Part 3

Now the road became heavy, wet, and full of deep ruts, and our miserable ponies came to a standstill--and balked. The Japanese mildness of our driver disappeared. He took to beating their poor backs with a heavy bamboo cane, while we remonstrated feebly, regretting that we had not sufficient strength to beat him too. Then he explained, deferentially, that confusion seized him at being unable to keep his promise of delivering us to Imaichi for the appointed hour, and I felt as if we had been put in the wrong. Imagine the difference had he been--any one but a Japanese. We turned aside from the main way into a little dry side-path, which led us into the hills and moors. As we got among them we left the annoying odors of the rice-fields and smelled for the first time the fragrance of wild roses, looking like ours, but a little paler. This was the first thing which reminded me of home--the roses that the Japanese do not seem to care for, do not seem to understand. With them the rose has no records, no associations, as with us; for, once on this farther side of the garden of Iran, the peony and the chrysanthemum, the lotus and the iris, the peach, the cherry, and the plum, make up the flower-poetry of the extreme East.

* * * * *

Then, leaving the dry and sunny uplands, we entered a famous avenue, shaded for twenty miles by gigantic cryptomeria trees 60 to 120 feet high. They were planted, as an act of homage, some two centuries ago, by some mighty noble, when it was decided to place at Nikko the tomb of the great shogun Iyéyasŭ. They rise on each side of the sunken road, from banks and mounds, over which steps lead, from time to time, to plantations and rice-fields beyond, and to shrines peeping out among the trees. In side-roads above, on either hand, passed occasionally peasants and pack-horses laden with forage, or the bright shine of a peasant woman's red skirt. Where an occasional habitation, or two or three, are niched in some opening, the tall columns of the great trees are interrupted by spaces filled with crossed branches of the wilder pine; and behind these, outside, sometimes the light-green feathery mass of a bamboo grove. Against the bank stood low, thatched buildings; near them the great trees were often down, or sometimes dying; an occasional haystack, sliced off below by use, was fastened, in thick projection, around some smaller tree. Once, at a turn of the road, near a building with wide roof, pushed against the corner bank out of a basin fringed with iris, sprang into the air a little jet of water. Near by, a solitary ditcher had placed in a bamboo fence some bright red blossom, with its stem and leaves, apparently to cheer him at his work.

The heavy road was being ditched on each side to carry off the soaking waters, and our weary, miserable horses broke down again. A---- and I rested by going in advance, and I experienced the new sensation of walking among the bamboo stems, like an insect among the knotted stalks of a gigantic grass. The still heat of the sun burned in great smoky streaks across our way, spotted by the flight of many yellow butterflies. There was no sound of birds in the high spaces above; the few peasants that we met slipped past on their straw sandals, their noiseless horses also shod with straw; occasionally a shiver of the great spruces overhead, and far behind us the cries of our grooms to their horses.

It was two o'clock when we galloped bravely, as if with fresh horses, into the single long street which is Imaichi village. We were now on high ground, some two thousand feet above our point of departure, and could feel, but not see clearly, in the blaze of sunlight, great mountains lost in great wet clouds.

* * * * *

We stopped at the village inn; drivers and runners were sitting on the stone bench in front, drinking tea, when we drove up. We sat down on the straw-matted porch inside, the whole front of the building open, and drank miserable, herby tea, and tasted the usual sweet balls of sugary stuff.

Alongside the tea-house, in one of the recesses between the buildings, we could see the runners of _kurumas_ being washed off and rubbed down, just as if they were horses in a livery stable. As they stood naked, their companions poured pails of water over them, its brown spread covering the stone slabs. Some of them, in the porch, lay on their backs, others prone, others on the side, all near a kettle, which hung over a charcoal fire, in which, perhaps, they were heating sakè. One on his back, his neck on the wooden pillow, was smoking. The village itself lay in hot, clean repose,--not dusty,--the rows of buildings on each side of the street irregular, but all of the same appearance. Most of the fronts were open, the goods all displayed outside of the walls, or on the floors, innumerable pieces of paper hanging about everywhere. A few men sat about on the porches, their naked feet hanging off, their sandals on the ground below them, the inevitable umbrella by their side. Most of the village was asleep in nakedness. The color of flesh glowed in the hot shade; brown and sallow in the men, ruddy on the breasts of the women and the entirely nude bodies of the children.

