Part 6

As our jinrikishas drew up before one of these, we saw a pretty, modern building of two stories, adorned as usual with paper lanterns. At intervals, on the edge of every balcony, were tall, rectangular boxes reaching from floor to ceiling. These upright cases contain wooden shutters, about as large as the leaves of a dining-table, which are at night taken out, and pushed along in grooves, to make an outside wall for the entire house. When that is done, each balcony of course becomes an inside corridor. Thus every Japanese dwelling consists, as it were, of two houses, one within the other, enclosed in separate cases,--the inside one of paper, the outer one of wood. As we alighted here, the landlord and his servants hurried out to greet us, dropped on their knees, and, with their hands spread out, palms downward, and their foreheads almost touching the floor, they bowed repeatedly, like the "three little maids from school." What a contrast was here between the Orient and the Occident. Imagine a hotel clerk in America down upon his knees! In our hotels the traveler's first duty is to register his name. Here there is something even more important to attend to, namely, removing his shoes. Off they must come before he steps upon the delicate mattings and the glistening floor, just as with us a muddy overshoe would not be tolerated on a parlor carpet. In fact, on entering the hall, one sees what in America would be called a hat-rack, but which is here designed for holding shoes.

The tourist, therefore, should invariably carry with him in Japan a pair of soft, felt slippers, for otherwise he will be frequently obliged to walk about in hotels, shops, and temples, with merely stockings on his feet.

In nearly all Japanese dwellings one usually finds, hung in conspicuous places, some handsomely framed mottoes and proverbs, much as in many of our own country houses we read upon the walls such a comforting assurance as "The Lord will provide," or the melancholy conundrum "What is home without a mother?" To Occidental eyes, Japanese ideographs do not appear beautiful. They look like the meanderings of intoxicated flies that have been immersed in ink. As for their meaning, one motto was translated to us as signifying: "May Buddha bless this house!" Others were words of praise which princely visitors had left; while not a few were epigrams or proverbs, for which the Japanese are famous. Some of them ran as follows: "The absent get farther away every day;" "Clever preacher, short sermon;" "A woman's tongue three inches long can kill a man six feet high;" "Live under your own hat;" "Don't make a long call when the husband is not at home." And yet we send missionaries to Japan!

With many bows and smiles the landlord of the tea-house led the way up a flight of exquisitely polished stairs, and showed us our apartments. We looked around us with astonishment, for no furniture was visible. The floor, it is true, was covered with fine matting, but, with that one exception, the rooms, which opened into each other, were as bare as an unfurnished flat. Their number and extent depended largely on ourselves. Did we desire an entire story? We had but to push back the paper screens, and it was ours. Did we insist on having separate rooms? Close up the little screens again, and each could sleep in his own paper box, exactly twelve feet square. Unfortunately there are no locks upon these paper screens; hence, just as one is getting out of bed in the morning, the whole side of his room will sometimes disappear with the rapidity of a liberated Holland shade! Moreover, Japanese servants, urged by curiosity, will often poke a moistened finger through a square of paper, to study foreign toilettes at their leisure. During the daytime, in the summer, even the screens are removed, to give free access to the breeze, and the house then becomes the empty skeleton of its former self.

But what most puzzled us at first was where to hang our clothes. There were no hooks upon the walls, there was not even a table for our toilet articles. It seemed too bad to put our coats and hair-brushes on the floor. But one must recollect that Japanese floors are not like ours, since no boots ever touch them. For native guests a beautiful, square, lacquered box is usually provided, in which they lay the carefully folded robes which they remove before retiring. To us, however, no limited receptacle like that was given. We had the unrestricted floor.

The beds in which we slept afforded us the most amusement. When bedtime comes in Japanese homes, quilts are brought out from a closet and spread upon the floor. Within five minutes all is ready for the night, and with the morning light they disappear again. Occasionally, in the larger tea-houses, we, as foreigners, had special luxuries,--such as cotton sheets, a couch of seven comforters, instead of the usual two, and, for a bolster, an extra quilt rolled up as with a shawl-strap. Thus altogether, including what we used for coverings, our most luxurious couches in Japan consisted of from ten to a dozen comforters.

We found some difficulty in getting sufficient sleep in Japanese tea-houses; not from the composition and arrangement of our beds, but from the noise about us, which seldom ceased before the hour of midnight, and always woke us with the dawn. Even our "summer hotels," with their distressingly thin partitions, are delightfully tranquil compared with the country inns of Japan. For sliding screens of paper are practically no barrier at all to sound, and, as if that were not sufficiently aggravating, these paper walls rarely reach the top of the room, but leave a ventilating space of a foot or two, through which the mingled snoring, prayers, and conversation of the guests, and the matutinal clatter of the servants, roll and reverberate like distant thunder.

