The Foundations of Japan Part 13

European art broke down barriers in the j.a.panese mind. When the younger generation, nourished on higher ideals, grew up, it would be the State, and there would be a more hopeful condition of affairs.

People generally supposed that social questions were the most practical; but religious, artistic, philosophic questions were, in the truest sense of the word, the most practical.

Yanagi went on to tell of his devotion to Blake. He could not understand "why Englishmen are so cool to him." He asked me how it was that there was no word about Blake in Andrew Lang's work on English literature. "I cannot imagine," he said, "why such an intelligent man could not appreciate Blake." Yanagi regarded Blake as "the artist of immense will, of immense desire, and a man in whom can be seen that affirmative att.i.tude towards life, exhibited later by Whitman." Yanagi spoke also of "Anglo-Saxon n.o.bility, liberty, depth of character and healthiness," and of "a deep and n.o.ble character" in English literature which he did not find elsewhere. Whitman, Emerson, Poe and William James were "the crown of America."

As I close this chapter I recall Yanagi's library, in the service of which, bettering Mark Pattison's example, two-thirds of its owner's income was for some time expended. I remember the thatched dwelling overlooking the quiet reed-bound lagoon with its frosty sunrises, red moonrises and apparitions of Fuji above the clouds seventy miles away.

No Western visitor whom I took to Abiko failed to be moved by that room, designed by Yanagi himself in every detail, wherein East meets West in harmony. I have made note of his Western books but not of the cla.s.sics and strange mystic writings of Chinese and Korean priests in piles of thin volumes in soft bindings of blue or brown. I have not mentioned a Rembrandt drawing and next to it the vigorous but restful brush lines of an artist priest of the century that brought Buddhism to j.a.pan; severe little gilt-bronze figures of deities from China, a little older; pottery figures of exquisite beauty from the tombs of Tang, a little later; Sung pottery, a dynasty farther on; Korai celadons from Korean tombs of the same epoch; and whites and blue and whites of Ming and Korean Richo. On the wall a black and yellow tiger is "burning bright" on a strip of blood-red silk tapestry woven on a Chinese loom for a Taoist priest 500 years ago. Cimabue's portrait of St. Francis breathes over Yanagi's writing desk from one side, while from the other Blake's amazing life mask looks down "with its Egyptian power of form added to the intensity of Western individualism." These are Yanagi's silent friends. His less quiet friends of the flesh have felt that this room was a sanctuary and Yanagi a priest of eternal things, but a priest without priestcraft, a priest living joyously in the world. Above his desk is inscribed the line of Blake:

Thou also, dwellest in eternity

and Kepler's aspiration, "My wish is that I may perceive G.o.d whom I find everywhere in the external world in like manner within and without me."

FOOTNOTES:

[107] One of the reasons a.s.signed for the suicide of the General was thoughts of his responsibility for the terrible slaughter in the a.s.saults on Port Arthur.

[108] Mrs. Yanagi is one of the best contraltos heard at the now numerous j.a.panese concerts of Western music.

[109] _Shinju_, or suicide for love, the girl often being a geisha, is common.

[110] "I am inclined to think," wrote Yanagi in 1921, in a paper on Korean art, "that we have paid if anything rather too much attention to European works while making little effort to pay attention to what lies much nearer to us."

[111] POLICE STANDARDS.--The sale of one issue of the magazine was prohibited by the police, who found a nude "antagonistic to the ordinary standard of public morals." The editors' answer next month--the police standard being, "No front views"--was to publish half a dozen more nudes with their backs to the reader.

[112] It will be remembered that this conversation took place in the summer of 1915 at the outset of my investigation. Since then, as noted throughout this book, economic questions have increasingly pressed themselves forward. I may mention that in 1919 Yanagi wrote a vigorous and moving protest against misgovernment in Korea. In a recent letter to me he says: "You know that I am going to establish a Korean Folk Art Society in Seoul. This is a big work, but I want to do it with all my power for love of Korea. I approach the solution of the Korean question by the way of Art. Politics can never solve the question. I want to use the gallery as a meeting-place of Koreans and j.a.panese. People cannot quarrel in beauty. This is my simple yet definite belief." Yanagi's manifesto on his project made one think of the age when the great culture of China and India glowed across the straits of Tsushima in the wake of early Buddhism.

[113] A well-known member of the Shirakaba group started two years ago an "ideal village" among the mountains. It is an effort towards social freedom in which the police manifest a continuous interest.

ACROSS j.a.pAN (TOKYO TO NIIGATA AND BACK)

CHAPTER XII

TO THE HILLS

(TOKYO, SAITAMA, TOCHIGI AND f.u.kUSHIMA)

Nothing which concerns a _countryman_ is a matter of unconcern to me.--TERENCE

During the month of July I went from one side of j.a.pan to the other, starting from Tokyo, across the sea from which lies America, and coming out at Niigata, across the sea from which lies Siberia.

