Chapter 5
I was not to see Fujiyama again for a week or so, but in the meanwhile I saw the Daibutsu, the giant figure of Buddha, at Kamakura, in all its bland placidity. These were the only big things I found in Japan.
TWO FUNERALS
Yokohama is industrial and dirty everywhere but on the drive beside the harbour, and on the Bluff, where the rich foreigners live. I visited one house on this pleasant eminence and there was nothing in it to suggest that it was in Japan any more than in, say, Cheltenham. The form was English, the furniture was English, the pictures and books were English; photographs of school and college cricket elevens gave it the final home touch. Only in the garden were there exotic indications. The English certainly have the knack of carrying their atmosphere with them. I had noticed that often in India; but this Yokohama villa was the completest exemplification.
Wandering about the city I came one morning on a funeral procession that ought to have pleased Henry Ward Beecher, who, on the only occasion on which I heard him, when he was very old and I was very young, urged upon his hearers the importance of bright colours and flowers instead of the ordinary habiliments and accoutrements of woe. For when a soul is on its way to paradise, he said, we should be glad. The Yokohama cortege was headed by men bearing banners; then came girls all in white, riding in rickshaws; then the gaudy hearse; then priests in rickshaws; and finally the relations and friends. The effect conveyed was not one of melancholy; but even if every one had been in black, impressiveness would have been wanting, for no one can look dignified in a rickshaw.
Compared, however, with a funeral which I saw in Hong-Kong, the Yokohama ceremony was solemnity in essence. The Hong-Kong obsequies were those of a tobacco-magnate's wife and the widower had determined to spare no expense on their thoroughness. He had even offered, but without success, to compensate the tramway company for a suspension of the service, the result of his failure being that every few minutes the procession was held up to permit the cars to go by; which meant that instead of taking only two hours to pass any given point, it took three. The estimated cost of the funeral was one hundred thousand dollars and all Hong-Kong was there to see.
To Chinese eyes it doubtless had a sombre religious character, but to us it was merely a diverting spectacle of incredible prolongation. We were not wholly to blame in missing its sanctity, for the participants, who were more like mummers than mourners, had all been hired and were enjoying the day off. For the most part they merely wore their fancy dress and walked and talked or played instruments, but now and then there was a dragon and a champion boxing it and these certainly earned their money. At intervals came bearers with trays on which were comforts for the next world or symbolical devices, while, to infinity both in front and behind, banners and streamers and lanterns danced and jogged above all. A miracle-show of the middle ages can have been not unlike it.
THE LITTLE GEISHA
I left Japan, as I have said, just before the cherry-blossom festivities began, but I was able to see a number of the dances--which never change but are passed with exactitude, step for step, gesture for gesture and expression for expression, from one geisha to another--as performed by a child who was being educated for the profession. Although so young she knew accurately upwards of sixty dances, and the pick of these she executed for a few spectators, in a little fragile paper-walled house outside Yokohama, while her adoring aunt played the wistful repetitive accompaniments.
The little creature--a mere watch-chain ornament--had a typical Japanese face, half mask, half mischief, and a tiny high voice which now and then broke into the dance. But dances, strictly speaking, they are not. They are really posturing and the manoeuvres of a fan. To me they are strangely fascinating, and, with the music, almost more so than our Western ballets. But there is a difference between the ballet and the geisha dances, and it is so wide that there is no true comparison; for whereas the ballet stimulates and excites, these Japanese movements hypnotise and lull.
MANNERS
The public manners of the Japanese are not good. In all my solitary walks about Myanoshita I met with no single peasant who passed the time of day, and in the streets of Tokio English people were being jostled and stared at and treated without respect. It was a moment when Americans were unpopular, and the theory was broached that for fear of missing the chance to be rude to an American the Japanese became rude to all outlanders indiscriminately. One indeed gathered the impression that, except in Kyoto, which is a backwater, foreigners are no longer wanted. "Japan for the Japanese" would seem to be the motto: one day, not far distant, to be amended to "The World for Japan." I shall never forget the humiliation I suffered in a stockbroker's office in Tokio, into which, seeing the words "English spoken" over the door, I had ventured in the hope of being directed to an address I was seeking. Not a word of English did any one know, but the whole staff left its typewriters and desks to come and laugh. I was always willing to remove the gravity of Japanese children by my grotesque Occidentalism, but I have a very real objection to being a butt for the ridicule of grown-ups. Such an incident could not have occurred, I believe, anywhere else. But it is not only the foreigners to whom the Japanese are rude: they do nothing for their fellows either. The want of chivalry in trains and trams was conspicuous.
