Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan Volume II Part 19

The public curiosity, however, lasted without abate for three days, and would have lasted longer if I had not fled from Urago. Whenever I went out I drew the population after me with a pattering of geta like the sound of surf moving shingle. Yet, except for that particular sound, there was silence. No word was spoken. Whether this was because the whole mental faculty was so strained by the intensity of the desire to see that speech became impossible, I am not able to decide. But there was no roughness in all that curiosity; there was never anything approaching rudeness, except in the matter of ascending to my room without leave; and that was done so gently that I could not wish the intruders rebuked. Nevertheless, three days of such experience proved trying. Despite the heat, I had to close the doors and windows at night to prevent myself being watched while asleep. About my effects I had no anxiety at all: thefts are never committed in the island. But that perpetual silent crowding about me became at last more than embarra.s.sing. It was innocent, but it was weird. It made me feel like a ghost--a new arrival in the Meido, surrounded by shapes without voice.

Sec. 32

There is very little privacy of any sort in j.a.panese life. Among the people, indeed, what we term privacy in the Occident does not exist.

There are only walls of paper dividing the lives of men; there are only sliding screens instead of doors; there are neither locks nor bolts to be used by day; and whenever weather permits, the fronts, and perhaps even the sides of the house are literally removed, and its interior widely opened to the air, the light, and the public gaze. Not even the rich man closes his front gate by day. Within a hotel or even a common dwelling-house, n.o.body knocks before entering your room: there is nothing to knock at except a shoji or fusuma, which cannot be knocked upon without being broken. And in this world of paper walls and sunshine, n.o.body is afraid or ashamed of fellow-men or fellow-women.

Whatever is done, is done, after a fashion, in public. Your personal habits, your idiosyncrasies (if you have any), your foibles, your likes and dislikes, your loves or your hates, must be known to everybody.

Neither vices nor virtues can be hidden: there is absolutely nowhere to hide them. And this condition has lasted from the most ancient time.

There has never been, for the common millions at least, even the idea of living un.o.bserved. Life can be comfortably and happily lived in j.a.pan only upon the condition that all matters relating to it are open to the inspection of the community. Which implies exceptional moral conditions, such as have no being in the West. It is perfectly comprehensible only to those who know by experience the extraordinary charm of j.a.panese character, the infinite goodness of the common people, their instinctive politeness, and the absence among them of any tendencies to indulge in criticism, ridicule, irony, or sarcasm. No one endeavours to expand his own individuality by belittling his fellow; no one tries to make himself appear a superior being: any such attempt would be vain in a community where the weaknesses of each are known to all, where nothing can be concealed or disguised, and where affectation could only be regarded as a mild form of insanity.

Sec. 33

Some of the old samurai of Matsue are living in the Oki Islands. When the great military caste was disestablished, a few shrewd men decided to try their fortunes in the little archipelago, where customs remained old-fashioned and lands were cheap. Several succeeded--probably because of the whole-souled honesty and simplicity of manners in the islands; for samurai have seldom elsewhere been able to succeed in business of any sort when obliged to compete with experienced traders, Others failed, but were able to adopt various humble occupations which gave them the means to live.

Besides these aged survivors of the feudal period, I learned there were in Oki several children of once n.o.ble families--youths and maidens of ill.u.s.trious extraction--bravely facing the new conditions of life in this remotest and poorest region of the empire. Daughters of men to whom the population of a town once bowed down were learning the bitter toil of the rice-fields. Youths, who might in another era have aspired to offices of State, had become the trusted servants of Oki heimin. Others, again, had entered the police, [17] and rightly deemed themselves fortunate.

No doubt that change of civilisation forced upon j.a.pan by Christian bayonets, for the holy motive of gain, may yet save the empire from perils greater than those of the late social disintegration; but it was cruelly sudden. To imagine the consequence of depriving the English landed gentry of their revenues would not enable one to realise exactly what a similar privation signified to the j.a.panese samurai. For the old warrior caste knew only the arts of courtesy and the arts of war.

And hearing of these things, I could not help thinking about a strange pageant at the last great Izumo festival of Rakuzan-jinja.

Sec. 34

The hamlet of Rakuzan, known only for its bright yellow pottery and its little Shinto temple, drowses at the foot of a wooded hill about one ri from Matsue, beyond a wilderness of rice-fields. And the deity of Rakuzan-jinja is Naomasa, grandson of Iyeyasu, and father of the Daimyo of Matsue.

