The Foundations of Japan Part 5

But when account is taken of all the drab materialism in the rural districts there remains a leaven of unworldliness. It takes various forms. Here is the story of a landlord at whose beautiful house I stayed. "When a tenant brings his rent rice to this landlord's storehouse," a fellow-guest told me, "it is never examined. The door of the storehouse is left unpadlocked, and the rent rice is brought by the tenant when he is minded to do so. No one takes note of his coming. If he meets his landlord on the road he may say, 'I brought you the rent,' and the landlord says, 'It is very kind of you.' It is an old custom not to supervise the tenants' bringing of the rent.

"Nowadays, however, some tenants are sly. They say, 'Our landlord never looks into our payments. Therefore we can bring him inferior rice or less than the quant.i.ty.' The landlord loses somewhat by this, but it is not in accordance with the honour of his family to change the method of collecting his rent. He is now chairman of the village co-operative society as well as of the young men's society, and he aims to improve his village fundamentally."

I also heard this narrative. The tenants in a certain place wished to cultivate rice land rather than to farm dry land. But when silkworm cultivation became prosperous they began to prefer dry land again in order that they might extend the area of mulberries. Therefore the landlords raised the rents of the dry farms. But there was one landlord who said, "If this dry farm land had been improved by me I should be justified in raising the rent. But I did not improve it.

Therefore it would be base to take advantage of economic conditions to raise the rent."

So he did not raise the rent. Then he was excluded from social intercourse by the other landlords because their tenants grumbled.

These landlords said to him, "You can afford not to raise your rents, but we cannot." Therefore the landlord who had not raised his rents called his tenants together. He said to them, "It is a hard thing for me to have no social intercourse with my equals. Therefore I will now raise the rents. But I cannot accept that raised portion, and I will take care of it for you, and in ten years I think it will amount to enough for you to start a cooperative society."

That was eight years ago and the formation of the society was now proceeding. In order that the reader may not forget on what a very different scale landlordism exists in j.a.pan, I may mention that the area owned by this landlord was only 10 _cho_.

I was told the story of a landlord's solution of the rent reduction problem. "Tenants," the narrator said, "sometimes pretend that their crops are poorer than they are. Landlords may reduce the payment due, but sometimes with a certain resentment. One landowner was asked for a reduction for several years in succession on account of poor crops, and gave it. But he was trying to think of a plan to defeat the pretences of his tenants. At last he hit on one. While the tenants'

rice was young he often visited the fields, and when any insects were to be seen he sent his labourers secretly to destroy them. In the same way, when crops seemed to be under-manured, he secretly cast artificial manure on them. At last his tenants found out what he was doing, and they said, 'As our landlord is so kind to us, we must not pretend that we need a reduction.' And they did not, and things are going on very well there. This is an ill.u.s.tration of the fact that our people are moved more by feeling than by logic."

This was capped by another story. "A landlord, a samurai, has for his tenants his former subjects, so something of the relation of master and servant still remains. He wished to raise his tenants to the position of peasant proprietors, so when land was for sale in the village he advised them to buy. They said they had no money, but he answered, 'Means may perhaps be found.' He secretly subscribed a sum to the Shinto shrine and then advised the formation of a co-operative society, which could borrow from the shrine for a tenant, so that the tenant need not go to the landlord to thank him and feel patronised by him. He need only to go to the shrine and give thanks there." "The landlord," added the speaker in his imperfect English, "has entirely hided himself from the business." A third of the tenants had become peasant proprietors.

In order to better the feeling between the farmers and landowners this landlord and several others had begun to ask their tenants to their gardens, where they were given tea and fruit. "In j.a.pan," said one man to me, "we see feudal ideas broken down by the upper, not the lower cla.s.s."

I visited the romantic coast of a peninsula a dozen miles from the railway. Some 10,000 pilgrims come in a year to the eighty-eight temples on the peninsula, and in some parts the people are such strict Buddhists that in one village the county authorities find great difficulty in overcoming an objection to destroying the insect life which preys on the rice crops. When rice land does not yield well, one landlord causes an investigation to be made and gives advice based upon it to the tenant, saying, "Do this, and if you lose I will compensate you. If you gain, the advantage will be yours." Money is also contributed by the landlord to enable tenants to make journeys in order to study farming methods.

