Part 12

As you see, the Mikado has been the fountain of honor for this world and the next; and I cannot help being reminded of the constant relations of Chinese and Japanese thought in this unity--this constant joining of that which we separate. The forms of China may be more "bureaucratic"; no such national prejudices and feelings can belong to the idea of the sovereign there as must exist in Japan, with a dynasty of rulers as Japanese as Japan itself. But there has been here, as there, a sort of natural duty in the Government to look after all the relations of those intrusted to its care. In China, all religion or religions must depend upon the sanction of the ruling powers; nothing is too great or too small to be satisfied with; official approval may attend the worship of some local heroine, official disapproval may be shown to some exaggerations of Taoist superstitions. The source of this right and this duty is always the idea that in the ruler all is centered; he is responsible to Heaven, and is the tie between the powers above and the deities below. Hence there is nothing absurd in his following the governed after death.

In Japan, the forms of this power may be different, but its workings will be similar, and hero-worship, combined with the respect and worship of ancestors, has had a most important part in the development of life here, in encouraging patriotism and lofty ideas, and in stimulating the chivalrous feeling, the ideas of honor, that seem to me the peculiar note of the Japanese. However misapplied, however mistaken, however barbarous some forms of these ideas may appear to us, I cannot make for myself a definition of the national character, nor see a clue to many of their actions unless I bear in mind the ruling power of this feeling. While we are in this place, where Iyéyasŭ's name is so important, let me cite a trifling anecdote.

It is said that on some occasion he accompanied Hideyoshi, the great Taiko Sama, each with few attendants, upon some visit, and all were afoot. Now, among the retinue of Iyéyasŭ was one Honda, a man of preternatural strength, who hinted to his master that this might be an opportunity for an attack upon his great rival. But Taiko guessed the danger, and, turning round, said to Iyéyasŭ: "My sword is heavy, for me unaccustomed to walking, so may I not ask your servant to carry it for me?" For Taiko knew that it would have been considered a disgrace to attack a man unarmed when he had intrusted his sword, not to his own servant, but to the servant of his enemy. And Iyéyasŭ understood this appeal to the idea of honor.

August 28.

Two more days and we shall be gone. As I sketch in the temples or about them, everything seems more beautiful as it grows to be more a part of my daily existence. Though I am perpetually harassed through feeling that I cannot copy everything, and through trying to force my memory to grasp so as to retain the multitudinous details of the architectural decoration, I have drawn the curve of this, and the patterns of that, and noted the colors, but I wonder, if the thread gets loosened that holds them together, whether I shall ever be able to separate one from another in their entanglement. And then I still do not wish to work. There are so many places that I should like to look at again without the oppression of an obligatory record.

This evening I must take another look at the neglected graves of the followers of Iyémitsŭ who committed suicide, as my Japanese account has it, "that they might accompany him in his dark pilgrimage to the future world." At least it says this of Hotta Masemori and of three others; while the graves, as I remember them, are twenty-one in number, and about this I have never thought to ask, but I must do so. And then there may have been retainers of retainers. It is a pleasure to me anyhow to set down at least one name and to help to keep this memory clear when I think of the neglected spot in which they lie. It is not far from that part of the land where stood the residence of their master's family, now destroyed, through the days of turbulence which closed the last moments of their reign. Broken fragments of fencing still lean against the little inclosures of stone posts, balustrade, and gate that surround each memorial pillar. They stand in two rows in a little clearing, the valley sunk behind them, hidden in part by much wild growth.

O---- was telling us some little while ago of the feudal habit which gave to a chieftain the vow of certain retainers who undertook to follow him faithfully even beyond the grave. It was expected of them in war that they should be about him sharing in his struggle, and if he died in peace, near or far, they should be ready to go too.

And as death is the most important thing in life, I cannot help thinking over the condition of mind of any one who looked forward to such a limitation of its lease.

When age had changed the view of life, had created more ties, more duties, had made the term nearer and more capricious, while everything else became more fixed, did this bond, with its promise of payment to be met at any moment's demand, become a heavy burden of debt? I can occasionally conjure up a picture--perhaps erroneous, because my imagination of the circumstances may displace them,--of some older man settled in pleasant places, rested in secure possessions, with dependants, with friends, with affections around his life, learning at any moment of the probability that the call might come. He might be summoned from any festivity or joy as if by a knocking at the door. How curiously he must have watched the runners of the mail who might be bringing into his town the news from the court, or wheresoever this other life--which to all purposes was his own--was perhaps ebbing away. How then he would have known what to do, even to its most minute detail, and be but part of a ceremonial that he himself would direct. Vague memories come up to me of places set apart in the garden, and the screens and the hangings and the lights that belonged to the voluntary ordeal. But as I keep on thinking, I feel more certain that my fancy displaces the circumstances of former times and of a different civilization. For instance, the concentration of the feudal territory, habits of clanship, the constant attendance, must have narrowed the circle and made the individual more like a part of one great machinery, one great family, than he can ever be again. The weakness, the insufficiency of the individual, has been stiffened by the importance of the family, of the clan, as a basis of society; and I could almost say that I discern in this one main-spring of the peculiar courtesy of this nation, which seems to go along with a great feeling of a certain freedom, so that the obedience of the inferior does not seem servile. The servant who has done his duty of respectful service seems afterward ready to take any natural relation that may turn up. The youth trained in respect to his betters and elders, and silent in their presence, will give his opinion frankly when asked, with a want of diffidence quite unexpected. The coming years are certain to bring changes that cannot be arrested.

