MWui^Mtaa ■—- ^- — i atettHIIMtlltk.^^*Am. tfi'tfn rttfil -U^Wf « nW** T^ €mm\l ^nmxmi^ pibvatg THE GIFT OF ^^'sj'-. C^vna3[SZJ^73V DS 810.D28'" """"'""' '-"'™'^ „Sakurambo / 3 1924 023 222 080 The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924023222080 SAKURAMBO By JAMES S. DE BENNEVILLE "Oh, past delights, Whereof the very thought excites A thrill in every limb, as though ^ The merry life of long ago *' ;; I lived again." Romance of the Rose (All rights resijrved) 3> Copyright, 1908 By JAMES S. de BENNEVILLE Press of J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY ERRATA AND MEMORANDA. Preface, line 4 from top, read — " As we pass along tliese fields and roads and thatched houses." Page 12 — transpose line 1 to follow line 4 from top. Page 21 — line 2 from top, read — " stove " instead of " store." Page 67 — line 8 from bottom, read — " shove " instead of " shore." Page 71 —line 5 from bottom, read-^" rejected " instead of " regretted." Page 89 — line 13 from top, read — " so to this " etc. Page 94 — line 11 from top, read — " these " instead of " those." Page 107 — line 15. The date given by the Xihongi ('405 A.D.) is generally accepted for the coming of the Chinese Scholar, Wani. The question depends somewhat on the date of the books tlien introduced. Cf. undei' Ojin p. 294. It does seem a long time (405 — 552 A.D.) for nothing to be known of Buddhism in Japan. Page 109 — lines 8 and 12 read — " Soga no Yemishi." Page 114 — line 18 from top — Bede was born in 67.3 A.D. Page 138 — line 3 from top, read -" patent " instead of " patient." Page 153— line 8 from bottom, read — "obscene" instend of "obscure." Page 167 — line 2 from bottom, read — " Fiitaara " insteivl of " Futarra." Page 168 — line 10 from top, read — " ChiJzenji " instead of " Chozenji." Page 188 and 189 la.st and first line, read — " transfer of the family powers to the State " etc. Page 221— line 12 from top, read—" Theos " instead of " eThos." Page 228 Chapter Title, read—" Hizen " instead of " Hisen." Pages 229 to 331 — For page heading, read — " From Bungo to Hizen." Page 231 — line 10 from top, read— "Kuro.shi wo "instead of" Kusoshi wo." Page 268 Note, read -" Kojiki " instead of " Kojishi." Pages 269 to 273 —For page heading, read — " The Land of Y;!mato." Page 298— line 12 from bottom, read— Sir Ernest Satow. Page 306 add elosine line — " and its odd habits." Page 308 to close — For page bending, read — " Nunc Dimittis." Page 337— hist line, read—" 10-23 " i„stead of " lO"*-'." Page 338— line 2 from top, read—" lO-i" " instead of " 10 ''." PREFACE In travelling through the highways and byways of a country there are many questions which present themselves, and which we try to answer on the facts familiair to us of our own present and past, require a resume of the authorities to which recourse was had so numerously sprinkled over the land of Japan, naturally these questions come up, to which, with this secretive Oriental people, it is difficult to find an answer. The material of this book is largely made of personal impressions gained by four years of travel through its countryside. For the opinions here expressed, only the writer is responsible. The facts, dealing in some cases with the past, require a resume of the authorities to which recourse was had to obtain such facts. I would therefore mention, in connection with Chapter IV., Klaproth's translation of the O Dai Ichiran, a Japanese dry-as-dust chronicle compiled about the middle of the seventeenth century, and carried down to 1818 by Klaproth himself; "Land Tenure and Local Institutions in Old Japan," by Simmons and Wigmore, and " Private Law in Old Japan," by Wigmore, especially his intro- duction. The first-mentioned is published in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Vol. XIX., Part I. ; the second, in Vol. XX., the Supplements. Also, mention should be made of Dr. Knox's translation of the Hyo-chu-ori of Aral Hakuseki (Vol. XXX., Part II., of the Transactions) ; also of Professor Dropper's " Population of the Tokugawa Period " (Vol. XX., Part II., of the Transactions). As to Chapter VI., I would refer to " Ances- tor Worship and Japanese Law," by Professor Nubushigi Hozumi, and to Mr. J. H. Gubbin's introduction to and translation of the civil code dealing with the Family in Japan ; also to Professor Pas- quale Villari's chapters on the Feudal System in Italy and Rise of the Communes, in his " History of Florence ; " also to the "Institu- tions Politiques du Japon," by Theophile Collier. As to Chapter PREFACE VII., Mr. A. G. Lay's paper on " Political Parties in Japan " was consulted (Transactions, Vol. XXX., Part III.), as also authorities more specifically referred to in the text. As to Chapter. VIII., in addition to the foot-note placed at the beginning of the chapter, I would add Mr. L. H. Parker's " Race Struggles in Korea " (Transactions, Vol. XVIIL, Part II.), and Mr. W. G. Aston's " Early History of Japan " (Transactions, Vol. XVI.). The foreign newspapers published in Japan are also a valuable source of material. These contain the impressions and experiences of men resident for many years in the country. Many special articles are so contributed, especially to the Japan Times (published by Japanese, in English) and the Japan Daily Mail, the latter of which has a monthly summary of the religious and native press, covering the widest range of subjects. Histories of Japan are numerous. That of Murdoch and Yamagata is a philosophical discussion based on the original documents of the period from the times of Nobunaga to the death of lyeyasu. Of those covering the whole period of Japanese history from legendary to modern times, mention should be made of Murray's " History," in the Story of Nations series, and " The Mikado's Empire," by Doctor Grififis. In dealing with so many subjects covering a wide field there is ample room for an- equally wide divergence of opinion. In the laws of Shotoku Taishi it is said : "Be not angered with others on account of disagreement of opinion. Each one may have a dif- ferent point of view, and may therefore come to a different con- clusion." All that can be asked is sincerity, and this is claimed for the present volume. And one word as to the title. The cherry-blossom, as is known, is distinctly the national flower of Japan. The tree is cultivated with reference to the beautiful spring bloom, when for a few days the groves are a sight of exquisite beauty. Sakura is the term usually applied to the tree itself, as we say " the cherry " meaning the cherry-tree. It enters into many combinations : Sakurabana, the cherry-blossom ; sakuraka, the delicate odour of the blossom ; sakuragari, the excursions to see the blossoms ; and so we pass on to the fruit of the tree — Sakurambo. Omarudani, August 7, 1905. CONTENTS. CHAPl'ER PAGE I.— FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN . . . 1 II.— BOSHU WAY 33 III.— IWASHIRO WAY." 70 IV —THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE . . loe v.— THROUGH KOTSUKE 151 VI.— SHINANO WAY .... '. . 185 VII.— FROM BUNGO TO HIZEN . . • . 228 VIII.— THE LAND OF YAMATO . . . . 268 IX.— NUNC DIMITTIS 307 SAKURAMBO I FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN " We went on board, and having set sail, came near the coast of Lanternland. We then saw certain little hovering fires on the sea." — Rabelais. It was one of the trifling incidents of life that led me to pitch my tent among this strange people. A sea tossed by the fresh breeze into a mass of whitecaps, a cloudless summer day monotonous in its sameness to the similar days that had preceded and would follow it, the desire for variety even if only in the weather, and a Japanese ricksha formed the compound of elements required to stififen up the vacillating ego to say " I shall." There were also the two essential stimulants to such an assertion of energy : the direct object acting as reagent and the ultimate object to be sought as result. The direct object was the sea itself. Thei"e is some- thing about the presence of large bodies of water inciting man to get on them or in them. There is no race so savage or so self- supporting in its present habitat that it has not been tempted beyond its own shores to seek the unknown. Moreover the Pacific, broad and wide-expanding as it is, does not seem such a lonely ocean as the others. There is always an island lying around loose some- where to bump into, like icebergs in season in the North Atlantic, and although men go down to the sea in ships on the Pacific and never return, there are romances of sunny isles, brown-skinned maidens, cocoanut palms and giant decapods, to stimulate curi- osity and to offset the lugubrious side of the oceanic ennui. And who does not believe himself the immortal, the one favoured by Fate and free from her disasters ? The little " man-power wagon," like a vane, pointed the direc- 2 SAKURAMBO tion of the prevailing sentiment. In its very name it seemed so isolated from the land of machinery, where man-power had been relegated to the past, where man had been almost relegated to the past, and the artisan had become a mere additional lever to the complicated machine, a lever of flesh among the levers of iron. To live among a people where arms of flesh and blood overcame the inertia of weight, where muscle, not steel, triumphed over nature, where your human steed whisked you through the country at a good round trot, and always found time to look after the personal comfort of his freight, and was always ready to enter into conver- sation with it on the slightest provocation, whether on matters of personal interest or on matters local to the place and occasion ! It sometimes seems to me that our boasted equality of man in the West is a very fictitious feeling. Few are the prophets to preach the dignity of manual labour, and we undeniably look down on occupations that imply nothing but the straining of the muscles, so much " horse-power " as we call it, and of less value than steam and electricity, because the latter is more economically distributed. Although the lower will always unite in dislike and jealousy against the higher, there is a greater feeling of disdain of manual labour shown in the man who adds so many yards of figures, or measures so many yards of cloth, than in the man with miles of railway on his back, and his honour and reputation upholding the interests of thousands of lives depending on his brain and judgment for their daily bread. Our ricksha runner or kurumaya has no feeling in his soul that his employer despises him for his daily toil. One man is born to silk and another to cotton. One man is a shop- keeper, another gets his living from a bank, and another from the rice-fields. He may envy the, to his eye, easier toil of the other man, but not its nature. He may envy the better education and training that has enabled the other man to obtain his higher posi- tion, but he does not for that reason despise his own means of living. And how greatly that higher knowledge and training is valued in Japan ! Hundreds of young men and boys will leave bet- ter occupations, in a social sense, to take up so-called menial but bet- FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 3 ter paid positions, which give them the money to gain training and knowledge ; who go out as cooks, " boys " or servants, gardeners, banto or under-clerks in the service of foreigners, a course a thousandfold more disliked than sei-vice among their own people, although the latter affords lower pay, or no pay, simply to acquire a foreign language. Never is there displayed in them a contempt for their occupation, a sense of degradation in pursuing it, simply because a feeling of humiliation due to menial service does not exist. The end justifies the means and honours the form of toil. Although service in foreign countries opens their eyes as to the foreign view-point of menial labour, I doubt if there are any, or but few, conversions to western ideas in this respect. No people hold knowledge, education, and all it brings, in higher honour than the Japanese, but all labour has its honourable side. I remember once, in travelling, meeting a peculiarly attractive character in one of our numerous self-made men. He was a Yankee who had made a fortune in the West, and had returned to his old home in New England to enjoy the balance of life. His interests in the West took him there frequently, and they were his mission on the occasion on which I met him. He was not only a bright man, but well informed by reading, had travelled over all the United States and Mexico on business, and on most subjects was extremely liberal in his views. Except as to the Oriental. On that point his brains seemed to be fairly " cut bias," so to speak. To him the Oriental was the opium-smoking, degraded Canton coolie. There was no other. The idea that there were men in the East fit opponents for our learned divines, economists, and statesmen ; that there were thousands of wealthy merchants doing business on a scale as large as our own, and that these men required for their business a capital, not only of money but of education and world-wide experience, quite as great as with ourselves ; that below them were artisans quite as skilful, and gaining a living to their own content, and that it was the surplus, the unskilful, of this class that sought other countries — these were Munchausen tales. He told me how on a recent occasion he had met in travelling a 4 SAKURAMBO Chinaman. Actually, the audacious heathen travelled in a Pull- man, whereas he, the peer of kings, travelled in the common car. Moreover, the said heathen paid not the least attention to his fellow-travellers, generally minded his own business, had no sense of his own shortcomings as one of those yellow-skinned races so recently described in the school geographies as " semi-civilized," or of his audacity in regarding himself as the equal of the other kings (travelling Pullman), and in general behaved himself, according to my now excited friend, like the Chinese -gentleman that he was. Now the fact flashed across me, that such gross ignorance was not confined to my Yankee friend. He really be- lieved every word he said, and could have cited articles by the hundred and editorials by the score, from the daily papers, sup- porting just what he said. And there came to mind the almost universal tone of superiority that we take toward these eastern nations. We will not force a tariff on any European country, or they on us, because we lack the power to do so ; we will submit our citizens to their laws, and they reciprocate, because we must submit or go away; we exclude from our shores whoever and whatever we please, and it is our right to do so : but we force on eastern nations our goods on terms to suit ourselves, and without regard to the distress and disorganization it may cause in their affairs; we force ourselves on them on terms making us practically irre- sponsible to any authority among them ; we murder one Chinaman, or a score of them, and it is the outbreak of a mob, and the Gov- ernor of the offending state reports " parties unknown." A China- man in a quarrel kills a foreigner, and there is a scramble to deter- mine the nationality of the murdered man, for the plunder is well worth the hurly-burly. The Governor of the Chinese state is promptly called on to execute somebody, which he does — although probably the victim is in no way connected with the tragedy, but has been marked out for removal on other grounds — and to pay an indemnity, which he does far less willingly. Western ideas of justice hardly seem to be reached in such cases, however good the principle. Lax law and lax justice should be well amerced. The FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 5 duty, however, seems to be reciprocal. A province and a million people is high pay for two priests killed by a mob. To us " John " is still " the heathen Chinee," and the rest of us, European and American, are the burly ruffians of the Sierras, drawn from all quarters of the globe, armed to the teeth, and really a good-natured lot — when we are sober and don't hang the wrong man. Some such thoughts came into my head as Saburo pushed back the heavy wooden outside shutters into the tobukuro (alcove), and threw wide open the little Japanese house to the whole of out- doors. Saburo is a little dried-up man, over forty years of age, and hence toshiyori (an old man) to the reverent younger gen- eration ; a smooth face, the top of his head bereft of hair, the red of hard winter apples in his sallow face, and yet a plumpness therein that gives him the delusive appearance of " childlike and bland." Saburo's countrymen had been wise in their generation. Martial valour is generally an inherent quality in island races, and a rigid caste system together with a punctilious code of etiquette had fostered and kept alive the martial spirit. The government had crushed out public disturbance in the land, and encouraged and substituted therefor private war. It is a matter of history how the martial spirit was there in 1853 and the years closely follow- ing, but the means and the skill to make use of it were lacking. The Japanese were dispersed like a band of rioters before the modern armed and drilled sailors and marines from the foreign warships. Before weapons of precision and modern tactics they were helpless. What they lacked was the spirit of the times. For two hundred and fifty years they had remained in the sixteenth century in thought and in practice, but the developed mind was there. We hear expressions of wonder as to the progress made by the Japanese within the last fifty years. Just why, it is hard to see. In the case of a race of savages such as the New Zealand Maori, one can indeed wonder at seeing the ripest product of civil- ization in men whose professional attainments in law, medicine, or politics, stand without question, and whose grandfathers were active advocates of " benevolent assimilation " of their fellow-men by the 6 SAKURAMBO fundamental medium of the soup-pot. In the present case we are dealing with a change of material direction of a high civihzation. Is there any intrinsic mental development in the man who rides at one hundred miles an hour on the third-rail system and the man who eighty years ago rode at twelve miles an houi in a coach? It seems to me that if Csesar or Norman William returned to the scenes of their former activity, we would find that it would not take them hundreds of years to grasp the science of modern war. Given supreme power, Caesar could have written the Gallic wars at any time in history, and afthe end of the eighteenth century and early in the nineteenth century he did so write them. This country of Japan had learnt its lesson well, and as I looked across the little garden to Tokyd Bay and the Nokogiriyama in Boshu, the line of forts lying across the bay filled the middle ground, and the naval station of Yokosuka lay nestled in the line of blue hills separating this shut-in basin from the Sagami Bay, open to the beat and storms of the ocean. Strong are the forts and elaborate the precautions taken in this corner of the Island Empire, for here lies the entrance to its capital and its rich Tokyo plain, extending for miles to the north in a champaign country comparatively extensive for Japan, one of the few \'ulnerable points of the Empire. The scene is anything but warlike, this fine January morning, although the land is in the throes of a great war. Japan is a country in which pretty scenery, charming combinations of sea and hill without savage grandeur, is so widely distributed that a man must indeed live in the bottom of a well to get away from beauty of some kind. This Sagami arm is the beauty-spot of Tokyo Bay, the prettiest view of it being perhaps from above Kanazawa, looking south. From the heights above the fishing village of Negishi there is a charming picture of an indented jumble of hills and sea, which in summer is rendered still more beautiful by the contrast between the vivid green of the growing rice and the darker green of the pines and fir-trees. The Japanese pine (omatsu) fits in peculiarly to the style of the scenery. Nature FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 7 seems to have an aesthetic sense of propriety in throwing together her materials. It is a grotesque, an obsession. Anywhere else it would be absolutely condemned as a tree. Slender, stumpy, knarled, distorted, it seems possessed of a vegetable locomotor ataxia. A western gardener, seeing such a tree in a plantation under his care, would root it off the surface of the earth, and con- demn it, not to firewood, for it hardly rises to such dignity, but to chips and kindling for the fairer specimens of Nature's woodcraft and the manor chimney. The Japanese, on the contrary, cherish it. They build elaborate structures to prop up its distorted branches, grown out of all relation to the trunk, like the arms of a polypus. They plaster up its wounds, so that not an ounce of precious sap will be lost. They revel in its deviation from Nature's norm, and when they have succeeded in bolstering up one of these degenerates into a life of ten generations, they build a circle of tea-houses around it and flock in crowds to look at it. As to how far they are right or wrong is not a matter of importance. The great black pines of the Sierras, the beautiful firs and hemlocks from Maine to Oregon, attract the eye by the purity of their curves and lines, and Nature duly gives them their centuries of life. They are strong in their symmetry. Such life, however, as the Japanese pine is contra Nature, for such exaggerations of trees, by the very laws of mechanics, are condemned as monsters. The great disparity between trunk and branches would have killed the tree long since, splitting the trunk from top to bottom, and leaving it an incoherent tangle on the ground. It is man who has baffled Nature, and thwarted her remedial legislation. In January, how- ever, it is the prevalence of this pine and the comparative absence of deciduous trees that give the landscape its green and living appearance. The sign of winter is displayed by the snowy cone of Fuji, which, by a sweep of a small segment of the circle, is brought into view, and continues along the lofty Oyama range, disappear- ing north and northwest into the Tokyo plain. The landscape will not materially change for months. The rice is not trans- planted until June, and the bare, shining, checkerboard patches, 8 SAKURAMBO fortunately hidden under water, even weeks later will only show here and there the velvety green of tiny patches of seed rice. Yet winter and late fall are in many respects the best seasons in eastern Japan. It is a rainy land at other times. It is safe to say that from March to November the days of the month on which rain will fall, more or less, will average nine in number, and others will be so threatening as to thwart outdoor intentions. In winter, how- ever, for days the sun shines, not with the steady persistency of southern California, but enough so as to enable man to be fairly careless as to his future outside engagements. Unfortunately, it is not a season for the foreign visitor. The summer resorts are rarely opened before April, and the Japanese houses, lacking any heating apparatus, become bitterly cold after the sun goes down. To live in a Japanese house in winter requires a concession on the part of the foreigners to the native clothing, which is far warmer than our western clothing. It is a common sight to see the " boys " employed in foreign hotels, and who necessarily wear tights and gaiters in European style, huddled around the stove, palpably suf- fering from cold. The same " boy " off duty and squatting on the tatanii in his little home open to the blasts of heaven, wrapped up in three or four layers of cotton-wadded kimonos, merely finds it necessary, from time to time, to stretch his frozen fingers over the few sticks of charcoal in the hibachi (brazier). Granted the art of sitting on one's feet, and the native dress, winter days, at least, are quite tolerable in a Japanese house from December to April. Sunrise is the signal for the day's work or play to begin, and sunrise is closely followed by Saburo and his operation on the shutters, the amado or rain-doors, as they are often called, in dis- tinction from the shoji or light wooden frames in which rice-paper replaces the glass of our western country, the only means by which in daytime the Japanese house is shut off from the gaze of the outside world. These to are about the only thing heavy and ungraceful in a structure which in other respects is lightness and grace itself in its arrangements; and when a driving rain from FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 9 the wrong quarter threatens to wash the rice-paper out of the frames of the shoji, then even in daytime the to have to be pulled out of the little box-like frame into which they fit when not in use, and we are shut in, in semi-darkness, bodily and mental, until the wind changes and gives our neighbours a dose, or the rain ceases, or, more often, drops into a gentle drizzle. Although Japan is a rainy country, such driving storms are not very prevalent, the steady soak, soak, from a dripping sky being more the rule; but in typhoon weather, sometimes for several days we will be shut in to darkness and ourselves. It must be confessed that under such circumstances the Japanese house does not shine ; but on a bright day, and in the warm weather, which substantially lasts from May until November, when even the shoji can be removed temporarily from their grooves and the whole house thrown open to the air, then this little platform raised some two or three feet from the ground is an ideal home. For platform it really is, enclosed only at points where rigidity requires a wall. It has an edging of polished wood about three feet wide, always kept in a condition of shine like a pair of boots, and on the outer edge of which is cut the groove in which slides the to, the tobukuro being usually attached to or sunk in the solid supporting wall section at a corner of the structure. On the inner edge of the polished rim a double- grooved frame runs around the whole open