A Japanese Boy Part 1

A j.a.panese Boy.

by Shigemi Shiukichi.

PREFATORY LETTER.

PROF. HENRY W. FARNAM:

_Dear Sir:_--My motives in writing this jejune little volume are, as you are aware, two:

1st. There seems to be no story told in this country of the j.a.panese boy's life by a j.a.panese boy himself. The following rambling sketches are incoherent and extremely meagre, I own; but you must remember that they are a boy's talks. Give him encouragement, and he will tell you more.

2d. The most important of my reasons is my desire to obtain the means to prosecute the studies I have taken up in America. Circ.u.mstances have obliged me to make my own way in this hard world. If I knew of a better step I should not have resorted to an indiscreet juvenile publication--a publication, moreover, of my own idle experiences, and in a language the alphabet of which I learned but a few years ago.

To you my sincere acknowledgments are due for encouraging me to write these pages. This kindness is but one of many, of which the public has no knowledge.

I am, sir, Yours very truly.

SHIUKICHI SHIGEMI

NEW HAVEN. CT., September, 1889.

A j.a.pANESE BOY.

CHAPTER I.

I was born in a small seaport town called Imabari, which is situated on the western coast of the island of Shikoku, the eastern of the two islands lying south of Hondo. The Imabari harbor is a miserable ditch; at low tide the mouth shows its shallow bottom, and one can wade across.

People go there for clam-digging. Two or three little streams empty their waters into the harbor. A few junks and a number of boats are always seen standing in this pool of salt-water. In the houses surrounding it, mostly very old and ramshackle, are sold eatables and provisions, fishes are bought from the boats, or shelter is given to sailors.

When a junk comes in laden with rice, commission merchants get on board and strike for bargains. The capacity of the vessel is measured by the amount of rice it can carry. The grain merchant carries about him a good-sized bamboo a few inches long, one end of which is sharpened and the other closed, being cut just at a joint. He thrusts the pointed end into bags of the rice. The bags are rice-straw, knitted together roughly into the shape of barrels. Having taken out samples in the hollow inside of the bamboo stick, the merchant first examines critically the physical qualities of the grains on the palm of his hand, and then proceeds to chew them in order to see how they taste. Years of practice enable him to state, after such simple tests, precisely what section of the country the article in question came from, although the captain of the vessel may claim to have shipped it from a famous rice-producing province.

About the harbor are coolies waiting for work. They are strong, muscular men, thinly clad, with easy straw sandals on. Putting a little cushion on the left shoulder, a coolie rests the rice-bag upon it and walks away from the ship to a store-house; his left hand pa.s.sed around the burden and his right holding a short, stout, beak-like, iron hook fastened in the bag. In idle moments the coolies get together and indulge in tests of strength, lifting heavy weights, etc.

At a short distance to the right from the entrance of the harbor is a sanitarium. It is a huge, artificial cave, built of stone and mortar and heated by burning wood-fires in the inside. After it is sufficiently warmed the fire is extinguished, the smoke-escape shut, and the oven is ready for use. Invalids flock in with wet mats, which they use in sitting on the scalding rocky floor of the oven. Lifting the mat that hangs like a curtain at the entrance, they plunge into the suffocating hot air and remain there some time and emerge again into daylight, fairly roasted and smothered. Then they speedily make for the sea and bathe in it. This process of alternate heating and cooling is repeated several times a day. It is to cook out, as it were, diseases from the body. For some const.i.tutions the first breath of the oven immediately after the warming is considered best, for others the mild warmth of later hours is thought more commendable. I, for myself, who have accompanied my mother and gone through the torture, do not like either very much. The health-seekers rent rooms in a few large cottages standing near by. In fact, they live out of town, free from business and domestic cares, pa.s.s time at games, or saunter and breathe pure air under pine-trees in the neighborhood. The establishment is opened only during summer time. A person ought to get well in whiling away in free air those glorious summer days without the aid of the roasting scheme.

To the left of the harbor along the sh.o.r.e stands the main body of Imabari. Mt. Myozin heaves in sight long before anything of the town can be seen. It is not remarkable as a mountain, but being so near my town, whenever I have espied it on my return I have felt at home. I can remember its precise outline. As we draw nearer, white-plastered warehouses, the sea-G.o.d's shrine jutting out into the water, and the castle stone walls come in our view. You observe no church-steeple, that pointed object so characteristically indicative of a city at a distance in the Christian community. To be sure, the paG.o.da towers toward the sky in the community of Buddhists; but it is more elaborate and costly a thing than the steeple, and Imabari is too poor to have one.