* * * * *

While I was being baked to-day, at my work that I could not leave, my companions have been away on a visit higher up the mountains, to the hot baths on the lake, and, at least for part of the time, have had the weather almost cold. They have much to say about the baths, and the fullness of visitors, and the difficulty of getting place, and one of them has gone to her bath in the native dress, and another cannot yet quite get over the impression made upon him by the pretty young lady near whom he stood under the eaves of the bath-house, where he had taken refuge from the rain, and whose modest manners were as charming as her youthfulness, and had no more covering.

Here everything is still hot and damp, though our nights are cooler and I am able to make out more conveniently my notes and my sketches and my memoranda of purchased acquisitions. On the lower floor boxes are being filled, and to-morrow evening horses and men will stand in our garden to be laden; we shall follow the light of their lanterns down the road, and they will seem to be carrying parts of us away from Nikko.

NIKKO TO YOKOHAMA

NEAR UTSUNOMIYA, August 30.

We left Nikko this morning; a hot, moist, quiet, lovely morning. We dawdled at our friends' house and breakfasted, and said good-by to our worthy landlord. Yesterday he had found fault with my sketching him in his ordinary yellow priest's dress, while he had vestments as beautiful as any painter or clergyman could desire; in proof of which he had rushed into his house and reappeared in those lovely things and moved about the green of the garden looking as radiant as any flamingo. But I knew not of these possessions of his, and regretted quite as deeply as he could himself not having painted him in them.

It was a sad moment--that of leaving his little garden for good, and walking down the road to the enormous steps under the trees by the river, where we reversed the picture of our arrival six weeks ago. There stood the naked runners, and our hostess above us, as we sat in the _kurumas_, but this time the doctor was not with us, except to bid us good-by. His place was filled by the professional guide and factotum, who sat anxious for departure in his own _kuruma_, and who for days had been packing and labeling and helping to make lists, and receiving instructions, and bustling about at times when he was not sleeping--and generally making life a misery. We rattled over the bridge, passed the children going to school, and the polite policeman with spectacles and sword, who looks like a German Rath of some kind or other, and the woman of the Eta class[7] who has sold us skins of monkeys and of badgers, as well as two baby monkeys, whom we have disrespectfully named Sesson and Sosen, after the painters who so beautifully portrayed their ancestors.

Soon we had entered the long avenue of cryptomeria and kept on through shadow and sunlight, with our runners at their fullest gait, for we had to be in time for the afternoon train at Utsunomiya, and it is twenty-two miles from Nikko. But we were more than in time, and had to wait at an inn near the station. I am absurdly stupid and fatigued, so that I have given up watching the landscape and merely make these notes. Besides, there is a missionary near us so self-contented that I feel like withdrawing into my own self and dreaming of the times he was not here. I recall a little story of Utsunomiya, connected with my associations of Nikko, which I shall try to tell you; though, at the very start, I find a difficulty in my having heard it told in several different and contradictory ways--and I can only travel one at a time. As I shall tell it, it represents a legend believed at least in the theater, which, as we know, everywhere makes a kind of history.

The story is about the shogun Iyémitsŭ, whose temple, you know, is at Nikko, and who was near missing the honor of being divinized there later, owing to a plot arranged by his enemies, the scene of which was this little town of Utsunomiya. At that time he was but a boy, the heir-apparent, and was on his way to Nikko, as was his official duty, to worship at the tomb of his grandfather Iyéyasŭ, lately deceased. In this story Iyémitsŭ is not in the legitimate line of descent, but is made the heir by the decision of the great Iyéyasŭ.

