Part 6

After the party the catching of one’s _kuruma_ was an exciting game; there was no system of getting at them, and the several hundreds of guests and several hundreds of coolies simply wandered about in the maze of _kurumas_ shouting and looking for each other. When the police were directly applied to they were helpful for a foreigner, as there were few of us, and of course we are more easily spotted than the natives.

I forgot to note that the only Princess with whom I chatted had a strong American accent; it sounded very strange. She had found a lot of fossils in her garden where they are sinking a well, and seemed a little interested in them.

=November 22.=--Professor _S----_ took me to visit Count Okuma in the morning; he is reported to be the second greatest statesman in Japan, and has a lovely house and grounds, which he was gracious enough to show me. Every ordinary day he has about thirty or forty visitors, and is one of the busiest men in the country. He has an old face, with almost no hair, and is tall for a Japanese, and dignified in his silken robes, and distinctly pleasing. He could speak no English, so that conversation was rather limited, as he spoke more than usually indistinctly, but he was amused with Professor _S----’s_ account of me, and very gracious. The rooms are nearly all provided with European chairs and tables, rich and handsome, the drawing-room in which he received me upholstered in gold brocaded silk, which harmonised well with the handsome old gold and painted screens from ancient Japan which stood round the room. I begged to see the Japanese wing of the house, which he showed me. His Japanese guest chambers were, to my taste, far more beautiful, though perforce less able to display his wealth. He is the Chamberlain of Japan in one sense, and has the finest orchid houses in the country. They were very beautiful, but not on the same scale as with us. The Japanese landscape garden is the chief glory of his place. He has also a fine collection of dwarf trees, and I watched one of his gardeners pruning a mighty forest of pines three inches high, growing on a headland jutting out to sea in a porcelain dish.

In the evening the Biologists gave a dinner in honour of Professor _M----’s_ safe return from Java, and my advent. About forty or so were there (all men, of course), and it was a very jolly dinner indeed, commencing at 5.30, and as I was a foreigner and used to late hours (!), continuing till 9. Nearly every one had been abroad, and between them they knew almost all my European and American scientific friends--so I did not feel at all as though I was in a strange land. They all stood up to drink the health of the guests, so I had to make a little after-dinner speech,--a thing I hate, and am not able to do very well.

=November 23.=--This morning I got up while it was dark, and only arrived here after dark--here being a district where beautiful fossil Angiosperms are reported. There was a four-hours’ ride in a _kuruma_, along one of the straightest roads I ever saw, for the first half of the time. After that the mountains were lovely, clad with pine and maple, a few of which were still crimson, with the clear water rushing over the green rocks. Though they told me it would be frightfully cold up in the mountains so late, I am very comfortable in this inn, where the hot water for the baths runs perpetually from a boiling natural spring. The baths are delightful, and if cyanophyceae make them slippery, what matter?

=November 24.=--This morning early I started off on foot in glorious hot sunshine to get the fossils, and succeeded in getting more than my coolie could carry. I am almost the only visitor in the place, and every one is very kind and very interested. My colloquial Japanese comes a cropper now and then--but I get what I want, which is the main thing. The rocky valleys and woods are very lovely, and I appreciate the loneliness after these Tokio weeks. I should like always to live in complete solitude two days in seven.

The rocks in the neighbourhood are volcanic and are of a lovely green, so that the water rushing over them is particularly beautiful. The woody valleys are quite deserted, but are still warm in the sun, and gay with crimson leaves and berries, and some brilliant _purple_ berries of a colour I never saw in Nature before--it is just like one of my detested aniline dyes, but looks quite beautiful when painting the skin of a berry!

=November 25.=--Hours and hours of _kuruma_ riding, and then five hours in the train, which in that time managed to do less than 100 miles, though it was on the main line and there was no change anywhere.

During the _kuruma_ ride I saw the first flock of sheep I have seen in Japan, about a dozen good-sized, clean, and healthy-looking animals.

I also learned that _monkeys_ are wild in the woods, but did not see any.

=November 26.=--I spent the day at the Institute with the new fossils and minor matters. At two o’clock I went to see the Marquis and Marchioness _N----_, who have a fine house and garden in the centre of the town near the palace. They were very kind, and showed me over the houses and garden, the former in European style, rich, but not quite aesthetic, the latter in Japanese style, with dwarf trees and quaint cut bushes, placed with an eye to effect, and where the outlook is over the tops of the town (where, I grieve to say, smoky chimneys of factories are rising up to curse and kill the beauty of the town) to the bay, with its ships on the blue water. Tea was served twice in two different drawing-rooms, and I found I had to risk insulting my hostess by speaking my low-class Japanese. I had expected her to speak English, as the invitation had been in excellent English, but I was forced to speak to a Court lady in the language of the vulgar. In Japan there are more grades of language, and even more varieties of vocabulary, than one can imagine, _e.g._ I already know for the word _is_ the following:--

{ Gosarimasu } { Gosaimasu } { Gosaimas } (arranged according to _is_ { Arimasu } the politeness). { Arimas } { Desu } { Des }

And of course there must be heaps and heaps of other forms I don’t know yet.

