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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76241 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+                            K A K E M O N O
+
+                           JAPANESE SKETCHES
+
+                                  BY
+                          A. HERBAGE EDWARDS
+
+
+                          _WITH FRONTISPIECE_
+
+
+
+
+                    [Illustration: Printer’s Logo]
+
+
+
+
+                                CHICAGO
+                          A. C. McCLURG & CO.
+                       LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
+                                 1906
+
+
+
+
+             [Illustration: COPYRIGHT 1906 S. L. WILLARD
+                        _A Daughter of Japan_]
+
+
+
+
+               American Edition Published Sept. 15, 1906
+
+
+                       _Printed in Great Britain_
+                   _Bound by Lakeside Press, Chicago_
+
+
+
+
+                            TO MY TEACHERS
+                          THE PEOPLE OF JAPAN
+
+
+
+
+                               CONTENTS
+
+                          THE FAITH OF JAPAN
+
+
+                                                  PAGE
+
+        I. DAI BUTSU                                3
+
+        II. THE SHRINES OF ISÉ                      5
+
+        III. THE TEMPLE OF NIKKŌ                    8
+
+        IV. KANNON, LADY OF MERCY                  14
+
+        V. RINZAKI’S ALTAR                         17
+
+        VI. TWO CREEDS                             19
+
+        VII. THE LEGEND OF THE NOSELESS JIZŌ       22
+
+        VIII. THE TEMPLES OF SHIBA                 27
+
+        IX. AMIDA BUTSU                            31
+
+        X. ST. NICHIREN                            34
+
+        XI. BETWEEN EARTH AND HEAVEN               36
+
+        XII. INARI, THE FOX-GOD                    39
+
+        XIII. THE ALTAR OF FIRE                    42
+
+        XIV. FORGOTTEN GODS                        48
+
+
+                               LORD FUJI
+
+        I. PROLOGUE                                55
+
+        II. THE ASCENT                             57
+
+        III. EPILOGUE                              99
+
+
+                         THE ART OF THE NATION
+
+        I. GRACE BEFORE MEAT                      103
+
+        II. IN A CLOISONNÉ FACTORY                110
+
+        III. FLOWER ARRANGEMENT                   114
+
+        IV. GOD’S MESSENGER                       119
+
+        V. THE ART OF THE PEOPLE                  122
+
+
+                      SCENES IN RAIN AND SUNSHINE
+
+        I. THE MOAT                               157
+
+        II. A RAINY DAY                           159
+
+        III. MMÉ (PLUM BLOSSOMS)                  161
+
+        IV. WET LEAVES                            163
+
+        V. ASAMAYAMA                              165
+
+        VI. CAMELLIAS                             176
+
+        VII. RAIN                                 178
+
+        VIII. THE BLACK CANAL                     181
+
+        IX. THE INLAND SEA                        184
+
+
+                         THE LAND OF THE GODS
+
+        I. ACROSS THE LAGOON                      193
+
+        II. TO KIZUKI                             199
+
+        III. IZUMO’S GREAT TEMPLE                 204
+
+        IV. KIZUKI’S BAY                          211
+
+        V. IN MATSUÉ                              214
+
+        VI. THE TWO SPIRITS                       235
+
+
+                        THE HEART OF THE PEOPLE
+
+        I. TOKYO                                  243
+
+        II. EAST AND WEST                         255
+
+        III. YONÉ’S BABY                          257
+
+        IV. THE GRAVES OF THE RŌNIN               260
+
+        V. THE DOLLS’ FESTIVAL                    263
+
+        VI. WITH DEATH BESIDE HER                 266
+
+        VII. KYOTO’S SOIRÉE                       269
+
+        VIII. NŌ                                  273
+
+        IX. A JAPANESE BANK-HOLIDAY               278
+
+        X. THE PALACE OF THE SON OF HEAVEN        282
+
+        XI. AND SHE WAS A WIDOW                   285
+
+        GLOSSARY                                  293
+
+
+
+
+                          THE FAITH OF JAPAN
+
+               “In my Father’s house are many mansions.”
+                                                 _John_ xiv.
+
+            Tenshi ni kuchi nashi hito o motte iwashimu.
+           “Heaven has no mouth, it makes men speak for it.”
+                                              _Japanese Proverb._
+
+
+
+
+                                   I
+
+                               DAI BUTSU
+                            (GREAT BUDDHA)
+
+
+The great God Buddha sits peaceful and still, a line of dark bronze
+against the blue sky, and the length of the garden is flooded with
+light. Two tall pink cherry-trees drop blushing snowflakes on to his
+broad shoulders, and the sound of running water is a liquid prayer.
+Under his heavy-lidded eyes he looks as one who saw not, or saw too
+well, and his slow smile is inscrutable and still. The mystery of it
+draws one nearer.
+
+What is thy secret, Great Lord Buddha?
+
+But the heavy-lidded eyes droop lower, and the slow smile is still.
+Only the cherry-trees send their pale pink petals floating downward
+into the bronzed lap. And the murmuring water runs more swiftly.
+
+Immutable he sits, and still; enduring, unchanging, though the sea
+destroy his temples and the earthquakes rock about his feet. Buddha on
+his lotus-leaf is still.
+
+And the generations of men rise up, and pass away, fretted with life’s
+fitful fever, and searching for his secret. Buddha is still, his slow
+smile unchanging, his heavy eyelids drooped.
+
+Is that thy secret, Great Lord Buddha? The mystery we passion-swept,
+ever-changing mortals can never penetrate?
+
+“God is the same, for ever. The _same_, and _for ever_.”
+
+And the murmuring water runs, the cherry-trees bloom and fade, the
+centuries pass away. Still the heavy-lidded eyes are drooped, the slow
+smile is inscrutable and still. Lord Buddha keeps his secret.
+
+Or is it only we who cannot read.
+
+
+
+
+                                  II
+
+                          THE SHRINES OF ISÉ
+
+
+On every side the circle of the hills shuts out all sounds, and the
+vast forest stretches solemn, sombre.
+
+The long two miles of white road from the village are forgotten, the
+crude sunshine of the public gardens fades away, the giant fir-trees
+stand as they stood two thousand years ago when the shrine of the great
+Sun-Goddess first was born.
+
+The broad grey path of unhewn stone, unshadowed in the darkness of
+the trees, bends downward to the river’s brink, where a grey still
+pool lies silent on the edge of the rushing stream. It is the Pool of
+Purification where all who go up to the temple stay and wash. Even the
+_kurumaya_ who daily draws the pilgrim or the stranger to the shrine,
+stoops to plunge his hands and feet into the still grey waters. And as
+he does so a great shaft of sunshine hits the weltering circle of the
+hills beyond the stream, and they quiver, blue as a distant mirage in
+the blue sky; while the forest is the darker for that light.
+
+The grey stone path is long and wide, the forest vast, unfathomable;
+primæval, untamed, and yet kept with a care that leaves no trace
+behind; the forest of a dream where Death is not, nor decay, nor any
+sign of man. From time to time the dark stern stems of the cryptomerias
+are broken with the glossy deep-green leaves of a camphor-tree; and
+each time my _kurumaya_ stays to pray, for camphor-trees are sacred,
+and their bark thrown into the sea has power to calm the waves.
+
+And the forest stretches on and on.
+
+In the distance the grey stone path broadens into a flight of shallow
+steps, and passes beneath an open gateway out of sight. A wooden wall,
+like the sloughed bark of forest trees, stretches right and left; and
+against it, rigid in his discipline, the white uniform of a modern
+soldier, bayonet fixed.
+
+I stand on the threshold of the most sacred spot in all Japan.
+
+Beyond the gateway is another gate, where a pure white curtain falls,
+fold on fold. It is the veil of the great Sun-Goddess. All through the
+ages since first the nation was, the shrine of the Sun-Goddess has
+stood behind that veil. Every twenty years night comes, her temple
+dies, and again is born, unchanged, unaltered to the last least detail.
+And her priests are the carpenters. So through all the ages, the body
+of the great Sun-Goddess glows, in youth eternal, and none save her
+far-off offspring, _Tenshisama_, the Son of Heaven, may pass behind the
+veil.
+
+The Japanese soldier stays to guard, for did the stranger, sacrilegious
+in his foolish pride, so much as touch those long white folds, evil
+might befall him. Viscount Mori died beneath the sword of a _samurai_
+for lifting but the edge of the curtain with his stick.
+
+My _kurumaya_ is on his knees before these fluttering, mysterious
+folds, two claps, a bow, a little murmured prayer; another bow, two
+claps, and he rises.
+
+Then he leads us along inside the wooden wall, and another grey-green
+wooden wall, built as it were of flattened tree-trunks, rises on the
+other side, leads us a few yards, and then he stops. The outer wooden
+wall runs round a huge imperfect square, then comes a broad band of
+space where we are standing, and then the inner wall rails out the
+world. Inside and opposite the curtained gateway, but with the whole
+distance of the sacred square between, stands the shrine itself, a
+grey-brown wooden building, unpainted, unadorned; a grey-brown roof of
+thatch, with the cross-beams of its roof-tree rising up through the
+thatch in two rough wooden anchors bound with gold. A building that is
+simple, with a simplicity more strange to modern man than the strangest
+complexity, archaic, primæval, a ghost from man’s dim past.
+
+The silent sombre trees stand thickly round. Beyond the circle of
+blue hills shuts out all sounds. The folds of the white curtain fall
+straight and close.
+
+My _kurumaya_ prays again.
+
+And there behind her veil the great Sun-Goddess dwells, untouched
+by time, of an age with the hills, more primitive than the forest
+trees--and sacred still.
+
+
+
+
+                                  III
+
+                          THE TEMPLE OF NIKKŌ
+
+
+In all the pomp of splendour and of power they buried Iyeyasu at Nikkō,
+and the greatest artists of Old Japan came and built in his memory a
+temple more beautiful than any in all the length and breadth of the
+land. For more than forty years they worked, and brains and money and
+labour were poured out like mountain water, until the temple stood
+complete, the mausoleum of Iyeyasu and the eternal monument of this
+artistic race.
+
+With Buddhist rites was the great _Shōgun_ buried, and for many hundred
+years daily remembered in a ritual as solemn as it is effective, but
+Buddha himself has not anywhere a temple so splendid.
+
+They buried Iyeyasu at Nikkō, not in the town of his birth or of his
+death, not in the city over which he ruled, but four days’ journey
+from Yedo in the midst of the mountains; and they did it that Japan’s
+greatest ruler might lie amid the nation’s best in nature as in art,
+that to the splendour of the temple the Land herself might add the
+glories of her mountains and her trees.
+
+At Nikkō is the great _Shōgun_ buried, and for twenty miles before his
+shrine a stately avenue of trees leads up to the temple, and up this
+avenue prince and pilgrim yearly come; prince and pilgrim, priest
+and peasant they still come, up the great avenue of dark thick-set
+cryptomerias, the giant pine-trees of Japan.
+
+At the temple’s foot a mountain stream rushes in a deep green gorge,
+and two bridges cross the stream: one bright red, the bridge of the Son
+of Heaven, one painted green, for the rest of this world’s humankind.
+
+And the reason is that when the Buddhist saint Shōdō Shōnin pursued the
+vision that had been sent to him, he journeyed into the mountains many
+days until the grey torrent of Nikkō rushing tumultuously across his
+path barred the way; but the vision abode with him, and Shōdō Shōnin
+knew that he must cross the stream, yet was there neither bridge,
+nor boat, nor crossing-place. So the saint kneeled down and prayed.
+Then there appeared to him an angel, clothed in black robes and blue,
+wearing a string of skulls around his neck, and holding in his hand two
+serpents, these he threw across the stream, and they became a bridge
+firm and strong. So Shōdō Shōnin passed over the torrent in safety,
+but when he looked back, snakes, bridge, and angel had vanished and
+only the rushing river remained. Then for a memory the two bridges were
+built in the very place of the crossing.
+
+Of all the marriages of Art and Nature the Sacred Red Bridge of Nikkō
+is the most beautiful. Scattered among hills and trees and river,
+beauty lay; but this people coming through the mountains saw the one
+bond that had power to bind the pale blue hills, the dark green gorge,
+the stone-grey stream together in an ordered whole of deep-thought
+artistic loveliness, planned, perfect, yet supremely natural.
+
+Then the avenue goes on, up the foot of the hill, till it widens and
+broadens into a great gravel circle before the entrance-gate of
+the temple. Here the great trees of the mountains spread out and up
+on either hand, with the temple in their midst surrounded but not
+overwhelmed by the grace of the wood. Under the granite _torī_, the
+first gateway is guarded by two figures, the mythical lions gilded and
+lacquered; while above, the mysterious _baku_, with his four ears and
+his nine tails, who has power to eat all bad dreams that pass before
+sleeping eyes, crouches alert.
+
+A flight of granite steps leads to the first courtyard, set at right
+angles to the gateway, and paved with rounded grey pebbles from the
+stream. Here are all the minor buildings of the temple, the stable
+for the sacred white horse, the library for the two thousand _sutra_
+of the Buddhist scriptures, the tank-house for the purification,
+the store-houses for the temple furniture; and stable and library,
+tank-house and store-houses are jewelled gems of carving and design, so
+rich, so splendid in the ordered magnificence of their colouring that
+western senses stand amazed. A blood-red lacquered fence aglow with
+coloured carvings divides the temple from the sombre majesty of the
+giant cryptomerias.
+
+Then the pebbled space contracts into a flight of granite stairs, and
+mounts between stone walls that end in painted friezes of carved wood
+to a second courtyard. This is almost square, and standing on the wide
+grey sweep of rounded pebbles are three bronze lanterns from the three
+tributary kingdoms of Old Japan--from Korea, Luchu, and _Holland_; and
+there in serried rows and ranged against the blood-red lacquered fence
+aglow with gilded carvings, stand multitudes of bronze lanterns, which
+the dead _daimyō_ of Old Japan sent as offerings to the temple. Beyond
+the lacquered fence the dark still stems of the pine-trees range out of
+sight.
+
+Then the pebbled space contracts again, and a flight of granite steps
+leads between granite walls set with coloured friezes of carved wood to
+the third courtyard; and the colourless pause of the second court, with
+its bronze lanterns on grey stones, gains a new meaning as one mounts,
+for in the third courtyard, between the blood-red friezes with their
+riotous coloured carvings, is the pure perfection of the Yōmei-mon, a
+double gateway, of white lacquer, cream-white and supported by four
+pillars of carved wood. And when they put the fourth pillar in its
+place they planted it upside down fearing if the beauty of the temple
+were all-perfect, evil might befall the house of Tokugawa through the
+jealousy of high heaven.
+
+And the stranger as he draws near pauses in sheer amazement; the wild
+untamable beauty of the mighty temple set in its giant framework of
+dark green trees is strange beyond believing.
+
+On either hand stretches the tropical splendour of the blood-red
+lacquered fence, set with coloured carvings as with shining jewels.
+Behind is the pale glory of the Yōmei-mon. All around the darkness
+of the forest lies like a still quiet tomb. And in front, rising in
+lines of sheer perfection, is the white beauty of the Chinese gate,
+cream-white, adorned with glittering yellow brass, brass in rounded
+sunken medallions on the lintel and the gate-posts, brass in quaint
+designs and shining points of yellow light, which break about the
+whiteness as sunshine through a mist.
+
+The carvings and the pattern, the picture-panels, the decorated eaves,
+the chiselled heads and sculptured birds and beasts, the growing,
+glowing flowers, the hanging lotus-bells that tinkle at the corners
+of the tent-curved roof, and all perfect, are more than a man’s mind
+can perceive though he look for many years. Brains and money and labour
+were poured out here like mountain water, and like the rushing stream
+of Nikkō the drops go unperceived in the beauty of the whole.
+
+In the short space of forty years were the temple and its fences, the
+gateways and the carvings, completed and set up; but forty short years
+from first to last, and the carving of one gateway is more than a
+lifetime’s work.
+
+Then the splendour culminates. Beyond the Chinese gateway is the actual
+shrine itself, its cream-white gateway studded too with brass, while
+superb in the utter beauty of their carving, two writhing dragons
+stretch on either hand between the door-post and the pillar. Inside is
+the temple of the memorial tablets, where with daily rites the Buddhist
+priests prayed for the soul of Iyeyasu. To-day the Buddhist emblems are
+all gone, the shrine is bare. A _shintō_ rope of rice-straw stretches
+from post to post, the mirror of the Sun-Goddess shines above the altar
+for her son, the “Son of Heaven” _Tenshi_, the Mikado, has come back to
+his own.
+
+All the magnificence of the temple now is in its walls, walls of panel
+carvings where the springing phœnix and the crouching lion rise like
+pale shadows from the pale unstained wood, so little are they raised
+above the surface. And yet the artist’s hand that carved them was
+without a rival in the world. They are real and living, delicate and
+true, and so entirely beautiful that the heart cries out with joy as at
+a long-lost good. Here is no colour, the sweep of pale yellow matting,
+the panelled walls of pale dust-coloured wood, are more light than
+colour. Here the rich joy of sense is laid aside: the temple stands a
+beauty immaterial.
+
+Through three hundred years they prayed for Iyeyasu daily with long
+rites, but his tomb is not here.
+
+It lies beyond the temple and above it. One climbs to it by a long,
+steep stair of grey-green granite, set in the sombre hill. A stairway
+built of granite in long slabs, so broad and thick that the balustrade
+with its coping, base, and sculptured columns is all cut from one
+solid block, with each block fourteen feet long. And the stairway took
+thirteen years to quarry and set up.
+
+The hillside is steep, the stairs are many, and the tall dark pines,
+the flame-red maples gather, gather till the temple’s roof, the sound
+of praying bell or chanted hymn is lost. The little space which Art
+stole from Nature is completely hidden, even the forest has forgotten.
+
+And the grey stair climbs, climbs among the dark-green trees, then
+stops.
+
+On the top of the hill is a rounded curve of stately pines. Alone,
+solitary between sky and trees, stands the tomb of Iyeyasu, a domed
+pillar-box of bronze glinting golden through the trees. A low stone
+wall surrounds the tomb, a bronze door solid but uncarved is its
+gateway, and that is all. Here among the quiet trees, in the stillness
+of the forest, above the splendour of the temple, lie the ashes of the
+great Iyeyasu.
+
+All the days of his rule he dwelt among men, but his soul climbed
+the steep stair of Life, casting off its splendours and its glories,
+climbed above them, climbed back into the eternal simplicity of Nature,
+and there he laid him down to rest.
+
+
+
+
+                                  IV
+
+                         KANNON, LADY OF MERCY
+
+
+It was the _fête_ of Kannon of Asak’sa, whose votaries are many. They
+thronged the narrow paved pathway set between the two long rows of red
+brick stalls, and overflowed into the temple grounds behind, where the
+juggler and the wax-works, the two-headed porpoise, and the headless
+man, and all the long scale of attractions in between shouted and
+drummed. All the fun of the fair was here, with the advantage of a
+_petit bout de messe_, to save the soul, over the way.
+
+Kannon of Asak’sa is a popular lady, and her doors stand wide open.
+You may go in with your boots on. It is true that the goddess herself,
+on her gilded altar, is railed off from public touch by a wire
+netting--like the animals in the menagerie outside. But that is all
+the privacy she enjoys, and the rest of her temple is as public as a
+railway station, and just about as sacred. The people pour in up the
+steps on all sides, the scraping of their _gheta_ on the dirty wooden
+floor adding its quota of noise to the chink of money and the buzz of
+voices, the ringing of bells, and the hurry and bustle of a surging
+railway crowd. There is the same wide-open, doorless feel, the same
+discomforting, amphibious sensation of neither open air nor closed
+house. A large bookstall in the corner, selling the latest illustrated
+numbers of the goddess, and the whole stock of Kannon literature adds
+to the illusion. Between two pillars a temple clerk issues tickets at
+a substantial booking-office. A shaven official appears and rings a
+bell at intervals, reciting a prayer in the voice of a railway porter
+proclaiming stations. There is the same reasonless flux and reflux of
+the crowd, the same rush and bustle, with its inseparable accompaniment
+of underlying roar that rises and falls, sometimes absorbing all the
+other sounds into itself, sometimes leaving them distinct and clear,
+but never for a moment ceasing.
+
+A huge lacquered case like a square coffin, its lid replaced by thick
+metal bars, stands between the bookstall and the booking-office, right
+against the wire netting. Into this each comer throws his coin before
+reciting his prayer, and the chinking of the money as it falls is as
+unceasing as the roar of the crowd.
+
+Away in a corner behind the booking-office a worn-out black statue
+sits huddled in rags. Around it, bands of invalids await their turn
+to rub the featureless figure with their hands, and transfer the
+charm by rubbing themselves in the corresponding spot. As a method of
+propagating disease, this treatment for curing it can have few equals.
+But the coffers of the temple profit greatly.
+
+Business, indeed, is brisk to-day. The shaven-headed booking-clerk is
+issuing tickets at a bank-holiday rate, and the bookstall is besieged.
+Up from all sides comes the tumult of the fair. Kannon must be a paying
+investment.
+
+As I stand on the steps with the din of the temple behind me, a man in
+the crowd below buys a cage of little birds at a stall, and, opening
+the door, throws them up into the air. The startled flutter of their
+wings as they soar up over the heads of the crowd into the blue carries
+me back to Ober-Ammergau, to the memory of the overturned tables of the
+money-changers, and the overthrown cages of those who sold doves.
+
+“My house shall be called the house of prayer, but ye have made it a
+den of thieves.”
+
+Is human nature the same all the world over? Are priests? Or is the
+fate of all religions alike?
+
+O Kannon of Asak’sa! Kannon, Lady of Mercy! how long must thou wait for
+thy deliverer? O Lord Buddha, how long?
+
+
+
+
+                                   V
+
+                            RINZAKI’S ALTAR
+
+
+On the edge of the dark hills is the temple of Rinzaki, and the green
+sea of the rice-fields washes up to its open doors. Overhead the grey
+sky of a sunless summer’s evening dims all the colours in the land, and
+leaves them shadows. It is fresh and still, and the wide, green bay
+sweeps in smooth curves to the foot of the dark hills. On the pathway
+the hosts of little green frogs hop like hailstones, and the startled
+splash as they fall back into the rice-fields is sharp and clear.
+
+Rinzaki stands alone, its _shōji_ walls pushed back, and the slender,
+square pillars at each corner are dark against the greyness. The open
+matted spaces of the temple are deserted, and the stillness is pure and
+clear as freshly running water. In the sunless evening light the sombre
+colours of the temple are but light and shadow, a sweep of pale matting
+under a dark roof framed in grey. And the stillness grows purer,
+clearer, and more still.
+
+Beyond the open spaces of the matting, between altar wall and altar
+wall, the garden of the temple hangs, a living picture on the wall. Two
+kneeling-cushions on the matting mark the purpose of the garden, and I
+stay to look.
+
+A faintly running stream, stone-grey, a shaven slope of green, and on
+it three clipped azalea-bushes pink with blossom. So still, so clear, I
+stretch my hand to feel.
+
+It is a garden--a garden painted by an artist who worked in earth and
+flowers. And the dim greyness of the temple, the pale spaces of the
+matting, frame the garden as a shell its pearl. I could but look.
+The pale pink of the azalea-bushes, the soft curve of the slope, the
+stone-grey of the running stream, were painted with the loving care,
+the certain touch of a master’s hand. There was no fault. Between altar
+wall and altar wall the living picture hung--perfect.
+
+Like David’s harping to Saul distraught, the stillness of the garden,
+the dim greyness of the temple, washed pure the heart. The sin-freed
+soul floated out unfettered, and thought was not.
+
+Alone the garden lay, an earthly Nirvana in the stillness.
+
+Rinzaki’s true altar stood here.
+
+
+
+
+                                  VI
+
+                              TWO CREEDS
+
+
+Above the white cloud of the plum-blossoms, through the dark wood of
+the cryptomerias, on the top of the hill lies the temple of Ikkégami.
+The broad spaces of its courtyards and its gardens are sunny and still,
+and the blue sky above is a bed of celestial forget-me-nots. Down each
+side the big, dark trunks of the giant fir-trees stand straight and
+tall--two rows of sombre pillars, shutting in a sunny aisle.
+
+In front, at the end of the wandering white path of rounded stones sunk
+into the bare earth, is the _Hondō_ or main building with the tent
+curves of its roof, and the polished floor of its veranda shining like
+a sword in the sun. Behind is the big wooden gateway, and the hundred
+stone steps which lead from the hilltop to the village beneath. And
+scattered down the wide earth courtyard, and half hidden under the
+dark arches of the trees, are the innumerable little buildings which
+form the complete whole of a Buddhist temple; the belfry, with its
+bronze bell hung from the big wooden beam of the ceiling to within
+three feet of the ground, and the polished wooden spar with which it
+is beaten; the quaint revolving library--like a dwarf windmill without
+sails--where the hundred volumes of the Buddhist Scripture can be dimly
+seen through the thick wooden lattice; the wide granite tank under its
+tiled roof, all hung with lengths of brown temple towels, where the
+faithful pour water over their hands from bamboo dippers as a symbol of
+purification; the side chapels with their drums and offerings. All are
+quiet to-day and deserted, only by the side of the tank, in front of a
+worn-out stone statue, a peasant mother is standing, her baby tucked in
+the back of her _kimono_--fast asleep. She claps her hands three times
+to call the attention of the gods, and then she prays, and the baby’s
+shaven head nods heavily over her shoulder. Then she takes the bamboo
+dipper and pours water over the head of the stone statue, carefully,
+that not a dry spot may remain, and prays again.
+
+Between the dark pillars of the tree-trunks and the stamped earth of
+the courtyard, a line of narrow, pointed laths runs like a wooden
+fencing round the temple precincts. I wonder what they are and leave
+the stepping-stones of the pathway to see.
+
+Tombstones? Yes. Set close together, and sometimes three or four deep,
+the long line of thin pointed laths closes in the temple and its
+courtyard with a fence of graves. Not a rich man’s graveyard this, but
+the last home of the peasants from the rice-fields and the fishermen
+from the sea. I look at the rows of Chinese characters running
+lengthwise down the narrow tombstones, and stop in wonder, for on one
+the Roman letters with their familiar outlines stand out plainly.
+
+                 “To the Men of the Warship _Onega_.”
+
+That is all.
+
+To the men of the Warship _Onega_! It was true then the story. The
+story of the loss of the _Onega_ in the bay below, and the sale of
+the sunken wreck with all its contents to fishermen along the coast.
+The story of the finding of the corpses of the drowned sailors, all
+entangled among the wreckage, and of how the Japanese fishermen
+collected them reverently, saying, with the faith of the ancient
+Greeks, that their souls would wander restless and distressed unless
+they were laid in their graves and the funeral prayers sung over them.
+So they sent a petition to the great _Ijin San_ in Tokyo praying him to
+come to the temple of Ikkégami, that his dead brothers might have some
+one of their own race, if not of their own family, to perform the last
+solemn rites. And the Ambassador came to Ikkégami, and the long line
+of weather-beaten Japanese fishermen bore the western sailors up the
+hill to the temple, and buried them in the courtyard, under the silent
+trees, with all the rites of the Buddhist church. And they set up the
+wooden lath as over the grave of a brother, among the long lines of the
+tombstones of their fathers; but they wrote on it in the tongue of the
+stranger so that God and their countrymen might know their own again.
+
+And all this they did out of their own hearts, and with the money of
+their own earning.
+
+So the men of _Onega_ lie buried with Buddhist rites in a Buddhist
+churchyard, and the wooden lath above their graves is but another rail
+in the holy fence of the Japanese dead which encloses the temple.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The long arches of the sombre trees are dark and still. The blue sky
+above is without fleck or stain, and the peace of God which passeth all
+understanding is spread as a hand above the tree-tops.
+
+The men of the _Onega_ sleep well.
+
+
+
+
+                                  VII
+
+                    THE LEGEND OF THE NOSELESS JIZŌ
+
+
+It was a great many years ago, but the stone Jizō stands there yet,
+just on the edge of the woods beyond the rice-fields. The blue cotton
+bib around his neck is new, the odd little piles of stones that balance
+on his shoulders, cuddle in his arms, or lie around his feet are
+larger, for kindly hearts have passed by since then, to pick up a stone
+and carry it to Jizō, who helps the souls of the little dead children
+crying naked on the banks of the Sai-no-Kawara, because the old hag
+Shozuka-no-Baba has taken their clothes away, and will not let them
+pass over into the happy land beyond, but keeps them piling stones on
+the banks of the Buddhist Styx, and crying bitterly.
+
+And Jizō sits there by the roadside still, the same benevolent smile on
+his shaven face, still holding the pilgrim’s staff with its metal rings
+in one hand, and the jewel which brings all wisdom in the other. Only
+he has no nose. He lost it thirty years ago, the day little Dicky James
+came running up the road, his new hatchet clutched in his hand.
+
+Now Dicky was the son of a missionary, and he had been brought up on
+good books and Sunday schools, and the night before he had been taken
+to hear the wonderful experiences of a “brother” from China, who had
+filled his little head full of “glorious martyrdom,” “sinful heathen,”
+“the overthrowing of idols,” and “the abomination of desolation,” which
+Dicky didn’t understand but thought meant the long stretch of muddy
+rice-fields down beyond Negishi. And that put Jizō into his head. And
+besides, there was the new hatchet.
+
+All the morning he had played Red Indians, until, in an access of
+realism, he had almost brained the baby. The threatened loss of his
+hatchet and the great idea that was working in his head made him quiet
+and subdued all through dinner.
+
+He was sorry about baby, “poor little martyr,” as his mother called
+her; and the idea grew and grew. Why shouldn’t he be a martyr too,
+and return to his family covered with glory? Then the thought of Jizō
+jumped into his head. He would go out, like the “brother” from China,
+into the “abomination of desolation,” and “overturn the idol” of the
+“sinful heathen.” Or, at least, if he couldn’t overturn it, the new
+hatchet would cut off its head, and Dicky’s fingers itched to try. He
+had no idea martyrdom was so interesting.
+
+So, dinner over, Dicky seized his hatchet, and started off, away from
+the settlement, across the canal, up by the racecourse, and down the
+hill towards Negishi. Here he took to the shore, to avoid complications
+in the village; for Dicky was used to showing his Christian superiority
+by cuffing the heads of the heathen, and the boys of Negishi were his
+particular enemies. So the tide being out he kept to the shore until he
+was past the village, and the long stretch of rice-fields, nothing but
+solid ponds of black mud, each surrounded by a little, low, mud bank,
+came into sight.
+
+“The abomination of desolation,” said Dicky.
+
+And it did look like it. He went on along the narrow path towards the
+hills, with the wide stretch of muddy ponds on each side of him. They
+dwindled away gradually as Dicky went up the valley, dwindled away
+until they only looked like a kind of mud river running between the
+green hills. And there beyond the last one, on the edge of the hill,
+was Jizō. Jizō, with his broad smile and his funny little bib.
+
+Dicky looked about him nervously; the great moment had come. No, there
+was no one in the rice-fields, and no one coming after him from the
+village; and Jizō’s smile was tempting. Up went the little hatchet
+and smash down with all Dicky’s strength. But Jizō’s head did not
+roll in the dust, as it ought to have done, so Dicky tried again. He
+was getting excited now. It was so beautiful to feel his dear hatchet
+coming down smash, smash, smash, and to know he was doing the “good
+work” at the same time.
+
+Smash, smash! This time something had smashed, and Jizō’s stone nose
+lay at his feet. Dicky stooped to pick it up, exultant, and in the
+momentary pause heard angry voices among the fields, and feet coming
+swiftly up the road behind him. Then Dicky forgot all about “martyrdom”
+and ran as fast as he could go, across the bank of the rice-field in
+front of him, up the hill beyond, his hatchet clutched in one hand, and
+Jizō’s stone nose in the other.
+
+It was the rice-field that saved him, because the men had to go round,
+but their shouts brought out the village, and the sight of Jizō,
+noseless, sent all the angry “heathen” up the hill in chase. I do
+not think they would have hurt him if they had caught him, for the
+Japanese are not fanatical, and they are very kind to children.
+
+It was just this feeling that made them so angry now. To think that
+any one could injure Jizō; Jizō the friend of those in trouble, the
+comforter of women in travail, and the keeper of the baby souls crying
+naked on the dark banks of the Sai-no-Kawara. I do not think they would
+have hurt Dicky, but the whole village came out to see, and the men and
+boys ran up the hills around shouting:
+
+“_Nan des ka? Nan des ka?_ What is it? What is it?”
+
+And Dicky in his terror ran until his little legs gave way under him,
+and panting he threw himself on the ground under the trees.
+
+The shouts had died away a long while, and it was growing dark in the
+wood before Dicky stirred. It was darker still when at last he crept
+cautiously down the hill and over the rice-fields towards the stone
+statue of Jizō. He was very tired now, and very hungry, but the memory
+of the angry voices calling after him in the hills made him afraid to
+go back through the village, and by this time the tide was up. So Dicky
+sat down by the side of Jizō in the growing darkness and waited. And
+all his nurse’s stories of Jizō and the little children came into his
+mind. He looked up at Jizō, smiling still his large benevolent smile,
+and crept nearer.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was quite dark that evening when they found Dicky, his head
+peacefully laid to sleep on Jizō’s feet, utterly worn out with the
+pangs and the excitement of his martyrdom, his little hatchet fallen on
+the ground, but one grubby fist fast clutching something that even in
+his sleep he held tight.
+
+But Dicky’s taste for martyrdom had gone, and once, to his father’s
+horror, he was heard to declare that he “wished he was a heathen
+because he would like to say his prayers to Jizō.”
+
+In the deepest depths of his pocket, next to his clasp-knife and his
+favourite ally taw, there lived for many years a small stone object
+that he sometimes took out and looked at when he was quite alone. And
+Dicky had serious doubts at times about the goodness of the martyrs,
+and the sinfulness of the heathen, while his ideas on idols underwent a
+radical change.
+
+It is thirty years ago now. But the legend of the noseless Jizō and his
+fight with the _Onigo_ (the devil in the shape of a child) is still
+told in the villages around Negishi.
+
+The other day Richard heard it himself.
+
+
+
+
+                                 VIII
+
+                         THE TEMPLES OF SHIBA
+
+
+A matchless blue sky overarches the world, pale, clear, intense, and
+the twisted green boughs of the Japanese pine throw their gaunt, black
+arms up into the blue, in the vain endeavour of a hundred years to
+reach it. The hush of cloistered calm in which the trees grew up is
+still here, although the Tokyo citizen walks and rides where once none
+but Buddhist priests might linger. The Red Gateway, with the tent
+curves of its roof petrified into grey tiles, still claims for all
+within Buddha as its master.
+
+And the hush of cloistered calm grows stiller.
+
+Through a wide space open to the sky, a space paved with rounded
+pebbles, water-washed for many years ere they floored the courtyard of
+the House of God, believing and unbelieving feet have beaten smooth a
+wide, brown pathway. All around, and arranged in serried rows, stand a
+myriad grey-stone lanterns, the pious gifts of dead _daimyō_. Between
+these tall stone emblems of the five elements the pathway runs; cupola,
+crescent, pyramid, sphere, cube--ether, air, fire, water, earth--and
+the crude shapes of the primitive elements, touched and altered by
+generations of artists, are turned to curves of quaintest beauty.
+Diagonally across the space goes the black pathway, the standing rows
+of tall lanterns thickly set on either side, until beneath another gate
+it makes a pause. A gate of red lacquer this, with carvings of gilded
+wood on ceiling and wall. Carvings full of that oriental luxuriance of
+colour and line which half shocks our sober northern senses; so shocks
+them sometimes that we call it scornfully “barbaric,” until we grow
+wiser with much looking and learn to see the truth and beauty of this
+exuberant splendour.
+
+Beyond the gateway, the black path leads out under the blue sky, a
+pebbled square on either hand, set round with stately rows of bronze
+lanterns, the pious gifts of yet greater _daimyō_. Another gate stands
+waiting at the end of the pebbled square, a gateway with rounded wooden
+columns of red lacquer, like its fellow, and carvings of gold. But
+the beams of its ceiling have been smoothed away, and in the centre
+a much twisted and curled dragon, which, like Joseph’s coat, is of
+many colours, writhes across the ceiling. A carved and gilded gallery
+stretches away on either side past the gateway. Another yet more
+beautiful, with its slender square pillars of red lacquer bound at base
+and crown with beaten brass, leads a rainbow shadow through the sunny
+court to the cool dark door of the temple itself. In the shade of the
+gilded galleries, suspended from the red-lacquered cross-beams, hangs a
+row of still bronze lanterns. Dimly in their exquisite shapes can one
+trace the symbolised elements.
+
+Behind a wooden barrier five steps lead straight to the temple’s
+front, closed now with dark blinds of split bamboo bound together with
+a silken thread. The tiled eaves of the curving roof overhang the
+steps, and between door and lacquered pillar writhes in many wriggles
+of green and golden carving two royal dragons, the Ascending and the
+Descending--the going-up and the coming-down.
+
+Leaning on the barrier, the glory of those golden dragons, of those red
+columns, of the carved beams and inlaid porch rushed riotously into
+the soul. And now one understood the preparation of those successive
+gateways, set each between a sunny space of pebbled court; for the
+first had shown but red and gold, up in the ceiling of the second
+lingered lines of azure blue, the third added green to the other three,
+the gallery gave glances of mauve and violet, while here, under the
+eaves of the temple roof, the rainbow itself is glorious in carved wood.
+
+A culminating point of colour and splendour, what can the temple hold
+within?
+
+Cool spaces of matted floor set round with black boxes on black stools,
+each box holding its portion of Buddhist Scripture; sombre pennants of
+dark blue and green brocade upon the walls; a sober light clear but
+colourless; and which is more beautiful, the rainbow porch of many
+colours riotous in carving and scrolls, or the sober quiet of the
+temple, a beauty of spaces and restraint?
+
+The colourless matted room is wide and low. In front between the sombre
+pennants is the inner sanctuary. Gods on either side on lacquered
+tables set against the walls; at the end, beyond more lacquered tables,
+two brocaded masses rise like square coffins on a raised daïs; between
+stand figures of the gods, white-faced Benten and Kannon, Lady of
+Mercy. The red tables bear many-coloured sweets and biscuits heaped
+high on metal plates, in metal cups; offerings to the spirits of the
+dead _Shōgun_ whose tablets lie enshrined behind those masses of
+brocade. A bronze bowl on the floor filled with grey ash sends forth
+filmy clouds of incense. There is no sound.
+
+Behind the temple, through two open spaces of pebbled squares, each
+reached by a score of granite steps, is the tomb; a smooth, round mass
+of stone encircled with a breast-high parapet of bronze; all around a
+sweep of grey pebbles.
+
+That is all.
+
+And yet standing here I wonder whether the dead _Shōgun_ have not
+rightly chosen? Whether their resting-place is not more truly beautiful
+than the beauty of sombre ornament in the temple, than the riotous
+carving of the gateways.
+
+The porch was Beauty’s body, arrayed, adorned; here lies Beauty’s soul,
+naked and eternal.
+
+
+
+
+                                  IX
+
+                              AMIDA BUTSU
+
+
+Buddhism is not one but many; the same faith and the same nation
+which produces the squalor, dirt and commercial profanity of Asak’sa
+can create the peace and purity of Rinzaki, while Shiba’s riot of
+impossible colouring is born of the same religion and the same people
+as the stern beauty of the _Hongwanji_; for the temples of the _Shin_
+sect are severe as a Protestant cathedral, as a Presbyterian church,
+only they are built by a race of artists.
+
+Kannon of Asak’sa is popular, but the beautiful _Hongwanji_ at Kyoto,
+finished a few years ago, at a cost of eight million yen, was built
+mainly by the peasants, who contributed not only in money but in kind,
+sending their most beautiful trees to be cut into beams, offering
+themselves to hew and to build, giving always of their best. And each
+beam was raised to its place by long hawsers made of women’s hair,
+the soft black hair of youth or womanhood, with here and there the
+shrivelled grey hairs of age. And the hawsers are suspended in the
+temple for men and missionaries to ponder on.
+
+Buddhism is not dead but living. The old, the weary, and the poorest
+poor creep into the _Hongwanji_ in Japan, and the pale matting of these
+temples is covered with the square-holed copper coins worth a quarter
+of a farthing, which they roll over the matting towards the altar from
+the corners where they kneel and pray.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nagoya’s _Hongwanji_ is the glory of the town. It stands in the thick
+of the city, in a great wide courtyard of stamped earth set round with
+trees. Its sculptured gates of bronze are always open, and once inside
+them the busy town with its factories and its workshops, its quarter of
+a million of inhabitants, is gone, for the wide courtyard sets a lavish
+space of stillness between the city and the shrine. A space so wide and
+ample that the temple’s curves stand out clear and sharp as a solitary
+tower on an empty plain.
+
+Built all of wood, unpainted, unstained; and so faded by the sunshine,
+so worn with age, and weather beaten with the wind and rain, that in
+the glow of the summer’s sun the temple stands against the brilliant
+light faded and grey, a beauty of pathos, not of joy.
+
+Under the eaves the saints and sacred animals are carved in tender
+lines of love. Age has touched and left them colourless, and the
+infinite pity of the Buddha which enwraps creation, enfolding man and
+his brother the beast, looks from their eyes.
+
+Inside there is peace and sober quiet. A wide low space suggestively
+divided into three with slender square pillars of wood, and behind,
+along the whole width of the temple a blaze of gold, sombre and rich.
+No riot of impossible colouring here, no profusion of design and
+decoration; sober, almost stern in its beauty, the centre and the two
+side altars shine in the dim light.
+
+A bronze figure of Buddha, dead black against the gold, stands on his
+lotus-leaf with uplifted hands. It is Buddha as the God of Mercy, the
+living, loving god, Amida Butsu--Eternal Buddha.
+
+Dull gold and black, alive in the altar, shadowly repeated in the pale
+yellow matting and in the grey age-stained wood, are all the decoration
+of the temple, save perfect purity and peace, and an atmosphere of
+quiet, enduring charity. For the Shin sect teaches that the law cannot
+be altered, that the eternal chain of cause and effect goes always and
+for ever on, that the wages and more than the wages of sin is death,
+that an act and its consequences roll ever onward through the world,
+and neither man nor time can stay them; it teaches that a man’s sorrows
+are made by his sins, but that Buddha is merciful and just, that he who
+is love gives love; love knows no sin, nor sin’s child, sorrow; without
+sin and sorrow is the world at rest.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Outside, the city labours, toils. Within, the workers kneel on the pure
+pale matting, and praying, roll their square-holed coins towards the
+image of Eternal Buddha, whose hand is raised to bless.
+
+
+
+
+                                   X
+
+                            SAINT NICHIREN
+
+
+Up a hundred steep stone steps lies the temple of the Lord Buddha, for
+Nichiren, his servant, whose head the executioner’s sword refused to
+cut off, died here.
+
+Now Nichiren was a man of faith. And his faith was the faith of the
+average man--he knew he was right. But Nichiren did more, for he had
+the courage of his opinions; and he said, “I alone am right; the rest
+are all wrong, unfaithful servants of the Lord--kill them.”
+
+And the people believed Nichiren, for is not such faith in one’s own
+opinion a sign of divine inspiration? And did not the Lord Buddha send
+lightning from Heaven to turn the edge of the executioner’s sword and
+save his pious servant?
+
+So they followed after Nichiren and despised the rest of the church,
+and built temples of the true faith throughout the length and breadth
+of the land. And the priests of Nichiren walked in the steps of
+their master, and are--for the tolerant Japanese--almost bigoted and
+fanatical.
+
+Now the Nichiren priests delight in noise. Perhaps they think--like
+many a politician--that it takes the place of argument. And so their
+temples for ever re-echo with the banging of big drums, the clapping of
+wooden clappers, the booming of big bells, and the eternal chanting of
+the _Namu-myōho-rengekyō_, the formula of the faith of Nichiren.
+
+In the little side temple to the left, wreathed with paper flowers and
+cheap ornaments--for Nichiren has even strength to blur the national
+sense of art--they are busy now.
+
+A priest in the middle crouches on the ground; on either side, before a
+big drum like a yellow barrel lying horizontally on the ground, sit two
+believers. Behind are grouped three more, all provided with clappers or
+bells. The drumming is incessant, the clapping nearly so, while all,
+priests and people, keep up one never-ending drone of
+
+“_Namu-myōho-rengekyō, Namu-myōho-rengekyō, Namu-myōho-rengekyō._”
+
+I can only see the backs of the group, and the arms of the two drummers
+as they raise them up above their heads to beat the big barrels in
+front of them. Suddenly, from round the corner of the drum, an old face
+peers--priest by its costume and its cunning. An unshaven, unkempt
+face that blinks--dirty, ignorant, bigoted. It crouches there on the
+matting, the old cunning eyes opening and shutting with each repetition
+of the never-ending formula,
+
+“_Namu-myōho-rengekyō, Namu-myōho-rengekyō, Namu-myōho-rengekyō_,”
+until sense and meaning are lost in a wave of wild, brute fanaticism.
+
+The drums bang louder, the clappers clap shriller, the bells boom
+quicker and quicker, and I stand there convinced.
+
+_Namu-myōho-rengekyō, Namu-myōho-rengekyō, Namu-myōho-rengekyō._
+
+I too am of the faith of Nichiren, for I know that I am right. All
+these are wrong, unfaithful servants of the Lord--kill them.
+
+
+
+
+                                  XI
+
+                       BETWEEN EARTH AND HEAVEN
+
+
+Five hundred feet of wall, and the temple’s courtyard hangs a balcony
+above the world.
+
+The thousand steps by which I climbed are hidden, and the _chaya_, in
+the width of the brown road that touches cliff and sea, is so beneath my
+feet that its roof seems resting on the ground. My _kurumaya_, in his
+white hat, is a growing mushroom on a dark blue stalk. The man is but a
+human atom crushed between two immensities.
+
+From cliff to distant sky the wide sea spreads out, a vast still plain
+of shimmering blue. This ball of earth is rolled out flat before my
+eyes, and its mysterious ends are a far-off rim, dark blue and clear.
+Overhead the burnished sky shuts down a domed cover on the flattened
+earth. The very sea seems hot. My _kurumaya_, sitting on the slender
+shafts of his _jinriksha_, fans himself with his hat, and I am startled
+to see how perfectly the three-inch figure works.
+
+The world lies all spread out below me, here is nothing but the temple
+and the sun.
+
+Across the burning courtyard where the sun smites the rounded pebbles
+with hard shafts of light, and through the open doorway in the temple’s
+wall, I go, and then the silent shadows of the trees fall all around.
+The sky above their tops is bluer, the very sunlight brighter for the
+shade.
+
+The temple’s shrine is built upon a polished raft of wood, moored three
+feet above the ground. Its walls are dark with matted blind. Only the
+square door-posts stand clear against the light, and through them I see
+the bareness of the shrine--a sweep of pale matting on the floor, and
+then dim space. Alone, the burnished mirror of the great Sun-Goddess
+hangs above the altar.
+
+On the threshold of his temple stands the high priest, attended by two
+acolytes. He wears a head-dress of black lacquer like a perforated
+meat-cover, but the face beneath is old and very calm. He bows as I
+mount the shallow polished steps which lead up from the ground, takes
+from the black-robed acolyte a slender silver vase, and a shallow
+terra-cotta bowl. Standing shoeless on the threshold of the naked
+shrine he slowly pours the sacred _saké_ from the silver vase into
+the terra-cotta bowl, and gives me to drink. The bowl is black with
+age, the _saké_ thick, like distilled honey; and I notice, as I drink,
+the carved figures running round the rim, and the faint scent of
+plum-blossom.
+
+Without a word the white-robed priest takes back the cup, and offers
+me a thin rice-wafer which I break and eat. I wonder what the rite may
+mean that I, a stranger, may partake, and look up to see the calm old
+eyes looking down at me, at my outlandish clothes and foreign face; but
+he does not speak. Then with a gesture which is almost a blessing, the
+white-robed priest is gone, and the acolytes follow after.
+
+The temple’s shrine stands bare and bare, only the burnished mirror of
+the great Sun-Goddess glitters.
+
+Was it a Passover that we have eaten together? Or a Eucharist? Or
+merely the symbol of our human brotherhood?
+
+We are all children of the Sun; and Faith is One.
+
+Yet it needed a Shintō priest in far Japan to show me a religion above
+nation, beyond race, above sect. But his shrine is bare. The Mirror of
+Truth hangs solitary above his altar, and his temple’s doors are open
+to the Sun.
+
+
+
+
+                                  XII
+
+                          INARI, THE FOX-GOD
+
+
+The green tongue of the rice-fields thrusts itself deep into the blue
+sea, and its tip is lacquered red.
+
+Haneda-no-Inari is a temple whose gateways have swallowed up its
+shrine, and on the low, flat, headland its many thousand _torī_ in rows
+of scarlet dolmens walk inland from the sea. The green point lies a
+henna-stained finger in the lap of the ocean.
+
+Beyond the red tip, a ridge of pearl-grey sky rests on the water, while
+overhead the clouds, like piled-up snowflakes, melt into the blue.
+
+It is the end of September, and wide through the land the rustle of
+ripening rice-ears comes and goes. Haneda-no-Inari, the Rice-God, is
+calling the peasants to his shrine. And they come; broad-shouldered,
+bullet-headed men, in short, blue tunics and dark blue hose, with brown
+weather-beaten faces, seamed and lined; and always their hard hands,
+half shut, half open, as though still holding hoe or plough. Old most
+of them, and with that half-deaf look which years of fieldwork brings.