portion of the house, sending off arms at intervals, which cut the flooring into squares of size appropriate for rooms. This frame, raised some two inches above the flooring, carries the shoji which separate the rooms of the house from each other and form the only privacy, limited in character, sought in a Japanese house. All is levelled off inside the frame by the totami or Japanese matting, thick, soft, and heavy, bringing the whole inside of the house to one level. A little child can and does readily carry off the light shoji, and ten minutes will convert a large house into one large floor space, only divided by the panels crossing the ceiling and which hold the upper end of the shoji, and which are often made of fretwork, artificial or natural, the latter being often grotesque and always pleasing in 10 SAKURAMBO outline. Such woodwork is highly polished, as also the wooden pillars supporting the roof, often left in their original irregularity. The tatamiis an important item in a Japanese house. Fairly good tatami can be obtained for 1.75 yen a mat, every mat being of the standard size, 3 by 6 feet, and the house being built to fit the mats, not the reverse. It is not simply as a matter of cleanliness that it is necessary to take off boots on entering a Japanese house. The matting is the padding, the mattress, so to speak, on which the Japanese sits and lies, and must be fairly soft. Shoes and boots and even the lightest slippers, if they have heels, cut and tear or mark it very quickly. As a foot-rest it is firmer, more springy, and as soft as our best carpets, but for foreign use a thick rug must be spread over it, and the supports of foreign furniture must be attached to broad flat discs to distribute the weight. Under such conditions there is no combination of foreign matting and carpets to surpass it. Simply as a platform, the living foundation of the home life, the tatami puts the Japanese house in the front rank. Japanese rooms are conspicuous by the absence of furniture; in winter a hibachi (brazier), and sometimes a zen or low table about a foot in height, of lacquered or highly polished wood, the legs often being curved and carved with intricate designs, usually being the only objects in sight. Harmony between the wall tints, the kakemono hanging in the tokonoma, a vase containing a spray of blossoms, relieve it of all sense of emptiness. The screens dividing room from room are often one of the rare subjects of adornment in the room — always simple and sketchy in design, and subdued in colour ; a branch of plum or cherry blossom, a shadowy flight of birds across one corner of the panel. On rare occasions I have seen the faintest suggestion of a landscape hidden away in one corner. It does one good to compare this with the ancient framed sampler of our great-grandmothers, " Rock of Ages," or a violent chromo-lithograph of the " Battle of Bunker Hill," or the stuffed trout so graphically describing the commercial room of Pickwick's day, and still a prominent feature of the furnishing of an average country inn even in these days. The little finger- FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 11 catches sunk in the edge of the screens to give the grip necessary to shde them back are also a means of adornment. Sometimes the size of a large buckle, oftener no larger than an English penny, these little bronze plates are adorned with all sorts and kinds of figures, a spray of blossoms, a grotesque, or a dainiio's train in which, in the space of an inch, there may be crowded a dozen tiny figures and a landscape and a house. I remember putting up at a beautiful little inn in an out-of-the-way spot in Kyushu. I was the only guest, and the only one likely to be there for some time. It was a famous shrine, and at certain seasons only, when the im- perial envoy was sent with presents to the shrine, was there any outside interest in the place. Hence the whole upper floor of the inn was thrown wide open. There were six large chambers and in each chamber there were sixteen of these little discs. And no two of the whole ninety-six were alike. I was free to roam at will over the whole space, with no wretched guide at hand to urge one on at express speed from object to object, expediting one through a tube, so to speak, in order to get at the next batch of victims and " backsheesh." The Japanese room does not stand strictly by itself. It is essentially a part of the outside landscape and is so open everywhere to outside nature that it really forms a piece with it. The little section of garden visible from it is part of the furnishing. Our shutters thrown back, the flood of light heralds the entrance of Okamisan. To no other hands are to be entrusted the plumage which convention requires the master of the house to weai in addition to his skin. With a Japanese, his kimono is hung on him much as in general any other child is looked after. The folds must hang gracefully, and all the accessories are to be so close to hand that he does not have the exertion of reaching for them. In fact about all he does do himself, in his own home, is to perform the necessary early ablutions. This is done at a little stand on the edge of the house, looking into the garden. A shining brass basin holds the water, dipped (not by him) from a large bucket, in which floats a primitive wooden dipper made by cutting a hole in 12 SAKURAMBO washing the teeth, and on the stand are lying a number of frayed a round box, much like the old fashioned fig-boxes, with heavy bottom and very thin sides, and inserting a piece of bamboo as handle. Another smaller brass basin holds some boiled water for wood tooth-brushes, used once and then rejected, and a cheap and efficient instrument. The only miserable feature about the equip- ment is the towel, for its artistic features do not make up for its diminutive size. Where two nations are involved, the subsequent proceedings require concessions on both sides, for few foreigners will allow the wife to act the valet, and yet the formalities of the native code are to be conformed to, and she must at least superin- tend the operation. The care of the man is her peculiar business, and not to be relegated to any one if she is physically able to per- form it. It is the custom to say that the Japanese wife is really a sort of upper servant, that her wishes have no weight whatever, that the contract is all freedom of action and direction on the man's side and all performance on the woman's side. It seems to me that such is not the case in affairs of the household. Social life in our sense of the word is so lacking among the Japanese that outside the home the spheres of man and woman are widely sepa- rated, and outside the house his sphere is practically unbounded and unrestrained, but in the house her sphere of action is a wide one, and the man acts more as adviser and police force on such rare occasions as when a stronger arm is needed and some yaka- mashii niiisoku (noisy coolie) is to be dealt with. It is frankly to be confessed that much of this freedom is due to the care taken not to disturb his masculine eminence with the trifling matters of the house; but the wife has the silent support of the household in the fixed routine of domestic life, and if the man violated the hundred and one little conventions established by years of usage, he would quickly feel that a sort of interdict was ruling throughout the establishment. While many a patient wife would put up with freaks of the wildest kind, the rest of them would not. The household emphasizes the importance of certain conventions in the domestic life that define the privileges of a woman in her home. FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 13 the right to be the domestic vizier, so to speak. So important was the right of position of the wife as mistress of the eastern house- hold, that in cases of hopeless sterility the child of a concubine was born in her presence, even between her feet, and from the hour of its appearance was of her and belonged to her, and the real mother had no place or portion in it. In the case of adoption of the grown- up child of a concubine, although the mother had not only borne but brought the child up, all the ties of years were broken between them in an instant by a legal formality and the child's duty passed to a stranger, his mother becoming only a servant to him, and to whom he must regulate his conduct as such — a hard fate for the son, an atrocious one for the mother. The life of the concubine was, and is to-day, in its domestic relations, a hard one, after the early glamour of the connection has passed away, but the position of the wife has always been very different. It is the result of grave diplomatic arrangements between two families, arrangements with which both she and her husband have had but little to say. A rupture of the relationship involves as many people as a Kentucky feud, in the old days and among the upper classes, a condition of affairs quite likely to result. To divorce a wife without good cause was like throwing a stone in a pool : the disturbance might spread to the farthest confines. Divorce was easy, but its burden was not light. The lot of the Japanese wife is not a happy one in our western sense, but she has rarely any abuse, in a physical sense of the word, and the main feature is neglect from a man whom perhaps she never saw before she married him. In those early days, say a hundred thousand years ago, when man and the cave-bear were engaged in mutual pursuit, it perhaps was the custom for the strong arm of physical force to have its own way during the whole twenty-four hours^ Since that time, however, the real restraints placed on women have been the con- ventions raised by women themselves. The genus homo is a gre- garious animal, and gregarious animals allow no departure from the norm. If the Great Teacher had addressed women when He said, " Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone," Magdalen's 14 SAKURAMBO fate would have been sealed in the twinkling of an eye. Man has been known to long- for a desert island, far from the " madding crowd," with a surplus of sun, sleep, and cocoanuts. Woman's ideals point to the biggest place with the biggest shops she can find, even if she has to talce the husband with the biggest purse to get there. Only a genius like George Eliot could have her hero poor — • and happy. And her genius is referred to the masculine type. Now by all this I mean to offer the suggestion that a good part of the self-effacement of the Japanese woman is owing, not to treat- ment by men, but by her own sex. In the West the sex have gained a preponderant position over the male in everything but political life and the rougher ways of getting bread and butter. After all, life is a battle in which a good many kicks and cuffs have to be exchanged of very necessity, and more than one advanced woman's voice is raised against the intrusion, too far, of women into this struggle, not for any tender consideration of the enemy, man, but for fear that in becoming a competitor woman will tender back to man many of the inestimable privileges her physical weak- ness has extorted from his passion. Familiarity breeds contempt, and they recognize that it is the unfamiliar in women that attracts men. Many women are by the exigencies of life required to enter into the world's struggle, but almost universally they complain of its coarseness and its buffets. Most of them expect to find the same consideration in business that they meet in the social world ; in that world where life itself is at stake, as in that world to which men withdraw for a few minutes to get their breath ; the time of armis- tice as compared with the time of battle. There is plenty of woman's work in the world, quite as arduous as any work of man ; but her very physical nature has separated woman in some respects from the continuous toil required of the male, and has subjected her to conditions which recjtiire her withdrawal for a time from the world's arena. The western woman has won her freedom from most of the restraint that is placed on the idler moments of life. She can take a mate or not as she pleases, accept " Eve's curse " or not as she pleases, but in going beyond this point and demanding FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 15 that she carry her privileges on to the field of battle, it is to be feared that she is running against a law of nature; the struggle is for existence, and in it there are no privileges of sex, and more kicks than " ha'pence." The world does not go backward. During the early years in which man is imbibing ideas as ineradicable as language, he is in the hands of women. It is woman who has pretty thoroughly subjugated man, not man who has subjugated woman; and the restrictions placed on her private and public life as a woman are re- strictions drawn up and enforced by her own sex. And this holds good in the East as well as in the West. With a difference of degree, for a seat in the diet or on the bench is not yet within the horizon of the Japanese woman. In other respects her sphere seems more to be confined by a harsher religious code, and a harsher social code as applied by her own sex, than falls to the lot of women in the West. To our Anglo-Saxon freedom she in no way approximates, but the comparison is perhaps fairer if made with the Latin countries of southern Europe, in which the Church comes so strongly to the support of the social code there in practice. I think the term religion could be applied here to the Confucian code as applied to women, although it is generally described as a set of practical moral maxims, as ethical, not metaphysical or religious. Such a cold set of formal morality as pure Confucianism would hardly appeal to women unless it were grafted, as it has been, into the religious codes of the East, hiding its iron hand under a velvet glove. Under such form the doctrine of unquestioning obedience to parents and husband takes on a sanctity equivalent to any funda- mental principle of salvation as laid down in western theologies. The only reward that woman has in life is that as she becomes old she becomes the object of such reverence, and as it has been ground into her in early life, so she grinds it into the younger generation, left, as with us, to her charge during the earlier and more impres- sionable years. Social life among a people devoted to an elaborate etiquette is no trifle in itself, and now to a thousand and one little details is to be added the stamp of this Confucian maxim of obedi- 16 SAKURAMBO ence. And this sometimes leads to startling results, as looked at by western standards, as in the sale of women to an evil life to relieve the necessities of parents. The Japanese, I think, are often regarded as a non-religious race, but my experience has been much the opposite. The}' take their religion differently, but it enters at least as thoroughly into their life as in western nations. As usual, the women are more religious than the men. The men would not have to raise a finger to maintain the subordinate position of women. The old Chinese philosopher has done it all for them, and the Japanese woman presses her scourge of thorns into her flesh rejoicing. It can be imagined that the social code, the restrictions women have based on such a religion, are none of the lightest. Among such an impersonal people as the Japanese, a people that hardly know the use of the personal pronoun except in the vaguest kind of way, there are not the individual aspirations to rebel against such a system. Such aspirations, if they dared to raise their head, would quickly be crushed out by an intolerant public opinion so universal as to be annihilating. The irregularity that is so fostered in nature by the Japanese is not tolerated in their social code. Self-sacrifice is the fundamental principle on which woman's relig- ion rests in Japan. Without it there is no salvation in this world or the next. It is works not faith that count, and lack of duty to parents or overlord is indeed rewarded with the hottest hell-fire of a very ingeniously imagined hell. Unnatural conduct to parents is equivalent to sacrilege" in the West. I don't think that any of this is in O Kami San's head as we hear the last rumble of the to and the flap-flapping of the little Japanese whisks beating walls, tatami, furniture, and everything within reasonable reach of the neya's (maid-servant's) arm. This flapping is the earliest sign of domestic life in the Japanese house. I do not know that the little broom is peculiarly effective. Jap- anese houses look, and on the surface are, peculiarly clean. I have my doubts, however, and I think with some basis of fact. At times in the summer season, when there is a little scare anticipated or actually threatened of cholera or plague, there is a general house- FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 17 cleaning ordered by the police, who, moreover, act as general over- seers, being reserved in the ordinary trend of Japanese events for the arduous task of looking on, taking presumably keen pleasure in seeing others work. Below the hill, in the town itself, is a quarter largely devoted to tiny houses many of them not covering more than half a dozen mats in total floor-space. Always wide open in summer weather from end to end, there is not a sign of dirt or litter; and yet on such cleaning occasions, when tatami and even flooring are taken up, and every crevice is thoroughly cleaned and scrubbed under vigilant eyes, the amount of rubbish — two or three barrels to a house — is extraordinary. Where it comes from, it is hard to say, but it looks as if the little broom drove everything into the crevices, or dispersed the finer dust in the air, to settle back again in its old place as soon as the maid's back was turned. However that may be, the Japanese housewife has great confidence in it, and the occasions of a general turnout are comparatively rare as compared with the West, where open windows, furniture massed in a corner, and a general scrubbing process on a large scale make an eternal rotation through the house from room to room, like a domestic wandering in the wilderness. Part of this debris that I speak of undoubtedly belongs to the outside of the house, for the Japanese, if finicky about their immediate surroundings, are ex- tremely indifferent to anything beyond their noses, and by no means pay the attention to things beyond and under the house line that they do to matters within it. Something extremely offensive may arouse them to a point beyond the expression kusai (smelly), but it has to be something pretty strong at that. However, in cholera season they do really get to work, and when on several occasions there has been reason to fear an epidemic, such an appar- ently superficial method as water justifies itself by the excellent results. This cleaning is not carried out blindly, under orders. A preliminary is the distribution of a notice setting out the disease, the hygiene to be adopted, with all the whys and wherefores clearly explained, and the remedial measures to be adopted. It is the 18 SAKURAMBO unknown that frightens, and this house to house distribution of these lucid httle notices obviates a great deal of panic. Meanwhile, our flapping cannot last forever, and is really the agreeable preliminary to breakfast. Japanese food has been most thoroughly abused. Even long-resident foreigners abuse it (which is natural), and declare it unsatisfying (which is not wholly accurate). All food is a matter of custom and climate, and often climate can overcome custom, as witness the evidence of men who have spent winters in the North living exclusively on seal blubber and walrus steak. In fact, the balance is singularly good between carbon and nitrogen, but it is prepared in a way foreign to western usage. There is no common point between eastern and western cooking. The westerner travelling in the interior of the country, living at Japanese inns and on Japanese food, gets quite enough to eat. The food is not tasteless — in fact, is often unpleasantly the reverse ; but it is not to his taste. In fact there is no greater tyrant tban the stomach even in health. It has all the prejudice of patriot- ism in its narrowest sense, and man will agree sooner with his foreign neighbour's politics than with his cooking. Hence, although fish are a common article of diet in Japan, many varieties of them as distinct to the Japanese palate as beef and pork, and dished up in as many different ways, to the westerner they are rarely more than insipid, sometimes worse. Hence such forms of cooking as at first please grow wearisome in a short time by repetition. The native finds it hard to understand why the foreigner should travel through the country districts with a commissariat as great as if the land was a Sahara. In truth, the Japanese are more adaptable, and live year in and year out in foreign countries and on foreign food, to an extent the westerner would find almost impossible to become accustomed to in the reverse case. This is no compliment to western food, for the Japanese prefer their own way of cooking, and are only too glad to get bacl-c to it. Apparently, they find much in western food that is pleasing to the palate, but they readily get tired just as in the case of the European. However, superiority, better adaptability, in a broad sense, has nothing to dO' with this FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 19 question. They can and do work as hard arid as long on their diet as the European does on his, and probably better than they themselves would on the bread and beer or wine of the European. In fact, the pure push and pull labour of the East certainly is far in excess of anything- we have in western countries ; and it is to be doubted that if an average were taken of man-labour ex- pressed in terms of horse-power, the western average would cut a vei^y respectable figure beside the eastern average. There would be found more men in the West able to carry very heavy burdens far in excess of eastern capacity, but the standard man, forming the great middle section, and far exceeding in numbers the others, would be found in the East. As to the other phase of this subject — the form of preparation — the Japanese with the same material prefer their own method of putting it together. They are very fond of sweets (kmashi). They put sugar into many things in connection with which the foreign mind would fly at once to vine- gar and pepper, or at least to salt. It is a favourite way of pre- paring fish. They do not use the sugar alone but add flour to it. These are to them the palatable forms. They are excellent cooks, and can simulate the skill if not the originality of a French cook, rather astonishing when the question of condiments and sauces is so foreign to their own taste. All the attractive forms of western pastry are within the range of the Japanese kitchen, and yet they are not used. It is not a question of milk, for at this date the milkman's cart is a common sight in all Japanese cities, although the country districts still refrain from its use. It is worth looking into the place where this food is being prepared for a dozen people — not a difficult task. Instruments of cooking in western style, and totally mysterious anyhow to the ignorant male. But it is the dimensions of the place that strike the eye; 6 by 4 feet will cover it amply. A couple of stoves much in size and shape akin to an assayer's furnace for his crucibles : one is devoted to the rice; on the other, various adjuncts take their turn, and in some mysterious way are kept hot. A small stand or chadansu holds the different ingredients necessary to savour the 20 SAKURAMBO food. The sakanayasan (fishmonger) does the cleaning and preparation of the fish. A low stand answers for any rolling or cutting required in situ, and the centre of the kitchen itself is sunk a foot or eighteen inches to a level with the outside ground, the iriguchi or entrance forming one side of the room and the general means of approach for the tradesmen connected with that depart- ment of the establishment. Certainly not an elaborate outfit. These tradesmen are an interesting feature in themselves. They are daily or occasional visitors according to the aristocracy of their pursuits. The rice man only appears at stated intervals ; rice being the daily bread of the household, it is bought in bulk, a hundred pounds or more at a time. There is great difference in rice, and closely does O Kami San inspect the mass as to the quality of the rice itself and the care which has been taken in cleaning it. The purity of the sample is a matter of no little importance, for it is eaten boiled and without butter or condiments, a form which grows very attractive, and in a short time will be found preferable to more elaborate methods of preparation. One would never sus- pect rice of so much individuality until he tries it. Rice is a staple product, and its fluctuations in price a matter of such general public knowledge that there is no bargaining involved in this item of domestic supply. Very different is the case with Obdsan from the country, who appears at times with vegetables and flowers. Price and freshness have both to be well looked to, for, all bows and smiles, she is keen as a needle underneath, and the quarter of a cent will be a great diplomatic victory to her. In addition, there is the boy from the corner store, so here there is competition. The corner store is a counterpart of the same in western life. The merchant sits on his mats and in the centre, his vegetables being distributed around the edge or in front. He is behind his counter as much as his western confrere. At stated times the boy goes out with orders, or to take orders at customers' houses. His stock is much the same as in the West, with some purely eastern products thrown in and some purely western pi'oducts omitted. He sends out a book which is settled at stated intervals, or paid on the spot. FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 21 duly stamped and receipted. Across the street is the baker, for the Japanese store not being adapted for baking, the baker has a more complete monopoly, such as it is, of such