A landlord here--I had the pleasure of being his guest--had started an agricultural a.s.sociation. It had developed the idea of a secondary school for practical instruction, "rich men to give their money and poor men their labour." In order to obtain a fund to enable tenants to get money with which to set up as peasant proprietors, this landlord had thought of the plan of setting aside each harvest 250 _sho_[27] of rice to each tenant's 3 _sho_.

Good work was done in teaching farmers' wives. "When no instruction is given," I was informed, "a wife may say, when her husband is testing his rice seed with salt water, 'Salt is very dear, nowadays, why not fresh water?' If a husband is kind he will explain. If not, some unpleasantness may arise, so wives are taught about the necessity of selecting by salt water."

[Ill.u.s.tration: LANDOWNER'S SON AND DAUGHTER OFF TO THE VILLAGE SCHOOL. p. 38]

[Ill.u.s.tration: BUDDHIST SHRINE IN A LANDOWNER'S HOUSE. p. 33]

Tenants are advised to save a farthing a day. In order to keep them steadfast in their thriftiness they are asked to bring their savings to their landlord every ten days. It is troublesome to be constantly receiving so many small sums, but the landlord and his brother think that they should not grudge the trouble. In two years nearly 1,000 yen have been saved. Said one tenant to his landlord, "I know how to save now, therefore I save."

[Ill.u.s.tration: MR. YAMASAKI, DR. NITOBE, THE AUTHOR AND PROFESSOR NASU. p. xv]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE HOME IN WHICH THE TEA CEREMONY TOOK PLACE. p. 31]

One of my hosts, who was thirty-two, hoped to see all his tenants peasant proprietors before he was fifty. The relation of this landlord and his tenants was ill.u.s.trated by the fact that on my arrival several farmers brought produce to the kitchen "because we heard that the landlord had guests." The village was very kind in its reception of the foreign visitor. A meeting was called in the temple. I told the story of Wren's _Si monumentum requiris circ.u.mspice_ and pointed a rural moral. Some months afterwards I received a request from my host to write a word or two of preface to go with a report of my address which he was giving to each of his tenants as a New Year gift.

This landlord's family had lived in the same house for eleven generations. The courtesy of my host and his relatives and the beauty of their old house and its contents are an ineffaceable memory. From the time my party arrived until the time we left no servant was allowed to do anything for us. The ladies of the house cooked our food and the landlord and his younger brother brought it to us. The younger brother waited upon us throughout our meals, even peeling our pears.

At night he spread our silk-covered _futon_ (mattresses). In the morning he folded them up, arranged my clothes, swept the room and stood at hand with towels, all of which were new, while I washed.

When on our arrival in the house we sat and talked in the first reception-room we entered, I noticed that outside the lattice a company of villagers was listening with no consciousness of intrusion, in full view of our host, to the sound of foreign speech. It was a Shakespearean scene.

Out of its setting, as it is often witnessed to-day, the tea ceremony seems meaningless and wearisome, an affected simplicity of the idle.

But as a guest of this old house of fine timbers weathered to silver-grey I found the secret of _Cha-no-yu_. This flower of Far Eastern civilisation is an aesthetic expression of true good-fellowship, and a gentle simplicity and sincerity are of its essence. The admission of a foreigner to a family _Cha-no-yu_ was a gesture of confidence.

Five of us gathered late in the afternoon of an August day in the cool matted rest-room in the garden. We looked on the beauty that generations of gardeners of a single vision had created. Our minds rested in the quiet as in the quaint phrase, we "tasted the sound of the kettle and listened to the incense." At length at a signal we rose. Led by the priestess of the ceremony, our host's aunt, a slight figure in grey with snow-white _tabi_ and new straw sandals, we pa.s.sed by the dripping rocky fountain, with its lilies, and the azure hydrangea of the hills which, some say, suggests distance. The hut-like tea-room, traditionally rude in the material of which it was built but perfect in every detail of its workmanship, we entered one by one. According to old custom we humbly crept through the small opening which serves as entrance, the idea being that all worldly rank must bow at the sanctuary of beauty. The tiny chamber held, besides the wonderful vessels of the ceremony, a flower arrangement of blue Michaelmas daisies, and an exquisite scroll of wild duck in flight in the miniature _tokonoma_,[28] the tea mistress, our host and four guests. We drank from a black daimyo bowl which had been made four hundred years before. We pa.s.sed an hour together and in the twilight we came out from the little room as from a sacrament of friendship. A year afterwards my host wrote to me, "Yesterday we had _Cha-no-yu_ again and you were in our thoughts. During the ceremony we placed your photograph in the _tokonoma_."