Some of the Matsudaira slumber in Buddhist ground, guarded by tortoises and lions of stone, in the marvellous old courts of Gesshoji. But Naomasa, the founder of their long line, is enshrined at Rakuzan; and the Izumo peasants still clap their hands in prayer before his miya, and implore his love and protection.

Now formerly upon each annual matsuri, or festival, of Rakuzan-jinja, it was customary to carry the miya of Naomasa-San from the village temple to the castle of Matsue. In solemn procession it was borne to .those strange old family temples in the heart of the fortress-grounds--Go-jo- naiInari-Daimyojin, and Kusunoki-Matauhira-Inari-Daimyojin--whose mouldering courts, peopled with lions and foxes of stone, are shadowed by enormous trees. After certain Shinto rites had been performed at both temples, the miya was carried back in procession to Rakuzan. And this annual ceremony was called the miyuki or togyo--'the August Going,' or Visit, of the ancestor to the ancestral home.

But the revolution changed all things. The daimyo pa.s.sed away; the castles fell to ruin; the samurai caste was abolished and dispossessed.

And the miya of Lord Naomasa made no August Visit to the home of the Mataudaira for more than thirty years.

But it came to pa.s.s a little time ago, that certain old men of Matsue bethought them to revive once more the ancient customs of the Rakuzan matauri. And there was a miyuki.

The miya of Lord Naomasa was placed within a barge, draped and decorated, and so conveyed by river and ca.n.a.l to the eastern end of the old Mataubara road, along whose pine-shaded way the daimyo formerly departed to Yedo on their annual visit, or returned therefrom. All those who rowed the barge were aged samurai who had been wont in their youth to row the barge of Matsudaira-Dewa-no-Kami, the last Lord of Izumo.

They wore their ancient feudal costume; and they tried to sing their ancient boat-song--o-funa-uta. But more than a generation had pa.s.sed since the last time they had sung it; and some of them had lost their teeth, so that they could not p.r.o.nounce the words well; and all, being aged, lost breath easily in the exertion of wielding the oars.

Nevertheless they rowed the barge to the place appointed.

Thence the shrine was borne to a spot by the side of the Mataubara road, where anciently stood an August Tea-House, O-Chaya, at which the daimyo, returning from the Shogun's capital, were accustomed to rest and to receive their faithful retainers, who always came in procession to meet them. No tea-house stands there now; but, in accord with old custom, the shrine and its escort waited at the place among the wild flowers and the pines. And then was seen a strange sight.

For there came to meet the ghost of the great lord a long procession of shapes that seemed ghosts also--shapes risen out of the dust of cemeteries: warriors in created helmets and masks of iron and breastplates of steel, girded with two swords; and spearmen wearing queues; and retainers in kamishimo; and bearers of hasami-bako. Yet ghosts these were not, but aged samurai of Matsue, who had borne arms in the service of the last of the daimyo. And among them appeared his surviving ministers, the venerable karo; and these, as the procession turned city-ward, took their old places of honour, and marched before the shrine valiantly, though bent with years.

How that pageant might have impressed other strangers I do not know. For me, knowing something of the history of each of those aged men, the scene had a significance apart from its story of forgotten customs, apart from its interest as a feudal procession. To-day each and all of those old samurai are unspeakably poor. Their beautiful homes vanished long ago; their gardens have been turned into rice-fields; their household treasures were cruelly bargained for, and bought for almost nothing by curio-dealers to be resold at high prices to foreigners at the open ports. And yet what they could have obtained considerable money for, and what had ceased to be of any service to them, they clung to fondly through all their poverty and humiliation. Never could they be induced to part with their armour and their swords, even when pressed by direst want, under the new and harder conditions of existence.

The river banks, the streets, the balconies, and blue-tiled roofs were thronged. There was a great quiet as the procession pa.s.sed. Young people gazed in hushed wonder, feeling the rare worth of that chance to look upon what will belong in the future to picture-books only and to the quaint j.a.panese stage. And old men wept silently, remembering their youth.

Well spake the ancient thinker: 'Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers, and that which is remembered.'