products than in the West, although their use is anything but general, and away from the large towns he is a curiosity. The milkman is another feature of Japanese city life. Deliv- ery is usually made in bottles and twice a day, and dairies are to be found sprinkled all over the immediate suburbs. Arable land is too valuable in Japan to be wasted in pasture, therefore they have no pasture land worth speaking of, and the cows attached to these dairies seem to lead a melancholy life in bare and confined enclosures. The milk, however, is good, but should invariably be boiled or sterilized before using, as in fact should be done with any milk; in the East, however, chances cannot be taken that in many parts of the West would hardly be considered chances. Modern artificial fertilization is a purely western growth. For centuries the eastern man has followed nature, and night-soil has been the main, almost the only, means of restoring its strength to the hard-worked ground. Where every available inch of ground is required to feed the people, land cannot be allowed to lie fallow. Such a method of fertilization, however, as night-soil carries its plain dangers with it. Between irrigation and such fertilization every running stream in the low inhabited land is a shining poten- tial poison. Man without knowing anything of germ theories has found this out. He does not drink cold water. He drinks tea or boiled water. Provided the well has not reached the point at which the water is offensive to Japanese taste, it is always available. The only thing to cause its disuse is for it to go dry, and that is not very likely in a rainy island country. West and East have solved the sanitary problem differently, and the East has solved it permanently — solved it, for with their overcrowded population and agricultural needs of irrigation, the liberal methods of Europe and America are out of the question ; as much out of the question for the large cities as for the continuous stretch of country popu- lation spread over the surface of the land. They have not the 22 SAKURAMBO ground to devote to forming large watersheds to supply pure water to large communities, and they have not the water to furnish both for general use and for irrigation purposes. If the large com- munities can avoid disease by drinking tea, why should they go to the large expense of establishing filters which in themselves take up tracts of ground better used for growing rice? So argues the Oriental, and goes on drinking tea; and on the whole, with a soupgon of cleanliness in the community, getting along pretty well. In Japan, where there is not religious prejudice to thwart sanitary ideas as to cleansing and fumigation, they manage without the im- provements necessary to secure an ideally pure water supply, and which involve vast cost even in a country where the available supply from the mountains is so close at hand and so abundant. East and West have practically attained the same end by different means. The West runs its refuse directly into the streams, and then filters it out again to render the water fit to drink. The East runs its refuse indirectly into the streams by the irrigation canals, and then boils the water to make it fit to drink. On the whole, in the end the western method is perhaps the more dangerous. The population is not getting the training it must come to in the end. We are pam- pering ourselves, although we frankly confess, in the case of our cities lying in low land, far from any pure source of supply, that something must be done. We filter the water and reduce our sick- rate, which a freshet or a defective filter sends cheerfully bounding upward. Thousands of people live on and by the river at Canton, drinking sewage, and managing to hold their own. The westerner living in the East must take the native as example. And more: no fresh, crisp salads — his greens must be boiled; no fresh, delicate-flavored ground-fruits. No finer strawberries are grown than are grown in the East. Many westerners eat and do not die ; as ditto the native. And of those who do eat, some die whO' would have died in the course of nature anyhow. The most important, however, of our day's visitors in the mer- cantile line is the sakauuyasan or fishmonger. About eleven o'clock this main feature of the supply, the piece de- resistance. FROxM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 23 makes his appearance and his apologies. The fish are very dear on account of the scarcity of the fish, or the obstinacy of the fisher- men, bad weather preventing their going out, or laziness, or a matsuri, or a dozen and one other reasons. O Kami San is quite up to all these statistics. She knows what fish are in season and what out of season; the date and extent of every matsuri is at her fingers' ends ; and if the fishermen have been lazy, or obstinate, or deterred by bad weather, then the long strip of fishing-boats com- ing in from Hanawa Point or from the Negishi side must have gone out for their own amusement. These are the preliminary features of the argument, and, once having impressed the extent of her knowledge, the bargaining gets down to the more legitimate feature of prices as ruling among the various kinds of fish. As fish take the place of meat with the Japanese, this question of variety is far more important in the bill of fare than with us — variety not only in name but in quality. Some fish, such as viaguro and same, have a distinctly meaty flavour, a stronger, harsher flavour; others are softer in texture and more delicate, and again others distinctly of the trifling natuie of an entree, such as the ebodai or the different forms of at or trout. In fact, ■whether due to cooking or skilful alternation — a sort of rotation of crops, so to speak — a Japanese meal made up of fish and rice can present contrasts between the courses, not so striking as with oui" cooking, but ample enough to give variety. Some of these fish of daily household use are particularly palatable. The tai runs through a whole gamut of the " breams," from the highly appreci- ated akadai or red tai to the succulent little ebodai. Mutsu is a fish coming with the cold weather and lasting until late spring. In some respects it has a distinct flavour of the shad, and the flesh is very tender and delicate, albeit with very few bones to distract the attention from the flavour. Bora is somewhat firmer in tex- ture, but with delicate flavour ; and maguro, which is a large fish, cuts up into steak like meat. The kurodai and shirame are fish of almost daily appearance with the fishmonger's stock, but are somewhat insipid. All the larger fish furnish roe and sashimi 24 SAKURAMBO or sliced raw fish. This is preferably taken from the live fish, the operator using skill to avoid all vital parts, and cutting as needed from the fish. The shirame gives a sashimi very delicate and white, and the maguro a firm, red sashimi. The sakanayasan cleans all fish, and if sashimi is ordered, prepares it, or brings it prepared. The first is preferable on the same principle that, although painful, it is important to see the lobster go kicking and objecting into the pot. In fact, the more he kicks the better we are pleased, gastronomically, on sanitary grounds, and the less likely is he to kick after eating, or to manufacture or recall for us a line of ancestors. A little pyramid of horse-radish (zuasabi), a larger one of shredded daikon or Japanese radish, and of kobu, a succulent green, with a sprig of sansa (herb) is symmetrically arranged with the sashimi laid in two parallel lines on broad hi- no-ki leaves, the whole forming a very cool and pleasing dish. As with everything eatable, the sashimi should be carefully kept in a fly-proof safe, and this also is an important reason why it should be cut from the living fish. In fact, in the fly season it is better to avoid its use altogether, as also the use of all kinds of uncooked food. It can be seen now that the sakanayasan' s duties do not con- sist simply in exchanging his wares for cash. The bargaining over, he becomes for a few minutes a member of the household, working away with his hands and chattering with his tongue, for his acquaintance is wide-spread in the neighbourhood, and his opportunities of conversation , extensive. Personal character counts for much with the sakanayasan, and if otonashii, a quiet and good-tempered animal, his daily visit is a feature affording food both mental and physical. His business over, he balances his tubs on his shoulders and makes off, lighter in burden and with items more or less substantial added to his chronique scandaleuse. Other requirements of Japanese household life go on much as in our western homes. The gomiyasan or garbage-collector is a municipal feature. At New Year's and the Bon Matsuri it is cus- tomary to give him a little present. Another cleans out the wells and cesspools on the premises. He has a district for his private FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 25 round, and collects five to fifty cents a month for his labour. Ten to twenty cents a month covers the expense for quite an extensive Japanese house. In the ex-treaty ports, gas and water attach- ments are looked after by the company's employes, just as with us, their duties ceasing with the property of the company, and elsewhere a private plumber being a necessity if things go wrong in the house itself. A number of itinerants drop in during the day: countrymen with flowers or vegetables, the hokiyasan or broom man — a Japanese broom being cheap and evanescent — begn gars, mendicant priests sent out by their fraternities, charitabte committees seeking to pension deserving paupers or publish unde- serving poems, to send blankets " to the front " or sell flags for the same good purpose, and at times a policeman to keep tab on the population and the safety of Dai Nippon. Now, in re breakfast, I will frankly confess that this particu- lar breakfast is zr\yth\ng but Japanese. Accustomed as one can get to Japanese food, a Japanese breakfast is too much like dinner to answer for that meal. It seems to me that the beauty of western home economy lies in the balance of the two meals a day — for the third meal, whether coffee and roll on rising or milk and roll for luncheon, should be more name than substance. The Scotch- American breakfast and the continental table d'hote perhaps form the ideal combination. Americans get their dyspepsias not from overeating but from hasty eating, and as a nation are anything but gouty. And the Scotch, in literature anyhow, make but little com- plaint of that disease. The English, however, make a substantial luncheon, a heavy dinner, and a good supper, jamming three fairly complete meals into a rapid succession of feeding beginning at noon and lasting until midnight. And they are notoriously gouty. The continental European can hardly point the finger at them, for he holds his due proportion of the victims at the different Bads, and walks his little round and nibbles his little biscuit, sips and drinks nauseating waters, and generally abandons his vin rouge and vin mousseux for sackcloth and ashes for a limited season. And he too jams two table d'hotes and a supper into the same 26 SAKURAMBO limited time. The Japanese would probably hold up their end also at Carlsbad and Homburg, if they were within reaching distance of it, but for different reasons — for dyspepsia, not gout. As to a coolie you can see his rice take up its journey through his oeso- phagus practically unmasticated in the original ball, a shape of which he is particularly fond. The man who ate nineteen mince- pies in nineteen minutes could easily be matched at any ricksha stand, provided the food was to the coolie's taste, and the Japanese would not know he had entered into any competition. To him it would be the normal method of procedure. I think these peculiarities of nations are sho\vn by a very every-day piece of evidence in the newspapers — the patent medicine advertisements. Once when travelling in the southern United States, being impressed by the number of large, sluggish rivers it was necessary to cross, and the sallow appearance of the inhabi- tants, I made inquiry as to .whether malaria was not common in the district. The hotel-clerk waved his hand : " Never heard of it, sir." In fact, he intimated a little jaundice, perhaps, on my part, making me see yellow, and transfixed rne with his diamond and asphyxiated me with his suavity. Still I had misgivings, and, strange to say, the drug-stores seemed to have little stock but qui- nine and " Antishake." The rest was fly-blown. That clerk told a tale that night to the assembled " drummers," how he preferred town to the country because he had time to shave between chills, and did not cut himself. They had not only chills but a liar or two in Arkansas. Now the Japanese prevalent advertisements largely recall American advertisements : very thin men become abnormally fat and shaking hands with each other over the change, pills and boluses for the stomach, and " detonators " to jar sluggish livers — and, right under one's eyes, at any Japanese hotel, the cause of it all. The tray goes into the apartment stored with little dishes and full contents. In a trice nesan appears again, all the dishes a howling wilderness; and three times {en regie) has the little rice- bowl travelled back to her to be refilled. Now the human boa- constrictor sits sipping tea and swelling up the mass of rice in his FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 27 stomach, until, in an alarming number of cases, that overworked organ goes on strike — almost the only effective kind of strike known in Japan. It is a fact, speaking from the cold statistical side of the subject, that stomach diseases are a very important feature of such returns, and ulcers and cancer of the stomach a far too large proportion of the bills, of mortality. They are not a drinking people, their oriental nerves are quite equal to any strain on the point of smoking, their food is digestible and well- cooked, and yet they suffer frightfully. The only unfavourable factor is their method of eating, which must be held responsible for the bad results obtained. No! only the tray and the dishes present native features in the breakfast that the little maid brings to O Kami San. It is too much to ask the American to give up his breakfast foods with their spice of controversy and his coffee with its spice of Java much closer at hand than at home. As to the latter, there can be much less controversy than when seven thousand miles away. As to the former, there can be as much partisanship as between the faithful followers of different prophets. All promise future happiness and life eternal; claim the other fellow to be a side-show in the race, or a fraud. The little maid that brings the breakfast tray represents one side of a problem which differs radically in its phases from that presented to western life. I refer to the servant problem. In many respects there is still left a strong leaven of the pre-Restora- tion days of 1867, in existing relations between the members of the Japanese household as a whole. In the old days the relation be- tween master and servants seems to have been a patriarchal one. He had many of the qualities in loco parentis in addition to that of employer. Owing to this double relation his duties of care and protection increased with the accentuated obedience required to his wishes. Hence the relation assumed a permanency unknown in Europe for more than three hundred years; in fact, unknown since the emancipation of the peasantry from a condition of serf- dom in which the individual man had no more standing than the herd of swine he was tending for his lord. Contests between king 28 SAKURAMBO and nobles, however, quickly brought the people into play as a valuable factor to one side or to both, and the value of a man's individuality, as distinct from communalty, was not slow in making its appearance. Master became separated from man, and the material advantages as distinguished from the personal bonds became the dominant motives. Old and tried servants were com- mon enough in European houses, and many are the instances of devotion and sacrifice, all the greater because they were against the steadily drifting tide of making the relation between master and man purely the financial one that it has become in modern times, and eliminatihg the personal side altogether. Hence " Jeems Yellowplush " could have written his memoirs of the Fronde with as much candour as Cardinal de Retz, and perhaps it is unfortunate that he has not done so. And the " Jeems " of that time was strikingly like the " Jeems " of the early nineteenth century, if we can believe the many complaints made by contem- porary writers as tO' his carelessness, fondness for his master's eat- ables and particularly for the drinkables, and his light-fingered afifection for finery — in general terms, his knavishness. No such relation had a chance to develop in Japan, because the feudal system as such remained in full force up to the present with but little modification, and because the groundwork of the prevailing moral code, being obedience to the master whether in relation of father or lord, lent its full weight to the imposition of the iron code which both interest and social etiquette imposed on all grades of society. In such a system social position and calling were stamped at the outset on the individual, and adding thereto the national lack of personality, a condition of contentment was reached with their lot in life very unlikely to rise to any rebellion against the social system. As with a hapdicraft, service ran in particular families and the connection between lord and retainer would last from generation to generation, the younger generation replacing the older as it became unfit for such service. The relation of familiarity thus existing between employer and employed did away with the menial side of the employment as looked at purely as a FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN 29 matter of gain or personal advancement. The employed gained a prestige from his more intimate association with his lord's family ; and the farther back he could point to such connection was a source of honest pride for it meant much as a certificate of a clean record of loyalty and favour. In fact, gain or wages were not a feature of such employment. It was a means of training for the young man or woman and it was so regarded. They were charges on their lord's bounty and it was their business to profit by their posi- tion to learn their various future duties of life in this best of practi- cal schools in which they were treated, not as paid menials, but as taking their share in the membership of the family. Even to this day this is a feature in Japanese family life. The wages are nominal. These young girls go out to service not to earn money but to learn to sew, to cook, to take care of children, and generally to fit themselves for their own future married life. And this must not he the haphazard training that so often follows now-a-days in the case of the western woman. Sewing is not confined to a few household articles and baby clothes. The Japanese woman and her maids are the tailors of the average Japanese home and every kimono that goes on her husband's back is the product of the house stafif. All the details of measurement, ratios, stitching and double stitching according to rule, are taught in the home', and the Japanese woman when she leaves her parents' home as bride carries this knowledge with her, not as an accomplishment, but as a necessity. She may not carry it into practice herself with her own fingers, but like Penelope she is supposed at least to be the mastermind of her handmaids. Her knowledge is practical, not theoretical, and she has the ability to act if the occasion calls on her skill. Anyone who has lived in a Japanese household cannot help being struck by the large amount of this needle-work. This is in part due to the nature of Japanese clothing, which involves not only the making but the frequent' remaking, for the wadded clothes of winter are ripped apart, washed and dried, and then put together again. Of course, in the average Japanese household this is all the work of nimble fingers, and it is only where foreign influence is at work 30 SAKURAMBO that the hum of the sewing machine is heard. Home seems at times a sort of school or sewing bee, and it is a curious sight to see the little maids' heads together in an interested circle to watch the elucidation of some knotty point in sartorial mechanics as ex- pounded by the mistress of the house. There seems to be an earnestness about the whole procedure totally different from the carrying out of an item of household labour done by contract at so much a week. It is not only sewing, however, but cooking- also which forms part of the repertoire of O Kami San. This she has no hand in herself, but she has practice to fall back on if necessity arises, and at all events the direction falls on her to effect such variety as ,the Japanese menu affords. All the little details, from the fly flapping in the morning through the more important mat- ters to the unrolling the quilts at night and hanging the big mos- quito net in summer, are part of the educational process of a maid that comes as green as the grass on the hillside. And when she has learnt it all her parents send for her and marry her off. That has been the object of her schooling, so to speak. So the average day passes in the household, and at five o'clock the tension — what there is of it — perceptibly slackens. It is the hour of the bath which has been for some time heating. In regular rotation the household enter the bath-room ; from the master down to the smallest neya there is a procession lasting until it is nearly time to close the house for the night. It is the most enjoyable feature of the day, although the great dark tub is a source of terror to the children, a supply of which commodity is kept on hand in every Japanese household. Japanese children have quite as much original sin in them as any other children and hate equally to have it washed out. They too are an important item of neya's educa- tion, their care and obviation of their general " cussedness " being part of the curriculum, so to speak. Now in all this day's work the keynote is simplicity. Getting up with the sun we have hardly made use of the western world's artificialities and yet have got along very well. To cook our food we have used a furnace not so widely different from what will be found among the wandering FROM MY JAPANESE GARDEN ■ 31 tribes of northern Asia. In fact, in get-up and mechanics, it rivals the simphcity of the giant ant heaps of Australia, which by kicking in one side can be turned into a very tolerable oven. Our water has come from a well which . doubtless any sane board of health would condemn on its general surroundings without even analyzing it ; but any harmful proclivities have been neutralized by boiling. The food has been much what O Kami San's for- bears ate a thousand years ago, and if we can judge anything from the books of those days they would feel perfectly at home in the house and on the mats. Politics have changed much for the better and there are no swashbuckling samurai to go around testing the edge of their blade on harmless beggars and drunken jnen, and generally making an unpleasant mess on the sidewalk — or what would have been one if there had been such a thing in those days. Our lamps — a modern type — are fit to read by and enable us to extend the day with comfort far beyond the bedtime of former days. But without all the accessories of gas, water, electric light, modern plumbing, stationary washtubs, elevators, hydraulic and other kinds, complex furniture, asphalt paving, and a hundred other necessities that our western life is crying for, we have passed the day not only in comfort but with pleasure and profit. Books and people are enough for any reasonable man, and neither of them are peculiar to modern or western civilization. Our amuse- ments change in nature, not in quality. Doubtless the old Greeks would utterly fail in putting a modern society play on the stage, just as we utterly fail in putting the Greek tragedy or comedy on our stage, and it is hardly necessary to ask which stage is going to survive the world test of the centuries. A circus parade is a worse than shabby affair compared to a Roman triumph. We know a little more of Nature's secrets than the ancient world, and most of that we have acquii'ed in the last hundred years ; and our pessimism keeps pace with our knowledge. Something of this came to mind looking down at the lights of the fishing village several hundred feet below me. These people were living identically as their fore- fathers for generations had lived. A kerosene lamp and a news- 32 SAKURAMBO paper, to give them a mass of details on people and matters outside the circle of their own hopes and fears, were the only additional items. A few miles away was a city crying out for electric trams, pure water, harbour improvement, and increased taxation. What was a man to think? These fisherfolk were happy as the world goes, although they had their neighbours' example close under their eyes. Their neighbours with their added western materialism and restlessness had not added to their content. Western roses have thorns, and increase the points of contact the more they will prick. And yet these roses are tempting to sight. The thorns are hidden and young Japan not overly conservative. II BOSHU WAY " High in the air the rock its summit shrouds In brooding tempests, and in rolHng clouds ; Loud storms around, and mists eternal rise, Beat its bleak brow and intercept the skies." — Odyssey {Pope's translation.) One of the pleasantest features of Japanese character is its contentment. I do not mean that contentment which is associated with a sort of vegetable existence too lazy or too stupid to want to move out of its environment. Japanese content is far from any relation with such a phase ; but, on the contrary, it is the strongest evidence of the completeness with which the people as a whole have entered into the inward meaning and spirit