Facing the town, in the sea, rises a mountainous island; it encloses with the neighboring islets the Imabari sound. A report goes that on this island lies a gigantic stone, apparently immovable by human agency, so situated that a child can rock it with one hand. Also that a monster of a tortoise, centuries old, floats up occasionally from an immeasurable abyss near the island to sun itself; and those who had seen it thought it was an island.

Very picturesque if viewed from the sea but painfully poverty-stricken to the sight when near, is a quarter closely adjoining Imabari on the north. It is on the sh.o.r.e and entirely made up of fisher-men's homes.

The picturesque, straw-thatched cottages stand under tall, knotty pine-trees and send up thin curls of smoke. Their occupants are, however, untidy, careless, ignorant, dirty; the squalid children let loose everywhere in ragged dress, bareheaded and barefooted. The men, naked all summer and copper-colored, go fishing for days at a time in their boats; the women sell the fishes in the streets of Imabari. A fisher-woman carries her fishes in a large, shallow, wooden tub that rests on her head; she also carries on her breast a babe that cannot be left at home.

Imabari has about a dozen streets. They are narrow, dirty, and have no sidewalks; man and beast walk the same path. As no carriages and wagons rush by, it is perfectly safe for one to saunter along the streets half asleep. The first thing I noticed upon my landing in New York was, that in America a man had to look out every minute for his personal safety.

From time to time I was collared by the captain who had charge of me with, "Here, boy!" and I frequently found great truck horses or an express wagon almost upon me. In crossing the streets, horse-cars surprised me more than once in a way I did not like, and the thundering engine on the Manhattan road caused me to crouch involuntarily. Imabari is quite a different place; all is peace and quiet there. In one section of the town blacksmiths reside exclusively, making the street black with coal dust. In another granite workers predominate, rendering the street white with fine stone chips. On Temple street, you remark temples of different Buddhist denominations, standing side by side in good fellowship; and in Fishmongers' alley all the houses have fish-stalls, and are filled with the odor of fish. The j.a.panese do not keep house in one place and store in another; they live in their stores. Neither do we have that singular system of boarding houses. Our people have homes of their own, however poor.

My family lived on the main street, which is divided into four subdivisions or "blocks." The second block is the commercial centre, so to speak, of the town, and there my father kept a store. My grandfather, I understood, resided in another street before he moved with his son-in-law, my father, to the main street. He lived to the great age of eighty: I shall always remember him with honor and respect. Of my grandmother I know absolutely nothing, she having pa.s.sed away before I was born.

It is customary in j.a.pan that a man too old for business and whose head is white with the effect of many weary winters, should retire and hibernate in a quiet chamber, or in a cottage called inkyo (hiding place), and be waited upon by his eldest son or son-in-law who succeeds him in business. My good grandfather--his kindly face and pleasant words come back to me this moment--lived in a nice little house in the rear of my father's. Although strong in mind he was bent with age and went about with the help of a bamboo cane. He lived alone, had little to do, but read a great deal, and thought much, and when tired did some light manual work. It was a great pleasure for me to visit him often. In cold winter days he would be found sitting by kotatsu, a native heating apparatus. It is constructed on the following plan: a hole a foot square is cut in the centre of the matted floor, wherein a stone vessel is fitted, and a frame of wood about a foot high laid on it so as to protect the quilt that is to be spread over it, from burning. The vessel is filled with ashes, and a charcoal fire is burned in it. I used to take my position near my grandfather, with my hands and feet beneath the quilt, and ask him to tell stories. My feet were either bare or in a pair of socks, for before getting on the floor we leave our shoes in the yard. Our shoes, by the way, are more like the ancient Jewish sandals than the modern leather shoes.

In this little house of my grandfather's I erected my own private shrine of Tenjinsan, the G.o.d of penmanship. The j.a.panese and the Chinese value highly a skilful hand at writing; a famous scroll-writer gets a large sum of money with a few strokes of his brush; he is looked up to like a celebrated painter. We school-boys occasionally proposed penmanship contests. On the same sheet of paper each of us wrote, one beside another, his favorite character, or did his best at one character we had mutually agreed upon, and took it to our teacher to decide upon the finest hand. The best specimens of a school are sometimes framed and hung on the walls of a public temple of Tenjin. He is worshiped by all school-boys, and I also followed the fashion. My image of him was made of clay; I laid it on a shelf and offered sake (rice-wine) in two tiny earthen bottles, lighted a little lamp every night and put up prayers in childish zeal. The family rejoiced at my devotion; they finally bought me, one holiday, a miniature toy temple. It was painted in gay colors; I was delighted with it beyond expression, and my devotion increased tenfold.