Sec. 35

Once more, homeward bound, I sat upon the cabin-roof of the Oki-Saigo-- this time happily unenc.u.mbered by watermelons--and tried to explain to myself the feeling of melancholy with which I watched those wild island- coasts vanishing over the pale sea into the white horizon. No doubt it was inspired partly by the recollection of kindnesses received from many whom I shall never meet again; partly, also, by my familiarity with the ancient soil itself, and remembrance of shapes and places: the long blue visions down channels between islands--the faint grey fishing hamlets hiding in stony bays--the elfish oddity of narrow streets in little primitive towns--the forms and tints of peak and vale made lovable by daily intimacy--the crooked broken paths to shadowed shrines of G.o.ds with long mysterious names--the b.u.t.terfly-drifting of yellow sails out of the glow of an unknown horizon. Yet I think it was due much more to a particular sensation in which every memory was steeped and toned, as a landscape is steeped in the light and toned in the colours of the morning: the sensation of conditions closer to Nature's heart, and farther from the monstrous machine-world of Western life than any into which I had ever entered north of the torrid zone. And then it seemed to me that I loved Oki--in spite of the cuttlefish--chiefly because of having felt there, as nowhere else in j.a.pan, the full joy of escape from the far-reaching influences of high-pressure civilisation--the delight of knowing one's self, in Dozen at least, well beyond the range of everything artificial in human existence.

Chapter Nine Of Souls

Kinjuro, the ancient gardener, whose head shines like an ivory ball, sat him down a moment on the edge of the ita-no-ma outside my study to smoke his pipe at the hibachi always left there for him. And as he smoked he found occasion to reprove the boy who a.s.sists him. What the boy had been doing I did not exactly know; but I heard Kinjuro bid him try to comport himself like a creature having more than one Soul. And because those words interested me I went out and sat down by Kinjuro.

'O Kinjuro,' I said, 'whether I myself have one or more Souls I am not sure. But it would much please me to learn how many Souls have you.'

'I-the-Selfish-One have only four Souls,' made answer Kinjuro, with conviction imperturbable.

'Four? re-echoed I, feeling doubtful of having understood 'Four,' he repeated. 'But that boy I think can have only one Soul, so much is he wanting in patience.'

'And in what manner,' I asked, 'came you to learn that you have four Souls?'

'There are wise men,' made he answer, while knocking the ashes out of his little silver pipe, 'there are wise men who know these things. And there is an ancient book which discourses of them. According to the age of a man, and the time of his birth, and the stars of heaven, may the number of his Souls be divined. But this is the knowledge of old men: the young folk of these times who learn the things of the West do not believe.'

'And tell me, O Kinjuro, do there now exist people having more Souls than you?'

'a.s.suredly. Some have five, some six, some seven, some eight Souls. But no one is by the G.o.ds permitted to have more Souls than nine.'

[Now this, as a universal statement, I could not believe, remembering a woman upon the other side of the world who possessed many generations of Souls, and knew how to use them all. She wore her Souls just as other women wear their dresses, and changed them several times a day; and the mult.i.tude of dresses in the wardrobe of Queen Elizabeth was as nothing to the mult.i.tude of this wonderful person's Souls. For which reason she never appeared the same upon two different occasions; and she changed her thought and her voice with her Souls. Sometimes she was of the South, and her eyes were brown; and again she was of the North, and her eyes were grey. Sometimes she was of the thirteenth, and sometimes of the eighteenth century; and people doubted their own senses when they saw these things; and they tried to find out the truth by begging photographs of her, and then comparing them. Now the photographers rejoiced to photograph her because she was more than fair; but presently they also were confounded by the discovery that she was never the same subject twice. So the men who most admired her could not presume to fall in love with her because that would have been absurd. She had altogether too many Souls. And some of you who read this I have written will bear witness to the verity thereof.]

'Concerning this Country of the G.o.ds, O Kinjuro, that which you say may be true. But there are other countries having only G.o.ds made of gold; and in those countries matters are not so well arranged; and the inhabitants thereof are plagued with a plague of Souls. For while some have but half a Soul, or no Soul at all, others have Souls in mult.i.tude thrust upon them, for which neither nutriment nor employ can be found.

And Souls thus situated torment exceedingly their owners. . . . .That is to say, Western Souls. . . . But tell me, I pray you, what is the use of having more than one or two Souls?'

'Master, if all had the same number and quality of Souls, all would surely be of one mind. But that people are different from each other is apparent; and the differences among them are because of the differences in the quality and the number of their Souls.'

'And it is better to have many Souls than a few?' 'It is better.'

'And the man having but one Soul is a being imperfect?'

'Very imperfect.'

'Yet a man very imperfect might have had an ancestor perfect?'

'That is true.'

'So that a man of to-day possessing but one Soul may have had an ancestor with nine Souls?'

'Yes.'

'Then what has become of those other eight Souls which the ancestor possessed, but which the descendant is without?'

'Ah! that is the work of the G.o.ds. The G.o.ds alone fix the number of Souls for each of us. To the worthy are many given; to the unworthy few.'

'Not from the parents, then, do the Souls descend?'

'Nay! Most ancient the Souls are: innumerable, the years of them.'