And here, now, we said good-by to the _basha_, and got into the two-wheeled baby wagon, which they call a _kuruma_. One man ran between the shafts, and another, in front, was fastened to the cross-bar by a long strip of cloth tied about him. The file of our five wagons started off at a rapid trot--we had two for our baggage--with the Doctor ahead, his white helmet dancing before us in the sun. From under my umbrella I tried to study and occasionally to draw the motions of the muscles of our runners, for most of them were naked, except for the complicated strip around the loins--a slight development of the early fig-leaf. The vague recall of the antique that is dear to artists--the distinctly rigid muscles of the legs and thighs, the rippling swellings of the backs--revived the excitement of professional study and seemed a god-send to a painter. The broad, curved hat, lifted by a pad over the head, was but an Eastern variation, not so far removed from the Greek πέτασος [Greek: petasos] of Athenian riders. Some heads were bare; that is to say, their thick black thatch was bound with a long handkerchief, which otherwise hung on the shoulders or danced around their necks. Not all were naked. The youngest, a handsome fellow, had his tunic pulled up above the thighs, and the slope of his drapery and his wide sleeves gave him all the elegance of a medieval page. I found it easier now to struggle against heat and indolence, and to make my studies as our runners ran along, for we had entered again the avenue of the great cryptomeria. We had passed the entrance of another, which in old times was the road traveled by the Mikado's ambassador, in the fifth month, when he journeyed across the island to carry offerings to Iyéyasŭ, in his tomb at Nikko. The big trees grew still taller in this higher air, their enormous roots spreading along the embankments in great horizontal lines and stages of buttresses. Prolonged wafts of cool air blew upon us from the west, to which we were hurrying. Above us spread a long avenue of shade, high up and pale in the blue. And so we got into Nikko as the sun was setting with the delicious sensation that at last we were in coolness and in shade.

* * * * *

Right before us, crossing the setting sun, was the island mountain of Nikko-san; small enough to be taken in by the eye, as it stood framed by greater mountains, which were almost lost in the glittering of wet sunlight. The mountain threw its shade on the little village; down its one long street we rode to the bridge that spans the torrent, which, joining another stream, gives Nikko the look of an island. Alongside this bridge, at a distance of two hundred feet, crosses the red lacquer bridge, over which we are not allowed to pass. It is reserved for the family Tokugawa, the former shoguns of japan, whose ancestors built the great shrines of Nikko, and for the Emperor on his occasional visits. It stands supported on a gigantic framework of stone, imitating wood, the uprights being pierced to allow the crosspieces to run through, against all European constructional principles, but with a beauty which is Japanese, and a fitness proved by time.

These great posts under the bridge lean against what seems the wall of the mountain; the rock foundation being supplemented, everywhere that a break occurs, by artificial work. Here and there cascades fall over natural and over artificial walls and glisten far up through the trees on the opposite side of the bridge. As we rattled over it, we looked down on the overflowing long wooden trough, which carried the pure waters of the mountain to the village that we had passed, and upon the torrent below, whose limpid clearness was made blue by mist, where the warmer air was chilled by a coldness drawn from far-up mountains. Before us steps of enormous width passed under the foliage and turned above in many directions, and there on the lowest step, her dainty feet on straw sandals, whose straps divided the toes of the close-fitting Japanese socks, with bare ankles, stood our hostess, in latest European dress, most graceful contrast to our own consciousness of being jaded and dirty, and to the nakedness of our runners. Panting with the last run, they stood at rest, and leaned forward against the cross-bar of the shafts, with muscles still trembling, clear streams of sweat varnishing their bronze nakedness, and every hair plastered with wet on forehead, chest, and body. Just before them rustled the unrumpled starched spread of the skirts of the fair American. She was summering at Nikko, and, friendly with the Buddhist clergy, had arranged that one of the priests should let us have his house, and kindly walked with us to it, a little way up in one of the first open spaces of the mountain. After passing the great outside fringe of trees we found a large clear opening, broken up by walled inclosures, the wall sometimes high and sometimes low, and edged by gutters through which the torrents ran. These were the former residences of princes, whom etiquette obliged to worship officially at Nikko. A quarter of a mile up we came to our own garden,--with an enormous wide wall or embankment of stone, some twenty feet deep,--which also had been a prince's, and now belongs to the little Buddhist priest who is our landlord. There are two houses in the inclosure, one of which he lets to us. Ours is brand-new and two stories high, while his is old and low, with an enormous roof, and an arbor built out from the eaves and connecting with his little garden. High behind his house rise rocks and wall; and on top of them are planted willows, pines, maples, and the paulownia, whose broad leaves are part of the imperial crest. A little waterfall tumbles over the rocks and gives us water for our garden and for our bath. In our house we made the acquaintance of Kato, who is to wait upon us. A few minutes later we were welcomed by our landlord, dressed for the occasion. He conducted us to our rooms, and, leaving for a moment, returned with a china bowl that was covered with a napkin, and contained sweetmeats which he told me are peculiar to Nikko.