The morning after my arrival, I pushed aside a screen with my forefinger, and lo! half of my room stood open to the rising sun. Descending to the courtyard, I beheld a Japanese servant hurrying toward me on her wooden clogs, to give me tea.

What shall be said of these attractive little waitresses, who make the dullest tea-house gay with laughter, brighten the darkest day with brilliant colors, and sweeten every tea-cup with a smile? They are not usually beautiful, or even womanly, in the sense of being dignified. They rather seem like well-developed school-girls, just sobered down enough to wear long dresses, but perfectly unable to refrain at times from screams of merriment. Yet search the world through, and where will you find servants such as these? From the first moment when they fall upon their knees and bow their foreheads to the floor, till the last instant, when they troop around the door to call to you their musical word for farewell,--"_Sayonara_,"--they seem to be the daintiest, happiest, and most obliging specimens of humanity that walk the earth.

We were particularly pleased with one agreeable trait of all these Japanese girls--their exquisitely clean and well-shaped hands. One would, of course, expect them to be small, for delicate frames are a characteristic of the race, but almost without exception the hands of all the waitresses who served us in Japan looked as if they had just emerged from a hot bath, and had been manicured besides. "A trifle," some would say, but, after all, such trifles help to make perfection. When one has traveled through a country for two months, and from one end of it to the other has seen pretty, well-kept hands extended to him fifty times a day, he feels respect and admiration for a race so neat and delicate to their finger-tips. The Japanese, according to our Occidental standard, may not have much godliness, but they possess what comes next to it--personal cleanliness. And I am sure that, at any time, I would rather associate with a nice, wholesome sinner than with an uncleanly saint!

It was while we were taking our breakfast here, that we beheld, in a neighboring room, a lady being served with tea by her domestic, who was approaching her mistress on her knees. Nothing amazed us more than this, for in the United States these positions are usually reversed. In free America it is the lady who, figuratively speaking, has to "go down on her knees" before her cook. When we consider the serious drawbacks to domestic happiness and comfort, occasioned by the insolence and inefficiency of servants in America, who, as a rule, are better lodged, clothed, and fed than any other class of laborers in the world, one questions if in this, and many other respects, Japan will be improved by contact with the Occident.

What Moscow is to the Russians, Kioto is to the Japanese, their present capital, Tokio, corresponding rather to St. Petersburg. Kioto is the ancient capital,--the sacred city of the empire,--hallowed by countless shrines and endeared by centuries of classic memories. It was for a thousand years the home of the Mikado, and is still the centre of old Japanese art. Here also, till the revolution of 1869, lived many nobles of the highest rank, together with distinguished poets, priests, and artists. Its name, Kioto, denotes the City of Peace, and its best citizens were thought to be the most refined and polished of a race whose gentle manners are still unsurpassed.

Our hotel in Kioto was unlike the inns of other Japanese cities, being neither a European structure, like the hotels at Tokio and Yokohama, nor yet a tea-house, such as we had lately seen. It was a compromise between the two, with comfortable rooms and foreign furnishings. Its situation is far above the city, upon a wooded hill that has been sacred to Buddha for a thousand years. Around it are old temples, monasteries, and pagodas, among which one can walk in shaded paths the livelong day. Often, while seated on the spacious hotel balcony which overlooks the town, we heard a strangely fascinating sound rolling toward us through the sacred groves in solemn, silvery vibrations. We discovered after a short walk the cause of this. It was a huge bronze bell,--no less than seventy-four tons in weight,--whose sweet-voiced call to prayer has echoed over this hill for nearly three hundred years. There are few sounds more pleasing to the ear than the vibrations of a distant, deep-toned bell. Except in Russia I had never heard such notes as those that issue from the bells of old Japan. Their solemn strokes swell through the forest like the crescendo of an orchestra. These bells, however, are not rung, like ours, by wrenching them from side to side, until a pendant tongue falls sharply on their inner rim. Ah, no! the Japanese treat them far more cleverly. Suspended from the belfry roof is a large, rounded shaft of wood, attendant swings this to one side, and lets it fall, to strike the inverted bowl of bronze one mighty blow. The difference in sound produced by using wood instead of metal, is astonishing. There is no grating jar, no sharpness in the tone, but one stupendous boom of sound, as though a musical cannon were discharged. This instantly resolves itself into slow-moving, ever widening circles of reverberation, which fall upon the ear more and more faintly, till they die away like the last murmur of the surf upon the sand.