His father, Hidetada, was shogun, as you know, having succeeded Iyéyasŭ, during the latter's lifetime,--the old man remaining in reality the master, though absolved from external responsibilities. Now, Hidetada's wife was of the family of Nobunaga, on her mother's side--and bore him a son, who was named during his childhood Kuni Matsu. Another son, whose boy name was Take Chiyo, was the son of Kasuga No Tsubone, a remarkable woman. Each son had tutors, people of importance, and around each boy gathered a number of ambitious interests, all the fiercer that they were dissembled and depended for success upon the choice of either heir as shogun, to succeed father and grandfather. The claim of the other son was favored by the father and more generally accepted; but the son of Kasuga was superior in looks, manners, and intelligence, and his mother hoped to influence in his favor old Iyéyasŭ, the grandfather.

Iyéyasŭ was then living in retirement at Sunpu, that is now called Shidzuoka, which is on the road called the Tokaido.

Kasuga took advantage of a pilgrimage to the shrines of Ise to stop on her road, and naturally offer homage to the head of the family, the grandfather of her son. Besides the power of her own personality, she was able to place before Iyéyasŭ very strong arguments for choosing as the heir of the line a youth as promising as her Take Chiyo.

Iyéyasŭ advised her to continue her pilgrimage, and not to go out of her woman's business, which could not be that of interfering with questions of state; and she obeyed. But Iyéyasŭ revolved the entire question in his mind, and decided that there was danger in a delay that allowed both parties to grow stronger in antagonism. So that he came at once to Yedo, which is now Tokio, and visited Hidetada, asking to see both the boys together. They came in along with their father and his wife, and took their accustomed places. Now these were on the higher floor, raised by a few inches from the floor on which kneels the visitor of lower degree, in the presence of his superior: a line of black lacquer edges the division. Thereupon Iyéyasŭ taking the boy Take Chiyo by the hand, made him sit by him, and alongside of his father, and ordered the other son, Kuni Matsu, to sit below the line, and said: "The State will come to harm if the boys are allowed to grow up in the idea of equal rank. Therefore, Take Chiyo shall be shogun, and Kuni Matsu a daimio." This decision gave to the line of the Tokugawa a brilliant and powerful continuity, for Take Chiyo, under his manhood name of Iyémitsŭ, was as an Augustus to the Cæsar Iyéyasŭ. And, indeed, Iyéyasŭ had certainly made sufficient inquiries to warrant his decision. If he consulted the abbot Tenkai, of Nikko, who was a preceptor of the boy, he must have heard favorably of him. For, according to the judgment of Tenkai, as I find it quoted elsewhere, "Iyémitsŭ was very shrewd and of great foresight," and in his presence the great abbot felt, he said, "as if thorns were pricking his back."

Not but that he was also fond of luxury and splendor; and one glimpse of him as a youth shows a quarrel with a tutor who found him dressing himself, or being dressed, for "No" performances, or "private theatricals," and who proceeded thereupon to throw away the double mirrors,--in which the youth followed his hair-dresser's arrangements,--with the usual, classical rebuke, condemning such arrangements as unworthy of a ruler of Japan.

There are many stories of Iyémitsŭ more or less to his advantage--and a little anecdote shows a young man of quick temper, as well as one who insisted upon proper attendance.

Iyémitsŭ had been hawking in a strong wind, and with no success. Tired and hungry, he went with some lord-in-waiting to a neighboring temple, where lunch was prepared for them by his cook,--a man of rank. Iyémitsŭ, while taking his soup in a hurry, crushed a little stone between his teeth; whereupon he immediately insisted upon the cook's committing suicide. The cook being a gentleman, a man of affairs, not a mere artist like poor Vatel, hesitated, and then said: "No soup made by me ever had stones or pebbles in it; otherwise I should gladly kill myself: you gentlemen have begun dinner at once without washing hands or changing dress, and some pebble has dropped into the soup from your hair or clothes. If after having washed your hands and changed your dress, you find any stones in the soup, I shall kill myself." Whereupon Iyémitsŭ did as was suggested by the cook, repented of his own severity, and increased the cook's pay. But the tutor and guardians of Iyémitsŭ watched over him carefully, and the story I had begun to tell shows that they had no sinecure.

The tutors and guardians of the brother, whom Iyéyasŭ had decided to put aside in favor of Iyémitsŭ, were naturally deeply aggrieved and sought for chances to regain their ward's future power and their own.

As my story began, Iyémitsŭ, representing the hereditary shogunate, was called upon to travel to Nikko and worship officially at his grandfather's tomb. On his way it was natural that he should rest as we did, at Utsunomiya, and in the castle of his vassal, Honda, who was one of the tutors of his brother. This was the son of the great Honda Masanobu, of whom I spoke above as a champion of Iyéyasŭ.

Here was an opportunity; and a scheme of getting rid of the young shogun was devised by his enemies that seemed to them sufficiently obscure to shield them in case of success or failure, at least for a time. This was, to have a movable ceiling made to the bath-room weighted in such a way as to fall upon any one in the bath and crush him. Whether it was to be lifted again, and leave him drowned in his bath, or to remain as an accident from faulty construction, I do not know.