Seeing that we were helpless with the language, he bowed low and left us to our bath and to a survey of our new quarters. We were tired, sick, miserable, weary travelers, having gone through a shipwreck of heat and fatigue, but there was a fascination in feeling that this baby-house was ours, that it was typical, that on entering we left our shoes out on our own threshold and were walking on the soft clean mats, stocking-toed; that in a few minutes we should be stretched on these as on a bed, and that Kato would pour out our tea. Our lowest story, which has a veranda, can be divided so as to make a servant's room and a hall beyond. In an L behind stretches out a wash-room with a big dresser fixed to the wall, under which, through a trough, rolls a torrent from the waterfall; and, farther on, is the little square bath-room with one side all open to the floor, when the wooden screen is drawn, through which we get light and air, and through which the box containing burning charcoal is brought from the priest's house to heat our bath. We have a little staircase--just the width of our trunk--which leads sharply up to the veranda above, from which we step into A----'s room and then into mine; they are separated by movable screens, so that we can be about as private as if the division were a chalk line. But outside we have a wealth of moving wall: first the paper screens, which, when we wish, can separate us from the veranda; then, lastly, on its edge, the _amado_, or wooden sliding-doors, which are lying now in their corner box, but which later will be pulled out and linked together, and close the open house for the night.

Then, as we were about leaving, we solemnly placed a great ornamental revolver before the little god of Contentment who sits upon the Tokonoma--that mantelpiece which is at the level of my eye when I lie on the floor, and which is the Japanese ideal seat of honor, but never occupied. This revolver is left there to appease a Japanese conventional fear of robbers. We went down in the twilight to our friends, and had a very European supper, and sat on their veranda, looking through the trees toward the bridge, in a moonlight of mother-of-pearl; and we were so sleepy that I can only suppose we must have talked of home, and I can only remember our host clapping his hands for lanterns, and Kato leading us back, with the light held low, and the noise of the torrents running under the little stone bridges that we passed, and our taking off our shoes on our own door-step, and the thunder of the _amado_ as Kato rolled them out for the night.

[1] The usual etymology of Torii is bird-perch; from _Torĭ_, a bird.

[2] Rain-doors, outer wooden screens, which close the house at night, and roll in a groove.

THE SHRINES OF IYÉYASŬ AND IYÉMITSŬ IN THE HOLY MOUNTAIN OF NIKKO

July 25.

From where we are in the Holy Mountain, our first visit would be naturally to the shrine of the shogun Iyéyasŭ, whose extreme walls I see among the highest trees whenever I look from our balcony over our little waterfall.

Iyéyasŭ died in 1616, having fought, he said, ninety battles and eighteen times escaped death, having almost destroyed Christianity, and leaving his family established as rulers of Japan. In obedience to his dying wishes, his son and successor removed the body of his father from its resting-place in the south to this final tomb at Nikko. Here, in 1617, with complicated and mystic ceremonial, he was buried and deified.

If you have no work on Japan near by to refer to, _sub voce_ Iyéyasŭ, I can tell you, briefly, what he did or what he was, though I, too, have no books at my hand. He was a great man, a patient waiter upon opportunity, who at the end of the sixteenth century came upon the scene of a great civil war, then filled by two protagonists, the military ruler, Nobunaga, and his lieutenant, Hidéyoshi, who was to be known later as Taiko Sama. Their aim was to settle something more definitely, of course in their favor; and, in fact, the death of the former and the triumphant success of the latter, who succeeded him, went far toward disposing of many contending claims, and toward a crystallizing of the feudal system, which had grown of centuries of civil war. This is the moment that we see reflected in the annals of the first Christian missionaries, to whom the military chiefs of Japan were alternately kind or cruel.

When Hidéyoshi died he had grown to be the master of Japan; he had been made Regent of the Empire, as a title of honor, for he was that and more in reality; he had become one of the greatest of Oriental warriors, and had begun life as a groom, the son of a humble peasant. The name of Taiko (Great Gate) he took like other regents, on retiring nominally from office, but with the addition of Sama (Lord) it is applied to him alone in popular memory. Naturally, then, he believed in a possible dynasty originating in him. At his death he could see, as his greatest fear for the future of the young son to whom he wished to leave his power, this man Iyéyasŭ Tokugawa, lord now of many provinces, but who had begun humbly, and who had assisted him in breaking many enemies, receiving a reward with every success, and consolidating meanwhile his own smaller powers. The dying Taiko made complicated arrangements to secure the good-will of Iyéyasŭ, and also to prevent his encroachments. These arrangements, including and combining the agencies of numbers of princes and vassals, many of them newly Christianized, seem only the more certainly to have forced on a position in which Iyéyasŭ, with few allies, but with clear aims and interests, took the field against a larger number of princes, commanding more men, but not united in any intention as fixed as his was. These he defeated for once and all, on a great battlefield, Sékigahara, on some day in October in the year 1600. It was the greatest battle that Japan ever saw, and one of the bloodiest--remarkable for us because of the death of three of the Christian leaders against Iyéyasŭ, warriors distinguished before in many wars, who could not, being Christians, take their own lives in defeat, as their Japanese traditions of honor commanded. Hence the victor had them beheaded--a shameful death, and thereby heroic. These were almost his only immediate victims. Iyéyasŭ wisely forgave, when it paid, and merely weakened the beaten, increasing the possessions but not the powers of his adherents; and finally remained in undisputed power, with great titles from the Mikado, who, though poor in power, was still a dispenser of honors, for, as with the greater gods, the _victrix causa_ pleased.

