, I had paid a very good price, for the tin was ancient and bent.

Then came the search for spirit to preserve it in, for I wanted to have the ants and all _in situ_; but one could not expect to find spirit in such a village, and it was no shock to find there was none. Then I bethought me of _saké_, the poet-famed drink, the wine of the marriage cups and the friendly festival, and I sent a maid for a jorum of _saké_; the wine is reported to be very highly alcoholic, I know two spoonfuls sent me to sleep after weeks of sleeplessness, and in the _saké_ I plunged my specimens and hoped for the best.

=September 3.=--I moved to a Japanese hotel down on the shore, far more comfortable for bathing--and with much cosier sleeping arrangements. It is curious, but I am miserable in a bed now unless it is soft and _safe_ feeling. If it is hard and rises up in the middle I dream of precipices all night, for all this year I have slept on the floor, which seems so nice and _safe_, and really the obvious thing to do when you have _tatami_ floors.

This hotel has a garden with pine trees, and a swing and cross bars, so I can exercise myself to my heart’s content, while it is quite isolated, the last house in the village and far from its neighbours. A delightful spot, to which I shall hope to return. The maid, O Sayo San, is the politest I ever met; and of all wonderful things, they refused _Chadai_ money the first night when I offered it in an envelope in the ultra best Japanese way on my arrival.

=September 4.=--It is rather too bad, but the weather has turned miserably cold, both here and in Tokio, and I should have been at work in comfort, while bathing is not the pleasure it would have been the week before in the broiling sun. But there are several nice people down here, Tokio friends.

=September 5.=--I got the loan of the “Bromide” book from Mrs. C----, how good it is. Have all you who read this read the little book called “_Are you a Bromide?_” If not, do so; for I fear if you haven’t, much of the humour of life is a sealed book to you. It has added greatly to my enjoyment, and it can be read in half an hour.

Coming home I looked into the grove of the village temple, a pretty little place on a small hill, and was at first much puzzled by an apparition.

You know (or more probably don’t know) that the most usual form of decoration in a temple is torn strips of white paper, which hang down. Real paper usually--only very grand temples have gold as a symbol of torn paper! Such hanging strips are put in the mouths of the sacred animals very often, and you may see a pair of foxes sitting, carved in stone, with these paper spouts streaming from their mouths or floating on the breeze as they sit immovable. These foxes are often more dog-like than fox-like, and sometimes cleverly painted, but no one could confuse them with a _real_ dog. But in this temple grove was a wonderful creature--a single one, not a pair as is usual--and instead of sitting on either side of the path to the shrine, he sat absolutely in the middle of the path--upright, pointed nose straight ahead, ears erect, and from his mouth the long fluttering streamer of sacred paper; so he sat, immovable, and before him I stood immovable but astonished, so marvellously was he wrought and coloured; could he but move, one would swear he was alive, but his gleaming eyes fixed glassy and unwinking on the distance to infinity in front of him, and only the paper fluttered in the breeze. I walked to either side and gazed--there was something impellingly arresting about this silent image--and for ten minutes I must have lingered near it, perhaps hypnotised by the fluttering white paper and the gleaming eyes; and then the creature rose, still holding the sacred paper in its mouth, and without a sound or a movement except the inevitable placing of its feet, walked down the centre of the path into the shadows of the shrine.

A dog?--a spirit? A wonderful dog then, and surely a spirit such as one only meets in the haunts of medieval religions.

=September 7.=--A simple day--bathing and walking and emptying my mind of thought as much as possible. Fuji mountain, alas, I cannot see, as the rain clouds cloak her, but on the horizon lies, dimly, Oshima, the burning island, and round the points of the rocky shore are countless islets crowned with a twisted pine or girt with white-fringed waves. From the hills one looks down on a long series of bays with brilliant blue horizon and solid white line at the shore--the Japanese artists are much truer to nature than we think.

=September 9.=--I went early to the Institute, where there is grand excitement over _Ginkgo_; the sperms are just swimming out, and they only do it for a day or two each year. It is no such easy business to catch them, in 100 seeds you can only get five with sperms at the best of times, and may get one and be thankful. I spent pretty well the whole day over them, and got three, and several in the pollen tube, not yet quite ripe. It is most entertaining to watch them swimming, their spiral of cilia wave energetically.