=November 27.=--The morning was spent at the Institute; at 12.30 Baron and Baroness _K----_ had invited me to lunch with several of the Japanese professors. Everything was in the best European style, with excellent food and ten courses for lunch! After that the Baroness kindly took me to the Japanese part of the house, where the dolls were being aired. This, I think, must be explained. Dolls in Japan are very important things, and have a feast and ceremony once a year, in March; and these dolls are very valuable--wonderfully dressed figures of ancient kings and their attendants, court ladies and ministers, with houses and exquisite lacquered furniture, chariots and sedan-chairs, boxes and swords and fans--the dolls from 4 to 10 inches high, and the furniture in rough proportion, exquisitely lacquered and finished--little gems, some of the things, and, of course, never given to the children to play with.

I sleep just now with a sword by my hand, in case of robbers, who, by the way, visited us every day last week but one. The dogs bark when they come, and after ten minutes or so of furious noise my house Herr gets up, armed with a mild wrath and a sword, and the robbers beat a retreat. Now one day it chanced that Professor _M----_ had given me a huge quince, hard as a stone. The quince had been given to me because I had pined for quince jam, in the making of which I pride myself. Well, I had made my jam one evening, and its fine smell rejoiced my heart (and perhaps attracted the robbers), but the core of the quince remained, weighing about half a pound, and as hard as a brick. At night the robbers came, the dogs barked in vain for my house Herr to arise. At last I looked out of my window, aimed the core of the stony quince with all my might, and presumably hit the robber, for he decamped suddenly, and with much more noise than he made coming. Hence I gather that housewifely instincts in women may have uses hitherto undreamed of.

=November 28.=--A day at the Institute spent in soaking the fossils in gelatine--a tedious but necessary job which I must do myself. Oh, Tokio in the rain, what a place it is! In London we grumble if by accident we step into a “mud pie” left by the street cleaners at some corner of the road, but in Tokio in the wet one must walk through one continuous soft mud pie, along roads where there is no footpath. Of course, take a _kuruma_, is the native reply, but _kurumas_, though cheap, will easily run up into three or four shillings a day at that rate, and they jolt one’s spine to a jelly. The Japanese who walk do so on wooden clogs of a curious kind, with two high stilt-like parts of quite thin wood, so that it is difficult to balance. I fall off even the low kind, and could not walk in them any distance, even if I didn’t fall, as one must take such short steps.

=November 29.=--Still pouring wet. I went to lunch at the Faculty lunch; however, the Dean was most charming, and the President of the University did his best to be, but speaks very little English, so that we say much the same kind of things to each other every day. How ridiculous are the people who imagine “all Japanese are alike”; as I look along the table I see every possible type (except the brutally coarse or sensual one), which may be seen in the English nation, so beyond the fact that all are rather darkly brown or slightly yellow, what need to describe them?

In one way, how much more important the University professors are to their country than is a similar body of Englishmen to England! They represent practically all the science in the country, and the Emperor receives them at Court thrice a year, when they wear beautiful uniforms covered with gold lace, and in their hands lies largely the honour of the country, the old spirit of nobility, as distinct from commercialism and apart from mere militarism, both of which are now getting so rampant here.

=November 30 to December 6.=--No time to write this up, though I have been doing a lot of things.

=December 7.=--There was an interesting meeting at the University to-day, when Professor _S----_ was fêted, because it is the 25th anniversary of his professorship, as well as his silver wedding. The meeting was held in the hall in the Botanical Gardens, where the room opens out Japanese fashion on to the garden, just where it is prettiest, with its ponds and landscape trees. About 200 were there, I should imagine, and I was the only foreigner--his wife and daughters the only other ladies. The speeches, of course, were in Japanese, so I understood very little, but things were explained to me. They have collected about £300, and will devote it to a prize for research in chemistry. They have also got a nice likeness of him, which goes to his family. Baron Kikuchi made the chief speech; he had met him first in England, when they were university students together.

As I cannot understand enough to follow the sense of the speeches, my attention is concentrated on the eloquence or otherwise of the speakers and the musical qualities of the language. Judged from the individual words one would expect it to be a very flowing and beautiful speech, as every syllable ends in a vowel, but alas, it loses so much from the abrupt breaks they make in the middle of the sentences, _e.g._ “Ano-né--anata nó--kiodai wa--uchi ní--mairimasho ká.” It is impossible to give the rather staccato effect with pauses between the words. Also, even the good speakers are very apt to hesitate for exactly the right word, even more than our speakers do. This is not to be wondered at, for, as well as their own language, they have incorporated the entire Chinese language and classics (with a special pronunciation of their own), as well as a good many words from other tongues. I know a man who has studied steadily for forty years and is making a dictionary which surpasses any that the Japanese themselves have produced, and yet _every day_ he learns some new fact about a word, or some new word.

