Part 30

Japan was undoubtedly a man’s country. Wherever we went, Grant was Exhibit A. He was a tall, dark, rather gawky youth, with adolescent manners but always cheerful. In private houses butlers and maids paid him much attention, and, in hotels, as soon as we entered the dining room everybody, because he was a man child, rushed to anticipate his wishes, to see that he was made comfortable. I straggled on behind. At our first appearance in one of these, the little girls who were being trained as waitresses and whose duty it was to bow the guests in and out were obviously confused. When we were seated at the table the proprietor apologized, “You must excuse them because they are so young, and they have their minds too much on this young gentleman.”

The Yoshiwara, to which some missionaries escorted me, was certainly an integral part of this man’s world. First we visited the unlicensed quarter, winding in our rickshas among alley-like streets lined with small houses. The dark eyes of the girls peered out through slits in the screen walls. Working men were standing in the muddy roadways, chattering, scrutinizing the prices which were posted in front like restaurant menus—so much per hour, so much per night. A door opened to admit a visitor. The light in the lower story vanished and soon another twinkled upstairs; or a light went out above and reappeared below, the door opened again and a figure emerged. Hundreds of lights behind paper windows seemed to flicker on and off constantly, low to high, high to low. The sordidness, the innumerable, shining eyes made me shiver involuntarily.

After we crossed a bridge to the licensed quarter the scene changed immediately. The wide thoroughfare, with a row of trees down the center festooned with electric globes like a midway, was clean and inviting. The amply-built houses had an air of spaciousness and luxury, their lanterns sent out a soft, alluring gleam, and carefully cultivated gardens produced a profusion of flowers in the courtyards. This part of the Yoshiwara appeared a delightful place. Its attraction for the girls was obvious; they would rather seek a livelihood in this fashion than in the dismal factories. Nor was it odd that they should find more romance here with many men than drudging for one all their days as the “incompetents” they became after marriage under the domination of their mothers-in-law.

Through portals as broad as driveways the patrons, much better dressed than those in the unlicensed quarter, strolled up to view the photographs of the inmates, posted like those in the lobby of a Broadway theater. In some frames was only the announcement, “—— just arrived, straight from ——. No time for picture.” The clients did a great deal of “window shopping.” Newcomers from the country might have eight or nine visitors an evening, an older one but two or three. Many of the girls came from good families, frequently to lift their fathers or brothers out of debt. They sent their earnings back and, as soon as they had accumulated a sufficiency, often went home, married, and became reputable members of society.

But in spite of the Yoshiwara’s artificial glamour, the crowd of men swarming like insects, automatically reacting to the stimulus of instinct, was unutterably depressing.

We walked home at midnight through the sleeping city, mysterious and quiet, not like a city at all—no jumping signs or illumination, but more like a nice, low-ceilinged room trimmed with old, brown-stained oak, and only here and there a glow.

Nothing else in my travels could compare with that month in Tokyo. The language was strange and unfamiliar. The bells in the shafts of the rickshas, ringing for pedestrians to get out of the way, added a bizarre note. The queer, clicking sound of the wooden geta was different although somewhat reminiscent of the clop, clop, of the Lancashire wooden shoes, which also were taken off at the door and exchanged for slippers. All the smells and the sights were quite new, even the signs on the shops were unreadable. In Europe, you could usually guess from some root word what kind of merchandise was for sale within. But not so in Japan. One day I stopped, totally puzzled, to inquire the whereabouts of a store the address of which had been written down for me. I showed my slip of paper but nobody there could help me. I went on. Fully three minutes later the pattering of hurried steps behind me caused me to turn. Here was one of the clerks. He had gone to the trouble of looking up the address I had asked for and had come to act as guide to make sure I arrived.

Throughout Japan the custom of greeting you and seeing you off was touching, and gave you a charming remembrance of a world where friendships were worth time and consideration. When a Tokyo doctor heard I was leaving Yokohama eighteen miles away at eight o’clock in the morning, he presented himself at seven to bring me a box of choice silk handkerchiefs. He must have risen at five to do so.

From the window of the train for Kyoto the faces of the old men trudging along the road looked curiously like the drawings of them. Everywhere were small village houses and, since I could see through from front to rear, I wondered where the peasants and their numerous offspring ate and slept.

The former capital was fascinating. The shopkeepers appeared to esteem their visitors more highly than the goods they had to sell, though Kyoto blue and, more especially, Kyoto red were like no other colors anywhere. If ever you see the latter, buy it if you can, cherish it among your treasures, save it for your children, because it is the most beautiful of all reds.