=September 10 and 11.=--Hunting _Ginkgo_ sperms nearly all the time; but about 3 on Friday I began to feel so queer and feverish that I went home and took my temperature; it was 103°, so I went to bed.

=September 12.=--Still so feverish and queer feeling that I stopped in bed, though the temperature is down a little; but this is usually the case with fever, and I have been almost delirious in the night with the most absurd ideas.

All this long quiet day I lay and enjoyed the beauty of my room. I had the quilts which make a Japanese bed laid in the drawing-room, as several people came to see me, and for my own pleasure; it is nicer in the room with one’s favourite vase and kakemono. How funny this mixture of bedroom and drawing-room will sound in England! But there is nothing “bedroomy” in a Japanese house.

People who have seen my rooms may wonder where the beauty was that could keep me occupied a whole day in its contemplation, because most people seem to judge rooms by the _number_ of beautiful things massed into them, and to think that twenty beautiful vases massed together on a stand counteract the clashing effects of three discordant antimacassars (this word is so old-fashioned, I never learnt how to spell it!)

As I lay I faced a wall of pale, warm, creamy distemper, with a band of cream unpainted wood about two feet from the unpainted beams of the ceiling, which show so beautifully their graining and the curving designs of their natural growth. In one side of the wall is a window, with wooden bars crossing and re-crossing till it looks like a diamond-paned window, only the glass is replaced by semi-transparent paper. This is taken down though, and I look out on to the smooth grey bark of a tree whose leaves are like the shining laurel leaves in a Burne-Jones design, and interlaid against the vivid blue of the sky. The window-ledge is inside the room (not outside in our mad Western way), and on it stands a low grey-green dish in which is growing a graceful spraying plant beside a gnarled grey stone that looks like a piece of a forest rock. Beside the window are short grey-green curtains, edged with a broad band of Chinese embroidery in which blue, pink, and coral run riot with half the other colours on the palette of a Watts. The other half of the wall is occupied with a bamboo settee, covered with the same cloth as the curtains, above which is a square of Japanese embroidery--a great golden flower (a richer tone of the colour of the walls) on a grey-green ground, with butterflies hovering over it--framed in dark brocade with a thread of gold. Above the band of wood is a picture, yellow, brown, and grey, a river scene at dusk. At right angles to this wall I can see the Tokonoma recess--a yard deep and two yards long and nearly as high as the room. It is dark brown, with one long kakemono--a grey-brown bird on a withered, gnarled branch, the work of an old and valued Chinese artist (lent me by Professor _S----_); below it to one side a stand of ebony, with a brilliant blue cloisonné vase round the slender stem of which curls a fiery dragon, and its colour is living and gleams against the brown. Then on the other side grows a little bent and twisted tree, in a flat earthenware bowl, and in the corner stands my sword. The left side of the house as I lie is open to the garden; there is no wall, and I look out over my own little green plot, with its Thuya trees and glowing “morning glories,” to the tree tops of the land around. In the verandah hangs a square black lamp which I had lit as the swift night fell, and from whose opaque white sides shines a light so soft that it does not frighten the moon or the fire-flies. Then the floor of my room is covered with _tatami_--straw mats closely fitted and edged with black, and the sliding walls of the cupboard recesses that make the room solid are also straw-coloured, with a narrow border of black. The wooden fretwork of the _soji_ supports the white paper through which light shines so radiantly and softly; then there are a few straw-coloured chairs, a dark wood table and grey-green cushions--and that is all.

=September 14.=--As my temperature rose to 104° last night I felt I ought to have a doctor--the first doctor I have called in in my whole life! I felt it a serious and terrible event. But I am not seriously ill, an internal chill (probably the cold bathing at Hayama, one gets chills here so easily) and a temperature which runs up very soon in this country. He is taking the temperature down with drugs. I told him I _must_ go to the Institute to-morrow, but he laughs.

=September 22–24.=--Quiet uneventful days at the Institute, working at fossils hard. What a lot of results you will expect! But to get one line of result often means days of labour over petty detail that does not show.

=September 26.=--At work all day till I went to the meeting of the Botanical Society where Professor _M----_ spoke of his visit to China during the vacation, but I couldn’t understand very much.

=September 28.=--At the Institute all day, at night how it rained! Like a typhoon rain, only lasting all night at high pitch; I couldn’t sleep for it.