Accepting the invitation which that bell conveyed to us, we strolled toward one of Kioto's many temples. In the one we entered, five bells, with long white cords attached, were hanging in the lacquered porch. The worshiper pulls one of these, to call the attention of the god; then, having said a prayer, he drops a coin into a grated box and goes his way. On one occasion, we saw a pretty baby, three months old, brought hither in its mother's arms, and made to pull the bell-rope with its tiny hand. Then the great-grand-mother of the child, herself almost eighty-six years old, advanced with trembling limbs and rang it for the second time. It was a suggestive picture,--this vision of old age and infancy, like opposite poles of an electric battery, completing here a circuit of four generations; pathetic emblems of the past and future,--the smiling infant looking forward to anticipated blessings, the feeble matron thankful for the gifts received.

The Japanese have really two religions, in some respects rivals of each other. The elder, or original faith, is Shintoism; the younger, which has struggled to supplant it for twelve hundred years, is Buddhism.

It is difficult to comprehend exactly what Shintoism is. The name means, literally, "The way of the gods," but it is the vaguest known religion. It has no bible, no dogmas, and not even a moral code. It dimly hints at immortality, but has no definite heaven or hell. Its gods, are either deified national heroes or else personifications of nature, such as the glorious sun, the all-surrounding ocean, and the innumerable deities of mountains, rivers, rocks, and trees. Its shrines for worship, with their gray stone lanterns and majestic _torii_, are severely plain, its services extremely simple, and all its priests appear like laymen in the streets, donning their clerical robes only when they officiate in the temples.

Not so the Buddhist priests. Their costume, like their ritual, is imposing. While Shinto priests may marry, the Buddhists take the vow of celibacy. In fact, though wholly different in its creed from the great Roman Catholic communion, some of the ceremonials of Buddhism remind us of it; such as their richly-mantled priests, their altars bright with candles and adorned with flowers, their clouds of incense, grand processionals, and statues of the gods and saints. What wonder, then, since it has such attractions, that this religion, when it came hither from India, about six centuries after Christ, achieved at once a remarkable success? The colder Shinto faith lost ground, and even the Mikados gave to Buddha's doctrines favor and support for centuries; but Shintoism has now once more become the state religion.

The furnishings of the Buddhist temples in Japan are often marvels of artistic beauty, comprising tables, columns, doors, and even floors, composed of ruby red or jet-black lacquer, which is so thick and smooth as to produce the effect of rosewood or solid ebony. Here, too, are altars loaded down with ornaments of gold and bronze, silken screens inscribed with sacred characters, exquisite bronze lanterns, incense-burners, gilded gongs, tall lotus-flowers with leaves of gold, and beautiful lacquered boxes placed on stands about the floor, within which are the precious manuscripts of Buddhist scriptures. In a word, recall the richest specimens of Japanese art that you have ever seen, and know that with such adornment the finest temples in Japan are filled.

In some of the less important Buddhist shrines, however, "all that glitters is not gold." Some temples are repulsive from their shabby ornaments, hideous idols, and gaudy paper lanterns. Some of their deities are enthroned behind a wooden grating, and worshipers tie to the latter a bit of cloth on which has been inscribed a petition. One such deity, we were assured, has for his special function the assisting of women to obtain good husbands. He is immensely popular. We saw, in half an hour, at least a dozen women knock on the grating to rouse him and entreat his services. One old woman, who evidently knew from experience how rare good husbands are, led two of her daughters to the gate, and pounded on it savagely three times. Yet even in that temple we found a proof of how the western world has invaded the customs of Japan; for here, amid the grotesque deities, was hung an eight-day clock, which proved on examination to have come from Ansonia, Connecticut!

A singular feature of many of these Buddhist temples is a line of votive tablets, erected by pious souls, who wished either to show by means of pictures the dangers from which God had rescued them, or else to certify, in written words, to miraculous answers to their prayers. The Buddhist religion, however, despite its age and its indubitable hold upon the people, is not to-day, as we have said, the official religion of Japan. Since 1869 the Government has favored Shintoism, and many Buddhist temples have been stripped of their magnificent decorations and dedicated to the Shinto faith.