It was now April, the festival of spring and of the geishas, the jealously guarded and chaperoned entertainers, singers, players. Everybody was anticipating the flowering of the cherry trees, and with the rest of Kyoto I went to see the enormous, spreading, willow cherry, then in dazzling white blossom. It was several hundred years old, its limbs which grew out and drooped towards the ground were propped up with care, and around it was a superbly groomed landscape garden. The proprietors of hotels near such trees erected unpretentious tea houses, temporary in character, where hundreds of people kept vigil. You could not help having respect for a people whose love of a tree brought them from miles away and who waited day and night throughout the duration of its brief blooming. They paid deference to it as they did to a great artist who they knew could live just so long.

The Japanese designed their gardens with the mood of the individual in mind. Some were filled with music, water, birds, activity, and there you could go to be cheered when gloomy and despondent. As soon as I entered the Golden Temple grounds its influence fell upon me. Everything was planned for thought and concentration. No color, no noise, no rushing of water, no singing birds distracted the attention. Only at certain hours could you even walk about, because movement was disturbing to meditation.

Japanese hospitality reached its finest flower in Kyoto, and the supreme day of entertainment was offered by a generous and considerate doctor. On inviting me to luncheon he said he would call with his car at ten in the morning. This seemed a bit early, but it appeared he wanted me first to visit the Museum of Art. Here was no wandering through miles of rooms so that the eye was wearied and no lasting impression was gathered. Instead, I was shown only the one most prized specimen of paintings, porcelains, and rare screens. Afterwards, I was ushered into the library to see a collection of precious manuscripts, then back through the city for a few especially renowned views, and finally at noon to the doctor’s home. His wife and two daughters greeted me and I was introduced to the guests. Little short-legged trays were put before our floor cushions, and we all picked up our chopsticks. I envied Grant his dexterity.

After the trays had been removed, we conversed until the business men had to return to their offices. But a fresh group of guests took their places, and with them appeared a painter. An easel was set up and each of us in turn made a single brush line on the rice paper—some straight, some curved, some vertical, some horizontal, crisscrossing each other in every direction. Then the artist took his brush and, amid exclamations of wonder and appreciation, with a few expert strokes converted the mélange into a flower pattern, a lake, or a mountain.

An hour or so of this pleasure and the easel was swished away, the painter vanished with his colors, and a sculptor was substituted. We were now supplied with dabs of clay which we began to mold, the sculptor going from one to another to give assistance. If you were clever, as several of the Japanese were, works of art resulted. I created a plain jug with handle and lip, was taught how to draw a design upon it and how to paint it. Next day it was delivered to me, baked and glazed.

Later we were escorted to the garden where we congregated beneath an open tea house perched high on a rock. There the younger daughter tended a tiny fire and brewed a ceremonial tea—no simple brew, but leaves of a special sort, beaten until the beverage was bright green. When we had enjoyed this delight we strolled about, admiring the brooklets, the dwarf pines, the shrubs, the iris in bloom.

We returned to the house to find, as though in a play, that the scenery had all been changed. Different screens were up, fresh flowers in the vases, the women of the household in more elaborate costumes, and new visitors waiting. Grant and I alone seemed to remain static.

Now on the immaculate matted floor appeared little charcoal stoves. The evening meal was served by the mother and daughters as a marked honor to their guests. This time I was brought a spoon and fork; apparently I had not been very deft at lunch in handling my chopsticks. After dinner came yet more people and yet more conversation. I had been talking steadily since early morning, the topic being selected according to the type of gathering. In the evening it was population, and more serious. Sometimes I forgot myself and spun out involved English phrases, then, realizing they had missed fire, had to go back and choose key words more easily comprehended.

This continued until midnight or later. At last we had to excuse ourselves and ask to be taken home, because we were leaving for Kobe the next morning.

The doctor and his wife, accompanied by some of their friends, were at our hotel betimes, all with boxes and bon voyages. This reversal of the Occidental custom of bestowing presents on one’s host or hostess was an enchanting way of conducting the amenities of life. They wanted no return for their hospitality. I had arrived in Japan with one small trunk and departed with five, laden with gifts.

_Chapter Twenty-seven_

ANCIENTS OF THE EARTH

New and different places, strange countries, peoples, and faces have always appealed to me. I did not have to be in London for the Fifth International Conference until July. When I had secured my Chinese visa it had occurred to me that it might be much better to go on around the world than retrace my steps.

On a misty day, the sun not bright enough to clear the sky completely, we sailed from Kobe through the glorious Inland Sea, threaded its innumerable islets, like the Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence, only more delicate. The boat was small and out-of-date. A few of the English had chairs but Grant and I wandered between crates of ducks, chickens, and livestock, and hundreds of Japanese squatting stolidly on the deck. When we emerged into the Yellow Sea it became very foggy and Grant was sick to his toes. I put on a brave face and ate, though with long teeth, as the old phrase goes.