of their surround- ings. Now this artistic sympathy with their nature environment is not inborn in a race. It is a sign of age. The young pioneer nations have not the time to feel that sympathy with Nature that is found in an older civilization. Nature to them is unsubdued, and it is part of their daily labour to contend with her. The American pioneer could hardly be expected to look with unadulter- ated pleasure on the forests of the Miami and Monongahela. His object was to establish a home, and to him those forests repre- sented the hardest labour in clearing them away. A wearisome monotonous course of felling, stumping, splitting, and hauling by main force so many thousand feet of timber in order to get at the ground and make it produce for him his daily bread. It was the trapper and explorer that could find time and inclination to appre- ciate the " murmuring pine and the hemlock." The husbandman on the contrary heard with joy of the rolling plains of Kansas and Nebraska, with few trees but those found in the river bottoms, and miles of prairie grass to feed and fatten his cattle. The 33 34 SAKURAMBO Japanese have long finished their contest with Nature in the rough, and this has taken on that sleepy immobility that is found in a top — " movement internal, rest external." The result has been that Nature has passed from the stage of being an active enemy, to that of a friend whose every peculiarity is known by long acquaintance. There is all the charm associated with intimate knowledge and pride of conscious superiority. Now this completeness with which Nature arouses and satisfies the aesthetic feelings has never reached the same development in the West that it has among the Japanese. Elaboration is the keynote, the entrance on the scene of more or less of the strictly human element, and a village of cafes, beer gardens, and hotels, with or without music, is certain to spring up around any great attraction of Nature until it is hard to tell which draws the crowd — Nature or the beer garden. So with the theatre. The cost of production is growing to be a more important feature in the advertising than the play itself, and as the manager knows or tries to know his pubhc, it is fair to assume that he judges it accurately for the benefit of his own pocket. The Jap- anese have as yet taken but a short step on this road, although likely to go further as time goes on. At present the tea house in its development is distinctly the merest adjunct to the attraction, a rest house not an object in itself. With all the means of amuse- ment that are found among the Japanese as among other peoples — music, dancing, pantomime, the stage, character sketches and story telling — the Japanese never mix them with natural scenery. Mar- gate and Coney Island are found at Asakusa, not across the river kt Mukojima where the crowds of people go in April to view the cherry-blossoms. Mukojima and a host of other places it can be said is an in- stance of the fact that the Japanese appreciate colour in mass, for it is common to see it stated that to them the highest form of enjoyment of flowers is the single spray appropriately arranged in a vase. This has indeed been brought to a fine art. Perhaps when the Japanese woman is " emancipated " it will be found that the time now devoted to training in such subjects as flower^ arrange- BOSHU WAY 35 ment and the tea ceremony will have to be curtailed and devoted to studies which will put her more on a par with man, to whom she will be not only wife but companion. It is undoubtedly the case that the western woman has not reached her present develop- ment without sacrificing something. There are only twenty-four hours in the day, and much of that is required by the simple neces- sity of ordinary living. But it is a question as to what is going to be of more value to the race; the tea ceremony or a course in hygiene as applied to the household; the arrangement of flowers or the ability to hold her own in that general social life which is bound to come even in Japan. After all, both tea ceremony and flower arrangement have reached their highest development and are now living on their past reputation. The period of seclusion has passed away and new duties require a new training. As Europe treasures its old traditions and bewails the decadence of these present days in all the finer qualities of man's nature, so the Japanese will cling to their old traditions and masterwork, retain as much of the old as conditions allow, and gradually replace it with the new. Doubtless a millennium from now our descendants will equally be able to look back on arts which seem lost to them. The present age may not be very fruitful from the sesthetic point of view but periods of great material and political activity rarely are, so. Man's mind after all is limited. Leaders are rare. This is an age of science and of politics, lines are changing rapidly in both spheres, and the mental material available to guide these changes is mainly occupied in that direction. ^Vhether the Japanese will ever come to our " hideous bouquets " so often held up to derision is doubtful. The said bouquet is largely a back number now in the West and rarely figures except at weddings and funerals and the debutante's first plunge into the social world. The Japanese lack the one flower which is really effective in that form, the rose. No westerner will admit any standing to the Japanese " bara " and it is not at all surprising that the Japanese have very little regard for it themselves. The rose is a strictly western flower. Whether as a single masterpiece — the " American Beauty " — arranged a la 36 SAKURAMBO Japonaise on a maiden's bosom, or en masse covering a whole house as seen in southern Cahfornia, it outrivals any flower in the East in grace and beauty and fragrance. No more can be asked of the flower than the combination of these three qualities. It does not seem possible to acclimate the plant in Japan. Like western fruit, the stock soon degenerates, perhaps on account of the peculiar dis- tribution of heat and moisture. The Japanese, however, do enjoy colour in mass as shown by the many flower shows based on just such effect. In May crowds of people flock to the Hon jo district in Tokyo to see the peony show, the effect depending largely on the massing of the plants which are of the most varied shades of colour. In the middle of May Kameido is at its best, the wisteria blossoms reaching the length of a yard or more. Still later in early June and in the same district the iris gardens are ready to display a wonderful variety of shade of the double iris. All this pleasure the Japanese gets at little cost. His country is one of the most picturesque in the world. Every hillside on the coast gives a charming vista of sea, mountain, and archipelago. He goes pic- nicking for the flowers and the \'iew, not for the beer, or the merry- go-rounds, the shoot-the-chutes, that the time and money available will allow him. He not only wants to enjoy himself, but he wants to enjoy the view, and the latter is inextricably involved as the chief feature of the outing. This characteristic it is to be hoped they will long retain. Apart from the flower shows Honjo presents but little other attraction. It is mainly a collection of small houses inhabited by fishermen and artisans and whenever plague or cholera visits Tokyo it is pretty sure that Honjo has or will have a hand in it. However it contains a railway station, not absolutely necessary but still presenting great advantages over Uyeno for reaching the country directly east of the great city. For several years I had been looking over the bay at the misty blue range of hills on the other side, of which Nokogiriyama and Kanozan are the most distinctive features. In legendary days of yore those blue inter- vening waters had witnessed the self-sacrifice of the Princess Oto- BOSHU WAY 37 Tachibana, wife of Yamato-take the hero, then on his mission against the hairy men of the North; traits of character that show that her sex has changed but Httle in these many years. Later it was among those hills that Yoritomo, first of the Mina- moto Shoguns, sought refuge, and in fact Boshu, or Awa, seems to have been the refuge of those whose political fortunes were under a cloud. Nowadays there is no particular reason to take anyone there. The guide book speaks of it pleasantly but slightingly as a nice winter trip in which such phenomena as flowers and naked people were to be seen in December. Not at all wonderful as to the display, but as to season and about which I was somewhat sceptical withal for I had been led one winter to Atami, in part by the deceptive orange groves to be seen growing all through the countryside. The Japanese orange however I found to be a broken reed as an indicator of climate. The local orange grower does not sit up at nights losing sleep over cold snaps and providing steam heat and wood fires for his trees. The tree has a supreme indifference to frost or to snow and the sun comes out on the winter days to warm everything into life only to be locked up again in a zero temperature at nightfall. The ultimate result of this erratic treatment for a tree so delicate as the orange is a fruit of the mandarin size, sweet with a pleasant tart twang. With these cold winter nights of Atami therefore in mind I postponed my visit to this " shadowy land of Avilion " until the warmer weather of spring made Japanese inns less of a winter campaign in the open. Hence the first of May found me at Honjo station with a minimum of luggage and also of expectation, for little was anticipated beyond pleasant valleys, rice-fields laid out in checkerboards between low hills, and native villages recalling some unfortunate town which has long ago been wiped out by fire and rebuilt temporarily, only the inhabitants have forgotten or been too busy to rebuild in a more substantial manner. Leaving Honjo this anticipation was realized; low hills to the left and the wide expanse of paddy fields to the right pleasantly varied at times by glimpses of the bay. As Ohara, the present jumping-oiif place ot 38 SAKURAMB5 the railway, is approached the hiUs become a feature. Travel is very light on this section as most of the traffic is diverted at Chiba to go toward Narita and the villages near the mouth of the Tama- gawa. At present the Ohara line is neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, the terminus being a tiny place, but with some little inns at which one can put up for the night if a sunrise start is desired down the coast. I managed to rout out a kurmnaya, a most ancient man who seemed to drop some present occupation to take me and my furniture part of the ten miles to Katsuura. The road was mainly good, the hills pleasing to the eye and much as in the neighbourhood of Kamakura, and some touch of interest was found in a traveller bound to Tokyo — a large niaguro fish, some ten or twelve feet in length, riding in state and pushed along by a crowd of joyful fishermen. A good haul, for such a fish I was told was worth a hundred yen to the Tokyd market. My ojisan (honourable old gentleman) left me to my own devices at the half-way stage, a kurumaya rest house at the point where the road reaches the sea. This place was better supplied and soon I was bowling along with a pushman in addition, through fishing villages and tunnels with slices of road interspersed and which seemed to improve with its distance from metropolitan life. It was getting toward night and the fishermen were already pushing off and putting to sea for the night's work. Ten to twenty men to a boat, naked to a breech clout, shouting and chanting, pushing and tugging, but with very little misdirected effort. Old men and children watched the process and the gay pictured kimo- nos, seen in scattered cases through the " treaty ports," wei^e here the general outfit. Women seemed to be otherwise engaged as they were conspicuous by their absence, the group of watchers being almost entirely men. I cannot say that my welcome at my inn at Katsuura was a warm one. This is one of the accidents of travelling in unfrequented corners and even then is of rare occur- rence. Misgivings as to chadai or tea money I think have little to do with it, for the innkeepers usually charge foreigners on a separate scale and incidentally get chadai in addition. There is perhaps an unwillingness to break the routine to cater to the possi- BOSHU WAY 39 ble idiosyncrasies of the foreigner which they do not understand and yet in the satisfaction of which they do not want to fail. Again, the presence of a foreigner is ahvays a matter of curiosity in out of the way places and curiosity is not always pleasant to either innkeeper or his guests. Also, as is not unknown in the West, there are inns that wish to confine their custom to the native. The foreigner is only an occasional item in their clientele, unprofit- able and perhaps annoying. There is moreover another compli- cation for the innkeeper. The places of public resort are peculiarly under the thumb of the police, and they wish no trouble from that quarter, the simplest method therefore being that of avoidance. The presence of a foreigner in a place is particularly noted. On application to the police, if it is feasible at all, the foreign traveller can get placed for the very good reason that his source of intro- duction is unimpeachable. If, however, he is taken in without ques- tion and trouble subsequently arises, the innkeeper is liable to an overhauling and his compliance with all the formalities gone into by very hypercritical judges seeking a scapegoat. Travel could be so hampered by a simple hint from headquarters to refuse accommodation that the country would practically be as close as before the revision of the Treaties. It happens therefore that it is necessary at times to make one's way good, and on such occasions once ensconced in the inn to lose all knowledge even fragmentary of the native tongue. In time they will cease dangling before the eyes of the obtuse foreigner the different means of exit from the town, and leave him alone much as one lets time and a burly canine planted on his premises take their course in due season. It can be added that it is no small matter in such cases to get ensconced behind the shoji. A favourable condition due simply to the innkeeper's hesitating frame of mind. In the morning my hosts and I parted company on rather cold terms. I stuffed away in available pockets the little book and towel which formed part of the external expression of our mutual forbearance toward each other and much etiquette was wasted on both sides. They cer- tainly fulfilled all the duties of a host and made a good bargain 40 SAKURAMBO for me with the kurmnaya who were to take me onward as far as Ho jo that night. Nothing more than that can fairly be asked of any inn. It was beyond Katsuura that the pleasantness of the surprise of this new district came upon me. So near Yokohama, here was a place of which people seemed to know little and care less. From Katsuura to Matsuda was a succession of landscapes, cape after cape stretching into the ocean. In the intervening valleys the road ran beside the sea and through the fishing villages. Then it would ascend some narrow valley, gradually working its way into a sort of ad-de-sac and then plunging through a tunnel, giving on the further side a picture of land, sea, and rice-field, set as it were in a natural frame. From Katsuura and almost to Kamogawa the coast was of a bold character. The road, a sort of Corniche road, was cut in the face of the cliffs, and ran along at times several hundred feet sheer above the sea. There are places along this stretch, at the narrow turns on the face of the cliff, that must carry no little danger in a heavy gale to vehicles and even to men. The road is narrow and without any protection whatever. Standing on such a headland one looks far down the coast to Cape Nojima and often just at one's feet and filling the width of a narrow valley lies a jumble of roofs, a fishing village notable in these parts for cleanli- ness. So it goes on over a fairly good highway, up and down, through the little valleys and around the faces of the cliffs in pic- turesque alternation. It is not always plain sailing however. The tunnels are very numerous and sometimes undergoing repair. A stiff climb over one took me to the Nichiren temple at Kominato, where I had to wait until my kurumaya arranged for our future progress, for the original kuruma could not be " toted " up the steep footway. The site of this temple is the very dubious place of the saint's birth; the supposed original being under water as the coast is losing to the sea on this side. He has gained by the trans- fer, for it is the most picturesque spot in the neighbourhood. The lack of any obtrusively Japanese vegetation on the scene gave it a touch of resemblance to our western world. A well-kept shaded BOSHC WAY 41 road, the " God's acre " with its temple outline only dimly shad- owed among the large trees and the low wall surrounding the whole, recalled in a way a scene often met with on the outskirts of some of our country villages which have gone to sleep for the past sixty years or more and have never grown up to and around the old church placed on its outskirts. An excellent luncheon at the Yoshidaya at Kamogawa marked the end of this more picturesque section of the day's ride. Changing men I soon reached Matsuda, at which point the road cuts across the peninsula to Ho jo, a dis- tance of about eight miles. Matsuda afforded another pleasant surprise. Japanese towns are not conspicuous by their attractive- ness. In fact they are unusually commonplace and ugly, the graceful curves of the roofs being the only redeeming feature. But Matsuda recalls all the pleasing greenness of an English lane. The houses are hidden behind hedges and there is a long vista of green looking down the town. Passing under this archway of trees soon brings one again into open country, broader valleys and rice-fields broken up by fantastic hills, and over a splendid road by which my kurumaya, covering the eight miles in a trifle over an hour, landed me at the Kimuraya of Ho jo. These excellent inns in such an out of the way corner as this edge of Boshii have a reason for their being. At this May season Ho jo was empty, but the land has a reputation in the Japanese world for mildness in winter and for bathing in summer. Many of the quieter people of the better class of Tokyo make a yearly pilgrimage hitherward. Only one remnant still clung to the Kimu- raya at this off season. A venerable old gentleman who was accompanied by quite a large family, some of the younger members of which must have been granddaughters, although a Japanese retires from life and takes on the appearance of Ojisan so early that it is easy to mistake the second for the third generation. Jap- anese and western social life often touch at some unexpected point. I do not refer to the receptions, balls, and dinners given in foreign style in Tokyo, where men and women meet on terms akin, in out- ward seeming anyhow, to western usage ; but to the social life as 42 SAKURAMBO carried on independent of any but native usages. Women have their outside interests, their circles and societies for rehef of the poor, interests of school girls, hospital service, study of poetry, needlework, and a dozen and one other social objects. In the rela- tion of women with women the social life is free enough or could be made so without opposition from any source, personal or con- ventional. In the home circle the relations between the sexes is free enough. The older women join freely in conversation; the younger, as they do or should do elsewhere, do not volunteer information until they are asked. Visiting perhaps is not so general as with us even among the women, being largely between families related in some way by marriage or blood, and there is no such concession shown to youth as represented by social functions which are mainly devoted to the pleasure of the young, and which are conspicuously a feature of Anglo-Saxon life. The Japanese father does not stand around cooling his head and his heels until the sun rises, while some young daughter wearies herself out with dancing and flirtation; both to return home, she to sleep until midday, and he to go to his ofifice at nine o'clock. The main feature of European life, the formal social intei^- course between the sexes, is the feature that is lacking in Japanese life. External social life of course exists but is confined to men, moving much on the same plane as in the West, only granting dif- ference in national taste and always apart from the home. Formal dinners and any such features of social life are confined to the tea house. There it is that the Japanese seeks to entertain his friends in sittings that last for hours, and on such occasions appear the only touch of femininity that is allowable in such public life — the geisha. This little creature is a product that it is extremely hard to classify because western life has nothing exactly to correspond. Her training is entirely directed in wit and accomplishments — dancing, singing and playing various musical instruments — toward pleasing men, and not only men but she rhust gauge the tastes of her par- ticular employers at the time. The dancing and singing is but part of her " business." It is the " coffee and repartee," so to BOSHU WAY 43 speak, between these intervals of the entertainment, the more inti- mate chatter, that is the attractive feature. In some ways she could be compared to the chorus girl of the western stage only the after-theatre life of the latter is purely her private affair, whereas with the geisha it is the main part of her function as entertainer. The comparison it can be said is, from an artistic point of view, hardly fair to the geisha who is a product of a very high and specialized training which raises her to that plane where the sym- bolism in her art in dancing (posturing) and singing calls in full play a species of elaborate mental aesthetics — a feature certainly far from being connected with the chorus of the comic opera stage which appeals purely to the eye. In some features she forms what might be called the demi-mondaine of Japan, but here again one would never think of her in connection with Sappho, ancient or modern. Charming and witty as she often is, it is more as child than as woman ; a plaything for idle hours, not a steel that can flash out brilliants when the occasion calls for it, and the tragedy so often thrown across Sappho's path rarely figures in that of the geisha. There is one ground on which she and her western sister of the night life of great cities meet. Both are equally looked down on and envied by the rest of their sex for their life, apparently one of gay careless freedom. Fashions in Paris first appear on the boulevards and geisha deeds and misdeeds are constantly on the tongue of Japanese women ; and any good' Japanese woman would resent being taken for a geisha, although she would speak warmly of her beauty and her dancing. After all that a few gentlemen should meet for eating, drink- ing, and otherwise disporting themselves adds but little to the general life of a people. The brilliant night life of great European and American cities is not found in Japan. Matsuris or temple festivals, really fairs, are very small change compared to the pano- rama of cosmopolitan life that streams along the boulevards of Paris. For this the sexlessness of public life is responsible. Men have their clubs based on all sorts of objects, useful or otherwise, as are clubs in the West. Political clubs abound and, as politics 44 SAKURAMBO are warm in Japan, new clubs are constantly in formation by a sort of fissile process. Scientific associations hold meetings on all sorts of subjects. The Japanese is by no means unclubbable. Quite the contrary. He does not seem to be able to get along without his kind. But women cutting no figure in man's public life, our general panorama of society is unknown. Now man (specific) is far more given to sensual pleasure than woman, and there is more particular application to him of the saying that " his god is his belly." It is no difficult matter to prove this, for the increasing influence of woman in social life has been accompanied by the retirement of the kitchen to the rear of the house. In the good old Saxon days, and long after, our ancestors used mainly to devote themselves to eating and drinking. Dinner began early and lasted pretty much all day. The great hall or dining room was the room of the house, and manners were such that woman generally had to disappear from the feast long before it got a good start. The wine came on with breakfast, and not in the more moderate allow- ance of our modern feasts. But with the gradual emergence of woman from her seclusion of the early feudal days, the dining room gradually loses its importance until in these present times the great hall has been replaced by the drawing room, and the dining room has been converted into as strictly special a use as a bed- room and has lost its position as the social centre of the household. Now if man makes a minor feature of social display — only relatively speaking for the high-sounding " titles " and " rituals," and the gold lace sprinkled over the trappings of some harmless creature whenever " the lodge " appears en masse and in public gives evidence that also in him the inclination for such display exists — it is the ne-plus-ultra of woman's life. Her public life is a competition of personal appearance with other women, and, as nature has given an unchangeable basis on which to work, this competition can only be equalized by the more or less skilful use that art, whether of costume or cosmetic, affords. That side of social life therefore of which woman is the commanding figure takes on the features of a stage setting in which the scenery is no BOSHU WAY 45 inconsiderable part of the display. The frame must be adequate to the picture that is to be set in it. The broader her stage the better pleased she is, and it can be seen that the more related any purely social function is to display, the wider the influence of woman appears in