+Intelligences half shut too, shutting fast on the primary ideas of
+life, on the traditions of their fathers; for a thought, like the
+hoe or plough, is too precious a thing to be lightly laid aside; it
+is bequeathed from generation to generation as are the rice-fields
+beneath their feet.
+
+Inari calls, and the peasants come. Not only for the sake of the
+Rice-God, though the rustle of the ripening rice-ears is a music in
+the land, but because the image of the fox has dwelt so long in the
+Rice-God’s temple that to the peasant Inari is both Fox-and Rice-God.
+And the fear of the _Kitsuné_ is a power in Japan. The _Kitsuné_,
+who can take a woman’s shape and bewitch you; the _Kitsuné_, who can
+beguile a man that he follow to the fox’s very hole and stay there
+living on snails and worms. The _Kitsuné_, who, entering a man’s body
+under his finger-nails, will possess it, so that he howls like a fox,
+slowly changes into one, and dies. And so they come to the temple, up
+from the rice-fields, up under the scarlet tunnels of the _torī_, for
+the passing through each tunnel means a wish fulfilled.
+
+The gateways indeed have swallowed up this shrine. There is no temple,
+only a low matted booth; at the back two white china images of the
+Fox-God, his tail curled high above his head, and a priest on the
+matting, as a shopman at his stall, selling charms, multitudes of
+miniature china foxes, words on rice-paper, and mounds of earth, a
+whole shopful of charms and amulets.
+
+Opposite is a row of rabbit burrows, each roofed with a shelving
+stone; just a hole in the ground, but full of meaning to the peasant,
+for it is the home of the _Kitsuné_, and he crouches on the ground in
+front of it, his head between his knees, or thrust far into the big
+burrow in the eagerness of his prayer. And his face works; the priest
+behind him watches. _Kitsuné_ is a reality to him, a force strong as
+Nature’s laws, but capricious; so he prays. Then half in fear, half in
+reverence, he thrusts one arm as far as it will go into the hole, and
+scraping softly brings back a handful of brown earth. His face lights
+up, and the priest behind leans forward.
+
+Still on his knees the peasant wraps the magic earth in layers of clean
+rice-paper and puts it carefully away in the breast of his patched
+tunic. Then he gets up. He has his charm, a remedy against sickness and
+disaster, a charm for his rice-fields and himself. The priest behind
+reaches out his hand. He makes a keen shopkeeper, and his celestial
+wares are never stolen. The temple terms are “cash down, and prayers
+not taken in exchange.”
+
+Through the long scarlet tunnels of the _torī_, back to the ripening
+rice-fields the peasants go. The green point lies a henna-stained
+finger in the lap of the ocean. Haneda-no-Inari, the temple of the
+superstitious, glows a living tip of red.
+
+For its sins are as scarlet.
+
+
+
+
+                                 XIII
+
+                           THE ALTAR OF FIRE
+
+
+It all happened in a suburban temple in the town of Tokyo, at the time
+of the blossoming cherry-trees; and the prosaic din of a modern city
+full of trains and tramcars hemmed us round. We had been conscious of
+it dimly throughout the long ceremonial within the temple, where Shintō
+priests in brocaded robes chanted in twos and threes, in solo and in
+chorus; where the old High Priest had blessed with long strange rites
+the four elements, earth, which is the mother of all things, fire,
+water, air; had blessed the rice by which the people live, salt, and
+_saké_; but now that we were all assembled in the outer courtyard the
+noise of a busy city came distinctly to the ear. Tokyo was working hard
+this April afternoon, and the cries of the newspaper boys pierced up
+shrilly from the street below.
+
+In the courtyard the ancient vestments of the priests showed strangely
+beside the modern frocks of American visitors, the tweed suits of a
+party of Cook’s tourists, even beside the _kimono_ of the Japanese
+crowd, so markedly Tokyo and _Meiji_ (age of enlightenment), in their
+felt hats, cloth caps, and “bowlers.”
+
+The courtyard was big, the native crowd railed in at one end left a
+large space bare, and here in the centre of the stamped brown earth
+a great pile of burning charcoal was heaped. Twenty feet long, and
+nearly as many broad, it glowed a solid mass of quivering heat, while
+priests at each corner stood fanning the sullen red to an ever fiercer
+flame. It was not hot enough yet, and in the sunshine of that April
+afternoon we waited.
+
+At the further end of the courtyard a broad band of salt lay on the
+brown earth like a white step to the altar. The great fans of the
+fanning priests sent puffs of heat across the court that made the
+distinguished guests shrink back. And yet the glowing charcoal pyre was
+not hot enough.
+
+Behind us, in a corner of the courtyard, stood a bamboo ladder, whose
+every rung was made of the razor-blade of a Japanese sword, set edge
+upwards. As we all stood waiting, watching the solid altar of red flame
+grow redder, a young man came out of the temple and crossed the court.
+He was dressed in the short white tunic of religious festivals, and his
+legs and feet were bare. He bowed to the party of distinguished guests,
+to the priests, to the old High Priest, and from his manner I judged
+him not a priest, but a temple attendant.
+
+Among the crowd there was a murmur, a sway of intense excitement, and
+then a dead stillness. In the stillness the young man put his bare
+foot upon the lowest rung of the ladder, and an involuntary shudder
+went through us all. A large-checked tourist, pushing every one aside,
+rushed up to the ladder, and felt a sword-rung with his hand. Then he
+came back, and across his open palm a ruled red line of blood rose up
+swiftly.
+
+There was a whispering among the priests, a commotion in the crowd, but
+the polite expressions of regret from the old High Priest were courtly
+with honorifics. The large-checked tourist tied his hand up clumsily in
+his own pocket-handkerchief, and looked annoyed. The fanning priests,
+with rhythmic movements of their hands and bodies, chased the living
+heat across the court, and did not pause.
+
+Again there was a murmur in the crowd, a stretching of necks to see,
+and a dead silence.
+
+The white-tuniced attendant, who had stood quite still beside the
+ladder, placed his bare foot upon the lowest rung, and I saw the
+large-checked tourist wince as though his injured hand were there
+instead. Lightly as a sailor climbs, the young man ran up the ladder
+rung by rung, and neither hands nor feet grew red. On the top he
+stayed, looking down, and a shudder like a cry of pain went through the
+courtyard. Then he turned, hanging for one brief moment by his knees on
+the topmost rung--turned, and came down again.
+
+In the April sunshine the sword-blades, from top to bottom of the
+ladder, glittered spotless.
+
+Firmly on his bare, brown feet the young man walked across the court,
+bowed to the party of distinguished visitors, to the priests, to the
+old High Priest, and disappeared within the temple.
+
+The crowd behind the railings exclaimed in admiration, but the
+distinguished visitors were above surprise. The party of Cook’s
+tourists who had just “done” India were full of explanations. It was
+“mere jugglery,” they said, though each man differed in his theory. One
+was eloquent on hypnotic suggestion, and though the damaged tourist,
+his hand still bound up, “couldn’t go so far as that, sir,” was not to
+be persuaded. The injured tourist had apparently only been hypnotised
+a little more effectually than the rest of us. The American guests
+favoured “acrobatic training from infancy,” which “made the bones just
+like jelly.” Somebody said he had heard it was “done with oil,” but was
+quite vague as to the how, and all the more insistent in consequence.
+And so we explained and argued while the level rays of sunshine fell
+on the spotless sword-rungs of the ladder, and on the vestments of the
+Shintō priests. They had watched and were impassive. The climbing of
+the ladder was not a sacred ceremony, not a rite, rather an amusement
+allowed the multitude, as the Catholic Church offered _jongleries_ in
+the Middle Ages.
+
+But as the sun fell lower and lower in the April sky, a hush came among
+the little group of priests, and growing, travelled slowly over the
+courtyard. Even the damaged tourist stopped his explanations. The great
+red altar of heat that lay a fallen pillar of fire across the courtyard
+was glowing now white-hot with life. The fanning priests at each corner
+had moved further back to escape the scorch of the flames, but still
+they fanned. In waves and gusts the heat was borne across the court,
+to flicker, as it were, upon the air, steady itself and then drive
+solidly forward. The Cook’s tourists who had seized upon the front row
+of seats, twisted uneasily on their chairs, unwilling to give up their
+“best places,” unable to endure the burning. But the fierce scorch
+of the heat came steadily onwards, and before it the tourists ran,
+dragging their chairs after them.
+
+Still the fanning priests fanned on, chasing the quivering flames on
+the red altar of heat, till it pulsed with a white-hot breath like a
+thing alive.
+
+In the pale April sky the swift sun was dropping golden through the
+last arcs of heaven to a grey band of clouds upon the horizon. In half
+an hour it would be night.
+
+There was a stir in the crowd beyond the barriers; the fanning priests
+beat out their rhythm slowly, and with the shadows the gathering sense
+of awe deepened. Only the altar of heat burned brighter, gathering to
+itself all the colour from the world.
+
+Apart from the crowd the High Priest stood, the gold on his vestment
+gleaming, and he watched the sun. The peace upon his face was like
+an unsaid prayer. Did his soul go out to _Amaterasu_, the great
+Sun-Goddess?
+
+Swiftly the sun dropped through the bank of clouds leaving them golden,
+showed a red circle on the horizon, and passed beneath. The faintest
+flicker of emotion stirred for a moment the grave reverence of the
+old man’s face. Then he turned. The rhythmic beating of the fanning
+priests died into silence. The red altar stood a burning fiery furnace
+in the courtyard, where already twilight was. He spoke no word, but
+the religious calm of a perfect trust was in all his being. It touched
+the straining multitude behind the barriers, even the tourists in
+their chairs. Breathless we stayed gripped by the powers of an awed
+suspense, of a great belief, as he came on. There was no hurry, no
+tremor in his movements, on through the hot scorched air he came, on,
+over the threshold of strewn salt, and on, over the altar of heat.
+With naked feet he trod from end to end the white-hot pathway, and the
+burning charcoal snapped beneath his tread. With naked feet he walked,
+unscathed, over that fiery furnace; and the breath of a passionate
+prayer passed like a sob through the courtyard.
+
+Then one by one the priests in their embroidered vestments stepped
+from the threshold of salt on to the fire. From end to end of the altar
+they too trod that white-hot pathway slowly, unhurt, and the living
+charcoal glowed like a thousand suns in the twilight.
+
+Slowly behind their distant barriers the crowd stirred irresolute. An
+old man whose face showed rapt in the circle of firelight approached
+the priests. Hesitating he was led up to the altar, over the white salt
+step, and faltering, he too trod the white-hot pathway. Then a coolie
+came through the shadows, he too stepped up to the altar, passed over
+the threshold of salt on to the living charcoal.
+
+In twos and threes the crowd was coming now. Some of them hesitated on
+the white salt step, some hurried along the fiery pathway. A few, a
+very few, walked away as though their feet were singed. But all came,
+even the children. The big children who went resolutely alone, the
+little children whom the priests led.
+
+And the twilight in the courtyard deepened into night. The broad altar
+of heat glowed ruddy, a deep sun-red as its life pulsed slower. The
+tourists were all quiet on their chairs, not one of them would venture,
+though the little children went before. The Faith was not in them, nor
+the power of that great Belief. But those behind the barriers, this
+Tokyo crowd in _kimono_ and “bowler,” they believed. With the sounds of
+a modern city humming in their ears, fresh from the western education
+of their Board Schools, they, as their forefathers for two thousand
+years, passed over the fire. This burning symbol of a spiritual
+purification had meaning for them. They _had faith and were not afraid_.
+
+Unto such is the Dominion of the Earth; unto such is the Kingdom of
+Heaven.
+
+
+
+
+                                  XIV
+
+                            FORGOTTEN GODS
+
+
+Neglected by the river side the Buddhas sit, in one long silent row.
+The rain is beating on their unprotected heads, and down their granite
+faces little rills of water trickle. The river at their feet runs swift
+and strong, grey among the boulders, as it rushes down to Nikkō. And
+they sit forsaken.
+
+The moss is thick upon their shoulders, the granite faces are all
+scarred and battered, blotched with pallid growths, spotted with dusty
+accumulations. But the Buddhas smile. Beneath their heavy-lidded eyes
+they smile, a slow, still, changeless smile.
+
+On the green bank above the tumultuous river there is no shrine, no
+priest; the forgotten gods sit still, in one long silent row, and the
+rain beats down relentless. Over their battered heads it runs, and
+down their moss-grown shoulders; the soiled stone laps are full of it,
+and it stands in ever widening pools about the lotus-leaves of each
+pedestal. For in Nikkō the rain, tropical in vehemence, is persistent,
+as in the Outer Hebrides. It lies to-day in slanting lines, thick as
+willow-switches, across the dull grey sky.
+
+I could not well be wetter, so I stop to look, and the whole long
+silent row of Gods Forgotten smiles gently back at me.
+
+Remindful of the legend which calls them numberless, I try to count.
+Once, twice, several times; but the legend is right. Each time my total
+varies. Perhaps the rain confuses me; the willow-switches lie so thick
+across the sky. So I give it up and look at the long desolate row of
+the numberless Buddhas. I wonder if they envy the Buddha who fell from
+his pedestal into the stream and was carried down to Imaichi, where the
+villagers, finding him uninjured, reverently set him up with his face
+towards Nikkō. Now the country-side adores him, and he wears a large
+pink bib.
+
+Across the madly rushing river, churned grey between the boulders,
+the Buddhas smile.... It is a smile of understanding. Yes, the slow,
+still smile of One Who Understands, who understands All Things, and
+understanding, is content.
+
+And who should understand, and understanding rest content, if not the
+Eternal Buddha? Is not the Godhead wise? Does it not see the meaning
+and the path of All Things? And seeing, were it not then content the
+Devil triumphs?
+
+                    “God’s in His Heaven,
+                     All’s right with the world.”
+
+If God be in His Heaven, and God be God, then must the Godhead
+understanding smile.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Through the thick-falling rain the long still row of granite Buddhas
+smile back at me. I have thought so long upon that smile, which strikes
+on western senses oddly, almost irreverently. Do we ever conceive of a
+smiling God? In all the long picture galleries of Europe I have never
+seen a Christ who smiled. With sword-pierced side and thorn-crowned
+head He hangs before us--suffering, always sad. The Man of Sorrows;
+yet He redeemed the world; He saved mankind. For pure joy a soul could
+smile at such a thought. Yet with us the Redeemer suffers; He never
+smiles.
+
+The peasant Sōgorō, from his cross where he had watched the killing
+of his children, laughed gaily as he bade his dying wife farewell;
+for he had saved three hundred villages from unjust taxation. In his
+intensest suffering a Japanese is taught to smile. He comes to tell you
+that his child is dying, and he smiles. Perhaps his eyes are red, but
+he smiles, that the sight of his suffering may not pain another. It is
+the sublimest unselfishness and self-control. Sōgorō dying on the cross
+bade his crucified wife farewell, laughing gaily, and no Japanese would
+praise or wonder at the fact. Sōgorō died as a martyr. Yes, I have seen
+a smile on the faces of our martyrs, rarely, it is true. Sodoma’s _St.
+Sebastian_ smiles; it is a smile of the eyes. He sees a vision--the
+Lamb of God and all the choirs of the angels. But Christ never smiles.
+I cannot think of one picture, one conception of a smiling God. Sad,
+weighed down with the sins of mankind; pitiful, pleading; or stern,
+implacable, the Just Judge, the Ruler of the Universe, immovable
+Omnipotence, scales in hand. Can either Godhead smile?
+
+Buddha suffered much and endured much, but still he smiles. He too is
+merciful and full of pity. He too suffers with each sin man sins. Here
+too the Just Judge judgeth the World. And the patient Buddha suffers
+till the wicked are redeemed. There is no end to his suffering till all
+are saved. Only when the wicked cease from troubling, cease because
+they are the good, is mortal life completed, till then the complex
+worlds spin on and on. Yet Buddha smiles. For man’s birthright is not
+sin, not sorrow, but Joy. The Godhead smiles.
+
+This long silent row of granite gods, fashioned by the hands and the
+hearts of this nation, smile. And all the bronze and granite statues,
+all the gilded images, all the Buddhas of this island smile too, for
+the people who made them and conceived them believe in Joy, in the
+innate as in the ultimate goodness of man; in the innate as in the
+ultimate Joy of the Godhead. Verily these are forgotten Gods in western
+lands.
+
+Across the raging mountain river, through the fast-falling rain, on
+the desolate green bank the numberless Buddhas battered and forsaken
+smile, that slow still smile of One Who Understands, who understands
+All Things, and understanding is content.
+
+Great Buddha, _Dai Nippon_, teach us.
+
+
+
+
+                               LORD FUJI
+
+         “Where on the one hand is the province of Kai,
+         And on the other the province of Suruga,
+         Right in the midst between them
+         Stands out the high peak of Fuji.
+         The very clouds of Heaven dread to approach it;
+         Even the soaring birds reach not its summit in their flight.
+         Its burning fire is quenched by the snow;
+         The snow that falls is melted by the fire.
+         No words may tell of it, no name know I that fits it,
+         But a wondrous Deity it surely is.
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+         Of Yamato, the Land of Sunrise,
+         It is the Peace-Giver, it is the God, it is the Treasure.
+         On the peak of Fuji, in the land of Suruga,
+         Never weary I of gazing.”
+
+                               Japanese poet, eighth century.
+                             (“Japanese Literature,” by W. G. Aston.)
+
+
+
+
+                                   I
+
+                               PROLOGUE
+
+
+From Pole to Pole the waters of the wide Pacific surge, unending and
+alone. Over the shifting plain the silence of the ocean broods. Here is
+man nothing; for the endless spaces of the ocean, the self-sufficiency
+of the unresting sea remain for ever outside of man, coldly non-human.
+A river or a hill can be loved into companionship, but the sea stays
+always strange.
+
+Without ends or boundaries, the shifting waters sweep from Pole to
+Pole, solitary, changeless. Only the curve of the earth itself, or the
+weakness of man’s eyesight draws imaginary boundaries on the horizon.
+And the waste of the waters lies empty and still.
+
+Coldly blue is the sea below, and the sky shutting down is blue too and
+bare. Two empty infinities which meeting set bounds to each other.
+
+And within there is nothing. Only space; blue, bare space.
+
+“In the beginning,” says the Scripture, “the waters below were
+separated from the waters above,” and out of the void came this world
+of two dimensions, so cold, blue and beautiful. It is immensity--empty.
+
+Then did the spirit of God move on the face of the waters, move slowly
+and pass.
+
+Into the empty blue came a white, still splendour. Softly it grew
+in the dome of the sky, unreal in its beauty. But two pale curves
+that stayed in the heavens, as the wandering snowflake seems to rest
+on its fall. Midway between blue and blue it stayed, this soft white
+splendour, stayed dreaming a pause.
+
+For the spirit of God had passed; and the empty, blue vastness was
+filled with a sense of joy and elation. Earth’s fairest presence had
+risen high to the heavens. And it lay, two curving lines of exquisite
+splendour, breathed light on the sky; and white as the wing of a gull
+in the gleam of the sunshine, all shining with whiteness.
+
+And the infinite plane of the waters stretches on to the Poles. And the
+endless space of the sky wraps the water around.
+
+But the empty, blue vastness is gone.
+
+It is blue sea. It is sky. They are framing a world, for Lord Fuji has
+come.
+
+
+
+
+                                  II
+
+                              THE ASCENT
+
+
+Geologists state that Fuji San is a volcano, a young volcano, 12,365
+feet high. Philologists add that _San_ is derived from a Chinese term
+meaning mountain, and is not the familiar Japanese title which we
+render by Mr., Lord, or Master; while _Fuji_ is, they declare, a word
+of Aino origin. And then they all fall silent.
+
+These are the facts: the material, provable facts, such as western
+text-books publish. But to Japan, Fuji San is much more, and most of
+this is not text-book fact.
+
+National tradition says that Fuji arose in a single night, and at the
+same time Lake Biwa, one hundred and forty miles away, was suddenly
+formed. There is a legend that, in those far-away days of _mukashi,
+mukashi_--once upon a time--the Elixir of Life was taken to the top
+of the mountain, where it still remains. And popular belief declares
+that all the cinders and ashes brought down by the pilgrims’ feet are
+carried each night back to the summit of Fuji.
+
+To the people, Fuji is sacred; holy to some as the abiding-place of
+the Goddess _Ko-no-hana-saku-ya-hime_, She who makes the Blossoms of
+the Trees to Bloom, but sacred to all for its majesty, its unutterable
+beauty. The peasants of the country-side call Fuji _Oyama_, Honourable
+Mountain; and to the people Fuji San is Lord and Master. Deep in their
+hearts, and unassailable by western facts, the worship of his beauty
+and his power lies throbbing. During that brief six weeks of summer
+when Fuji’s wind-swept sides alone are climbable, the pilgrims come in
+thousands, in ten thousands. They dress themselves in white from head
+to foot. They carry long staves of pure white wood in their hands, each
+stamped with the temple crest, and in bands and companies they climb
+the mountain. And always the leader at their head, his staff crowned
+with a tinkling mass of bells, like tiny cymbals, chants the hymn
+of Fuji. From base to summit, as the white-clad pilgrims climb, the
+tinkling cymbals clash, and the voice of the leader rises loud at each
+refrain:
+
+“We are going, we are going to the top.”
+
+Above the clash of the bells the chorus echoes:
+
+“To the top, to the top, to the top.”
+
+“We are going,” chants the leader, and the tiny cymbals clash--“We are
+going, we are going to the top.”
+
+The western facts of modern text-books cannot touch the meaning of
+this mountain; the love of its long curving line which permeates the
+nation’s art, the adoration of its beauty, and the reverence of its
+power.
+
+Already in a time which to us upstart western nations is almost
+_mukashi, mukashi_, in the days before King Alfred burnt the cakes, a
+Japanese poet had caught and expressed the feeling of the nation for
+its mountain: for he wrote of Fujiyama as
+
+                “A treasure given to mortal man
+                The God Protector watching o’er Japan.”
+
+And to-day the God Protector watches still, and yearly the people come,
+in the white garb of pilgrims, chanting to his shrine.
+
+For six short summer weeks they come. Then the winds rush down,
+the snow falls, the tempests rage, and Lord Fuji lives alone. No
+human being has yet stayed a winter on his summit, and even in the
+summer weeks the winds will blow the lava blocks from the walls of
+the rest-houses, and sometimes the pilgrim from the path. For Fuji
+stands alone, not one peak among a range, but utterly alone. Rising
+straight out of the sea on one side, and from the great Tokyo plain
+on the other, his twelve thousand three hundred and sixty-five feet,
+in two long curving lines of exquisite grace, rise up and up into
+the blue, and not one inch of one foot is hidden or lost; it is all
+there, visible as a tower built on a treeless plain. It dominates the
+landscape. It can be seen from thirteen provinces; and from a hundred
+miles at sea the pale white peak of Fuji floats above the blue.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was a day in the beginning of August, in the very middle of those
+hot three weeks which are the great festival of Fuji San, in the
+simmering dawn of a summer’s day that we left Tokyo for Subashiri. As
+the train approached Gotemba the whole crowded carriageful of Japanese
+looked eagerly for Fuji. The train was climbing slowly by a mountain
+stream, and we were all looking, looking, beyond the dark green
+pine-trees of the river’s bank. Suddenly, for one dazzling moment, the
+deep blue cone of Fuji lay pillowed on a bank of clouds in the middle
+of the clear blue sky. Then, swiftly, the clouds rolled up and up. Fuji
+San was gone. The whole carriageful gave vent to those long strangled
+_h’s_ of admiration and delight, and with a murmured “Fuji San seeing
+have” sank back on their heels on the cushions.
+
+Gotemba is the nearest railway station to Fujiyama, and the highest.
+It lies a thousand feet up. Being the most accessible, it is the most
+usual starting-point for the climb, but it is not the most picturesque.
+A wonderful line of trams now connects Gotemba with Subashiri, and
+even with Yoshida, a place half round the base of the mountain. We
+were to start from Subashiri and come down to Yoshida, and return by
+the lakes. So from the station we walked up the straggling, badly kept
+street of Gotemba, where every house is a hotel and every hotel hangs
+out many advertisements in the shape of cotton streamers twelve feet
+long and six inches wide, which are attached by rings to bamboo poles.
+So through groves of white and blue and brown banners all adorned with
+beautiful Chinese symbols we walked to the tramway.
+
+A dive through a wooden archway between two tea-houses, where a
+ticket-hole and a wooden barrier composed the station, and we were
+there. The trams stood under the archway; the lines were lost in the
+black cindery mud--and they were both Japanese--the tram-lines, just
+rows of knitting-needles and laid very close together, the trams
+diminished by the national taste for the national needs to a little
+oblong box like a stunted bathing-machine. Our tram stood from ground
+to roof perhaps some five feet high. By taking off our hats we could
+just manage to sit down, and by judiciously fitting our knees into
+one another like elaborate dovetailing we got in width-ways, and we
+only got in at all by entering the door sideways. Fat people do not
+travel in Japanese trams--not unless they have a ladder and sit on
+the roof. The only way to insinuate luggage is to coax it through the
+window-frames, which, as there were only two to a side, were almost
+once and a half times the width of the door, not more. In the Fuji
+tramways pilgrims’ hats are not admitted. This is no prohibition. It
+is an impossibility, for the diameter of the pilgrim hat, which is
+twice as large as the largest halo, is equal in size to the width of
+the entire tram. So the pilgrims hang their huge circles of straw hats,
+like scooped-out orange halves, outside; and our tram before it started
+became a new kind of armoured train.
+
+In this dumpy bathing-box we had room for four a side. We took five and
+thought it empty; smiled at six; submitted to seven; where an eighth
+would have disposed himself I do not know, he would certainly have got
+in, but the puzzle would have been to have found a vacant cubic foot
+of space for his occupation. Trams are never full in Japan. There is
+always room for more, if the more arrive. In this case the more got in
+at a small junction outside the back lanes of Gotemba. They got in,
+three of them, and with huge bundles too. Then the conductor looked
+round inquiringly and smiled, whereupon two polite pilgrims of lighter
+build than the newcomers gave up their seats and wedged themselves into
+the window-frames, while the bundles were deposited on the continuous
+strata of passenger. What happened to the third I do not know. He got
+in.
+
+Then we started, really started, for there was no other halting-place,
+no village or station between here and Subashiri. Nothing but a broad,
+bare sweep of upward-tending common, where multitudes of wild flowers
+grew out of the cindery soil.
+
+As we went on, the faintly curving common, which always sloped round
+and up, grew wilder and wilder. There were fewer flowers on the black
+soil. Sometimes the cinders lay all bare in large dull patches against
+the coarse grass. We were on the broad swelling slope of Fuji, on the
+edge of the first ripple before it dies away into the smooth water
+of the plain below. And we were crawling slowly from the first to
+the second ripple as a fly crawls round the curve of an orange. Fuji
+himself was invisible. For all we could see he did not exist. Spread
+out before our eyes was only the endless swelling line of the green
+common, always curving round and up. From time to time our driver blew
+a melancholy thin note from a tiny copper horn shaped like a thickened
+comma and ornamented with a worked band of brass, a pathetic far-off
+note unknown to western scales.
+
+Our tram-line was laid among the ample cinders of Fuji’s burnt-out
+fires, and sometimes the curves were very sharp. Then the conductor,
+balanced on the step and grasping the window-frame with both hands,
+jerked the tram towards him to keep it on the lines; and we rounded the
+curves in triumph. The compact mass of passenger which filled the tram
+interior looked on unperturbed, while those in the window-frames kindly
+adjusted their weight to assist the conductor. And the melancholy
+thin note of the copper horn travelled over the long slope of the
+upward-tending common as we crawled slowly on.
+
+In the midst of a perfect stocking-heel of knitting-needles, which all
+looked as though they were about to begin violently knitting at once,
+the tram stopped, and the compact mass of passenger disintegrated
+itself slowly. Having been the first to enter we were the last to
+detach ourselves from the general lump, and when we did recover a
+separate entity the knitting-needles lay gleaming in the cindery
+mud--and there was nothing else. We stumbled on over them for some
+time, until a ticket-hole in a sentry-box restored our belief that it
+was a stopping-place and not an accident. So we stood still and shouted
+for our tea-house boy by name. He came running, in long, tight-fitting,
+blue trousers like thick cotton hose and a blue tunic; and he was a
+girl, a pretty bright-coloured girl with daintily coiffured hair; and
+we all set off for the tea-house.
+
+Subashiri is another straggling ill-kept street, all tea-houses and
+long cotton banners tied to bamboo poles, and our tea-house was the
+last of them all. It lay on the very edge of Fuji, and when we left
+it, after all our preparations had been completed, our lunch eaten,
+our guide engaged, we stepped straight on to the endless curve of
+upward-tending common.
+
+I should have said our horses stepped, for the first stage of Fuji
+San is climbable on horses, pack-horses of a unique Japanese breed,
+which bite. They are harnessed with elaborate trappings in scarlet and
+gold, saddled with huge wooden saddles, rising like the prow of a ship
+behind, and sloping so steeply that the middle is one long knife-blade
+ridge, and only a tight hold of the stirrups prevents the rider
+from falling. All ride straddle-legged. I do not recommend Japanese
+pack-horses for pleasure, comfort, or security.
+
+We plodded along over the bare common with its eternal long sweep
+upwards, like the swell of a great Atlantic roller, and the freshness
+and the coldness seemed to lift us out of Japan and carry us miles and
+miles north, to the chill summer of a northern land. The path which cut
+winding across the long up-sweep of the green common was black as ink,
+and shining with the wet of mountain clouds. Fuji was invisible, but as
+the deep rumble of the thunder, deadened behind the thick white clouds
+which bounded path and common, rolled slowly out of hearing it was as
+if Great Fuji spoke. Behind the mist the presence of the “honourable
+mountain” could be surely felt. Already the world seemed sunk away and
+the pilgrimage begun.
+
+Over the green common the pack-horses plodded. Our guide and the
+little girl groom, in her thick blue hose and dark blue tunic, were
+far behind talking in peace. The big drops of rain which the thunder
+brought had ceased to fall, and the freshness and the chill coming
+after the tropical heat of the plain stung strength to life again.
+Even the pack-horses grew less sulky, and urging made them shuffle
+into something near a trot. But this outbreak of energy, which lasted
+perhaps eighty yards, was more than enough for comfort, though it added
+to experience, for like the knights of old who “clove” their enemies
+in two, we too “clove,” but in another direction. It was painful. So
+the horses sank back into their bad-tempered pace, and the wide common
+swept onwards and upwards.
+
+After awhile the monotony of the black path crossing the green common
+was varied by stunted bushes which, gradually growing bigger and
+bigger, actually enclosed the cinder-track as English hedges an English
+lane. But the change was brief and the sloping green world with the
+long black line of path winding across it came back again.
+
+The pack-horses plodded bad-temperedly on, and the structure of
+that saddle seemed to be petrifying in my frame. A blot in the path
+which had lain for so long on the edge of the common came gradually
+nearer until it widened into a deep oblong pit filled with the
+rakings of a thousand fires. Through this we ploughed our way, and
+the loose cinders came over the feet of the horses. With a good deal
+of exertion we climbed out again, then a few yards, a sharp turn,
+and we passed an empty row of sheds, for we had reached the _Mma
+gaeshi_--“Horse-turn-back” station. My horse evidently understood the
+Chinese characters of the tea-house sign, for no sooner did he see
+them than he promptly walked into one of the sheds, with me clinging
+affectionately to his neck to avoid the shock of the roof on my chest.
+But promptly as he walked in, the little girl groom and the boy guide
+were prompter; with a rush they were at his head, hauling him out
+again. He objected strongly, snarling like an ill-used dog, and so did
+I, but we were backed out of the shed at last.
+
+We did not “horse-turn-back,” we were going to take our steeds on one
+more station. The stations on Fuji, which are nothing but the native
+tea-house, rougher, ruder, and less scrupulously clean, are mostly
+built right across the actual path itself. You go in at one side and
+out at the other.
+
+Up to the very threshold of the tea-house the sweep of the wet green
+common rolled, like a gigantic, motionless wave that never breaks. It
+was a bare wild world bounded only by the pale walls of the distant
+clouds. But on the other side the path plunged steeply into a thick
+interminable wood, where the great trees dripped slowly, with the heavy
+persistency of Fate, and the dark trunks glistened uncertainly with
+wet. The little girl groom and the boy guide came and led the horses
+carefully, for the path was very steep, and the thick roots of the
+trees stretched like cords above the cinders.
+
+This stage was short. At the next tea-house, which lay confined as
+a lake between the walls of the mountain, we said “good-bye” to the
+ill-tempered horses and to the little girl groom. The boy was to take
+us to the top and down to Yoshida. Then the wood, which the tea-house
+had interrupted no more than a buoy the ocean, stretched on. The great
+trees dripped coldly, with that chill feel of damp green things that
+makes the springtime of the north: coldly fresh as though the running
+sappy life were chill as mountain water, as though the growing trees
+were enwrapped in invisible ice and the very air made of impalpable
+snow.
+
+In the midst of the wood stood a little desolate shrine, its floor was
+nothing but the black stamped earth, its roof of roughest thatch kept
+down with lava-stones, and only the tiny altar had walls at all. Behind
+a sort of wooden bar the gods sat dim, and a mournful old priest was
+their only attendant.
+
+Straight towards the altar led the mountain path. This was the gateway
+of Lord Fuji. Each path that climbs the “honourable mountain” leads
+through a temple to the temple on the top. At the first shrine the
+pilgrim buys his long white staff, stamped with the temple crest, which
+he carries with him upwards to the summit.
+
+We bought our staves. And the old man, thrusting a thin bar of iron
+like a stick of sealing-wax into the charcoal fire, burnt the crest of
+Subashiri’s shrine into the clean white wood, and with a courteous
+gesture he said the prayer which we, unknowing, had left unsaid.
+Lord Fuji is neither fierce nor exclusive, all the world may come as
+pilgrims through his gateways. From the great Sun-Goddess the Mikado
+sprang, and the people of Japan are all kin to the Shintō gods, but
+the Shintō gods themselves welcomed the Lord Buddha when he came.
+Side by side with the older gods Buddha’s temples stand to-day, and
+Lord Buddha, too, once said, “All men are one”; and again, “All
+living things are brothers to mankind”; for Buddha, like the modern
+scientists, declared the world, all worlds, and all that in them is,
+one, in substance one.
+
+Three steps from the temple and the trees of the wood shut over it
+as waters over a stone. It was lost. Lord Fuji is greater than his
+temples. With the help of our staves we climbed on up the steep
+cinder-path, till the great green trees, dripping slowly, dwindled,
+drew back, were ended.
+
+On the very edge of the wood was a tea-house, the _Ichi-gō_, No. 1
+station, a roughly built wooden-walled tea-house, on the edge of whose
+matting, with our feet on the path, we sat and drank tea, innumerable
+egg-bowls of hot green tea. While we were sitting here a whole party of
+pilgrims, in their white hose trousers, their white tunics tucked into
+their white _obi_, and their wash-basin-big straw hats, came down the
+path. They turned into the tea-house, and one old man, dropping on to
+the matting, rolled himself into a corner and was covered with _futon_.
+He had caught cold on the top, and was perfectly exhausted with pain
+and fatigue. But as he lay in the corner, clutching the _futon_ to
+him as though to press a concrete warmth into his numbed bones, there
+was in his eyes a look of dwelling content that not all the pain nor
+all the fatigue could overcome. He had climbed from the threshold to
+the sanctuary of Fuji; had knelt by the cloud-swept altar; felt the
+might of the God in the winds of his summit, in the still depths of
+his crater; caught up with Lord Fuji on high, he had looked down upon
+earth. What now was pain or fatigue?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The path from the tea-house struck out abruptly across the mountain,
+and we soon stood above the trees, stood on the bare cinder-slope
+that is Fuji. It was very much like walking up an ash-heap or a
+ballast-mound, and about as beautiful. Below us everything was hidden
+in a shifting mist; above, twenty feet of cinder-slope ended in a white
+wall. It was like climbing a black rope hung between two clouds.
+
+After the ballast-heap came a lava-bed, where a molten river of lava
+had dried itself into high rocks and deep cracks, as the ice of a
+glacier. We crossed it obliquely, and in the twilight saw neither
+beginning nor end, neither from where it came nor to where it went; but
+its pinnacles and crevasses, its tumbled waves and jagged, piled-up
+ridges, lay lustreless and dark, as though of coal-black ice.
+
+Once across this lava-glacier, and out of the dip formed by its bed, we
+stood on a sort of self-contained ash-heap, and looked down that long
+slope of Fuji which already lay below us.
+
+Dimly through the faint floating veil of mist we could see all
+the green earth bare and smooth, with a darker line of hills as a
+child’s bank of mud curving round the black surface of the lakes. We
+were so high up, the lakes so far away, and the whole air so heavy
+with moisture that they looked in the misty light like polished
+slabs of black rock dropped into the green earth as one might sink
+stepping-stones into a lawn. As we watched the light seemed to thicken,
+the white mists spread through it as motes in a sunbeam, gathered
+themselves together. Swiftly they hid the black lakes; and boiling
+within the dark curve of the hills in billows of smoke, boiled over the
+mud-bank of hills, and blotting them out; submerged the green earth,
+and flowing rapidly upwards hid all the long slope of Fuji beneath a
+shoreless sea of fog.
+
+Again we stood on a steep cinder-heap on the black rope which hung from
+void to void--alone.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And impenetrable Fuji remained. We simply climbed a cinder-path which
+ran from end to end of a never-ending, ever-retreating circle of cloud.
+And still within this grey-white circle we reached the _Ni-gō_, or No.
+2 station. Here we were to stop the night, because No. 2 is larger and
+more comfortable than No. 4, and No. 8 was too far away.
+
+No. 2 lay on the side of the path, its face looking over the precipice
+and its three sides well within a scooped-out hole in the cinder-heap.
+It was nothing but an ordinary Japanese room, only its walls were of
+solid wood, protected outside by cut blocks of lava, and inside with a
+lining of folded _futon_ on shelves. Far away in the back of the room
+the charcoal fire was sunk in a sort of earth well, so that you could
+sit on the matting with your legs in the hole, absorb warmth, or do
+your cooking. Otherwise the tea-house was bare matted space on which
+each comer staked out a claim for himself with his luggage.
+
+Having chosen a good site in a corner less draughty than the rest of
+the enclosure, we proceeded to unpack and wash. Just outside the middle
+of the open wall of the house, and full on the pathway of Fuji, stood
+a large waterbutt. Having been directed by the family--an amiable man,
+an indifferent wife, and an inquisitive boy--to wash outside, I stepped
+on to the pathway. The tub was half full of water and looked very like
+the ordinary bath-tub of Japan. It was the first time I had seen a bath
+out of doors, though they figure so largely in travellers’ tales; still
+there was nothing else, so boldly I plunged the top half of myself into
+the water.
+
+A simultaneous scream from the man, the wife and the boy, brought me up
+dripping and bewildered.
+
+What had I done?
+
+Not sinned against their moral code, surely. No--worse. Washed in the
+drinking-water!
+
+Luckily there was more, enough for endless tea that night, and
+to-morrow fresh water could be fetched. But my wash came to an abrupt
+end. Of course what I ought to have done was to unearth a brass
+pan tucked away behind the tub, take down a bamboo dipper from a
+lava-block, dip out water from the tub into the pan and wash in that.
+Quite simple, naturally, when it was all explained and the pan and
+the dipper produced, but all problems always are simple after the
+explanation.
+
+The amiable man remained amiable even after this catastrophe, and the
+indifferent wife had not been shaken from her indifference save for the
+space of one brief scream, while the small boy, at such an exhibition
+of curious manners on the part of the _Ijin San_, grew more inquisitive
+than ever, and we fried ham, ate tinned tongue, cut slices of bread,
+and drank foreign wine under a close and exhaustive series of comments
+which were questions.
+
+It grew dark rapidly as we ate. And as relays of pilgrims came in out
+of the night to fling themselves down on the matting, swallow cupfuls
+of hot tea and exchange long compliments with the man, the wife,
+and the guide, and disappear again into the night, we congratulated
+ourselves. No. 4 must have been very full. At eight o’clock, when the
+_amado_ were drawn and the tea-house became a compact box, No. 2 had no
+guests but the _Ijin San_.
+
+It was time to go to bed. The man put out the one smoking lamp by the
+fire-pit which had cast such lurid yellow lights on the white clothes
+of the pilgrims as they sat and drank, and such murky, gigantic shadows
+on the rest of the room; the boy went to bed in a corner, and we rolled
+ourselves up in our carefully Keatinged _futon_ and tried to sleep.
+
+It was cold. There were fleas. And Fuji sent us down a draught which
+simply whistled through the wooden walls, the folded _futon_ and the
+lava-blocks. And the sense of the unusual, of the rest-house, the
+cinder-path and of Fuji, crept into our slumbers, holding back sleep.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When we awoke it was already five o’clock and the _amado_ were open.
+The boy, careering over the matting, was detailing how the _Ijin San_
+slept.
+
+We shook ourselves out of our _futon_ and went outside to wash--not in
+the waterbutt.
+
+Already, when we stepped upon the cinder-path, the unseen sun had
+touched the white clouds lying like islands in the blue beneath.
+And as we watched they coloured blushing, till in blood-red pools
+they studded thick the air below. They lay away out over the land,
+moving slowly through the vapoury mist. It was as if the air was half
+precipitated, the atmosphere made visible. We looked down on to the
+world below and saw it as one sees white stones at the bottom of deep
+water.
+
+The hidden sun was rising swiftly, and as he rose the blood-red pools
+faded out; the vapoury white air grew thinner, seemed slowly drying,
+until clear and invisible, we looked through it and saw the green earth
+stretching away and away to the level line of the horizon; while midway
+the little lakes lay sepia-black upon the green, curving so comfortably
+into the tiny crescent of the hills all dark with purple shadows. A
+fresh-washed world lying green and flat at the bottom of 7,000 feet of
+atmosphere.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was cold, the water in the brass pan colder, and tingling with
+sudden chill we ran rapidly up the path past the scooped-out hollow
+where the rest-house hid--and stood transfixed.
+
+Above us, touching us, and black against a sky all blue and liquid as
+the living sea, was Fuji San.
+
+His clear-cut lines rose up quickly, and the mountain, whose slope our
+hands were holding, seemed to draw back its summit that our eyes might
+see it, so close it lay, so steep above. Round as a tower it rose in
+curves of grace, a black lighthouse springing towards the sky, delicate
+as Giotto’s lily tower: slender in its grace and fragile. This was no
+rude Colossus, mighty with brute strength, but a god, great in grace,
+and strong, because divine.
+
+Upwards the soaring lines rose up, coal-black, and the growing light
+caught faintly at a wine-red patch where the sullen fires were
+sleeping, caught and turned it redder; redly it glowed, smouldering
+into life, the living life of Fujiyama.
+
+Beneath the rounded dip of the summit were two tiny cracks, and the sky
+which lay so blue within the crescent curve seemed straining through.
+Here was neither tree nor rock, neither snow nor glacier, nothing to
+hide the form and substance of the mountain. Quite smoothly it rose,
+deep black, one great dead cinder.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was perfectly fine when at last towards six o’clock we started to
+climb; and the pale blue sky lay flat behind Fuji, as the background in
+a picture.
+
+Our path was narrow, just a foot-wide track beaten firm in the steep
+cinder-slope. And we climbed, till at No. 4 we stopped to rest.
+
+The stations on Fuji are all much alike. A matted room lined with
+_futon_, and always a square well at the back with a charcoal fire
+and an ever-boiling kettle. As you go up the wooden walls are hidden
+outside beneath huge blocks of cut lava, hidden deeper and deeper,
+while the roofs are fastened down with lava-stones. Yet every winter
+Fuji blows down the built-up walls, tears off the roofs, and sends the
+big blocks hurtling down the slope. Even in summer the roof and walls
+lose portions of themselves, which, rolling, rolling, rolling, roll
+for ever downwards. Some of the stations are smaller, some larger,
+some cleaner, this is the only difference. In each you sit down on the
+matting to rest, and the crouching man over the fire brings you hot
+tea, and rice-paste cakes, while a far-away figure dimly seen through
+the smoke of the charcoal fire asks your guide where you come from,
+where you are going to, when you started, and what time you will be
+back. And your guide replies, with endless details as to your behaviour
+if you are an _Ijin San_, and the amount you have already expended on
+tea and tips.
+
+It was a glorious morning and one with the added charm of uncertainty.
+
+Floating in the blue above and below us were clouds, large white clouds
+which would swoop down on the land, suddenly, and hide it as under a
+napkin. Then the black cone of Fuji, a cone with its top bitten out in
+two little bites, would pull down a thick flap out of the blue, and
+disappear. Mountain, sky and land shifted and shone, passed in an eddy
+of broken glimpses, stayed in a still-set picture, or were lost under
+covering clouds.
+
+But always the steep little path led up through the loose cinder-slope,
+and always we climbed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The steepest and most tiring part of the climb, except the natural
+staircase below the summit, is between the sixth and eighth station,
+where the path, leaving the cinder-slope, runs along a ridge of solid
+lava, rising like the long root of a tree high up out of the cinders,
+and loses itself among great black blocks. To cross this was something
+like jumping over sea rocks when the tide is out, only instead of lying
+flat these went steeply upward.
+
+As we went toiling painfully along, feeling very like ants crawling up
+a tree-trunk, the clash of tiny cymbals, the faint echoes of talk and
+laughter came floating up. It was a whole party of pilgrims who came
+swinging up hand over hand, as it were, and as easily as if they were
+skating on good ice. We first saw them as we stood propped against
+the lava-blocks, panting, and they were far below us, tiny as dwarfs,
+little spots of white on the dead-black slope, away down in the second
+storey as we were in the sixth. But as we laboriously climbed our
+inches they came on swiftly--on, up, on, past us; the little bells
+clashing and chiming gaily to the talk and laughter. Our guide told us
+they were _kurumaya_ who had started from Gotemba that morning at two,
+and who would get back there again before dark, to work the next day
+as usual. Anything like the pace at which those men came up the steep
+slope of Fuji--for the most part straight over the long beds of loose
+cinders--I have never seen. It was like sailors running up a rope. They
+came up more swiftly than most people would care to go down, without
+an effort, with plenty of breath left to talk and laugh, and with that
+supreme ease which only comes when doing something well within the
+margin of one’s power.
+
+We were very glad to rest at No. 8, though our friends the _kurumaya_
+had gone on cheerfully. It was such a nice large tea-house, beautifully
+clean, and the hot egg-bowls full of tea were peculiarly refreshing.
+Without the continuous tea I do not know how one would climb Fuji at
+all. The air at 13,000 feet freezes, but the sun of Japan pours down
+relentlessly, fierce as the tropics, while the hot dust drifts down
+one’s throat, into one’s very skin; and when the wind blows you need to
+cling to the shifting cinders with the very soles of your feet. Shelter
+on the bare slopes of Fuji there is none. Frequently the wind is so
+fierce even in the six brief weeks of summer that to stand upright is
+impossible, for Fuji’s summit is in the heart of the storm.
+
+Between the eighth and the ninth station the path was easy, but we
+climbed it wrapped in a sudden cloud. All the long sweep of earth below
+was gone. The green Tokyo plain, where the dark thunder-clouds lay
+brooding in the still blue air, and the great fingers of light which
+struck so fiercely on the little lakes beneath the mud bank of the
+hills, the dark cone, so near above us, all were gone, sponged out by
+a big cloud. And we were only climbing up a steep black rope that hung
+between two infinities, climbing out of space, into space.
+
+From the ninth and last station you climb into Fuji’s stronghold by a
+giant staircase of rough lava. It is necessary here to hoist yourself
+painfully up by the aid of guides or your own two hands. We climbed on
+slowly. The lava was quite hot, for the staircase lies cut within the
+slope, and gets and keeps the heat.
+
+On the steepest step of the staircase we passed an old, old man, and
+an old, old woman, both in the white garb of pilgrims, and each with
+a guide on either side to help them on. The last pitiful effort of
+the old woman to drag herself up on to a lava-block had exhausted her
+completely; she lay huddled against the stones gasping, her eyes shut.
+The old man kneeling by her side was holding the wrinkled hand in both
+of his trying to encourage her. The cracked old voice, broken with
+quavering pants for breath, sounded strangely on the desolate black
+staircase as we came by.
+
+“We are going,” he chanted--“we are going to the top.”
+
+And the four guides in their fresh young voices sang: “To the top, to
+the top, to the top.”
+
+“We are going,” repeated the old man, softly stroking the hand he
+held--“we are going to the top.”
+
+And again the four young voices rang out vigourously: “To the top, to
+the top, to the top.”
+
+It was the pilgrims’ hymn, and the old woman heard it. Slowly she
+stirred, her mouth opened with a sigh of utter weariness, but still she
+too sang in the thinnest trickle of a voice, broken with quavering sobs:
+
+“To the top, to the top, to the top.”
+
+It was the most pathetic music I have ever heard. Indeed the wave of
+faith was great which could carry such as these to the top of Fuji San.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Up the steep steps, cut so deep within the lava, we hurried panting,
+eager we, too, to reach the top. But the summit of Fujiyama is a
+sanctuary, and on its threshold stood two priests.
+
+As we stumbled up over the last step, and on to the path which runs
+around the crater, they barred our way, standing motionless behind a
+white-wood wicket. In the breeze their black robes fluttered, their
+tonsured heads were bare.