We landed at Fusan one evening. Koreans stood about in their white robes which fell to their ankles, pale figures outlined against the night in the subdued light of their mysterious paper lanterns. The next morning as I glanced out over the countryside on the way to Seoul it appeared an Oriental desert, odd but seemingly familiar. I felt at home within its gates. White-robed coolies smoking long thin pipes with minute bowls drove oxen, worked in the fields. They had North American Indian faces, uncut, ragged hair, reddish skins, and curious, wooden structures strapped to their backs to carry burdens of any kind—soil, coal, rocks.

The streets of Seoul were broad, dimly lit. The tall Korean men were unique, a combination of priest, patriarch, and grandee, so formal and elegant with their pointed beards a trifle larger than Van Dykes. They were utterly indifferent to other people, managing to preserve a proud and aloof air in spite of their idiotic, silly-looking hats, dinky-crowned and wide-brimmed, from which hung strings of amber beads, valuable family heirlooms.

I wondered again at the universal white costumes. Everywhere on the banks of rivers women were eternally pounding laundry; you could almost feel the threads parting company with the terrific beating—washing with stones and ironing with sticks.

The Korean was held in contempt by the Japanese, who declared his Government had built schools, roads, railroads, brought cleanliness. It was true that the houses of the Koreans were not so well-kept, their habits not so sanitary, but they were a separate race, and they accepted scouring and scrubbing and sweeping only under pressure. Hatred and rebellion had been the result of denying them their language and customs. They claimed they were taxed out of existence to pay for such luxuries, and nourished antagonism and stubborn resistance against anything Japanese. They maintained further that they had no personal liberty, even being required to have passports to move about in their own country.

Koreans also resented the speeding up of production in the silk factories through the exploitation of little girls. I saw them there, shoulders bent, crouched up over their work, hair braided down their backs; they were almost like babies. Their job was to put their tender, delicate fingers into boiling water to pull out the silk cocoons—the hands of older people were not sensitive enough. But the Japanese said they did not feel the pain.

Even though I had a large luncheon meeting attended by foreign missionaries and officials, Korea was but a stepping stone to China. The Celestial Kingdom had an indefinable odor of its own, peculiar and inimitable, which waxed and waned, varying with each city and with each district of a city. It might be a compound of sauces, onions, garlic, incense, opium, and charcoal, but who has ever succeeded in putting an odor into words? It marched upon you, at first faintly and indistinctly like a distant army, and then closed in relentlessly, associating itself with memories, making you gasp in protest or pleasure.

At Peking I wanted to change into fresh clothes all the time. I was haunted by dust—dust in my body, in my ears, up my nose, down my throat, between my teeth. Some of the streets were paved, but the dust was suffocating. After every sight-seeing sortie I bathed and bathed and bathed in a desperate effort to rid myself of the diabolical dust.

We were seven days viewing palaces, native quarters, night life, sing-song girls, hospitals, factories, silk mills. We heard the mechanical chanting and beating of drums by Buddhist priests, mostly young boys dressed in soiled yellow robes; gazed with amazement at the funeral processions—great floats, fantastic gods, food, flowers, possessions; visited old Chinese gardens and museums. I shopped for jade and lapis lazuli and was well cheated.

Beggars, many of them crippled and on crutches, were hobbling along in the gutters or sitting on corners, gaunt and filthy. Children were turning handsprings, doing anything to attract your attention; they edged beside you, and you had the feeling they had been born with palms upward.

You could not set foot out of doors without being besieged by ricksha boys clothed only in scant, cotton trousers and jackets, always short at ankles and wrists. The moment you stepped in they picked up the shafts of their little vehicles and began the dogtrot journey. I could not become accustomed to the eager running of these half-naked creatures, so weak, so underfed, so much less able than the rest of us. It had been bad enough in Japan, but there you felt the runners were sturdy; in China they usually were suffering from varicose veins, heart disease, and, forever, hunger. Often, as the wind blew some of the rags and tatters aside, I saw pock marks and wondered how close we were to the manifold diseases of the Orient.

I was going about a good deal and it worried me to be pulled around by a human being so emaciated. One morning our regular boy was missing. Another replaced him, cheery and smiling. Three days later the first returned. He had been sick, he said; he had had smallpox. The scabs had not yet peeled off.

I spoke to the doorman at the hotel, who managed the rickshas. “This boy is not well enough to work.”

“Oh, yes, he’s used to it. He feels a little bad, but he’s all right.”

Nevertheless, I sent him home to rest up. Nothing save famine and pestilence and plague seemed to give the Chinese any breathing spell. It was said the average ricksha coolie lasted but four or five years—the remainder of his life he merely subsisted. I was submerged in a strange despondency and questioned “the oldest civilization in the world” which still, after so many thousand years, permitted this barbarism.