Meanwhile the protection of the son of the great Taiko Sama, for which all this war had been supposed to grow, had not been effected, and even this one obstacle or reminder was to disappear from before Iyéyasŭ, but not for several years, and only just before his death.

He had, in Japanese custom, resigned his apparent power to his son, for behind him he could act more obscurely and with less friction. Then began the drama of the extinction of Christianity; slowly, for many reasons, not the least being that several Christian princes, with their vassals, had supported Iyéyasŭ in his struggle. And at length the son of Taiko Sama, Hidéyori, indirectly connected with the Christian side, fell before Iyéyasŭ. His strong castle at Osaka was said to have become a place of refuge for the persecuted and the discontented, even to the very Christians whom his father had cruelly persecuted.

Which was in the wrong and disturbed the waters, the wolf or the lamb, I do not know, but only that in June, 1615, the great castle was attacked by Iyéyasŭ and his son in as bloody a battle as was ever fought; and notwithstanding that for a moment victory hung in the balance, the Tokugawa Luck prevailed, the castle took fire, thousands perished, and Hidéyori and his mother disappeared.

Whether Iyéyasŭ was the author of the code of laws or rules at which he is supposed to have worked during these years of waiting, with the aid of learned scholars, to bequeath them to his descendants for the maintenance of the order of things he left, I do not know; nor perhaps was the information I once had about them at all accurate. They, or their spirit, however, served to guide the nation for the next two hundred and fifty years; that is to say, until the second Commodore Perry came to Japan, with the increased weight of an outside world much changed.

Meanwhile the great man died, leaving a great personal fame behind him, over and above the powers he could transmit. He was buried here, as I said. The place was chosen in 1616; at the end of the same year the buildings were begun, and in the beginning of the next year were partly completed. When the funeral procession arrived, in nineteen days from Iyéyasŭ's former resting-place, amid great ceremonies and religious rites, the title of "Supreme Highness, Lord of the East, Great Incarnation," was given to the hero and ruler and son of the small laird of Matsudaira.

While he was being thus deified the persecution of the Christians increased in violence, passing into a hideous delirium of cruelty; wiping out its victims, but unable to affect their courage. There can be apparently no exaggeration of the sufferings of the martyrs nor of the strength of mind shown by them--a courage and constancy ennobling to Japan.

Hidetada, the son of Iyéyasŭ, is buried at Yeddo (Tokio); but Iyémitsŭ, the grandson, has a temple and a tomb here in the forest, alongside of his grandfather's.

He succeeded to power in 1623, and lived and ruled some thirty years more with an energy worthy of Iyéyasŭ, and carried the system to completion. The laws known as the laws of Iyéyasŭ are sometimes made out to be his. These laws, based on the old feudal habits, and influenced and directed by the great Chinese doctrines of relationship and duties, are not laws as we think of law, nor were they to be published. They were to be kept secret for the use of the Tokugawa house; to serve as rules for conduct in using their power, so as to secure justice, which is in return to secure power, that exists for its own end in the mind of rulers. These laws, some of which are reflections, or moral maxims, or references to the great man's experience, made out a sort of criminal code,--the relations of the classes,--matters of rank and etiquette, and a mechanism of government. They asserted the supremacy, and at the same time destroyed the power, of the Mikado, and by strict rules of succession, residence, and continued possession bound up the feudal nobles. They reasserted the great individual virtues of filial piety and of feudal loyalty, and insisted on the traditions of military honor. "The sword" was to be "the soul of the Samurai,"[3] and with it these have carried the national honor and intelligence in its peculiar expressions.

Full recognition was given to the teaching, "Thou shalt not lie beneath the same sky, nor tread on the same earth, with the murderer of thy lord." The rights of the avenger of blood were admitted, even though he should pay the penalty of his life.

Suicide, which had long been a Japanese development of chivalrous feeling and military honor, was still to be regarded as purifying of all stain, and, for the first time, allowed in mitigation of the death penalty.

Indeed, half a century later, the forty-seven Ronin ("wave-people"--Samurai who had lost their natural lord and their rights) were to die in glorious suicide, carrying out the feudal idea of fidelity.