it. Display being the main object, the relation between the individuals drops into mere formalities, the inanities of polite conversation in its general assemblies. It is intercourse of people who merely meet each other to make comparisons and not for any real object of vital interest to them. Not that these wider gatherings have not a deeper meaning. They have a much deeper meaning and in fact grow out of the gradual development of the individual in European society. The gradual appearance of woman from her feudal environment up to the present when she walks the earth free and untrammelled has gone pari passu with the widening of the sphere of the individual until to-day man is left in free course to work out his life without interference from his fel- lows, provided he does not interfere with them. But as man is individually the freer, so he is more thrown back on himself and the more isolated he has become. Competition having become wider the wife has stepped out into the arena of life, and from being merely the regulator and guardian of the household she has be- come also an active ally in his struggle with the world. A man cannot in these days voluntarily reduce the effectiveness of his right arm, so to speak. Public life does not consist merely in doing so many hours' work a day at a fixed reward. It also means keeping in touch with his fellows as far as possible. Man is a gregarious animal, and it is through and by the herd that he works. As breadwinner he finds his hands full, and as breadwinner he finds that concentration on the object in view is essential to success. Effort cannot be scattered. Hence this regulating of the more formal intercourse has been left to the woman and has taken that form of development which her love of display demands. This outer form, the shell so to speak, is what is visible to the outside world. It is often the only part visible to many inside the charmed circle, but if so they are mere pawns in a game which 46 SAKURAMBO has life's success for its object, and at times both stake and players are of the highest. It is the only field on which man can look over his future antagonist before he comes to grips with him, the ground set apart from the field of contest where no business and any business can be approached through the inanity of general formula, can be touched on lightly, cursorily, incidentally, and then be referred to the more serious moments, and all without that earnestness which necessarily must be attached to matters that men regard as of vital interest. The importance we attach to it is found in the stress we lay on " keeping up one's appearance in the world." And sharply does the world scrutinize its members for often this formal society is the only means of judging a man's capability to fit the standard he aspires to maintain. Not always a good means of judging, as the bankrupt list, moral and financial, shows of people who have kept up appearance to the final smash. However it is a means of judging more palpable instances of decline in worldly prosperity. From the Minister of State to the townsfolk " who hold a general amalgamation of themselves in the town hall," as Mr. Bantam, M.C., described it, this general field is their field of observation and man willingly lets the woman work her will in it, set its rules and manage its details. He has enoug'h to do without more minutise. This feature, I think, ordinarily escapes an easterner brought in contact with western society. To him it is often merely subserviency to women whose proper sphere is the home in his opinion and who figure very badly outside of it. To Japanese eyes the Bo is parade and Rotten Row must be a great puzzle. The round of balls, receptions, theatre parties, where apparently to judge from the inmates of the boxes the play is the last thing thought of, all these features of western life are conces- sions to woman's whims that are foreign to his outlook. His life is largely bound by convention both in politics and in its social features where it touches the lives of other men. Not so the westerner. He largely stands alone. Associations of men by their very nature have a cut and dried object or else an intimacy too close to cover the exact field here sought. Neither the club nor BOSHU WAY 47 the convention will cover it and so he has invented a new witenage- mote and left the framing of its rules to the other sex, while he uses it as a new instrument for his advancement and protection in this complex modern world. To the European the East has no social life at all. The man is alone or else figures at a set feast. His contact is at a few points with those interested in his particular life work or in the intimate relationship of personal friends. With society, as a whole, he has nothing to do. Indeed, if usage had not crystallized certain rules into an automatic feature of his daily life it is hard to see how his rulers would get in touch with him except by the aid of a police- man. The different small spheres in which men find themselves of course touch each other, the whole forming the body politic. Society therefore in the western acceptation of the term is a con- geries of such associations not one homogeneous well-kneaded mass. Now I think Japanese politics bear this out. Intensely national they are intensely sectional. Indifferently this can be put down to the history of the race, or to the history of the race can be attributed their sectionalism. They are convertible terms. Japan of the past is usually described as a feudalism. A feudalism which in its modification so closely follows the history of feudalism in Europe that the parallel between the two is interesting. The feudal system in. Europe, for instance, can be limited to that time during which the great lords, while owing their service and alle- giance to the king, were equally supreme in their own dominions over their own subjects. The breakdown of the system was gradual. In France it began with the reign of Louis XI and was completed under Louis XIV by Mazarin and Colbert. Under the latter king we find that his writ runs everywhere, and that when the local authority is in collision with it, this must yield at once by the very source of its issuance. Great lords there were with great powers in their hands, but before the king sitting in Parliament on a " Bed of Justice " the greatest of them was wax before the flame. Absolutism reigned supreme. " I am the State," said Louis, who from the time he came to manhood had not even to 48 SAKURAMBO juggle parliaments to make them yield. And so it lasted up to the reign of Louis XVI. Now something like this obtained in Japan from the time of Tokugawa lyeyasu. With the final crushing of the great daimyo there was no place in which the Tokugawa writ did not run and no place where the final decision sent down from Yedo did not command instant obedience. This was accom- plished in Japan in much the same way as in France by a judicious lopping off the heads that stuck above the crowd and by impover- ishing the nobility. But here Tokugawa centralization of feudal- ism stopped. They always continued to deal with the daimyo alone who were left absolute within their dominions. With the people at large they had no contact. As Richelieu found that Henry IV and his great minister had paved the way for him, so lyeyasu had his way made easier by Nobunaga and Hideyoshi, and when he died the kingdom passed to his grandson lyemitsu with very little to do except to keep things in the same condition. That he did not reach the same absolute position as Louis XIV is due to a complicating factor. If Rome and the Papal Court had formed part of Louis' dominions he too in all fulness could not have said " I am the State." There were two reasons why the Tokugawa court never reached the splendour of the French court. It always had a rival in the Court of Kyoto which, while of little importance from a political point of view, always maintained its ascendancy as the nominal fount of honours bestowed, and by its continued existence always kept alive the knowledge that there had been another power in the land. The Tokugawa system also deliberately maintained the clans. No matter how absolute that government its system was really based on a balancing of one daimyo or baron against his neighbours and elaborate rules restricting free passage from one district to another kept alive the local spirit. Instead of fusing the people into one homogeneous mass loyal to the government as such, the nation was made up of a series of clans whose loyalty was due to their chief and whose common head was still the shadowy priest Em- peror who had become to them almost a tradition. It is not diffi- BOSHU WAY 49 cult, however, to see that as the Tokugawa influence gradually waned through enervation — a course almost inevitable where for a long period the conditions were not such as to call for strong men — the clans whose interests were directly opposite, the " outs " as opposed to the " ins," would simply await the favourable oppor- tunity to supplant them. The revival of the study of shinto or the national religion had directed the attention of the warlike class to the only feasible rallying point. Long experience of the advantage of a central power prevented any return to the clan system in its original heterogeneity of the fifteenth century, and the presence of the foreigners knocking for admittance also forbade any return to such a rope of sand. Satsuma and Choshu ousted Tokugawa in the name of the Emperor but the very fact ensured the moderniza- tion of the political system. This of course was not done at a jump, and dissatisfaction was so great that the Satsuma rebellion was an almost necessary consequence before the country could settle down under the centralized government which was foreign to the ideas of the people at large. This rebellion was due in part to reaction against such centralization which stripped the reactionary element of the last shadow of feudal power in their princip^ities, and in part to the absorption of the governing power by the progressive element which excluded such reactionaries from any share in the spoiling of the Tokugawa. Where difference between parties however is based not on some national policy but on supposed local interests or clan jeal- ousy, the rallying points are very numerous and the parties of the Japanese Diet are difficult to follow. Sometimes they seemed based on locality as North and South. Again one man of particu- lar abilities, and with a wish to impress some policy or system of economics on the national legislation, has his body of supporters who do not hesitate to bolt from the party caucus if their immediate leader thinks their principles violated. In other words, if parties are numerous, factions within parties are still more numerous, and the party lash by no means has the power that it has in England and particularly in America. This is to a large extent explained 4 50 SAKURAMBO by the nature of the franchise. The upper house is appointed by the Emperor. The lower house is elected on a very restricted property suffrage. When it is understood that in a large city like Yokohama, with nearly two hundred thousand people, barely five per cent, have any voice in the election of their own local govern- ment and not one-half of that have anything to do with the election of a member to the Diet, it can be understood that the Japanese Diet is not in any sense of the word a popular assembly. The people at large have one striking if somewhat strenuous method of showing their displeasure; assassination, which although very uncertain in its action, has in some cases a deterrent effect on push- ing through a measure which is absolutely repulsive to the public at large. The vindicator of the public rage is regarded as a hero, and though he may be hanged a dozen times over, his grave is kept green and his spirit appeased by the offerings of his admirers. These assassins make no effort to escape and usually carry a paper on their person setting forth their reason for their action in case they should be cut down by the officers. East and West therefore have approached this relation of the individual to the community from the same standpoint and have solved it differently, and the West far more completely. We remember the three Johns of the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. John, as John saw him, and very different from the real John; John as his neighbours saw him, very different from the first John and from the real John; John as his Maker sees him. Starting with the individual, fettered John, the West has thrown the world open to him, until among the more advanced peoples John's John is given a fair field and stands free to use all his powers as best he may with all the tremendous fruition that they may bring him. The only limitation placed on him is that such powers be not used to the detriment of his neighbours. The result has been a fishing in strange waters, and to-day a remarkable feature in west- ern civilization is its fundamental homogeneity which is anything but related to its divers constituents, and due largely to the inherent self restraint of the race. In art and science this homogeneity has BOSHU WAY 51 given rise to a cosmopolitanism anything but harmful in this age of iron. Herein East differs from West. To the East the indi- vidual, John's John, is not of the slightest importance. His de- velopment is to be carried out within certain narrow conventional lines. What conforms to the norm is good. What does not so conform is bad. This of course crushes out all originality. Whether any elasticity has been left in the human mind after cen- turies of such training remains yet to be seen. Man's only distinc- tion being that he is a thinking brute, imitation and adaptation are hardly the limiting qualities of any race. But the quality of originality needs exercise, like any other quality of the mind ; and it is only in the last forty years that Japan has somewhat length- ened the fetters of the individual John to give him freer move- ment; for this must not only be through legislation but through that far wider range governed by social convention. Private life — as our neighbour sees us — is as well sheltered West as East. The law of libel is finding extension, not diminution of its scope, among western nations. Some of the episodes however that find their way into the Japanese press would hardly find publication in the most reckless yellow journal, not it can be imagined through any particular delicacy but because of a damage suit. There is one point on which the law of libel is very definite, and that is in relation to the government. Here punishment is severe and cer- tain, but otherwise great leniency is shown as if the object was to get the boys to tell on each other so that their paternal rulers can better keep an eye on them. The general social life of the West certainly seems healthier, in many ways. It is always the case where some trust is shown in the individual. The essentials of family life are quite as much hidden and yet there is a fuller exchange of ideas and customs through the whole mass of the body politic on a more intimate basis than the relations of business and politics can afford. Men learn to know each other better the more points they touch at. Without entering in any way into the merits of including or ex- cluding woman from general society it is a fact that the extension 62 ' SAKURAMBO of her sphere has been accompanied by a lessening of the spirit of provinciaHsm and clannishness, and their disappearance from the sphere of Japanese public life is to be regretted. That the life within the family of the West suffers from such liberality ig much to be doubted. Filial duty is as important to the West as to the East, although the West has long since stripped the father of his autocratic power in the household and refused to hold the grown man in tutelage. One would think from the way this question of filial devotion is often discussed that western sons were mainly occupied in turning their parents out of doors, or beating them, or otherwise maltreating them. We have few special laws on this subject, and where one of them is violated the perpetrator is quite as much an object of horror to the community as he would be to the East. We do not recognize the permanent tutelage of the son for that is incompatible with our system of individual liberty and liability granted as soon as man reaches what has been agreed on as man's estate. As only up to that time he has claim on his father for support, so all his life his father has claim for support on the son, and in the rare cases where the Courts have to intervene to enforce that right they have done so emphatically. The father of the West cannot enforce that unvary- ing obedience that the eastern parent accepts as his due. It is against our whole system of life. The western father must get his son ready to take his place in the world's battle on his own account, and hence conventional lines are made very broad and the boy is given much more opportunity to show his capabilities and how much originality is in him, to be developed for his future advancement. He does not want the boy to show himself equal to the average that he sees around him. He wants him to stand high in the world. The restraint is still there or should be there. It is well shown in a common saying, " give the boy plenty of rope." This can be done wisely or foolishly as is the case with all things human. In external deference to the aged an eastern household presents a very beautiful sight. Not more so I think than can be found in those older communities of Europe where parental author- BOSHU WAY 53 ity has retained much of its earlier flavour, which is the more worthy of note as in the West filial respect is a part of religion whereas as in the East it is the whole of religion. Filial mis- conduct in the West is a breach of religious law. In the East it is a dereliction against the Divinity itself and is regarded as sacrilege and punished accordingly, and there is no point on which the Jap- anese law is more minute and goes into greater detail as to the nature of the punishment than with crimes of this class. If filial misconduct is such a rarity in Japan they have piled up a very complete code in anticipation. An elaborate structure to act as a preventive which must have been based on intuition, for these laws are old laws and in existence long before Japan had contact with the demoralizing West. The Kimuraya is a delightful stopping place and Ho jo is noted for its view of Fuji rising up on the other side of the strait. My morning's ride would keep the mountain pretty constantly in sight. If the ride down the east coast of the peninsula had been a fine one there was a still more pleasant surprise in store. There are no late breakfast hours to bother one at Japanese inns. No sulky waiters to divide their attention between you and their slicking up for the day, a secret circumambient hostility because you take ad- vantage of God's daylight, disturb their routine, and start your day pretty much with the sun. Hence before seven all the preliminaries had been disposed of and my men were ready for their freight. The first half of the day was on the plain or through the hills, the ride still keeping the pleasing type of the afternoon before, shady lanes and villages buried in trees. There were pretty views across the water to the Sagami peninsula and still more distant the blue outline of Izu. Ahead the mountains apparently barred the way to further progress in that direction, the most prominent being Nokogiriyama or " saw-tooth mountain," a ridge so named from its regularly indented shape. At this point the road is approaching the turn which brings the western side of Tokyo bay into full view. The mountains here come close to the sea, sometimes leaving barely room for the road to pass, again cutting it off entirely. In such 64 SAKURAMBO cases the only remedy is a tunnel, and of the thirty odd found between Katsuura and Minato two-thirds are on this section of the road, which runs along the sea not more than a dozen feet above the high water-mark. The previous night had been stormy and the waters of the bay were still in a great turmoil, dashing the spray over the edge. It was a fine ride on a good road with the cliffs towering far up overhead. There was comparatively little traffic. Rest sheds were conspicuous by their absence. It is to be suspected that these fine roadways have more to do with military purposes than with the immediate needs of the country district they traverse. Upper Boshii swarmed with soldiers, and they formed no little part of the wayfarers met on the road. In this part of the peninsula however I met with but one emblem of the powers that be in the shape of a policeman who was driving an offender to confinement. With his hands tied behind his back and attached to a cord some half a dozen feet in length the said offender was trotting along much as the unconscious pig goes to market. It goes against the American grain to see the genus homo treated in this degrading manner. It is a common enough sight in the country districts. In the treaty ports however the foreign system of a " Black Maria " is used to convey prisoners to and from a hearing, and the sight of two or three men trussed together like cattle, while seen at times is not a very common occurrence. Just why such desperate measures are taken with the average Japanese criminal is hard to see, for once in the clutches of the law he becomes a very mild product and the sight of a uniform is enough to turn his gall to milk and reduce him to submission. There is a fair amount of savagei"y underlying the surface of the " Bete Hiiinaine " and the Japanese have their full share of it, as is well shown in the encounters between the ordinary public and the law- breakers. One would think that where the individual counts for so little in the community that the derelict from the path of law would rush to extremes in his encounters with it, and the result would be a dangerous criminal as one outside the pale of the community altogether. That this is not the case is perhaps due to BOSHU WAY 55 the lenity of the Japanese criminal law, which imposes less severe terms of imprisonment and has a graduated system of rebates, so to speak, according as the criminal gives less trouble in clearing up the offence. Hence a thief when captured not only gives a full account of his present transgression but often goes into full details of his past sins. This undoubtedly saves much trouble for the police if not for the public, against whom the offences are just as frequent. The specimen I had in front of me on this occasion — a thief^ — and who doubtless fell on- his knees and gave in at once when confronted by the man in authority, would not have hesitated to carve me into little bits with the short sword which is the favourite weapon of thieves, if I had caught him robbing my house. They are a class of offenders that get little sympathy from the public who are in great dread of them. The indentations of the coast were on more sweeping lines at this section of the way but on reaching Minato the road, here embowered in trees, turns into a little estuary, the locality being very, picturesque. No Japanese town has any appearance of an- tiquity, 'but simply of shabbiness. In fact, they are not ancient, for fires periodically wipe them out. Minato, however, on the whole looked quite new and shiny. A great deal of sake is brewed here and there is an excellent Japanese inn of the better class which fortunately I: found open, for the place is a watering resort and out of season the inn ordinarily is closed. About a rriil© from i Minato the main road is left for a cart track, which quickly degenierates into a trail leading up the outlying spurs of Kanozan, the loftiest part of the range as seen from Yokohama. It is not much of a climb and the view a beautiful one, Fuji rising in>:all its snowy splendour across the bay. Kanozan has an important temple on the summit, a plateau rather than sumraitjf'for the mountain is really a ridge. On the eastern side is a view over the cut up country to the east and south, locally called the " ninety-nine valleys." It is an exaggerated counterpart of the confused jumble that one finds on the Yokoharna side. In fact this line of hills running across the base of Boshu and taking in the Sagami penin- 56 SAKURAMBO sula makes a section of Tertiary clays whicii subsequently have been raised above sea level as an island when all the Tokyo plain was still under water. This peneplain has been carved into the most confused shapes — ramifications of valleys intersecting each other at every angle where the water courses have met the least resistance to their power of erosion. A condition of affairs not badly illustrated by the result of a watering pot on a good-sized mud pie. The inns are well placed, overlooking Tdkyo Bay and with a full view of Fuji. The food was rather primitive but the people were very willing. Four miles of a picturesque walk down the mountain — ^picturesque in a European sense, for the road just at the foot of Kanozan has but little Japanese in its surroundings — and kuruma can be obtained into Kisarazu, the main local port on the east side of Tokyo Bay. Here the welcome was cordial enough, but it was very necessary to make one's way good, for they were evidently uncertain about foreigners and there was some little delay before they would say they had accommodation for the night. However, being ensconced behind the shoji, by a judicious ignorance of the native tongue and a lesson in English to the scion of the house who had ambitions toward one of the Yokohama schools, our nationality was proved, so to speak, and the guests' book was brought at once, not a usual thing, for ordinarily it is produced near the dinner hour in the evening when it seems more of a formality than a necessity. One of the first impressions that is the gift of the gods to the arriving stranger in Japan is the ease with which he picks up the language. It is merely a matter of vocabulary. There are no persons, genders, numbers, or inflections to be grasped with their involved combinations. The