+
+Surprised we paused. All the climber’s hurry fell away. This was not
+another peak to be raced up and raced down by the indifferent tourist,
+not another ascent to be added to the list of the mountaineer. Fuji
+San is sacred. Enter into his courts as into the temple of the Lord,
+humbly, reverently, or at least with a sincere respect.
+
+The two priests leaned over the wicket as we came up and bowed; but
+they did not open it. One stretched out his hand for our staves to
+stamp them with the temple’s crest. On the summit of Fuji San the crest
+is stamped in vermilion ink. In the temples at the foot it is burnt
+with a red-hot iron: vermilion is a royal colour.
+
+The other priest, holding a bamboo dipper, came slowly towards us.
+Something he was saying as he moved, in the nasal sing-song of the
+priest. Then he motioned to us to put out our hands and slowly,
+carefully, he poured the ice-cold water over them. And they bade us
+enter. It was the rite of purification, the symbol of the contrite
+heart which all who cross great Fuji’s threshold must surely bring.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Once inside the wicket the path, beaten wide here, ran between a
+breast-high wall of lava which, built like a rampart on the edge of
+Fuji, hid the sheer sides of the mountain and a row of low wooden huts,
+the rest-houses--ran between these and on, up to where the black edge
+of the crater, like the rim of a broken cup, cut the sky in sharp clear
+lines.
+
+For the moment it was fine, and leaving our luggage in one of the huts
+we hurried on, past the rest-houses, on past the rampart wall, on along
+the little beaten track which still led steeply upwards. Then sharply
+it turned, and we stood wedged within a crack in the crater wall, with
+the sharp black rim rising high on either hand.
+
+We were alone on Fuji’s side, before his altar. And there was no sound.
+
+In a stillness as of death the vast crater stretched 800 feet below,
+and the grey ash-dust gathering through two centuries lay thick and
+smooth as sand upon the shore. Steeply the cinder-walls rose up, rose
+round, and held the ash. Only in front of us, across half a mile of
+silent dust, a wide crack in the cup-like rim showed two tall poles
+and many floating banners, there where the temple’s wicket crossed the
+pathway from Gotemba.
+
+Grey ash and cinder, that was Fuji San. Once a mighty fire, a fire
+two and a half miles round, with 13,000 feet of cinders, and a bed
+of ash 2000 feet across. And now, dying or asleep, rigid as death,
+grown grey and cold, but yet mighty as the sea, powerful as the storm;
+Nature’s eternal force made visible. And that still life which rolls
+around our human incompleteness, mysterious and unknown, drew near.
+Almost it seemed as though we touched the force without, the unresting
+naked flame of being which threads through the spheres. Almost we
+touched--but saw only the corpse of Life, for Nature keeps her
+secrets....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In a silence as of death, the vast still crater stretched for a circle
+of two miles, and the grey ash-dust gathering through two centuries lay
+thick and smooth--the pall of a mighty God.
+
+Steeply the cindery walls rose up, rose round in jagged points like
+the rim of a broken cup, and into the crack there came two white-clad
+pilgrims. They knelt bareheaded on the edge of the crater, looking
+down, and the murmured sing-song of their prayers broke the silence.
+Old and grizzled, their bullet-heads were bent before the altar in a
+Faith reverent and sincere.
+
+Truly the might of God had dwelt on Fuji; the breath of Eternal Life
+had rested here--rested and passed, or was passing; and the pilgrim in
+his faith holds sacred the print of that footstep. He prays to that
+part of the Godhead incarnate in Fuji--Fuji so perfect in his grace, so
+stirring in his strength.
+
+In western lands the Roman Catholic peasant prays before his altar, but
+the symbol of his Godhead is often reduced to a composite Christ in
+pink and white plaster. If Truth must have a form--and mankind believes
+with difficulty in abstract nouns--it surely is a purer, grander faith
+to feel God visible in Fuji’s curves, dwelling in his sleeping fires,
+than to hem Him in a building made by man and seat Him on an ugly altar
+between groups of tawdry flowers.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The little narrow path which led down into the crack led also round
+the summit below the jagged edges of the crater’s rim, and we followed
+it. Outside the crack it went steeply downwards before it turned, for
+above, the cindery slopes of Fuji were steaming white in the sunshine,
+and the ground was very hot. It is but a patch, still evidence that
+Fuji sleeps. He is not dead.
+
+Then the wandering pathway, a black thread on the loose cinder-slope,
+led up again, round and down into a tiny fold among the cinders, and
+suddenly, quickly as a camera snaps, the white clouds, loosely piled
+upon the mountain, were riven asunder, and the whole world shimmering
+in a golden haze that touched but did not hide it, lay at our feet.
+
+Straight down below, 13,000 feet away, it lay. All the long line of
+the river Fujikawa, gleaming blue-black as rough-cast iron, among the
+orange sand-flats of its mouth. And the soft curves of the Yokohama
+peninsula, a smaller but more graceful Italy, floating, floating, on
+the water, purple-blue on azure blue.
+
+And all beyond was the blue intensity of the infinite sea.
+
+So near it looked, so clear that the steely line of the Fujikawa seemed
+a sword-blade one could stoop and reach. And leaning we looked from
+Fuji’s top as from a tower; but Fuji’s self we could not see. His
+cinder-slopes had vanished.
+
+Straight down below there was the world, and we above it hung suspended
+13,000 feet above the earth. Beyond, above, outside of it. Dear Earth,
+how still it lay, how beautiful!
+
+And into my mind there floated the old, old words: “And He divided the
+land from the waters, and the dry land He called Earth.... And God
+looked and saw that it was good.”
+
+Above the world, beyond it, we too could look and see, and we too “saw
+that it was good.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then the little wandering track, beaten firm by the feet of the
+pilgrims, led on, up and down, among the cinders of Fuji’s sides, and
+round to that great crack in the cup’s rim where the pathway from
+Gotemba reached the summit.
+
+Here were crowds of people, all the pilgrims on Fuji San, pouring
+through the white-wood wicket, or buying draughts of the sacred “Golden
+Water” which is born in the depths of the crater.
+
+As we stood drinking our little bowlful of the ice-cold water, the low
+boom of a Japanese temple bell came swaying through the air, and each
+jagged peak round the crater’s rim added its muffled echo to the bell’s
+deep boom.
+
+The level space which formed the floor to this big crack was full of
+pilgrims old and young, men, women and little children, and they were
+all pressing forward between the tall poles, where the long banners
+tied top and bottom were stirring in the wind, to the little temple
+lying under the very edge of Fuji, as a nest beneath the eaves. The
+temple seemed full already, but the crowd, courteous for all their
+zeal, pressed forward gently, content, if they could not enter, to stay
+outside.
+
+Again the low liquid boom came swaying through the air, prolonged by
+the muffled echoes of the jagged peaks. And we too walked towards the
+temple. But the patient crowd without reached already to the pathway,
+and must press back against the cinder sides as the long procession
+of black-robed priests, with copes and stoles and vestments of rich
+brocade, swept into the temple.
+
+Then the liquid booming bell swayed out again--and was still; and the
+muffled echoes of the peaks, subdued and faint, lingered in the intense
+silence.
+
+The priests had passed within.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The ash on the floor of the crater was soft and very thick. It lay in
+thin round flakes that broke between the fingers, and the feet sank
+into it, drawn under as on sand that is half-quick. It was like walking
+on piles of those sunlit flecks that carpet a beech-wood; but the
+light had gone out of these and left them pale and grey.
+
+All around the black walls of the crater rose up into the sky, five
+hundred feet of sheer height. Shut into the crater pit with the dead
+ash sucking our feet we seemed to have come to the region where death
+lies behind--and birth is yet to come. We stood in the Place of Pause,
+in that Between which is Nothingness.
+
+Smooth as the sand of the shore the ash stretched along. Loose and
+thick the flakes were piled, and the feet, drawn under, grew heavy.
+
+What was beneath? Nothingness?
+
+And a strange fear of falling through the loose ash into that
+Nothingness grew with each empty moment.
+
+Faintly, far away, the stir of Life’s Birth reached into the void. It
+came from below, deep through the ash where a little clear trickle of
+water sang in the silence. Distinct, but so soft that the senses must
+needs strain to hear. Through the ash, beneath the ash, the water
+trickled, faint as a new-born breath. And its name it was Golden.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The hut when we reached it was empty, and it lay facing the lava-wall,
+the last of the row, and all of them were open in front, like cages at
+the Zoo.
+
+The square pit with its charcoal fire was in front here, and we had to
+pass behind it to reach the unoccupied space at the back. As we crawled
+over the matting darkened by our own shadows, for the only light came
+through the open front, we almost stumbled over some one rolled up in
+a bundle of _futon_. It was the old, old woman of the morning. She was
+asleep, in the deep, dull sleep of utter exhaustion, and her wrinkled
+chin, dropped down, trembled, as she slept.
+
+It was very cold in the hut, and we too were glad of _futon_ and
+egg-bowls of hot tea, glad to eat our tinned tongue and slices of
+dry bread, and gladder still just to stay wrapt in the _futon_, and
+sleepily rest.
+
+The landlord, like an image, sat on his heels in the well and never
+stirred. From time to time he put fresh pieces of charcoal on the fire
+with a pair of brass chopsticks; then the smoke, sweeping in dense
+waves through the room, would make us all cough abruptly, till it
+melted slowly away and the room was still.
+
+Beyond the lava-wall the grey-white clouds lay herded as a fold of
+sheep, and we watched them mounting up and up, rolling against the
+wall, rising above it, sending thin wreaths and wisps of mists across
+the pathway, which stayed like ribbons in the air, and then sinking,
+dropped down again. Often they came up, and always rolled back beaten.
+Fuji’s summit is above the clouds, they could not scale it.
+
+In twos and threes and little groups, the white-robed pilgrims stopped
+to sit on the edge of the matting and drink tea, and eat innumerable
+balls of rice rolled in a soft grated substance that looked to be, but
+was not, cheese--a thing unknown in this milkless land. So the pilgrims
+sat on the matting and ate their rice-balls, which the landlord,
+without moving his body a hair’s-breadth, produced and rolled, and
+sprinkled, and handed. And the acrid smoke from the charcoal fire
+drifted across the room, filling it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Quite suddenly I awoke out of my sleep, to find some one on the floor
+beside me waking the old, old woman. It took her a long time to
+struggle out of that dense, deep sleep into a state of even drowsy
+consciousness. She sat up, bewildered, and when they told her she must
+go, get up, climb all that weary way down again, the old face seemed
+to shrink together in hopeless despair. There was a long dreary pause.
+Then the old, old woman bowed, the smile of courtesy upon her worn old
+face.
+
+“_Yoroshū gozaimas_” (“As it honourably pleases you”), she said. And
+rising, she tottered out.
+
+This flesh was more than weak, but the spirit was the spirit of her
+race--it sacrificed all things.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We were to sleep in Yoshida that night, and for us too it was time to
+go. So leaving our money on the edge of the fire-pit we crawled out
+of the hut. The image sitting on its heels never stirred; with one
+swift glance beneath the eyelids, he had reckoned the money to the
+last _sen_, but whether more or less than he expected, he remained
+immovable, magnificently unconscious, occupied solely in bowing us
+out. Had it been less than the proper charge we certainly should have
+heard of it through the guide, but as tea is never charged for, each
+visitor pays for it according to his rank, exigencies, generosity, and
+the status of the tea-house. In reality, of course, it is payment for
+attendance as well as tea.
+
+The Japanese hold that no service performed can ever have a money
+equivalent. In their economy, money was never a real asset, as courage,
+knowledge or art, and they ignored it, when they did not despise it. So
+in the old days, those trades which had most to do with money, whose
+aim seemed to be the getting of money, were looked down on. Shopkeepers
+and merchants ranked below swordsmiths, peasants and artisans. Only the
+ignoble would choose such as a life’s work, and if to-day this idea has
+hindered commerce, if it has produced the low standard of some business
+men, and consequently the foreigner’s bad opinion of them, it has, on
+the other hand, lifted the nation out of the rut of sordid greed, made
+it seek after, and lay fast hold of, that which seems to it true--made
+of its people a race of men, of gentlemen, honourable, high-principled,
+and capable of indomitable devotion to their ideal.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We stepped off the summit of Fuji San into a wet white cloud, which
+was the sky of the earth below. For the first two stages the way down
+was the same as the way up, but at No. 8 the paths divided, the one to
+Yoshida leading away to the left.
+
+After we had made a sort of semi-tour of the mountain we climbed over a
+lava-ridge and found ourselves in the centre of a black scoop in Fuji’s
+side that, coming from above, stretched interminably downwards. And
+the whole of the huge groove was a mass of the loosest, most shifting
+cinder. There was no path. One went down. At each step all the cinders
+on that part of Fuji slid bodily, tumbling over each other in their
+haste. You slid too, until the cinders, piling themselves up and up,
+reached the knee, and abruptly you stopped, only to pull out that leg
+and begin to slide again with the other. The rate at which one shot
+down was prodigious, and the method alarming. Each step seemed to start
+half the mountain rolling, rolling, for ever downwards, and there
+seemed no particular reason why the other half with you on it should
+not roll away too. Positively, as the torrent of cinders rolled and
+rolled and rolled, the conviction that Fujiyama must look smaller next
+morning grew upon me. Until with a flash of understanding I remembered
+the legend of the dust brought down by the pilgrims’ feet flying each
+night back to the mountain. And it seemed a very necessary explanation,
+and quite convincing too, when I looked at the tons and tons of cinders
+which my feet alone were sending down Fuji’s side.
+
+After awhile the slope grew even steeper, and the cinders from black
+became a deep dull red. And still one shot downwards. Small patches of
+powdery, grey snow sprinkled with tiny round spots were tucked away
+here between the red cinders, and the whole slope was covered with the
+straw sandals of former pilgrims. They were scattered over the red
+cinders like a new kind of vegetation hardier than the rest, and there
+were thousands on thousands of them.
+
+And still we shot downwards. At too steep an angle now to be brought up
+merely by the weight of the cinders, so that we were obliged to invent
+brakes with our more or less free foot, our extended arms, or the
+angle of our bodies; and we were very glad indeed of our staves to put
+any sort of term to the long uncomfortable slide.
+
+It was a long while before we passed out of the zone of the _waraji_,
+and saw real little green things growing between the cinders. They
+looked utterly miserable and degenerate, but they did make the ballast
+solider, and the sliding easier.
+
+It was a gigantic slide, but we brought up at last on a ridge of grey
+rock, over which we had to climb carefully, for it was full of holes.
+On the other side of this ridge the degenerate green weeds had grown
+into degenerate green plants; and after a few more slides and climbs
+the plants became bushes, stunted and miserable, but bushes, and we
+came out on to a sort of natural grass platform, before the rest-house
+of No. 4, Yoshida side. It was dirty, the first dirty house I had ever
+seen in Japan. Below us, as though stopped short by a word of command,
+“Thus far and no further,” were the trees; the tops of the nearest were
+on a level with the platform, but not one grew upon it.
+
+With the cinder-slope behind us we stepped off the grass platform
+straight into the forest. It was a beautiful forest. First firs, and
+then, as we went downwards, green trees, small oaks and cryptomerias of
+all kinds.
+
+To feet weary of ballast-heaps, the forest footpath was a rest
+refreshing, and the delight of growing trees and green fresh leaves
+after _waraji_ and cinders, an enchantment. But Fuji had not finished
+his surprises or his trials. Soon the pathway disappeared from under
+our feet, and only the roots of the trees remained. On these we had
+to walk, and they were slippery, knotted, and far apart, and full of
+tangled holes that caught and tripped the feet.
+
+A polite Japanese student came and walked with us a little way “to
+improve his English,” but his feet in their _waraji_ stepped over the
+tree-roots faster than ours in our boots, and we were soon left alone
+again.
+
+Gradually, as we went downwards, the forest altered from the austere
+wood of the mountain to the rich luxuriant wood of the plains, green
+with moss, covered with creepers, dripping with big juicy drops of
+water as though rich sap were oozing from every vein.
+
+All through the wood there were tiny tea-houses, set under a tree and
+lost among the branches. We passed No. 1 at least seven times, each
+time certain that it really must be the real original No. 1, and that
+the “horse-turn-back” station, where we could get a _basha_ to carry us
+to Yoshida, was necessarily “the next.” After the weary sliding down
+that abrupt slope, the muscles of one’s legs were all trembling with
+the strain, and the tree-roots, slippery and uncertain, became doubly
+difficult. We were still going down so steeply that the hollow of the
+pathway lay like a green chimney below us. Slowly up through this
+living funnel came the pilgrim’s chant.
+
+“We are going,” and the little bells clashed out triumphant--“we are
+going to the top.”
+
+Then the deep sing-song of the chorus, coming nearer with each
+syllable, grew louder:
+
+“Top ... the top ... to the top.”
+
+We waited while the chant coming up from the green depths below came
+nearer, came past us, went on.
+
+From the green heights above it sounded down.
+
+“We are going,” and the tiny cymbals clashed--“we are going to the
+top.”
+
+And faintly echoing from above came the answer: “To the top ... the top
+... top.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And still the first stations succeeded one another, and the tired feet
+and the aching muscles grew more weary. The wood was dense as ever, but
+less steep, and at last there came earth as well as tree-roots for a
+pathway.
+
+We passed through another station, half tea-house, half temple, where
+a man sat behind a tray of thin irons stamped with the temple’s crest,
+and where gods and tea-bowls filled the shelves. The path went through
+it and out again, under the trees, a path of good stamped earth. Then
+twisting suddenly it ended in four smooth green steps that led down
+into a natural amphitheatre, with tea-houses on each side. This was the
+_Mma gaeshi_--“horse-turn-back” station--Yoshida side. Away to the left
+were several square boxes on wheels, otherwise the stage was empty. It
+was, indeed, exactly like a “set” in an opera.
+
+We hobbled, it was so difficult to walk on _flat_ earth, to a tea-house
+and sat down demanding _basha_. Slowly a man entered right front, and
+crossing left centre tipped up a square box and waited. Then another
+man, entering left front, harnessed a horse to it. This took them half
+an hour, because they wanted four times too much for the drive to
+Yoshida, and at each refusal, at each expostulation, at each rebate,
+the one man dropped the square box down on the ground and the other
+gave up harnessing the horse. Meanwhile we drank tea and monotonously
+repeated our price. After half an hour the _basha_ was finally
+harnessed, and crossing left front we got in.
+
+This _basha_ was simply a square box without a lid, mounted on wheels.
+You sat on a piece of matting spread at the bottom, leant against
+the wooden back and clutched hard at the sides to keep yourself in.
+The driver sat on the shaft and used his feet as a brake. The reins
+consisted of one length of straw rope attached to the left side of the
+horse’s head.
+
+For the first half-hour the relief of stretching out one’s miserable,
+trembling legs was pure bliss, after that, _basha_-driving was
+pleasant but jolty, and after that it became renewed torture to endure
+the jolting, and the aches in one’s back and arms were vigorous and
+persistent. Road there was none, only two large ruts, in, over and
+among which we wandered.
+
+The trees stopped as abruptly above the natural amphitheatre of _Mma
+gaeshi_ as they had begun below the platform of No. 4. And for the
+whole two hours of our journey to Yoshida we travelled over an immense
+far-reaching common, one of the soft ripples at Fuji’s base. There was
+not a house or a village to be seen, nothing but the wide stretch of
+green common.
+
+It was half-past five when the _basha_ started out among the ruts,
+and the clear, colourless light of a northern evening--we were 3000
+feet up--which is not cold, yet is so colourless, enclosed the earth.
+The sky was as bare of clouds as the common of landmarks; the one lay
+palely blue above, the other stretched subduedly green below. Here and
+there the green was crossed by long flushes of colour, with the red of
+tiny tiger-lilies, and the pale yellow of the evening primrose. Behind,
+Lord Fuji rose majestic. At first a line of fleecy cloud had lain above
+the deep green of the forest, and Fuji’s head was lost in mist, but at
+the sunset the clouds fell away lower and lower, until the whole long
+sweep of Fuji rose up triumphant into the blue.
+
+It was but slowly that the _basha_ jolted among the deep-cut ruts of
+the common, and but slowly that we travelled on, downwards.
+
+Looking out across the wide flat land we saw that the whole world was
+slightly rounded, slightly tilted. It was like journeying over a large
+green apple. The globe in fact palpable, visibly rounded. Away on
+the left the sun was setting in straight streamers of pale red edged
+with shining gold. And the green common, with its pools of little red
+lilies, and its bands of pale yellow primroses, grew greyer and greyer.
+
+Fuji San, perfect in long smooth curves, stood purple-blue behind.
+Clear-cut as a jewel in a setting he rose up, rose up, until the
+rounded strength of his summit lay bright sapphire on the azure sky.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Over the ruts the _basha_ stumbled, endlessly jolting.
+
+The sun set slowly, and slowly the colours died. Grey lay the common in
+front of us, on each side. Lord Fuji was but a dark, still shadow. And
+over the ruts the _basha_ stumbled in long, slow jolts.
+
+We were very tired, our backs ached with the jolting, and our arms were
+numb with pain. All around us the grey spaces of the common stretched
+uninterruptedly, without house or village. Where was Yoshida?
+
+Still the _basha_ lumbered and stumbled, and we looked for lights and
+houses.
+
+Nothing. Only in front of us the grey level of the common grew tall
+and black.... In a few more jolts the deep black had engulfed us, grey
+common and all, and we were wandering among dark shadows that were
+trees.
+
+In the very pitch of the blackness the cart suddenly stopped. We were
+asked to get out. The _basha_ went no further.
+
+“But Yoshida?”
+
+“_Yoshida yoroshī!_--all right,” replied the man, unconcerned, as
+though every traveller to every town arrived in a dark wood without
+sight or sound of houses; and he drove off.
+
+Our guide picked up the luggage, and we followed stumbling, straining
+our eyes to tell the deeper shadows that were trees from the paler dark
+that meant pathway.
+
+Slowly the deeper shadows receded, and in their place came the dim
+forms of houses. Then a sharp turn and we were walking along a real
+road with the familiar knitting-needles of the Japanese tramway shining
+in the twilight. After a while the houses grew denser, and some of
+them had lights; but the contrast only made the pale dark of the open
+roadway seem still blacker.
+
+Large trucks, like kitchen-tables with their legs cut short, came
+sliding past us as we stumbled on, gliding slowly down the road alone
+and unattached.
+
+Parties of pilgrims in white, with white staves in their hands, came
+unexpectedly out of the darkness, and the lighted paper lanterns in
+their hands warmed their white clothes into a rich cream-yellow,
+precipitating them into solid bodies from the waist downward, while
+their heads and shoulders drifted slowly on through the pale night like
+impalpable ghosts.
+
+We had reached the top of the hill, and the road, in a sudden turn,
+ran sharply away from us. The houses were on both sides now in one
+continuous line, and the shock of meeting trucks jarred through the
+street. There was a flare of orange light where the knitting-needles
+became a shunting-yard.
+
+This was Yoshida.
+
+Our landlady was aristocratic to her finger-tips. She had the long
+slim neck, the long thin face, with its pure outlines, the long
+narrow eyes, the long graceful body, and the delicate poise which is
+the ideal type of the aristocrat--and rare even among them. When she
+knelt on the matting to receive us, she did it with the distinction
+of a queen, and all her movements showed that clean-cut grace, that
+courtesy without effort, that refinement of pose and gesture which
+only the continued culture of long generations can produce, and which
+is to mere politeness or mere beauty as the subtle music of the poet
+to Monsieur Jourdain’s prose. Her husband was a bullet-headed man
+of the people, stubby and plebeian. His manners, like his Japanese,
+were polite of course, but undistinguished, while our hostess spoke a
+language as courtly as her ways. When she glided over the matting, her
+long sleeves swaying, or stretched out her thin slim-fingered hand to
+take our tea-cups, we felt like beings of a lower evolution, and this
+higher product, evolved by centuries of self-control and a living love
+of beauty, was the human form made perfect, to which we might, perhaps,
+one day attain.
+
+Even the inn possessed something of her grace: the matting was whiter,
+the woodwork smoother, the steep stairway--set like a ladder between
+the walls--more polished than elsewhere. The tiny medallions set deep
+in the _shōji_, which are as the handles to our doors, were works
+of art. The miniature garden of the courtyard, with its hills and
+trees and swift grey stream, was a living landscape, perfect in form
+and colouring. Even the shallow brass pans in which we washed, the
+commonest of hotel furniture, had an elegance of their own. And in
+the refined and beautiful inn our graceful, courtly landlady knelt
+and offered us platefuls of “mixed biscuits.” They were certainly
+cheap ones, but never did the utter vulgarity of their shapes, or the
+crudeness of their colouring, strike so sharply on my senses. If they
+had tasted like manna from the wilderness I could not have eaten one.
+They were too ugly.
+
+It is vivid still, the bliss of that hot bath in fresh mountain water
+pumped from a stream which comes from Fuji’s sacred slopes, and the
+joy of that long dreamless sleep under the green mosquito curtain in
+our white matted room. Vivid still, the breakfast cooked over the
+_hibachi_, with our aristocratic landlady, every line of her graceful
+form looking purer and more refined as she stooped to hold the handle
+of the frying-pan, while her stolid husband on his knees before his
+office desk in the corner looked on good-naturedly, and the stout
+little maid watched the foreign cooking of our ham as though it had
+been a sacred rite.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We were to return by the lakes which encircle Fuji, and we set out that
+morning along a dull dusty road between dull dusty banks.
+
+It was but a little way to the first lake, but hot beyond believing,
+and when we reached it, and pushed out in our boat beyond the narrow
+inlet which ran deep into the road, the heat settled down like a roof
+above our heads.
+
+The sky was one superb arch of azure blue; the earth in front of us a
+wide, bare flat, glittering with heat. And from out of that gleaming,
+quivering mist which hid the level land Great Fuji rose dark blue on
+blue. Naked and superb he stood against the background of the sky
+secure in his strength, perfect in his beauty, beyond words, beyond
+praise, in sober truth--divine.
+
+It took an hour and a half to cross the lake, and all the time Fuji
+San, set in the framework of the turquoise sky, with the gleaming,
+glittering mist of light sweeping like an iridescent cloud to the edge
+of his dark blue slope, stayed with us. For an hour and a half we
+looked, and the form and the soul of the mountain sank deep within our
+hearts.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The second lake is divided from the first by a natural wall of hill
+over which we climbed, the sun striking fiercely on the pathway where
+one small patch of shade lay black on the thick white dust.
+
+The second lake was set deep within the circle of the hills, and we
+crossed it in company with three men who had drunk much _saké_, and
+another who stuck fuses into a row of dynamite cartridges and then,
+leaving them under a corner of the matting in the bottom of the boat,
+apparently forgot their existence. These four passengers and the two
+boatmen were continually stumbling up and down the boat to row in
+turns, and always within a few inches of the dynamite.
+
+It was a somewhat agitating row, although we were assured the
+cartridges were “only for fishing.”
+
+It ended at last, after a long two hours of suspense, among the quiet
+grey boulders which stretched for a hundred yards between the water and
+the wood.
+
+Down the little valley beyond the stones, a winding river of
+rice-fields ran like a grass-green stream, and we followed it, as one
+follows up a mountain brook, till it dwindled and disappeared. Then the
+wood closed in above it, and we were in the middle of a weird uncanny
+forest, all grey and wrinkled, where multitudes of thick-set pole-like
+trees, covered with a powdery dust, ranged ghost-like out of sight.
+
+And here we walked, the only living things in a spell-bound world,
+walked until the earth grew thin beneath our feet and the rough grey
+boulders came up through the soil.
+
+Then for a long, long while we went beside a grey lava-river flowing
+between the grey tree-stems, a wide and furious river arrested as it
+swept in angry tumult through the wood, stopped dead, and each breaking
+wave turned into stone. We looked at this still, dead river and saw
+how the years had covered the waves with a thick white crust of dust.
+Buried deep lay that tempest of passion which once had swept burning
+from Fuji’s sides, buried deep beneath blocks of grey lava and the
+drifting ash-grey dust.
+
+Yet the very stones that buried it were carved in its image. And the
+face of that passion, petrified and deadly, looked up from the river.
+And all around the grey wood stood dead too, and very still, coated
+deep with a powdery dust, ash-grey. For the spell of the river was over
+the wood, and it was the death of Destruction.
+
+For miles we walked beside that Medusa river, sometimes we left it,
+sometimes we crossed it, then losing it between the trees we wandered
+where the ghostly pole-like trunks grew thickest. But always the river
+came back with the dead passion that made it staring rigid beneath the
+stones.
+
+Miles and miles of lava, wide, and long, and deep. The ghostly trees
+were rooted in it, the very lakes lay cradled in it, the world for far
+around was made of it. Verily the fires of Fuji San were mighty in
+those days.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The third lake was black, ink-black, black as strong-cast shadows in
+the moonlight. Tarnished and still it lay, without a glitter or a
+gleam; yet the washing wavelets, as they poured over the stone at our
+feet, were pure and clear, and the high steep hills that half encircled
+it were dense with the greenest trees.
+
+The ghostly wood was ended, the petrified river gone; on the banks of
+this sombre lake living trees were growing. Tangled and thick and high,
+they walled in three sides of the lake, and, sweeping round in a long
+thin promontory, divided the ink-black waters with a sword of green.
+
+Along the hill there ran no pathway, the trees stood too thick, the
+hill too steep. There was no boat upon the lake nor any road around
+it. The black waters washed to the foot of the trees, the trees
+stretched green to the top of the hills, and lake and wood were still
+as undiscovered country.
+
+And behind us lay all the long silence of the ghostly wood.
+
+On the very edge of the promontory a white house rested, poised like a
+gull on the water, but the dead-black lake gave back no reflection, and
+the dark-green hills caught no colour from the sun, nor stirred a leaf.
+Silent as the waters the house poised white beneath the evening sky.
+
+On three sides the high hills shut in the lake, but on the fourth the
+lava-stones met the marsh, the marsh the common, and wide and flat the
+common stretched away to the beyond.
+
+A little while and the setting sun was down behind the hills, and all
+the sky was darkening into night. Far over the common, and purple as a
+king’s raiment, rose Fuji San. Grand and lonely he stood between dark
+earth and darkening sky; far off on the edge of the world, and all the
+solemn stillness of the evening wrapt him round.
+
+Gently fell the twilight on lake and hill. The grey spaces of the
+common stretched more vast and wide. The night was coming fast.
+
+Beneath my feet the blackness of the waters opened as the deep abyss.
+Behind, the horror of the spell-bound wood waited wide-eyed. Sweeping
+onwards in the twilight the indistinctness of the common passed out of
+sight, the pathless hills closed round me.
+
+Then the spell of the ghostly wood reached out to clutch. I looked
+towards the light.... Dim as Life’s hope it lay, far off beyond the
+horizon, while all the blackness of the lake and hill surrounded me.
+
+I strained my eyes across the indistinctness, and from that far-off
+heaven a lofty Presence leaned.
+
+It was the Great God Fuji.
+
+
+
+
+                                  III
+
+                               EPILOGUE
+
+
+The blue sea lies sleeping warm and still; the sky, another sea, sleeps
+too; only the green headlands standing between blue and blue watch,
+their feet in the water. And the heat is the heat of a summer’s noon.
+
+So still the sea, so quiet the sky, so calm the earth that the soft
+breath of the sleeping ocean comes as a rippling sigh towards the land,
+while the blue sea above floats lazy.
+
+From their low hill Tesshuji’s forsaken Gods look out. The temple walls
+are bare, its altars dumb, and the grass-grown court has shod even
+silence with a velvet shoe. Dreaming, the Gods sit undisturbed, and the
+hush of the noonday’s heat is deepened.
+
+It is long since the clang of the praying-bell overhead called them to
+listen. Still they sit, and look.
+
+In the shadow of the doorway at the still Gods’ feet, I, too, sit and
+look.
+
+Over the sleeping sea, blue and still, beyond the watching headlands,
+out into the liquid sky above, where in utter majesty great Fuji
+rises one sheer line of beauty in the blue. The rounded curve of his
+snow-crest shimmers white as a sun-caught sail, and the long slope of
+his perfect form is a deep blue line on blue. Fuji rises as a tower, he
+floats in that limpid sea above a mist-clad iceberg. And the glimmer
+of his snow-crest is a shining crown of glory in the sky. So real, so
+simple, so beautiful. Just a crescent of white snow floating thirteen
+thousand feet above the world, and two long lines of blue sloping
+gently downwards, outwards to the earth. So simple, so beautiful, is it
+real?
+
+A faint stir in the sleeping sea and I drop my eyes to the blue below.
+
+Beauty, said the Greeks, was born of the waves and the foam. Once in
+that clear sea above, a great blue wave came leaping with a crest of
+foam. It was Beauty’s self, all-perfect, and they called it Fujiyama.
+Beauty content to be but beauty.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Tesshuji’s Gods look out over the sea, beyond the green headlands into
+the blue. They dream undisturbed. They have looked so long.
+
+The noonday heat has spread the land with a quivering haze of blue. It
+sleeps. The softly breathing sea sleeps too. No prayer has roused the
+Gods, they too are sleeping.
+
+The whole world, says the Scriptures, is but a dream of the great Lord
+Buddha. Tesshuji’s Gods are dreaming, and Fuji is.
+
+Dream Gods for ever.
+
+
+
+
+                         THE ART OF THE NATION
+
+         “All that is superfluous is displeasing to God and Nature;
+        all that is displeasing to God and Nature is bad.”
+                       DANTE, “De Monarchia,” bk. i. chap. xiv.
+
+
+
+
+                                   I
+
+                           GRACE BEFORE MEAT
+
+
+The _kuruma_ running quickly through the narrow opening in the high
+bamboo fence curved into a tiny garden set with dark green shrubs, and
+stopped abruptly.
+
+In front of us, where a square recess broke the long line of wooden
+wall, a pile of _gheta_ lay heaped on a grey stone block. At the sound
+of our coming the wooden wall opened, and a Japanese in _kimono_ and
+_hakama_ stood bowing before us. He came with pairs of soft woolly
+night-socks to cover English feet, and, sitting down on the narrow
+knee-high platform of polished black wood, we took off our boots. Two
+giant curb-stones at right angles made a solitary step to reach the
+platform, and leaving our leather boots, looking caricatures of feet
+among the wooden sandals, we followed the waiting _kimono_ along the
+three-foot-wide platform.
+
+Round the corner of the square recess, and shut off from the tiny
+courtyard by a thick screen of fence and shrubs, was a white garden,
+sunny and still, where, under a pale blue sky, the tall shadows of
+the trees fell black across the pure white snow. Sliding back the
+paper-paned wall the waiting _kimono_ bowed us to enter.
+
+“Come in, come in,” said our friend the professor, his familiar face
+looking strangely unfamiliar from out the wide-sleeved silken _kimono_
+and pleated silken skirts of his _hakama_, as he laughingly bowed us a
+Japanese welcome.
+
+The first sensation on coming into that low matted room, bare of all
+furniture, was one of intense awkwardness, all one’s limbs seemed to
+have swollen to ungainly proportions, and to have grown correspondingly
+wooden and jerky. In a flash I had slipped back to a child’s years, and
+was lying in my little iron bedstead in the dark, the haunting terror
+of the unknown upon me, as I stealthily pinched a mountainous leg with
+a hand twelve feet thick, and trembled to feel the bedstead giving way
+beneath me. That old sensation of unaccountable largeness, of bursting
+one’s surroundings, stayed as the unreal background to my mind until
+the paper-paned walls closed behind me again.
+
+“If you would like a chair, there are just two--” began the professor.
+
+But we had come to be really Japanese, and Japanese we intended to
+remain at all costs. So, getting gingerly down on our knees on the
+square cushions that lay on the matted floor, we tried unsuccessfully
+to sit on our heels with the same grace as little Miss Hayashi
+opposite. There she sat, demure, serene, and, above all, supremely
+graceful all through lunch, while we, like chestnuts on hot bricks,
+hopped from knee to knee, bobbed up and down, tucked our legs under us
+like Turks, or bunchwise like children, leaned on one arm, then on the
+other, enduring untold horrors of pins and needles as we became more
+intimately acquainted with our own anatomy than we had ever done in all
+the previous years of our existence. And my admiration of Miss Hayashi
+grew as she sat there, one line of pure grace from the curves of her
+slender neck, rising from the folds of mauve and white, to the thick
+wadded hem of her _kimono_.
+
+As I looked I grew more and more conscious that the dress and the room
+were one, each the necessary complement of the other, the right frame
+for the right picture, and the right picture in the right frame.
+
+“The soul of Japan,” they say, “is the sword of the _samurai_.” “Then
+the soul of the _uchi_,” I thought, “is the _kimono_ of the housewife.”
+
+The simplicity of the straight-falling lines, the perfection of the
+embroidery on the innermost of the folds around the neck, the richness
+of the _obi_ at the waist, there was the same severity of design
+with richness of decoration which characterised the room, where two
+paper-paned walls, one of sliding wood and the fourth stained a subdued
+brown, enclosed the bare matted space. Against the one solid wall was
+built a slightly raised platform of polished black wood, forming with
+the two low pillars of wood a wide recess, the _tokonoma_. Within the
+_tokonoma_ hung a long silken scroll where pale storks flew across the
+moon, a _kakemono_ of price. On the black wood of the platform, which
+was raised but a few inches from the ground, were set the two swords
+of the _samurai_, a bronze horse of exquisite workmanship, and in the
+corner some long branches of white plum-blossom in a vase. In these
+four objects (as in the _obi_ and the embroidery of the neck-folds)
+lay the entire decoration of the room. And looking, one realised that
+great truth, almost unknown to us, but a truism in Japan--the artistic
+value of space. In a European drawing-room you often cannot see one
+ornament for its fellows: here the bronze horse and the _kakemono_
+held the eyes; one looked, and one _saw_; their beauty filled the soul;
+next week, next month, they will go back to the store-house, and others
+will take their place. I could never forget the curved lines of those
+two swords against the polished black floor under the white fragrance
+of the plum-blossoms, any more than I could forget the soft half-moon
+curves of Miss Hayashi’s _kimono_, white below mauve, as she glided
+over the matted floor.
+
+Our lunch, we had come to lunch, opened with tea, pale amber tea
+in little round bowls on bronze stands, and sugar chrysanthemums,
+rice-paste storks and dolphins, cakes and sweets as perfect in design
+and colouring as though they were intended to last for ever. A
+rosy-cheeked maid, who bumped her head so vigorously on the floor that
+I thought she must get a headache, presented the tea, a bump for each
+guest and three as a salutation, while Miss Hayashi, folding squares of
+white paper in double triangles with one sweep of her hand, delicately
+heaped them full of sugar flowers and fishes, and passed them round,
+one to each of us.
+
+Then came a long pause, while we asked all the questions that occurred
+to us about _kimono_ and _hakama_, and swords and etiquette; and then
+our lunch, a whole lacquered trayful of bowls for each one of us, with
+all the courses served together, and all irretrievably and, to us,
+inexplicably mixed. I pass the hot soup in a lacquered bowl, and the
+hot rice in a china one, but the rest--a golden bream on a pale blue
+plate set round with oranges in jelly; slices of pink raw fish, and a
+design in brown seaweed and green roots; a deep bowl of pale yellow
+custard, its surface ruffled with silver fishes, oriental whitebait,
+and its depths filled with bamboo shoots and lily bulbs and other
+surprises; and one dish, a triumph of design and colour, where an oval
+slab of pounded fish, white as snow, rested against a green mound of
+preserved chestnuts, while in front, arranged in a curving crescent
+like the tail of a comet, were purple roots, brown ginger, and slices
+of a red radish. And all this you eat as you please, a bit here, and a
+bit there, now a drink of salt soup, then a mouthful of sweet chestnut;
+custard, vegetables, fish, sweets, with relays of rice for bread, and
+_saké_ for wine, paper napkins, and withal two penholders to eat with,
+and your Japanese dinner is complete.
+
+Having tried everything with the greatest perseverance, and wriggled
+our chopsticks until our hands were as tired as our toes, we gave in
+and rested from our labours. The little maid, rosier than ever, removed
+the trays of food, and brought in bowls of oranges and dried persimmon.
+
+At this moment there was a rustling of screens, and a dear, little old
+lady with shaven eyebrows and blackened teeth slid into the room, and
+instantly went down on her knees, and putting out her hands bowed her
+head right down on to them.
+
+“This is my aunt,” said the professor, “a real old-fashioned
+woman--there are not many left nowadays--who blackens her teeth and
+shaves her eyebrows.”
+
+The little old lady laughed, and made many polite speeches, asking
+after our “honourable healths” and our “august appetites.” At every
+word she made another bow, until I felt as if I really must get down on
+my knees and hit my forehead against the ground as well. Luckily the
+professor, after a moment’s consultation, suggested we should see the
+house, and we all got up. The little old lady was on her feet in a
+twinkling, but our half-dead limbs sent pins and needles up our legs,
+as we stumbled on to them and awkwardly walked away.
+
+The sliding paper wall of our room hid another absolutely bare, no
+_tokonoma_ here, only a poem painted on a long narrow board fastened
+against the door-post, and in the further wall, shut off by sliding
+screens, a large cupboard, full of the household linen, which means the
+silk-wadded quilts or _futon_, on and under which one sleeps. Sliding
+aside the door-panel we found ourselves on another three-foot-wide
+platform, looking out through more paper-paned walls into another
+garden. This house was just a long series of rooms with a platform and
+a garden on each side, and a little square bunch of rooms at one end.
+In one of these we cuddled down under a silk quilt thrown over a square
+hole in the middle of the room, and felt the heat coming up from the
+glowing charcoal sunk in a sort of pit beneath the floor.
+
+Then we peeped into the bathroom, containing a high wooden wash-tub
+with a stove-pipe running down one end. The wash-tub is filled with
+cold water, and lighted charcoal put down the stove-pipe, and in a few
+minutes the water is hot, and you get in, and the longer you stay the
+hotter grows the water, until having boiled yourself in the approved
+Japanese way you step out and wipe yourself dry with a yard of white
+cotton adorned with blue storks.
+
+Then we invaded the kitchen, bare of everything like the other
+rooms, and with only a two-fold brazier to cook over; one brazier
+has permanently fixed above it a coppered wooden tub, dedicated to
+rice-boiling, the other brazier cooked everything else. That was
+all. Wooden pots, pans and dippers were hung up inside the sliding
+cupboards, or were washing in the yard outside. A tiny shrine, like a
+mantelshelf over the sliding door, held minute gods in a dim light; a
+paper-framed bamboo lantern, like an afternoon-tea cake-table, with
+shelves between the legs for plates, stood in a corner. This is the
+_andon_, and inside the paper panes a floating wick in a saucer of oil
+burns all night.
+
+Our advent into these regions was attended with much excitement
+punctuated with peals of laughter, it striking the dear old lady as
+irresistibly funny, that it was all funny to us.
+
+In the midst of our hilarity came the summons of the _kurumaya_, and
+out we had to go, take our boots from the friendly company of the
+wooden _gheta_, and laden with mysterious boxes neatly tied with red
+and white strings, and bunches of plum-blossom, say stiff English
+“Good-byes,” while the little old lady, the rosy-cheeked maid, and the
+rest of the household bowed us graceful Japanese _sayonara_ and _mata
+irasshai_ (Come again).
+
+The _kuruma_ curved out through the tiny snow-covered garden set with
+dark shrubs, the paper-paned walls shut with a soft thud; the picture
+was gone, but the memory of it will remain with me always.
+
+
+
+
+                                  II
+
+                        IN A CLOISONNÉ FACTORY
+
+
+Nagoya is a manufacturing town with a quarter of a million of
+inhabitants. It is full of porcelain and fan factories, cloisonné works
+and cotton mills. It is the centre of the celebrated potteries of Seto,
+and is famous for its embroideries and its silks. It is bigger than
+Nottingham or Hull, and is almost as large as Dublin. Nagoya is both
+Staffordshire and Bradford--and yet a city clean and still. A town of
+sunny streets and pure fresh air, whose sky is blue and clear, whose
+trees are green. Its 250,000 inhabitants are mostly factory hands--and
+there is neither dirt nor din. The golden dolphins on its castle’s roof
+are three hundred years old, and they glitter in the sunshine like
+new-fired gold.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the edge of the growing rice-fields the porcelain factory lies.
+Its doors are open to the sun; and in the corner of the low, white
+room, where the workmen sit cross-legged like Buddhas, each beside his
+potter’s wheel, a yellow vase of purple iris stands.
+
+The room is still and fresh and clean. The whirr of the turning wheel
+is soft as the drowsing of a bee. There is no hurry as there is no
+idleness. And each worker, as he moulds his clay, looks towards the
+purple iris in the yellow vase.
+
+The cloisonné works are built in the heart of the city, in the middle
+of a busy street, where blue-clad coolies continually load and unload
+the wide coster-barrows which are the waggons of Japan. The hum of
+working life is in the air, and the wide road which stretches without
+division of pavement across from side to side, is thronged. Business
+men in grey _kimono_ and foreign hats go out and in; the loaded
+barrows drawn by the blue-clad coolies pass up and down; fast-running
+_kurumaya_ steer in and out among the foot-passengers and the traffic.
+And the occasional collision is followed by mutual bows and polite
+_Gomen nasai_ (“I beg your honourable pardon”), on the part of either
+coolie or _kurumaya_.
+
+Nagoya factories and cotton mills are hard at work.
+
+The gateway of the cloisonné works leads down a wooden passage into
+a tiny court, a garden set round with the workshops of the factory.
+And such a garden. It is not larger than the front lawn of a suburban
+villa, but the skill of a Japanese gardener has planted a whole
+mountain side with forests of pine and bamboo, has spanned with an
+arching bridge the stone-grey stream at the mountain’s foot. From
+inside the tiny matted rooms, no bigger than bathing-boxes, which shut
+in three sides of the garden, the illusion is complete. And the shade
+and coolness of the real trees and water, of the imaginary forest
+and stream, brings a sense of calmness and repose, of quiet peace
+and beauty, to all the many workers of the factory. It is a living
+landscape growing unspoiled in the heart of a workshop in the centre of
+a manufacturing city.
+
+Each on his mat in the clean, bare, matted rooms the workmen sit, the
+rice-paper _shōji_ pushed open to the mountain stream, and the forest
+of pine and bamboo. In the first room sit workers outlining the design
+on the bare metal vase with metal wires, silver wires on silver vases,
+copper wires on copper vases. And each design is different, and many of
+the men are old. In the second room the bare metal vases are getting
+a coat of coloured paste, and now the design stands out rough as a
+cave-man’s drawing. Here the workers are younger, while boys fill in
+the body of the vase. In the third and fourth rooms the matted floor at
+the back is replaced by a large hearthstone, and a round earthen oven;
+in this the vases are baked, passed back to the men and boys to recoat
+with the coloured paste, and then rebaked, recoated and rebaked many
+times, until at last the vase is handed over to the workers in the last
+rooms. It has lost all trace of design by now; the metal wires are no
+longer visible; the colours have bubbled over in all directions, the
+vase is an unmeaning mosaic of a thousand shades. Then the workmen,
+sitting on their heels on the kneeling-cushions in their clean, bare,
+matted rooms, tiny as bathing-boxes, polish, polish, polish, sometimes
+for a whole year, until the worker’s hand wears down the hard smooth
+surface and the design shows through clean and true once more. The
+workmen here are grey and old.
+
+But the oldest of all sat by himself in a little room just opposite the
+arching bridge which crossed the mountain stream. He wore a pair of
+quaint horn spectacles, and his face was the face of an Eastern sage.
+He sat with his tools before him fixing silver wires on to a silver
+vase, with a certainty and a rapidity beyond his fellows; and all that
+is most beautiful and most difficult in the cloisonné works of Nagoya
+comes from his hands. The old man pushed back his horn spectacles as
+I stopped before the open _shōji_, and his eyes rested on the still
+picture of the garden with a smile.
+
+I, too, turned to look at the row of tiny paper rooms stretching out
+like arms on either hand, at the living landscape lying in their midst,
+at the blue sky above, and at the old face beneath the horn spectacles.
+I did not wonder at the peace which lay upon it, nor at the exquisite
+beauty of the finished vase standing on the matting beside him. For the
+garden was still as a cloister, though the cloister was a workshop for
+cloisonné ware in the manufacturing town of Nagoya.
+
+
+
+
+                                  III
+
+                          FLOWER ARRANGEMENT
+
+
+We sat opposite each other on the matting, and she laughed. The polite,
+audible smile of the Japanese. All around us lay cut branches of fir;
+and on the long wooden footstool they call a table stood a shallow
+bronze dish and a wonderful cleft stick of bamboo.
+
+She was a little bent old lady, with the courtly politeness of a
+thousand Grandisons refined to a subtle essence, and she gave lessons
+in flower arrangement. The close-cropped grey hair gathered into a
+slide behind told its own tale of widowhood, and the withered careworn
+face its story of work and want.
+
+The _shōji_ were shut, and the light through the rice-paper panes
+sent a warmed white light into the room that knew no colour, a light
+as though one sat inside a luminous mist, or in the heart of the
+plum-blossoms. A passionless, lifeless light which was simply light.
+
+And the little old lady laughed again.
+
+“There is much to learn,” I said, stopping to watch her bending the
+warmed fir branches over the _hibachi_ always to the exact curve, never
+too near or too far, and mine snapped at the first touch.
+
+She handed me another branch in place of the one I had broken, and
+watched while I wedged it into the cleft bamboo stick with little chips
+of wood.