=December 8.=--To-day was wet and cold, so I stopped at home (it was Sunday) and had visitors in the afternoon. We have had some frightfully cold weather these last few days, and my furs are very useful. One curious thing that I have noticed here, the gravel of the path to the Institute is lifted several inches up in the air by little delicate ice pillars, and these support the pebbles and sheets of mud so that the path looks quite as usual until one treads on it, when, of course, down one goes. The pillars are of clear ice, 1 or 2 inches high, and less than a pencil stem in thickness, growing in a forest like moss together. They even raise very heavy slabs of solid stone 20 or 30 pounds in weight, but they only come when the night is clear and still.

=December 11.=--A beautiful, warm, sunny day, the sky as blue as midsummer and the air sweet. At the Institute doing nothing worth recording in the day-time. In the evening I had been asked to give a short address to some of the students of the Law Department of the Imperial University. I spent more than an hour getting there, for “No. 3” _Y----_ Street represents at least thirty houses, as is so often the case in Tokio, so that one must go from door to door asking the householder’s name. Indeed, this is a “Land of Approximate Time.”

The club was small and very jolly, and I quite enjoyed the evening. There was only one Japanese lady there, the mother of one of the students, who was herself half German. She was very charming and much more intelligent-looking than the pure Japanese women. There was a small earthquake this evening.

=December 12.=--Another earthquake this morning! but quite small, and still a third at midday, also too small to be any fun. We are having lovely, hot, sunny weather, and for the first time there were a number of house flies in my room.

=December 13.=--A bright sunny day with a clear blue sky and ice pillars on the ground--such heavenly weather that I hated to remain in the Institute. Dinner with the G----s at the Embassy in the evening.

=December 17.=--The machinery for the fossils is now installed and very fine it is. It is far and away more compact, more ingeniously contrived, and grander than our English outfit. I have been endlessly astonished at the resource displayed by Professor _F----_ in the whole business.

=December 18.=--A day at the Institute testing the cutting-machine. As to-day the machinery goes for the first time, all the workmen have to be treated to _Soba_ (a kind of macaroni made of buckwheat), and we had the chief engineer from the factory to tea. The machinery goes almost noiselessly, and the ingenious shield round the wheel makes it very clean. At present, however, it cuts rather slowly, probably because the wheels are new and have not got thoroughly penetrated by the carborundum. In the evening I went to a nice dance.

=December 19.=--A quiet day at the Institute. The Japanese fossils are harder than the English ones, and take a lot of cutting.

In the evening the Geologists of Tokio gave me a dinner--European style, of course; they cannot understand that I would much prefer Japanese style. There were no other ladies, and no foreigners, and the dinner was very enjoyable; as nearly all of them could speak English or German, conversation did not flag. I am beginning not to be so afraid of after-dinner speeches, though I make them very short.

Afterwards we sat round and talked music the whole evening, some examples of all their kinds being given by a dear old fat professor, whose name I have forgotten, and who looked very German. It seemed rude to refuse to let them hear English and other European music, so _I_ sang a Norwegian, a Scotch, an English, and a German song; the two latter they did not like--the two former pleased them, as I knew they would. Their music is so fundamentally different that they cannot like our music without training, particularly soprano singing; the minor key Scotch things appeal to them much more directly. I rather like their music, which is somewhat unusual for a foreigner--but the strained sound in it which they cultivate (a question largely of breathing) spoils it for me. On the other hand, our clear notes, with no sound of the breath, do not please them!

But, as they are always telling me, a foreigner cannot understand their tastes.

Two of the party saw me home at the modest hour of half-past nine, but as the dinner began at five, my entertaining powers were pretty well exhausted.

=December 20.=--A day at the Institute cutting slices of the fossils.

=December 21.=--I spent the morning at the Institute and the afternoon shopping for Christmas, and the latter was most entertaining. The shops are delightful, but the _kankobas_ are much nicer. They are a kind of bazaar or arcade, where all manner of things are sold, and one walks as through a maze between the stalls in little winding alleys. They are filled with lower and middle-class Japanese, all buying their year-end presents. Gifts are given from the 25th to the 30th of the month, and every one has to give every one something. Also every one _has_ to pay every farthing he owes by the New Year, so that it is a great time of settling up, and those who cannot make two ends meet, though honest for the rest of the year, are very apt to turn burglar for the few days before the 1st. Householders have to be very careful just now.

=December 22.=--The fascination of Tokio streets is upon me. How often does one come out into a lonely country lane, or turn into a gem of a little temple garden so near a busy street!

