Part 13

As I said before, the story as I have just told it has been kept in memory, if not invented on purpose, through a book written in honor of a Japanese opposed to Honda, the master of the castle, the author of the plot of the Hanging Ceiling. There may have been such a story afloat at that time among people of low degree kept out from the many secrets of the court, but knowing that things were being done; at the same time, there is nothing that would account for a sufficient reason; and, worse than all, the date is impossible. Young Iyémitsŭ was not in any position at that possible date (eighth year of the Genwa) to represent the shogunate. His father Hidetada would have been the proposed victim, which is again impossible because of the devotion of Honda, the lord of the castle, to Hidetada. That there was such an accusation I believe is understood. It was met at the time and at once disproved to the satisfaction of the shogun. It was the Lady Kano who had denounced Honda, and apparently invented the plot. She was a daughter of Iyéyasŭ, and had, perhaps, some of the fierce strain said to have shown in her mother and sister. Her baby grandson had only just been deprived of this very fief for the advantage of Honda, so that she had at least this grievance. And she was united in intention with the wife of the shogun Hidetada. This was a beautiful and wilful woman,--known to us by her after-death name of Sogenin, whose preference for Iyémitsŭ's brother, her son also, had met Honda's resistance. You can realize that I am not capable of even discussing the question, and that I am only doing it to amuse you and to bring in more pictures.

As the shogun was to be received by the lord of Utsunomiya, new additions were ordered for his castle, the bridges and roads were repaired, which works required all the laborers, skilled or otherwise, of his domains, and even obliged him to draw upon his retainers and soldiers. Such enormous preparations were, of course, noised abroad. Now, it so happened that at one time Honda's father had been concerned in an insurrection, or levy of arms, of certain members of the Buddhist sect to which he belonged, and had fought the great Iyéyasŭ, whom afterwards he served so faithfully. Among the upholders of the faith were fighting monks, a variety of the militant church well known in the annals of Japan. At the close of this rebellion a band of these monks--something like a hundred--and a hundred other warriors were intrusted--Japanese-way--to the wardship of their former fellow partisan, and there they were handy for use. But they had retained something of both the clergyman and the warrior, keeping their priestly names and wearing their hair unshorn, and they refused to work, which in their eyes would have assimilated them to common soldiers and laborers. Thereupon,--and this was thought to be queer even in those days,--the lord of the castle invited them to go about the country and report upon certain matters in various places, at which places they were met by bodies of armed men, who put an end to them. I suppose that, according to strict views of the country and time, this was justifiable, though excessive, and this is one of the little pictures that I wish to frame. You see how the unpleasantness of the occasion might help the later stories of assassination.

And now, in correcting another error, I can give you another picture of feudal Japan, a Japan now broken up, against whose last rulers, the Tokugawa, I hear daily so much. That lady in the story just given you, where she is the mother of Iyémitsŭ and the concubine of his father, the shogun, was a very different person.

Little Iyémitsŭ was the legitimate son; moreover, the one who by date of birth was the probable heir, notwithstanding the preference shown by his father and his mother, Sogenin, for his younger brother. So that the succession was decided abruptly by the stern head of the family, Iyéyasŭ.

Great attention was paid by the grandfather, the great Iyéyasŭ, to the education of this grandson. As a Japanese friend remarked, he believed that the important place in the generation was that of the third man. So that three distinguished noblemen were appointed his governors: Sakai, to teach benevolence; Doi, to teach wisdom; Awoyama, to teach valor. Besides these great professors for the future, the little boy needed an immediate training by a governess good in every way. Kasuga, a married woman, the daughter of a well-known warrior of imperial descent who had lost his life in some conspiracy of the previous generation, was chosen by the government for the position. This was, perhaps, as great an honor as could be offered to any lady. Besides, there was an opportunity to clear the memory of her father. And she begged her husband to divorce her that she might be free to give all her life to this task. So devoted was she that the boy being at one time at the point of death, she offered herself to the gods for his recovery, vowing never to take any remedy. In her last illness she refused all medicine, and even when Iyémitsŭ--now ruler--begged her to take a commended draught from his hand, she merely, out of politeness, allowed it to moisten her lips, saying that her work was done, that she was ready to die, and that her life had long ago been offered for the master. Nor would she allow the master to indulge her with regard to her own son. He was in exile, deservedly, and the shogun asked her permission to pardon him, in the belief of possible amendment. She refused, bidding Iyémitsŭ to remember his lesson: that the law of the country was above all things, and that she had never expected such words from him. Moreover, that had he revoked the law for her, she could not die in peace. There is a Spartan politeness in all this, for which I think the stories worth saving to you.

