A Yankee in the Far East Part 8

The obsequies of the Empress Dowager had closed the kindergarten school for days, and I missed the best show in j.a.pan.

The missionary and his wife insisted that I take lunch with them. My team of coolies were champing at their bits--my lunch was ready at my hotel--I told them so. They told me that the hotel would excuse me and they would not.

XI

YAMAMOTO AND HIGH COST OF LIVING

After lunch at the missionary's I found my team at the gate spoiling for a run.

"Yamamoto, take me to your home," I said; "I want to meet your family.

I want to see how a rikisha man lives. And, Yamamoto, I'll give you a yen if you'll invite me to supper at your home tonight."

The yen looked tempting, but Yamamoto wouldn't play the game.

He said to have a foreigner as a guest at his humble home would bring around his house such a crowd of curious neighbors that all pleasure in the repast would be spoiled--or words to that effect; but he would take me to his home. Off we started, a three-mile run; Ushi pushed and Yamamoto pulled, and I was soon a self-invited guest in Yamamoto's home; and, if to break bread or chopstick rice in Yamamoto's home would have brought a greater horde of curious neighbors than gathered to witness a foreigner's call at that home, then Yamamoto's head was level--Yamamoto's head was level anyway.

[Ill.u.s.tration: He said to have a foreigner as a guest at his humble home would bring around his house such a crowd of curious neighbors]

A little house 8 x 16, two rooms 8 x 8, the front opening on a street about eight feet wide; a yard in the rear 6 x 8, was Yamamoto's home.

It was as neat as wax and furnished with an _hibachi_ on which to cook, a _tanstu_ in which to store their clothes. No chairs--they sit on the floor; no beds, save _futons_, to lay on the floor; and an _okimono dai_, a sort of what-not stand, on which a few ornaments and articles of household use were placed.

The wife was gone for the day, but his children were at home, and a more interesting trio of children one wouldn't ask to meet.

My team took me back to the hotel. I dismissed them for the day at five o'clock. I paid off Ushi, and made a deal with Yamamoto to go home and write me the story of his life. I told him I'd pay him a yen to tell me all about himself, his family, how they lived, and what it cost. To bring me the letter written the next morning and get one yen fifty for the day and an extra yen for the letter. Two yen fifty I would hand him in the morning when he handed me the letter; and Yamamoto said he would, and Yamamoto did--I imagine one of his daughters did the writing.

Here is an exact translation of Yamamoto's letter as he handed it to me the next morning--and Yamamoto has his stand within the wall, but Ushi does business without the gate:

The present living condition of Tokichi Yamamoto. He was born in the 12st May 2nd year Meiji 1869. I was born and bred in the city of Kioto, and have been engaging in the job of Rikisha for these twenty years, and my family is consisting of my wife and three children. Elder and younger girls who have had finished the whole course of the Primary school (4 years), and they are now working in the factory of the Tobacco Monopoly Buelow, and the young son is attending the Primary school.

I am somewhat puzzling with the expense of living. My estimated income is 30 yen each month in the months of April, May, October and November and the rest of is about 18 yen per month, therefore, I make it average, it becomes about 22 yen per month, and two girls get 16 yen, so all the income of my house is reckoned 38 yen per month.

The elder sister has just abandoned her work in the factory, and she attends a house for learning of sewing. The list of paying out a month:

House rent 3.00 yen City tax and town expense .50 The expense of education 1.10 The rice charge 12.00 Wood, charcoal and oil 1.30 Vegetable and fish 7.00 Dressing charges 3.00 Miscellaneous expense 5.00 ----- Total 32.90[A]

[Footnote A: $16.45 American money.]

Fortunately I am in robust health. Though I am not educated myself, I am thinking that the dutifulness and truthfulness are the most important to intercourse with people, and as I am truthful and dutiful to my friends, I am rather welcomed by them.

XII

THE SOLDIER SAID SOMETHING IN CHINESE

Before starting on this around-the-world trip a friend of mine in the United States said to me: "When you get to Shanghai look up my friend, Dr. "John Blank." He has been in China over thirty years. He is the biggest individual intellectual a.s.set in China today--the founder and moving spirit of an International Inst.i.tute which recognizes the good in all religions and gives them all a hearing.

"He is a graduate of Hamilton College in your town of Clinton. He is a strong, a busy man, and true. Please look him up and arrest his attention long enough to give him my regards"--and I promised this enthusiastic friend of "John Blank's" I would do this thing.

"Missouri" had, by rare good luck, driven his business in j.a.pan ahead of him to such purpose that he was ready to sail on the same ship that brought me from Nagasaki to Shanghai. He had, in his peregrinations through j.a.pan, run his intense Americanism plumb against an English tea. Somehow, when "Missouri" and an English tea collided the tea got spilt--as "Missouri" told me the tale en route from Nagasaki to Shanghai the tea took second honors.

Arriving in Shanghai, "Missouri" went his way on business bent, while I looked up Dr. "John Blank," only to find that this busy man was out of town, and I regretted that I should have to disappoint our mutual friend and not be able to deliver his regards to Dr. "Blank." And I took a railroad trip to Pekin.