=September 29.=--The results of that rain! It was fair in the morning so I bicycled, thinking that as the rain was so heavy it would have cleaned the roads. And so it had, cleaned them just as long boiling cleans the bones of a chicken, and there was only left the stony skeleton of most of the roads; but in the high ground of Azabu, where the roads are pretty well made, they were passably good.

But then I got to Koishikawa, and about a mile from the Institute the entertainment began. Coming down a tram-line road I had been rather astonished to see straw piled up all round the telegraph posts, and several domestic articles such as pillows lying about the road, but where the tram stops I saw the reason, this road, a big main high road, was entirely under a rushing flood of water. I asked a policeman if there was any way of getting to the Botanical Gardens without going through it, but there was none.

I got a _kuruma_ man to take me and my cycle on a _kuruma_, and by keeping in the central ridge of the road, he waded with me through this mile of water. But what devastation on either side! Men walking by their houses (placed a little lower than the road) up to their shoulders in water, though it had subsided a good deal already, all sorts of things floating about, and signs of ruin everywhere. The underground channel they had made for the river burst through in one place, and at the side of the road a regular roaring waterfall. As we went along floating _tatami_ (heavy mats of straw, as much as one can lift and about 6 feet long and 2–3 inches thick) rushed on the _kuruma_, and my man had difficulty in getting round them, for he couldn’t drop the shafts to free his hands for that would have landed me in the water. We got there without mishap, but saw many tragi-comic sights, for the loss and wreckage among the small one-storied shops is terrible.

Coming back the water had subsided a little, but there was still much to go through. It was funny to watch people wading through it; on the shore on either side men balanced themselves on one leg on their high stilt-like _geta_ (no easy feat I can assure you) and drew off their trousers, but not always without a spill. Piles and piles of straw mats, washed into pulp, were all over the place. When I returned home I heard that in the low ground in my neighbourhood six children had been drowned.

=September 30.=--In the papers one reads of many deaths and terrible loss of property from the floods, which were almost universal in the low ground of the city. There are regular hills of straw and wreckage all along the main highway I passed yesterday in a _kuruma_ and the smell is far from pleasing, but there is no other way into the gardens, as the other roads are still under water.

In the evening we had a Debate, “That lies may be justifiable”; an excellent meeting, nearly all of the people speaking, and very amusing. One missionary got up and said she was most strongly in favour of lying and that she told three or four every day! Shrieks of laughter, for she spoke immediately after a very sweet missionary who spoke in favour of truth. All the rest of us were about equally divided, and the truth only won by three votes on more than thirty.

=October 4.=--Went to Ōmori and walked on to the temple on the hill beyond. Its green groves and quietness were very peaceful and lovely. It is almost woodland there, and there are few people. In the temple grove was a scarlet high pagoda, which gleamed between the stately trees. The spot is so peaceful and sweet and I was so tired of working that the day was very pleasant. We collected moss, and some little stones covered with it, and I had five _Cryptomeria_ seedlings to make a forest, and with them I made a miniature landscape in a flat earthenware dish when I returned home--but it isn’t half as easy as it looks!

=October 5.=--At work on the fossils; at 2 o’clock I gave the first of my course of lectures at the University, the room was more than full, several standing all through the hour, and there were several Professors and the Dean there. I didn’t do so badly as I feared, after being so long out of practice, but the flying chalk made me hoarse. It was a little terrifying, and half of them didn’t understand very much owing to the language difficulty, but the others did. It is nice lecturing again, it is an excellent tonic.

=October 12.=--At work at fossils in the morning--my lecture at 2. I find as I have to speak so slowly to be clear, that there isn’t much time in an hour. There is a sort of demonstration with microscopics afterwards which helps.

It is now very cold at night and in the early morning, but still warm enough to wear cotton frocks in the middle of the day. The clear moon is wonderful.

=October 13.=--At work all day on fossils, cycled back in time to dress for a dance, to which I cycled, as it was a lovely night. It was a very jolly dance and not the least pleasure of the evening was cycling back with Mr. G---- instead of jolting and freezing and catching cold in a slow _kuruma_. Out of every 24 hours the cycle saves me one to two or more in this slow Tokio, so that I shouldn’t grumble at it.