+
+“Very much,” she said. “It takes three years of learning for the pupil
+and seven for the teacher. And the _Ijin San_ has had four lessons.”
+
+The fifth and last branch being successfully wedged into line, I got on
+to my knees to admire the effect, while Arabella, from her camp-stool
+in the corner--she considered it lowering to sit on the floor--bridled.
+
+“Oh, the _Japanese_,” she said; “but any European could learn in half a
+dozen lessons.”
+
+The little old lady bowed, letting her forehead almost touch the
+ground, as she sat on her heels on the kneeling-cushion.
+
+“The august stranger----” she began, when I interrupted.
+
+The contemplation of my five branches of fir, two curving to the left
+and three to the right, had not filled me with any satisfaction. They
+wobbled. All their curves were wrong, and the five stems, instead of
+being hidden one behind the other, so that the illusion of a single
+branch growing out of the bronze dish was created and kept, were all
+distinctly and decidedly visible.
+
+“It doesn’t look a bit right,” I said; “but what is the matter?”
+
+The task of sticking five branches of fir, already bent to the
+prescribed curves for me, into a cleft stick had not seemed difficult,
+especially with three lessons behind me, and I had worked hard and been
+very confident that morning.
+
+With a thousand apologies the little old lady pulled the bronze dish
+towards her, while Arabella cleared her throat.
+
+“In Europe,” she said, in the tone of voice adapted to a kindergarten
+class--her Japanese voice, “we do not learn such a simple thing, we do
+it naturally. Every European woman can arrange flowers, and they are
+flowers” (with a glance at the fir branches in the little old lady’s
+hand--she was busy correcting) “not trees.”
+
+The little old lady was putting back the five fir branches into the
+cleft stick with the deftest of deft fingers. Arabella unclasped the
+brooch at her neck and pulled out what she called a “nosegay.” A bamboo
+vase, just a piece of the stem hollowed out, in which the fir had come
+from the florist that morning, lay on the floor. She picked it up.
+
+“It should be of glass,” she said forgivingly, “but I will make it do.”
+
+And then with her own hand she proceeded to arrange the Yokohama
+nosegay in the slender bamboo stem. There was a bit of spiræa, one fat
+red rose, and some miscellaneous leaves, which Arabella referred to
+grandiloquently as “green.” These she crammed tightly into the bamboo
+stem, and then placed it, with a “who-shall-deny-me” air, upon the
+table.
+
+I looked at it. No, it was not a good specimen even of Western flower
+arrangement, but in how many buttonholes, on how many tables, had I
+seen something like it.
+
+Flower arrangement is taught in the schools in Japan, and every
+Japanese girl learns. If she did not, she would not “arrange” anymore
+than we should paint or play.
+
+The little old lady had finished, and she pushed the bronze dish along
+the table beside the bamboo vase. Then, with many compliments and much
+bowing, she thanked the _Ijin San_ for her “august kindness” and her
+“honourable condescension.” And the smooth phrases ran on and on, while
+I sat back on my heels and looked.
+
+East and West, they stood there before me. At the best, what we aimed
+at was a scheme of colour, and at our worst no scheme at all. And what
+they strove after was line, whether in fir branches or lily leaves, in
+plum-blossom or iris flowers, line, and a coherent whole. Each branch,
+each twig, each flower, nay, each curve of the branch, each petal of
+the flower, each leaf of the twig, were parts, essential parts of the
+whole; for in Japan they draw with flowers and fir branches as we only
+draw for “design.” And line is beyond colour as sculpture is beyond
+painting.
+
+The sun through the walls of rice-paned _shōji_ spread a warmed white
+light through the room, a limpid, liquid light in which there was no
+shadow.
+
+The little old lady had been busy tidying up. The room was one clear
+sheet of pale yellow matting. On the low empty _tokonoma_ stood the
+bronze dish and its pure line drawing in fir. Arabella was offering the
+bamboo vase and its mixed contents “as a model,” and the little old
+lady bowed to the ground.
+
+Once more I looked at the bronze vase and the pure outlines of the fir
+branches, at the bare room perfectly proportioned, at the rice-paned
+_shōji_, and the snowflake whiteness of that light which knew no colour
+and no shadow struck on my consciousness.
+
+I think I understood. Colour, as colour, in that luminous, shadowless
+room, whose beauty was its line and its proportion, would have been not
+colour but a blot. Outside the rice-paned _shōji_ lay life and colour
+enough. Here was but light and line.
+
+Arabella was removing the white night-socks from her boots, she always
+refused to take them off, on the veranda. The little old lady, down on
+her knees with her forehead to the ground, was saying sweet Japanese
+_sayonara_.
+
+I looked back one last time--and Arabella’s nosegay vanished.
+
+
+
+
+                                  IV
+
+                            GOD’S MESSENGER
+
+
+The first fresh heat of summer is here, and outside the city the
+rice-fields spread in quivering pools of green. It is the month of the
+Iris, _Hana-shōbu_, and along the raised causeway, between the fields,
+the miniature hansoms, drawn each by the bent dark figure of the
+_kurumaya_, silhouette against the blue sky.
+
+You pay as much as three sen (three farthings) to enter an Iris garden,
+and they are an hour’s _’ricksha_ ride from the city, so that the
+_fête_ is select. In the covered court of the entrance the _kuruma_
+are stabled in long lines under a pale yellow roof of mats, while
+the _kurumaya_, their black mushroom hats on their knees, sit on the
+slender shafts and smoke their pipes--three whiffs from the metal
+thimble in the bamboo stem, and then the sharp _tink_, _tink_, as
+the ash is knocked out against the shaft. Inside the garden the blue
+tunic of the coolie is absent, three farthings and the long _kuruma_
+ride proving prohibitive; but the grey _kimono_ of the classes, Tokyo
+shopkeepers for the most part, is everywhere. The gardens are large and
+full, but in no sense crowded, for the Japanese, by the very polish of
+their politeness, contrive to create a sense of space and repose around
+them even in a crowd. But the gardens are full, and the deadened clack
+of the wooden _gheta_ on the earthen pathway, as the little _musmé_
+carry the “honourable tea” and the “honourable cakes” to the mat-roofed
+summer-houses, is incessant.
+
+We do not sit on our heels on the flat cushions on the low matted
+table, under the bamboo roofs; we sit _on_ the cushions, with our feet
+on the ground, and the little waitress laughs, her polished black
+hair shining like a metal mirror in the sunshine. It is so ridiculous
+to see the _Ijin San_ sitting on the tables with their legs hanging
+uncomfortably down in front of them, when all the world agrees it is
+much more natural to sit on your heels with the cleft toes of each
+little white _tabi_ sticking up behind like rabbit’s ears. The idea
+of getting cramp in such a comfortable position makes little O Haru’s
+brown eyes open very wide indeed. I believe she revolves the idea,
+inside that metal-polished head of hers, that the _Ijin San’s_ legs are
+not made aright, or why do they hide them so? And surely the civilized
+boot could only have been invented by people without toes?
+
+The open summer-houses, behind the bamboo bushes, or on the tops of
+the miniature hills, are full of family parties, with children in
+all stages of age and coiffure, from the shaven baby heads and the
+stiff horsehair ribbon bunches of the children, up through the flat
+fronts and the first freehand designs of the schoolgirls, to the black
+cockscomb fronts and the elaborate polished rolls of the grown-up
+daughters. And they are all content to sit in the sunshine, drink tea,
+and look at the flowers. They do not want to be for ever restlessly
+doing something, not even the children.
+
+In the summer-house over the way a party of bachelors, students from
+the University perhaps, are also drinking tea and smoking cigarettes;
+one of them is writing a poem. And a _bourgeois_ Sabbath peace is over
+the land.
+
+The tap of the tiny tea bowl on the lacquered tray, the deadened clack
+of the _musmé’s gheta_ on the pathway, is hushed, for I have left the
+summer-house, and am standing close down by the river of flowers.
+
+Iris, the messenger between Gods and men, said the old Greek legend,
+Iris, _Hana-shōbu_. And surely this swaying river of lavender-blue
+flowers, floating out from the fleckless blue of the summer’s sky, on
+into the young green of the rice-fields, is a living message from the
+Gods. A message of beauty and peace, and of the holiness that springs
+from these. A message which this cultured, courtly, beauty-loving
+people alone know how to create--and how to read. For many generations
+have lived and died, tenderly caring for God’s Messengers, before these
+flowers learned to unfold their petals in a hundred ways, and wear a
+thousand hues from pink to purple, from blue to grey, from grey to
+black or to the purest white.
+
+The river of exquisite blossom flows on, straight out from the
+fleckless blue, on into the delicate green, bearing God’s message of
+beauty to man. And these who see it know how to read.
+
+
+
+
+                                   V
+
+                         THE ART OF THE PEOPLE
+
+
+It is usual in judging the art of a nation to consider solely the art
+of the artists and never the art of the people. The first is naturally
+of greater importance; it affords moreover an easy method of comparison
+and enables art critics to register the high-water mark of a country’s
+art, and this being found, the question is considered settled and
+the nation judged accordingly. We say the French are artistic and
+think promptly of Corot, Meissonier, or Puvis de Chavannes, not of
+the people of France. But the art of a nation, always something less,
+is often something very different from the art of its artists, and
+though the artists’ art will give you the high-water mark, it does not
+and it cannot give the general art level of the people. The English
+nation produced the greatest dramatist who ever lived, and several
+fine comedians, yet the level of the nation’s dramatic instinct is
+acknowledged to be far below that of the French. If we wish to get
+a true opinion of French and English dramatic feeling we must study
+something more and something other than the dramatists. For it is not
+the presence or the absence of a certain number of celebrated men, or
+even the greater or the lesser value of their works, which necessarily
+makes a whole nation dramatic or artistic, but it is the general level
+of the dramatic or artistic feeling in the average individual of that
+nation. That a truly dramatic or artistic nation has more chance of
+producing a greater number of dramatists or artists is certain, the
+conditions under which they would work being so much more favourable,
+but to consider no one but the artist and nothing but his art, and
+then to transfer the judgment on the artist’s art to the whole nation,
+is surely a confusion of ideas. It is a confusion to which art seems
+particularly susceptible. For most people, in England any way, seem to
+regard art as comprising only expensive objects suitable for exhibition
+in museums, and not as an integral part of every article used in
+daily life. Museum art is the product of a nation’s artists, for the
+enjoyment of the rich and the cultured, but the art of a people is as
+wide as its life, it touches everything and is for the joy and the
+pleasure of all men.
+
+Artists’ art is an end in itself, its whole reason for existence is to
+create beauty, but the art of a people is not an end, but a means. The
+problem before it is very different and really more complicated, for it
+is to add beauty to mere utility, and by force of art to create art in
+objects whose _raison d’être_ is usefulness. And the greater the number
+of useful objects made beautiful, and the more beautiful the useful
+objects, and the further removed from beauty and the more sunk in mere
+utility the useful object is, so much greater will be the people’s art.
+
+To add beauty to mere utility, art may be said to use three ways. It
+does it
+
+(1) Directly, by moulding the shape (the material of useful objects
+being already determined);
+
+(2) Indirectly, by decoration; and
+
+(3) Extra-directly, by arrangement.
+
+And if art be truly in a people, even the most ugly and stubborn of
+useful objects will, by one of these three methods, be made beautiful.
+
+I suppose that any one who has ever seen a rice-field will allow that
+for at least some six months in the year it is one of the ugliest
+objects in the world. Made of liquid mud, it lies for half the year a
+slimy, greasy black pond shut in by low mud walls. On its oozy surface
+gather unwholesome growths that shine with metallic reflections, while
+the manure, in Japan mostly human, decomposes in the thick mud. There
+is nothing, I suppose, much uglier, nothing more useful, and its
+ugliness is the condition of its utility. The Japanese cannot change
+the thick black ooze, they cannot change the low mud walls which embank
+the slimy pools. These, with all their ugly consequences, are fixed and
+determined. But the art of the Japanese people has yet rendered the
+rice-fields beautiful. They change the shape. Those embanking walls of
+mud are moulded as a potter moulds his clay. A series of dead square
+fields I have never seen. Two, three, four, five, six, even eight-sided
+rice-fields can be found in Japan, and often the curves of the mud wall
+itself are graceful as the lines of a Greek vase.
+
+Beneath the temple of Tesshuji, which looks towards the wonder of
+Fujiyama, with its two pure lines of exquisite grace, is a great
+fertile plain, a plain of innumerable rice-fields, one of the richest
+in the country. When I stood on the steps of that deserted temple and
+looked down, the fields were all black and naked, and yet the plain
+was neither ugly nor monotonous, for the peasants had curved their
+rice-fields into exquisite lines, and not two were alike.
+
+A wall has certainly more possibilities than a rice-field, but our
+modern walls, the high brick atrocity of a prison or an embankment, is
+not usually beautiful. We make spasmodic attempts to beautify their
+monotonous ugliness with creepers or other coverings. That is, we do
+not beautify the wall, we take something less ugly and conceal it.
+Now the Japanese beautify the wall. (We are only considering here
+walls of mere utility, where all decoration or ornamentation is out of
+the question.) Except for the brick walls of the foreign buildings,
+walls in Japan are made of hewn stone usually shaped like pyramids
+and hammered base outwards into a bank of earth. In a country whose
+architecture, from the most glorious of its temples to the humblest
+of its houses, is all of wood, a clumsiness, a _gaucherie_ in its
+stonework might be well excused, yet Japanese walls are a wonder to
+all who see them, for the hard enduring granite is plastic beneath
+their fingers. Their walls are never dead straight. The line always
+curves softly outward as it touches the ground. And this not only in
+the strong walls of the _daimyō’s_ castle, or the long moat walls of
+the Mikado’s palace, but in the embankment walls of the tiniest shrine,
+in the modern walls of the modern temple of the modern coaling port of
+Moji.
+
+To beautify a useful object indirectly by decoration is a great deal
+easier, at any rate the means and the possibility of doing so are more
+apparent; and yet, do we draw designs on our sacks, on our flour sacks,
+grain sacks, potato sacks, as they do in Japan?
+
+For many months I passed regularly every day through a street of
+warehouses where sacks of all kinds, and containing all sorts of
+produce, were lying on the ground, were being carried into the
+_godown_ or were loading or unloading. It was some time before it
+really struck me that the sacks were decorated, that their blank yellow
+sides were made beautiful with a design; but when I had once realised
+it, I used to look carefully to see if I could find sacks without.
+They were extremely rare. The designs varied considerably. A flower,
+conventional or natural, a maple leaf, a broken branch of plum-or
+cherry-blossom, the delicate outline of the bamboo in a thousand
+different shapes, were the most common, but there were others, birds,
+geometrical patterns, rice-ears, Fujiyama. These designs were with
+true decorative feeling in one corner, rarely in the exact centre, and
+admirably proportioned to the size of the sack. They were mostly drawn
+in, in soft blues--the commonest colour in the Far East--sometimes in a
+pale but very beautiful green; colours which, on the unbleached cotton
+or pale yellow matting of the sack, made complete harmonies.
+
+But a sack, whatever its business in life, is at least an article of
+considerable duration, it is not made to be used and thrown away the
+next moment like the paper wrapping of a parcel. Yet it is very few
+parcels in very few shops which are not wrapped up in paper whose
+monotonous surface is broken by just one tiny design. The papers in
+which piece-silks are wrapped, the equivalent to those whitey-brown
+covers which drapers seem perpetually doing up on our counters, are
+often really beautiful in both colour and design. I do not think a
+Japanese can see a blank surface without wanting to design something on
+it, something little, something beautiful, just to redeem it for art.
+
+These designs are to be found, if one looks for them, in the most
+unexpected places, on the axle-heads of your _kuruma_ for instance.
+A casual and rather dilapidated _kuruma_ in an out-of-the-way town in
+Japan had such exquisite flying storks beaten on to the bronze metal of
+its axle-head that I had to get out and look at them. The _kurumaya_
+was amused at my enthusiasm, and entered into a detailed comparison
+of these axle-heads with all the other axle-heads of all the other
+_kuruma_ of his acquaintance, explaining their respective merits and
+defects. If there is no actual design the metal is usually beaten in
+such a way as to form an irregular pattern.
+
+When a Japanese cannot mould the shape of an object, when he cannot
+redeem it by a design, when in fact he has no control over its creation
+at all, but it is placed in his hands as it is, finished, he will
+still contrive to add beauty to it merely by arrangement. I first
+noticed this on board the steamer going out, where the Japanese “boy”
+arranged the extra blanket on the berth in a new design each day. He
+folded it into lotus leaves and chrysanthemums, into half-opened fans
+and half-shut buds. He had one wonderful arrangement which, being
+patriotic, was more often repeated than the rest. The blankets of the
+steamship company had, instead of the usual stripes at top and bottom,
+just two thick wavy lines of deep red--the steamer’s flag was two wavy
+red lines on a white ground; by some wonderful twist of his fingers the
+“boy” would fold that blanket into the rising sun, with the four red
+lines coming out of it like blood-red rays. It sounds difficult, but
+he did it so perfectly that I recognised the flag of Japan the moment
+I saw it. Nor was he exceptional; the other “boys” on board were just
+as artistic, all the other cabins, for in the course of the voyage I
+entered most of them, were equally decorated, though in most cases the
+art had been quite lost on the occupants.
+
+A Japanese servant, any servant, even one in a hotel, will set out your
+hair brushes, clothes brushes, nail scissors, collar box, tooth-powder
+tin on the ordinary average hotel dressing-table and make a design
+of them. The toilette table will somehow be a picture, an artistic
+whole. It was an application of art I tried hard to learn, and failed
+dismally. After awhile I could manage something with the brushes;
+but the nail scissors, and more especially the tooth-powder tin,
+remained, in my hands, the unbeautiful necessary articles which they
+intrinsically are.
+
+We make in Europe various attempts at beautifying our food. We put
+parsley on white dishes round cold mutton, and paper frills on ham
+bones where the pins are dangerous. On special occasions, such as a
+Lord Mayor’s banquet or a cookery exhibition, we serve pastries as
+Tower Bridges, or jellies as broken lutes, but we do not consistently
+arrange our food so that each dish is a colour scheme and an art design
+of its own.
+
+I lunched once with a professor in Tokyo; it was a modest meal in
+the house of a man badly off, according to our ideas, but when the
+red-lacquered trays came in, each lunch on its own tray, and all the
+courses served together, I could not restrain a cry of delight. The
+whole set out in its red-lacquered tray was a picture, each dish in
+itself was another. The golden bream lay on a pale blue dish; an oval
+slab of pounded fish, pure white in colour, rested against a mound
+of lime-green chestnuts; in front and lying in a crescent curve were
+purple roots, brown ginger, and tiny slices of red radish. It was
+simply a triumph. I have eaten pinky brown soup in which the curved
+peel of an orange floated like a golden dolphin; pale yellow custards,
+served in delicate blue bowls, whose surfaces were ruffled with
+silver fishes; white rice-moulds wrapped in the delicate tendrils of
+a vine-green seaweed; thin slices of pink raw fish, the colour of an
+uncooked salmon, laid out on green dishes and garnished with little
+heaps of olive seaweed shaven fine and eaten with a burnt-sienna
+sauce. The very hawkers in the streets serve their one-_rin_ (10 to a
+¼_d._) sweetmeats or their snow-white _tōfu_ daintily, on plates of
+appropriate colour, artistically set out. The rice-paste biscuits are
+veritable works of art in shape and colour. You can eat almost every
+variety of chrysanthemum, as well as see it, and the colouring, all
+vegetable, is almost as beautiful.
+
+We have, I believe, in England, a profession called “window-dressing,”
+and in a few cases this does truly attain to art. But with us it always
+ends at the windows. Enter the shop and, unless it is a showroom, you
+stand in the midst of undigested cargoes of goods; and whose eye has
+not been pained by heaped rolls of stuff where a post-office red will
+lie, as often as not, on the top of a crimson and underneath a magenta?
+That is a thing which could not happen in Japan; the eye of the young
+man behind the counter would forbid it.
+
+I once watched a whole consignment of silks being put away on shelves
+in a shop in Tokyo. It was the European side of the establishment, so
+that the shop was fitted with counters, chairs, and the usual drapers’
+shelves, the silks, too, told the same tale in their width and pattern.
+It was only a boy who was putting them away, sixteen at the outside,
+yet he did it with a conscious choice, and when he had finished,
+the silks, which ran through the whole gamut of colour, harmonised
+delightfully. But the real Japanese shops are more beautiful still. To
+go over the Mitsui is to walk through a gallery of pictures in still
+life. Here are no heaps of undigested goods, no mere piles of articles,
+but a definite and deliberate setting forth of certain things which
+left the impression that the clerks of the Mitsui posed their silken
+goods as an artist his model. The Mitsui is one of the best shops in
+Tokyo; to be perfectly fair compare it with one of our “art salesmen.”
+But the best of our shops tie up their parcels in whitey-brown paper
+with tow-coloured string, thinner or thicker according to the weight of
+the parcel. In the Mitsui the string is all pure white or scarlet-red,
+and each parcel is tied with a strand of both laid side by side, the
+heavier the parcel the greater the number of scarlet and white strings,
+always laid side by side, until sometimes they make a wide white line
+above a wide red one, kept evenly together by a skilful knot. The ends,
+too, are not snapped off anyhow after tying an ugly knot, but are cut
+slantwise, to form a V or a point, and even the knot is beautiful
+because it is a coherent whole, and not a conglomeration of successive
+ties.
+
+So far, all these things, rice-fields, sacks, and food, with the sole
+exception of the blankets and hair brushes, have been exclusively
+Japanese, the nation has evolved them in itself, and by itself, and
+consequently in comparing them with things European it has only
+been possible to take similar and not identical objects. But since
+their first contact with Europe, and more especially during the last
+thirty years, the Japanese have borrowed a certain number of articles
+directly from the West. They have borrowed beer-glasses, windows, and
+wall-papers. And from the Dutch, three-hundred years ago, they took
+pipes and tobacco pouches. A light kind of _lager_ beer is rapidly
+becoming a universal drink in Japan. There are several native breweries,
+and those places where beer has not penetrated are considered hopelessly
+“old-fashioned.” After the beer came the beer-glasses, and though the
+art of the nation has not been long at work upon them, they are already
+very different from their European models. It must be remembered, too,
+that glass was unknown to the Japanese until it was introduced from the
+West. The first thing which the nation did when it set to work upon
+beer-glasses was to reduce the size, otherwise they would have been
+out of all proportion to the rest of the dinner service, and so the
+beer-glasses of Japan are small as dolls’ tumblers in which, if you are
+lucky, you will find three sips of beer under the egg-white froth.
+
+If this example illustrates the love of the little, generally supposed
+to be the chief characteristic of the Japanese, the case of the windows
+will show their dislike to unredeemed blank space, and at the same time
+their knowledge of the artistic value of space in design. So long as
+windows only existed in houses built in the style called “foreign,”
+they remained severely Western, just another European object like the
+railway or the telegraph set up in the land, but when they began to be
+introduced into Japanese houses, then the art of the nation set to work
+upon them. They are still rare, but in a few private houses and in some
+of the best native hotels windows exist. They do not open. They were
+not introduced to supply ventilation, an unnecessary consideration in
+a Japanese house, which is all draughts, nor really for light, the
+paper panes of the _shōji_ admitting light readily; but just in order
+that the person inside might have another picture before his eyes--the
+picture of what lies without. The window then is not a glass fitting to
+an oblong hole knocked into a wall, but a broad band of glass running
+round the whole length of the _shōji_ at just that distance from the
+ground which will allow anyone sitting on his heels on the floor to
+see through comfortably. A pattern on this glass window would have
+interfered with the view, and the window was there expressly for the
+view. So the glass is empty and clear, but not blank. Then it would
+have been merely useful, and the Japanese never stop at utility; it
+had to be made beautiful, and so the pure perfect curves of Fuji were
+traced upon the glass. The design was quite small and only occupied
+one end, but the area of the glass was no longer blank space, but the
+demanded setting to a picture.
+
+There is no place in a Japanese house for wall-papers, but the number
+of foreign-built hotels and houses has created a certain demand for
+them. Also the Japanese are beginning to export wall-papers abroad. As
+the patterns are mostly supplied to them direct from European firms, or
+copied from models sent them on order, they have to please their market,
+and yet I have seen a wall-paper in a hotel bedroom where two golden
+dragons drawn back to back studded a white ground. It was a perfectly
+conventional pattern, and at first there seemed nothing remarkable about
+it. The tiny dragons, looking something like a _fleur de lys_, occurred
+at six-inch intervals. Then it dawned gradually, the intervals were not
+regular, they differed both lengthways and width-ways. It took indeed
+ten feet of wall before the pattern absolutely repeated itself.
+
+But windows, wall-papers and beer-glasses are new growths, only just
+engrafted on to the life of the people. They are still thought of
+as something foreign, whereas pipes and pouches, although coming
+originally from the West, have in the course of three hundred years
+become thoroughly absorbed and transformed by the genius of the nation.
+To judge from the old pictures the first pipes were three or four feet
+long, with a bowl to correspond, in size and capacity suggestive of
+those long wooden pipes with china bowls smoked by the traditional
+Dutchman. At the same time we in the West have also been evolving our
+pipes and pouches, as the art and the convenience of Europe demanded,
+and to-day the British navvy has arrived at his clay and the city
+clerk at his briarwood, and both at the gutta-percha pouch. When bent
+on “something tasty,” they may indulge in skeleton-head pipes with
+carbuncle eyes, or magenta plush pouches embroidered in apple-green
+silk. In Japan the navvy (or his wife, for smoking is equally common
+to both sexes) uses a doll’s pipe made of a slender bamboo reed, whose
+bowl and mouthpiece are of metal, beautifully finished, and holding
+just three whiffs of their fine-cut red-brown tobacco. The pouch is
+made of leather, fastening like a purse, and the metal snap is always
+fashioned into a design, however simple--two birds flying, a fish, a
+grasshopper. There is also a leather case to keep the pipe in, like
+an open spectacle-case, and the two are fastened together by means of
+a twisted silken cord. The pipe-case is stuck into the _obi_, and the
+pouch hangs over. It was to allow of the free hang of the pouch, and
+also as a finish to the silken cord, that the _netsuké_ was invented,
+and some of the most beautiful of museum art objects produced. But
+_netsuké_ are not for the navvy or the people, or if they do occur in
+the cheap pouches of the poorer classes they are nothing more than
+a rounded bead only valuable artistically as a spot of colour. The
+pouches, the pipes and the pipe-cases are genuinely beautiful in shape,
+make and proportion. They also have the merit, rare in gutta-percha, of
+endurance. A pouch bought four years ago by a careless European, and
+in use ever since, shows to-day no sign of wear. It is not cracking at
+the seams, and the snap is as firm as ever. A smoker, I believe, has no
+particular hankering after the Japanese pipe with its metal bowl and
+mouthpiece, but anybody with a sense of form must enjoy the delicate
+refinement of even the commonest native pipe with the gentle yellow of
+its bamboo stem, the finish of the metal mouthpiece, and the perfect
+shape of its acorn bowl.
+
+These are, after all, only a few examples, sufficient perhaps for the
+purpose, but any one who has lived in Japan and looked at the common
+objects of daily life used, owned and produced by the people would be
+able to multiply them almost indefinitely.
+
+In thinking them over perhaps the thing which occurs most frequently
+to the mind is the simplicity of the means used. The whole artistic
+effect of the rice-fields consists in the variation of their shape, in
+the curve of the mud wall; in the shops and in the food simply in the
+right choice of given articles. But through all Japanese art, even the
+most elaborate, this same simplicity of means is noticeable. I have
+seen the most elaborate imperial brocade which produced an effect of
+running water, and it was done by simply throwing over the original
+blue brocade a rough mesh network of brown silk. Every garden in Japan
+is an illustration of this point, for a Japanese in a dull back yard
+as big as a bath-towel will, by the judicious planting of two small
+palm-trees, the setting up of a stone lantern, and the careful making
+of a puddle, convey to the mind of those who look the greenness and
+the coolness of a dense forest, the freshness of clear water, and the
+delight of hills and dales. I have seen it often in wayside inns, in
+shops, in big towns, in factories, everywhere.
+
+Exactly the same thing is true of their flower arrangement. Putting
+aside all other points of beauty and charm, a Japanese with three
+chrysanthemums, with one branch of fir, will produce a whole which we
+should only think of attempting with a shilling’s-worth of flowers and
+two penny bunches of “green.”
+
+On the characteristics of Japanese art European writers have varied
+greatly, but in considering only the art of the people there are
+perhaps fewer difficulties or differences, and we come, I think,
+to four--value of space, desire for line, sobriety of taste, and
+thoroughness of workmanship. I do not include the dislike of symmetry,
+because a want can hardly be called a characteristic. Symmetry is more
+properly a characteristic of our art. The Japanese dislike it, they
+make nothing in pairs, and if certain things, such as candlesticks, are
+required in twos, each one, though resembling the other in the main
+idea, always differs from it in detail.
+
+The sense of the artistic value of space shows itself everywhere, in
+every form of decoration and design, as well as in every object of art.
+In Japan there is no such thing as overcrowding. It is one small leaf
+which decorates the sheet of paper wrapping. It is the scarcity of
+articles in the Mitsui which accounts for nine-tenths of the artistic
+effect of that draper’s interior. If ever a nation has thoroughly and
+æsthetically realised the psychological fact on which much of our
+theory of backgrounds is based, that we only really see an object by
+its outlines, it is the Japanese. They have worked out this fact to its
+last artistic value. In a Japanese room there hangs one picture; on
+the raised and polished platform of the _tokonoma_, the artistic altar
+of the room, there is set one bronze or porcelain vase of flowers,
+one ornament. These are changed as often as the fortune or the taste
+of their owner permits. When a Japanese comes to Europe he complains
+that our drawing-rooms, with their dozens of pictures and their scores
+of ornaments, are “like warehouses”; and after this first disturbing
+feeling of crowd, when he has lived in that drawing-room for several
+months and finds that the ornaments are never changed, only perhaps
+added to, he complains then of the monotony. For he knows and has
+realised another psychological fact, that it is in the freshness of
+observation that the eye sees clearest and the brain works best.
+
+With the sense of the supreme value of space comes an intense feeling
+for line. Whether this has something to do with the climate, which is
+clear, and the landscape, which is mountainous, I do not know; but
+compare the purity of outline in the Italian painters, more especially
+in the Tuscan and the Umbrian, Botticelli and Perugino, with the
+Netherlands School, Rembrandt and Rubens, where light and shadow, and
+colour as colour, play so great a part. But whether it is due to the
+landscape or not, personally I should be inclined to attach a great
+deal of importance to the artistic value of Fujiyama, a mountain
+whose exquisite outlines, visible from thirteen provinces, have simply
+permeated Japanese art; but landscape or no, the desire for line is a
+fact. The Japanese draw with everything; with the mud embankments of
+their rice-fields, with the granite stones of their walls, with the
+trees in their gardens, with the flowers in their vases. The whole
+essence of flower arrangement is not colour mass, but line drawing. It
+is the same with their trees, the dwarf trees in their pots, or the
+grown trees in their gardens. Both are trained and educated to produce
+a beautiful outline, and they succeed. It is perhaps interesting in
+this connection to notice the number of illustrations in Japanese books
+where the trees are simply silhouettes washed in in Indian ink on a
+blank background. We should have, I think, a great disinclination to
+treat our trees in this way.
+
+The feeling for line is very strong, and it is perhaps perpetuated by
+the daily use of those dead pictures, the Chinese ideographs. Several
+hundred years ago the Japanese invented the phonetic syllabaries called
+_kana_. It is interesting from an artistic point of view to compare
+them with our alphabet. A very short contemplation of the alphabet as
+used in our books and handwriting will show that it is mainly composed
+of straight lines, often parallel, with a certain admixture of circles.
+Now, although a straight line is the nearest way between two points, it
+is rarely or never the most beautiful; did not some one once say, “The
+line of beauty is a curve”? I do not think any one’s artistic soul has
+received much nourishment from a contemplation of the letter “m,” three
+parallel lines, or “t.” Compare them with the corresponding _kana_, and
+the difference will be felt at once. Indeed, we are all unconsciously
+well aware of the artistic failing of our ordinary alphabet, for
+directly we carve or write an inscription, or introduce it in any way
+into something which claims to be an object of art, then we discard it
+altogether, and either fall back on the Gothic letters, or adopt some
+kind of fancy alphabet. As the average Japanese child is taught writing
+four hours a week for the first three years, and three hours for the
+next two, and as their writing is really painting, their feeling for
+line has at least a chance of development.
+
+Of the thoroughness of Japanese workmanship I do not think anybody
+would disagree; when the wing of the stork on your rice-bowl is
+finished inside, when the chrysanthemum petals on your wooden tray
+curl over the edge, when the bottom of your flower vase has a design
+as well as the outside, you are convinced that the Japanese knew
+Ruskin’s dictum long before he said it. I have seen the feet of a
+bronze statuette, the feet which were entirely hidden under the folds
+of the _kimono_ from in front, carefully finished off underneath. The
+statuette in question cost 50 _sen_ (1_s._), and was sold by a street
+hawker. Nobody really sees the designs on the _kuruma_ axle-heads,
+not unless they look for them, except perhaps the _kurumaya_ himself,
+when he squats on the ground waiting for a fare; but they give a
+thoroughness of finish to the _’ricksha_ which it would miss without.
+
+Most people are agreed, I think, upon the thoroughness of workmanship,
+but sobriety of taste is a more disputed point. We are very fond of
+talking of the “gorgeous colouring of the East,” and using terms like
+“barbaric splendour” and “oriental luxury.” These terms may have had
+some truth as applied to the art of India, but because Japan is also
+situated in the East, they do not necessarily apply to her. We do
+not sufficiently realise over here that there is considerably more
+difference between China and Japan, let alone India and Japan, than
+there is between any two European countries whatsoever, be they Greeks
+or Dutch, or what you will; that they are not of the same race, nor do
+they belong to the same linguistic family. Therefore, to transfer an
+adjective applicable to India to Japan, just because both are Oriental,
+is like applying an adjective suitable to the Turks or the Laps to the
+English, on the ground that both are European. This is, I think, one
+source of error; the others are more subtle. There is first of all
+the climate. Now a colour, any colour, under a bright blue sky in a
+dazzling yellow sunshine, will always look more subdued than that same
+colour under a grey sky and in a cloudy atmosphere. This is simply an
+effect of contrast. Therefore, Japanese colouring must be judged as it
+is seen in Japan, not as it may look when transferred to England. And,
+again, a study of the actual colour itself will show that the Japanese
+have learnt how to make the very brightest colours soft in tone. This
+fact has been well rubbed into me lately, for I have tried both in
+Paris and in London to match certain Japanese stuffs, or at least to
+find something in the same note of colour which would go with them.
+It was quite impossible. All our soft colours, the so-called artistic
+shades, are too dull in tone, while none of our bright ones are soft
+enough; by the side of the Japanese colours they look simply crude.
+These are all quite material reasons, objective facts, but there is
+another which only those who have stood and looked at the glorious
+splendour of a Japanese temple such as Nikkō or Shiba, where the whole
+rainbow is resplendent in carved wood and gilded lacquer, and that is
+their matchless power of combination and of background. The temples of
+Nikkō or Shiba are both built in the midst of a wood; the dark, deep,
+sober forms of the giant pine-trees stand all around. This is the
+setting; then between each gorgeous gateway comes a still clear space
+of court, paved with quiet grey pebbles; and when the glory culminates
+in the temple’s interior the building is of unstained, unpainted wood,
+soft as the dust-brown carpet of the beech-leaves when the sun’s
+rays are level. But the temples, supreme in their way among all the
+products of Japanese art, are exceptional. The average Japanese room
+is colourless, luminous, but practically colourless. The floor is of
+the palest yellow matting, the one or two solid walls of the room are
+washed in the softest of bark browns, the wood of the _tokonoma_ is
+dark and polished, and the other walls are _shōji_, that is, composed
+entirely of small panes of rice-paper. Through this paper the sunlight
+comes luminous but colourless. To sit in that room is like living in
+the heart of the plum-blossom, or within the petals of a warm white
+rose.
+
+In their dress the Japanese are equally subdued: the men wear mostly
+grey or dust-coloured silks, the women soft mauves, blues and greys.
+It is only the children who are dressed in bright colours and gay
+patterns. All the working classes, both men and women, wear a dark
+indigo blue. The Japanese wear no jewellery. Precious stones they have,
+exquisite mauve and purple amethysts, crystals of blood-red splendour
+or soft and milky as flushing pearl. And the rich man buys these,
+not to wear, but to look at, as works of art, as exquisite natural
+objects. He never hangs them round his own neck, or enmeshes his
+womankind in them. The Japanese are, I believe, the only nation on the
+earth who know and value precious stones, and yet wear no jewellery.
+Might not this be considered convincing evidence of their essential
+sobriety of taste? Even the landscape, though supremely beautiful and
+sunny, is never flaunting. There are too many sober green pine-trees,
+and pale, bewitching bamboos for that. I have never seen anywhere in
+Japan, in the poorest house, in the cheapest shop, anything that was
+tawdry or even “loud,” except in that part of porcelain and other
+factories which supply goods, mostly from “foreign” patterns, for the
+European market.
+
+In this enumeration of the characteristics of Japanese art, you will
+perhaps wonder why I have omitted the very popular one of their love of
+the little, the small, the minute. I have left it out simply because
+I do not believe it exists as such. Many writers have exclaimed in
+paragraphs sprinkled with interjections on this passion for the little
+which they say the Japanese possess; and they have apparently seen in
+it nothing but a blind unreasoning prejudice for the something small as
+opposed to the something great. I think this opinion is mostly due to
+the “little knowledge” of the tourist or the restricted knowledge of
+the specialist. It leaves also entirely unexplained and inexplicable
+the _Dai Butsu_ of Kamakura, a bronze statue of Buddha, fifty feet
+high and of the most exquisite workmanship; the Buddhas of Kyoto and
+of Nara; the big bronze bell of Kyoto, the largest hanging bell in the
+world, besides that at Chion-in, the second largest, and at Nara, the
+third; the _Hongwanji_ at Kyoto, the walls of the castle at Osaka--and
+the battle of Mukden. A wider acquaintance with the Japanese people
+and the realities of their daily life will show, I think, that this
+so-called love of the little is really a highly cultivated and acute
+sense of proportion, where it is not purely ethical.
+
+The Japanese beer-glass, you will remember, was the size of a doll’s
+tumbler. “Why?” “Oh, because they have a passion for little things”
+is certainly the easiest and most obvious answer. But follow that
+glass to its home on its Japanese dinner tray, in its Japanese room,
+and you will see that its littleness is in exact proportion to the
+tray and the room. Nor are the rooms so small, but because we insist
+on bringing our encumbering “foreign” ideas into them. There is no
+furniture in a Japanese room, no furniture of any kind whatsoever. Two
+kneeling-cushions and a round box, a brazier, are the only possible
+objects which could come under that heading, therefore the whole space
+within the four walls of a room is space for movement. If a measurement
+were taken of the actual feet of free space in many a modern European
+drawing-room, I believe that it would be found to be something _less_
+than that in the “tiny” Japanese apartment.
+
+Another thing to be borne in mind is that life in Japan is lived, not
+above the floor on chairs, but on the floor itself. Try living on the
+floor and you will find the whole horizon of a room opening out in the
+most astonishing way. What we call a stool, for instance, represents
+the same level as a table. The actual difference in the height of the
+eyes sitting on one’s heels on a Japanese floor and on a chair is
+really between two and three feet, while it must also be remembered
+that Japanese eyes, belonging as they do to a body shorter on the
+average than our own, come still nearer to the ground.
+
+Thus a careful examination of the things which are small in Japan,
+which they have deliberately chosen to make small, copied smaller than
+the foreign originals, will show, I think, that it is due to their
+acute sense of fitness and proportion. There is also another reason,
+which is not artistic but ethical.
+
+The Japanese are a sober and abstemious race, a race of high culture
+and of ancient civilisation. When we were running about clad in the
+inadequate skin, gorging off half-raw oxen, and drunken with seven-day
+feasts of mead, they lived already under an ordered and an organised
+government with most, if not all, of the essentials of civilisation.
+And after all, is not one of the hall-marks of real civilisation the
+learning to take “a little” instead of “a lot,” in extracting from each
+atom the whole of its use, enjoyment and pleasure? Children and savages
+are always wasteful. We do not now try to eat whole oxen or drink mead
+for seven days, we have learnt to get as much if not more pleasure out
+of one glass of wine and one slice of beef, and the reason is that we
+are slowly learning _not_ to gulp. If you watch the working man drink
+his beer, or the working woman her tea, you will see that they usually
+gulp it down in big draughts, imagining, I suppose, that it is sheer
+quantity which produces flavour. They have not yet learnt that profound
+ethical truth, expressed by the old epicure when he said approvingly of
+some young man that he “had already learned to sip his wine and not to
+gulp it.” The Japanese have learnt to sip. Their wine-glasses, which
+are china bowls, hold perhaps two tablespoonfuls, their tea-cups three,
+their pipes just three fleeting whiffs. Drunkenness is exceedingly
+rare; it does exist, but with a glass holding two tablespoonfuls there
+is time for reflection. It is also more economical than the foreign
+variety, the actual quantity required to produce intoxication when
+taken in small doses being, I believe, considerably less.
+
+There is always another side to a people’s art, a side which is
+frequently overlooked, and that is the art, not in the object, but in
+the workman. A people’s art will show itself, not only in the actual
+object produced, but in the life of the producer and in the conditions
+of production.
+
+In the cloisonné works of Nagoya, an industrial centre of a quarter of
+a million of inhabitants, the workers sat in peace and solitude, not a
+sound of the busy streets penetrated to the long series of matted rooms
+where they worked. Each room and each workman looked towards a quiet
+garden, cool with running water, and still with the deep mystery of the
+pines. In the modern porcelain factory, dedicated to the production of
+goods for the “foreign” market, the long white room looked out through
+open doors upon the waving rice-fields, and each potter’s wheel was
+turned to see the branch of purple iris standing in its yellow vase.
+There is a cotton factory in Japan which is a positive addition to the
+beauty of the landscape.
+
+Nor is it only the big and wealthy workmen who produce good art.
+Some of the most beautiful silver enamel-ware in Tokyo was made by a
+little man who owned the smallest and poorest of general shops, where
+halfpenny tooth brushes and farthing sheets of paper formed the richest
+portions of his stock. All this beautiful silver enamel-work was done
+in the back parlour, and at no time could he have had more than ten
+_yen_ (£1) worth of such goods in hand. Yet he was an artist to the
+tips of his fingers, and the sheen and colour of his enamelled silver
+lotus flowers were a joy to the beholder.
+
+In Nikkō there was a carpenter who made wooden trays for the
+inhabitants. His stall, the merest shanty, was the littlest imaginable,
+yet he carved me a wooden box with a design in chrysanthemums which was
+skilled artistic work, and even his cheap wooden trays had the stamp of
+art. He did them with a penknife, and the whole surface of the tray was
+grooved in shallow curving lines.
+
+And the worker himself? If there is art in the product and in the
+conditions of production, what of the producer? Is there art in his
+life and his tastes? Is there art in the life of the labourer, of the
+coolie and the _’ricksha_ man? Is there art in the daily life of the
+common people as well as in the things they use?
+
+A man’s tastes are known by his pleasures. When the common people
+of Tokyo make “Bank Holiday” they go to see a handful of pink
+cherry-blossoms against the blue of an April sky. They walk politely,
+looking up at the trees, and though the crowd is thick, endless, nobody
+pushes or fights or swears. No special posse of policemen is turned
+out to keep order. Down the long two-mile avenue of cherry-trees at
+Mukojima the crowd wanders amiably, and the municipality of Tokyo has
+never thought to invent a single penalty for the destruction of young
+trees and shrubs. The world stares contentedly, drinks tea, and goes
+home again. And this is considered to be the rowdiest crowd at the most
+popular resort on the favourite “Bank Holiday” of the year.
+
+The blossoming of all the other flowers, plum, peach, azalea, peony,
+wistaria, iris, lotus, convolvulus, maple, chrysanthemum, are equally
+visited, and advertised daily in the newspapers. The people of Japan
+take few holidays, but those they do take are almost always at the time
+of the flower festivals.
+
+When they can afford something more expensive they go to the “Royal
+Academy,” which opens its doors twice in the year for the aristocratic
+sum of 3 _sen_ (¾_d._) _gheta_ (wooden clogs) and umbrellas
+left outside, 5 _rin_ (10 _rin_ make ¼_d._). The other picture
+exhibitions, not having the status of the Tokyo “Royal Academy,” are
+more moderate, averaging 1 to 2 _sen_ for admission, and _gheta_, free.
+The entrance to the exhibitions of bronze, lacquer, porcelain and
+other arts is the same. Even on the basis of Japanese incomes, where a
+General earns £300 a year, the Headmaster of a Public School £160 and
+a coolie 6_d._ a day, the charges are exceedingly moderate. And the
+people, the real working people, go. I should be curious to find out
+how many working men have paid at the turnstiles of Burlington House.
+
+Besides art exhibitions, Japanese workmen go to the theatre, but this
+is a taste they share with many other nations; what is all their own is
+their love of pilgrimages, not only to temples of religious repute, but
+to places of celebrated beauty. Fujiyama is yearly ascended by hundreds
+of thousands of pilgrims. Here religion and beauty are mingled. For
+the great mountain is sacred. So is almost every spot in Japan that
+is particularly beautiful. As one journeys through the country, the
+traveller will always find that the most beautiful point of view,
+the grandest scene, the loveliest nook, has a temple, or at least a
+wayside shrine, set up by the common people and tended by them. There
+never was a nation since the days of Ancient Greece who so entirely
+believed that beauty is sacred, or who so entirely disbelieved that
+art can be divorced from ethics. They have the love of beauty innate
+and inalienable. A man I knew was once crossing Tokyo in a _’ricksha_;
+he was a prosperous, commercial being with a vast contempt for the
+“heathen.” It was late afternoon. His _kurumaya_, after looking round
+at him several times, suddenly stopped short, and waving his hand to
+the west said respectfully but firmly:
+
+“Honourably please to observe the unusual glory of the sunset.”
+
+“And I told him to jolly well get on,” was the end of the story as I
+heard it.
+
+A favourite pastime of the _’ricksha_ men on the cab-stands as they
+wait for a fare is to draw in the dust of the roadway one against the
+other. If sand has been spilled from a cart anywhere within reach
+the whole _’ricksha_ stand migrates and has the happiest time. I
+have seen really good outlines of Fujiyama and of flying birds, or
+blossoming flowers, all on the roadways by the _’ricksha_ stands. And
+whatever their faults, they at least had life, for the _’ricksha_ man
+has knowledge, knowledge based on intelligent observation and on the
+inherited training of his race.
+
+In the Japanese language there is a word, _edaburi_, which means “the
+formation or the arrangement of the branches of a tree.” Merely to
+possess such a word shows the long training in art and observation
+which the nation must have undergone. But this word is not a technical
+term used only by artists and the cultured classes; it is a living,
+breathing expression, part of the vocabulary of every Japanese, even
+the Board School educated. _Kurumaya_ discuss _edaburi_ in the streets
+of Tokyo. Railway porters at wayside stations argue the matter with
+the stationmaster. Every peasant knows, understands, and talks of the
+matter as though he had brought himself up on long courses of Ruskin.
+It has often been a subject of great regret to me that Ruskin did not
+know the Japanese, for in them he would have found the living proof of
+so much of his teaching.
+
+But the people of Japan not only discuss _edaburi_, they write poetry.
+There is an exceedingly simple form of poetry called _hokku_. It
+consists of only three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, and
+is written in the language of daily life. The _hokku_ was invented by
+a man called Bashō, for the definite ethical purpose of cultivating
+the taste and improving the morals of the people. He believed in the
+composition of poetry as an ethical force, and he wished to bring
+it from the home of the educated into the lives of the poor. He
+succeeded. Not because the _hokku_ is a so much easier form of poetry
+than the English couplet, but because the people have taste, and art,
+and civilisation in the very cells of their brains. Every one writes
+poetry, even the typical _jinricksha_ man, who is to the Japanese
+what the _charbonnier_ is to the French or the coster to us. When
+the _kurumaya_ and his wife go to visit their relations the whole
+party amuses itself by composing these tiny poems. On all occasions
+of joy and grief, on birth, death and marriage, at the time of each
+flower festival, or of any other happening, the people compose poetry.
+Literary composition has always been inculcated as the best medicine
+for sorrow, and as such is practised daily.
+
+This is a little poem taken from the diary of a woman who died in
+Tokyo a year or two ago. She lived with her husband, a doorkeeper, on
+an income of £1 a month, and she was very delicate. She bore him three
+children, who all died shortly after birth; then the poor mother died
+herself. Her diary came into the possession of Lafcadio Hearn, who
+translated it under the title of “A Woman’s Tragedy.” This poem was
+composed on the death of the third baby and runs:
+
+    “Tanoshimi mo
+     Samété haka nashi.
+     Haru no yumé.”
+
+    “All my delight has perished, and hopeless I remain.
+     It was a dream, a dream of spring.”
+
+Here is another poem which is more typically Japanese. It was composed
+by the same woman after the death of her second baby, and runs:
+
+    “Sami daré ya
+     Shimerigachi naru
+     Sodé no tamoto wo.”