Coming home down a steep hill at sunset I saw the great Fuji Mountain standing out in all its calm magnificence, black and grey against a crimson sky. The huge single cone, with sweeping curves, was like a silhouette, and below rolled a tumbled wave of smaller hills, while high above the one clear evening star shone over the great peak.

Every evening on my way home I see the clear evening star, that seems larger and more brilliant in this land than anywhere else I have been. The days and nights are heavenly now.

=December 23.=--All to-day I worked at the Institute--the cutting-machine is now getting finally smartened up. The Hokkaido fossils are unfortunately harder, and therefore slower to cut, than the English ones were at home, as we have been testing to-day.

=December 24.=--More presents, and further work on the cutting-machine.

=December 25.=--A brilliant sunny Christmas. I was taken to church by the P----s. Then went to midday dinner with Mrs. W----.

After that I went for tea (though after the dinner it was quite impossible to eat anything) to the English Sh----s. Then in the evening had dinner at the P----s, where I spent the night. We had a very jolly time, and I won the prize (a silver spoon) at the Geography Game, of all things!

=December 26.=--In the morning we all spent the time skipping in the garden to work off yesterday’s feeds, and as the afternoon was my day at home, I went home: several nice people called, among them Professor _S----_, who brought gifts, one of which was a huge and beautifully executed enlargement of the group at the University the day of his silver professorship celebrations.

=December 27 and 28.=--The fossils fill all my time, so I cannot have Christmas holidays. I worked at the Institute; nothing special arose.

=December 29.=--Round my house the garden is now ready for the onslaught of winter. All the delicate shrubs done up in straw, and decorated with little top-knots, they look quaint. Then the bare ground is covered with straw, and very neatly edged with rope to look pretty. Some of the pine trees which have rather brittle branches have a kind of tent of string over them, which is to prevent the weight of the snow breaking them, so that everything looks neat and well prepared for the cold.

The Camellia tree has still opening flowers, out in this neatly packed-up little garden, and they look gay among its glossy leaves.

It is only at nights that it is so cold, and then often there is more than an inch of ice on our little pond, all to be melted in the sun of midday.

=December 30.=--The University is shut for the New Year holiday, so I cannot work there now, and played tennis in the morning and spent the rest of the day “domestically.” The climate rots one’s clothes so, that there is plenty to do. I also made up some writing.

=January 1, 1908.=--This is _the_ greatest day of the year in Japan. Until long past midnight the people in my house were up preparing for it. Outside the door of every house is a pair of leafy bamboos and pines, and over every front door a line of pointed straws. Most also have a wreath with fern leaves, sea-weed, fish, and a large kind of bitter orange--each of these symbolic of some special aspect of good luck. In the house are found the _mochi_ cakes, a kind of round cake made with much-pounded rice-paste, a horrid glutinous sticky mass, but very essential for the future welfare of the household! These are put two together in little piles; and there is a pair of big ones, 10 inches or so across, and a number of little ones all round it. The little ones are distributed on white papers in various nooks and crannies of the house, and are said to be for the rats, though those I have watched have not appealed as yet to those ubiquitous creatures. At the end of the year there is a rampage of present-giving, in which, of course, I had to join. The gift from my house lord overwhelmed me with its splendour: he presented a beautiful ancient sword, with pearl-inlaid sheath, a handle richly set, and ornamented with gold flowers. I had given very small things, only cotton dresses to the maids, and a silk bag to the lady. The sword is a gem, and I love it very much--but perhaps it is only lent me for the year I am here: I don’t quite know, but gathered from their flow of words that I was to take it to England.

On the first day of the year every one wears their very grandest silk robes, and instead of my usual breakfast I was requested to partake of the prescribed New Year dishes. The two maids and the mistress, all in their best (and in their best the Japanese women are truly butterfly-like and fascinating), brought a tray, and on the tray a stand of old valuable lacquer with three lacquer drinking-cups, out of all of which I should have drunk, and exchanged with her, the special sweet _saké_ that is a vital element in the proceedings. To pacify my hostess I sipped from one, and handed it to her. She raised the cup to her forehead and drank also a sip. Then I had to eat the three foods. A kind of paste, or rather “shape,” of finely-pounded fish, a kind of rolled omelette, and a mash of sweet stuff made principally of chestnuts, and, of course, _mochi_. The three subsidiary dishes I did not eat, one of which looked too queer, a kind of foundation of small brown beans with brilliantly coloured pickles. The dishes were covered with beautifully embroidered silk crape, representing a gold tortoise or turtle (old age luck), storks (ditto), pine, plum blossom, and other New Year symbolic plants and animals.

I had a present from one of the men at the Institute of a dear little dwarf plum tree, with sweet-smelling pink blossoms, which scented the room. There is not a sign of a leaf on the little tree, which is now covered with blossom.