Accordingly, the contributions that once came freely from the people are now falling off, and it is difficult to keep in good repair the costly lacquer-work and gilding of the temples. Some shrines already look shabby and neglected. However, an occasional exception to this rule shows how dangerous it is to make unqualified statements about Japan.

In Kioto, for example, we found a most astonishing proof of the vitality of Japanese Buddhism in the new and splendid temple of Higashi Hongwanji, which at the time of our visit was in process of construction. We saw it on the occasion of a special festival, when popular recognition and acclaim were manifested in profuse and elaborate decorations. But, the truth is, the temple is continually receiving the support of untold thousands of the Japanese. All the surrounding provinces have given it, not only money, but timber, metals, and stone, besides the transportation of materials free of cost. It seems as if conservative and faithful Buddhists, indignant at the prevalent idea that their religion is declining, were making this stupendous effort to show the world their strength and their devotion.

One object in this shrine especially impressed us. This was a pile of rope,--each strand as long and large as a ship's cable,--made of women's hair, twisted and spliced with hemp! These ropes are the offerings of poor but devout women, thousands of whom, in nine Japanese provinces, having nothing else to give, contributed their hair, to be woven into cables for hoisting beams and tiles in the construction of the temple. One rope, two hundred and fifty feet in length, was the gift of three thousand five hundred women in one province alone. This seems at first, perhaps, a trifling thing; but when one recollects the pride which Japanese women take in their abundant hair, the care they show in its arrangement, and the entire absence in Japan of hats or bonnets to conceal the sacrifice, their action is remarkable. And when we perceived among the usual black strands occasional streaks of white and gray, proving that this enthusiasm extended from youth to age, it seemed to us the most touching proof of popular devotion to a sacred cause that we had ever seen.

We witnessed a number of _matsuris_, or religious festivals in Japan, when all the principal streets were thronged with people, and even the house-tops held their private box-parties. On every such occasion there would appear, in the centre of the thoroughfare, an object that never failed to fill us with amazement. Think of a hundred men pulling madly on two ropes, and drawing thus a kind of car, mounted on two enormous wooden wheels. Resting on this, and rising far above the neighboring roofs, imagine a portable shrine, resembling a pagoda, with roof of gold, and gorgeously decorated with silken tapestries, which are so richly embroidered and heavily gilded as to be valued at many thousands of dollars. This structure had two stories, on each of which were many life-size figures,--some being actual men and women, while others were mere painted statues, hideous and grotesque. Behind this came another car, shaped like a huge bird with crested head. Upon this second vehicle also stood an edifice, three stories high, resplendent 'with magnificent tapestries and gilded ornaments, and bearing statues of old Japanese deities, so laughably grotesque, that had not their surroundings been so rich the whole procession would have seemed a farce. Some of these statues, which were made to open their mouths and wag their heads like puppets, were especially applauded. Men, women, and children rode upon these cars, blowing horns and beating drums. If we had closed our eyes, we might have thought that we were listening to a Fourth of July parade of the "Antiques and Horribles." What most impressed us was the absence of what we should consider religious feeling. It was a show, a brilliant pageant--nothing more; though, as such, it was heartily enjoyed by thousands.

The streets in Kioto, like those of most Japanese cities, are usually much alike. No heavy teams disturb their rounded surfaces. Few vehicles, save light jinrikishas, pass over them. Almost no animals are ever seen in them. They are as clean as sidewalks are with us. In most of them we can perceive some groups or individuals, arrayed in varied colors, moving about like brilliant fragments in a long kaleidoscope. On either side extends a line of little houses, which, in point of architectural effect, appear monotonous, but since their lower stories are all open to the street, and from the fact that most of them are shops with all their goods on exhibition two feet from the thoroughfare, they really offer infinite variety.

Approaching one of these shops, one first encounters a wooden platform, two feet from the ground. On this the Japanese purchaser usually seats himself, as he prepares to bargain. Most foreigners, however, being unable to fold comfortably their limbs beneath them for a cushion, assume a different attitude, and allow their feet to hang over the side. If they ascend the platform and really enter the shop, they are supposed to leave their shoes below, and walk in stocking feet; for the shops of the Japanese are, like their houses, paved with polished wood or covered with spotless matting. The goods displayed by no means constitute the merchant's entire stock. The choicest articles are often in a fire-proof store-house, close at hand, and can be sent for at a moment's notice. As for the contents of these street bazaars, they comprise every article of clothing, ornament, and furniture conceivable by the Japanese mind.