And they will help to give Iyémitsŭ existence for you. He seems too vague in the temple dedicated to him at Nikko, even when we look at his bronze tomb and are told that he lies there packed in vermilion: our minds have become so far removed from the ways of thinking of Japan that a divinized mortal is an empty phrase for us.

The details of such stories as I have told would not have seemed very antiquated across the seas, at their date, to those who remembered the days of Queen Elizabeth. The change has been as great in Europe as in Japan, but here it has been sudden, like the shifting of the scene of the theater; so that I can realize that when I was a boy such things as I am telling you would not have seemed very old-fashioned hereabouts.

And now I make my notes in this little railroad coach, with the telegraph wires running in and out of the picture that I see through my window; and, indeed, it is this implied contrast which I think has urged me most to tell you these more or less accurate anecdotes.

If you wished to learn more about Iyémitsŭ from the Japanese biography that I have with me, you might be puzzled. One has felt so distinctly the all-powerfulness of the men whose names and stories are the outer history of Japan. So full is the impression forced upon one by the outside of the life of such a ruler as Iyémitsŭ, bounded between the worship of his grandfather in golden temples and his own worship in almost equal splendors, and filled in by despotic use of power, that it leaves little place for the theory of all this power coming from the Mikado, who practically lived upon a narrow income apportioned to him by his lieutenant, the shogun. But in my little biography, written evidently to keep to present views and theories, I learn that toward the emperor our impatient hero was "faithful and humble"--and part of his story consists of visits to the emperor and of his receiving honors from this source of all honor. Thus, upon his coming of age, and having his hair trimmed, cut, and shaved in a manner to indicate this important event, the emperor sends a great court officer to compliment him, gives him the name of Iyémitsŭ, honors him with the rank of _Junii_, and appoints him a Go Dainagon. Also, later he appoints him to be the commander of the right wing of the imperial guard, and also superintendent of the Right Imperial Stable. Thereupon Iyémitsŭ calls upon his majesty at Kioto to pay his homage, and is made commander-in-chief of the army and navy, and moreover Naidaizin, with the rank of Shonii; and he is also permitted to ride in an ox-carriage and to have armed body-guards; the latter privilege one that he had been obliged to enjoy perforce from early days, as we have seen. Whereupon, says my chronicler, Iyémitsŭ had the honor of presenting to his majesty a yearly income of twenty thousand bags of rice; and this goes on until after his death, when the emperor gives him these titles for the future, the name of Daiken-In, the rank of Shoichi, and the premier office of Daijo-Daizin. "The favor of Five Imperial poems was also extended to the deceased."

Iyémitsŭ was fond of painting, and studied under the instruction of Kano Tanyu. He liked to paint the sacred mountain Fuji, and the same courteous chronicler tells me that some of his work was better than Tanyu's. But I should prefer seeing, before deciding; though Tanyu's imperturbable security makes one not a little bored.

It is dark; we are approaching Iyémitsŭ's city, Tokio, formerly Yedo, the city of the Tokugawa, now finally returned to the emperor, to whom they gave the thousands of bags of rice for income. We shall sleep at No. 22 Yokohama,[8] and look out on the water again.

[7] "Pariahs. Their occupations were to slaughter animals, tan leather, attend at executions, etc. The class, as such, is now abolished, but remnants of its peculiar dress may still occasionally be seen in the persons of young girls with broad hats who go about the streets playing and singing." (Satow).

[8] All of Yokohama given to foreign settlement was laid out by numbering, and retains it, apart from any other designation.

YOKOHAMA--KAMAKURA

YOKOHAMA, September 1, 1886.

Naturally we have again been wandering in Tokio; I don't know that we have seen anything more, as we should certainly do if we had any energy in the heat. It is more natural to fritter away time in little things. Besides, there is a general feeling of discouragement accompanying the continuance of cholera; and this is an unseasonable moment. Theaters are closed; people are away. If I had to give an account of my time, I could not make it up. I know that I went to see an engraver on wood; that he showed me his work, or his way of working, of which I knew a little; that he made me drink some cherry-blossom tea, pretty to look at and of unseizable flavor; that he took me to see some of his work printed; that I climbed up a ladder, somewhere into a hot room, where a man, naked but for his loin-cloth, sat slapping pieces of paper with a big brush upon the block previously touched with color; and that the dexterity with which he fitted the paper in proper place, so that the colors should not overlap, was as simple and primitive as his dress.

Then I went to see the painter whose drawings had been engraved. I can't explain just why the arrangement of his courtyard seemed what I might have expected, and yet I still keep that impression without having noticed anything but the heat--the heat and the sun--the heat accumulated in this big dreary city of innumerable little houses.