CHAPTER II.

The earliest recollection I have of my school life is my entrance with a number of playmates into a private gentleman's school. At that time the common school system which now exists in j.a.pan had not been adopted; some gentlemen of the town kept private schools, in which exercises consisted mainly of penmanship; for arithmetic we had to go somewhere else. In Imabari there lived a keen-eyed little man who was wonderfully quick at figures, and to him we repaired for instruction in mathematics.

We worked, not with slate and pencil, but with a rectangular wooden frame set with beads, resembling an abacus. It is called soroban; you find it in every store in j.a.pan. I like it better than slate and pencil, for the fundamental operations of arithmetic, but cannot use it in higher mathematics. I remember seeing a young man of my acquaintance perform algebraic calculations, of which we had some knowledge before the influx of Western learning, with a number of little black and white blocks called the "mathematical blocks." A knowledge of penmanship and arithmetic is all that is required of a man of business, but a learned man is expected to read Chinese.

My schoolmaster was a kind of priest, not of Buddhism nor of Shintoism, but one of those who go by the name of Yamabushi; he let his hair grow instead of shaving it off as the Buddhist priest does, wore high clogs and the peculiar robe of his religion. He simply followed his father in the vocation; he was a young man of high promise and manifested more ardor in letters than at the prayers for the sick or for the prosperity of the people. His house was on the fourth block of the main street, set back a little from the street and with an open yard between the tall, elaborate gate and the mansion. The front of the residence was taken up by the shrine; the school was kept in the back part of the house. When we first entered the school we were known as the "newcomers" among the older boys, and though bullying was not altogether absent, we had no ordeal to go through as the Freshmen have in American colleges.

The pupil's equipment in one of these old-fashioned schools consisted of a low table, a cushion to squat upon, and a chest for the following articles: white paper, copy-books and a small box containing a stone ink-vessel, a cake of india ink, an earthen water-bottle and brushes. A little water is poured in the hollow of the stone vessel, the india ink rubbed on it for a while, and when the water becomes sufficiently black the brush is dipped in it. Then looking at model characters written down for us in a separate book by the teacher, we try to trace the same on our copy-books, paying close attention to every particular. The first that we must learn is our alphabet of forty-eight letters.

I recall vividly the trials in making the alphabetical figures. I tried time and again, but to fail; the sorrow gathered thickly in my mind and soon the grief overpowered all my strenuous efforts not to weep, then the master would send one of the older boys to help me. He stands behind me while I sit, grasps my hand which holds the brush, and to my heart's content traces figures like the master's in perfection.

The copy-book is made of the tenacious soft j.a.panese paper, many sheets of which are bound together. Each of the forty-eight characters is studied separately; it is written large so that the learner may see where a bold stroke is required and where a mild touch. After the alphabet we learn to write Chinese characters. The copy-books become black after a while, being dried and used again; therefore they need not be perfectly white at first; usually they are made of the sheets of an old ledger. I used to see on the pages of the copy-books made for me by my father, old debts and credits, and the names of the parties concerned in them, dating back to grandfather's time; they disappeared collectively under my wild dash and sweep of india ink. What an act of generosity to wipe out the remembrance of former money complications!

After a day's work all the copy-books are literally drenched with the black fluid; they are moist and heavy. They must be dried. Every patch of sunshine about the school is improved, every breezy corner turned to account. At home the kitchen is spread with them at night, so as to have them dry by the morning. Copy-books that have done long service are coated with a smooth, shining incrustation of carbon--shining if good ink has been used, but dull if ink is of cheap quality. The quality of an india ink cake is not only judged by its l.u.s.tre, but also by its hardness and odor; a good one is hard and pleasant and the bad soft and unpleasant. After we have practised writing the letters for some time, we finally write them on white papers and present them to our teacher, who with red ink makes further necessary corrections. If the final copy is satisfactory, he sets us at work on a next portion.