We first made a four hours' railway run through the great Kwanto plain (6,000 square miles). Travelling is comfortable on such a trip, for travellers take off their coats and waistcoats, and the train-boy--he has the word "Boy" on his collar in English--brings fans and bedroom slippers. The fans, which on one side advertised "Hotels in European style, directly managed by the Imperial Government Railway[114],"

offered on the other a poem and a drawing. A poem addressed to a snail played with the idea of its giving its life to climbing Fuji. The poem was composed by a poet who wrote many delightful _hokku_ (seventeen-syllable poems), showing a humorous sympathy with the humblest creatures. One poem is:

Come and play with me, Thou orphan sparrow!

Like Burns, Issa addressed a poem to a louse.

As we climbed from the vicinity of the sea to higher lands someone recalled the saying about saints living in the mountains and sages by the sea. Speaking of religion, one man said that he had known of people giving half their income to religious purposes. He also mentioned that for some years his mother had gone to hear a sermon in a j.a.panese Christian church every Sunday, but she still served her Buddhist shrine.

It was at an inn at the hot spring near the Mount Nasu volcano--the odour of the sulphurous hot water was everywhere in the district--that I first enjoyed the attentions of the blind _amma_ (_ma.s.seur_ or _ma.s.seuse_), the call of whose plaintive pipe is heard every evening in the smallest community. _Amma san_ rubbed and pommelled me for an hour for 28 sen. The _amma_ does not ma.s.sage the skin, but works through the _yukata_ (bath gown) of the patient. I had my ma.s.saging as I knelt with the other guests of the inn at an entertainment arranged for the benefit of residents. The entertainers, professional and non-professional--the non-professionals were local farmers--knelt on a low platform or danced in front of it. They were extraordinarily able.

A dramatic tale by one of the story-tellers was about a yokelish young wrestler and a daimyo. Another described the woes and suicide of an old-time Court lady.

The next day we started on foot on a seven miles' climb of the volcano. Its lower slopes were covered with a variety of that knee-high bamboo with a creeping root, which is so troublesome to farmers when they break up new ground. One variety is said to blossom and fruit once in sixty years and then die. An ingenious professor has traced mice plagues to this habit. In the year in which the bamboo fruits the mice increase and multiply exceedingly. Suddenly their food supply gives out and they descend to the plains to live with the farmers.

At length we came in sight of the smoke and vapour of the volcano.

Soon we were near the top, where the white trunks and branches of dead trees and scrub, killed by falling ash or gusts of vapour, dotted an awesome desolation of calcined and fused stone and solidified mud. At the summit we looked down into the churning horror of the volcano's vat and at different spots saw the treacly sulphur pouring out, brilliant yellow with red streaks. The man to whom there first came the idea of h.e.l.l and a prisoned revengeful power must surely have looked into a crater. In the throat of this crater there seethed and spluttered an ugliness that was scarlet, green, brown and yellow. The sound of the steam blowing off was like the roar of the sea. The air was stifling. It was very hot, and there was a high eerie wind.

Adventurous men had built rude bulwarks of stone over some of the orifices, and in this way had compelled the volcano to furnish them with sulphur free from dirt. The production of sulphur in j.a.pan is valued at close on three million yen.

As we went on our journey we spoke of the st.u.r.diness and cheeriness of our chief carrier, who had told us that he was seventy. I asked him if he thought it fair that he should have to walk so far on a hot day with so much to carry while we were empty-handed. He replied that it might appear to be unjust, but that he was happy enough. He said that he had lived long and seen many things, and he knew that to be rich was not always to be happy. He quoted the proverb, "Sunshine and rice may be found everywhere," and the poem which may be rendered, "If you look at a water-fowl thoughtlessly you may imagine that she has nothing to do but float quietly on the water, yet she is moving her feet ceaselessly beneath the surface."

At the little hot spring inn where we next stayed, insect powder was on sale, not without reasonable hope of patronage by the guests. The _Asahi_ once facetiously reported that I had taken on a journey three _to_ (six pecks) of insect powder. The chief protector of the prudent traveller in remote j.a.pan is a giant pillowslip of cotton. He gets into it and ties the strings together under his chin. The mats and futon of old-fashioned hotels are full of fleas. The hard cylindrical j.a.panese pillow has no doubt its tenants also, but I never got accustomed to using it, and laid my head on a doubled-up kneeling cushion.

A foot-high part.i.tion separated the men's hot bath from the women's.

My cold bath in the morning I found I had to take unselfconsciously at a water-gush in front of the house. As the food was poor here, we were glad of our tinned food and ship's biscuits. This was of course in a remote part. Apart from ordinary j.a.panese food, there are usually available at the inns chicken, fish of some sort, eggs, omelettes and soups. With a pot of jam or two and some powdered milk in one's bag, one can live fairly well. Fresh milk can now be got in unlikely places on giving notice overnight. It is produced for invalids and children.