+
+    “Oh, the month of rain; all things have become damp;
+     the ends of my sleeve are wet.”
+
+Which being interpreted is: “Oh! the time of grief. All things now seem
+sad. The sleeves of my robe are moist with tears.”[1]
+
+  [1] The long sleeve of a Japanese _kimono_ is always held before the
+  face to hide emotion.
+
+It is this very allusiveness, this saying of something simple and
+commonplace, and hiding behind it a whole meaning of intense emotion,
+which makes this poem so typically Japanese, for Japanese art is always
+suggestive, it always needs the observer to bring his share of thought
+and mind to its interpretation.
+
+It is interesting to speculate how much the two most universally
+recognised characteristics of the Japanese, politeness and cleanliness,
+owe to their sense of art. If one looks into the psychology of the
+race, one sees, of course, that this national trait of exquisite
+politeness was built up, or at least assisted, in many ways. There was
+that stern training of the _samurai_ which taught eternal, never-ending
+self-control. There is the whole Buddhistic teaching, which is one
+long gospel of unselfishness and kindness. But other nations have had
+training in self-control, we ourselves among the number--think for a
+moment of the Puritans and our public schools. And other religions
+preach kindness and unselfishness, our own again, and yet there is no
+other nation so widely recognised, even by the snappiest of tourists
+who ever wrote his “memoirs,” as universally polite from the Emperor to
+the coolie in the streets. It is a hypothesis which I put forward with
+some hesitation, because the origins of national psychology are not for
+the amateur, but I do think that a certain stress is to be laid upon
+this innate and instinctive, but much cultivated sense of art. Has not
+the politeness something to do with that love of a beautiful outline,
+that desire for a perfect curve in the relations between man and man
+as well as between man’s eye and his drawing? Is not, in fact, a rude
+action a something inartistic in the social whole, a blot of crude
+colour that jars?
+
+The whole of the _cha-no-yu_, or tea ceremony, one of the few Japanese
+things of which Europeans have heard more or less vaguely, is an
+illustration in point. The tea ceremony, divested of its subsidiary
+and attendant growths, is in essence nothing more than the proper
+making and the proper drinking of a simple cup of tea. This, in the
+course of centuries, has been elaborated into an imposing and very
+complicated ceremonial. Nowadays the _cha-no-yu_ is regarded mainly as
+a useful reservoir of etiquette and politeness, and is taught as such.
+But the whole idea on which it rests is that for every given action
+there is always one, and only one, right and proper attitude, that is
+to say, the most graceful. So that the curve of every finger in the
+mere passing of a tea-cup is the result of careful thought and long
+experience. Everything has to be considered, the room, the person, the
+relation of the body to the arm, of the arm to the hand, of the hand
+to the tea-cup, the position of the person serving, and of the person
+served, the place of the tea-cups, of the teapot, and the tea-kettle;
+all have been taken into consideration by the tea ceremonialists, and
+the proper, the most graceful attitude carefully evolved.
+
+That you may not think politeness a matter of social caste in Japan,
+I may say that the _kurumaya_ when they run into one another at the
+corners, the coolies hauling carts when they collide, bow profoundly
+and beg one another’s pardon.
+
+And the exquisite cleanliness? Some one once defined dirt as “matter
+out of place.” Is not much of art just the putting of things in their
+right places, in their best and most appropriate and consequently their
+most beautiful place; in the putting of a thing in such a place that
+you feel it never could have been otherwise. As the child said when
+lost in admiration of his birthday cake, “It’s so beautiful I think God
+must have made it.” It is this cleanliness, this neatness, which the
+Japanese possess, a neatness which has passed beyond mere precision,
+passed on into its essence--grace.
+
+All this may perhaps sound far-fetched to English ears. If we are
+clean and polite it is on sanitary or on ethical grounds, not for
+æsthetic reasons, because “it is healthy or right,” not “because it is
+more beautiful,” and we make a broad distinction between ethics and
+æsthetics. In Japan, on the contrary, there is the most intimate of
+relations between them. The whole modern controversy of “art for art’s
+sake,” all the dearly cherished views of French critics that art has
+nothing to do with morals, is simply unmeaning to them. You might as
+well say that the sun had no relation to light.
+
+I have already mentioned how the _hokku_ form of verse arose as a moral
+influence, how literary composition is always recommended as the best
+medicine for sorrow; but what of a nation whose gardens are arranged to
+express an ethical abstraction such as courage, resignation, obedience,
+or to suggest a saying of Buddha, the Blessed One; whose dwarf trees
+are not merely grown to make a design, but also to express an idea
+and suggest a reflection; where every single tree, and flower, and
+bird, and beast is a moral symbol and is commonly used as such; where
+a simple candlestick of a stork standing on a tortoise and holding
+the stem of a convolvulus in its mouth is a whole philosophy: the
+stork, representing Life, standing upon the tortoise, Eternity, and
+holding in its mouth the Morning Glory, a flower whose brief life, only
+blooming for the few hours after dawn, is typical of mortality, and
+the impermanence of all things. From Life based upon Eternity springs
+Mortality, whose joys are fleeting. Here is the kernel of the whole
+Buddhistic faith. The impermanence of phenomena and the eternity of
+law, that is, cause and effect.
+
+Even such an ordinary art as that of arranging flowers is deeply
+ethical. The whole of Chinese philosophy is bound up with it. Each stem
+is known by the name of some tenet in this philosophy, and at the end
+of the lesson on flower arrangement the teacher sits down and talks to
+the class of the underlying ethical ideas.
+
+I do not think there is any art in the world into which so much thought
+and meaning has been poured as into that of the Japanese. Every design,
+even the simplest, even the most stereotyped, has behind it a whole
+world of symbol, of suggestion which speaks to the mind of the beholder
+as the outlines to his eye. And this is the reason why no design is
+ever unmeaning, haphazard, as it so often is with us. It is there not
+only because it is beautiful, but because it is appropriate to the
+place and the occasion, because it has some connection with the object
+it decorates, with the person who gives or the person who receives
+it, with the time and the circumstances of the giving. Their art, in
+fact, regarded from the ethical point of view, is often a sort of moral
+shorthand, a very beautiful, finely wrought shorthand, which men can
+take away and think upon.
+
+And this brings me to my last point. John Addington Symonds, in one of
+his wonderful essays on the Italian Renaissance, says that painting
+inevitably fell from its high estate among men because modern life
+is too complex to be expressed by it. That just in the same way as
+the Renaissance required something less simple than the sculpture of
+the Greeks to translate its thoughts and feelings into outward form,
+so we in this century cannot express our own more subtle and complex
+thought in terms of painting, and therefore never again can we hope
+to rival the perfection of that old Renaissance art. And he concludes
+by remarking that it is in music, more plastic and suggestive, that
+we must seek our best expression. Now Japanese art is not dead but
+intensely living, and it has always seemed to me that it lives, it
+holds its place in their life, thought and culture just because it has
+learnt to express those complex and subtle emotions which make up our
+world to-day. And it does it, not by imaging them forth defined and
+definite as our painting seeks to do, but just as our music would by
+suggestion.
+
+To every Japanese painting a man must bring his own soul and his own
+thoughts, and where he has none or little, then he will turn away
+complacently, saying, “Here, there is nothing.” For his are not the
+eyes to see all the dim eternal problems, all the vistas of unwritten
+poetry which the artist has but shadowed forth; the artist whose part
+is not to portray, but infinitely to suggest.
+
+
+
+
+                      SCENES IN RAIN AND SUNSHINE
+
+                       “What it is
+                     That dwelleth here
+                        I know not;
+                   Yet my heart is full of gratitude,
+                   And the tears trickle down.”
+                                           SAIGIO.
+                          “Japanese Literature,” by W. G. Aston.
+
+
+
+
+                                   I
+
+                               THE MOAT
+
+
+It is winter, and yet a summer sky of clearest blue, faint and pure. A
+white sun rides in the southern sky, winning me to believe it summer
+until the cold northern wind lifts the edge of my cloak, and I know it
+winter.
+
+It is warm here in the corner of the bridge, full in the sunlight, and
+I linger. The dark, still waters of the moat creep stealthily along
+on either side of me; in the distance I can see the rounded arch of a
+bridge, so arched is the span and so white that I could believe the
+people had stolen the young crescent of the moon to span their waters.
+
+I lean on my bamboo parapet and look. The dark still waters run between
+brown stone walls all overhung with the twisted limbs of the fir-trees,
+such big strong branches lying almost along the ground, and twisted as
+if in a vain endeavour to get back to the earth beneath. I watch the
+thick strong branches, soberly green, the masses of foliage riotously
+so, a green line and its shadow.
+
+The stone banks of the moat are unhewn and uncemented, but their
+surface is one unbroken line of sober brown; and I look at the long
+wave of muddy finger-marks traced by the tide’s edge, and now high up
+the wall, and drop my eyes to the deep mud-brown of the waters below.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The bamboo parapet grows hot, hotter. I wonder who laid those stones,
+and who keeps them so free of grass and weeds. On the whole they are
+not more silent and solid than the big limbs of the trees above. Past
+the bridge in the distance is an unkempt space of yellow grass, then
+a tall red building shoots abruptly into the sky. The small brown
+policeman, hidden by his military cloak and sword, stands motionless as
+I. Am I dreaming that this is a city of a million souls?
+
+Blue, green, brown, black; sky, trees, stones, water; a white sun, a
+white bridge--and suddenly the two seem to meet in a whirl of dust,
+my scale of colours vanishes and with it the dreamy quiet and the
+summer sun. A clatter of _gheta_ on the bridge, two _kuruma_ past the
+policeman, a boat on the moat, the voice of the _tōfu_ man following
+his bell along the road, the shadow of the tall house over the
+world--and I awake to winter and the town.
+
+
+
+
+                                  II
+
+                              A RAINY DAY
+
+
+Rain!
+
+And the world lies like an impressionist picture washed in with
+white. Shut up in my miniature hansom, with the apron up to my eyes
+and the roof down to the brim of my hat, it passes before me in misty
+unreality. But for an occasional bob of the black mushroom hat of my
+_kurumaya_ as he pulls the _’ricksha_ out of a hole, I am drawn by an
+invisible force.
+
+It has rained for a week, and the streets are bogs, the puddles--ponds.
+The wind drives the rain with a murmured “_ssssh_” against the
+tarpaulin sides of the _kuruma_, but in front there is no rain, only an
+intangible, shadowy whiteness between the world and me.
+
+The green bank of the moat, the dark water, even the fir-trees whose
+green arms stretch down long fingers into the water, are uncertain
+and swollen as the world to sleepy eyes. Black _kuruma_ splash past
+me, with the large glass eye in their aprons shadowly suggestive. The
+coolie in his straw raincoat, just a walking sheaf finishing in two
+bare brown legs, plods on, a golden figure against the grey. A long
+string of carts pass by me, long narrow carts drawn by long thin
+horses; cart and horses hidden under a structure of yellow oil-paper,
+until they look like huge golden bats or mythical dragons. And with his
+back to the head of the horse, a halter in one hand, a yellow paper
+umbrella in the other, his bare brown legs lost in the mud, the walking
+sheaf moves on.
+
+All the world to-day is four inches higher than its wont; and the
+stilt-like _gheta_ seem an uncertain footing for their owners. Bare to
+the thigh is the _kurumaya_, and his brown legs look like the statues
+of Greece sunned into life, so perfect are their outlines.
+
+Down the vanishing road are two pale yellow umbrellas, gold on grey,
+and I marvel at the beauty of the colour. Suddenly round the bend of
+the street comes a third--foreign, _black_--and in a flash the beauty
+goes; a muddy road in the drenching rain alone is left, cold, prosaic.
+And I shiver in my _kuruma_.
+
+
+
+
+                                  III
+
+                          MMÉ (PLUM-BLOSSOMS)
+
+
+They lay in fleece-white purity down the hillside, and the brooding
+stillness of that garden was as a sheltering wing above the world.
+
+Beneath one’s feet the six-sided tiles set in the brown earth were
+clean with a Dutch cleanliness, and the soil all around had been raked
+with the same quaint precision. Not a fallen leaf, nor the foot-mark of
+a bird, marred the soft brown surface--only the narrow line of glazed
+tiles ran on and on under the trees.
+
+On every side the curve of the hill sloped upwards, outwards, drawing
+the white garden nearer as a mother draws her child close within her
+arms.
+
+A hot sweet scent is in the air, delicate as honeysuckle, fragrant as
+the pine, half-soft, half-spiced--the scent of the blossoming plum,
+_mmé_, the emblem of chastity, of womanly purity and strength.
+
+The pale grey stems of the trees are bent and old; some are covered
+with a grey-green moss, and between their silvered stems I walk as in
+the cloistered calm of ruined abbeys.
+
+Up through the white fleece of blossom overhead bright stars of blue
+shine down. The sun-warmed presence of the living earth draws her
+children near. In all the world there is no sound....
+
+“Like as a hen gathereth her chickens.” ...
+
+Is not that the white wing of the eternal mother overhead? And the
+warm, sweet fragrance of herself is all around.
+
+
+
+
+                                  IV
+
+                              WET LEAVES
+
+
+It had rained all night and all day; big, solid drops of rain that
+fell as compactly through the air as battalions of small shot, but at
+twilight the raindrops dwindled, slackened, dwindled, ceased.
+
+The clear, colourless sky, which the whole day long had shot down
+its drops of rain, drew together in grey clouds, growing momentarily
+greyer, thicker and more grey, and shining with a pale light as though
+far away behind those thick coverings a great white light was burning.
+
+The stones on the pathway were all wet and shining and crunched down
+into little pools of water under one’s heels. The trees were dripping
+raindrops at each leaf, the trunks of all the pines were a dark brown
+with wet.
+
+In the garden there was peace, a peace of plants weighed down with
+raindrops, and very tired. Up on the damp hillside the note of a
+solitary bird sounded forlornly. _Uguisu_, the Japanese nightingale was
+calling. One sweet short song, and then a greater silence.
+
+Above the little grey shrine to Inari, the Fox God, two golden oranges
+swayed out against the dark green bush. The raindrops on their under
+sides trickled slowly over the little temple, and down the miniature
+steps, while those on the upper sides stood out in little clusters
+growing larger and larger until an imperceptible stir of the heavy
+fruit sent them chasing their fellows down the temple’s roof.
+
+And the sky above grew greyer. The golden oranges, larger for the
+raindrops, swayed mysteriously out, bright yellow against dark green,
+in a damp, dark world.
+
+At the path’s edge another pathway of clear water encircled the temple
+and the orange trees; a water so clear that it hardly seemed to exist,
+while the brown banks and the brown stones showed wet and dark as the
+pathway under foot. And round the temple and the orange trees in ever
+silent motion along the brown pathway swam strange fishes; bright blue
+carp with black sides and designs in creamy white, large orange carp
+with tracings in silver, golden carp with six or seven waving tails,
+and solitary in their midst one white patriarch whom age had turned to
+driven snow.
+
+And the damp, dark world turned slowly darker. The wet hillside grew
+a black, blurred line; the light behind the cloud was going out; the
+trees had lost their colour.
+
+All silently the blue carp moved along the dark pathway, and the golden
+orange globes dripped above the little temple. Bright blue, orange; the
+light behind the clouds was out.
+
+
+
+
+                                   V
+
+                               ASAMAYAMA
+
+
+We were to climb Asamayama. The plan seemed simple and delightful;
+to take horses in the cool of the evening and ride by moonlight to
+the last green frill of trees upon the mountain side: to climb the
+nine thousand feet to the very edge of the crater; and then in those
+blackest hours before the dawn to look into the volcano’s mysterious
+depths, all red and glowing, where flame and smoke strive ever for the
+mastery, where the long orange tongues leap up through rolling purple
+masses of the smoke; and all around and all below, as far as eye can
+pierce, is lurid glowing red. And still on the crater’s treacherous
+sides which hold smoke and flame unsteadily as a drunkard holds his
+cup, to look down fascinated until they crumble beneath one’s feet, and
+the thrill of terror bites in the memory of the mighty force indelible.
+Then to breakfast under the sheltering walls of the old crater; to
+watch the darkness melt before the coming day, to see the sun rise
+swiftly in his strength, and the long circle of the hills stand clear
+and blue and liquid on the upland plain; to see the giant ridges of the
+mountains stretching from sea to sea with the faint white cone of Fuji
+a dream upon the distant sky; to look in the freshness of the morning
+upon the beauty of the land, and standing on the cinder slopes of
+Asama to trace the tortured lava beds stretching like long grey snakes
+among the green till the trees grow over and the forest engulfs them.
+And still in the first hours of the dawn to ride back slowly with the
+memory of the crater and the sunrise making pictures in one’s mind,
+tired but contented.
+
+The programme was delightful, perfect, it only remained to carry it
+out. So we started, on the sorry horses of the upland regions of Japan,
+and the full moon fitful behind thick clouds shone sadly. It was
+distinctly chilly, for the table land of Karuizawa is 3000 feet above
+sea level, and in the air was the damp shiver of coming rain. Still
+we started, out of the village and along the wide still plain where
+the dark shadow of a hill showed round as a basin on our right. This
+was Asama’s satellite, born of her fires, made of her ashes, a round,
+smooth, green hill, cruelly deceitful.
+
+The empty plain stretched dark to the edge of the misty clouds and
+diffused through it was a pale grey light that shimmered, trembling.
+Over the plain and the mountain, through the air and the shadows, the
+light filtered mistily, swaying and rounding the outlines till they
+looked like solid bodies seen through a vast perspective of clear
+water. As we plodded on, the paper lanterns held by each boy at the
+horses’ heads turned all the wet black path to shining silver pools
+which gleamed as the light fell on them, quivered like spreading veins
+of ore, and disappeared into the blackness. The limpid flowing air that
+swayed above the plain, all luminous and clear, grew darker, shrank as
+it were together, lost its liquid light, turned slowly into rain, and
+came down steadily.
+
+We passed through a second village, and went on, over a rutty road,
+between high banks, persistently upwards. All the sounds of the world
+had died away, and the life of the woods, the rustle of leaves and of
+grasses, the long thick hum of the insects was dead. Nothing moved.
+Even the rain made no sound as it fell in great wet clouds upon the
+ground.
+
+High up on the rutty road we halted, while the two boys plunging
+downward through the bushes in the darkness drank of a silent stream
+which flowed below, the last water we should pass that night. The
+leaves of the bushes cut sharp green silhouettes upon the blackness,
+stiff and metallic as tinfoil, as the boys, lantern in hand, plunged
+downward. But we did not go, for the soft cloud of rain was falling
+thicker, wetter, and we were cold. When each had drunk his fill, and
+the metal green leaves of the bushes had flashed back into darkness
+again, we plodded on, over the common, under the trees, along another
+piece of road, looser, more rutty than the last, and definitely among
+the dripping trees we climbed upward.
+
+The moon was gone now, hidden deep behind the falling layers of cloud.
+And there was a hush, a stagnancy upon all things as though an unseen,
+unknown force were terrorising life to stillness. Not a tree had leave
+to stir. The branches huddled dumbly, and all the seething insect
+life which makes the woods so full of sound lay stricken, lay dumb,
+paralysed; and among the damp trees we journeyed on.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At midnight the horses stopped, in a fold of the hills on the edge of
+the trees, where the blackness lay solid, and we slid down. One boy
+tied the horses together and sat down patiently to await our return
+next morning. The other snuffed the candle in his paper lantern and
+prepared to lead the way. By this time it was raining hard, in distinct
+material drops, which splashed sharply on face and hands, and it was
+pitch dark. The boy, lantern in hand, went first, and all the light of
+the lantern so carefully trimmed was cut off from us by his stout round
+body. We knew by the crunch there were cinders under foot, by the cold
+wet dabs that ghost-like pressed our hands that there were bushes, and
+that we climbed.
+
+From time to time the boy would sway his lantern to one side or the
+other, and stunted shrubs like London laurel trees would start into
+being, and disappear. With each swing of the lantern the stunted shrubs
+grew scarcer and more stunted, till they dwindled to bushes, to mere
+green weeds like dandelions, to nothingness. Then the light fell on
+cinder, piled up, half-burnt cinder with ends of broken brickbats,
+and all the rubbish of a dust-heap. And at each step the wind came up
+and up; colder, stronger, wetter it tore down the bare steep slopes
+driving us backwards. Then we would sit down upon the cinders, our
+backs to the mountain, our feet on the brickbats, and pant. It was
+distinctly exhausting. Each footstep was a launch into the unknown,
+and a searching for a foothold, each pause an adding to the weight of
+cinders that drifted down boots and clothing. And it rained with fierce
+splashes when the wind blew, with dull persistency when it died away,
+but still unceasingly. And that sense of an unseen, unknown force,
+paralysing all things, grew with each footstep. The chill of a dumb
+terror lay upon the world, and the utter desolation struck colder than
+the wind.
+
+We rested again while the icy wind rushed screeching through the
+cinders; and, as it died away, the chirp of a Japanese grasshopper came
+into the stillness. We were far above the weeds now, in the region of
+perpetual cinder, and still that grasshopper chirped weakly. But the
+spell was too real, the terror too deathly; the unseen, unknown force
+took a step nearer in the darkness, and the weak wee chirp seemed only
+the voice of the horror, the breath of the dumbness giving it life.
+
+The cinders grew looser and looser as we climbed, more difficult to
+tread, and the stagnant silence was filled and filled with sulphur.
+It did not come in breaths or gusts, or driving before the wind, it
+was there in the silence, part of it, and it wrapped us round. If dead
+silence can grow more deathly, then did that stillness die again. The
+dumb terror tightened on the world, and the unknown force came nearer.
+
+From far below the sound of pouring heavy stones drove up and up. The
+mountain rumbled in its depths, rumbled and was still. The presence of
+that unseen force was manifest. Before it terror crouched still as a
+bird beneath the swooping shadow of the hawk.
+
+We climbed up heavily, up through the thick sulphur and the loose
+steep cinders, up till we turned, and the full force of the wind came
+sweeping round the side of the mountain. We were walking on the edge,
+the real edge over which you could fall, and it was all of lava, sticky
+as clay and crossed with deep black cracks that had no bottom. The wind
+swept down here undisturbed, the gusts of rain broke sharply on the
+paper lantern as it swayed from side to side to peer out a way. The
+sticky lava softened rapidly until it sucked around our feet, drawing
+them down. Then a long fierce gust blew out the lantern and we stood
+still.
+
+“Honourably please stand very still,” called the boy quickly.
+
+And we stayed dead still.
+
+The gust of wind rushed by us, rushed on. Then another blew till we
+cowered on the sinking lava. It was so long in passing that the moments
+seemed as hours. We stood like statues. Insidiously the lava crept
+above our feet, crept stealthily, and motionless we waited.
+
+The gust died down but the wind still blew, still blew. A light
+quivered for a moment in the darkness and went out. The boy had lit
+a match. He struck another. It flickered in little yellow leaps that
+showed the lantern and his face and went abruptly out. Again the tiny
+mandorla of light shot up, the boy was holding the lantern in his hand
+all ready. We could see the flame double as the candle caught, then
+both went swiftly out, for again the wind came rushing down. It blew
+and blew. Then it blew so fiercely that to blow again it stopped to
+take its breath. Quickly in the second’s pause the match flared up, the
+lantern lit, and we could move.
+
+As we drew out our feet the wicked sticking lava sucked, and the boy
+held the lantern low to peer out the cracks. Then he turned sharply to
+the left, and the wind was gone.
+
+We stood in a narrow roofless cave whose sides were overhanging rock,
+whose floor was lava ash, wet with big rain pools. This was the old
+crater. Asama has three craters, and two are at present in disuse. We
+were sheltering in one of these. It was a still haven of refuge after
+the fury of the wind outside, and a sure. There were no cracks, no
+sticky sucking lava here. With relief as from a heavy burden we sat
+down upon the wet ash to rest and eat, the lantern in our midst.
+
+It was now 3 o’clock. Since midnight we had been climbing, our clothes
+were soaked and heavy with rain and cinders, and we were very tired.
+The boy prosaically unpacked the hamper, and by the flickering light
+he set out plates and food. But before we could take one mouthful, the
+wind rushed down the roofless cave, upset the hamper, swept the lantern
+along the ash before it, tore like a whirlwind from end to end, and
+left us in an unearthly livid darkness that lighted nothing.
+
+For a moment we all stayed numbed, then the boy sought the remnants of
+his lantern and we the remnants of our meal. They were both embedded in
+thick lava dust.
+
+We could not go on up the crater now, for every minute the wind blew
+fiercer, and the paper lantern was torn in several places. We must wait
+for the dawn to show us the way. So we huddled under the shelter of the
+overhanging rock and waited.
+
+The livid darkness that lay upon the mountain grew more livid and less
+dark to our watching eyes, till we could distinguish the faint outlines
+of things, though not the things themselves. It was, oh! so cold, and
+that sense of stagnant terror, dispersed for a little by the wind and
+the food, crept back and back, intenser, dumber than before.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then the mountain rumbled in its depths, and the sound of pouring
+heavy stones came up again. This time it did not die away, it stopped
+abruptly, as though by force of will. And we waited.
+
+It was so cold that I could sit still no longer, and, wrapping my cloak
+around me, tired as I was, walked up and down, up and down.
+
+The overhanging rocks, whose outlines showed so ghostly against the
+livid darkness, rose high above our heads. From time to time the
+sulphur thickened in the air, making us cough.
+
+And the deathness of that silence, the dumb horror of that stillness
+spread and spread and spread. It was all afraid.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The boy, curled under his rock, slept peacefully. We walked and waited.
+
+Then, in an instant, two great tongues of flame shot into the darkness,
+leapt high toward the sky, and two reports, as of the heaviest thunder,
+shook the mountain. The boy, awakened, jumped up quickly, looked at
+the flames as they sprang into the darkness, and the thunder of the
+second report shook the ground beneath his feet, turned to speak, when
+a sudden sharp clatter came like a hiss past all our ears, calling
+“Stones, stones,” he threw himself flat on his face and rolled right
+under the rock.
+
+We, too, rushed to the overhanging rocks and crouched down quickly, and
+the sharp clatter of stone on stone went on all around us.
+
+Asama had rumbled to some purpose, and she was resting.
+
+Then the utter silence, the dead, dumb horror came back, came back
+again. Fear breathed beside us in the darkness.
+
+Slowly the little stars above the rocks dropped out of the sky, the
+livid darkness changed to livid light, and it was dawn, a cold, grey
+dawn, but little lighter than the night had been. Still we could see,
+see the lava and the ash, so, rolling out from under our rock, we shook
+ourselves together, chattering with cold.
+
+The ground at our feet was sprinkled with pinky-grey stones, daubed
+with bright yellow sulphur, and glowing hot. They were as large as
+a clenched fist, with edges sharp and jagged. We stooped to pick up
+one--the least hot--and carry it wrapt in handkerchiefs, which it
+burnt, and mackintoshes which it singed, back to Karuizawa.
+
+The boy looked at the stones, looked at us, looked towards the crater,
+and asked with many warnings if we were to go on. We, too, looked at
+the stones, and thoughtfully towards the crater, and, as we looked, the
+mountain rumbled slowly in its depths.
+
+Seizing the basket, the boy fled, our one and only guide. We followed
+him, over the cracks and the spongy soft lava, too occupied with
+wondering how we had ever passed over it safely the night before to be
+afraid now--too busy, too, watching the boy fleeing in front of us,
+too occupied marking his path to think even of eruptions. And somehow
+we got over safely, back on to the solid cinder slope of Asama again,
+the slope that went down straight as a shoot, and fell away as abruptly
+on each side as a bridge. It was ground, and after the cracks and the
+sucking lava, solid, though the cinders did shift beneath our feet.
+We had leisure to look round us, and found the mountain wrapped in a
+thick white mist. By this time the boy had disappeared entirely, but we
+did not trouble now. There seemed no choice of paths down. Our cinder
+bridge went on, sloping steeply downwards into the hidden world below,
+and we followed it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A little way below, the mist sank suddenly beneath our feet, and we
+were walking in the yellow sunlight--walking down a cinder slope that
+shone jet-black against a pale blue sky, while all around and all
+beneath, and surging up against the cinder slope, floated a wild wide
+sea of dead white clouds--a dead, still sea, with its waves stiffened
+into frozen snow. Tossing, it lay beneath the clear blue sky, and
+the pale sun glinted on its snow-white crests, glinted on the still
+gigantic billows that stretched from cinder pathway to the far blue
+sky. It lay a silent sea of milk-white frozen waves that was such stuff
+as dreams are made of.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And we went on, down. As the gods of old along a sloping bridge that
+crossed the clouds and stretched from the blue heaven to the hidden
+earth beneath, like Izanagi and Izanami, as they crossed the rainbow
+bridge from the High Plain of Heaven and stirred the floating brine
+with their jewelled spear--stirred till it went “_koro, koro_”--till it
+went “curdle, curdle,” as the old chronicle says, and the drops that
+dripping fell from the celestial spear piled up into the firstborn of
+the islands of Japan.
+
+A sudden peal of echoing thunder shook our cinder bridge, and we turned
+abruptly. Somewhere on the other side of the topmost edge of cinder
+rose up a huge column of thick smoke. The wickedest dead-white smoke,
+which, slowly curling over at the tips like ostrich feathers, showed
+shadows of deep mauve and dull blue-purple, while from below the heavy
+pouring of great stones drove up and up. Asama rumbled, rumbled in her
+depths. Half an hour sooner we should have been up there still. Had we
+gone on to the crater we should have been on the very edge. The memory
+of the sharp-edged clattering stones, red-hot and big as fists, came
+back to us. We looked at one another silently, and went on, downwards.
+
+Slowly the gigantic plumes of thick curdled smoke drifted up into the
+blue, and they were very beautiful. It was as though Asama wore a
+sweeping white _panache_ in her coal-black helmet. But the thundering
+roar of the eruption had torn our sea of frozen snow, to pieces. The
+blank white mist shut swiftly down, and hid the mountain and the smoke,
+the cinders and the sky; only the wide black bridge was left sloping
+straight downwards.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We reached our horses drenched, to sit on high-peaked saddles and
+journey back through dank dripping trees, over rutty roads, across
+thick green commons heavy with mist, back cold, wet and hungry to
+Karuizawa again.
+
+But we kept our stone, and though we had not seen into the crater,
+we had perhaps come nearer to that mysterious force, itself unseen,
+unknown, which dwells beneath the lava and the ash, and terrorises
+life.
+
+
+
+
+                                  VI
+
+                               CAMELLIAS
+
+
+Blue bay below as far as eye can reach. Blue sky above, blue to the
+edge of the horizon. And in between a steep cliff of green: dark fir,
+pale bamboo, and that impenetrable undergrowth for which alone a
+botanist has a name--or names.
+
+The time of the plum blossom has been, is gone, and the world is
+drowsing in the dream of summer. Up here in the green the quick sappy
+life is stirring, I can hear it plainly; for in all the world there is
+no other sound.
+
+The trodden green path runs up, from blue to blue. Midway between the
+two I stop. And the green world closes in around me, shutting out the
+blue I came from and the blue to which I go.
+
+The tall dark firs sway slowly. The pale bamboos wave slim fingers,
+green as March lime leaves in the sun, their golden stems are elusive
+and bewitching, sunned dryads of the East.
+
+The green world has me in its hold. I forget the steep path to the blue
+above. It is warm and still, and the bamboos beckon as they sway.
+
+How green it is! All the greens a painter ever dreamt of ... and the
+graceful bamboos beckon Eastern Vivians to bewitch.
+
+I stay to look and look--never trees so graceful nor the green world
+so fair. A step. I have left the pathway,--and then--I stop. Beyond the
+pale bamboos and above them, its dark green branches rising upwards to
+the blue, is a camellia tree. Each glossy handful of leaves holds a
+single blood-red flower. And the tree stands there beyond, above the
+swaying, beckoning bamboos, stern, severe.
+
+“And the Wages of Sin is Death.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I turn back to the path. The blue below spreads out as far as eye can
+reach, the blue above lies shining at the end of the pathway. The green
+world between is still.
+
+But the path is very steep.
+
+
+
+
+                                 VII
+
+                                 RAIN
+
+
+The world is wet as when first parted from the waters; and the
+firmament above, uncertain in its new position, seems slipping bodily
+down to join the waters below. The sound of falling rain, unformed,
+continuous, seems to have come from the time before Time was; while
+the tiny squelch of liquid mud oozing up between the bare toes of the
+_kurumaya_ alone marks the present.
+
+It is dark. The paper lantern, swinging at the end of the shaft, lights
+up the pools of the roadway with a transient gleam. For the rest, alone
+in my miniature hansom, with the apron up to my eyes, and the roof down
+to my eyebrows, the world, with the rushing swish of falling rain,
+seems dissolving slowly into the waters, and the history of creation
+marching backwards.
+
+A splash of wheels behind me, and the black mushroom hat of my
+_kurumaya_ bobs up above the apron, for the hill is steep. A shout, and
+the _’ricksha_ behind me stops. My _kurumaya_ stands still, holding
+the thin lacquered shafts in his hands and shouts back. Then he drags
+me to the roadside, and, putting the shafts on the ground, steps over
+them and disappears with his lantern. Balancing in my _kuruma_ like the
+monks on the miserere seats I am left all alone.
+
+What is the matter?
+
+A splash of wheels, the heavy panting of two men. They are pulling
+the other _kuruma_ up the steep hill, and will come back for me. So I
+wait, rigid; for the hill is steep, the mud slippery and the angle of
+the seat precarious. I strain my eyes to see--a corner of muddy road,
+half the blurred outline of a hedge. And not all the light in all the
+world could show me more, for the roof above my head is as a hand on my
+eyelids pressing them downwards.
+
+The wheels have splashed their way up the hill, and I can hear them no
+longer. Only the sound of the falling rain, driven momentarily away by
+the sharper splash of the moving wheels, comes back, slowly, steadily,
+irresistibly, submerging the world and me.
+
+I am all alone, a stranger in a strange land, behind me an unknown
+road, in front--I strain my eyes to see. Even the hedge has grown
+unfamiliar. It is no hedge, nothing but impenetrable undergrowth. I am
+on the edge of a forest.
+
+And the road?
+
+For the first time I notice how strange even the mud of a road can be.
+This is trodden all over with the prints of naked human feet, and the
+endless knife cuts of the _gheta_.
+
+The loneliness is wrapping itself around me as a pall.
+
+The dull swish of the rushing raindrops goes on and on. How long have
+they left me in a dissolving world alone. No sound above, no sound
+below. And the rush of the falling rain is drumming in my ears.
+
+A hideous nightmare possesses me. Surely the trickling pools are
+carrying away the mud from under my wheels. I shall slip down, down
+into nothingness with the falling rain.
+
+I dare not move. My eyes are fixed on the narrow strip of muddy road in
+front of me. The shafts are surely slipping----
+
+Then the rush of the falling raindrops drowns the world.
+
+
+
+
+                                 VIII
+
+                            THE BLACK CANAL
+
+
+The handle of the Japanese guitar, from which Lake Biwa takes its name,
+is at Otsu, six miles from Kyoto and three hundred feet above it.
+Between stands all the thickness of Kyoto’s girdle of mountains. Built
+in the flat bottom of an immense bowl, dark green with pine-clad hills,
+Kyoto, the ancient capital, is still the artistic centre of Japan. It
+is a city of 350,000 inhabitants, and many manufactories, but with
+little water or water transit, while only six miles away, beyond the
+mountains and above the town, Lake Biwa stretches a long arm from the
+ports of the west coast towards the city.
+
+It was in 1890 that Tanabe Sakuro, piercing the heart of the mountains,
+brought the waters of Lake Biwa, running swiftly under the hills, into
+Kyoto. And the Black Canal begins at Otsu.
+
+Deep down in the last of the rampart of locks which shuts out the lake
+lies the long narrow _sampan_, a white gondola, carpeted and cushioned,
+a large torch flames on either side, and the boatman stands ready
+behind. We sit on the cushions on the carpet, for the canal is but
+just the height of a man, and but just the width of two _sampan_. The
+cement sides of the lock rise up like walls; in front is the black arch
+of a tunnel, cut like a tiny doorway in the base of the great green
+mountain. A moment, and we are inside, in the pitch blackness; rushing
+swiftly, silently along in the freshness of a subterranean night. The
+two huge torches that we carry show the darkness falling like a thick
+curtain before, behind us; and the silence is the silence of infinite
+ages asleep.
+
+The rhythm of the rushing water passes like a breath through the
+darkness, but the speed is unfelt. Move your hand beyond the side of
+the boat, and the contact of the wall will tear all the skin from the
+knuckles in one swift scrape. For the water rushes, rushes silent in
+the darkness, not a current but a force.
+
+Suddenly in the blackness there is a light; three nude figures poised,
+their muscles strained, human strength pitted against the water’s
+force. Their boat moves but slowly, we are by in a flash. The naked
+orange figures form but one picture, one posture against the blackness,
+a living red group from the black urns of Greece; seen, gone; and the
+darkness drops down in thick curtains all around.
+
+Swiftly the water rushes, silent, the rhythmic breathing of black
+night. The darkness deepens, deepens; then cracks. A thin, thin slit
+parts black from black, and slowly grows a narrow streak of faintest
+grey.
+
+It is light; light like the thinnest edge of a sword set in the
+far distance. But the crack broadens, widens, rounds, and grows by
+imperceptible degrees into an open archway, showing the bright water
+and the green hills beyond. And swiftly we rush towards the light,
+while the little picture no bigger than the reflection on a camera
+grows curves and outlines, swells here, retreats there, and passes from
+a flat reflection into a rounded reality.
+
+The tunnel itself is no longer black. The walls, the rounded roof, lie
+like shadows, deep brown, growing quickly greyer. And above, on either
+side, the bats are clinging thickly, in long rows.
+
+We shoot into the light and see that walls and boat are covered with
+a fluttering half-dead mass of ghost-grey moths. They coat the tunnel
+from wall to roof, they lie in struggling heaps on boat and carpet, our
+clothes are full of them.
+
+With one last swift glide we are out of the grey shadow, out under the
+blue sky. The green hills rise on either side, the water dimples in the
+sun. Slowly the grey moths flutter back to the darkness. For through
+the heart of the mountain Lake Biwa has come to Kyoto.
+
+
+
+
+                                  IX
+
+                            THE INLAND SEA
+
+
+The little steamer lay tilted up against the end of the pier, for all
+the waters of the ocean were rushing madly through the Straits of
+Shimonoseki into the Inland Sea. The waters lay encircled as a lake,
+for the space between the inner and the outer strait is narrow, but
+they ran swift as a mountain river. The square-sailed junks, all sails
+set, were racing down the stream in the very eye of the wind, while
+those coming up with a strong breeze behind them hardly seemed to stir.
+And the little steamer at the end of the pier tilted herself up higher
+and higher.
+
+She was a foreign-built boat, though only about the size of a launch,
+but she looked like a Moorish house afloat, for all the boat was
+cabin, and all the deck was roof, whitewashed, ribbed roof, with a
+striped awning. As we left the pier and struck the full force of the
+current, the striped awning and the uneven deck dipped down and down
+until the Moorish roof turned Gothic. We were in the full force of the
+current now, and tearing down the stream with, as somebody said, “all
+our engines going the wrong way.” Up the side of the boat the water
+climbed, pulling it down with long strong hands, until the flat deck
+was turned to a gable roof.
+
+For five breathless minutes we balanced between air and water, and then
+we were through the inner strait which turns the waters of the Inland
+Sea between Moji and Shimonoseki into one big lake, and the coast of
+the South Island began to fall away. The tide was running less swiftly
+now, the ridge of our gable roof sank slowly into the water, and the
+little steamer floated a white, flat-roofed, Moorish house once more.
+
+“There is nothing,” said the steward, “for the _Ijin San_ to eat.”
+
+He had been standing behind us, balancing himself on the steep gable
+roof, for some while, but the current and the laws of gravitation had
+been absorbing all our attention, and like a true Japanese he was much
+too polite to interrupt.
+
+“There is nothing, nothing,” said he, “to eat.”
+
+For the rare missionary, or the rarer tourist, who patronises the
+coasting steamer of the Inland Sea comes provided as for an Arctic
+expedition.
+
+“But we shall eat Japanese food,” we explained.
+
+He bowed, a low, polite bow, but I do not think he believed us. Then he
+went away, and returned bearing foreign cups with saucers, full of a
+hot brown liquor called, he told us triumphantly, “coffee.” It was of
+the kind bought ready mixed in cakes, and made with hot water. We were
+pleased to know it _was_ coffee, and the attention touched us, still,
+Japanese tea would have tasted better. We thought the pinky-brown soup
+flavoured with orange peel, the fried fish with chestnut preserve, the
+custard stuffed with shrimps, and the bowls of rice eaten with salted
+plums and spiced roots off which we dined infinitely preferable; and
+the steward who fanned us with one hand, and served us with the other,
+saw that there was “something for us to eat.”
+
+It was eight o’clock when we climbed the steep ladder which led to our
+Moorish roof, eight o’clock on a July evening, and already the tall,
+deep-dented mountains of Kyushu lay dark and indistinct. They lay cut
+sharp against a twilight sky as though they had no thickness. And
+slowly the coast-line fell away grey into the sea. Kyushu was dying as
+the ship and sun moved on, Shikoku was but a blur upon the ocean, and
+between them the open sea made a pathway to the sky, all silver-grey
+and trembling, a road of light to that sunken light beyond.
+
+The sun had set, and the fleeting twilight of the East was night
+already. Japan’s green hills were turning grey. Night held sky and
+islands fast, but the pathway shone and trembled until it died in the
+last long streaks of light on the edge of the horizon. Night was come.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From Kobé to Shimonoseki stretch the two hundred and forty miles of
+the Inland Sea; and in it are gathered together most of the islands
+of Japan. Continuous as a mainland the coast of the big island runs
+down, while on the other side Kyushu and Shikoku with ancient Awaji,
+the firstborn of the Gods, dip their high green mountains in the sea;
+between, in lines and clusters, lie thousands upon thousands of baby
+islands; some large enough to hold a village, others too small for a
+single house; some green with trees and rice-fields, others a mere
+speck of rock reaching up out of the water. From morning until night
+we sat under the striped awning of our roof top, and watched as they
+glided past, green islands on the blue water; and always on our left
+hand the tall, deep-dented mountains of the mainland ran on and on.
+
+In the morning sunlight Miyajima’s granite _torī_ stood knee-deep in
+the pale blue waves. Its temple roofs were brown against the dark,
+green pines, and the sacred island, where neither Birth nor Death may
+come, slept blue-black with shadows in the dawn.
+
+And still they glided by, the green islands on the blue water. The sun
+travelled up the sky; it grew hot--hotter.
+
+At mid-day we had reached the narrow channel, where mainland and island
+are so close that the sea is but a canal between the houses; and the
+children of the two villages throw stones across the stream. Here, at
+the end of the passage, a great stone lantern stands deep in the idle
+water. Then, abruptly, as we turned, the canal was gone; and the wide,
+blue sea lay shimmering among the green islands in the summer sun.
+
+Under the striped awning of our roof-top it was cool, but outside the
+sun was smiting sea and land, until sea and islands quivered, quivered,
+losing themselves, colour and outline, in one mist of shimmering,
+shadowy blue. And the ship and the sun travelled on.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Five sturdy naval cadets shared our luncheon with us, and knew the
+number and the tonnage of England’s smallest gunboats, and for all
+their blue uniform and “foreign” dirk, their _Sayonara_ as they left us
+were courteous with an old-time courtesy.
+
+And the sun grew hot and hotter. The light like a mist wrapt sea and
+islands round. The continuous quivering hurt. On the other side the
+deep-dented mountains of the mainland, grown bare and scraped now,
+caught the sunshine on their rocky patches, and sent it in glittering
+arrows of light across the still air. And yet in the brown villages,
+at the mountains’ feet, the blue-tuniced, brown-legged peasants were
+working in the sun; and at each stopping-place the bareheaded men and
+women came off in boats to offer their fruit and _saké_ in long-handled
+fishing-nets, scent-bottles full of _saké_ flavoured with plum-blossom,
+_saké_ flavoured with chrysanthemum or peach-blossom, white rice,
+“woman’s” _saké_, _saké_ to ward off old age, or all and any of the
+nine different kinds of _saké_ for which Tomotsu is famous, and all in
+scent-bottles, artistically tied up and labelled, and costing, bottle
+and all, _is-sen_. One old lady was highly indignant when after much
+excitement we had contrived to haul up in the fishing-net the exact
+scent-bottle we coveted, and had sent her down one sen in return,
+for the patois of the district makes _is-sen_ of _jis-sen_ (10 sen =
+2½_d._), to the unaccustomed ear.
+
+And the ship and the sun travelled on.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As the shadows grew the quivering ceased, the light no longer like
+a veil of darkness hid the land and sea. The islands grew a gradual
+green, as they drowsed on the clear blue water. And slowly the still
+sea opened wider; the islands passed more slowly until they ceased to
+pass at all; and then on the blue water there grew that indefinite look
+of ocean space. The Inland Sea was ending. Away on the still sweep of
+waters lay Awaji, the First-born of the Gods, the Eden of Japan.
+
+“And when,” says the legend, “the first man and the first woman met
+after they had journeyed round a pillar set upon the land the woman
+cried, ‘How joyful a thing it is to meet a lovely man!’ Whereupon the
+man, displeased that language had been invented by a woman, required
+the circuit to be made again, that he might speak first. So again
+they journeyed round the pillar, and again they met, and loudly the
+man cried out, ‘How joyful a thing it is to meet a lovely woman!’ And
+thus,” says the chronicle, “was Speech invented, and the Art of Love
+and the human race begun.”
+
+Dim grey on a grey sea lay Awaji; before us stretched the broad sweep
+of the landless ocean; the Inland Sea, dreaming among its islands, lay
+behind.
+
+
+
+
+                         THE LAND OF THE GODS
+
+       “That which I saw seemed to me a smile of the Universe.”
+                                         “Paradiso,” canto xxvii.
+
+
+
+
+                                   I
+
+                           ACROSS THE LAGOON
+
+
+We sat still on the deck, with our backs propped against portions of
+the ship’s cargo, and watched.
+
+It was necessary to sit still, for a rise of only a few inches would
+have sent the awning over our heads into the blue waters of the lagoon;
+and each newcomer, as he stepped from the wharf on to this Kensington
+Garden craft, doubled himself in two and stayed so. First-class
+passengers lay flat, for a square hole in the side of the boat opened
+into a three-feet-high saloon elegantly carpeted; we had matting. When
+the first half of the passenger was inside, a big-headed boy removed
+his _gheta_ and piled them up on the deck, reshoeing him in the same
+way when he emerged. The difficulty of extracting foreign boots in this
+manner would alone have deterred us from using our first-class tickets;
+and then the deck passengers under the awning had at least six inches
+more room, besides ventilation. So we sat on the matting and watched.
+
+Anything out of a toy-shop so tiny as this absurd little steamer was
+never seen. She might with generosity have been fifteen feet long; yet
+she carried some twenty passengers besides cargo down the lagoon and up
+the river, from Matsué to Shobara, with safety and Oriental speed; and
+did it twice a day too.
+
+The carpeted saloon was reasonably filled with half a dozen passengers;
+the deck overflowed with the rest. The brown-skinned, bullet-headed,
+ugly, good-natured Japanese peasant, sitting on his heels with his dark
+blue _kimono_ tucked up above his brown legs, and his fan in his hand;
+or his little wife, wrinkled and meek, her white cotton towel, with
+its bamboo design in blue, folded round her head and tucked up under
+her hair behind in something between a night-cap and a sun-bonnet;
+quiet and sweet, but never abject, and always respected. Here and
+there a shopkeeper or a clerk, or some one from the town in a grey
+_kimono_, with a face pale yellow against the other’s brown. We all sat
+bare-footed on the matting to keep it clean, with our _gheta_ in our
+hands, fanning ourselves with rice-paper fans decorated with storks
+flying across the moon, or sprays of plum-blossom or pine-trees, each
+man of us showing his well-turned leg and thigh, with all the muscles
+brought into strong relief by the weight of the body on the toes. All
+polite, all amused, all conversational.
+
+After a great deal of snorting on the part of our very small steamer,
+we casually left the wharf and shot into the lagoon. Matsué, hidden by
+the sunlight, disappeared; and even the wide sweep of waters wavered
+indistinct beneath the hard glitter of the morning light. It was not
+yet nine o’clock, and already the distant blue shore was blurred
+with the shimmering heat, and the near green one fitful with the
+scissor-grinding of the _semmi_. The heat was dropping down on the
+world with the swiftness of a tropical night and the glitter of it hurt.
+
+Away over the surface of the waters a red-brown head floated, lazy,
+the nimbus of straw hat against the light glowing yellow as a halo.
+Slowly, idly, the head moved over the water, suspended between blue and
+blue. Too hot to doubt or question or deny, I accepted the head and
+shut my eyes, only to find on opening them again two, three, a dozen
+heads strolling slowly over the lagoon.
+
+“Honourably please to understand, dredging for mussels,” said a voice
+at my elbow. And the passengers repeated the information in a sort of
+Greek chorus with many bows.