Every morning, after breakfast, I gathered together dried copy-books and went after or waited for some boys to come along. We strolled up the street toward the schoolmaster's, calling on other boys as we went. The first task in school upon our arrival was to set the tables in order, get the things out of the chests and go after some water for making the ink. It was no comfortable occupation, cold winter mornings, to get the water from the well in the windy, open yard in the rear of the house, and dip our hand and the drip-bottle together and keep them in it until all the air escaped by bubbles, and the bottle was full. A bottle though I called it, the receptacle is a hollow, square china vessel, with two small holes on the flat surface--one in the centre and the other in one of the corners.

We sit in a house where there is practically no arrangement for heating and where we are poorly protected from the gusts from without. The j.a.panese house is built opening widely into the external air; it has but a few segments of external walls around it; therefore one can select no breezier abode during the warm months, but in the dead of winter--the mere thought of it makes me shiver. Those immense open s.p.a.ces could be closed, to be sure, at night with solid pine-board sliding doors; but in the daytime the question of light comes in. To meet this difficulty our ingenious forefathers had contrived a frame-work of wood pasted with paper. You must know they had no idea of gla.s.s. We can scarcely call it a happy solution of the problem, for the paper is soon punched through and lets in the biting wind. Too much active ventilation takes place, whistling through the holes; and then when a storm strikes us, the whole frail work shakes in the grooves wherein its two ends are fitted, like the chattering of the teeth. This sliding paper part.i.tion is called shoji, and of late has been somewhat replaced by the more expensive gla.s.s windows. Since the introduction of gla.s.s I have seen the shoji partly covered with it and partly with paper, the j.a.panese thinking it very convenient to see through the part.i.tion without being at the pains of pushing it aside or making a hole in the paper. Had paper been entirely discarded and gla.s.s alone been used the j.a.panese house would be much brighter and warmer.

Such a building is a poor place to hold a school in, but the boys were used to it and they behaved so--quarreling, weeping, laughing, shrieking--that there was little time left for them to feel the cold in their young warm blood.

CHAPTER III.

When just from school our faces and hands were as black as demons' with ink. On my reaching home my mother would take care of the copy-books, and send me straight to the kitchen to wash before I sat down to the table. The vessel corresponding to the basin is made of bra.s.s. We have not learned to use soap; old folks believe that it would turn our black hair red like that of the foreigners. There is no convenience of faucet or pump; each house has its own well in the back yard, even in the city;--hence no water-works, no gas-works, and no fuss about plumbing; the housewife must proceed to the well for water, rain or shine, and struggle back to the kitchen with a pailful of it every time she needs it.

The kitchen itself is not often floored; the range (of clay and of different appearance from that, which is used here) and the sink stand directly on mother earth under a shed-like roof which has been darkened by smoke. The range has no chimney; not coal but wood is burned in it, and all the smoke escapes from the front opening or mouth and fills the entire kitchen, causing the dear black eyes of the amiable housewife to suffuse with tears.

She has the small j.a.panese towel wrapped round her head to protect the elaborate coiffure from the soot of years, that has acc.u.mulated everywhere and falls in gentle flakes, snow-fashion, on things universally. She works her pair of lungs at the "fire-blowing tube," a large bamboo two or three feet long, opened at one end for a mouth-piece and punched at the other for a narrow orifice. The imprisoned volumes of smoke in the kitchen must crowd out through a square aperture in the roof; if it be closed on a rainy day, they must escape through windows or crevices the best they may.

The water when brought in from the well is emptied into a deep heavy earthen reservoir of reddish hue standing near the sink. With a wooden ladle I would dip out the water into the bra.s.s basin (sheet bra.s.s, not solid), and wash myself without soap in the most rapid manner possible, yearning eagerly for dinner. The towel is a piece of cotton dyed blue with designs left undyed or dyed black. I grumbled, I confess, when my mother sent me back for a more thorough washing; but with the utmost alacrity I always saluted the very sight of viands.

Oftentimes I was late and was obliged to eat a late dinner alone; but when all of our family sat down together, enough of life was manifested.

At one end my witty young brother provoked laughter in us with stuff and nonsense; next him sat my younger sister, quiet and good. I a.s.sumed my position between my sister and my father and mother, who sat together at the head of the row. I forget to mention that my elder brother, whose place must be next above me, had been ordered to keep peace in the region of my merry little brother. My sister-in-law or my elder brother's wife took her stand opposite us, surrounded by a rice-bucket, a cast-iron cooking-pot, a teapot, a basket of rice-bowls, saucers, etc.