Grant rode a donkey when we went to the Ming tombs, and the guide did also. I was carried in a chair for miles and miles through an arid, dusty plain. Two coolies held the lengthy bamboo poles on their shoulders and a third jogged alongside waiting to take his turn. I felt so sorry for them I wanted to get out and walk. I wished I could carry myself. All the way these poor, starved creatures made animal noises, “Aah-huh, aah-huh,” nasal, interminable, varying the tone but slightly; even their words sounded like grunts to me.

China was not yet past the story-telling age, as you saw in the theater, where someone recited the news from the stage; for a copper anybody could hear what was going on in the world. The ancient classical forms of the Chinese language were intelligible to scholars alone, and Dr. Hu-Shih had been instrumental in devising a literary vernacular which the people could use. This philosopher who at three years old had been familiar with eight hundred characters, now in 1922, while only in his late twenties, was already reputed to be the initiator of the Chinese Renaissance. He asked whether I would speak to the students of the Peking National University and, though he was to act as chairman, volunteered also to interpret, which I esteemed an almost unheard-of honor. His outlook, coinciding with mine, recognized what birth control might mean for civilization.

Dr. Tsai Yuen-Pei, the Chancellor of the University and a leader of the anti-Christian movement, had gathered into his fold the most brilliant students of Young China, all of them bubbling over with interest at Western ideas, which were sweeping the globe. A great turmoil was going on in their lives and a revolt against rigid Chinese tradition.

Due to the translation difficulties I had encountered in Japan, I had decided I could not afford to speak in China unless I went over the subject first with my interpreter and knew he understood the spirit as well as the words. Therefore I showed Dr. Hu-Shih my lecture material in advance. He suggested, “These students will want to know everything about contraception as it is practiced.”

“But I’ve never given that except at medical meetings.”

“China is different from the West. Here you may discuss contraception as an educational fact as well as a social measure. You will be listened to respectfully, laughed at if you do not, and will surely be asked for definite information. I think you should prepare yourself for this.”

It was not simple to digress from principles and theories and go into methods that needed diagrams and technical knowledge to secure understanding, and I felt diffident about following his advice. But these young people, responsive and alert, received my first practical lecture with earnest attention. Dr. Hu-Shih translated accurately and quickly, interjecting amusing stories and improving, I imagine, upon my own words.

Afterwards he and I were escorted across the campus to the home of Dr. Tsai. I have always been interested in foreign foods. I like to try them out, and have brought home dozens of Hawaiian, Chinese, Indian, Japanese recipes which can be made at home. This dinner was an Arabian Nights experience. It began at seven and lasted until one in the morning—bird’s-nest and quail egg soup, fried garoupa, ducks’ tongues and snow fungus, roast pheasant, rice and congee, lotus nuts and pastry, sharks’ fins, and various kinds of wine.

There must have been well over thirty guests invited for the evening, among them an American woman, Mrs. Grover Clark, whose husband was on the faculty of the University. Some of the students had been to her between the lecture and dinner time and given her the transcribed notes which they had taken down in shorthand. Would she correct them? They wanted to get the information published. When they came to the Chancellor’s home to call for them so that they could deliver them to the press, I could see at a glance that this was not at all what I desired to leave behind me; my spoken words never sound adequate or complete in print. Therefore, I sent a boy to the hotel for a copy of the old stand-by, _Family Limitation_. The students set to work at once to translate it. Mrs. Clark offered to pay the expenses, and the next afternoon five thousand copies were ready for circulation.

This little incident was significant of Young China; an idea to them was useless if only in the head. Their motto was to put it into concrete reality.

Symptomatic also of new China was the abandonment of bound feet, although women of advanced years still were to be seen leaning on each other for support as they tottered by. Amahs were carrying nurselings about when they themselves seemed scarcely able to stand up. However, I was glad to see only a few of the small children had these lily feet. Fathers realized their daughters could not earn a living if thus deformed. At the Peking Union Medical College, combining the modern equipment of the Occident with the artistry and traditions of the Orient, no girl was accepted for training unless her feet were normal.

One day Dr. Hu-Shih asked me to lunch in an old Manchu restaurant where his friends were accustomed to gather and ponder. Many were business or professional men, but all, with their little beards and intellectual faces, had the appearance of professors. It was an unusual combination of Wall Street and university. In our private dining room were seven English-speaking Chinese with families of from four to nine children. Each said the later ones had not been wanted; nevertheless they had come.

The conversation took a scientific turn. Since man had through breeding brought about such changes in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, why could he not produce a class of human beings unable to procreate? Was there any reason why the particular biological factors that made the mule sterile could not be applied further? They discussed the interesting possibility of creating a neuter gender such as the workers in a beehive or ant hill.