The ceremonial manners of the Japanese can, however, be more precise and formal than any I ever witnessed. A wedding reception chanced to be in progress in my Tokio hotel one afternoon, and through the open door I had glimpses of Japanese gentlemen in frock coats bowing to Japanese ladies and making perfect right angles as they did so. So elaborate indeed were the courtesies that to Western eyes they bordered dangerously on burlesque.
The destination that I was seeking when I entered the stockbroker's office was a certain book-store, and when I eventually found it I was asked a question by a Japanese youth that still perplexes me. It was in the English section, the principal volumes in which, as imported to supply Japanese demands, were American, and all bore either upon success in engineering and other professions and crafts, or on the rapid acquirement of wealth. "How to double your income in a week"; "How to get rich quickly"; "How to succeed in business"; and so forth; all preaching, in fact, the new gospel which is doing Japan no good. There were also, however, a certain number of novels, and one of the customers, a boy who looked as though he were still at school, noting my English appearance, brought a translation of Maupassant to me and asked me what "soul" meant--"A Woman's Soul" being the new title. Now I defy any one with no Japanese to make it clear to a Japanese boy with very little English what a woman's soul is.
THE PLAY
At Tokio I was present for an hour or so at a performance in a national theatre. It had been in progress for a long time when I entered and would continue long after I left, for that is the Japanese custom. In London people with too little to do are on occasion prepared to spend the whole day outside theatres waiting for the doors to open. They will then witness a two and a half hours' performance. But in Japan the plays go on from eleven a.m. to eleven p.m. and the audience bring their sustenance and tobacco with them. The seats are mats on the ground, and the actors reach the stage by a passage through the auditorium as well as from the wings. The scenery is very elementary, and there is always a gate which has to be opened when the characters pass through and closed after them, although it is isolated and has no contiguous wall or fence.
None of our Western morbid desire for novelty, I am told, troubles the Japanese play-goer, who is prepared to witness the same drama, usually based on an historical event or national legend thoroughly familiar to him, for ever and ever. It is as though the theatres in England were given up exclusively to, say, Shakespeare's Henry IV, V and VI sequence. On the occasion of my visit there was little of what we call acting, but endless elocution. During the performance the attendants walk about, with the persistence of constables during a London police-court hearing, carrying refreshments and little charcoal stoves. The signal for the next act is a deafening clicking noise made by one of the stage hands on two sticks, which gradually rises to a shattering crescendo as the curtain is drawn aside. It must be understood that the theatre that I am describing was set apart for national drama. In others there are topical farces and laughter is continuous; but I did not visit any. On board ship, however, we had a series of performances of such pieces by the Japanese cabin attendants and waiters, many of whom were professional actors. The Japanese passengers enjoyed them immensely.
MYANOSHITA
A whole week of my too short stay was given to Myanoshita, whither I was driven by the impossibility of retaining a room in either Yokohama or Tokio, and where I stayed willingly on, out of delight in the place itself. After being cooped up for so long on ships, and kept inactive under the heat of India, it was like a new existence to take immense walks among these mountains in the keen rarified air, even though there was both rain and snow. Myanoshita stands some four thousand feet high and is situated in a valley in which are many summer cottages and health resorts. The heart of this Alpine settlement is the Fujiya Hotel, where I was living, which is kept by an enterprising Americanised and Europeanised Japanese proprietor and his very charming wife, Madame Yamaguchi, whose father was the founder of the house, and, I believe, the discoverer of the district, and who herself is famous as a gracious hostess throughout Japan. No hotel so well or so thoughtfully administered have I ever stayed in; nor was I ever in another where the water for the bath gushes in from a natural hot spring. But hot springs are numerous in this region, while there is a gorge which I visited, some four miles distant, where boiling sulphur hisses and bubbles for ever and aye.
Many of the Myanoshita dishes were new to me and welcome. There is an excellent salad called "Slow," and the bamboo, which is Japan's best friend--serving the nation in scores of ways: as fences, as walls, as water-pipes, as supports, as carrying-poles, as thatch, as fishing-rods--here found its way into the salad bowl and was not distasteful. The custom of drinking a glass of orange juice before breakfast might well be adopted with us; but not the least of the oddities of England which I realised as I moved about the earth is our unwillingness to eat fruit. Japan also has a perfect mineral water, "Tansan."
When not making long expeditions to catch new glimpses of Fuji I roamed about the hill-sides among the little villages, or leaned over crazy bridges to watch the waterfalls beneath; for there is water everywhere, tumbling down to the distant ocean, a wedge of which can be seen from the hotel windows. This Japanese valley might be in Switzerland, save for the absence of any but human life. Not a cow, not a goat.