structure of the verb seems simplicity itself. There is something of a hitch in getting used to a post position instead of a preposition, but otherwise the sentence looks not unlike one of the Latin languages or German. Noun, object, verb. And so he rambles through the land, getting along tolerably well, and waxing pretty great in his own conceit over his linguistic accomplishments. If he does not stay too long in the land no harm BOSHU WAY 57 has been done and the experience has all the freshening effect of any tonic that acts more on mind than on matter. It is when the period has been extended beyond a few months that he gets the full shock of the truth, and sooner if he wanders away off the beaten track where they not only do not understand him but do not care enough about foreigners to take the trouble to understand him. In other words, the time comes when he finds that the linguistic accomplishments have been mainly on the side of the native. In those parts of the country frequented by foreigners, the number of natives that are familiar with English constructieja of sentences is extraordinary. They may not know a word of English itself but they have grasped the foreigner's use of their own words, and it is this knowledge of theirs that enables him to make himself understood so readily in the large majority of cases. A native will address a foreigner in a way perfectly comprehensible to the latter both in accent or in use of words and addressing one of his countrymen will become at once incomprehensible. He has adapted himself to the foreigner's needs, his first thought being to take the easiest method of being understood. Of course in turning to a Japanese he drops into the native idiom and use of words. If there is no royal road to learning there is certainly not even a " first aid " to Japanese. " Japanese at a glance " would be a mere vocabulary of words, for Japanese grammar could only and does only, to the foreigner, consist in a lengthy exposition of innumerable idioms. Every English construction undergoes not reversal but a sort of grammatical earthquake, shaking it into a tumbled heap of words which, as they stand, have no particular meaning whatever. Given a collection of a dozen words we can start in and build up a fair collection of sentences from them by altering the arrange- ment. This is very much the situation if a sentence be literally translated word for word from Japanese into English. It is often absolutely without meaning and we can suit our sweet will in making very much what we please of the combination. There must be a key, and fortunately this has been supplied by the very few who have penetrated the genius of this most difficult of eastern 58 SAKURAMBO languages. Only with one of the excellent Japanese grammars written by foreigners and the aid of a Japanese teacher can the foreigner hope to make any impression on the native tongue. Unaided efforts are only too likely to end in the stumbling block of the native adaptability and the adoption of the lingua franca of the country. There is no question here of entering into a Japanese family (not readily possible for other reasons of a purely social char- acter) and surrounding oneself with the native medium, so to speak. The eye gives no aid, for to read the. language one must first learn several thousand Chinese ideographs, must learn the endless readings of these ideographs as used 'by the Japanese in combinations and when standing alone, sometimes taking the Chinese sound or the Chinese sound as pronounced by the Jap- anese, and again appearing in the form of purest Japanese. And having grasped this, one must again go to school and learn a new grammar as applied to the written language in distinction from the language as spoken in daily intercourse. Very few foreigners can ever hope to grasp the etiquette of this tongue. For etiquette it has. From highest to lowest and vice versa the form of address is so different as in itself to explain the personal relations and does away with any but this indirect use of pronouns. This indirect- ness of address not only applies to the speaker and immediate hearers^ but defines the relationship of persons or objects the sub- ject of the conversation. Forms of official address, even to some extent found among western nations, are of course carried to a much greater extreme in a country where connection with govern- ment carries with it social position in itself, a government that " hands down " its will to a people that " respectfully receives." In the upper circle of the Court a vocabulary and form of address is used entirely limited to its narrow membership. Among west- ern nations there has always been to some extent a formula for official addresses and receptions but limited to the occasion of its use. The East possesses its cut and dried set of formulas for such conditions and in addition has carried into general life a form BOSHU WAY 59 of speech marking off class from class. Also throughout Japan can be found numerous dialects and in a still narrower sense what can be called patois, expressions without any literary sanction in form and often confined to the range of a single fishing or moun- tain village. There is perhaps here a distinction from the use of the term " dialect " as used in the West. The crystallized form of the written language (its Chinazation, analogous to the Latiniza- tion of our fifteenth century literature) prevents the development of a dialect literature such as exists in all European languages. But the divergence between Tokyo and Kyoto, north and south, ig radical enough to form a dialect in the colloquial, and where it has been reduced to literary form represents a true literature. A Japanese can in general terms distinguish the particular habitat of his countrymen, just as an American can quickly tell the average " down-east Yankee," the Southerner, the man who lives in the Mississippi valley, and on the Pacific coast. As for patois it is not uncommon when travelling with a Japanese to find him stumped on occasions in some mountain hamlet by local idioms, although not more than a dozen miles away lies the large district town which limits itself only to some dialectical forms of expression. Another difficulty lies in pronunciation. Many foreigners living in Japan speak Japanese as their native tongue. They were born and brought up in the country. But there is a distinctive timbre about the Japanese voice that marks the native, and hearing without seeing the speaker, a foreigner usually betrays himself by the lack of this timbre. As to the foreigners who have grasped the genius of the . language, who have a full and complete knowledge of its different ramifications, they can be numbered on one's fingers, and curiously enough are nearly all immigrants. Outside knowledge of Japanese, the grammar of the Japanese language has been given to the western world, not by those one would think most capable of doing the work, but by a set of scholars who have had to build the structure from the ground up ; to whom the language was an accomplishment not an accident of birth. It will not do however to think that Japanese has all the diffr- 60 SAKURAMBO culties to itself. Our English tongue which has cut loose from most of the complexities of inflections, and reduced itself to the simplest form compatible with clearness, still has enough bristles left to make it a very tough morsel. We do not appreciate this until the occasion arises to prove our boast as to how easy English is as a language. " Just talk straight ahead." We have, in com- mon with most other European nations, an alphabet of twenty-six letters to express the sounds found in the language. That is, we fondly think so until examination shows that the number is nearer three hundred, a number corresponding to the forms of the Jap- anese hiragana syllabary. Taking small letters and capitals, writ- ten and printed, old script, black letter, and German script which is so often quoted as to be necessary to a student of English literature, this latter number can be reached without any difficulty, and italics and more fanciful forms common to our printers' fonts can be fairly added to swell the list. To us of course the relation- ship between these forms seems so evident that we say with perfect sincerity that the sounds of our alphabet are expressed by fhe twenty-six symbols; but to a Japanese, totally unfamiliar at \ht start with these symbols, this is not the case, and it is quite a shock in its way, after having impressed the printed symbol b on the neophyte to be asked what the form B represents, or 5 a form often used in heading chapters, and a host of other b's as the case may be. Monograms are often a puzzle to ourselves, as is also the ornamental script commonly used in seals. For words, English literature requires but a small glossary until we get behind the fifteenth century, but in that time there has been a wide range for change in orthography and printing, not only new words and new uses of words but new symbols. There are plenty of old books still living a hale existence in the libraries — some of us prefer these hardy old relics — not enough called for to reprint •in our modern style and still showing their old dress of seventy years ago with f's for s's and final e's in places long since disused. Many still use the long / for .? in writing. Change of words with time, change of meaning and of spelling BOSHU WAY 61 with time, are unavoidable difficulties for which the glossary is the only medicine, but our modern tongue oflfers plenty without going back to hunt for them. For instance homonyms. These are so superabundant in Japanese that it is the Chinese ideograph that makes the written language intelligible. The neophyte simply dipping his feet in the ocean of Japanese writing and printing quickly learns this fact and turns to the ideograph to read the kcna meaning printed beside it. In English, as compared with Japanese, such cases are rare, but still they exist in number enough to be troublesome. The context shows us at once the meaning to be taken but to anyone less familiar with the language they are a very serious stumbling block, especially the nearer they stand to being a keyword in the sentence. As with dear used in the sense of cost, dear as a term of affection, and deer an animal, this last named involving the long forgotten days of the dreaded spelling book. Spelling and the juvenile eauivalent for swearing and vigorous switching were too common concomitants not so many years ago. The world has grown less strenuous to its progeny in these latter days, for less than twenty-five years ago in many of our schools we got a personal and practical application of the East in the shape of the bamboo cane. But all the verbal diffi- culties are- slight compared to the pronunciation of English. Here even foreigners akin to our own race admit the difficulties piled up with almost every sentence they seek to use. The dictionary is a collection of words that in arbitrariness rivals the Chinese ideograph, for all our vowels have several sounds and no accents or indication to show which particular sound applies to the word under consideration ; and diphthongs and triphthongs add their quota to the merry confusion of the fifteen different simple vowel sounds. For instance — receive, neighbour, height: pierce, piebald: mould, mound: my, myriad, myrrh: tub, tureen, true: father, fat, fair, afterward: every, even: pine, pin: etc., etc. Then there is elision, slurring, and silent letters. Difficult as these vagaries of the alpha- bet are to other westerners, they however recall familiarities in their own languages that offers some aid in surmounting the 62 SAKURAMBO peculiarities of English pronunciation, but to a Japanese using a syllabary and not an alphabet these difficulties are enormously increased. It is really surprising therefore how widespread a knowledge of English is found in travelling through the country. Most of it is of a very haphazard character, a few words picked up by peasants who have lived on the sugar plantations of Hawaii or in the western states of America, or by " boys " who have been in service in the foreign settlements. There is a much better quality of English found among Japanese who have lived in England or in the United States, apart from the Japanese com- munities, and among Japanese of the educated classes it is spoken with remarkable accuracy of grammar if not accent. It is an occa- sional experience to meet with an English speaking Japanese who speaks without a trace of foreign accent, and these cases have been caught young, so to speak, and brought up abroad or under foreign inflvience. The general impression one gets however is, that as a nation the Japanese are no mean linguists. On asking the question, most of them seem to think that the continental languages — French, German, Italian, and Spanish — are easier to learn than English. It is not the involved declensions that stagger them so much as pronunciation. The nebulous quality of the alphabet. Incidentally foreigners will often be found who say that they can understand the English as spoken by Americans more readily than when spoken by the English themselves. The former speak more in monotone ; the latter accent words much more sharply, throwing the rest of the sentence in shadow. According to the Japanese, among foreigners there are a number that speak correct grammatical Japanese, and a great many who speak the language fluently with more or less correctness. They usually shakie their heads as to its pronunciation. The general medium of exchange between native and foreigner is the " lingua franca" as it can be called, a Japanese with English syntax and sprinkled with Japanese idioms which will not stand transposition and must be learned by heart. In connection with language there is a subject that here pre- BOSHU WAY 63 sents some very interesting features, and that is as to Japanese literature. It is difficult to believe that such a gulf exists between art and literature as on the surface appears to exist in this case. As to art, the West recognizes the high standing of the Japanese in most features and its supremacy in some. Western Catholicity cannot be better instanced than by the tribute it has spontaneously given to eastern art. In fact, it is the keynote of our western civilization to accept the good — or what it conceives to be the good — no matter where found. And such appreciation has a very wide range. There is less cant about this side of our character than any other. The beautiful features of the intricate scroll work carving such as is found among a truly savage race as the Maoris of New Zealand give rise to a genuine not a fictitious or curious pleasure. Only those who have access to it can state why Japanese literature has not been able to take its stand side by side with Japanese art. In these days the western world is going back of the race feature of any man's work. It is striving, so to speak, to find a formula to which everything mental, moral, and physical, is to be reduced. To find the ultimate natural basis on which phenomena of any character rest, and according as the particular instance conforms more or less closely to standard to judge it entirely apart from the factor of personal or national equation. Excluding subjects whose facts must ultimately rest on a purely scientific basis Japanese literature covers the whole gamut from the heaviest and hardest theology to the lightest novel. There are foreigners and Japanese well able, not only from command of language but from high literary qualifications, to translate the masterpieces of Japanese prose and poetry into the European languages. The instances of such translation are very scattered and strange to say have been mainly directed to that form which is the most difficult for foreigners to appreciate — the poetry, of which there are charming examples in English dress. A most difficult form of translation, for Japanese poetry is particularly a matter of form. There is one branch of it, the Hokku or Haika, almost built on a Chinese basis. It forms a sort of perpetual motion 64 SAKURAMBO machine. It leaves the development of the thought in obscurity and enables a literature of commentaries without end to spring up over the dead bones, as in the controversy over " Bill Stumps, his mark." It must be confessed that in its original form the western mind cannot take much interest in such a production as the oft cited. " Asagao ni Tsurube torarete, Morai-mizu! " which Professor Chamberlain translates : " Having had my well- bucket taken away by the convolvuli — gift water ! " If the reader feels unable to solve the whole of the really beautiful idea con- cealed in these few words from his inner consciousness, he can find it in the Professor's paper on Basho in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Vol. XXX. Many examples are there elucidated. The question, however, rises in the mind of the foreign reader how much of these beautiful translations from the Japanese we really owe to the translation in developing the thought of the original. To us conundrums and acrostics and word puzzles have their place. But not as literature. Literature is complete- ness of thought and its expression in pleasing form according to more or less elastic canons of taste. The Literature of Power as De Quincey called it, as distinguished from the Literature of Knowledge, cannot depend on obscurity of meaning. Japanese poetry has literally been piled up by the ton but its appearance in foreign form is rather scanty. That of prose is still less. Essays, novels, folklore, memoirs, description of man- ners, dress and customs, all the little minutiae of Japanese life, abound ; and the description of Japanese life and manners as seen through foreign eyes is complete and detailed, but very seldom has the native spoken for himself. Scattered fragments of Jour- nals, of Travels, and very scattered fragments of the " Hizaku- rige " (Shank's mare), by Jippensha Ikku, the Japanese Rabelais so called, are found in essays often devoted to general subjects. I suppose we are to be considered fortunate that the idea came into BOSHU WAY 65 the head of Sir Thomas Urquhart and old Peter Motteux to trans- late the great French master for we have grown too nice in these latter days, or perhaps our fabric is a little more worn out and our modern Babylon cannot stand the push of coarser Nature. Much of Japanese literature is freely denounced as pornographic. All literatures are more or less so, and at times the greatest artists fairly waHow in the mire. In fact, man is many sided, and if " he strikes the stars with his lofty head " his feet on the contrary get in some very queer holes, but the one-sided man is not the whole man, and expurgated copies of our great authors are fit equipment for Sunday-schools and the use of children but not for libraries and grown men. It is safe to say that the indecencies of Rabelais, of Shakespeare, of Cervantes, of Sterne, or of the Irish Dean, never made a lewd or immoral man; which is far more than can be said of some of the modern analytical society novels and of the irretrievably vicious suggestive literature which is so prevalent to-day. To go through the world with one's eyes on heaven while desirable is no defence against the wicked who lay traps for one's feet. After all this question is one not only of an Age but of a Nation, and the term "pornographic " has a range as wide as nations. Judging by externals the most artistic peoples are the most human. Perhaps their very kinship to Nature makes her natural to them. Hence the Latin peoples will give a very dif- ferent interpretation to the term " pornographic " than the people of the North; not that there is any difference intrinsically but it lies in the expression. The less clothes a man wears, the broader his smile. Now man is not any more moral for suppression. He is more hypocritical and it is no great boast to feel, as Taine says, that Pecksniff is thoroughly English even as Tartufife is thoroughly French. If art and morality had any intrinsic connection then the western Anglo-Saxon who puts trousers on Apollo and denounces Longfellow's " Launching of the Ship " is the artist. But the world at large is hardly likely to admit any such conclusion, and statistics of the divorce court would hardly support the contention s 66 SAKURAMBO 3i supra-morality. Now in saying that the translations from Jap- anese literature are limited, we are not confining the question to the narrower limits of what is acceptable to the more restricted taste of the Anglo-Saxon nations. The statement applies equally to all European languages. As Japanese art has been studied and lauded all through the West, so the field of Japanese literature has been as studiously neglected, which is the more remarkable if the catholicity of western taste be considered. There is not here the limitation of the eastern mind, for limitation it seems to be. Everything of practical value is eagerly accepted. Books of Science and of practical Philosophy, the range of the" Literature of Power " has been freely translated for the use of Japanese stu- dents; but with European art, poetry, and general literature, the Japanese has no touch. Here he is the true Oriental ; unchanged and unchanging within the circle of his own civilization and in that steadily revolving around the old centre laid down ages ago. With earth's eyes fastened on the deeds of his ancestors as his soul's eyes are fastened on the shades of those ancestors. The western standard is here far the safer to follow and by it we must judge that there has been found no Japanese Shakespeare or Moliere, no Dante or Milton or Goethe, no Boccaccio, Ariosto, Cervantes, Fielding, Smollett, Dickens, Thackeray, Balzac, Flau- bert, or George Sand, to paint Japanese life as these masters have painted English, French, Italian, Spanish, and German life; no Montaigne to entertain with his garrulous geniality; and finally, no Rabelais to get us through this world of trouble, drowning its discords in an Homeric peal of laughter and teaching us, without cynicism, to make merry over its defects and make the best of its opportunities. At the time I speak of there was no direct service across the bay from Kisarazu to Yokohama. I had therefore to return to Tokyo. From distrust we had passed to the greatest affability, and the whole inn was present to say "■" sayonara " the next morn- ing. With a towel, a book, and some kwashi, and most important two large slabs of wood, I had quite an armful in addition to the BOSHU WAY 67 luggage, and they took the trouble to get me off promptly for Kisarazu is a large place, the inn what we would call a commercial inn, and they had a houseful to get rid of that morning. The start was made by kuruma, and after plunging through the lanes of the town we came out on the edge of the bay; Here there was no sign of boat or wharf or anything but water. Some distance out were lying a few sampans, and at least a quarter of a mile away was a tiny steamer. I expected some sort of a move on the part of the sampans, but instead my kurumaya plunged boldly into the water, and started apparently for Yokohama direct. On we plunged slowly through the soft silt, and it was soon evident that he was making for one of the sampans anchored some hundred and fifty yards from the shore. Quite a little procession was now directing its way thitherward. A line of kurumas was following me, and by the " roadside " were pedestrians, men and women, their kimonos tucked up to the middle and carefully picking their way among the sea shells strewed along the bottom. On reaching the scow the water was nearly up to the floor of the kuruma. At this point one of the before-mentioned slabs of wood was consigned to the kuruiiic.ya, with " mo go sen," and he took himself off smil- ing. The other slab was destined for the boatman. The proces- sion followed on, the scow being gradually poled out as the tide went down, vmtil we were quite a distance from the shore and per- ceptibly nearer the little steamer. This side of Tokyo Bay is very shallow near the land and a rise of a few inches covers no little amount of plane surface. The last shore was a long one and the late-comers reached us rather damp. After more than an hour spent at this elastic anchorage we were finally " complet " and pushed off for the ocean greyhound " Fukugawa Maru." One could not help thinking what would be the result if this trip is made in the reverse direction and the kurumas ran short or did not appear at Kisarazu. A foreigner would have to camp on the sam- pan until the kurumaya with his indefinite sense of time (of other 68 SAKURAMBO people) came to his aid, or else take off his " breeks " and appear " ail naturel." European undergarments are hardly of a model to meet such contingencies. In somewhat less than three hours the steamer was to land us at the Ryogokubashi in Tokyo, a speed which, although by no means swift, was less exasperating than on a previous occasion, when coming from Shimoda, the " county town " of Izu, I had taken thirteen hours. Japanese coasting steamers are not a joy forever. After struggling through one of the side plates which is swung back, and denting one's hat and temper in the operation, a low cabin is entered bare of everything but matting and a narrow ladder which leads to a very small hatch and the deck. Most of these little steamers carry two boxes on deck, one of which at least is available for passengers. I advisedly say box for they are not more than 5x3 feet and little more than three feet high. Pas- sengers of course provide their own food if the length of the voyage calls for it. The bento or lunch box is an almost universal institution in Japan. The dining car is strictly an importation. The food in some cases explains the vital statistics of the Empire. Japanese fruit is not good under the most favourable circum- stances, the pear and the peach being the worst offenders. The pear is to be tabooed on all and every occasion. Either the name or the fruit is a hideous caricature. The peach is sometimes fairly good — for a Japanese peach — ^but as the native often eats it, is an atrocity. On the occasion to which I