We explained at the door our request, and after a few moments we were told that the painter, though he was ill, would see us. We entered, and sat awhile, during which interval a boy pupil, occupied in copying sketches of the master, looked at us surreptitiously through a circular opening in the partition that made him a room.

Our artist came in and sat down, evidently an ill man, and offered us the inevitable tea, and showed us his methods of preparation for the colored wood-blocks, and got down examples from the great pile of rolls and bundles of papers and drawings that filled one side of the room, among which I noticed many fragments of illustrated English or American newspapers. And we dared not intrude any further, and departed--just as the conversation had turned toward European art--with gifts of drawings from him and promise of exchange.

No; what we have really done is again to call at shops and begin over again the pursuit of bric-à-brac. It is so impossible to believe that we can find nothing in all the accumulation of all these shops. But even if it be so, the manner of hunting is an amusement, as is the mere seeing of all this stuff in its own home; and the little attentions of the dealer, the being in a house with the privileges of tea and smoking, and a lazy war of attack and defense; and the slow drawing out of pieces from bags and boxes, so that time, the great enemy, is put in the wrong. And then, what one is not expected to buy or look at is quite as good. I know of one place to which I have returned to look out of the _shoji_ screens into the garden, where there is a big pottery statue of Kwannon. I don't intend to get it or to bargain about it, but I intend to buy other things under its influence; perhaps the _daimio_ seats that we use in our visit, or the lanterns that light us when we stay late, whose oil will have to be emptied if they are sold. And there are places where things are for sale to people versed in Chinese ways of thinking, but where amateurs on the wing like ourselves are not encouraged, and that is certainly seductive. Still, I am afraid that we shall miss a great deal that we wish to see, because of this dawdling in shops.

And yet there is no sadness following these visits, such as has come upon us when we have gone to see some of the modern workers. From them we depart with no more hope. It is like some puzzles, like the having listened to an argument which you know is based on some inaccuracy that you cannot at the moment detect. This about the better, the new perfect work, if I can call it perfect, means only high finish and equal care. But the individual pieces are less and less individual; there is no more _surprise_. The means or methods are being carried further and _beyond_, so that one asks one's self, "Then why these methods at all?" The _style_ of this finer modern work is poorer, no longer connected with the greater design, as if ambition was going into method and value of material. Just how far this is owing to us I cannot tell, but the market is largely European, and what is done has a vague appearance of looking less and less out of place among our works, and has, as I said before, less and less suggestion of individuality. None of it would ever give one the slight shock of an exception, none of it would have the appearance which we know of our own best work, the _feeling_ that we are not going to see more of it. This statement applies to the best work; the more common work is merely a degradation, the using of some part of the methods; just enough to sell it, and to meet some easily defined immediate commercial needs. I saw the beginnings years ago, and I can remember one of our great New York dealers marking on his samples the colors that pleased most of his buyers, who themselves again were to place the goods in Oshkosh or Third Avenue. All other colors or patterns were tabooed in his instructions to the makers in Japan. This was the rude mechanism of the change, the coming down to the worst public taste, which must be that of the greatest number at any given time; for commerce in such matters is of the moment: the sale of the wooden nutmeg, good enough until used. Have I not seen through the enormous West any amount of the worst stained glass, all derived from what I made myself, some years ago, as a step toward a development of greater richness and delicacy in the "art of glass"? And my rivalry of precious stones had come to this ignoble end and caricature. The commercial man, or the semi-professional man whom we call the architect, must continually ask for something poorer, something to meet the advancing flood of clients and purchasers, something more easily placed anywhere, at random, without trouble or responsibility, and reflecting the public--as it is more easy to fit in a common tile than the most beautiful Persian one--in the average of buildings made themselves to meet the same common demand. And so with all applied beauty; the degradation is always liable to occur.

Japan is an exceptional place for studying these changes; we can see them gradually evolved--all as if by vivisection of some morbid anatomy. The study of these diseases and infections of art at home is attended with moral distress and intellectual disgust, because we are all in part responsible; but here we can see it disinterestedly, and speculate dispassionately upon the degradation of good things resulting from the demands of business.