The labourers wear blue linen smocks, usually with some device upon them, and they merge into the landscape as naturally as French or Belgian peasants. These men, whether working on the soil or the roads, or engaged in cutting bamboos or building houses, wear the large straw hats that one sees in the old Japanese prints. Nothing has changed in their dress. But the modernized Japanese, the dweller in the cities or casual visitor to the country, pins his faith to the bowler. The bowler is so much his favourite headgear that he wears it often with native costume on his body. Perhaps it is to Japan that all the bowlers have gone, now that London has taken to the soft Homburg. It was odd to meet groups of these bizarre little men among the precipices: even stranger perhaps were their little ladies, especially on Sunday, in the gayest Japanese clothes, their faces plastered with rice powder and cigarettes in their mouths. Too many of them are disfigured by gold teeth, which are so common in Japan as to be almost the rule. An English resident assured me that I must not assume that the Japanese teeth are therefore unusually defective: often the gold is merely ostentation, a visible sign that the owner of the auriferous mouth is both alive to American progress and can afford it.
Even in Myanoshita Fujiyama has to be sought for and climbed for, the walls of rock that form the valley being so high and enclosing. But the result is worth every effort. Immediately above the hotel is a hill from whose summit the upper part of the enchanted mountain can be seen, and I ascended tortuously to this point within an hour of my arrival. The next day I walked to Lake Hakone (where the Emperor has a summer palace), some eight miles away, in the hope of getting Fuji's white crest reflected on its surface; but a veil of mist enshrouded all. And then twice I went to the edge of the watershed at the head of the valley: once struggling through the snow to the Otome Pass, on an immemorial and nearly perpendicular bridle path, and once by the modern road to the tunnel which, with characteristic address, the Japanese have bored through the rock, thus reducing a very steep gradient.
In the tunnel the icicles were hanging several feet long and as big as masts, and the air was biting. But one emerged suddenly upon a prospect the wonder of which probably cannot be excelled--a vast plain far below, made up of verdure and villages and lakes, with distant surrounding heights, and immediately in front, filling half the sky, Fuji himself. It is from this point, and from the ancient Otome Pass, a mile or so away on the same ridge, that the symmetry of the mountain is most perfect; and here one can best appreciate the simplicity of it, the quiet natural ease with which it rises above its neighbours. There was more snow on the slopes than when I had seen it from the train a few days before; and the sky again was without a cloud. I have never been so conscious of majestic serenity, without any concomitant feeling of awe. Fuji is both sublime and human.
No other country has a symbol like this. When the Japanese think of Japan they visualise Fuji: returning exiles crowd the decks for the first glimpse of it; departing exiles with tears in their eyes watch it disappear. There is not a shop window but has Fuji in some representation; it is found in every house; its contours are engraved on teaspoons, embossed on ash-trays. You cannot escape from its counterfeits; but if you have seen it you do not mind.
When on my way home I found myself in an American picture gallery, either in San Francisco, Chicago, Boston or New York, I lingered longest in the rooms where the coloured prints of the Japanese masters hang--and America has very fine collections, particularly in Boston--and I stood longest before those landscapes by Hokusai and Hiroshige in which Fuji occurs. Hokusai in particular venerated the mountain, and in many of his most beautiful pictures people are calling to each other to admire some new and marvellous aspect of it. It was he who drew Fuji as seen through the arch of a breaking wave! I was looking at the British Museum's example of this daring print only a few days ago, and, doing so, living my Myanoshita days again.
There is much in Japan that is petty, much that is too material and not a little that is disturbing; but Fuji is there too, dominating all, calm and wise and lovely beyond description, and it would be Fuji that lured me back.
AMERICA
DEMOCRACY AT HOME
My first experience of democracy-in-being followed swiftly upon boarding the steamboat for San Francisco, when "Show this man Number 231" was the American steward's command to a cabin boy. I had no objection to being called a man: far from it; but after years of being called a gentleman it was startling. This happened at Yokohama; and when, in the Customs House at San Francisco, a porter wheeling a truck broke through a queue of us waiting to obtain our quittances, with the careless warning, "Out of the way, fellers!" I knew that here was democracy indeed.
I confess to liking it, although I was to be brought up with another jolt when a notice-board on a grass-plot suddenly confronted me, bearing the words:--
But I like it. I like the tradition which, once your name is written in the hotel reception book, makes you instantly "Mr. Lucas" to every one in the place. There is a friendliness about it: the hotel is more of a home, or at any rate, less of a barrack, because of it. And yet this universal camaraderie has some odd lapses into formality. The members of clubs in America are far more ceremonious with each other than we are in England. In English clubs the prefix "Mr." is a solecism, but in American clubs I have watched quite old friends and associates whose greetings have been marked almost by pomposity and certainly by ritual. Yet Americans, I should say, are heartier than we; more happy to be with each other; less critical and exacting. They certainly spend less time in discussing each other's foibles. That may be because the dollar is so much more an absorbing theme, but more likely it is because America is a democracy, and the theory of democracy, as I understand it, is to assume that every man is a good fellow until the reverse is proved. I should not like to say that the theory of those of us who live under a monarchy is the opposite, but it seemed to me that Americans are more ready than we to be sociable and tolerant.