After dinner we had _kyogen_[29] by distinguished amateurs, one of whom, a neighbouring landowner, had lately appeared before the Emperor. After the plays he painted _kyogen_ scenes for us on _kakemono_ and fans. He painted the _kakemono_ as he knelt with his paper lying on a square of soft material on the floor.

The plays were performed in ancient costumes or copies of old ones and of course without scenery. The players were lighted by oily candles two inches in diameter, which flamed and guttered in candlesticks not of this century nor of the last. A player may make his exit merely by sitting down. The players are men; masks are used in playing women's parts. The stories are of the simplest. There was the well-known tale of the sly servant who was sent to town by a stupid daimyo in order to buy a fan, and, though he brought back an umbrella, succeeded in imposing it on his master. There was also the play of the fox who comes to a farmer to advise him not to kill foxes, but is himself caught in a trap. I also recall a story of two good tenants who had been rewarded by their landlord with an order that they should receive hats. Owing to an oversight they received one hat only between the two. Problem, how to meet the difficulty. It was solved by the rustics fastening two pieces of wood together T-shape, raising the hat of honour upon the structure and walking home in triumph under either side of the T.

The next morning I was greeted by the aged father and mother of our host. The household was an interesting one, for the landlord and his brother were married to two sisters. Before taking our departure we knelt with our landlord and his father before the Buddhist shrine on which rested the memorial tablets of former heads of the house. I expressed my sense of the privilege extended to strangers. The reply was, "Our ancestors will feel pleasure in your being among us."

FOOTNOTES:

[25] Samurai or _shizoku_ comprise about a twentieth of the population.

[26] Every j.a.panese signs by means of a stone or hard-wood seal which he keeps in a case and ordinarily carries with him.

[27] A _sho_ is about a quart and a half.

[28] The raised recess in which is usually displayed the flower arrangement, a piece of pottery and a _kakemono_. (See Note, page 35.)

[29] Farcical interludes of the _No_ stage.

CHAPTER V

COUNTRY-HOUSE LIFE

The sense of a common humanity is a real political force.--J.R. GREEN

The stranger in j.a.pan sees so little of the intimacies of country life that I shall say something of further visits to what we should call county families. My hosts, who seemed to be active to a greater or less degree in promoting the welfare of their tenants, lived in purely j.a.panese style. Yet now and then in a beautiful house there was a showy gilt timepiece or some other thing of a deplorable Western fashion. At all the houses without exception we were waited upon by the host and his son, son-in-law or brother, and for some time after our arrival our host and the members of his family would kneel, not in the apartment in which our _zabuton_ (kneeling cushions) were arranged, but in the adjoining apartment with its screens pushed back.

Even when the time of sweets and tea had pa.s.sed and a regular meal was served, all the little tables of food were brought in not by servants but by the master of the house and such male relatives as were at home.

When the duration of a j.a.panese meal is borne in mind, some idea may be gained of the fatigue endured by the head of a house in serving many guests. The host sometimes honours his guests still further by eating apart from them or by partaking of a portion only of the meal.

The name of a feast in j.a.panese is significant, "a running about." The ladies of the house are usually seen for only a few minutes, when they come with the children to welcome the guests on their arrival; but on the second day of the visit the ladies may bring in food or tea or play the _koto_.

The foreigner, though on his knees, feels a little at a loss to know how to acknowledge politely the repeated bows of so many kneeling men and women. He watches with appreciation the perfect response of his j.a.panese travelling companions. It is difficult to convey a sense of the charm and dignity of old courtesies exchanged with sincerity between well-bred people in a fine old house. Although all the _shoji_[30] are open, the trees of the beautiful garden cast a pensive shade. The ancient ceremonial of welcome and introduction would seem ludicrous in the full light of a Western drawing-room, but in the perfectly subdued light of these romantically beautiful apartments, charged with some strange and melancholy emotion, the visitor from the West feels himself entering upon the rare experience of a new world.

Everyone knows how few are the treasures that a j.a.panese displays in his house. His heirlooms and works of art are stored in a fireproof annexe. For the feasting of the eye of every guest or party of visitors the appropriate choice of _kakemono_,[31] carving or pottery is made. I had the delight of seeing during my country-house visiting many ancient pictures of country life and of animals and birds. It was also a precious opportunity to inspect armour and wonderful swords and stands of arrows in the houses in which the men who had worn the armour and used the weapons had lived. The way of stringing the seven-feet-high bow was shown to me by a kimono-clad samurai, as has been recorded in the previous chapter. When he threw himself into a warlike att.i.tude and with an ancient cry whirled a gleaming two-handed sword in the dim light thrown by lanterns which had lighted the house in the time of the Shoguns, the figures on old-time j.a.panese prints had a new vividness.