If one makes no fuss, remembers one is a traveller who has resolved to see rural j.a.pan, and realises that the inn people will try to do their best, one will not fare so badly. On the railway one is well catered for by the provision of _bento_ (lunch) boxes, sold on the platforms of stations. These chip boxes contain rice (hot), cold omelette, cold fish or chicken and a.s.sorted pickles, and provide an appetising and inexpensive meal.

Monkeys, bears and antelopes are shot in this district. One man spoke of a troop of eighty monkeys. In the high mountain regions there are still people who escape the census and live a wild life. The records of a gipsy folk called Sanka have a history going back 700 or 800 years.

As we wound our way up and down the hill-sides we saw evidence of "fire-farming." It is the simple method by which a small tract with a favourable aspect is cleared by fire and cultivated, and then, when the fertility is exhausted, abandoned. I was a.s.sured that after fire-farming "tea springs up naturally," and that though tea-drinking may have been introduced from China there could not be such large areas of tea growing wild if tea were not indigenous.

Most of our paths lay through woods and matted vegetation. I noticed that trees were often felled in order that mushrooms might be grown on and around their trunks. There is a large consumption of these tree-grown mushrooms in j.a.pan and an export trade worth two and a half million yen.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CULTIVATION TO THE HILL-TOPS.]

An inscribed stone by our path was a reminder of the belief in "mountain maidens." They have the undoubted merit of not being "so peevish as fairies." At another stone, before which was a pile of small stones, a farmer told us that when a traveller threw a stone on the heap he "left behind his tiredness."

[Ill.u.s.tration: IMPLEMENTS, MEASURES AND MACHINES, AND A BALE OF RICE The photograph was taken in Aichi-ken. p. 73]

In the first house we came to we found a young widow turning bowls with power from a water-wheel. She could finish 400 bowls in a day and got from one to five sen apiece. She said that she had often wished to see a foreigner. Like nearly all the girls and women of the hills, she wore close-fitting blue cotton trousers.

We descended to a kind of prairie which had a tree here and there and roughly wooded hills on either side. This brought us to the problem of the wise method of dealing with the enormous wood-bearing areas of the country, the timber crop of which is so irregular in quality. j.a.pan requires many more scientifically planned forests. As coal is not in domestic use, however, large quant.i.ties of cheap wood are needed for burning and for charcoal making. The demand for hill pasture is also increasing. How shall the claims of good timber, good firewood, good charcoal-making material and good pasture be reconciled? In the county through which we were pa.s.sing--a county which, owing to its large consumption of wood fuel, needs relatively little charcoal--the charcoal output was worth as much as 35,000 yen a year.

We saw "buckwheat in full bloom as white as snow," as the Chinese poem says. At a farmhouse there was a box fixed on a barn wall. It was for communications for the police from persons who desired to make their suggestions for the public welfare privately.

Towards evening, when we had done about twenty miles, I managed to twist an ankle. Happily I had the chance of a ride. It was on the back of a dour-looking mare which was accompanied by her foal and tied by a halter to the saddle of a led pack-horse which was carrying two large boxes. Thus impressively I did several miles in descending darkness and across the rocky beds of two rivers. The horse of this district is a downcast-looking animal in spite of the fact that it is stalled under the same roof as its owner and is thus able to share to some extent in his family life.

At the town at which we at last arrived, the comfort of the hot bath was enhanced by a st.u.r.dy la.s.s of the inn who unasked and unannounced came and applied herself resolutely to scrubbing and knuckling our backs.

The next day I went to the princ.i.p.al school. There were in the place three primary schools, one with a branch for agricultural work. The "attendance" at the princ.i.p.al school, where there were 379 boys and girls, was 98 per cent, for the boys and 94 per cent, for the girls.[115] The buildings were most creditable to a small place fifty miles from a railway station. The community had met the whole cost out of its official funds and by subscriptions. More than half the expenditure of many a village is on education, which in j.a.pan is compulsory but not free. One cannot but be impressed by the pride which is taken in the local schools. The dominating man-made feature of the landscape is less frequently than might be supposed a temple or a shrine: where the picture which catches the eye is not the vast expanse of the crops of the plain or the marvels of terracing for hill crops, it is the long, low school building, set almost invariably on the best possible site. The poorly paid men and women teachers are earnest and devoted, and their influence must be far-reaching. They are rewarded in part, no doubt, by the respect which pupils and the general public give to the _sensei_ (teacher).[116] At the school I visited, the children, as is customary, swept and washed out the schoolrooms and kept the playground trim. Above one teacher's desk were the following admonitions:

Be obedient.

Be decent.

Be active.

Be social.

Be serious.