Try as I might I could never be quick enough to get in first with that delightful American greeting, "Pleased to meet you," or "Glad to know you, Mr. Lucas." I pondered long on the best retort and at last formulated this, but never dared to use it for fear that its genuineness might be suspected: "I shall be sorry when we have to part."
SAN FRANCISCO
It was in San Francisco that I learned--and very quickly--that it is as necessary to visit America in order to know what Americans are like as it is to leave one's own country in order to know more about that. Americans when abroad are less hearty, less revealing. They are either suffering from a constraint or an over-assertiveness; and both moods may be due to not being at home. In neither case are they so natural as at home. I suppose that on soil not our own we all tend to be a little over-anxious to proclaim our nationality, to maintain the distinction. In our hats can perhaps be too firmly planted the invisible flag of our country.
Be this as it may, I very quickly discerned a difference between Americans in America and in England. I found them simple where I had thought of them as the reverse, and now, after meeting others in various parts of the country, even in complex and composite New York, I should say that simplicity is the keynote of the American character. It is in his simplicity that the American differs most from the European. Such simplicity is perfectly consistent with the impatience, the desire for novelty, for brevity, of the American people. We think of them as always wishing to reduce life to formulae, as unwilling to express any surprise, and these tendencies may easily be considered as signs of a tiring civilisation. But in reality they are signs of youth too.
ROADS GOOD AND BAD
San Francisco I shall chiefly recollect (apart from personal reasons) for the sparkling freshness and vigour of the air; for the extent and variety of Golden Gate Park, where I found a bust of Beethoven, but no sign of Bret Harte; for the vast reading-room in the library at Berkeley, a university which is so enchantingly situated, beneath such a sun, and in sight of such a bay, that I marvel that any work can be done there at all; and for the miles and miles of perfect tarmac roads fringed with burning eschscholtzias and gentle purple irises. That was in April. I found elsewhere in America no roads comparable with these. Even around Washington their condition was such that to ride in a motor-car was to experience all the alleged benefits of horseback, while in the Adirondacks, anywhere off the noble Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Highway, with its "T.R." blazonings along the route, one's liver was bent and broken. While I was in America the movement to purchase Roosevelt's house as a national possession was in full swing, but this Memorial Highway strikes the imagination with more force. That was an inspiration, and I hope that the road will never be allowed to fall into disrepair.
UNIVERSITIES, LOVE AND PRONUNCIATION
Watching the young men and maidens crowding to a lecture in the Hearst Amphitheatre at Berkeley, under that glorious Californian sky, I was struck by the sensible, frank intimacy of them all, and envied them the advantages that must be theirs over the English methods of segregation at the same age, which, by creating shyness and destroying familiarity, tends to retard if not destroy the natural understanding which ought to subsist between them and if it did would often make life afterwards so much simpler.
I asked one of the professors to what extent marriages were made in Berkeley, but he had no statistics. All he could say was that Cupid was very little trouble to the authorities and that Mr. Hoover and Mrs. Hoover first met each other as students at Stanford. And then I asked an ex-member of one of the Sororities and she said that at college one was a good deal in love and a good deal out of it. The romance rarely persisted into later life.
She pronounced romance with the accent on the first syllable, whereas somewhere half-way across the Atlantic the accent passes to the second; and why such illogical things should be is a mystery. The differences can be very disconcerting, especially if one refuses to give way. I had an experience to the point when talking with some one in Chicago and wishing to answer carefully his question as to the conditions under which the poor of our great cities live. These are, in my observation, infinitely worse in England than in America. Indeed I hardly saw any poor in America at all--not poverty as we understand it. But I could not frame my reply because "squalor" (which we pronounce as though it rhymed with "mollor") was the only fitting epithet and he had just used it himself, pronouncing it in the American way--or at any rate in his American way--with a long "a." So I turned the subject.
Neither nation has any monopoly of reasonableness in pronunciation. The American way of saying "advertisement" is more sensible than ours of saying "adver´tisment," since we say "advertise" too. But then, although the Americans say "inquire," just as we do, they illogically put the stress on the first syllable when they talk about an "in´quiry." The Tower of Babel is thus carried up one storey higher. The original idea was merely to confuse languages; it cannot ever have been wished that two friendly peoples should speak the same language differently.
But I have wandered far from Berkeley and Stanford. I am not sure as to my course of conduct if I had a daughter of seventeen, but I am quite convinced that if I had a son of that age I should send him to an American university for two or three years after his English school. He should then become a citizen of the Anglo-Saxon world indeed.
FIRST SIGNS OF PROHIBITION