What also helped in illuminating for me the old prints of warlike scenes was a display of a remarkable kind of fencing with naked weapons which one of my hosts kindly provided in his garden one evening. The tournament was conducted by the village young men's a.s.sociation. The exercises, which, as I saw them, are peculiar to the district, are called _ki-ai_, which means literally "spirit meeting."

They call not only for long training but for courage and ardour. The combats took place on a small patch of gra.s.s which was fenced by four bamboo branches. These were connected by a rope of paper streamers such as are used to distinguish a consecrated place. Before the first bout the bamboos and rope were taken away and a handful of salt was thrown on the gra.s.s. Salt was similarly thrown on the gra.s.s before every contest. The idea is that salt is a purifier. It signifies, like the handshake of our boxers, that the feelings of the combatants are cleansed from malice.

Most of the events were single combats, but there were two meetings in which a man confronted a couple of a.s.sailants. The contests I recall were spear _v_. spear, spear _v_. sword, sword _v_. long billhook, spear _v_. the short j.a.panese sickle and a chain, spear _v_. paper umbrella and sword, pole _v_. wooden sword, pole _v_. pole, and long billhook _v_. fan and sword. The weapons were sharp enough to inflict serious wounds if a false move should be made or there should be a momentary lack of self-control. The flashing steel gave an impression of imminent danger. There was also the feeling aroused in the spectators by the way in which the combatants sought to gain advantage over one another by fierce snarls, stamping on the ground and appalling gestures. The neck veins of the fighters swelled and their faces flamed with mock defiance. Their agility in escaping descending blades was amazing. But the _ki-ai_ player's dexterity is famous. It is his boast that with his sword he could cut a straw on a friend's head. I noticed that no women were present at the "spirit meeting."

More than once I found that my landlord host was accustomed to make a circuit of his village once or twice a week in order to see how things were going with his tenants. Public-spirited landlords were working for their people by means of co-operation, lectures and prizes, the distribution of leaflets and the giving of from 2-1/2 to 7-1/2 per cent. discount in rent when good rice was produced. The rural philanthropist in j.a.pan sees himself as the father of his village.[32]

The j.a.panese word for landlord is "land master" and for tenant "son tiller." The old idea was patronage on the one side and respect on the other. This idea is disappearing. "We wish," said one landlord to me, "to pa.s.s through the transition stage gradually. We do not feel the same responsibility to our people, perhaps, now that they do not show the same reverence for us, but we do not say to them that they may go to the factory and we will invest our money for our children. We check ourselves. We know well, however, that things will change in our grandsons' time. We therefore try to mix our grandfathers' ideas and modern ideas. We are believers in co-operation and we try to be counsellors and to work behind the curtain."

From time to time there are such things as tenants' strikes. Mr.

Yamasaki a.s.sured me that the problem of the rural districts can be solved only by appealing to the feelings of the people in the right way. He said that "the j.a.panese are largely moved by feelings, not by convictions." In some coastwise counties, someone told me, a hurricane destroyed the crops to such an extent that the tenants could not pay rent, and the landlords who depended on their rents were impoverished.

Things reached such a pa.s.s that a hundred thousand peasants signed a paper swearing fidelity to an anti-landlord propaganda. Officials and lawyers achieved nothing. Then Mr. Yamasaki went, and, sitting in the local temple, talked things over with both sides for days. He got the landlords to say that they were sorry for their tenants and the tenants to say that they were sorry for the landlords, and eventually he was allowed to burn the oath-attested doc.u.ment in the temple.[33]

Many landlords are "endeavouring to cultivate a moral relation"

between themselves and their tenants. They have often the advantage that their ancestors were the landlords of the same peasant families for many generations. But there are still plenty of absentee landlords and landlords who are usurers. There are also the landlords who have let their lands to middlemen. The cultivator therefore pays out of all proportion to what the landlord receives. Of landlords generally, an ex-daimyo's son said to me: "Many landlords treat their tenants cruelly. The rent enforced is too high. In place of the intimate relations of former days the relations are now that of cat and dog.