refer, coming from Shimoda, one of my fellow passengers brought on a bundle of the native peaches for his amusement and sustenance. As one rolled out at my feet it gave me an opportunity to inspect it when returning it to him. It was absolutely green and hard. ■ Eight of these he consumed between Shimoda and Tokyo, and perhaps more at times when not under observation. He knew nothing of the affecting mishap to " Johnny Jones and his sister Sue, them two " which was just as well for his peace of mind. Slipping close by the old Shimbashi forts the Fukugawa Maru entered the Sumida River and soon put us on shore at the slip near the bridge. I had re- BOSHU WAY 69 turned in good time for the azalea blossoms at Okubo — a suburb of Tokyo — and it was night before I once more reached my head- quarters. During my absence I had had a visitor in the shape of the doroho or thief, and he had ..been regulating the distribution of the goods of this world on his own socialistic principles and with small regard to the wishes of the normal owner. The fact is worth mentioning in connection with a curious superstition of this facetious fraternity. They believe that if they befoul the place selected for their exploit and cover it over with a tub the people of the house will be held fast by the god of sleep. Hence the visits of such gentry call up an amount of wrath that would give spice to the interview if they were caught at the time. Japanese housekeepers are careful not to leave any of their tarai or tubs lying around so as not to offer any facilities for the performance of this curious rite, although it is much to be doubted if any thief is really deterred by his inability to carry it out with all its formalities. Ill IWASHIRO WAY " Cerchiamo la bonta, la virtu, I'entusiasmo, la passione che riempira la nostra anima, la fede che calmera le nostra inquietudine, I'idea che difenderemo con tutto il nostro coraggio I'opera a cui ci votere- mo, la causa per cui moriremo con gioia." — Romanzi della Rosa. Anyone who comes to Japan to surround himself with an- tiquity is doomed to grievous disappointment. If there is a coun- try that has the stamp of external newness on it is " the Central lai^d of Reed Plains." Not that there are lacking hoary monu- ments of antiquity, such as the temples at Nara, at Kamakura, the various Daibutsu, and even such evidences of a more remote past as dolmens. Ancient monuments are to be found to some extent, but they are lost in an oasis of wooden houses which have no mark of age on them but shabbiness. Much of Japanese antiquity as you see it is a gross fraud. Stones in the cemeteries take on a mouldy and moss-grown appearance in the lapse of twenty-five years. A new house or temple in a half a dozen years looks as weather-beaten as if it had stood there for a century. Places are indeed ancient and place names in some cases figure in the earliest of their chronicles dating from the eighth century, but nothing is left but the names. The present is its heir. The reason for this is fire. Even if structures for secular use, built of wood, could have stood the test of time, this element would probably have wiped them out, so widespread being its range that the average life of a house in Tokyo is put at less than a dozen years. Although there is plenty of building stone they make but little use of it, the usual explanation being the prevalence of earthquakes. It is noticeable however that such structures as were built of stone — Nagoya Castle for instance — admirably withstood the great Gifu earth- quake and no material damage has ever been reported to foreign built houses. The Japanese are losing their timidity in this 70 IWASHIRO WAY 71 respect, brick coming into use ; and, as in a number of other direc- tions, what was needed being the initiative from the outside to show them the way. It is only fair to say that a twenty-two storied " skyscraper " would never become popular in the country, either as an investment or as a neighbour. Now the lack of antiquity in Japanese colour is very much the reverse of Europe where age impresses itself " en bloc" With all due respect it is quite feasible to find in Christian Rome monuments outdating the temples of Nara by centuries. But in addition whole districts have a hoary life. The Italian and Spanish Ghettos, the Latin quarter of Paris, have no counterparts in Japan. An old Spanish city like Toledo fairly shows the old bones from which it has been constructed and a Moorish palace, perhaps later the Hall of the Templars, will still house a multitude unconscious of the past frowning down on them from some capital, or arch, or groining. There is a touch of fellowship in the homage both East and West pays to the places associated with its great minds. In these present times the wave of such feeling is in full force, and if a few years earlier it might have spared the old Tabard Inn of South- wark to stand as a national monument. Such work must spring from the heart of the people. Official support is too likely to take into consideration the politics not the merits of the candidate to such honour. There is one feature of Japanese literary life that fosters this preservation of detail of the lives of some of their literary men. Every literary man of eminence had his disciples and it is their reverence that has preserved all the little details of the master's life. But it must be understood that their system did not favour originality. A man's work must be based on a certain classical norm, without interest in itself as an instance of evolution. As it conformed to the norm it was a thing of beauty, as it lapsed it was to be regretted and cast into outer darkness. A teacher's life, thus surrounded by these watchful disciples, was a continual illustration of his doctrines. As a rule they practised what they preached. But as they subordinated themselves to a formula, so they lost much in personality. They are rarely off 78 SAKURAMBO guard; usually on exhibition. Such an occasional irregular char- acter as Jippensha or Hokusai gives a sense of relief. The Jap- anese are not so tender to some other symbols of the past. At the fall of the Shogunate the land was dotted with the castles of the daimyo. These were all given up and passed into the hands of •the government. Against modem artillery the great majority were worthless hulks, more dangerous to those taking shelter in them than to any assailant. Just why these picturesque remnants of a bygone age should be wiped off the surface of the earth is hard to see; and yet they were, and so effectually that one can travel through the land without seeing a sign of them. Occasion- ally a bit of stone wall perched on a slope outside a village, and which by a suspicious sweeping line on the corner recalls some old Japanese print, and shows where only forty years ago such a structure represented the governing power in the land. Now antiquity in the abstract is just as pleasing- as antiquity in the concrete. I do not know but that the intervals spent in rambling through the old quarters of Italian, French, German, and English towns, without any particular archa£ological lion in view, are the pleasantest features of travelling. They are the idle moments of sightseeing. When we are viewing some particular spot — house or place — where an important event of history took place, the mind is or ought to be more or less on strain. We are at school, so to speak, for the time being. But when the attention is not so concentrated ; when we are simply placed in such a medium, as for instance, the ancient canals of Venice, or a row of the square- timbered houses of Shrewsbury, or a sixteenth century corner hid- den away in the ecclesiastical quarter of Rouen; then the very diffusion of pur attention, its scattered range, removes all element of strain and leaves behind simply pleasurable interest. It is the difference between the burning lens and the prism. The Tower of London and Westminster Abbey are of overpowering interest, and at them we go guide-book in hand for the good of our minds and iSouls. The old inn at Ludlow — the Feathers — arouses a much milder interest. We .need no guide-book and concentrate our IWASHIRO WAY 73 attention on chops, potatoes, and a tankard of ale, and find the time passes anything- but slowly in recalling the old and varied life of the inn in the days of yore, the pleasant and profitable picture of the life of the past that it has seen. Although his journey to the North may take the traveller half way across the city of Tokyo — which has been a great city since the seventeenth century — he meets with no such interest on the way. Only one-quarter of the town, the surroundings of the Im- perial palace, presents exceptional features. The rest is simply an enlargement of a score of a number of minor towns. A few foreign style shops in the Ginza make some display, for the rest, miles of one-story wooden houses monotonously alike. If the district is a business one, the front is a shop. Otherwise latticed windows and in front of the large majority a screen or half-screen of fencing to protect the houses from the more immediate inspec- tion of the passing public. In the wealthier residence quarter high fences and more or less elaborate gates, and within, some trees the tops of which appear behind the fence. The house behind all this may be old. It may have escaped the ravages of time and fire, but the probability is that it has not passed its quarter of a century and in- all events architecturally would resemble its neighbours. This is the usual panorama seen by foreign eyes, for the shortest route from the Shimbashi station to Uyeno — the station of the Northern Railway — leads through narrow streets to the left of the Ginza. Streets given over to special trades where one block will be a waving front of kimono stuffs displayed to would-be pur- chasers, and the next block a choice collection of old metal of all kinds from a second-hand hib::chi to a second-hand anchor for a junk. There is one thing to be noticed about the streets them- selves, and that is the fairly good condition in which they are kept. They may-be ankle deep in mud, but the only obstructions tolerated are the repairs made by the municipality itself — perhaps cutting off part or the whole of a street from public travel or coating it with a layer of rough stone. This is a feature of no little importance where many of the people go barefoot or at best with straw sandals 74. SAKURAMBO on their feet. Broken glass, fragments of tin cans or other sharp objects would be very serious under such conditions, but one does not often hear of accidents of this character. The " ricksha " men run ahead through the darkness without much care to footing. I remember once in crossing the city at night one of my runners stubbed his toe rather severely against a manhole which had been set so as to project above the road level, and- there was no little excitement over it. It is the only time I have seen them show front to a policeman, and he regarded the fact of some importance, for a note was at once made of the occurrence and presumably somebody was hauled over the coals for carelessness. The approach to Uyeno is along one of the best stretches of highway in Tokyo; a broad avenue nearly a mile in length and with a pavement for foot passengers. The Japanese, however, has as yet not taken up the question of tree-planting in the cities, and from side to side it is as bare as a board, except in so far as electric poles and rails for the cars break its surface. The station itself is an anticlimax. Most Japanese stations are. Bare, shabby wait- ing rooms and a travelling public with manners quite as bad as they are in any other part of the world. Otherwise the construc- tion is excellent. The platforms are all raised so that one enters the cars on the same level. They are all faced with stone and macadamized, and the larger stations are sheltered from the weather throughout the platform. Overhead bridges connect the different platforms and only travellers are allowed access to them or those holding platform tickets. The speed on Japanese rail- ways is intolerably slow, twenty to twenty-five miles an hour for the average express service. This is largely due to the fact that most of the roads are single-tracked, and the trains take root on switches until one thinks the operation of the road has come to a sudden and untimely end. The roads are protected by an ample signal service and the engineer carries his right of way with him, so to speak, in the shape of a little baton which is given up at the next block. The Japanese boast that they never have an accident — not strictly true — and there is no particular reason to dread one. IWASHIRO WAY 75 for it does not seem feasible that there should be any great crash if two trains should happen to dispute the right of way. The Sanyo railway in the South has the best service, and the government road - — the Tokaido — has the worst. On their Maebashi line the North- ern railway have some cars of improved American pattern, and their weight and strength are palpably evident in smoother run- ning. In some ways the Japanese newspaper man is much re- stricted in his legitimate field of operations, and some of our scare headlines would be treasure trove as journalistic timber, substitute for the gay doings of the geisha. " A terrible crash," " The flyer telescopes the dynamite local at sixty miles an hour," " Amos Quito one of the victims," etc., etc., have not yet been imported. The Oriental is supposed to be far more careless as to his life than the Occidental, but I think in some ways the statement has its limits. He is one of the best drilled creatures in the world. Im- plicit obedience to his superiors is one of his qualities, and when sent on a mission involving death itself he will carry that mission out to the best of his ability and with great indifference to the result personally. But he takes it for granted that what can be done has been done to obviate the dangers attendant. No mis- take has been made, and if he comes to grief it is so written down in the fates. East, as in West, there is not indifference to useless sacrifice of life. He makes one of the best soldiers in the world simply on this ground, that his individuality has been merged into the ground mass of the operating body. He is an instrument and has abdicated his own personality, so to speak. His body is there but his mind is " possessed " by his superior officer just as it is " possessed " by one of his Shinto gods. Now this is a very good quality and a very formidable one — found elsewhere it can be added — but carried to an extreme in the Asiatic. It is the spirit that has animated Asia from the dawn of history, and it is the direct opposite of the great pioneer nations which foster individualism. With them the individual has scat- tered himself over the world, getting a foothold, subduing the savage tribes, developing the country and, most important, develop- 76 SAKURAMBO ing himself with it, until the first thing the world has known is that from a few scattered energetic men, with little support but their own right arms, a great colony and a great nation has sprung into life. The government-ridden man has never done this as yet. In the first place the government decides whether there shall be any going at all. This is the first blow to his self-reliance. In the second place, it says where he shall go, and lays down endless minute rules as to what he shall do when he gets there and how he shall do it. On new soil broad lines are the only guide, and the minutiae are so much rubbish from the official brain which clog the wheels of progress. They rarely fit the new conditions, and simply deal a second blow in stripping the settler ef so much more of his remaining stock of self-reliance. What is left is not worth having; a gang of labourers who have simply changed their habi- tat not their condition, themselves looking to their governnjent to smooth over every difficulty for them, and their government regarding them as another source from and by which to satisfy placeholders. The nations of the world all started fairly even. Asia had as good a chance as Europe to people the world, but the Asiatic system was against it and they hug their chains to this day. Continental Europe to some extent makes the same mistake, but on a much less complete scale. Only the Anglo-Saxon has set the individual free, giving play to his freest efforts and to-day ruling half the world. Continental colonies are languishing the world over. America, North and South, is the goal of the Con- tinental European who is worth having, the man who has energy enough to try and better his condition in preference to tamely going to the wall at home. And America is getting them simply because these men see their failure at home and do not see why they should succeed under the same conditions abroad, whereas they see their fellows succeed on the other side of the Atlantic. The Japanese is far too much of an Asiatic to feel the charm of individual freedom. He is content with all the government he can get, to have his down- sittings and his uprisings regulated for him, much as one bobs a sparrow on the tail to make him drink ; but it is getting hard to IWASHIRO WAY , 77 find a living at home and hence he emigrates in bands. They may come in as individuals, but invariably drift into their local communities. As the object is simply to make a living, and not to form part and parcel with their hosts, they take no interest in their temporary home except as its laws may press on their prejudices or the local interest of the Japanese community. As individuals they deal with their own community and their community, as a settlement outside the local authority, deals with that authority. Colonization by government order perhaps can be successfully car- ried out close at hand, and there seems to be a future for the Jap- anese is northeastern Asia. Whether under that system they are going to become competitors as a world power remains to be seen and much to be doubted. Colonies must be planted with the even- tuality of becoming self-supporting and self-seeking, but as the Mussulman, the world over, turns his face to Mecca as the sun rises and sets, so the Japanese for ages has turned, and for ages perhaps will turn, his face to the throne of the Mikado. Western individualism always has defeated the centralism of Asia. Be- tween the man who carves the most exquisite netsuke or weaves the finest silk, and the man who first detected radium emanations, there is a great gulf fixed, and granted the same conditions the same result will follow. Asia must not only adopt the spirit of western material progress, but must prepare to adopt the means to keep that spirit alive. If one looks at a geological map of the main island of the Empire, there can be seen a white splotch shaped something like a polypus with the body at the head of Tokyo Bay and extending arms in different directions. This is the Tokyo plain pushing as far south as Odawara and the Hakone Mountains, running other branches up to and into the main mountain mass to the west, and north to Sendai, with an offshoot to the upper part of Kazusa. It has not been many ages since it was all under water and in the main is level. A range of low hills stretches across country at the head of the bay from the Tonegawa River to the Tsurumigawa at Kawasaki, and the more elevated part of Tokyo has been built 78 SAKURAMBO on these hills. Half an hom- however to the north takes me out of the little valleys and on to the main plain, which extends a sea of rice-fields in every direction. This is pleasantly broken by groves of trees, sometimes mere clumps of half a dozen or less around a shrine, and by the villages dotted over the plain. The whole land is under the most complete cultivation, and as we roll over miles of this plain it is not hard to see why the lord of Yedo obtained and held such a dominating position in the political development of Japan. Nearing Utsunomiya the Nikko Mountains appear to the left and ahead on the right the outlyers of the Coast Range, which takes a much greater development farther north. The stations mostly have names familiar enough in EngHsh dress, Akabane, " Red Wing," Oyania, " Little Mountain," Kurihashi, " Chestnut Bridge," Shirakaiva, " Level River." At the more important stations men parade the platforms with trays of little boxes, sold in pairs, one containing rice, the other a slice of omelet, some smoked fish or stewed meat, bamboo root and relish. Beer, at some places " sandoyeach " (which is close enough to sandwich), all sorts of kwashi or cakes, and soft drinks. This business is in the hands of the neighbouring teahouses, and no matter how one may differ as to the edibility of the contents of the boxes the surroundings are usually neat aiid clean. The stations differ — to Japanese eyes anyhow — in their makeup of these boxes, and by following the example of our native neighbour we can do better. As the place that enjoys the culinary reputation is reached, heads go out in every direction and the hento man is enshrined on the pedestal; whereas elsewhere tobacco, newspapers, etc., have the call. Most of the foreign passengers leave the train at Utsunomiya, which is the junction for Nikko. This was but half of my present day's journey. The boy brought on a fresh tea supply — a little stand fitted with pot and saucers supplied by the railway company — - the blue mountains unrolled in a continuous line in the \\''est, a volcanic cone here and there jutting out of the mountain wall, and the same scene of rice-plains and valleys unfolded itself, but here interspersed with barren spots, sandy, and on which only stunted IWASHIRO WAY 79 pines were growing. At Koriyama, " Herd Mountain," it was my turn to leave the train and take the branch hne which runs into the mountains and is extended as far as Wakamatsu in Iwashiro. It was evening when we entered the fine gorge of the Gohyakugawa, the mountains rising high on both sides. My destination was Ina- washiro, a little mountain village at the foot of Bandaisan, which volcano soon appeared on the right raising his head to a height that in the gloaming looked unpleasantly excessive. It was quite dark when I reached the little platform station, to find that as usually happens in Japan the connection between station and town was rather theoretical, or perhaps the railway had been built with a liberal eye to the future growth of the place. This was nearly a mile off, and over a road recently coated with shingle which I considered very bad walking, although later I revised my views and could conceive of something worse. In the darkness it was most picturesque. The great mountain loomed up directly in front towering over the little village, the outskirts were farms hidden behind hedges of bamboo in the darkness and taking a familiar home look. The town itself thus gradually entered on was a mere mountain village with no pretence to anything but its agricultural affairs. The night was a hot night in early August and people were lounging up and down, the houses wide open from front to back, and everybody was, so to speak, metaphorically if not literally out of doors. The inn was no exception to the rule, and was built more on the lines of one of the farm houses than with the formality of the town inns. The gossips were mainly collected in the front apartment which also answered for kitchen, and Ojisan made but little show of his books and writing pad and nesans and the other paraphernalia displayed in what corresponds in the Japanese ya- doya to the " office " of our western hotels. I was quite habitu- ated to the conditions of the Japanese bath, but I must say it was the first experience of entering it so " coram publico " as in this particular case. The general lavatory appliances for washing everything from one's person to the dishes were jumbled together in the front of the establishment. In mountain districts I had 80 SAKURAMBO often seen people — men, women, and children — tubbing in front of the houses for the very good reason that the house was too small to conveniently arrange a place for the bath other than the high- way. I had now an opportunity to put this experience to use. The tub, a converted beer barrel, was placed in the front of the yadoya and open to the public, although withdrawn some dozen' feet back from the house front. In this real Japan we have some- thing of the times of the garden of Eden, minus fig-leaves or before that unseemly episode. Undressing to that condition known to the Scotch as a " mother naked man," handing the garments over to nesan (elder sister), in turn we stepped in to be boiled like a lobster for as long as desired. Nesan washed her lacquerware, Obasan (honourable grandam) cooked the supper, I bathed, we were all girls together, and the passing public lacked the curiosity to gaze. Now this brings up the question of modesty as it is under- stood East and West. Or rather as it is misunderstood, for there is much reason to believe that we are tilting at the two sides of the same shield. And to both sides its contrast presents features that shocks every sense of what they understand to be modesty. The South Sea islander, who would send his spouse to the tent of his brand-new white friend, would have been highly scandalized at any appearance of women in general association with men and in public life. The women have their own side at public festivities, as much so as in any Quaker meeting house of the old days, and generally from the external relations with the other sex women could be said to be most carefully looked after as respects the exposure of their persons. If external respect has any relation to modesty then the Mohammedan should be held to be the most considerate to his womenkind, for he veils them from head to foot in such way as to prevent even an outline of the form appearing. But the very reverse is the case, for they perhaps hold women lower than among any other nation, not even granting them a soul. The question therefore of exposure of the person as related to modesty is a purely relative one, and, to tell the truth, is simply related IWASHIRO WAY 81 to mental condition and is