+
+Matsué’s only representative of the vast world of the _Ijin San_
+is one missionary; but these peasants, with the refinement of true
+breeding, accepted our outlandish dress and faces, our boots on their
+matting too, without a stare of curiosity, although when our attention
+was apparently absorbed elsewhere, the whiteness of our skins, the
+aristocratic bridge of our noses (it is only the _noblesse_ in Japan,
+and not all of them, who possess an aquiline nose), were commented on
+with interest and admiration.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The near green shore ran in and out, and in and out, wooded thick with
+the slim green fingers of the bamboo, until it opened into a tiny green
+bay, with a thin bamboo landing-stage running out into the silent
+water. Here we stopped with such an amount of “ay-aying” on the part
+of the captain--a short man in a grey _kimono_, who sat in a hole in
+the deck the other side of the funnel reading Chinese poetry--and the
+crew, a tall youth in “foreign” trousers, who greased wheels, that we
+might have been an Atlantic liner approaching an unknown shore. There
+were no passengers for the invisible village behind the landing-stage
+but the captain, who climbed over the side of the boat up on to the
+landing-stage, and disappeared.
+
+By-and-by from out of the green there came a charming little figure in
+a sea-blue _kimono_, lined with lacquer-red, followed by a maid bearing
+neatly matted parcels. The crew wiped its hands and moved forward,
+while the sea-blue _kimono_, kneeling on the landing-stage, handed down
+the parcels on to the boat for safe carriage to Shobara. They seemed
+to require quantities of explanation those parcels, accompanied by
+irrepressible giggles, principal giggles on the part of the mistress,
+and secondary giggles on the part of the maid; while the crew listened,
+replied, grew eloquent. It was one of the most effective flirtations
+I ever saw, but alas! conducted in that Izumo dialect so hard for the
+Tokyo-taught foreigner to understand. And it went on like the hum of
+the _semmi_, while the water, the world, and the boat drowsed in the
+heat.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Suddenly, from out of the nowhere, appeared our captain, who swung
+himself down from the landing-stage on to the boat as imperturbably as
+a stone Buddha. The sea-blue _kimono_, still on its knees at the edge
+of the water, swayed in one last enchanting giggle that showed all
+the lacquer-red linings in a quiver of flame, while the supplementary
+giggles of the stout little maid followed us regretfully out of the bay.
+
+With more “ay-aying” we shot back into the hard glitter of the lagoon.
+The captain retired to his hole and his Chinese poetry, the crew had
+completely disappeared, but the big-headed boy, emerging from some
+unknown region behind the captain, carried out a _hibachi_ and a
+kettle. He set the kettle on the brass tripod over the _hibachi_ and
+blew up the charcoal fire with a large fan; and we all watched him
+with interest as he made Japanese tea in a green china teapot, rather
+larger than the kettle, with a black handle and with dividing lines of
+black separating the green into leaf-like petals. At this we all sat
+up, thirstier with anticipation, and the little china bowls filled from
+the green kettle-teapot vanished from the tray. Then the big-headed boy
+handed round _manju_ cakes (like boiled chestnuts in a white coat of
+sweet rice-paste), and collected payment, one _sen_ (a farthing). We
+all promptly demanded more tea, and the little bowls were filled and
+refilled until the green kettle-teapot ran dry; and we all subsided
+again. Only the _tink, tink_, of the metal pipes, knocking out the
+glowing wad of tobacco on to the deck in order to light a fresh pipeful
+from the burning remains of the old one, broke the drowsy silence.
+Three little whiffs and the acorn bowl of a Japanese pipe is empty, so
+the _tink, tink_, of the metal on the deck was rhythmic as the _vee-um_
+of the _semmi_. They were all smoking, men and women, and the scent of
+the bright brown tobacco, fine-cut as hair, lay under the awning.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The near green shore ran in and out, and in and out, until all the wide
+sheet of glittering light, spread over the blue waters, lay behind
+us; in front a bright green bank of rushes hemmed in the light. The
+lagoon was ended, and still we went on, seemingly with the intention
+of stranding ourselves among the bulrushes. But the bulrushes stood
+back as we came on, and ranging themselves on either hand, left a water
+pathway down which we went, until the bank of rushes following the
+lagoon lay far behind, and we found ourselves in a narrow river that
+seemed half natural stream and half artificial canal.
+
+Our unnautical captain, who, ever since we had entered the rushes,
+had been intoning directions to the invisible crew as though he were
+reading poetry aloud, got up out of his hole. The _tink, tink_, of
+the metal pipes on the wooden deck died gradually away as each smoker
+knocked out his last wad of tobacco and put away his pipe. Then with a
+sudden and terrific snort the absurd little steamer, an end in either
+bank, stood still. The big-headed boy, hanging over the side of the
+boat, kicked violently with his heels, while the unexpected apparition
+of the crew’s head rose up at our feet. The head took a look round
+and sank again, and the engines rattled. Still with an end in either
+bank, and with the big-headed boy clasping the gunwale in his arms, we
+proceeded to turn slowly round, and then, assisted by several ropes and
+several haulers, to back majestically into the main street of Shobara.
+
+Our journey was ended. The big-headed boy, leaving the gunwale, rushed
+to reshoe the first-class passengers as they wriggled from the saloon
+on to the roadway. The bullet-headed peasants and their little brown
+wives bowing low bows to each other, the captain and to the _Ijin
+San_, took up their bundles and trudged off, while we, like a Royal
+arrival, were received by the authorities of Shobara, in the person of
+a fierce little policeman in a new white suit, and duly escorted the
+three-and-a-half paces from the ship’s side to the tea-house door in a
+procession, the people lining up the way.
+
+And the last we saw of that absurd little steamer, as we turned into
+the tea-house, was a glimpse of the crew looking down the funnel, while
+the big-headed boy, standing amidships, handed out the cargo to its
+owners on either bank.
+
+
+
+
+                                  II
+
+                               TO KIZUKI
+
+
+The green earth lay burning in the sun, wrapt round and round with
+heat. Between the tall blue lines of hills it stretched, the flat green
+floor of a deep blue cavern, whose roof-top was the sky. And through
+the green the long white road ran out of sight. The only living thing
+that moved was the running _kurumaya_, all else lay sleeping in the
+bright night-time of heat, a heavy drugged sleep that neither rested
+nor refreshed.
+
+Inert the green earth stretched between the blue hills, weighed down
+with heat; a palpable heat through which we moved as a fish moves
+through water; a visible heat which was lying there heavy on the land,
+floating round the blue hills, quivering against the white sky, humming
+in the still air, rolling in great drops down the bronzed back of the
+_kurumaya_, drowsing me to sleep as with the soft waving of a heated
+fan, a heavy, encompassing heat that stunned.
+
+And always the white road ran on through the green earth, and the long,
+straight lines of hills on either side shut off the sky.
+
+Between the fields of rice, here and there among the green, a
+brown-thatched house like an open shed rose up, its roof supported on
+the square pillars of the four corner posts, its walls rolled out of
+sight. And on the matted floor the women and children lay sleeping,
+their necks supported on a narrow stool; the men stretched on their
+backs, or lying prone, their heads between their arms.
+
+Not a living thing in house or field, in land or road, was moving save
+the running _kurumaya_. Heat had slain the world and life itself was
+senseless.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On either side the straight blue hills stretched out of sight, the
+green earth lay like a narrow passage-way between; and on and on we
+ran, until the green floor contracted, and the white road became a
+broad still street, where brown houses shut out the hills.
+
+A rapid spurt through the empty village, for a _kurumaya_ never stops
+except at the top of his speed, and we arrive at the tea-house. Dazed,
+weary, and stiff with two hours of continuous running, we struggle from
+under the shawls and wraps that keep out the sun, and sink on to the
+matting; while the crowd which has grown no man knoweth how, from out
+of an empty village, stands silently, staring. With equal suddenness
+a small policeman starts up in front. He inquires our names, ages,
+residence and destination; orders back the crowd with one wave of his
+arm, commands that we be taken into an inner apartment, remote from
+public gaze; and, in short, declares we may repose on him.
+
+We are taken into an inner apartment, a room that is almost cool, while
+the crowd drifts patiently round the house trying to look in. One
+little wide-eyed _nēsan_ brings us tea, and then house and world sink
+back into slumber again.
+
+The _nēsan_, reluctant, but at last dismissed, lies down on the
+matting, beyond the courtyard, and falls asleep. Her neck rests on a
+narrow wooden pillow that has the curves of a _torī_; she lies like a
+long-stalked flower on the ground, rigid, quite graceful. Every fold of
+her _kimono_, every twist of her hair, is in place. She is fast asleep,
+unconscious, perfectly tidy, with a neatness that has passed into its
+essence, grace, and is natural as the feathers to a bird.
+
+We cannot sleep, the mere transition from the greater heat outside
+to the cooler heat of this open matted space makes us wakeful. It is
+cooler here actually, in degree, and imaginatively, from the green
+palms of the baby garden. The garden of a doll’s house, which any
+moderate-sized bath-towel would have roofed, yet with a forest of dwarf
+palm-trees in one corner, a winding pool in another, the cool grey
+outlines of a stone lantern to hold the eyes, and a sense of still
+greenness, of limpid freshness, which not rivers of water or forests of
+giant trees could more distinctly convey. To look at that garden was to
+take a mental bath and drown out the sense of heat. But the heat itself
+remained, intense and stagnant, a heavy presence in the house that
+permeated all things.
+
+Out in the courtyard one shaft of burning light shone down, turning the
+cotton towel on its bamboo line to a white-hot banner, the polished
+passage to a molten pool, while the water in the big stone font was
+warm as condensed steam. Like the flaming sword of the Archangel
+Michael, the shaft of burning light cut the passage-way in two, and the
+sharp white-heat of it seemed to cut. It was absolutely still, only the
+heat moved awake in a house and a world asleep.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Very slowly the little _nēsan_ sat up; some one had called her. A
+moment, and she was on her feet, neat as a growing flower.
+
+“The _kurumaya_ awaits,” she said, kneeling on the matting, “when it
+honourably pleases the august ones to come.”
+
+Then she touched her forehead to the floor and waited for what it
+honourably pleased the august ones to do.
+
+They came, down the polished passage, under the flaming sword of
+light, out into the open space before the tea-house, where the little
+policeman waited to command them to be packed into their _kuruma_, to
+deliver stringent orders for their safe conduct to the _kurumaya_, to
+authoritatively bid them the politest of _sayonara_.
+
+The crowd had disappeared, harangued out of existence; the village
+street was empty as a desert, the houses dead; and then the steep line
+of blue hills grew up on either side, shutting in the sky, and the long
+white road stretched away through the green earth.
+
+Palpable, visible, the heat lay over the land, quivering against the
+white sky, floating round the blue hills, humming in the still air,
+drowsing me into a somnambulant life that was neither sleep nor waking.
+
+Between the green earth and the white sky the telegraph wires cut a
+bronze line against the quivering blue; and the rows of little birds,
+all sitting with their tails to the road, hung drowsily there, rows on
+rows of them. And still the long white road ran on and on.
+
+Beneath the short thick hair of the _kurumaya_ the heat gathered in
+wet patches on the white scalp, rolled in big drops over the black
+head, trickled down the bronze neck, and was wiped off with one rapid
+movement of the blue cotton towel, as the running _kurumaya_ sped
+swiftly on; gathered again, rolled again, trickled again, was wiped
+dry again; gathered, rolled, trickled, until the automatic movements,
+repeated and repeated, grew part of Time itself. They were Time.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then I awoke. It was as if some one had slid a thin lining of fresh
+air along the tops of the blue hills, beneath the burning sky. A thin,
+thin sheet of fresh air, but the green earth gave a great sigh, the
+_kurumaya_ a little shake, and I awoke.
+
+The peasants in their brown thatched houses, open as a shed, were
+stirring, the naked red figures in their white cloths were moving down
+the road.
+
+In the fields the long bamboo poles that shot up out of the green earth
+like masts were dipping up and down, drawing water for the thirsty rice.
+
+The little birds on the telegraph wires were chirping sleepily, flying
+off in twos and threes, and settling down again, audibly fussing over
+the laziness of their friends and relations.
+
+The bright night-time of heat was over and gone.
+
+I sat up in my _kuruma_ and looked. We were running through green
+rice-fields, under a blue sky. And it was a hot summer’s afternoon.
+
+
+
+
+                                  III
+
+                         IZUMO’S GREAT TEMPLE
+
+
+“So they made fast the temple pillars on the nethermost rock-bottom,
+and they made high the cross-beams to the plain of high heaven;” and
+the god Onamuji, the “Master of the Great Land,” King of Izumo, in
+accordance with his compact with high heaven, entered into that temple
+and dwelt there.
+
+So the province of Izumo and the kingdom of Western Japan passed under
+the rule of the great Sun-Goddess whose descendants endure to this day.
+But the Master of the Great Land, the god Onamuji, is worshipped from
+end to end of the Emperor’s dominions, and his temple and his priests
+are sacred as the mirror of the Sun-Goddess in their eyes.
+
+All through the year, the pilgrims in thousands journey into Izumo to
+remote Kizuki, whose name to their ears is still resonant with the
+beating (_tsuku_) of the pestles (_ki_) which made the foundations of
+that first great temple firm and everlasting, while in the month of
+October the immortal gods themselves, from every shrine throughout
+the land, come to visit Onamuji, and that desolate month known in
+Japan as _kami-na-zuki_ (month without gods) is called in Izumo alone
+_kami-ari-zuki_ (the month with gods).
+
+At the foot of the everlasting hills the temple stands, and the far-off
+ripple of the Western Sea, half a memory, half a dream, wanders through
+its sunlit courts, a sound to listening ears.
+
+The long dark avenue of twisted trees, so old that many are almost
+limbless, the three giant _torī_, hewn in solid granite, lie behind
+us; we have reached the white sunlight of the outer temple space, and
+the scattered buildings of the shrine are in front. Our landlord, in
+his Sunday-best _kimono_ of silver-grey, leads the way. He has walked,
+since we left the inn, exactly three paces behind us, while three paces
+behind him came our _kurumaya_. In Kizuki it has not been considered
+consonant with our dignity to allow us to move anywhere without them.
+
+Our landlord, with the profoundest bow, moves on in front. He has a
+letter to deliver on our behalf, so that when we reach the long, low
+building at the end of the first enclosure, an authoritative young
+priest in long white robes is there to greet us. He wears a wonderful
+head-dress of black lacquer, the model of a meat-cover, tied on under
+the chin, with two red cords in the manner of a doll’s bonnet; but his
+chin is human, not inflexible, so I watch to see the meat-cover tumble.
+It never does, not even when with a low bow he invites us up the steep
+polished steps into the room above. We take off our shoes and climb.
+
+The room is long and low, with a “foreign” table covered with a green
+baize cloth. There are bright blue velvet chairs, an inkstand, pens;
+just a second-hand committee-room greatly the worse for wear, which
+impresses our landlord, so that his strangled h’s of admiration sound
+like paroxysms of coughing. We sit on the velvet chairs and wait. Our
+landlord, the letter and the priest have disappeared into an inner
+apartment. And the sound of much discussion comes to our ears. “How
+far are we to be allowed to go?” And then the terms “learned _Ijin
+San_,” and “august sage” reach us. At last they are all agreed. The
+“learned _Ijin San_,” the “honourable teacher,” the “august sage” shall
+be permitted to enter the very Holy of Holies; but the “honourable
+interior,” being a woman, must not cross the sacred threshold. Then
+there is a long pause before the authoritative young priest comes out
+and explains the position to us. We bow the profoundest thanks and
+follow him down the steps, and the reason for the pause is evident. He
+has changed his clothes, and is now in the fullest and most resplendent
+of sacerdotal robes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Under the shadow of the gate of the _ita-gaki_, the second enclosing
+fence, stands the High Priest himself, whose fathers for two thousand
+years have led the temple rites. He is the eighty-second descendant of
+the mythic Susa-no-wo, and is still termed by many _Iki-gami_, which is
+the “Living God.” An old, old man, whose face is almost white, a mystic
+sacred face, quiet as the eternal smile of the Eternal Buddha. He wears
+a lacquered head-dress, the most imposing of meat-covers, and his robes
+are of white and purple adorned with gold.
+
+We pass within the _ita-gaki_, and the landlord, the _kurumaya_, the
+crowd of other worshippers are left behind. Before us rises the low
+fence of the “jewelled hedge,” which encloses the sacred shrine itself.
+Again before the gateway there is a pause. The minor priests, even
+our authoritative young friend, do not enter here. It is explained to
+us that the “honourable interior” must not pass within the temple.
+She is a woman, but it is permitted to her, as the wife of the most
+“honourable one,” to look into the shrine from a room above the
+gateway. The High Priest removes his sandals, we our shoes, and over
+the rounded, water-washed, grey pebbles, hot as burning plough-shares,
+we enter the holy court.
+
+A long, low wooden building is the temple, primæval in its form, the
+broad ends of its roof-tree sticking up like pointed anchors through
+the roof. Six feet around it on every side the pebbles stop, and the
+space is filled with the whitest, smoothest sand. All those who go up
+to the god leave the mark of their feet behind.
+
+Within the temple there is nothing; bare space, dim, obscure; but the
+High Priest, reverently kneeling on the matting, creates the god. And
+into that narrow empty space the shadow of the Eternal Presence comes.
+
+Slowly the splash of the breaking waves drifts into the stillness,
+faint as the whisper of God in the heart of man, a still, small voice.
+Over the temple there is peace, the peace of two thousand years,
+unbroken, sacred. And the dreamy ripple grows a sound in the silence.
+Faint, faint, faint, is it the song of the limitless sea, the voice of
+the peace and the stillness, or a broken murmur of the beyond that the
+listening pilgrim hears? Half a memory, half a dream, it dies at the
+gate of the shrine, where the stir of the world grows loud; yet the
+soul has heard, has believed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Out in the sunlit court beyond the “jewelled hedge” the little group of
+priests still wait. And as we come slowly over the hot round stones,
+our shoes once more upon our feet, they greet us with an added respect.
+Even the “honourable interior,” whose sacredness is but indirect,
+transmitted through a space of court and two open _shōji_, has become a
+personage.
+
+The old, old priest, with the face of a Chinese sage, goes on in front.
+We cross the second court obliquely over the stone-grey pebbles, each
+rounded with the rubbing of running water, and enter another building,
+the treasure-house of the temple. Here in a shaded upper chamber, where
+the white sunlight filters through the yellow matting, a long low shelf
+runs round, and on it lie the temple’s treasures--relics of dead heroes
+and of living legend. One by one the High Priest points them out, and
+in the thin frail voice of age tells their story: A _biwa_, a sword,
+some pieces of tattered brocade, the old, old relics of Old Japan.
+The tales are long, as the old man tells them with the slow-moving
+utterance of one who has had eighty years in which to speak. But there
+is a personal vibration in his voice that brings back the long two
+thousand years of service that he and his have given to the temple,
+recalls the eighty-two High Priests, his fathers, who join the living
+man before us to the god Susa-no-wo, from whom the Great Master,
+Onamuji himself, descended.
+
+All this time, the authoritative young priest has been respectfully
+but quite obviously waiting to show us something. At last he draws
+us across the room to where a life-sized plaster statue stands, the
+Sun-Goddess herself in the flowing robes of Old Japan, a figure full of
+majesty and power, with round her neck a string of those prehistoric
+jewels of which the _Kojiki_ is full, comma-shaped polished jewels
+of jade and crystal, threaded on a scarlet string. And in the loose
+sleeves of the plaster figure and about the folds at the neck are
+touches of brightest red. A modern plaster statue of a figure old to
+unbelief.
+
+And the young man tells the story. He is so eager, so proud to relate
+what has indeed become the great central fact of the story, that who or
+what the statue is, or how or why it came there we never hear; but--it
+had gained a prize at the Chicago Exhibition!
+
+And all the rest of the clergy intone a little chorus of triumph and
+delight. Even the High Priest himself seems pleased, and a faint smile
+passes over his face as he bids us examine the ticket.
+
+It is quite true. From the out-stretched wrist of the Sun-Goddess
+hangs a much-worn ticket, stating in printed Roman capitals that “This
+Exhibit has won a Prize at the World’s Fair of Chicago.” And the figure
+stands there, in the long low treasure-house of Izumo’s Great Temple,
+while the white sunlight, filtering through the yellow matting, falls
+on the white-robed priests who serve a temple worshipped through two
+thousand years, falls on the old High Priest with the mystic sacred
+face, whose fathers stretch back into the mists of Time, and falling,
+trembles on the faded ticket on the arm of the Sun-Goddess:
+
+
+                       WORLD’S FAIR, CHICAGO.
+
+                       This is to certify----
+
+“If the august sage will honourably please to descend.”
+
+And we descended.
+
+In the hot still court the High Priest takes his leave, with long
+polite phrases of strictest ceremony. The authoritative young priest
+who escorts us back through the _ita-gaki_ into the outer court is
+equally ceremonious, and our polite Japanese is heavily taxed to keep
+up with him. At the outer court he bids us _sayonara_, and our landlord
+and our _kurumaya_, who have been respectfully waiting, form into
+procession again. We have become great personages in their eyes, very
+great personages indeed; and the pilgrims, kneeling before the shrine
+in the outer court, look at us with reverence. We have entered the Holy
+of Holies, we have visited the god Onamuji in his shrine.
+
+It is with the lowest of bows that our landlord leads us out of the
+side of the temple court, westward, to where the tall dark trees of
+the mountain have grown down into the plain. Here, set in the silence
+of the cryptomerias at the foot of the everlasting hills, is the home
+of the High Priest. So still, so ordered, so spotless, the house and
+garden lie like a snowdrop in a forest. And the sound of the sea drifts
+in as we stand.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then for the last time we cross the courtyard where the pilgrims are
+praying in the sunshine, and the temple dancing girls, dim figures
+in the distance, glide round and round in the long slow circles of
+the sacred _kagura_. Court and temple are burning in the sunlight.
+Beyond the “hedge” and the “jewelled hedge” the great beam-ends of the
+roof-tree rise out through the temple’s thatch. Within the shrine hangs
+the mirror of the great Sun-Goddess. For the heart of man, says the
+Shintō faith, is good and pure. And even as this mirror, when undimmed,
+reflects the sun, so in the tranquil soul God’s self is imaged.
+
+Over temple and courtyard there is peace; the peace of long centuries
+dead; the peace of enduring belief. Down from the mists of the past
+the teaching comes: “Know thyself; in the stillness of peace, know but
+thyself, and thou shalt see God.”
+
+
+
+
+                                  IV
+
+                             KIZUKI’S BAY
+
+
+The Sea of Japan, as it wandered down the western coast, took a sudden
+and unexpected bite out of the land of Izumo; and that bite is the bay
+of Kizuki. It is the tiniest of bays, with but half a mile of sandy
+shore between the two steep lines of hills that run straight out to
+sea: green hills that stretch so far, the green has time to grow a
+misty blue before they curve toward the water in a deep blurred line.
+Landwards a length of sandy dune shuts out the village street; and the
+little bay, set between the hills, and cut off from the sea, lies like
+an ebbing lake.
+
+On the sandy shore it is still and cool; and from the dozens of
+Japanese families comes only the high pitched laughter of the playing
+children. Kizuki is the Margate of the West, and the pilgrims who
+journey to its shrine stay to breathe its sea air, and combine a
+religious pilgrimage with a summer holiday in a manner so usual in
+Japan.
+
+The big hotel under the great north wall of green, with its ground
+floor, and, wonder of wonders, two, yes--two storeys, is full. So full
+that the landlord was forced to tuck away his distinguished guests in a
+back room of the old inn up the village street. The square two-storied
+house, with all its _shōji_ pushed back and the contents and occupants
+of every room exposed to public view, looks for all the world like a
+big doll’s house with the door gone. And its inhabitants eat, drink,
+play, laugh, sing with the natural unconcern which we could only reach
+secure behind brick walls, curtained windows, and venetian blinds. The
+unconcern is so simple, so unaffected, that the Yokohama foreigner,
+feeling dimly that his own behaviour could never be so natural under
+such conditions, suspects “play acting,” and will sometimes speak of a
+“nation of mountebanks” with the scorn of a man among monkeys.
+
+The hotel is built just where the blue beyond of the Western Sea,
+glowing between the headlands, draws eye and mind away, adding the
+unbroken curve of Infinity to the quiet lake’s rounded life.
+
+The sun has set; perhaps behind that great green wall he still drops
+swiftly to the horizon, but in Kizuki there is twilight, a luminous
+grey twilight that has no shadows, which, spreading, blots all colour
+from the world. Between wall and wall of hill the sky stretches clear
+and green. The bay is flooded with a golden light. And there, a black
+line from gold to green, its base in the yellow water, its crest on the
+sunset sky, stands Kizuki’s second wonder, the third beauty of Izumo--a
+tall pointed rock. For the Japanese, who seek much more for line than
+colour in their beauty, glory in its curves; and the little bay of
+Kizuki owes its visitors not to the purity of its air, its fishing,
+boating, bathing, or casino, but to the beauty of its solitary rock and
+the nearness of its sacred temple.
+
+From shore to sky the luminous grey twilight climbs. The flood of
+golden light is dead. The great green walls that make the bay are dark.
+Only in the sky the faintest stain of colour lingers; and there the
+rock’s lone crest blots a black line upon the dying green.
+
+My _kurumaya_, in his long parson’s coat and waistcoat, blanched the
+purest white, asks if I have ever seen a bay more beautiful. And all
+the dozens of Japanese families stand looking out to sea, for the cult
+of the stone is in their hearts.
+
+Slowly the luminous twilight draws the world in Chinese ink. It climbs
+the sky, and the colour dies; only the sombre lines of rock are left.
+
+The little bay is grown a mystic _kakemono_.
+
+
+
+
+                                   V
+
+                               IN MATSUÉ
+
+
+We had journeyed in trains and in steamers, in big boats and in little
+boats, in _kuruma_ and _sampan_, and had reached the Land of the
+Gods--and the inn at Matsué.
+
+Not the least of our difficulties had been to find that inn, for our
+landlord at Kyoto, on hearing we were bound for Matsué, had offered to
+make all arrangements for us through a “friend in the Prefecture.” And
+the arrangements had been made, but when we asked for explanations, the
+address of the friend or the name of our inn, he only smiled, a polite
+unexplanatory smile, spread out his hands with ceremony, and bowed. All
+was “_yoroshī_.”
+
+With this much information we had started, with this much and no more
+we had arrived. The baby steamer ran alongside the wharf at Matsué, her
+first-class passengers wriggled out of her cabin, her deck passengers
+crawled from under the awning; and we sat still, our luggage piled
+around us, wondering if, like the Peri at the Gates of Paradise, the
+Land of the Gods would admit us or not.
+
+Just then, when the pause had become really embarrassing, a
+white-uniformed policeman boarded the steamer; with much ceremony he
+announced--under the circumstances he could hardly have inquired--that
+we were the _Ijin San_ from Kyoto. We assented, and he promptly led
+us outside, where a tall, loose-jointed Japanese, with a Red Indian
+face hatcheted out of iron wood and wearing “foreign” clothes, stood
+waiting. The white-uniformed policeman politely performed the ceremony
+of introduction, and stood aside. This was the friend from the
+Prefecture; and once we had thoroughly and properly and ceremoniously
+replied to this fact, which took time, our friend from the Prefecture,
+who had the smile and the teeth, and the difficulty in concealing
+them, of the famous Mr. Carker (only he was amiable), introduced our
+landlord, a little, bright, black squirrel of a man grasping an immense
+umbrella. More ceremony of course, while the crowd gathered round and
+the policeman patrolled the group. We were personages. One gesture
+from the amiable Carker of Matsué Prefecture and five _kurumaya_ burst
+through the crowd, while twice as many assistants rushed off to bring
+out our luggage under the eagle eye of the policeman; and with his
+personal assurances as to our safety and comfort in Matsué, we and our
+luggage were packed into three _kuruma_, the amiable Carker and the
+black squirrel of a landlord climbed into two more, and the procession
+started. The policeman saluted; the crowd, at the most respectful
+distance, silently stared; Matsué received her visitors as the most
+distinguished of strangers.
+
+The _kurumaya_, uplifted with pride, tore along at the top of their
+speed in the exact centre of the road, and the traffic scattered before
+us. We did not run, we flew, over the stone bridge built just where the
+canal ends and the lagoon begins, up the long, long street parallel
+to the lagoon, then a dive to the left over a canal bridge, a dash
+through a green turning, another dive, another bridge over another
+canal, and with the most imposing clatter we tore into a gravel court
+in front of the inn, and pulled up short in the recess of the entrance.
+In an instant the _shōji_ slipped aside and three women in dark blue
+_kimono_ were bowing, knees and forehead, on the polished wood. We had
+reached the inn at Matsué.
+
+The three figures got up, as we left our shoes on the long thick block
+of rough-hewn granite which forms the front door-step between the
+gravel and the house, and led us in a long procession to an open matted
+space in the garden. This was our room. It had but half a wall, where
+the _tokonoma_ stood; the other half was open _shōji_, leading to the
+house, and two square pillars at the corners supported the roof. Here
+we all subsided upon the kneeling-cushions in the strictest order of
+precedence, based on nearness to the _tokonoma_. Our black squirrel
+of a landlord and the amiable Carker of the Prefecture, who had also
+arrived, sat on their heels with great ceremony, though the “foreign”
+clothes of our friend from the Prefecture got sadly in his way, and
+then the interchange of polite phrases began. It was exhaustive, for
+they were, oh! so ceremonious, and although two little girls with
+goggle eyes fanned us vigorously, and the blue waters of the lagoon
+filled what should have been wall in front of us, we grew hotter and
+hotter.
+
+Then the plain daughter of our comely landlady brought in an immense
+white meat-dish of railway-buffet thickness, and set it down with
+conscious pride before her mother. It contained piles of chipped ice,
+which the comely landlady shovelled into miniature tumblers, the size
+of dolls’ tooth-glasses, with an imposing iron ladle. She sifted over
+it white sugar from a pie-dish, and the plain daughter presented it to
+the company. The drink of the Gods themselves was never more divine!
+Though like Sam Weller’s orthography, which “varied according to the
+taste and fancy of the speller,” you can eat this drink or you can
+drink it. Either way is inelegant, but both are delicious.
+
+It was only by relays of this amphibious refreshment, which went on
+as long as there was anything besides a large pool of water in the
+meat-dish, that the polite phrases flowed, on our part at least. At
+last etiquette, even Japanese etiquette, was satisfied, and our amiable
+friend from the Prefecture bowed himself away.
+
+The plain daughter removed the meat-dish, not resisting to tell us it
+was “foreign” as she did so, and retired. And we lay out to cool upon
+the matting.
+
+The lagoon, the garden and a green courtyard filled the three sides of
+the room where walls might have been. Even the _shōji_ here had been
+removed, for there were no houses visible; a high green hedge of thick
+bamboo bounded court and garden, beyond were the pale blue hills.
+
+It was not a room, it was a nest, we lived as freely in the open air
+as the birds or the flowers; a brown roof hung like a sheltering leaf
+above our heads, a cool clean matting covered the ground beneath our
+feet, but the rustle of leaves and of rice-fields, the restless hum of
+insect life, the rippling rhythm of the wide lagoon, the whole stir of
+a growing world was ours. We did not peep at it through a window, we
+lay in it, we _were_ it; and it rippled and hummed and grew part of us,
+for Pan is not dead, in the Land of the Gods he is living still.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then the comely landlady called us to our bath; “the honourable hot
+water was ready,” and the plain daughter assisted us out of our clothes
+into our _kimono_ with an attention which, to our sophisticated code,
+was embarrassing, and led us down a passage whose wooden wall opened
+into the bathroom. Here our landlady received us. She was just sliding
+down the wooden plank, which shut off the pipe filled with glowing
+charcoal from the rest of the bath-tub, and looking up she said the
+bath was “_yoroshī_.”
+
+The water was positively bubbling, at that delicious temperature of 110
+degrees which the Japanese love; but we were not yet used to literal
+boiling, so we demanded cold water. And the two little girls with
+goggle eyes ran away to fetch it in high wooden pails with stiff wooden
+handles. They ran out by the wooden _shōji_ on the opposite side, which
+opened straight on to the gravel courtyard of the entrance, and their
+dark-blue _kimono_ were tucked up into their _obi_, showing the bright
+red _kimono_ underneath. And they were laughing.
+
+When we demanded still more cold water they laughed again. The _Ijin
+San_ had strange ideas of baths evidently. At last, in deference to
+their feelings, we desisted. The water was no longer bubbling, so we
+pronounced it “_yoroshī_,” and they all retired.
+
+The bathroom had a grey stone floor and walls of wooden _shōji_; at one
+end stood the high barrel-bath, and wooden buckets, pails and dippers
+lay all around. A three-foot-high platform ran all down one side and
+adjoined the passage-way by which we had entered; from it one stepped
+into the bath, on it one washed and dried oneself. A bath in Japan,
+which is used by all the family or hotel in succession, is not intended
+for washing--that is done outside. The two _shōji_ walls, just sliding
+panels of wood, opened, one on to the passage-way, the other into the
+front court, and had no fastenings. The Japanese have attained to that
+sense of modesty which we still feel immodest. They say to bathe is
+necessary; you cannot take a bath with your clothes on; a necessary
+action is never immodest, neither has it any prurient attractions for
+healthy minds. But a Japanese cannot see the low-necked dresses of
+western women or the pictures of Modern France without a blush. To him
+a bathing woman is neither modest nor immodest, but simply indifferent;
+while exposure, merely to attract, is indecency itself. Obscenity
+exists in grosser minds as in every country in the world; but the
+people of Japan have a moral simplicity of thought and action that is
+at one with the conclusions of abstract ethical philosophy.
+
+Like lobsters going to be cooked, we bathed, and got out swiftly but
+not silently. A yard of cotton towel, where a bank of purple iris grew
+out of a pale blue stream, was all the towel we had. It would have
+adequately dried our finger-nails, but the design was comforting if
+the towel was not. At last, in grey crêpe _kimono_ and straw sandals,
+clothes as naturally a growth of the climate and the country as its
+trees or people, we went back to our wall-less room and sat in peace.
+
+The heat of the day was passing, and the colours of the sky and trees
+deepened before they died. For light in this land of sunshine can
+hide as well as darkness; it covers the land as a pall, all white and
+glittering, which blinds as surely as the night. But in that half-hour
+which comes before the swift descending twilight of the East, all the
+colours deepen and intensify; they take a strange opaque lustre which
+makes the thinnest leaf look solid. Mere colour seems thick, almost as
+though distinct from what it colours and the colours deepen, deepen,
+till, emerging from a glittering pall of white, they sink beneath the
+grey-black pall of night. It is the intensest hour of all the day. The
+world is not working as at the dawn, nor sleeping as in the heat, but
+strong with the beating pulse of Life that fills even the stillness.
+
+So we sat and watched the deepening glowing earth glow and deepen, and
+heard the throb of life grow ever louder, till from the streets came up
+the sound of children’s laughter, and from the town the stir of men.
+
+Rich in richest colours lay the world, with greens and blues of
+polished jewellery. And then the hurrying twilight settled like the
+swooping pinions of a bird. The colours lost themselves in grey, the
+forms they coloured in a broad, still sweep of darkness. On the white
+bridge, set between canal and lake, the lanterns were already glowing,
+and the indistinct brown lines of roof melted from the light into the
+darkness.
+
+For a little while the curved earth-bridge of our miniature garden,
+the pebbled pathway that in a fragment of a circle led across the
+winding pond, traced a clear black line against the open sky. Then the
+children’s laughter in the street grew silent, the stir of men and
+women stilled.
+
+Slowly, among their shadows, the houses each hung out a light and
+disappeared. The purple darkness grew with each moment deeper and more
+black.
+
+Then in a flash the shadows and the lights themselves went out, for our
+inn had lit her lamps.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then they brought us dinner on black lacquered trays: pink soup and
+many kinds of fish, and rice with pickled cucumbers, white and brown
+and purple. And we did eat. And all the time our landlady and her plain
+daughter, kneeling on the matting, filled up our rice-bowls from the
+wooden rice-box, or our tea-bowls from the china teapot, and the bronze
+kettle which filled that teapot itself needed filling many times, for
+we were thirsty. And the landlady and her daughter sat placidly on
+their heels, watching our many social crimes, for there is an etiquette
+of chopsticks, as strict or stricter than ours of knives and forks, and
+in equivalent terms we probably were eating with our knives, putting
+our dirty spoons upon the tablecloth and exhibiting the general manners
+of the stable.
+
+As a sign that you have finished in Japan you eat your last bowl of
+rice flavoured with a bowlful of tea. Hardly had we reached this stage
+when the bright black squirrel of a landlord arrived to announce a
+visitor, and “Might he come in?”
+
+Considerably surprised we said “Yes,” and who should enter but our
+amiable Japanese Carker, this time in his own clothes. From an
+insignificant and somewhat common individual he had, by the mere
+change from a misfitting yellow suit into a grey silk _kimono_ with
+striped silk _hakama_, changed from an underbred clerk into a courtly
+gentlemen. His manners, always the same, were now at ease with himself,
+and no longer incongruous or even somewhat ridiculous, they became the
+perfection of grace and breeding. It is a change that one may often see
+in Japan.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Again we all sat on our heels on the kneeling-cushions in the strictest
+order of precedence, and exchanged the politest phrases of ceremony
+in the courtliest of Japanese. We heard all about the great Temple of
+Kizuki, the pride of Izumo, and we told of our journeys in the Far
+East, to Korea and Siberia; and the landlord’s son, who had come in
+behind the visitor, “half expected he might go there some day with the
+army,” a wish which may well since have been fulfilled.
+
+In true Japanese fashion our guest had brought us presents, photographs
+of Matsué and of Izumo’s Great temple. We could only present him
+in exchange with our cards, a map of the world with the British
+possessions marked very red, and an old copy of a railway novel. The
+gifts pleased him, and the whole family examined the map with great
+interest. They wanted to hear all about England, and the fact that
+cows and sheep (which they have never seen) walked over our fields,
+and that it was sometimes light at nine in the evening struck on their
+imagination. They asked many questions about the sheep, and “what the
+light looked like?” which was difficult of explanation.
+
+In spite of more amphibious drinks from the white meat-dish, which
+seemed served here (probably as a concession to our foreign tastes)
+instead of the inevitable tea to visitors, the struggle after faultless
+_politesse_, the intricacies of a ceremonious Japanese made us grow all
+limp with heat again. And when we had bowed our last bow, uttered our
+last “_Mata o-me ni kakarimashō_” (“Another time may my eyes honourably
+behold you”), we were reduced to a really pitiable state of exhaustion.
+Our comely landlady, who had a large brain and a seeing eye, did not
+wait to question. She cleared the room, sent the two giggling girls
+with the goggle eyes to hang the green mosquito net, like an imposing
+martial tent, from the four corners of the room, while the plain
+daughter brought _futon_ like thin eiderdown quilts to sleep upon,
+undressed us carefully and retired, bidding us “honourably resting
+deign” as she did so.
+
+As the lamp went out the ample folds of the square tent stood out like
+a royal pavilion. We crept beneath and lay down upon the matted sheets
+which covered the _futon_. In deference to our foreign bones we had
+several _futon_ underneath us, and one rolled up beneath our heads; but
+for all that the hardness of the matted floor, stuffed though it was,
+rose up and hit us before the night was out.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We slept beneath our transparent tent, in our wall-less room, as the
+flowers sleep, part of the living night. All the little sounds of leaf
+and lake stirred round us undisturbed; the rice-ears rustled in the
+silent night; the great trees stretched their branches as they slept.
+Dreaming, the waters of the salt lagoon moved towards the sea, and all
+the wealth of insect life, turning in its sleep, called faintly. The
+still small voice of the sky whispered softly in the breezes, and the
+great green Earth reached up to listen through her dreams. Bound in the
+chains of man, it is at night-time that she stirs so restless, when
+all the humming, conscious life is laid to sleep, when men and insects
+slumber. Then the green Earth wakes; but she has endured so long that
+even in her waking she is half asleep. Bound down with streets and
+houses, she never wakes at all. And so all night we listened to the
+voices of the world. At the dawning, when all Nature stands hushed
+before the coming of the sun, we slept. But the dawning in this
+southern land is short and swift. With no clouds to dim his strength,
+the sun soon sat flaming on his wide blue throne; and all the insects
+of the tropics, warmed into life, rose up to buzz and hum. And we awoke.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the Land of the Gods there are no clocks, and although one in the
+main street of Matsué proclaimed its “foreign” time, the inhabitants
+beneath go their own way, and the baby steamers arrive and depart in
+open disregard of the hours upon the dial. So some time between the
+dawning and the noon we woke. The house was getting up. All the little
+sounds of rising men and women, of a day’s beginning, were about us, so
+we got up too. Crawling from under our vast green tent, we went down
+the polished passage-way to the inner courtyard, where in a cool green
+cloister all the rooms of the inn looked out. A long stone font filled
+with water, a hanging wooden dipper, a row of shallow brass pans on
+a wooden shelf stood waiting. Here the whole inn washes. With water
+from the font, cool and fresh from its night’s sleep in the grey stone
+basin, you fill the bamboo dipper and pour out into the shallow pans;
+and then, standing in the passage-way, with all the rooms around you,
+you wash. And unless a _nēsan_, attracted by the whiteness of your
+skin, should stop a moment to look and wonder, no one is interested.
+The usual lengths of cotton towelling hung beside the dipper, like
+banners on their poles; and a crevice of sunshine piercing into the
+green courtyard quivered on the round brass pans.
+
+Tent and _futon_ had vanished when we returned, and the two little
+goggle-eyed girls, still with their blue _kimono_ tucked up to show the
+red ones underneath, were sweeping the matting with bamboo brooms. We
+dressed in corners unattended, and sat down to wait.
+
+From the sounds of passing feet, and the directing words of our comely
+landlady, it seemed that great things were preparing for us--quite
+what remained a mystery. At last the plain daughter, bubbling with the
+pleasure of our surprise, came to call us.
+
+“As for the morning meal,” she said, “all is prepared,” and even the
+ceremony of her bows suffered from her eagerness.
+
+We went through the half-wall of _shōji_ panels, across a room, into
+another, where the family, all assembled, almost (had it not been
+entirely un-Japanese) clapped its hands in pride.
+
+There on the matting, and each leg protected by a supporting slab of
+wood, stood a foreign table; four foreign chairs, their legs too nailed
+into long slats of wood, stood round. Across a corner of the table lay
+a thin strip of cotton cloth, and on this, in all the majesty of its
+solid ugliness, reposed the white meat-dish of our god-like drink. This
+morning it was full of something smoking, dimly resembling Irish stew.
+
+The comely landlady beamed as we approached.
+
+“Sea-food forthcomes,” she said proudly.
+
+And to our “foreign” breakfast we sat slowly down. How bad it was! But
+the family, even to the old, old grandmother, were so delighted, so
+proud of their unexpected triumph, that we ate that abominable stew
+till not a fragment of its tough meat or a spoonful of its gluey gravy
+remained.
+
+Many times since have I wondered how that Napoleonic landlady organised
+the feast? How did she get the meat? Who cooked it? and where did they
+learn? Did she invent the recipe out of her own head? Perhaps she
+raided the garrison? She was capable of it. There was bread too. Matsué
+was quite in the front of the fashion; not like poor Kizuki, which was
+sadly out of date; they hadn’t even _bīru_ (beer) there.
+
+All this she told us as she helped us, always with the iron ladle,
+to that terrific stew. With the foreign food too, we had “foreign”
+china, horrible railway-restaurant plates and cups, clumsy and thick,
+sprawled all over with a large design in bilious blue; knives and forks
+that never matched, and, of course, the inevitable cruet. This hideous
+article is always the first vestige of “foreign” fashion in a Japanese
+hotel, where it accompanies every meal. Once it may have been of German
+silver; it is all drab now. Long centuries of use have left it bent and
+dinted. Its bottles leak, their stoppers never fit, and whatever they
+once held, all now drip oil and taste soy. We thought of our dainty
+lacquered trays, our delicate white china with drawings in faint blue,
+the refinement and the art of that meal, and we sighed. The fish they
+could not spoil, and their tea is always good, so we breakfasted. And
+the plain daughter, whose ambitions (or her mother’s) soared to Tokyo
+heights of fashion, asked if everything was really “_yoroshī_” upon the
+table, and, if not, “would we show her how?” The knives and forks had
+puzzled her woefully; how ought they to be laid? So we laid the table,
+and we set the forks, and we placed the bread, and we handed plates and
+glasses, and the ancient grandmother shook with astonishment. Was ever
+like seen under the sun? And even the capable landlady exclaimed. So
+the conscientious plain daughter worked through her knives and forks,
+her bread on this side and her glasses on that, with the zeal of an
+earnest student; and afterwards we caught her displaying her great
+accomplishment to a circle of admiring friends.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We were to see the sights of Matsué. Our friend from the Prefecture and
+the black squirrel of a landlord had talked it over exhaustively the
+night before. We were catered for like Royal visitors. We did not need
+to plan, or ask, or seek. “Honourably trouble not. It happens.” And it
+did.
+
+That morning the landlord, in a long polite speech, made us over to
+his son, a quiet clever lad who might have been the twin of his plain
+sister; and we set off. We wished to stop for many things, temples and
+toy shops, the peeps of life on street and wharf, but our guide, though
+never contradicting, was so preoccupied, so intent on something that we
+gave in and meekly followed down the long streets over the many canals,
+whose bridges showed an arch like the young crescent of the moon, along
+the hot white road, until we reached an ugly wooden building in the
+style called “foreign,” all decorated with flags and policemen. Here we
+entered. The policemen drew up in line as we passed, and the scurrying
+feet of a dozen officials all clothed in long frock-coats came down the
+vestibule.
+
+It was an Exhibition of the Arts, Industries, and Manufactures of the
+Province of Izumo, and quite inadvertently we had arrived to open the
+proceedings. The distinguished strangers from England, received by
+the phalanx of frock-coats, were conducted majestically through the
+whole building. We were not allowed to miss a single room. If, after
+peeping into one, and finding it contained nothing but sacks of rice,
+or samples of raw silk, we retreated, instantly a frock-coat or a
+policeman appeared to lead us round. We did not miss the least little
+exhibit of the least little room. We saw them all: bags of rice,
+cocoons of silk, hollow candles with growing designs in faint pale
+colours, Izumo crystals famed throughout Japan, lengths of piece-silk,
+twists of sewing-silk, embroideries, china, the famous yellow china
+of Matsué, all the roots and grains and wood of the province, fishing
+nets and field tools, and a whole large section of the beautiful Izumo
+matting. In our admiration we wished to buy, and instantly all the
+frock-coats ran after one another, each official going to consult his
+chief. They arrived in groups and talked; they went away and came back
+again. We had unknowingly placed the whole officialdom of Matsué on the
+horns of a dilemma. We were the distinguished visitors from England;
+we wished to buy Matsué’s most especial production; the honour was
+great--but the regulations said no exhibit might be taken away before
+the close of the exhibition; and the Japanese respect the law as they
+respect the Emperor. So we waited. At last a most wonderful frock-coat
+appeared resplendent with decorations; solemnly he made a speech
+explaining the difficulty, excusing the delay, expressing great honour
+at our request, and at a sign his attendant handed over the matting to
+our attendant, and with many bows we parted.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That afternoon, as we lay upon our matting in our wall-less room,
+fanned by the plain daughter, our landlady brought in the local
+newspaper, and sitting down on her heels she read to us a long account
+of the arrival in Matsué of the “distinguished strangers from England,”
+and a kind of “Stop Press telegram” announcing their gracious purchase
+of matting at the exhibition that morning, besides an editorial
+advertisement of a description of their visit to the exhibition for
+the next issue. Our rooms at the inn were described at length, our
+appearance “with faces white as milk”--the foreign simile showing great
+learning on the part of the reporter--our ages politely overstated, for
+the young here, women as well as men, desire to be old so that to be
+thought older than one’s age is the greatest of compliments; the paper
+therefore called us most politely “upwards of forty,” causing our dear
+landlady to beam with delight, and the plain daughter to utter a long
+series of those curious strangled “h’s” by which the Japanese express
+intense admiration, as she fanned us more vigorously. Then, _à propos_
+of our “milk-white faces,” the landlady, with much hesitation, asked
+a favour “so great that to speak unable am.” Might she have our soap?
+Japanese soap they had, but somehow, possibly, that “foreign” soap of
+ours might account for some of our strange whiteness. So she and the
+plain daughter retired with the soap; and for the rest of the afternoon
+they scrubbed diligently in the bathroom.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And we sat quiet upon our matting in the heat, while the green hills
+and the rice-fields, the pebbled pathway of our garden bridge, and all
+the wide still spaces of the lake hung as frescoes round our room. The
+hot blue sky burned fiercely, the blue of a heated brick-kiln, and our
+living frescoes hung motionless as the work of man. There was neither
+change nor shadow. Hills and lake and rice-fields lay still against the
+sky--flat as it were upon a flattened background, and in that light
+which did not shine but suffused itself through all things, there were
+no shadows, a deepened blueness here and there, but neither shadow nor
+perspective. The sense of distance, as the sense of shade, was quite
+annihilated. Those old Japanese artists saw truly, despite our western
+dictums, light does not lie here as we see it, still less as it lies
+in the actual tropics; it has effects of light and distance which are
+all its own, and the Japanese, seeing them, reproduced them, not
+because there are no others, but because these are so truly Japanese.
+And we, knowing neither the country nor the climate, but strong in our
+arrogance of “laws,” called it “false, a childlike art ignorant of
+science.”
+
+In the Land of the Gods we sat and learnt wisdom, and Japan and its
+people, its life and its pictures took a new meaning in our eyes, and
+the false became true.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When our landlady and her daughter came back from the bathroom they
+brought a small thin oblong of soap, and their hands were all wrinkled
+with washing.