While I have come to China several times, until this trip I had never ridden a mile on a railroad in China, nor had I been north of Shanghai, and I was full of curiosity to see what I should see on a thousand-mile ride through China with its teeming millions.

At eleven P. M. of a sweltering night I found myself ensconced in a very comfortable sleeping car, composed of commodious staterooms of four berths each, two upper and two lower, and as the only traveling companion to share my stateroom, a young German of twenty-six years.

He was a keen young chap who had right ideas of life. Dropped in Shanghai four years ago, with an expired term in the German navy and fifty Mexican dollars in his pocket, bare-handed and alone, he had hit the Orient with such st.u.r.dy resolution and solid German sense that he had, in four short years, added to the fifty Mex. a young Urasian wife, half German and half Chinese (he a.s.sured me she was the dearest, sweetest little thing), a baby, and nine thousand good hard Mexican dollars in the bank.

A feat like that is worth mentioning--when you know the Orient--they don't all do so well, even with pull and influence to help.

It's good to have a chap like that, a right-principled, wholesome chap, who can speak your tongue and Chinese as well, in the berth across from you on a lonesome thousand-mile trip through China. A night's run and Nankin is reached at seven A. M. with a three hours'

wait for breakfast, and to ferry across the Yangtze to Pukow to connect, at ten A. M., with the Pukow-Tientsin road--then settling down in a comfortable train, carrying a good restaurant car, for a ride of thirty hours without change of cars until we should reach Tientsin.

For an hour we followed up the delta of the Yangtze, low, level land devoted to rice culture, splendidly tilled. The only remarkable thing about the landscape was dearth of population.

We pa.s.sed no towns of any size. A lonesome railroad station, now and then some little mud-walled, straw-thatched hamlets. A like ride over such agricultural land in any of our Middle States at home would show much greater evidence of population.

Then for another hour a poor strip of territory, a hilly, semi-barren country, then we rolled out onto level plains which stayed with us until darkness shut out the scene.

From a little after noon till dark on a day in early June we pa.s.sed through Illinois and Iowa land, prairies bounded by the horizon, with fields of waving wheat and barley just coming into harvest, and fields of corn and beans six inches high. And in all that seven or eight hours of travel, at an average speed of twenty-five miles an hour, we pa.s.sed no city of any size.

Lonesome, solidly well-built brick railroad stations, at long intervals villages and hamlets, set back from the railroad, of the same one-story, mud-walled, thatched construction.

The wonder to me was: Where did the population live to till the land so thoroughly?--for it was all tilled like a well-kept garden. Where the early wheat and barley was harvested it was threshed on threshing floors, even as Boaz threshed his grain, and all of those millions of acres of grain we pa.s.sed was cut either with a crude cradle or sickle, or pulled up by the roots; and the farm animals used were the caribou, the ox, and a.s.s.

No fences, no wagon roads. Where one man's land ended and another man's began you'd never guess, viewed from the car windows.

And all that plain defaced with graves! Out in the fields, helter-skelter, here and there. Here a single grave, there two or three, again six in a row. Pa, and ma, and brother John, sister Ann, and Will, and baby Tim, were buried there. Pa had a big grave. Ma's not so large, and tapering down in size to a small one for baby Tim, all of the same pattern; a hayc.o.c.k-shaped mound of earth topped with a wad of mud.

I had it in for the geography I studied as a boy that told me of China's teeming population. That geography told me that China was so full of folks that to support the congested population they loaded dirt onto flat boats and moored those boats in rivers and utilized the ground thus made for gardens--and in that same geography lesson I learned that these boats were called flower boats.

The erudite writer of that geography got mixed in his metaphors. The flower boats of China have been pointed out to me in the rivers of China. They are places where "gilded youth" resort, and it is not garden truck they raise on them, but Sherman's definition of war--but let it pa.s.s.

Night shut out the scene, and morning dawned and found us at a city. I was glad to find a city in China, and here I lost my German friend. I regretted the parting, for I could talk to him. We were in a mountainous country now with some vegetation s.n.a.t.c.hed in spots. Not much, but some, and through this strip of meagre land they had good stone houses and wagon roads--and it looked more prosperous and more like folks back home.

For a couple of hours we pa.s.sed through that kind of country, then came out onto prairies, and as far as the eye could reach the same spa.r.s.e population, mud huts, and ugly graves, but all tilled like a well-kept garden. I'd lost my German friend for six hours now--and from morning until noon, having had no one to talk to, there had acc.u.mulated in me a considerable store of oratory.

We had stopped at a splendid brick station--perhaps some day a town will grow around that spot--and I got out to stretch my legs. A row of Chinese soldiers stood on guard; and in good old United States, the only tongue I speak, I broke loose on one of them: "China is a fine country, sir," I said; "a fine country, sir. The agricultural possibilities of China, sir, are great! Your boundless plains and mighty rivers are grand, sir; grand! Unshackled from your past, you've burst the bands of superst.i.tion, lethargy, inertia. You've climbed out of your rut. Unleashed from all your past, you've grasped the pregnant present, and now, with your eyes turned to the mighty achievements yet to come--with this glorious new Republic you've achieved, what the future holds for China is impressive, sir; impressive."

The soldier said something in Chinese.