Were it quite in the line of what you expect to-day from me, I might make out for you the lines of the old scheme of civilization under which former work was done. The feudal organization of Japan divided the country into provinces of distinct habits and modes of work--more or less isolated, partly by want of easy or general communication, partly by the political interests of their rulers and of the main government, partly by the permanence of the provincial feeling which prevented the inhabitant of one place moving to another to find occupation and employment. The rule of the idea of the family, which is still great in Japan, kept things in the same order, preserved all traditions, and at the same time offered opportunities, by adoption, to individuals who might increase or keep up the family reputation or influence. Here, too, I suppose, is the basis of a certain dignity and personal independence in the manners of the people which runs in with their courtesy. Every one must have known what was expected of him, and have felt quite free after that duty paid. Within this courtesy that I see all about me, I feel something of what we might call democratic, for want of a better name. I recognize it in the manner of the subordinate, who takes an apparently personal interest in things, after his duty of politeness and obedience is paid. And though there was no absolute caste, as we understand it, except in such a case as that of the Eta, the lines of life were strictly laid out, until the new laws, which have made things open more or less to all.[9] With these changes, with disturbances of fortune, with the loss of power and of income on the part of the small rulers, with a country all laid out now in "prefectures," with the necessarily increasing power of "bureaucracy," the whole tone of individual life must change, must become less independent in any one thing, more independent apparently in general--must flatten out, if I may so express it. And the artisan will have to follow the course of trade and its fluctuations until some general level has been established--some general level of manufactures, I mean, for there is no general level possible in art. Something will happen which will resemble the ways of France, where art still exists, but where things have been so managed that any artist out of the general level has had a very bad time of it--the whole live forces of the nation, in trade and "bureaucracy," being against his living easily any life of his own. When the forces of traditional taste and skill and habits of industry now existing in Japan shall have been organized anew, Japan, like France, will have undoubtedly a great part to play in industrial trade.

Art may live or may not in the future here; nothing of what has been done elsewhere to grow it or foster it has made it stronger. It has always come by the grace of God, to be helped when it is here, or choked out; but no gardener has ever seen its seed. Some of my friends in Japan are plunged in a movement to save what there is of the past in art, to keep its traditions, to keep teaching in the old ways, without direct opposition to what may be good in the new. They see around them the breaking up of what has been fine, and the new influences producing nothing, not even bad imitations of Europe. I know too little upon what their hopes are based, but O----, who is in the "tendency," sails with us for America and Europe, and I may find out more through him. Meanwhile he is to inquire with Professor F---- into the education of the artist and artisan with us, and to see "how we do it." I am deeply interested in their undertaking, perhaps the most remarkable of all similar inquiries--if honestly conducted. But I see vague visions of distorted values, of commercial authorities looked upon as artistic, of the same difficulties, for instance, that I might meet if I wished now to make an official report, not to the public or to government,--that is always easy,--but to myself, who have no special interest in being misled, of the methods of art and industry that have been and exist in the East.

... Three days are wasted. I do scarcely any work, and there comes to me, as a punishment, a feeling of the littleness of a great deal here, coming, I think, from the actual smallness of many details--of the sizes of the little houses, of the little gardens, of the frail materials, of the set manners.

... To-morrow we shall go to something great, to the great statue, the "Daibutsŭ," at Kamakura, and perhaps we may even push as far as Énoshima, but I doubt it. It will be our last day, as we shall sail the following morning for Kobe. As I run along the streets of Tokio in the afternoon, with the feeling that I have tried to set down, of things having narrowed as they become familiar, comes the excited melancholy of departure, and this same ugliness and prettiness have a new value as I look upon them for the last time. I sit in the little tea-house near the station, waiting for A----, and drink the "powdered tea," which tastes better than ever, as a stirrup-cup. And I do not resent the familiarity of a big Chinaman, proud of his English, and of national superiority here in size and commercial value, who addresses me and seeks to find out whether I, too, have a commercial value. My answers puzzle him, and he leaves me uncertain as to quantities, and walks off with the impudent majesty of his fellows among this smaller and less commercial race.

... At dinner I see at the table near me a Japanese gentleman, not very young, dining with his wife and another lady, who, I am told, is a well-known _gei-sha_. This information I receive from my more or less trusty courier, who also gives me some confused intimation that this gentleman had participated in the murder of Richardson, the Englishman, many years ago, under the old régime, for which murder somebody else was decapitated. The wife is correct and immovable, the _gei-sha_ animated, with a great deal of color and charm. A German or Russian sits at another table, heavy, diplomatic, thick-bearded; the _gei-sha_ recognizes him, rises, goes over to his table, and bends very low before him, almost kneeling; then speaks courteously and animatedly, as if in compliment, to which the diplomat, without turning his head, says a word or two distantly. Then the _gei-sha_ bends again down to the table, and walks respectfully backward, and then swings back into her seat. I am amused by this complete inversion of our own habits, and am reminded of the manners and assiduous attentions of our men at the theaters when they call on the indifferent fair. I see, too, that the points of attack and defense must be different.