+
+“_Mada kurō gozaimas kara omachi nassatta hō ga yō gozaimas_,” they
+said in a melancholy, half-laughing voice. “Still brown because,
+leaving off had best be done,” and they held out their four hands for
+inspection.
+
+The _Ijin San’s_ whiteness was not in the soap. But when we went
+we left as a present a whole new cake of “foreign” soap; and their
+supplementary scrubbings must have been many.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That evening we were entertained by a small boy with the snubbiest of
+noses, who peeped slyly at us from out of the darkness of the garden.
+When he was induced to come in he brought all his lesson books, which
+he turned over for our amusement, and between each page he chuckled,
+but he never told us why. Whether it was the recollections of his lost
+lessons or a subtle sense of absurdity that we could not read the
+Chinese hieroglyphics of his primers we never knew, but his chuckles
+were deep with joy. Then in the pauses he would count solemnly up to
+ten, all the English he knew, and chuckle again.
+
+Two wide-eyed little maidens were brought in next morning to see the
+_Ijin San_. In a very awestruck whisper they inquired “if we were real.”
+
+These little babies were very solemn and very good, but not one scrap
+shy or frightened. In all their little lives they had never met a
+grown-up being who was harsh to them. Though obedience is the first
+requisite of Japanese children young or old, they give it as the plants
+their flowers, not from a sense of hard-learned duty, but as a natural
+product of an eternal law.
+
+The babies made the funniest little bows as they touched their little
+foreheads to the ground. And then they sat and looked at us with wide,
+wide-opened eyes. To them we belonged to the world of the mythical
+_Kirin_, and the terrible _Kitsuné_ who takes bad babies away and feeds
+them on frogs and snails; we belonged to the realm of the sea-goddess
+who married Urashima, to the land of the fairies. So they asked if we
+were real.
+
+They could not be induced to talk to us, though they were wonderfully
+polite, and quite knocked their little foreheads on the floor when
+they said “Good-bye.” Did we figure as goblins or as fairies in their
+dreams, I wonder?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That afternoon a stall-owner from the exhibition came to show us Izumo
+crystals.
+
+For two hours he knelt upon the matting opening the beautifully made
+boxes of white unpainted wood. And we looked at large divining-crystals
+without fleck or flaw, at the pale clouded crystals shading from
+mist-white to palest crimson, at the agates and amethysts; and all the
+time our comely landlady and her plain daughter sat on their heels and
+admired with taste and great discrimination.
+
+There was not in all this shopful of precious stones anything to wear.
+A few crystal hairpins, a few “foreign” studs, but no jewellery as we
+understand it. The Japanese never wear jewellery; neither rings, nor
+bracelets, nor chains, nor pins, nor brooches, nor tiaras--nothing.
+One wonders how much crime and heart-burning has the nation missed.
+Precious stones they have, but they buy and keep them for their shape
+or for their colour, as a picture or a bronze, not to adorn themselves.
+All the rest of the world, in all times, barbarous and civilised, have
+fought and stolen, slain and ruined themselves just to heap upon their
+fingers or their heads strings of gleaming stones. In this island-empire
+alone men and women have looked at precious stones, have handled and
+admired, but never worn them. One wonders was it purely the artistic
+instinct of the race which kept them from it, or the stern morality of
+the _samurai_, preaching denial and self-control.
+
+And again one wonders if too much jewellery be barbaric, where in the
+scale of civilisation does a nation come that wears none at all? Surely
+art can produce worthier things than jewellery, and are not morals
+better without it?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Our inn was full of guests, quite full, and all the rooms have paper
+panels. There are no keys, no locks, no bolts, the whole inn, were it
+so minded, could go in and out of every room; and yet we all sleep in
+peace and quite secure. It is true that an innkeeper here must bear an
+unblemished character or his house is shut, and that the guests often
+come with a letter from their last innkeeper, but not always, and yet
+we all sleep with half an inch of rice-paper between us, and walls of
+sliding panels. Could a hotelful of civilised Europeans be so trusted?
+If not to steal, then not to pry as well? But here nobody looks.
+Although we have become great personages indeed, nobody looks. And
+in the big towns as in the country villages, in railway hotels as in
+this remote corner of the Land of the Gods, we have slept in absolute
+security in rooms that are always open. Only once in all our wanderings
+did someone push the _shōji_. It was an _Ijin San_ who thought it was
+“a lark.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And so we lived in the Land of the Gods and learnt wisdom, wisdom from
+the lake, and the hills, and the rice-fields, from the night and the
+daylight, and the inner beauty of the land lay before our eyes, still
+dim, for western eyes are blind to eastern meaning through want of
+power to focus, but in part we saw, and the joy of that seeing has
+never passed away. The town, the inn, the comely landlady, and the wee,
+wide-eyed children all taught us wisdom and the meaning and the beauty
+of the land. Slowly we saw, dimly too, for western eyes are very blind
+to eastern meaning, and race, religion, training and the whole up-make
+of our ideas and beliefs stand so often in the way. Still in part we
+saw, and the lessons of that seeing have never passed away. We had come
+in all humility, so the Gods were kind. They opened our eyes that we
+might see.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When we announced that we were going the household was upset. And
+on the last morning of our stay they all, landlord, landlady, plain
+daughter, goggle-eyed waiting-girls, came in a procession bearing
+gifts. We had fans to keep us cool upon the journey, white towels with
+pictures of the inn in blue, and above all, gifts of the beautiful
+Matsué china which we had so much admired. Everything was tied up in
+the neatest parcels wrapped in pieces of brocade, and presented on
+lacquered trays. On the top of the Matsué china lay a tiny white paper
+cone lined with red in which was stuck a splinter of bamboo cane, the
+modern symbol of the old-time fish which was always presented with each
+gift. And the meaning of the whole is peace, plenty, and prosperity. We
+had nothing so beautiful to give in exchange, only a cake of foreign
+soap and a visiting-card. The cake of soap was considered by the rest
+of the household, including the old grandmother, who had come in, as a
+palpable hit, and the visiting-cards were much prized.
+
+Then with every one carrying our luggage we were escorted to the gravel
+recess of the entrance, where our _kurumaya_ stood waiting, and all the
+household went down on its knees on the polished wooden platform and
+said sweet _sayonara_.
+
+And there in the walled-in recess with the wooden _gheta_ lying on the
+big grey block of stone the kneeling figures stayed. Clad in their dark
+blue _kimono_ with the bright-coloured _obi_ at the waist, they knelt
+on the polished wood, their heads on their hands, their hands on the
+floor; and as they knelt the rolls and whorls of their coiffures seemed
+to grow like flowers from bending stalks of blue.
+
+“_Sayonara_,” they said, and all the blue stalks swayed.
+
+“_Sayonara_,” we called back. “Farewell.” Oh, dear Land of the Gods
+that has taught us wisdom, not you, but we have need to fare well.
+
+
+
+
+                                  VI
+
+                            THE TWO SPIRITS
+
+
+Out of the town and above it, the _daimyō_ of Matsué once built him a
+castle, and he filled it with the stern warriors whose soul was their
+sword. _Daimyō_ after _daimyō_ lived and died, and still a _daimyō_
+ruled over Izumo; and warrior after warrior fought and was slain, and
+still the _samurai_ learned the laws of the _bushi_, the way of the
+warrior, and the strong fortress of Matsué, with its moat and its
+walls, was guarded and kept by men whose lives were one long servitude
+to honour and duty. The grim ideals of a code which feared no death and
+no torture, which exacted the sternest courage and self-control, were
+taught and practised in the castle of Matsué, until the Son of Heaven
+ruled in Tokyo and _daimyō_ and _samurai_ were feudal lord and loyal
+vassal no longer.
+
+The grim walls are standing now, the castle with its moat still rises
+above Matsué to possess it, but the spirit of its fierce dominance is
+gone; instead, that twin-soul of the Japanese race has entered into the
+stronghold, the Love of Beauty has cast out the Love of Battle, the
+sword is changed to flowers, for in the moat of the castle the lotus is
+blooming.
+
+Stern and very strong the grey walls rise high into the air, they have
+not lost their grimness though their feet are bathed in flowers. It is
+true the gateway is broken, and where the drawbridge once fell there is
+now a broad path of stamped earth, but the long lines of solid wall are
+firm still and uninjured. They still rise frowning from out the deep
+waters of the moat; but to-day the moat itself has disappeared, in its
+place the broad thick leaves of the lotus stretch like a silvery green
+river around the walls. So broad, so strong, so helpless, the great
+leaves hang like unsteady giants on their stalks, and the pin-points of
+water gather and gather on the hairy surface, till the leaf curls to a
+cup and a big waterdrop, molten as quicksilver, runs gleaming over the
+green.
+
+The lotus leaves lie all lazy at angles of rest, but the flowers seem
+to rise on their stalks as birds taking wing. All pure white or palest
+pink, each single flower is a giant’s handful of blossom, and yet the
+petals are delicate, almost transparent; thin, too, in their texture,
+but of a satiny softness, they curl with the grace of a rose above the
+pure gold of their hearts.
+
+The lotus leaves dream inert, each on its stalk hangs drooping,
+often awry: they encircle the walls like a green river of water that
+stagnantly sleeps; but the flowers are awake and they rise from their
+leaves as the Spirit of Beauty once rose from the waters. All pure
+white on this side of the gateway, all pale pink on that, the great
+cups of blossom stand stately. Very fragile in their texture, and yet
+so ample in their form the lotus flower seems the meeting-point of
+luxuriance and grace; the point where more of either were really less
+of both.
+
+With its roots deep down in the mud, with its leaves often frankly
+ridiculous in the large uncouthness of their attitudes, with its beauty
+in no way ethereal, the lotus is yet the symbol of Death, not of
+Nirvana, but of Death, of the completing of one brief period in this
+long cycle which we call Life. So in Matsué they planted the moat of
+the castle with the flower of the lotus for the life of Old Japan, of
+castle and _daimyō_ and _samurai_, is ended. It is Death but a new
+Beginning.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Beyond the gateway, a grass-grown flight of granite steps leads to the
+castle, and we climb.
+
+All the castles in all Japan are the same, bigger or smaller, with
+details of decoration or style that differentiate them, they are yet in
+the broad outlines of their architecture one and the same. A Japanese
+house is Japanese, but the castle comes from China, at least originally,
+and its pagoda character is very evident. The castle at Matsué had its
+ground floor of stone, rough-hewn blocks of granite which fitted closely
+to each other without mortar. The stone storey, as all the succeeding
+ones of wood above it, tapered gradually inwards so that the topmost
+wooden storey would have fitted into the one below it, and that into the
+next, and all into the square stone box of the ground floor, as neatly
+as the nest of baskets sold in the streets of the town below.
+
+Inside, the rough-hewn stone walls were left as bare as the outside,
+and a long steep ladder of a staircase, which began abruptly in the
+middle of one floor to end with equal abruptness in the middle of the
+floor above, led from storey to storey. The stone storey was divided
+into two, the rest were of wood, and all now were absolutely bare and
+unadorned; the mere outer shell of a building which had once lived
+and sheltered lives. Only in the top floor, where on all four sides
+sliding panels of glass had replaced the rice-paper _shōji_, was there
+any sign of life. This room had been turned into a sort of Military
+Museum with relics of the China war, swords and guns, and a whole long
+series of wonderful coloured prints, with the Chinese always fleeing,
+their long, long pigtails floating in the breeze, the Japanese always
+pursuing with impossible profiles and highly polished boots; and
+gravely studying the pictures was a group of schoolboys. Their comments
+were mostly bloodthirsty; the best way of sticking the pink Chinaman
+on the left, or of beheading the yellow one on the right; but they did
+not seem moved with any animosity or any sense of triumph, they merely
+discussed the sword-cuts scientifically, seriously, as though it were a
+grave business of life and they wished to arrive at a right conclusion.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Matsué’s castle is beyond and above the town, and the _daimyō_ who
+built it and the warriors who guarded it looked down on this side over
+the grey roofs of the houses to the wide blue waters of the still
+lagoon, on that side over the grey roofs of the houses and the sweep
+of the quiet rice-fields where the river, like a broad path of steel
+wanders through the bright green fields; and further round they looked
+to where the tall trees climb the steep hillsides, and further still
+to the great blue lines of the hills themselves shutting in the sky.
+And the old warriors in their watch-tower looked out over this wide
+fair world which lay so still around them. They guarded the castle and
+they kept it, and the light that was set in that tower was the light
+of courage and of duty. Over the world beneath their feet it shone out
+clear and bright, but the world was wider than their horizon. After
+many years they learned that lesson, and then they came down from
+their watch-tower, and the light which once burned there in the castle
+is gone to-day through all the land.
+
+Then the Spirit of Beauty, the soul of that world which lay so still
+beneath the tower, went up to the castle, where with courage and duty
+the love of battle and of death had ruled so long, to possess it. And
+in the waters of the moat the lotus is blooming.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With its roots in the mud, say the Japanese Buddhists, the lotus flower
+is an emblem of man, of a good man in this wicked world. From among the
+sins and the passions of life Buddha himself rose perfect, pure as the
+lotus, and perfect. So for a sign and a comfort to all men, Lord Buddha
+himself sits throned on the lotus, showing how Goodness Eternal came,
+not from good, but from the midst of things evil.
+
+In the moat of the castle the people of Matsué have planted whole
+fields of the lotus, that the flower which is perfect might grow from
+the sins of the past, grow with each cycle of Life ever more perfect.
+
+
+
+
+                        THE HEART OF THE PEOPLE
+
+     “Shakspeare would have us know that there is no devotion to
+     truth, to justice, to charity, more intense and real than that
+     of the man who is faithful to them out of the sheer spirit of
+     loyalty, unstimulated and unsupported by any faith which can be
+     called theological.”
+                        DOWDEN, “Shakspeare, his Mind and Art.”
+
+
+
+
+                                   I
+
+                                 TOKYO
+
+
+Tokyo is a city of one million five hundred thousand souls, and in its
+heart of hearts stands the Palace of the Son of Heaven.
+
+The city through its girdle of brown streets works hard, its wharfs
+and factories, its shops and warehouses are dense with human life
+and resonant with human labour. The low brown streets so thick with
+flimsy paper houses stretch for ten miles along the plain. In them the
+children play, the _kuruma_ pass quickly, the heavy laden hand-carts of
+the coolies push and jostle, but the heart of this great capital lies
+still.
+
+From circumference to centre as you come, through street on street
+of houses, wharves and shops, the magic of the city grows. First the
+streets space out and out, then the houses dwindle as the trees and
+gardens grow, greener, wilder, stiller, till the heart of Tokyo’s city
+is a moated park of peace.
+
+Up nine steep hills the city spreads, and sea and river, and the wide
+green rice-fields lap it round, while far away across the land, above
+the level blue of sky great Fuji rises peerless in the midmost heaven.
+
+Engirdled by the thronged and busy streets the nine tall hills peaceful
+with well-kept houses and secluded gardens, make a crescent round the
+moated park. For in this strange city whose centre is a palace and a
+peaceful walled-in pleasaunce the “suburbs” lie within and not without
+the town.
+
+And through the town and over street and roadway, in the gardens and
+the courtyards the gaunt beaked crows flap coal-black wings as they
+sail past, and their cynical “Haw, haw” is sarcastic with an utter
+disbelief. With stately swoop, black wings outspread, they drift past
+the ear of the newcomer confident with a three weeks’ visit that he
+understands the East, and in the midst of his cocksureness they drop
+their cold, sarcastic “Haw.”
+
+Brown and so crowded are the streets, bewildering with their jostle of
+blue-clad men and women, their open stalls, their unmade roads of earth
+stretching flat between the houses on each side, where man-drawn carts,
+and _kuruma_, passengers, and children get in each other’s way. The
+white uniformed policeman, sword on thigh, stands, a bronze statue, at
+each busy corner, and to him even the criminal is polite. And down the
+streets and through and through the town, cut straight or winding, the
+brown canals, valleys of black mud, or slow streams of dark water, run
+to the river and the sea. And thousands upon thousands, too, seem the
+bridges, some flat and narrow as gangways, most arched in a crescent
+curve, and the brown canals run from the sea and from the river far
+within the town.
+
+On one of them, at high tide, a steamer like the ark of Noah plies. It
+seems to go indifferently stern or bow foremost, and is no larger than
+a big-sized rowing boat. The one landing-stage to which I traced it
+was like a pasteboard on two rolling-pins, and stood as the threshold
+to the back door of a house. A European picture hung above the
+entrance, bright with greens and blues and reds and yellows, where this
+resplendent steamer floating amid green waves, showed at alternate
+windows a head, male, Japanese, dressed “foreign”; a head, female,
+Japanese, dressed Japanese. A policeman and a soldier both in uniform
+balanced on the deck at either end. The ark’s ports of call, as its
+starting-place and destination, remained a mystery. At low tide the
+canal was an inch of water between two banks of mud, and only at high
+tide could this toy ark float at all.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One long, straight street, broken into sections at the bridges, and
+then reset at different angles, runs from end to end of Tokyo, runs
+from Shimbashi to Ueno, from the “Mercantile Marine Store,” which
+sells dried fishes, to the Parcels Office of that delicious “Internal
+Railway,” otherwise unknown to fame. This is the main street of the
+town, here is the Ginza, with its red brick sidewalks, its shop-boys
+who speak English, even its plate glass windows. Here, too, is the
+goldsmith who advertises:
+
+          “RINGS, BRONCHITIS, AND OTHER JEWELRY.
+           BEST KINDS ONLY KEPT IN STOCK”;
+
+And the residence of that mysterious baker who keeps:
+
+          “BEARDS, VINE CAKES AND SLOR FOR SALE.”
+
+And down it from end to end runs Tokyo’s main tramway. With the river
+on the east, the moated park upon the west, north and south the broad
+street runs, and the park of Shiba lies at one end and the park of
+Ueno at the other. Shiba, where the tombstones of the dead _shōgun_
+lie in their sumptuous lacquered temples; Ueno, where the lacquered
+temples stand bullet-pierced, for the soldiers of the _shōgun_ and
+the soldiers of the emperor fought their last fight here before the
+great _Tenshisama_ came back to his own again. Once the closed gardens
+of Buddhistic monasteries, both parks now are open to the town,
+bicycles ride through them, nursemaids, their babies on their backs,
+loiter in them, little girls play classic games of bones, boys catch
+grasshoppers, while beneath the trees the low red blanketed tables of
+the _chaya_ offer ¼_d._ teas.
+
+The Park of Shiba is green and quiet, smaller than Ueno, for its
+temples hold so large a space. It is a forest growing in the heart of a
+town. Ueno is lighter, brighter, fuller of flowers and festivals, with
+long avenues of cherry-trees, and a lake where the lotus flowers grow
+thickly.
+
+And over the lake and the temples, over the cherry-trees and the
+tea-stalls, over the city below and the playing children within, the
+big bronze bell of Ueno sends forth its great booming note--that note
+which is outside our music, deeper, more liquid, which comes with its
+low, booming sway, just when daylight turns to darkness. Cast of bronze
+and silver, rung by a wooden beam that strikes a boss outside, the
+note of the great bell comes swaying as though the air were water. And
+slowly over the city the bell booms, trembling, and he who hears it
+sits still and thinks; sits lost and dreams of the song of the seven
+spheres.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Ueno’s avenues of cherry-trees are pink with flowers, when the
+stalls beneath the trees are full of flower hairpins, then Tokyo
+through its gardens and its roadways blushes too, for the whole
+city is planted thick with cherry-trees. Not only on the river bank,
+where the long two-mile avenue of Mukojima is a perpetual _fête_, but
+everywhere, in private gardens and in public streets, the delicate,
+pale pink blossoms on their brown leafless branches catch the sunshine
+and the showers, and fall as little rosy clouds from heaven on to the
+ground beneath. For Tokyo is a city holding the country in its lap. Not
+an artificial bedded-out country, stiff as a Versailles park, but the
+real wayward country, though tended with a loving, understanding care.
+
+And Tokyo is a city brimful of flowers. Between the cherry-trees of
+April and the chrysanthemums of November most of the flowers can be
+seen within the city in temple courts or nursery gardens or public
+parks. The lake of the lotus at Ueno is famous through Japan, and in
+the temple of Kameido grow the age-old wistarias.
+
+Trained on horizontal trellis work, their long pale tassels hang down
+towards the water, stirring with each breeze. The trailing clusters
+of the flowers grow four feet long sometimes, and droop towards the
+surface of the lake in thick swaying pendants of pure colour. Behind
+these living curtains, in a twilight of pale mauve or soft white light,
+on the edge of the pond whose shape spells “heart,” sometimes afloat on
+the pond itself, the tables of the _chaya_ stand, and those who make
+holiday because the flowers are blooming, all Tokyo, sit and look,
+drinking wee bowls of pale green tea, or writing poems to the flowers.
+
+On the waters of this lake of the letter “heart” float the pale mauve
+petals and the petals of pure white, which fall and drift and sink,
+and fall and drift and sink, until the waters are hidden with flower
+flakes and the wistaria is over and gone.
+
+Kameido lies on the far bank of the Sumidagawa, in a network of poor
+streets, for the left bank of the river, like the big island at its
+mouth, is denser with yards and factories than is the right. The
+streets are narrower, fuller of children and the noise of hammers and
+of wheels. Yet in this poor wage-working quarter the festivals of the
+plum-blossoms, the wistaria, and the peony are held.
+
+In all Japan there is no other flower _fête_ which in the least
+resembles a horticultural show except that of _Botan_, the tree-peony.
+For when the peony blooms, the little trees, large as dwarf
+rose-bushes, are placed on tiers inside a matted tent. There the
+resemblance ends. These plants are set each in a framework of space,
+and the colours are grouped and blended with the thought and the
+instinct of an artist.
+
+The flowers of the peony are as large as the largest chrysanthemum,
+larger than ours, but their petals are rich, made of satin where ours
+are of cotton, delicate, fragile, and sheeny. The colouring is soft and
+subdued, and the faint sweet scent which comes from them is like the
+dream of a rose. The colours are simple, white warming to cream, paling
+to snow, and all the tints of pale reds, deep reds, and crimsons.
+
+The matting which covers them is of pale yellow, but somehow the
+light, as it comes through it, touched perhaps by the flowers, is the
+light of a dream--as sunlight without heat, as moonlight warmed and
+living, a light that shimmers, holding colour fast within, yet fast
+asleep. To-day the light in that peony tent at Kameido remains to me
+as definite as the flowers, as distinct as the scent, as real and, in
+truth, more beautiful. It was as though one saw the radiance of an
+unknown, unmade jewel, light but not yet substance.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All this left bank of the river from Fukagawa to Eko-in is full of
+workmen and workshops, of small trades and smaller traders, and here
+in the month of May in the grounds of the temple raised to the memory
+of the hundred thousand citizens killed in the great fire of 1657, the
+yearly wrestling contests are held. The _Smō_, tall, broad, powerful
+men, many six feet high or more, who dress in large checked _kimono_
+and wear their hair in the old-fashioned top-knot, are adored by the
+populace who come in thousands to see them.
+
+The little round platform of stamped earth sprinkled with sand, set in
+the midst of a huge amphitheatre of faces, shows small as a raft on the
+sea, and slight despite its purple trapping. The crowd, a Tokyo crowd
+in _kimono_ and foreign head-gear, cap, bowler, and felt hat, sit from
+morning until night, day in day out, for the three long weeks of the
+wrestling matches.
+
+The wrestlers stand, knees bent, body horizontal, their out stretched
+hands almost touching the ground, and grip. And the bout is long
+because the grip must be accepted by both of them, and because between
+each false grip the two retire slowly to their respective sides and
+wash out their mouths with tea. This may be repeated a dozen, twenty
+times, but when the real grip comes, then the action can be swift as
+lightning; the opponent forced beyond the straw rope which lies upon
+the sanded earth of the ring, before one realises that the wrestle has
+begun, or pushed down over it with the slow resistless force of flowing
+water, or the two may sway about interminably before one is beaten.
+
+Bulk is not the one ideal of the wrestler, the young and strong rely on
+their activity; it is only when a man is getting older that he weights
+himself with fat, that his bulk and heaviness may prove too great for
+his opponent easily to push over. The wrestlers all wear waistbands and
+stiff fringes of blue silk, and the rippling of the muscles beneath
+their golden brown skin is such a joy as the Greek nation knew at the
+time of the Olympiads.
+
+A man with a fan, an average-sized Japanese who hardly comes above
+the elbows of some of the wrestlers acts as starter, as umpire, and
+as referee, and the sharp s-s-sh of his shutting fan can be heard
+distinctly in the silence of the amphitheatre. The judges, four old
+tried wrestlers, sit under purple hangings and decide disputed points,
+while half the front tier is reserved for the _Smō_ themselves.
+
+But to the non-Japanese it is not the wrestlers but the spectators
+who are the centre of interest. Here gathered together within the
+amphitheatre, concentrated on one thought, absorbed, therefore natural,
+sit samples of all Tokyo. For the _Smō_, like our prize fight of last
+century, is beloved by the populace and patronised by the aristocracy.
+Every one takes some sort of interest in it, and results are as widely
+known as the Derby or a test match. The crowd, a crowd of men and
+boys,--for the fathers bring their little sons with them,--knows, as
+well as the umpire himself, the forty-eight falls, the twelve lifts,
+the twelve throws, the twelve twists, the twelve throws over the
+back, alone allowed the Japanese wrestler. The excitement at disputed
+points is intense, the whole amphitheatre arguing with its neighbour.
+The enthusiasm at a brilliant, a quick, or a well-contested throw
+is intoxicating. Spectators will rise in their seats and throw down
+presents, tobacco-pouches, purses, hats, or other property, which the
+owner redeems next morning in money.
+
+The _Smō_ are the idols of the street boys, and tall, huge,
+unintelligent, in gaudy _kimono_ and well-oiled top-knots, they stride
+through the Tokyo streets haughty, and sometimes overbearing.
+
+We think of the Japanese as unalterably small, yet here is a class,
+bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh, who are huge, strong,
+large-framed men, taller than the tall races of the north. They are
+another and a living contradiction of the imaginary minisculism of
+the nation. If the Japanese desire to produce big things, in war, in
+statues, or in men, they take thought, they take care; much thought,
+infinite care, and somehow it is done.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So Tokyo wrestles, works and plays, and this left bank of the river
+toils and lives hard. Across the water Tsukiji, secluded in its
+“foreign” residences, dwells genteel, and gossips. The Ginza shops. The
+suburbs far within the circle of the streets grow hedged-in gardens and
+long avenues of trees, where the houses lie unseen. The schools, the
+training colleges, and the university, a cityful of students study, and
+boys in cotton _hakama_ and dark-peaked soldiers’ caps walk through the
+streets--boys who are passing from the indulged childhood of Japan to
+the iron self-control of manhood.
+
+There is apparent in their ways and manners a touch of self-assertiveness,
+a touch of almost self-conceit, which at no other time in their own
+lives, and at no time at all in any other member of the community, will
+ever be observable. It is but a touch, and would pass unseen in any other
+land, in any other setting; here it stands out palpable. A little hard
+these boys look and very earnest. They will strike work if they think a
+teacher is not competent to teach, so bent are they on learning. They
+seem to have accepted school as the modern training of the _samurai_,
+and to study in that spirit.
+
+The scholarship boys at Government Colleges work harder still and on
+the narrowest of means. They can afford so little for their board that
+one whole college gave up playing base-ball in its recreation hour
+because “it made them too hungry.”
+
+And at the University, where the students matriculate at twenty and
+stay till twenty-four and five, for beside their own learning, beside
+the ten thousand Chinese symbols and all the philosophy of the East,
+they must to-day add the learning of the West, the languages of Europe,
+the laws, the sciences, and the arts of another civilisation and of
+an alien race, at the University the students live lives of hardest
+brainwork and rigidest economy. Many spend their evenings in earning
+the money that buys their day. Some deliver newspapers and sleep in
+the porches of “foreign” houses. Many die of consumption, brought on
+by over-work and under-feeding. Across the river the hammers ring,
+the wheels whir round, the hum of a people’s toil sounds in all ears.
+Here within the girdle of the streets, between the factories and the
+palace is a work doing, silent, less perceptible but harder, higher and
+undertaken for that end.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Between the hard work of hand and brain Ginza and Nihon-bashi shop,
+and at night the wire-drawn twang of the _samisen_ comes from the
+lighted restaurants. Restaurants where each diner or each party
+occupies a separate room, and _geisha_ girls are sent for to
+entertain the guests, with puns and games, with polite conversations
+and endless repartee. They sit on the kneeling cushions throughout
+the meal pouring _saké_--and amuse. Then they dance. Posturing and
+swaying to an accompaniment of _samisen_ and song they glide over
+the matting always graceful, always reserved. The quality of their
+dancing rings passionless, dainty, graceful, not cold but controlled.
+An air of serenity surrounds them. They are not trained to the duties
+of womanhood, but to its heaviest burden--pleasing. The licensed
+playthings of the nation, toys to amuse, they reach up to their
+limited, low-scaled destiny, through the perpetual sacrifice of self;
+and the national self-control encases them, so much their very own that
+few perceive it. With very different fates and from very different
+motives there is about them, as they dance, something of the charm and
+of the aloofness of Andersen’s mermaiden; and if their steps too are as
+steps upon a sword, they, too, will smile untroubled.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So the city strives and pleasures, so the city learns and toils. Full
+and full of life the streets, quiet and very still the heart. The nine
+tall hills from Shiba to Ueno make a crescent round the moat, the brown
+streets lie without, the Mikado dwells within. Born as a camp Yedo made
+its ruler’s seat its centre, its nobles’ _yashiki_ an enclosing wall;
+and then beyond, out of sight and sound, the necessary, unimportant
+commonfolk had leave to work and sell. Tokyo to-day is still as Yedo
+was. _Yashiki_ are pulled down, their ground is sold, but parliaments
+and embassies, nobles’ houses and their gardens, still make a circle
+round the palace, a space of suburb and of peace between the city and
+its centre.
+
+Over the streets and the roadways, through parks and gardens, the
+black-winged crows sail past cynical, unbelieving. The web of brown
+canals beneath their high-arched bridges, the broad uncertain river
+sometimes slowly, sometimes fiercely, all flow towards the sea. The
+land-locked ocean, and the pale green rice-fields ripple round the
+streets. From sixty miles across the plain great Fuji looks towards the
+capital.
+
+And here in Tokyo’s heart, in _Dai Nippon’s_ heart of hearts, not the
+usurping _shōgun_ or general in his camp, but _Tenshisama_, Son of
+Heaven, bestower of a western constitution, augustly dwells.
+
+
+
+
+                                  II
+
+                             EAST AND WEST
+
+
+                                 EAST
+
+The large red building covered all over with Chinese characters--a
+white sign on each cardboard square of red--overlooks the canal. It
+seems too gaudy and unsubstantial a building for sober work, and yet
+all day long multitudes of dark-blue coolies, like Florentine noblemen
+run to seed, go in and out. Fantastic key patterns in white are traced
+upon the skirts of their blue tunics, while on each back is a large red
+circle covered with the hieroglyph of the building. They may earn some
+6_d._ a day for twelve long working hours.
+
+From among the pale straw-coloured bales emerge two workmen. There are
+patches in their dark-blue hose, and the brown toes stick out through
+the blue of their divided socks. Even the blue designs on the white
+towels around their heads have faded away with much washing.
+
+Catching sight of one another they bow low. A step nearer, and the
+jaunty ends of white towel tied in a knot on the forehead of one man,
+touch his knee.
+
+The other, whose towel is tied like a night-cap round his head and
+under his chin, bends lower still.
+
+Another step, and the indrawn whistles of politeness grow loud and
+shrill.
+
+Another, and the white towels disappear entirely between the blue legs.
+
+Then the night-capped one straightens himself and speaks:
+
+“_Shitsurei de gozaimas ga, chotto hi o kashte kudasai_” (“Although
+this is great rudeness on my part,” he says, “would you condescend to
+lend me a match.”)
+
+
+                                 WEST
+
+Between two rows of slovenly houses a long grey street stretches away,
+wet and grimy. There is just one break in the grey monotony where the
+gin palace stands in all its gilt and plate-glass splendour.
+
+Coming up the street are two workmen. The billycock hats on their heads
+have lost their brim, and show more dirty stain than original black. As
+they catch sight of one another across the street they pause.
+
+Suddenly one removes the clay pipe from his lips and spits profusely.
+The other eyes him, his hands in his pockets; then he too takes the
+short pipe from between his lips, and jerking his head in the direction
+of the public house, slowly puts out his tongue.
+
+The first billycock replaces his pipe with care, crosses the road, and
+with a sanguinary word they both disappear within the doors of the gin
+palace.
+
+
+
+
+                                  III
+
+                              YONÉ’S BABY
+
+
+It lay on the matted floor, a little brown thing that cried, and Yoné
+sat on her heels and looked at it.
+
+Huddled over the brazier in the corner, her skinny hands stretched
+out to clutch the warmth from the sticks of glowing charcoal, the old
+grandmother dozed and grumbled.
+
+And Yoné did not move. The _Ijin San_ for whom she worked had told
+her she ought to take care of her dead daughter’s child and bring it
+up; but Yoné’s conscience, the conscience of her race, the inherited
+upbringing of her dead fathers, made her instinctively turn towards the
+_O Bā San_ in the corner. She could not feed two mouths. Life was hard
+for Yoné; and the _O Bā San_ had a good appetite though she was so old.
+
+So Yoné sat on her heels and sullenly listened to the quavering wail
+without moving.
+
+“If the gods wanted the child to live, why had they let its mother die?
+Why had its father divorced the little wife ‘for temper’ before the
+baby was born? It was Fate. And after all the baby was very small and
+ugly, a little, cross sickly thing that cried. No, it had much better
+die, much better.”
+
+And Yoné got up, and went to get ready the evening rice for the _O Bā
+San_. As she did so the shadow of the _Ijin San_ herself fell across
+the floor, and her voice, in very English Japanese, asked after the
+baby. Yoné was down on her knees in a moment, drawing in her breath
+through her teeth in long whistles of politeness.
+
+“The baby was not well, as the _Ijin San_ could see. It did nothing but
+cry; and after all what was the use? It had much better die.”
+
+The _Ijin San_ sat down on the little platform, the _shōji_ pushed back
+between her and the room, in consternation. After all she had said the
+day before, all she had urged, Yoné still clung to that awful idea. The
+_Ijin San_ had a shrewd suspicion that the old lady in the corner had
+something to do with Yoné’s idea “it was better baby die.” It would
+be quite easy for “baby to die” too, and that without much active
+doing on Yoné’s part. So she sat there perplexed, the baby cuddled up
+in her arms. Moral persuasions she had tried, and appeals to Yoné’s
+conscience, her love for her dead daughter, her duty--all in vain. And
+she looked down at the queer little atom in its bright red _kimono_,
+with the wide flapping sleeves, wondering whether it would look quite
+so odd dressed like other babies, her own for instance, and she smiled.
+It was a last chance any way.
+
+“Yoné,” she said, holding up the baby. “How would you like to see him
+dressed like the _Bot’chan_.”
+
+“Hē,” cried Yoné, turning round, her vanity awake in a moment.
+
+“Well, if you’ll take care of him, I’ll dress him in foreign clothes,
+and he’ll look just like the _Bot’chan_.”
+
+Yoné’s strangled “h’s” of admiration grew deeper and deeper. Her
+admiration for the _Ijin San’s Bot’chan_ knew no bounds; and then
+the pride of having a foreign-dressed baby of her own! Why, not one
+of her acquaintances, not even the rich _saké_ merchant at the corner,
+dressed their children “foreign fashion.” It was a height beyond their
+ambition, a dizzy pinnacle only reached by the _samurai_ and the Court!
+And Yoné’s strangled “h’s” of admiration and her indrawn whistles of
+politeness knew no bounds. Even the _O Bā San_ in the corner turned her
+head round and showed some signs of interest. And the baby stopped its
+feeble cry and lay back on the _Ijin San’s_ lap--and smiled.
+
+With a sudden swoop Yoné caught it up. “I take care, I take care,” she
+said, “let the _Ijin San_ bring the clothes.”
+
+And from that day she went about her work with the quaintest little
+brown morsel in a foreign pelisse and a white bonnet nodding over her
+shoulder. And neither the _O Bā San_ nor the baby ever went hungry
+whatever Yoné might do.
+
+
+
+
+                                  IV
+
+                        THE GRAVES OF THE RŌNIN
+
+
+The white wing of a blossoming plum-tree casts a pale shadow across the
+pebbled steps of the causeway, and the spring sunshine is warm. Behind,
+under the great gate of the temple, is a stall with souvenir tea-bowls
+of the _Forty-Seven Rōnin_ and the red blankets of a tiny _chaya_. In
+front, at the end of the causeway, stands a Japanese father with his
+little son, buying bundles of incense sticks from the Buddhist sexton.
+Coming up the path are two peasants with bare, brown legs, one wearing
+the old-fashioned gunhammer top-knot. And the plum-tree, its scent warm
+and fragrant, lies a white wing above the path.
+
+The Japanese father, _samurai_ from his face, and modern by his
+clothes, and his son have passed into the graveyard before us. But we
+all stand together in the little square garden on the side of the hill,
+with its thickly clustered tombstones, shaped like Moses’ Tables of the
+Law in the Child’s Bible, set in the flat brown earth.
+
+Below, a sharply falling line of dark green shrubs; above, the
+overhanging trees of the hillside; and the garden is quiet and still,
+with a little chill of damp and death that sobers and subdues.
+
+Before each stone tablet on the earthen path are bamboo vases filled
+with freshly cut branches of evergreens, and the burning incense sticks
+trail a thin scarf of smoke along the ground.
+
+The two old peasants are busy sticking their thin, brown incense tapers
+into the little heaps of grey ash--to become grey ashes in their turn.
+The little son has already lit his before the tomb of Oishi Kuranosuké;
+and the father, gravely feeling in the pocket of his “foreign” coat,
+takes out a visiting-card, and lays it reverently among the pile of
+others on the grave.
+
+Then they go away slowly. And I catch the names of Asano Takumi no Kami
+and Kira Kōtsuké no Suké, and I know that the little son is listening
+to the story of the _Forty-Seven Rōnin_.
+
+For two hundred years now they have come up the pebbled pathway into
+the graveyard, country peasant and Tokyo gentlemen coming with incense
+sticks and flowering branches, to keep green the memory of the loyal
+retainers who died to revenge their lord: coming in _kimono_ and
+top-knot: still coming in foreign clothes and _shappo_, for the old
+spirit lives though the outer form is changing. The fierce unswerving
+loyalty, the utter self-sacrifice, the tenacity and strength of the
+_Forty-Seven Rōnin_ still stir the soul of the modern Japanese under
+their foreign envelope as it stirred the heart of those fierce old
+_samurai_, with their hands ever on the hilt of their long two-handed
+swords.
+
+“Thou shalt not live under the same heaven nor tread the same earth as
+the enemy of thy father or thy master,” says the Scripture. And the
+Forty-Seven died, and more than died, to fulfil the commandment.
+
+In the temple below their wooden effigies stand to this day. Among them
+are old men and young boys--one with the grey locks of seventy-seven,
+one with the boyish cheeks of seventeen--but neither the old man nor
+the young boy faltered, through all the long months of waiting, in the
+dangerous moment of the struggle or after. They plotted and endured;
+they fought and slew; they brought the bloody head of Kira Kōtsuké no
+Suké, washed in the well beyond the plum-tree, here to the grave of
+their dead lord; they gave themselves up to Justice; they carried out
+the sentence of death on their own bodies with their own hands--all
+with the same quiet self-control which only the sense of a supreme,
+absorbing duty can produce.
+
+And the Forty-Seven were buried here, in the quiet cold graveyard,
+beside the body of their lord. And when they had been laid to rest
+there came a fierce two-sworded _samurai_ to the little garden, and,
+kneeling down in front of the tomb of Oishi Kuranosuké, he took his
+dirk from his belt and stabbed himself above the grave. For he had
+insulted Oishi Kuranosuké, in the long months of the waiting, thinking
+he had forgotten his lord.
+
+So they buried him among the Forty-Seven, and before his tomb are
+flowering branches and burning incense tapers.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The two old peasants are gone, but the sound of coming steps is on the
+pebbled pathway.
+
+It is the feet of the nation. They come to keep their age long watch
+above the graves of the Loyal _Rōnin_.
+
+
+
+
+                                   V
+
+                          THE DOLLS’ FESTIVAL
+
+
+Enshrined in their white wooden boxes the dolls look down; and the
+gently drifting crowd stare their fill.
+
+It is the eve of the Dolls’ Festival, and for a hundred yards along the
+wide _Odōri_, the street is wreathed across and across with swaying
+lines of paper lanterns.
+
+On each matted floor, raised knee-high from the ground, a shopman sits
+on his heels, his hands eternally stretched out over the charcoal fire
+of the _hibachi_.
+
+The background of dolls on three sides of him seem as interested in
+their sale as he. The crowd drifts, talks, points, looks, but he sits
+still, absorbed in his occupation. Occasionally he will turn a languid
+head over one shoulder in the direction of an inquiring voice, and
+tranquilly name a price four times bigger than he expects to get;
+but unless the customer pursues the bargain with vigour he does not
+stir. Even then, all the talking is done without moving more than a
+head. And when the culminating point arrives at which the would-be
+buyer shakes the dust off his feet and makes vigorously for the next
+shop, he murmurs an impassive “_Yoroshī_” (“All right”), and warms
+another finger, while a boy in the background, who for ever dusts the
+stock-in-trade, does up the parcel and takes the money.
+
+I wonder--would anything stir this _blasé_ image of indifference?
+
+Perhaps if a fool or a foreigner, interchangeable terms in the East,
+paid the price he asked he might----. No, “_Yoroshī, yoroshī_,”
+he murmurs, and does not interrupt the warming of his hands by a
+finger’s-breadth.
+
+For ten long days now the dolls, all in the quaint robes of old,
+have looked down on the gently drifting crowd, emperor and empress,
+lords and ladies, and court musicians. The red silk trousers and
+the flowing hair, the cut-glass chandelier-like head-dress and the
+wide, wide sleeved _kimono_; the court lady leading her lap-dog; the
+musicians with their instruments; and along the lower shelves, the long
+procession of lacquered bowls, and tables and furniture, the old, old
+shapes of Old Japan, the realities buried for ever in museums, and only
+these, their midget substitutes, enjoying a brief life once a year.
+
+They are so neat and pretty, of such exquisite workmanship and finish,
+that I stay to look and look. Behind me the crowd closes in thicker
+and thicker, looking too--but at me; so thickly that they obstruct the
+rails of Tokyo’s main tramway, and cause it much embarrassment.
+
+To-morrow is the Dolls’ Festival, and all the world is buying; I, too,
+would like to buy. So I sit still on the edge of the matted floor
+and watch. I shall learn what I ought to give and how to conduct the
+intricate matter of a purchase. But though they were here before me,
+and though they stay long after me, and though I wait with what I
+consider quite Oriental patience, they do not buy, not one of them,
+they only talk. So I am compelled to conduct my own purchase without
+the aid of native example, and to the certain advantage of the
+impassive shopman.
+
+Does any one ever buy anything in Tokyo?
+
+In all my many wanderings I have never seen them, patiently as I have
+stalked them. They are always just going--just going--just going----
+
+Perhaps that is why the impassive shopmen are so impassive.
+
+
+
+
+                                  VI
+
+                         WITH DEATH BESIDE HER
+
+
+“_Go-han wa skoshi mo arimasen_” (“Not another grain of rice, not a
+grain”). And O Matsu sat back on her heels, the lid of the wooden rice
+saucepan clutched in her hand.
+
+“_Skoshi mo arimasen._” And the grey head, with its cropped hair
+gathered into a slide behind, bent despairingly over the saucepan.
+
+The _O hachi_ was quite empty, O Matsu had eaten the last grain
+yesterday; she knew that quite well, but the trembling old fingers went
+on feeling round and round the bare sides of the saucepan, for she was
+very hungry. All through the long months of the rice famine O Matsu had
+managed somehow. To-day the empty _O hachi_ lay on the ground while O
+Matsu sat staring slowly into it. Then Death stared back at her, and
+she knew it.
+
+With a trembling little movement she got on to her feet and moved
+across the matted floor into the _zashki_. The sun was shining on the
+rice-paper panes of the _shōji_, and she pushed them back and stood out
+on the little platform of polished wood, trying to warm herself; but
+the piercing winter wind made her blackened teeth chatter, and she came
+in again. In the _hibachi_ the grey ashes were dead and cold, the last
+stick of charcoal had boiled the water for her tea last night. There
+was neither fire nor food. O Matsu stood still watching, while Death
+and his Shadow grew, as a ghost in the twilight.
+
+Slowly the familiar walls, the matted floor, the half-opened _shōji_
+insisted that the house was yet unswept, the first duty of a housewife
+still undone; and with a painful effort O Matsu went and fetched the
+bamboo broom that swept the matting, and the damp cloth to polish the
+platform. The broom felt heavy to the weak old hands, and the task of
+polishing the platform almost beyond her strength; so she worked on
+slowly, stopping often, for hunger made her faint, but always going on
+again. At last, _zashki_ and platform finished, she crept back into the
+kitchen, longing to rest. The empty _O hachi_ lay on the floor. She
+made a great effort, and, picking it up, carried it outside to scrub,
+for cleanliness is a supreme duty in Japan.
+
+When she came back she put the freshly scrubbed _O hachi_ in its place.
+Then she sat down. There was nothing more to do. The house was as clean
+as a house could be. O Matsu was inexpressibly weary, and the desire
+for food was almost beyond control. Instinctively she wandered back to
+the empty _O hachi_ and took off the lid. The copper bands, dim and
+splashed with the washing, caught her eye. It seemed to her the hardest
+thing of all her life to go and fetch her little cloth and sit down to
+polish them, but she did it. And Death and his Shadow sat down at her
+side.
+
+Somehow as she rubbed, two tears gathered in the dim old eyes, and
+rolled down the withered cheeks. O Matsu dropped the cloth, and holding
+the long sleeve of her _kimono_ before her face, sat still and wept.
+
+There is nothing in all the world so lonely as a Japanese woman without
+husband or children. She has no claim on her own family, and little on
+her husband’s; and in a land where the children, once grown up, provide
+for their parents, what can a childless widowed old woman do?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sun moved round the house, and O Matsu still sat in her kitchen
+rubbing softly at the copper bands of the saucepan. And death, in
+infinite pity, laid his hand upon her head, and his Shadow vanished.
+
+“_O meshi wa skoshi mo arimasen_,” she said. And the shaven old
+eyebrows puckered themselves together. “_Skoshi mo arimasen._” And the
+bent little figure went on rubbing.
+
+When the policeman came in the grey dawn of the morning, surprised that
+the _amado_ were not drawn, he found O Matsu, the polished copper bands
+of the _O hachi_ glittering in her lap--quite dead.
+
+
+
+
+                                  VII
+
+                            KYOTO’S SOIRÉE
+
+
+Midnight and yet as hot as mid-day. Over our heads the velvet darkness
+lay as a visible lid above the streets, warm and still. Not a breath of
+air was stirring from one end of Kyoto to the other; the city seemed a
+vast dark house with all its windows shut. Only the rapid running of the
+_kurumaya_ produced the slightest breeze, and that was but the fanning
+of a heated ballroom; and when it stopped the hot still air settled down
+hotter, stiller, than before.
+
+We had reached the bank of the river, the bridge and Theatre Street lay
+beyond; and, as suddenly as one opens a door in a dark passage, we were
+there, inside, in the press and the noise, the lights and the crowd of
+Kyoto’s nightly _soirée_.
+
+Restaurants and hairpin stalls, _geisha_ booths and theatres, the
+interesting show of the two-headed fish, or the tragic story of
+the _Forty-seven Rōnin_, embroideries, and _bīru_, jugglers and
+phonographs, cheap stalls for the sale of shaved ice and sugar syrup,
+elegant restaurants with fish dinners; dancing-booths at two _sen_ a
+head, where white-painted _geisha_ girls continually sang four notes
+and assumed four postures, and sang the same four notes and repeated
+the same four postures to a tightly packed audience sitting on its
+heels, silent but appreciative; and all, restaurants, booths, theatres,
+stalls, blazed with lights and posters, deafened with the banging of
+big drums and the invitations of the proprietors, reeked with the smell
+of burning tallow, the fragrance of boiling tea, the scent of crushed
+geranium, the odour of an eastern summer’s night and of the press of
+clean-washed, hot humanity.
+
+Along the street, inside the stalls and out, the crowd was dense,
+cheerful, polite and contented. There was no pushing, no ill-humour,
+no fights, no drunkenness, nor one policeman. The people of Kyoto were
+enjoying themselves like well-bred guests in a ballroom, with the
+courtesy of self-control, and the self-abandoned pleasure of a child.
+The road with its shifting crowd, and the two long lines of brightly
+lighted buildings, covered with paper lanterns and cotton banners on
+bamboo poles, looked more like a “set” in a theatre than real houses
+in an out-of-doors street. Not a candle-flame quivered, not a banner
+stirred, and the long perspective of the arched bridge was still as a
+painted background.