To build this machine, ten carpenters were set to work within the castle and kept jealously secluded,--even when the work was done, for the young shogun delayed his coming. The confinement fretted the men, among whom was a young lover, anxious to get back to his sweetheart, and not to be satisfied with the good food and drink provided to appease him. He told of his longings to the gatekeeper, whose duty it was to keep him imprisoned, bribed him with his own handsome pay and promise of a punctual return, and at last managed to get out and be happy for a few moments. The girl of his love was inquisitive, but reassured by explanation that the work was done, and that he should soon be out again; yet not before the shogun should have come and gone on his way to Nikko. And so he returned to the gatekeeper at the time appointed. Meanwhile, during that very night, the officers of the castle had gone their rounds and found one man absent. In the morning the roll-call was full. This was reported to the lord of the castle, who decided that if he could not know who it was that had been absent it was wise to silence them all. Therefore, each was called to be paid and dismissed, and, as he stepped out, was beheaded. The gatekeeper, getting wind of what was happening and fearing punishment, ran away, and being asked by the girl about her lover, told her what he knew and that he believed all the carpenters to have been killed.

Since her lover was dead, she determined to die also, having been the cause of his death and of the death of his companions. She wrote out all this, together with what her lover had told her of his belief and suspicions, and left the letter for her father and mother, who received it along with the tidings of her suicide. The father, in an agony of distress and fear, for there was danger to the whole family from every side, made up his mind to stop the shogun at all hazards, and in the depth of the night made his way to Ishibashi, where one of the princes had preceded Iyémitsŭ, who was to pass the night still further back on the road.

Here there was difficulty about getting a private interview with so great a man as this prince, whose name you will remember as being the title of the former owner of our friend's house in Nikko: Ii, Kammon no Kami.

The letter was shown to Ii, who despatched two messengers, gentlemen of his own, one back to Yedo, to see to the safety of the castle there; the other one to Iyémitsŭ, but by a circuitous route, so that he might appear to have come the other way. The letter was to the effect that the young shogun's father was very ill and desired his son's immediate return. By the time that Iyémitsŭ could get into his litter, Ii had arrived and shown him the girl's letter. Then the occupants of the litters were changed, Matsudaira taking Iyémitsŭ's _norimono_ and Iyémitsŭ Matsudaira's. This, of course, was to give another chance of escape in case of sudden attack by a larger force, for they were now in enemy's country and did not know what traps might be laid for them. The bearers of the palanquin pressed through the night, so that, leaving at midnight, they arrived at Yedo the following evening; but the strain had been so great that they could go no further. There was still the fear of attack, and among the retinue one very strong man, Matsudaira Ishikawa, carried the litter of the prince himself. But the gates were closed, and the guards refused to recognize the unknown litter as that of the shogun; nor would they, fearing treachery, open when told that Iyémitsŭ had returned. Delays ensued, but at last admission was obtained for Iyémitsŭ through a wicket gate--and he was safe. Later, after cautious delays, the guilty were punished, and I hope the family of the carpenter's love escaped. When I first read the story, years ago, the version was different, and there was some arrangement of it, more romantic--with some circumstances through which the young carpenter and his sweetheart escaped, and alone the father, innocent of harm, committed suicide. The story sounded sufficiently Japanese and upside down and was pretty, but I have forgotten its convolutions, so that I give you this one, which I think has a pleasant local color. It has local color, and that charm of action which belongs to such histories as those of the great Dumas--not to mention Mr. Froude.

Do not forget that these details are given for your amusement, and not for your instruction. I am quite uncertain as to the historical value of my information as soon as I come down to close particulars. What little I really know comes down from early reading of the missionaries and of the Dutch, and that is mostly outside impression, though thereby valuable, because not based on theory or principle.

I do not know that critical history has yet begun here. But in the historical place where we have spent our summer, talk about the past was but natural and all to be listened to without much chance for us to distinguish what was of record and what was of legend. What I have been writing about is legend, and I am warned of its complicated incorrectness. That has not prevented my setting it down. You would like the pretty murderous story whose details reflect a peculiar past. It would be nothing to you if it were not at all Iyémitsŭ, but his father Hidetada, for whose destruction the famous plot of the Hanging Ceiling was hatched. Nor would you care if the ceiling and bath-room had never existed. What is worth having is that many people thought that they saw themselves in the mirror of a period.

Now see how re-arranging the atoms of which the previous story is constituted will give you quite another picture that I would spare you, though it is a correct historical one, but it has the advantage of being quite as strange in certain ways, though not so fitted for the theater, and of giving you again a picture of feudal Japan.