+
+Down in the river, in the actual bed of the stream, were more lights,
+whole crowded restaurants afloat. Sitting on the tops of tables,
+whose four legs driven down into the sand brought them within six
+inches of the water, supper parties innumerable ate and talked;
+while the children, slipping off their _gheta_, paddled their feet
+in the stream. Even the little waitresses, as they ran from customer
+to customer, would leave the long polished gangways that led from
+tea-house to table, and take the shorter way through the water. Every
+one was eating, and every one was happy--shaved ice with sugar syrup,
+at two _sen_ a glass, or dishes of brown eels and rice at two _yen_,
+gratuitous tea or _bīru_ in thirty-_sen_ bottles. And with the summer
+night above, the water all around, the hundreds and hundreds of little
+tables floated on the water bright with _kimono_ and lanterns. The
+broad shallow backwater either side the bridge was full of them, and
+the gentle rushing of the actual river beyond the circle of bright
+light lent a sense of freshness to the shadows that they did not in
+themselves possess.
+
+Up on the bridge the crowd grew thicker, Theatre Street more full; the
+hairpin stalls were surrounded with women and little girls, buying
+long hairpins carved at the end, or ornamented with silk lanterns or
+flowers, or ingenious designs of tortoises made of shells, with legs
+that quivered realistically. And the velvet blackness lying above the
+streets and beyond the river was warm to feel.
+
+Suddenly, as when one throws a stone into the water, the crowd surged
+forwards, then rippled slowly back; half a dozen white-uniformed
+policemen, with the distinctive, distinguished face of the _samurai_,
+were coming over the bridge, driving the people before them, back
+and back. The confused noise of indistinct shouting filled the air.
+Suddenly on to the bridge came running in a sort of jog-trot a crowd of
+bareheaded men, their short white tunics hardly reaching to the thigh
+and their brown legs naked beneath, all tugging and straining at a huge
+unwieldy car, which moved in jerks on its wheels of solid wood. On
+each side ran bands of men brandishing flaming torches in their hands,
+while priests in gorgeous apparel came behind. And priests and people,
+torch-bearers and car-pullers, were chanting as they ran, a fierce, wild
+cry, which went on and on. The car-pullers swayed from side to side,
+tossing their hands above their heads, the torch-bearers rocked, sending
+great flaming fragments among the crowd, and we all stood pressed
+together, shrinking back from the burning torches, and the feet of the
+car-pullers, singed here, trampled there, in one sweating mass of hot
+humanity.
+
+In the middle of the bridge the car stood still. The men in white
+tunics moved restlessly on their feet, straining at the cords; the
+torch-bearers chanted louder, tossing their torches in the air; the
+priests hurried to the front, and stood gesticulating while the wild,
+monotonous cry, gathering fierceness and frenzy from its very monotony,
+thundered and roared. Then with a sudden swirl the car turned round,
+and torch-bearers, car-pullers and priests were rushing back again to
+the same fierce wild cry, the same frenzied swaying of the bodies, and
+the same mad tossing of the arms. The sacred procession had come, was
+gone.
+
+Slowly the crowd rippled back, on over the bridge, back down the
+street, the policemen disappeared, the drums of the _geisha_ booths and
+the invitations of the stall-owners rang out again. Down on the surface
+of the river the floating tables grew fuller and fuller.
+
+Kyoto’s nightly _soirée_ was at its height.
+
+
+
+
+                                 VIII
+
+                                  NŌ
+
+
+A room whose sloping floor is cut into chess-board squares; each square
+flat and matted, so that the back is twelve inches high and level
+with the front of the square above; a bare still wooden room long and
+crowded. Each matted square thick with kneeling men and women, the
+long-headed aquiline faces of the nobles and the _samurai_. At the
+end a platform with an opening vaguely leading from it. No scenery,
+no footlights, no curtain. It is the theatre for the performance of
+the _Nō_. Those sacred old world plays written many hundred years
+ago, acted by _samurai_ for _samurai_, the religious mysteries and
+moralities of Japan.
+
+In the West the theatre long ago shook off, escaped, forgot the Church.
+Here the elder child, the mother rather, still lives by the side of
+her offspring, and lives unchanged. The _Nō_ to-day is as the _Nō_ of
+five hundred years ago, the _Nō_ which grew out of the sacred dances
+of an immemorable antiquity. Like the drama of the Greeks it has its
+choruses, its chants, its unities, its one or two actors masked,
+richly dressed, impressive, who move with a religious solemnity, and
+speak as voices, not as men. Its plays, too, are drawn from sacred
+legend, from the mythology of Shintō deities, from the mysteries of
+the Buddhist faith, and from the fairy tales of the race. Over it all
+there is a glamour as of a stolen glimpse into the buried past. To-day
+its language is archaic, but preserved by constant repetition, handed
+down from father to son in the families of nobles who, since _Nō_ first
+began, have played in _Nō_, it remains the language and the speech of
+those dead Japanese, who towards the fourteenth century organised the
+_Nō_.
+
+The chant is strange and piercing, its very notes and phrases are
+outside of all that we consider music, as unfamiliar as the speech of
+insects, or the song of the remotest fathers of mankind. It echoes like
+a voice from out the long dead worlds, piercing yet remote, and the
+_tink_ of pipes dies out. There falls a stillness in the room.
+
+It is the afternoon of the last day of the Iidamachi _Nō_. As in
+the theatres of Greece the plays, each of which lasts about two
+hours, are given one after another throughout the whole day, while
+between them comes the _Kiogen_ (mad words), or _folies dramatiques_,
+farce-like, Greek-like comedies, shorter even than the _Nō_. Many of
+the spectators have been here since the morning, and on the matting of
+the shallow square boxes are lacquered trays of food, on all teapots
+and tobacco-stands; others come to see a special play or so and go away
+again; but to one and all it is not an amusement, it is a study, a
+homage paid to the past, a rite.
+
+As the first notes of the strange piercing chant wail down the room,
+the pipes and cigarettes go out, the tiny tea-bowls are set down, and a
+silence falls.
+
+The actors, in their rich brocaded robes of a make and texture of
+a long dead past, come slowly through the passage-way on to the
+platform. Their masks are made of lacquer, and they speak in a slow
+nasal deep voice that seems to come from the very back of their
+throats. They speak with every muscle strained and taut. It sounds
+almost as outside of speech as the chant is outside of music, and
+they move in strange long strides. Such movements are not merely for
+artistic effect, nor to mark agitation, or to reproduce nature; they
+are often used to mark the passing of a period of time.
+
+For all its stiffness and its rigour, its archaic make-believes, its
+unnatural realities, there is an intensity and a thrill in it as of a
+living thing that matters. The strange music of the tambourine-like
+instruments, the thin wailing of the bamboo flute, the beating of
+the one small drum, shaped like an hour-glass with three supporting
+pillars, breaks in again and again upon the intoned speech of the
+actors with its repeated irregular cadences in notes outside of speech.
+And the long-robed figures, masked and rigid, stalk slowly across
+the stage; and the chant of the chorus, as in the plays of Greece,
+explains, comments, describes the action.
+
+It is the story of the fisherman who found an angel’s robe of feathers
+on a tree, and would not give it back though the angel begged and
+begged. Without it she cannot reach her home in the blue of the heavens
+above, and for a heavenly spirit to stay for long on earth means death.
+Already the chorus is chanting her dirge when the fisherman, seeing her
+beauty fading and her life ebbing fast, relents. He will give back the
+robe if she will dance for him. She promises, but implores first her
+robe that the dance may be more perfect. The fisherman fears she will
+deceive him and fly back to heaven at once. But the spirit turns upon
+him.
+
+“Fie on thee, fisherman,” she cries, “deception was born of man; the
+high heavens know not of it.”
+
+And, touched, he gives back the robe. She dances, while the chorus
+sings the beauties of the landscape, of Japan. How
+
+      “Heaven has its joys, but there is beauty here,
+
+Here
+
+      Where the moon in bright unclouded glory
+      Shines on Kigomi’s lea.
+      And where on Fujiyama’s summit hoary
+      The snows look on the sea.”
+
+Even the angel would stay awhile in a land so beautiful.
+
+     “Blow, blow ye winds that the white cloud-belt driven
+      Around my path may bar my homeward way,
+      Not yet would I return to Heaven.”
+
+And still the angel dances, and the vision of Heaven descends upon
+earth. She sings,
+
+      “And from the cloudy spheres,
+      Chiming in unison the angels’ lutes,
+      Tabrets and cymbals, and sweet silv’ry flutes
+      Ring through the heav’n that glows with purple hues.”
+
+Then the voices fall away. And to the strange, tuneless music, whose
+notes are not our notes, the spirit dances on, round and round in
+gliding circles, with the slow, smooth movements of the sacred _Kagura_.
+
+      “Fragrant and fair--too fair for mortal eyes.”
+
+The chorus sings again. And gliding round and round in circles ever
+smoother, ever slower, the spirit passes from the platform and up the
+vague passage-way that leads to the green-room beyond.
+
+The fisherman starts. The play is ended. In long, stiff strides, so
+slow, so slow, that an appreciable space of time seems set around the
+movement of each muscle, the actor goes across the stage, up the vague
+passage-way, into the room beyond.
+
+It is five minutes before the last slow solemn stride takes him beyond
+our sight. Then hour-glass drum, the flute, the two tambourine-like
+instruments that wail, shake out their last weird tuneless tune. The
+chant of the chorus ends on a note that to us is a middle--and stops.
+
+My ears still wait the end of the phrase when the hush of intense
+silence dissolves. There is a rustle in each square shallow box, a
+lighting of tiny bronze pipes and cigarettes, a filling of tea-cups, a
+tapping of chopsticks.
+
+The _Nō_ is over.
+
+  NOTE.--In quoting from this _Nō_, “The Robe of Feathers,” I have
+  followed Mr. B. H. Chamberlain’s translation in “The Classical Poetry
+  of the Japanese.”
+
+
+
+
+                                  IX
+
+                        A JAPANESE BANK-HOLIDAY
+
+
+The bulletins grew longer, and all the world waited and watched.
+
+The Japanese papers were full of minute descriptions and hopeful
+prognostications. The cherry-trees were doing well; they were expected
+to bloom next week.
+
+Then came a cold wind and rain; “for flowers,” as the proverb says,
+“bring showers.” And the bulletins became paragraphs.
+
+But the sky grew blue again, and even the foreign papers broke through
+their Western disdain, and announced that “Marquis Itō had gone to
+Kyoto to see the cherry-trees.” Imagine the _Times_ gravely recording
+amongst its official intelligence that “Mr. Balfour had gone to
+Devonshire (not a third of the journey) to see the apple-blossoms”! But
+the Japanese are, of course, uncivilised!
+
+On Easter Monday the trees were out, and all the world with them.
+The two long miles of river-bank at Mukojima were crowded. The river
+itself was thick with _sampan_. And still all Tokyo pours itself out
+over the bridges, across the canals, out under the long double line of
+cherry-trees.
+
+The chrysanthemum may well be the Imperial crest; the cherry-tree is
+the national emblem, and its flowering a national _fête_--a Japanese
+Bank Holiday, with Mukojima for its Hampstead Heath.
+
+The two long miles of raised bank is a sea of heads, a second black
+river set between pale pink banks; and it washes slowly, undisturbedly
+onwards. Nobody pushes, nobody shouts, nobody calls rude remarks. And
+the blue-tuniced coolies, like Florentine noblemen out at elbows, with
+the work-a-day blue towel round their heads replaced by a pink one, the
+very shade of the cherry-blossoms above, say polite “_Go men nasai_”
+(“I beg your honourable pardon”) if in looking upwards they stumble
+against each other.
+
+The _kurumaya_ has drawn his wife and children to Mukojima, and they
+wander slowly under the trees, the little ones in their gay-coloured
+_kimono_, covered with the largest of large flowers. Even the little
+tonsured babies blink up at the pink wonder overhead from the warm
+pouch on their mother’s backs. And the old grandmothers, with their
+cropped grey heads and shaven eyebrows, tell how the cherry-trees were
+much finer when they were young. The little girls, with their hair
+oiled into lengths of black ribbons and tied in loops on the top of
+their heads; the young wife, with the wonderful whorls of the married
+woman’s coiffure; the bare-legged, blue-knickerbockered _’ricksha_ man;
+the schoolboys, with their striped cotton _hakama_; the fathers, in
+their grey _kimono_--all the working world, all the people are here.
+
+Below the level of the bank, raised high here, for the Sumidagawa,
+like all the rivers of Japan, is fierce in its floods, and set thick
+together, are the _chaya_. These range from the humblest little roofed
+shed, with its broad, low tables, like a series of large trays on dwarf
+legs, covered with coarse red blankets, to the superb tea-houses with
+their snow-white matted rooms, their painted _shōji_. And they are all
+full. The _kurumaya_ drinks his bowl of pale green tea, sitting on his
+heels on the red blanket. The little wife tries the immensely popular
+drink of _ramuné_ (lemonade) out of a doll’s tumbler. The coolie, with
+his festive pink towel, pours warm _saké_ from slim china vases into
+tiny china bowls, and the smile on his broad, bullet-headed face grows
+broader. For the _saké_ drinker, unlike Western drunkards, only becomes
+politer and politer, until the Japanese smile of courtesy broadens
+into a large, fixed, unending, amiable grin, and the _saké_ drunkard
+goes politely, though stumblingly, home to sleep. But of even _saké_
+drunkenness there is little, for the most part _o cha_ (honourable
+tea) and _o kashi_ (honourable cakes) content these uncivilised Bank
+Holiday-makers, who have come out to see--just the pink cherry-blossoms
+against the blue sky. And will go home again--content.
+
+On the river the red towels are perhaps more numerous, for all the
+fishermen, all the dock labourers, the whole riverside population of
+Tokyo have come in their _sampan_ to Mukojima. And they float past now,
+little and big, crowded with blue tunics or grey _kimono_. Some with
+an awning of paper lanterns, and all gay with flags and banners. And
+full as the river is with boats, and jammed together as they are under
+the bank, nobody shouts, nobody quarrels, nobody swears. A garden party
+at Windsor Castle might be better dressed, it could hardly be better
+behaved. Nor in the whole length of those two miles of crowded bank,
+with the line of _sampan_ on one side and the line of public-houses on
+the other--_sampan_, avenue, inns, all full to overflowing--are there
+three policemen. More, the trees, with their exquisite cloud of pink
+flowers, are within easy reach of a man’s arm, and nobody breaks them.
+The municipality of Tokyo has not even considered it necessary to affix
+a notice regarding the penalty for damaging trees. I should doubt if it
+had even thought to invent one.
+
+And yet the blossoms are beautiful enough to make a man’s heart long to
+possess them.
+
+“A little pink cloud of the sunset has caught in the bare branches of
+the cherry-tree.” And not all Western imagery can surpass the simile,
+for the pink is the pink of a cloud at sunset, and soft as the softest
+mist. When the wind stirs the trees, the blue sky seems scattering pink
+snowflakes to the ground.
+
+“What is the soul of Japan?” asked the poet. “It is the mountain
+cherry-tree in the morning sun.”
+
+But a soul so simple, the civilised nations, of course, disdain!
+
+
+
+
+                                   X
+
+                    THE PALACE OF THE SON OF HEAVEN
+
+
+Kyoto is a city of immense distances where the brown earth streets, set
+in between their rows of low brown houses, run on interminably. Even
+under the weltering summer sky the streets are full; for Kyoto, the
+once-time capital, is still the second city of the Empire, and the art
+centre of Japan. My _kurumaya_ scatters men and children as he runs;
+and the sounds of busy bargaining, the inevitable _takai_ (too much),
+following the _ikura des ka_ (how much?) pursue me as I ride.
+
+At each corner two more streets stretch out, as straight as
+interminable, as full of life. And still my _kurumaya_ runs.
+
+I am going to see the Emperor’s Palace. Through many hundred years,
+through most that is history in Japan, the Son of Heaven dwelt in the
+heart of this city, and these long interminable streets so full of life
+stretched all around him. The _Tenshisama_ lived in the midst of his
+people, and neither saw nor heard.
+
+We have left the streets at last; on either hand stand railed-in
+squares of growing trees; the road is wide and smooth, the busy
+thousands in the streets drop out of sight and sound. My _kurumaya_
+runs more swiftly.
+
+Here is neither shop nor house, nor passer-by, the restless hum of
+life itself has ceased. It is quieter than a forest, for in these
+artificial squares of railed-in trees nothing stirs. Men’s gardens are
+always three parts dead.
+
+The broad road widens still; white as fuller’s earth and hard, it
+stretches like an avenue between high walls of smooth white brick, laid
+flat and thin as Roman tiles, on thick layers of pale white mortar. Two
+carefully paved-in streams of fresh grey water run between wall and
+road. And streams and road and walls go on and on. It is the Palace of
+the Heir Apparent.
+
+The walls are twelve feet high, the stream is three feet wide; and
+still my _kurumaya_ runs. The pale white walls stretch down the road
+like parallels in Euclid. It is the Palace of the Princes of the Blood.
+
+And still he runs. The pale white walls, thin tiles set in their thick
+layers of mortar, run as he runs.
+
+I have lost sense of the city now, lost memory of the gardens, lost
+belief in life itself. The world is a dead white road between white
+walls. This is the Palace of the Son of Heaven, one speck of brown
+breaks the interminable line of white, the carved gateway whence the
+great _Tenshisama_ issued once a year to visit the temple. One other
+speck, the gate by which he returned. And then the pale white walls,
+thin tiles set in thick layers of mortar, stretch out of sight.
+
+Inside these miles of walls, in his artificial solitude, year in, year
+out, the Son of Heaven dwelt. The life of the city, surging through its
+streets, surged up in vain; he could not see it, hear it, nor conceive
+it. Lord of a world he did not know, the Son of Heaven lived, while
+all around the sons of earth fought and toiled, were born and died,
+and not a murmur of their being passed his Palace walls. Shut up in
+his rose-garden world, fictitious, quite unreal, the Son of Heaven
+augustly ruled. And while the thousands in the city and the millions
+in the land held him divine, so that whoso looked upon his face did
+surely die, the men who looked usurped his power, crowned or deposed
+him; ruled in his name, but reigned supreme, and fought to reign. The
+history of Japan lies there. War and worship, divine unquestioned right
+and civil strife, never rebellion, each army fighting in the name of
+the ever-sacred Son of Heaven, to use victory for its own ends.
+
+And the living son of these dead Emperors, brought up as they, Son of
+Heaven still, though without the walls, a modern monarch holding levees
+and cabinet councils, does that fictitious rose-garden world lie about
+him yet shutting out the real?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+“And always in Japan,” says my _kurumaya_, “the Son of Heaven augustly
+rules.”
+
+And he sings:
+
+                         “Kimi ga yo wa
+                          Chiyo ni yachiyo ni
+                          Sazaré ishi no
+                          Iwaho to narité
+                          Koké no musu madé.”
+
+ “The descendants of the Emperor shall live for a thousand times ten
+ thousand years, until the little stones are grown great rocks, until
+ the great rocks are all green with moss.”
+
+
+
+
+                                  XI
+
+                          AND SHE WAS A WIDOW
+
+
+_O Mmé San_ looked into her son’s eyes and saw that they were sad.
+
+It was in the month of the plum-blossom, when throughout the length
+and breadth of Japan the soldiers of the Empire were daily leaving for
+the front; for the war with Russia had been declared, and the rich
+were giving of their wealth, the poor of their poverty, and every one
+of his sons. In Tokyo the rival newspapers had agreed to bury their
+political differences until the war was over. An Osaka merchant had
+offered his priceless art treasures for sale. On the western coast the
+poor fishermen, forbidden to fish in the sea of Japan because of the
+danger, sent a petition to the Government asking to be allowed to go
+out “as scouts.” Noble students on the far-off banks of the Sungari
+were risking an ignominious death as they crouched beneath dark bridges
+with dynamite in their hands. Everywhere, every one was giving, giving,
+giving. Even in this remote country town each day mothers saw their
+sons march away, and bid them a last “_Sayonara_.”
+
+O Mmé San had been waiting many days, expecting, hoping, dreading, and
+to-night in the sad eyes of her son she read the long delayed summons.
+“He has heard at last,” she thought. And for one moment her heart grew
+very tender over this, her fatherless son, her only boy.
+
+Then she put away her weakness, for she was the wife and the daughter
+of _samurai_, and she knew that it was the proudest privilege of a
+warrior to fight for his lord, that it was the most sacred duty of her
+race to give her life and her son’s life to the Emperor. So, looking
+towards the curved swords of the family, which lay on the _tokonoma_,
+she began to talk of her husband, of the grim old _samurai_ his
+fathers, and to tell old tales of battle and of death that made her
+boy’s eyes glisten, and then look sadder than before. But he said
+nothing, and O Mmé San wondered. She knew that he had been down to the
+Prefecture that morning. O Kiku San’s two sons had left last week, O
+Hana’s eldest was going to-morrow. Surely her boy must know when he was
+leaving, or why did his eyes look so sad?
+
+Then she began to tell him of all the plans she had thought of for
+managing without him, for they were poor. And at last her son looked
+up, and said, very gently as he took her hand:
+
+“Honourably trouble not; as for leaving, it is not for me.”
+
+And this time it was O Mmé San’s turn to be silent.
+
+When dinner was over her son went out to his work, and O Mmé San
+wondered and wondered. The wife and daughter of a _samurai_ she was
+eager to give, give even her only son for _Dai Nippon_, and the Son of
+Heaven. And yet her boy was not going, what could it mean?
+
+It was O Hana San who brought the answer. O Hana came in, very proud
+and pleased to tell all the last news about her eldest and his regiment.
+
+“They say these Russians are seven feet high,” she said, as they sat
+opposite one another on the kneeling cushions sipping tea, “and that
+they never wash. And, just think, over there in _Chō-sen_ (Korea)
+everything is still frozen.”
+
+O Mmé San listened. “A warrior is always warm enough when he fights,”
+she said, looking at the long curved swords which lay on the _tokonoma_.
+
+O Hana San followed her glance. There were no swords at home on her
+_tokonoma_.
+
+“Oh! fighting’s very different nowadays,” she said. “My boy hasn’t got
+a sword at all. They only carry guns now.”
+
+For O Hana was not above a certain feeling of pleasure at getting even
+with a _samurai_.
+
+O Mmé San bowed, and gently offered more tea.
+
+“That is the Emperor’s will,” she said, in her soft, low voice. “My son
+will also carry a gun.”
+
+“But your son isn’t going,” cried O Hana San. “Didn’t you know?
+The Prefect said yesterday something about the law of the Emperor
+forbidding it. I forget why.” And she gave a little giggle of pride at
+the idea of her son going to the war when the son of a _samurai_ must
+stay at home.
+
+O Mmé San’s hands trembled as she poured more tea into the tiny bowls,
+but her voice was as low and as gentle as ever, and she did not abate
+one bow or one word of politeness; but how glad she was when O Hana
+was gone! She sat back on her heels after her last bow, her face
+flushed with anger. The Emperor would not take her son! O Hana must be
+mistaken. It could not be true. But “the Prefect said.” Then she would
+go and ask the Prefect. And O Mmé San got up resolute.
+
+The Prefect was very busy, and refused at first to see her, but, with
+the softest and gentlest politeness, O Mmé San still persisted, and at
+last she was admitted into the ugly “foreign” room where the Prefect,
+in a frock-coat and tweed trousers, sat on a “foreign” chair. O Mmé San
+sat on the edge of hers and held her _kimono_ tightly with both hands.
+She was not used to chairs.
+
+“You wish to know when Suzuki Tetsutarō leaves for the front.
+Honourably please to wait a moment.”
+
+O Mmé San waited. The Prefect, deep in his work, almost forgot her.
+Something in the tremulous way in which she had spoken made him think
+she was afraid for her boy; and he was a stern man, with the sternest
+ideas of duty to the Emperor. So when the answer came back to him, he
+turned to her somewhat coldly.
+
+“Suzuki Tetsutarō is exempt from service. It is the will of the Emperor
+that the only son of a widow shall stay and take care of his mother.”
+
+A great light sprang into O Mmé San’s eyes. “Honourably please to say
+is that the reason?” she asked, bowing low.
+
+The Prefect looked at her, at the strange light shining in her eyes;
+and in his heart he regretted the old stern times when _samurai_
+mothers sent out their sons to fight to victory or to death.
+
+“That is the reason,” he said, and he bowed her out.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That night O Mmé San did not sleep. She sat up looking at the curved
+swords of her fathers and thinking.
+
+She knew now why her son’s eyes were sad. The Son of Heaven, in his
+graciousness, had wished to spare the widow’s son, but--but a subject’s
+duty was to give, give all, give himself, give everything that was most
+precious to him; above all, a _samurai_ boy must not stay at home when
+peasants’ sons went out to fight. And in the quiet night, with the
+blossoming plum-tree stretching like a white wing above the house, Mmé
+thought.
+
+This gentle, soft-voiced woman, tender as the white blossoms overhead
+from which she took her name, was delicate as they; but in her soul
+there dwelt that subtle, untouched fragrance, the sense, of sacrifice
+and duty, which, like the scent of the blossoming plum-tree, penetrated
+all things. Brought up on the “greater” and “the lesser learning,” in
+the strict rule of the three obediences--to father, husband, son--O Mmé
+San had lived her simple life, a loving, tender woman, exquisite in
+grace and courtesy; but in her heart there burned that ecstatic faith
+and fealty which we have never truly known, but call by the cold name
+of loyalty. So she sat there and thought in the still, dark night,
+and all the thoughts and feelings of the dead, all their resolutions
+and impulses, stirred back to life in her all the long line of her
+_samurai_ fathers, who had fought and died, the yet longer line of
+patient mothers, who had endured and given their sons, husbands,
+fathers, called to her. They were not dead nor sleeping. They were
+alive in her. She sat and listened as their lives thrilled through her
+in the silence, and their voices spoke aloud within her soul. It seemed
+a simple thing to sacrifice herself. She had no fear of death, rather
+a great desire. No haunting fear of Purgatory or Hell beset her. Even
+the all-loving Buddha was forgotten; she trusted to the older gods
+to-night--Amaterasu, the great Sun-Goddess, from whom the Son of Heaven
+himself descended. Beyond the shadow of this life the great gods lived,
+and all the long line of her fathers stood waiting to welcome her.
+When she slipped into that light her son’s father himself would stoop
+to take her hand, content that she had proved herself worthy to be a
+warrior’s wife.
+
+The snow-white _mmé_, the blossoming plum-tree, stirred in the cold
+night wind. “Chastity, purity and strength, womanly strength,” it
+whispered, and its pale soft blossoms sighed. The fragrance of them
+floated by in the chill spring air; floated wide from end to end of
+Great Japan.
+
+“Strength, womanly strength,” it said, and O Mmé San looked up and
+smiled, a little sad, sweet smile. For the strength of a woman lies in
+the sacrifice of herself. And getting up she went to look at her boy
+tossing in his sleep.
+
+Then she too slept, for she knew what she had to do; and Shinigawa, the
+Lord of Death-Desire, drew near and touched her as she slept.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was nearly dusk the next evening before everything was prepared. All
+her son’s clothes mended and ready, the house put straight, the letter
+written, telling her boy quite simply that, having learned the reason
+why the Emperor in his graciousness would not take him for his soldier,
+she had taken her own life that he might be free to fight. On her knees
+she thanked the gracious _Tenshisama_, but her son and her son’s life
+were his not hers.
+
+Then she sharpened her dagger, and when O Mmé San felt its edge was
+keen enough, she knelt down on the matting, took off her long silken
+under-girdle, and tied it carefully around her knees, for a _samurai_
+woman must lie modestly even in death. Then she felt in her throat for
+the artery, and with one quick thrust drove the dagger home.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Prefect was sitting with his family that evening when Suzuki
+Tetsutarō came to the house. He carried a paper in his hand, and he was
+trembling.
+
+“Honourably please to take notice,” he said, “that I am qualified to
+serve, for my mother is dead.” And he handed the Prefect the paper.
+
+When he had read it the stern official turned to the lad.
+
+“The detachment has not yet left for headquarters,” he said, writing
+rapidly as he spoke. “Go straight to the station. Give this card to the
+officer in charge. I will bury your mother and perform the rites.”
+
+Then he laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Suzuki Tetsutarō,” he
+said, “your mother was worthy of her race. Go, that her spirit may have
+peace.”
+
+So Suzuki Tetsutarō went straight to the front.
+
+
+
+
+                               GLOSSARY
+
+
+ =Aino.= The aboriginal inhabitants of Japan, only found now in the
+ North Island. A remarkably hairy, remarkably dirty race, with the
+ flattened shin-bone only occurring in skeletons of the cave-men. They
+ are great hunters and fishers.
+
+ =Amado.= Sliding wooden walls which are drawn all round a Japanese
+ house at night, completely enclosing it.
+
+ =Amaterasu=, _lit._ “Heaven-Shiner.” The Sun-Goddess, born from the
+ right eye of the Creator Izanagi.
+
+ =Amida Butsu.= Buddha as Amida. Originally Amida was an abstraction,
+ the ideal of boundless light.
+
+ =Benten.= One of the seven Deities of Luck, frequently represented
+ riding on a serpent. Her shrines are mostly on islands, and from her
+ connection with the sea she has certain points of resemblance with
+ Venus. Benten always has a white face.
+
+ =Biwa.= A musical instrument with four strings, something like a lute.
+
+ =Boy.= Term universal among foreigners in the Far East for a male
+ servant, of whatever age.
+
+ =Bot’chan.= A little boy; baby; Japanese baby language. Derived from
+ _bōsan_, a Buddhist priest (bonze). Japanese babies, like Buddhist
+ priests, having completely shaven heads.
+
+ =Bushi.= Warrior.
+
+ =Bushidō.= Way of the warrior.
+
+ =Cha-no-yu.= Tea ceremony, from _cha_, tea. The people of Tokyo and
+ the initiated call it _chanoyī_. This ceremony, religious in its
+ inception, has in the course of the 600 or 700 years of its existence
+ passed through a medico-religious, a luxurious, and an æsthetic
+ stage. A little of the religious element still clings to it, tea
+ enthusiasts usually joining the Zen sect of Buddhism, while diplomas
+ of proficiency are obtained from the abbot of Daitokuji at Kyoto.
+
+ =Cha-ya.= Tea-house.
+
+ =Cloisonné.= A species of mosaic, its characteristic feature being
+ a network of copper, brass, or silver wire soldered on to a solid
+ foundation of the same metal. The _cloisons_, or spaces between the
+ network, are then filled in with enamel paste.
+
+ =Daimyō=, _lit._ Great name; a feudal lord. Before the Restoration of
+ 1868 Japan was divided into provinces, each ruled by a _daimyō_. Every
+ _daimyō_ was the head of a clan of armed retainers, the _samurai_,
+ and all _samurai_ had to belong to some _daimyō_. Shortly after the
+ Restoration the _daimyō_ voluntarily gave up their lands, powers, and
+ possessions to the Emperor.
+
+ =Fuji.= Usually translated as “The Peerless Mountain,” from the two
+ Chinese characters with which, in poetry, it is usually written,
+ meaning “not two,” “unrivalled.” In prose it is generally written with
+ Chinese characters meaning “rich _samurai_.” It can also be written
+ with ideographs meaning “not dying” and so “deathless.” Most probably
+ Fuji is derived from the Aino word _push_, to burst forth.
+
+ =Futon.= A sort of eiderdown quilt made of silk wadding. The Japanese
+ spread one of these on the matting at night to sleep on, using a
+ second as a covering. The native pillow is a shaped and padded piece
+ of wood or lacquer which supports the neck.
+
+ =Geisha.= Girls trained to the profession of dancing, singing,
+ playing, and socially entertaining. They are the usual accompaniment
+ to a Japanese dinner.
+
+ =Gheta.= A sort of wooden clogs kept on by straps passing between
+ the big and second toes. _Gheta_ are only worn in the street, and
+ are left outside houses, temples, or other buildings. It would be as
+ disrespectful to enter a house or a temple with your _gheta_ on as for
+ a man to walk into a church, or a drawing-room, in his hat.
+
+ =Godown.= A fire-proof building for storing valuables. Derived from
+ Malay word _gādong_, a warehouse.
+
+ =Hakama.= A divided skirt of either cotton or silk, pleated into a
+ broad stiff band in big pleats. Worn by the _samurai_ on official or
+ ceremonial occasions. Always worn by both teacher and pupil in the
+ classrooms. Also worn nowadays by the girl students.
+
+ =Hibachi.= A brazier in the shape of a lidless box of wood or bronze
+ containing charcoal, the warming apparatus of Japanese houses.
+
+ =Holland.= Considered as a tributary kingdom of Japan during the
+ Tokugawa shōgunate, because the Dutch shut up in the island of
+ Deshima, near Nagasaki, sent yearly presents to the _shōgun_.
+
+ =Ijin San.= Barbarian; foreigner; or perhaps simply “strange man,” and
+ so foreigner.
+
+ =Iyeyasu.= _B._ 1542, _d._ 1616. The founder of the Tokugawa
+ shōgunate, which lasted from 1603 to 1868. Iyeyasu was one of the
+ greatest generals and perhaps the very greatest ruler, Japan has ever
+ produced. He went to school in the Temple of Rinzaki (p. 17), and the
+ room where he learnt to write, his ink-slab and other belongings,
+ are still preserved. Iyeyasu founded Yedo, now Tokyo, making it
+ his capital. He died at Shizuoka, and was first buried at Kunō-san
+ (Between Earth and Heaven, p. 36), and afterwards at Nikkō.
+
+ =Izanagi= and =Izanami=. The Creator and the Creatress of Japan. It
+ was during the purification of Izanagi after his descent into Hades in
+ search of Izanami, a legend which has many points of resemblance with
+ that of Orpheus, that Amaterasu, the Sun-Goddess, was born.
+
+ =Jinricksha= or =Jinriksha=. From the Chinese, _lit._
+ man-power-vehicle; shortened by Europeans into _’ricksha_, by the
+ Japanese to _jinriki_, but usually called in Japan by the native word
+ _kuruma_. A small two-wheeled carriage like a miniature hansom or an
+ old-fashioned perambulator, drawn by a man.
+
+ =Kagura.= Sacred _shintō_ dance, whose origin is supposed to be traced
+ back to the time when Amaterasu, angry at the insult offered her by
+ her brother Susa-no-wo, retired to a cavern, thus plunging the world
+ into darkness. She was at last induced to look out by the sound of
+ music and dancing, and finally enticed right out by the sight of her
+ own face in a mirror. The dance performed in front of her cavern is
+ supposed to be the _Kagura_. (Note the “g” here, as all medial “g’s”
+ in Japanese have the sound of “ng” as in English “sing.” So Nang-o-ya,
+ _not_ Na-go-ya. Some dialects, as that of _Satsuma_, say a hard “g.”)
+
+ =Kakemono=, _lit._ the hanging-up-thing. A picture painted on either
+ silk or paper, in either monochrome or colour. It is mounted on
+ brocade, and has a roller each end. Roughly and quite untechnically,
+ _kakemono_ can be divided into two classes: those which seek to give
+ only an impression, and those which are a kind of miniature painting.
+
+ =Kana.= _Katakana_ and _Hirakana_, popularly supposed to have been
+ invented, the first 772 A.D., the second 835 A.D. In reality they
+ were not inventions, but simplifications of certain common Chinese
+ ideographs. The _kana_ represent sounds, as does our alphabet,
+ but they stand for syllables, not letters. They both consist of
+ forty-seven sounds, which by the addition of dots and other symbols
+ can be considerably increased.
+
+ =Kannon=, written K(w)annon, Sanskrit Avalokites-vara, the Goddess of
+ Mercy, who contemplates the world and listens to the prayers of the
+ unhappy. In the opinion of a small minority Kannon belongs to the male
+ sex.
+
+ =Kimono.= The long-sleeved robe of Japan, which has no fastening. It
+ is merely folded across on the right-hand side (only grave-clothes
+ are crossed to the left) and kept in place by the folds of the _obi_.
+ Practically the same shaped kimono is worn by men and women, the
+ difference consisting principally in pattern and colour. The number of
+ _kimono_ worn depends entirely on the temperature.
+
+ =Kirin.= A fabulous monster answering to our griffin. He degenerates
+ sometimes into a sort of three-cornered dog, and is said not to
+ trample on live insects nor to eat live grass.
+
+ =Kitsune.= Fox. It is the fox and the badger in Japan who are credited
+ with supernatural powers. Foxes are able to change themselves into
+ beautiful young women to the undoing of confiding man. The powers of
+ the badger may be comic.
+
+ =Kojiki=, or “Record of Ancient Matters.” The oldest literary work
+ of Japan, dating from the year 712 A.D. It is a chronicle partly
+ mythological, partly historical, of the doings of gods, emperors and
+ men.
+
+ =Kuruma.= _See_ =Jinricksha=. The Japanese term for _jinricksha_.
+
+ =Kurumaya.= The man who draws the _kuruma_.
+
+ =Manjū.= A flat round cake of rice paste filled with a brown bean-jam.
+
+ =Meiji.= Age of Enlightenment or Progress. The name of the years from
+ 1868 onwards. The privilege of appointing year-names is regarded in
+ the Far East as one of the rights of independent sovereignty, much as
+ coining money with us. In Japan the length of the year-name period has
+ been up to now purely arbitrary, not coinciding with the reign of an
+ emperor as in China.
+
+ =Miyajima.= One of the _San-kei_ or “Three Chief Sights” of Japan.
+ An exceedingly beautiful island in the Inland Sea. It contains a
+ temple built on piles, which at high tide seems to float on the water.
+ According to tradition, the first temple was erected about 600 A.D.
+
+ =Mma.= The actual pronunciation in the Tokyo district of the word
+ usually Romanised as _Uma_, horse.
+
+ =Mmé.= The actual pronunciation in the Tokyo district of the word
+ usually Romanised as _Umé_.
+
+ =Musmé= or =Musumé=. Daughter; girl; and so, waiting-girl.
+
+ =Namu-myōho-rengekyō.= Sanskrit, _lit._ “O! the Scripture of the Lotus
+ of the Wonderful Law.”
+
+ =Nēsan=. _lit._ elder sister miss. Used as a half-polite,
+ half-familiar address to girls; and so, waiting-girl.
+
+ =Nichiren.= _B._ 1222, _d._ 1282, at Ikkégami, where some of his
+ bones remain as relics. He entered the priesthood at the early age of
+ twelve, when he adopted the name of Nichiren, or “Lotus of the Sun.”
+ He miraculously learned the whole of the 100 volumes of the Buddhist
+ canon in one night. He fiercely attacked all the already existing
+ Buddhist sects, a thing unheard of in Japanese ecclesiastical history;
+ was twice banished, and once condemned to death, on which occasion
+ the executioner’s sword refused to perform its function. His crest is
+ the orange blossom.
+
+ =O= and =Go=. Polite prefixes usually translated as “honourable” or
+ “august.”
+
+ =O Bā San=, _lit._ honourable grandmother Mrs.
+
+ =Obi.= A long sash usually of wadded brocade, which is folded several
+ times round the waist and tied behind. The _obi_ is the most expensive
+ part of a woman’s dress, and exceptional ones of richest brocade
+ stiffened with gold thread can cost as much as £50 or more; such _obi_
+ are handed down in families as heirlooms.
+
+ =O hachi=, _lit._ honourable pot. Tub in which cooked rice is kept.
+
+ =Persimmon.= A fruit the size of an apple which can be round and
+ reddish, or orange and pear-shaped. Called in Japanese _kaki_.
+
+ =Ricksha.= _See_ =Jinricksha=.
+
+ =Rin.= 10 _rin_ make 1 _sen_, or one farthing.
+
+ =Ronin=, _lit._ wave-man. _Samurai_ without a feudal lord. He might
+ be described as a _samurai_ out of work either through fault or
+ misfortune.
+
+ =Saké.= An intoxicating drink obtained from fermented rice, containing
+ 11 to 14 per cent. of alcohol. It is generally drunk warm and tastes
+ something like sherry.
+
+ =Samisen.= A square three-stringed lute with a long handle, played
+ with a plectrum; the commonest and most popular of the musical
+ instruments of Japan. Its notes are very tinny. In Tokyo usually
+ called _shamisen_.
+
+ =Sampan.= A small flat-bottomed boat, rowed by a man standing in the
+ stern.
+
+ =Samurai.= Derived from the verb _samurau_, to be on guard. A term
+ used in the early Middle Ages of the soldiers of the Mikado’s palace,
+ then applied to the entire warrior class. The _samurai_ were “the
+ gentry” of Japan, the _daimyō_ corresponding to the peers. In Old
+ Japan all gentlemen were soldiers and all soldiers gentlemen. Since
+ the Restoration, when their incomes were commuted for a lump sum, the
+ _samurai_ have had to earn their own livelihood. They are now the
+ officers, professors, schoolmasters, policemen, officials, practically
+ the whole governing class of Japan.
+
+ =San.= Contraction of _sama_. A title such as our Mr., but used for
+ both sexes and all ages.
+
+ =Semmi.= Cicada. Japan grows innumerable _semmi_ of many kinds. A
+ favourite amusement of boys is to catch them and keep them in small
+ cages of green net.
+
+ =Sen.= ¼_d._ 100 _sen_ make 1 _yen_.
+
+ =Shappo.= From the French _chapeau_. The modern name for the modern
+ “foreign” hat. Old Japan knew no hats.
+
+ =Shintō=, _lit._ the way of the gods. This, the native religion of
+ Japan, is a combination of ancestor-and nature-worship. Its priesthood
+ is not a caste, nor even a separate profession. Up to the time of the
+ revival of Shintōism, due to the Restoration of power to the Mikado,
+ everybody was born with _Shintō_ and buried with Buddhist rites. The
+ whole Japanese nation is supposed to be descended from the lesser
+ _Shintō_ deities, while the Emperor is the direct descendant of
+ Amaterasu.
+
+ =Shōgun=, _lit._ generalissimo. A title first used in 813 A.D., and
+ continued down to 1868. In the twelfth century the _shōgun_ Yoritomo
+ first contrived to become the effective ruler of the land; thus
+ originating the dual control of Japan, the temporal power belonging
+ to the _shōgun_, the spiritual to the Emperor. Yoritomo was succeeded
+ by various dynasties of _shōgun_ until Iyeyasu founded the Tokugawa
+ shōgunate in 1600.
+
+ =Shoji.= The sliding wall of a house, like an immense lattice window
+ whose leadings are wood and whose panes are rice-paper, _Shōji_ are
+ semi-transparent, and divide the room from the outer world. The walls
+ which divide one room from another are called _karakami_ or _fusumi_,
+ and are of opaque paper. They slide in grooves and can be entirely
+ removed when required.
+
+ =Susa-no-wo=, _lit._ the Impetuous Male Deity, was born from the nose
+ of the creator Izanagi. It was owing to the insult which he offered
+ his sister Amaterasu by breaking a hole in the roof of the hall of
+ heaven where she sat weaving with her celestial maidens, and dropping
+ down into it “a heavenly piebald horse flayed with a backward flaying”
+ that the Sun-Goddess retired to the cavern and left the world in
+ darkness. Susa-no-wo was the ancestor of the rulers of Izumo, who
+ finally gave up their throne to the descendants of the Sun-Goddess,
+ accepting a spiritual for an earthly homage. Susa-no-wo is sometimes
+ considered as the God of the Moon, sometimes as the God of the Sea.
+
+ =Suzuki Tetsutarō.= The family name in Japan always comes first, the
+ “Christian” name after, as Smith John. Suzuki is one of the commonest
+ of Japanese surnames of _samurai_ rank, Hayashi running it very
+ close. Tetsutarō, _lit._ own eldest son.
+
+ =Tabi.= Half-boots fastening up on the inner, not the outer, side, as
+ with us. They are made of cotton, and the sole is a soft sock. There
+ is a separate compartment for the big toe. _Tabi_ are of either dark
+ blue or white cotton; white is for house and street wear; dark blue
+ for hard work or walking, and mostly worn by the lower classes.
+
+ =Tenshisama.= Chinese term meaning Son of Heaven, from _ten_, heaven.
+ _Sama_ is the longer and more courteous form of _san_. The Emperor is
+ also called _Tennō_, Heavenly Emperor, or _Shujō_, the Supreme Master;
+ all Chinese terms. The word Mikado is very rarely used by the Japanese
+ except in poetry or on great occasions.
+
+ =Tōfu.= A white bean-curd, looking like cream cheese. A favourite food
+ of the coolie.
+
+ =Tokonoma.= A raised alcove. Probably it was originally that part of a
+ room raised above the level of the earth floor, on which people slept.
+
+ =Tokugawa.= The family name of Iyeyasu and so of the shōgunate founded
+ by him. The last _shōgun_, who abdicated in 1868, is still living.
+
+ =Tokyo.= The modern name for Yedo, meaning the Eastern Capital.
+
+ =Torī.= A gateway without a gate formed of two perpendicular and two
+ horizontal beams, which at first stood in front of every _shintō_
+ temple. When the Buddhists adopted it they turned up the ends in a
+ glorious curve, and used it for affixing tablets. Popular etymology
+ derives it from _tori_, fowl, and _i_ (_iru_), dwelling, regarding
+ it as a perch for the sacred birds. It probably came from Northern
+ India, where similar gateways called _turan_ are found outside
+ burial-grounds. _Cf._ Luchuan _turi_.
+
+ =Uchi=, _lit._ inside; and so, house.
+
+ =Uguisu.= A small brown bird, the _cettria cantans_, with a simple but
+ exquisite song.
+
+ =Urashima.= The Rip Van Winkle of Japanese folk-lore. He married the
+ Sea King’s daughter. After a short honeymoon he came back to visit his
+ parents. But the oldest inhabitant of the village could only dimly
+ remember the family tombstones in the graveyard. Thinking he was the
+ victim of an illusion, Urashima rashly opened a box the Sea Princess
+ had given him. Instantly a grey smoke went up to heaven, and Urashima
+ changed from a stalwart youth to an old man, sank down on the seashore
+ and died. He was a thousand years old.
+
+ =Yedo.= The original name of Tokyo, given it by its founder Iyeyasu.
+
+ =Yashiki.= The house or enclosure of a noble or honourable person.
+
+ =Yen.= The Japanese money unit, worth 2_s._ ½_d._
+
+ =Waraji.= A straw sandal fastening securely with strings of straw. The
+ straw turns up slightly round the back of the heel. _Waraji_ are for
+ travelling.
+
+ =Zashki.= The room; parlour; the sitting-room of a house.
+
+For much of the information contained in these notes I am indebted to
+the works of Prof. B. H. Chamberlain.
+
+
+                 Printed by BALLANTYNE & CO. LIMITED
+                       Tavistock Street, London
+
+
+
+
+                      Books on Japanese Subjects
+
+=A Handbook of Modern Japan.= By Ernest W. Clement. With two maps and
+over sixty illustrations from photographs. _Fourth Edition._ Cloth,
+12mo, $1.40 net.
+
+=Japan As It Was and Is.= A Handbook of Old Japan. By Richard Hildreth.
+Edited by Ernest W. Clement, with an Introduction by William Elliot
+Griffis. With maps and numerous rare illustrations. In two vols.,
+cloth, 12mo, $3.00 net.
+
+=Arts and Crafts of Old Japan.= By Stewart Dick. With thirty
+illustrations. Gray boards, 8vo, $1.20 net.
+
+=Far Eastern Impressions.= Japan, Corea, and China. By Ernest F. G.
+Hatch, M. P. With three maps and eighty-eight illustrations from
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+
+=Kakemono.= Japanese sketches. By A. Herbage Edwards. With
+frontispiece. Cloth, 8vo, $1.75 net.
+
+=The Makers of Japan.= By J. Morris. With twenty-four illustrations.
+Large 8vo, $3.00 net.
+
+=McDonald of Oregon.= A Tale of Two Shores. The chronicle of the
+earliest Japanese refugees to land in America, and of the first
+Americans who visited Japan, later to act as interpreters to Perry. By
+Eva Emery Dye. Illustrated by W. J. Enright. 8vo, $1.50
+
+                          A. C. McCLURG & CO.
+                                CHICAGO
+
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+
+
+                          TRANSCRIBERS’ NOTES
+
+The Publisher’s Advertisement Page has been moved from the front to the
+end of the text.
+
+Different spellings of the same word have been standardized.
+
+In this text version, the following marking were used to indicate the
+original text styles: _italic_ and =bold=.
+
+Text originally printed in small caps has been converted to uppercase
+letters.
+
+The following typos and omissions have been changed in the text:
+
+Page 39: missing “b” added to: _blue hose, with brown weather-beaten
+faces_
+
+Page 63: missing period added to: _and there was nothing else._
+
+Page 115: “proscribed” changed to “prescribed”: _already bent to the
+prescribed curves for me_
+
+Page 122: “ackowledged” changed to “acknowledged”: _dramatic instinct
+is acknowledged to be far below_
+
+Page 125: “possibilites” changed to “possibilities”: _more
+possibilities than a rice-field_
+
+Page 140: duplicate “in” removed from: _are washed in the softest of
+bark brown_
+
+Page 151: “th” changed to “the”: _the position of the person serving_
+
+Page 167: comma changed to period: _as the boys, lantern in hand,
+plunged downward._
+
+Page 209: “capitials” changed to “capitals”: _stating in printed Roman
+capitals that_
+
+Page 230: “ust” changed to “us”: _but he never told us why._
+
+Page 230: “nor” changed to “not”: _that we could not read the Chinese_
+
+Page 266: missing period added to: _Skoshi mo arimasen._
+
+Page 295: missing period added to: _1542, d. 1616. The founder of the
+Tokugawa_
+
+Page 300: missing period added to: _meaning the Eastern Capital._
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76241 ***