governed largely by climate. The standard of correctness is a purely national one, and where evil is not thought there is no evil, until the serpent enters the garden of paradise and whispers the thought about. One cannot even grant that external modesty is properly a question of morals. There is a larger percentage of illegitimate births among the nations of northern Europe than among the nations of the South, the prevalent form of religion undoubtedly being the controlling factor. It is only necessary to contrast the two neighbouring coun- tries of Scotland and Ireland to have an instance. Exposure of the person plainly has nothing to do with these cases. In fact exposure of the person is more of an antidote to pruriency than an incitement. Artists who deal with the nude are by no means immoral people, and in fact, if we can judge by divorce court records they figure very favourably. In fact, sexual immorality is a question not of clothes at all but of social standard. Questions of property and succession visit the offence on the woman in such cases in a social sense, and social damnation, the auricular confes- sion, and fear of Hell in people of lively religious faith, have more preventive effect than any innate feeling as to exposure of the person. In western communities our ideas of modest}* are some- what contradictory. Every effort is made to develop arid beautify the lines of the female figure and the whole dressmaker's art is ■directed to such display. A woman is perfectly modest who is almost naked to the waist and yet must not show an inch of ankle. Now this is an acquired feeling, for any young girl who appears in her first low neck. dress feels — and ought to feel under our train- ing — a shock to her modesty. It quickly becomes customary and such exposure is regarded as perfectly natural. In the West also we associate acts of necessity with our animal nature and carefullv •seclude such features in public life. This is highly proper on the ground of the offence such necessities give to our whole aesthetic sense. The range of such seclusion however is very wide, and certainly is not to be carried to the ridiculous excess as in certain American cities, where public latrines are not supplied at all or in 6 82 SAKURAMBO such minor numbers as to be of little practical use ; namely, only in certain public buildings in which business may keep men for some large portion of the day. There is no doubt that in the West, according to our varying standard, we act wisely. We have forcibly connected clothes and modesty, but it is a case of the whited sepulchre and on the point of pruriency the West cannot claim any cleaner record than the East. Pruriency is common enough in the East, and the eastern mind is no cleaner than the western mind. In one respect, in his lower view of woman he is distinctly worse, as shown by the snatches of remarks cast by coolies when women pass, and which rouse the protests of their own newspapers. He has the advantage that a number of minor necessities, which we absurdly call animal forgetting that we ourselves are animals, do not arouse in him other opportunities for its exercise. The Japanese woman is just as modest as her western sister, if directed in somewhat different channels. To her the exposure of the low neck dress is of the grossest immodesty and she would never dream of exposing her breast in that manner just as she would not hesitate to suckle her child in public; in which connection it can be added that among the upper classes of Japanese, wet nurses are commonly employed. She would not hesitate to retire for purposes of necessity. Here we in the West have carried modesty to an absurd excess, for all sorts of excuses are resorted to by men to obtain a few minutes intermission at the theatre, and many a woman has suffered physi- cal injury because the train crew have made up the train so that the woman's lavatory is placed at the upper end of the car. Cus- tom has been much modified in Japan simply because the idea of evil has entered — which by the way shows how much custom has to do with the question. To the Japanese woman the bath is a neces- sity and she does not hesitate to visit the public bath; or rather did not hesitate, for this practice is now only found in the country districts retired from the view of foreigners. Once more the " idea " has entered and hence the Japanese have taken measures to guard against its evil influence. IWASHIRO WAY 83 Bandaisan had not grown appreciably smaller with daylight. Standing at Inawashiro at an elevation of 2000 feet, the top of the mountain was some 4000 feet above us, and the uncertain factor was just how much of that ascent was necessary to secure my object, a matter of no little consideration on a hot August day. Part of the way anyhow was to be done on horseback, and two steeds, by no means fiery, were waiting me at the inn front. Jap- anese cattle seem to come under the national influence, so to speak, and have the same respect for the police regulations as the native himself. The stallion and the bull are seen performing their func- tions as draft animals in every direction. The Japanese horse is an overworked quiet little beast. They have a nasty trick of biting, which requires as much caution in passing them by the head as the'- average mule by the heels. I and my " boy," climbing up on our Japanese saddles, were started off led by two natives in raincoats and mushroom hats of vast size. Altogether the sight was edify- ing and called to my mind in some ways Hogarth's painting of the Knight and Ralph in Hudibras. We were taking a base advan- tage of Bandaisan by attacking him in the rear, and passed out of the village along the base of the mountain paralleling the railway running nearly a mile away. Gradually rising up the slope a beau- tiful view unfolded itself. Japan is made up of mountain and valley scenery of every kind, but I can recall but one other instance that gives the exact sense of isolation that is found in this Waka- matsu plain ; the sense of unity in itself. The steep narrow valleys' so often seen seem part of a system, the ranges piling up and obviously forming links in a more or less extensive chain. So,, many twists and turns and we are again in the world of men. But here we are in the bottom of a bowl. The plain is wide enough to give a sense of completeness to the scene. The villages sprinkled over its surface make a little world in themselves, but this plain is surrounded by a wall of mountains except at the corner where the Gohyakugawa, flowing from lake Inawashiro, breaks through the gorges. Even here the mountains so fold and overlap each other as to hide entrance and exit. The plain seems abso- 84. SAKURAMBO lutely cut off from the outside, the only apparent exit being over the lofty and precipitous wall of mountains. Lake Inawashiro itself is a product of Bandaisan, filling a depression the result of an eruption of the volcano. It teems with fish, but the sides being meadow flats and not wooded, it presents but few attractive fea- tures. Not far from its head lies the large city of Wakamatsu, not in contact with the lake as would be thought desirable, and not particularly in touch with its railway, which has an air of uncer- tainty as to its future direction. We obtained no little height on these slopes, and gradually turning the base of the mountain, ascended over grass-covered slopes and up to the entrance of a valley, which in direction was taking us toward Inawashiro again, but which gradually narrowed to the base of a saddle connecting Bandaisan with its nearest neighbour. The trail straggled over these slopes which rose at a very easy grade. Once well in the valley, clumps of bushes and trees appeared, and the path became decidedly bad and the slope steeper until it began to climb up to the foot of the saddle where were located a group of two or three huts. These were found to be a hot spring, very primitive and plainly only of use to the country people roundabout. Here horses were left behind, and here also followed one of the agreeable surprises in life, for a ten minutes' climb up the zigzags brought me to the top of the saddle and the huts which were partly damaged in the eruption of '88, the elevation being 5000 feet. Off to the right lies the summit of the mountain ; to the left my road led down over the debris of the eruption to the village of Kawakami. There are some sulphur banks and hot pools here on the saddle mainly of interest in showing that the volcano still has plenty of life in it. Below lies the crater, and we started down over as rough a piece of ground as we could desire. In places the trail was pretty fair, but even then the sharp cinder played havoc with any kind of footgear. The debris was mainly made up of a tufa, almost an acid slag, and in the shape of fragments ranging from heaps of large bowlders piled up in confused hillocks to the finest sand. A favorite form for the trail to take was over these fragments some- IWASHIRO WAY 85 what larger than road-metal, and a mile of this cut beyond repair a stout pair of oxhide boots. There seemed to be very little mud to cement this mass. The crater is very impressive. Pi-operly speaking, it is a cleft. The walls tower up a thousand feet and more. At the head of the cleft — the actual crater — a few hot pools and fumaroles form the source of the poisonous little stream which flows down the side of the mountain. We lunched here to find out the grievous oversight of the leader of the expedition, and omission of " the boy " — no water in the commissariat. Of course there was nothing to be found in the immediate neighbourhood, and we would not have dared to drink it if there had been, for it almost certainly would have contained enough arsenic to give us at least grave discomfort of mind if not of body. The native himself rarely drinks water unless he has some information as to its source, and the prospects of " the boy " and myself were poor in- deed unless there happened to be a tea shed at the foot of the mountain, a thing hardly likely on such an out of the way excur- sion. On we went, scrambling down banks of rubble, then a piece of fair going over a little level. The great cleft stretched on the right extending all the way to the foot of the mountain. Looking back and to the left over the devastated country toward Lake Hibari, formed after the eruption by alteration of levels and dam- ming of the water courses, it was as great a contrast to the Waka- matsu plain with its rice-fields as can be imagined. The mountain itself is to be classed with the explosive type, and the eruption of 1888 is almost the counterpart of that of Tarawera of New Zealand in 1886, which however was on a greater scale. In both cases the side of the mountain has been blown out, and an enormous mass of debris scattered over the exposed country. In the case of Tara- wera this was in the form of fine mud, the material being literally blown to dust and carried down by the torrents of rain following the eruption. There, too, at Tarawera, the effects on one side of the mountain have been tremendous, the outpouring of the liquid mud being enormous, covering the country for miles to a far greater extent than at Bandaisan. The country around Tara- 86 SAKURAMBO wera however is somewhat desolate — fern-covered brackens^and great as is the contrast in crossing the divide between Lake Rotorua and Lake Rotomahana, it is not so great as -between the two sides of Bandaisan. Our last scramble was a helter-skelter over bowlders and through and down the little stream flowing from the crater, and after five hours of this work we stalked through the little village of Kawakami which lies almost athwart the cleft. It came near being overwhelmed during the eruption, but escaped, lying just on the edge of the downpour. The loss of life was not so great at Bandaisan. Some four or five hundred perished, but the destruction of property was very great, a dozen villages being buried in mud and cinder. The inhabitants had warning and most of them had already left their homes for places of safety. There was no sign of tea shed or place to substitute for it. One female, in puris n..turalibus and the bath, was the only living Creature in sight. The rest of the inhabitants of the little hamlet seemed to have disappeared underground. As negotiations with the lady were not en regie under the conditions we continued on down the valley to complete our circuit of the mountain and enter Inawashiro at the end opposite to that by which we had left it. It was a pretty walk down the river gorge. A fairly good cart track, with the Nagasegawa, the opposite hills, and the slopes of Ban- daisan to keep us company. About a mile from Inawashiro we crossed a mud flow curiously distinguished by its sharp differentia- tion from the surrounding land. It narrowly missed Inawashiro. A pretty walk through orchards and along the paddy fields brought us again to our inn. The seven miles from Kawakami had not improved affairs, and, as with the good citizens of Orleans, Panta- gruel had seized us by the throats and our tongues lay out a yard long. This was soon remedied at the inn, and after boiling the stiffness out of my limbs before a larger and more interested audi- ence than the previous evening I stretched out on the soft cool tatami with a better appreciation of that necessary article of Jap- anese furniture than before the scramble over the rubble heaps of Bandaisan. IWASHIRO WAY 87 The next morning I again made tiay way over the stony road to the station, which, after the experience of the day before, seerned a masterpiece of Mr. Macadam. A short run of half an hour along the lake landed me at Wakamatsu, a large Japanese town of the usual stamp, with a park occupying the site of the former castle. The revolution of 1868 saw hard fighting here, and Prince Aidzu was the last to show organized resistance on the Main Island to the triumphant southern clans. With the fall of Wakamatsu the Tokugawa sun had set forever. The town is prettily situated, out on the plain but close to foothills on the east. On a spur ovei'- looking it is a temple from which one gets a beautiful view of the plain with its encircling mountains. We are not looking at it here so much from the end of the oval as when on Bandaisan, and the multum in parvo effect is not so evident. The temple has a very particular interest as the place where seventy-eight of Aidzu's clan committed hara-kiri after the fall of the castle. A large stone has been erected commemorating the event and bearing the names of the men, heroes in the eyes of the Japanese and commanding respect in the eyes of Europeans. The question of suicide has not been judged in the same way East and West. Taking that chord of European feeling which is more or less one of connected senti- ment, we find that for 2500 years, while motives and justification have remained much the same, the necessity of such justification has always been felt and each particular case has had to plead on its own merits before the bar of public opinion. Warfare up to recent times has been very cruel, and suicide in preference to hard or degrading slavery or death by torture has been a frequent reason for such a course. Wretchedness, misery, loss of honour, have all furnished their victims, but it has always been understood they must fight to the last gasp. Death on the battlefield has always been held in high honour, but when that has failed it has been held- justifiable to leave it to the future to retrieve lost ground. Suicide being distinctly an escape from greater evil than living, it has been justly held the man who fights his life out to the bitter end, using every ounce of energy and will to effect his object, is the greater 88 SAKURAMBO man than he who voluntarily succumbs/ In ancient and mediaeval days many a man would have spared himself years of suffering by the course of suicide, but he would have gained nothing in public opinion by doing so. Suicide, therefore, being a matter of emer- gency in western life, has never reached the stage of an elaborate code of etiquette. Certainty and rapidity were the two objects sought and the means adopted. There was but one form of suicide which was more formal in the ancient world, and that was the form of execution performed under official order and carried out by drinking juice of hemlock or by opening the veins. This is the form of suicide most nearly approaching to Japanese hara-kiri when performed as a punishment for some offence against the state. And with rare courage did these old ancients perform it, for they had neither the hope of the Japanese warrior in the due respect that his descendants would give him on his fulfilment of the Samurai code, neither had they the indifference as to the future that the scientific spirit of modern scepticism furnishes. They had a very palpable and unpleasant Hell in the next world in which even the good got very little comfort. When with calm courage Atticus Vestinus opened his veins and smilingly bade farewell to the very beautiful world he had around him, he was having a much harder trial than if he fell in the heat of action or after a struggle with his master. The old faith in the gods to strike the balance of justice had left him, the old superstition of the cold and dark Hades still remained to him. Men can die by a code, or can die when they have exhausted every effort to prevail, but to die without this preliminary of struggle or according to the capricious cold-blooded will of another, as he would crush a spider, is the hardest task of all. There were cases of course where the modern spirit of scepticism existed, but the Rome of the Emperors was Agnostic rather than Atheist. It had lost faith in its old gods and retained all its fear of them. But few had the investigating spirit of old Empedocles, who cast himself into the yawning crater of ^tna to solve the question of that other world. The agnostic spirit in ancient philosophy while it did not countenance suicide did IWASHIRO WAY 89 not condemn it, except on the grounds of to-day: That a man should make every use of the hfe nature has given him. With the Christian Era of course the whole viewpoint changed. Suicide now became a matter of religious prohibition, an offence against God. And for 1900 years this view of it has held western society in an iron grasp. It is but little more than a century that Christian countries heaped every sign of obloquy on the suicide. He was buried at a crossroads with every degrad- ing accompaniment heaped on the convicted criminal. Like all such feelings this reasoning has not always been consistent. Most of the early martyrdoms were to all purposes suicides; suicides without any more redeeming features than the Mohammedan who rushed to battle to ensure his reception into Paradise. So this day western religions refuse burial in consecrated ground to a suicide, and our laws keep up the same spirit by punishing the un- successful attempt. The same spirit is shown in the acrobatics of coroners' juries who dodge everything they decently can to bring in some other form of verdict than suicide. With all this strong tide of public opinion and religious conviction — certainty of pun- ishment or contempt in this world and certainty of Hell in the next — suicide could not be eliminated from the western world any more than from the eastern world. But the code of honour had to undergo modification. The code of honour that was to spring from the feudal institutions in Europe of the seventh century was quite as severe as any that sprang from those of Japan three hun- dred years later. Following the lines of ancient thought the indi- vidual man was responsible for the complete use of his life. It was not his to take but to use, the Gods or the Fates settled the question of its duration, to encroach on their sphere was sacrilege. Hence it was better to endure any sufferings in preference to felo de se, to cut himself off from God's congregation. Men, women and children perished in burning ruins or languished out years in noisome dungeons not for love of life but for the duty which their religion put on them to avoid every wilful semblance of taking it themselves. Indeed in this direction we have a notable 90 SAKURAMBO Japanese example when Konishi, the great Christian general of Hideyoshi, after the battle of Sekigaliara and the final triumph of lyeyasu, refused to take refuge in the national custom of hara-kiri. He and his Christian companions, submitted to the shame of death at the hands of the public exe- cutioner. Up to the first quarter of the nineteenth century man was decidedly a fighting animal. Every gentleman wore a sword which was his protection against personal affront. Now the question that might arise was a question of affront from a quartei too high for the victim to resent. There was a self-adjusting balance here between the lord and the retainer. If they had their duty of loyalty to him, he had in turn his duty to them, and' a gratuitous insult to one against the accepted code would quickly bring the others to his support. The public opinion of the clan here operated certainly and quickly to determine the wrong, and that being done the remedy lay easily to hand. The lord was a leader not an absolutist. He had no more right to be disloyal to the clan than they to him. The man who rode rough-shod over the feelings of his retainers quickly found his various Achilles sulk- ing in their tents. The code of honour was too exacting to allow a man's self-respect to suffer. The world was wide. He could retire to his farm, or take his sword elsewhere without any loss of prestige. Not that treason was ever condoned any more in the West than among the Japanese samurai. Count Julian for his treason to his country will always be held in infamy by his country- men, but if he had plunged his sword through Roderic's body they would equally have applauded him. Even though they would have to take off his head afterward. As the religious bond has loosened in these present days, so suicide due purely to pessimism or inability to support the strain of modern life has become more frequent. From a scientific point of view it is to be condemned on ground of violation of Nature's law. Nature provides for our removal and should be allowed to operate in her own way. Besides, a man rep- resents so many units of energy to act or to be acted on by external forces. Government still pursues the attempted suicide, nominally IWASHIRO WAY 91 on grounds of a violation of Statute Law based on God's law, but really on the scientific ground that a man belongs to the com- munity and not to himself. The latter ground is of course the only rational one. To punish a man for failing to kill himself carries with it a degree of bathos that should throw a ray of cheerfulness even into the mind of the would-be suicide, who if he still remains in the same frame of mind will certainly not be deterred by any such punishment from seeking his voluntary exit from his troubles at a more favourable opportunity, or if he has changed his mind will certainly not regard as punishment the lesser evil as compared with the greater he has just escaped. Suicide therefore in Europe was modified by the far wider extension of a man's possibilities. His sphere of action being thus extended, granting the reaching of an impasse in his present surroundings he could find a field more congenial to his honour. ■He was not in such a position that he had tamely to submit his honour to the will of another or seek the only outlet available — self-destruction. As strictly as any Japanese samurai was the European gentleman bound to loyalty to his chief, but if that chief failed him he could transfer his services to another field. The field of European politics was wide, and this could be done without deti'iment to his honour. In the West as in the East he who fought for the destruction of his own people was regarded with the scorn due to a renegade, and but little respected by those who made use of him. There was plenty of fighting without having to meet one's former companions in arms on the field of battle. Various were the nations represented in the armies that followed the banner of the crusading chief or later of one of the "free companies," and to the standard of William the Silent or of Prince Eugene flocked the best swords in Europe. With the same underlying motives for the act, suicide in Japan took a dif- ferent development. A peculiar feature of Japanese political life cut ofif any such career to the Japanese samurai. In disfavour with his lord he had to become either a ronin — a more or less out of the pale character in so far as he had no support but his own 92 SAKURAMBO sword — ©!■ to commit suicide. There was no middle course. Jap- anese politics were purely domestic and very local. They had no international relations, for the temporary invasion of the continent through Korea could hardly be classed as anything but episodes. Gibbon has graphically described the condition of the man who had become a source of offence and a stumbling block to the mas- ter of the Roman world. Within the bounds of civilization there was no place for him to hide his head. In the wide range of the body politic therefore, when it became a question of death or successful rebellion, the two influences reacted on each other to an extent that is shown in the fearful tyranny of the Emperors and their violent deaths. Roman philosophy was far too much ad- vanced to grant the divinity claimed by their Emperors. The Roman at heart was too much of a republican to admit that the Emperor was more than a part of the state. Multitudes would shout " Hail, divine Csesar," but there was always in the back- ground the Ciceros, and Catos, and Senecas, to say " this is a man, very much of a man." In fact, in this very crux lies the parting of the ways between East and West. To the West the divinity lay in the sacredness of the community as represented in the man ; it was his office not his personality that was sacred. The old republican spirit of Rome is at the bottom of all of us. " Civis Romanus Sum " fitted well into the Germanic theory of the state. And whether by the aid of the Church or the aid of common sense, the state found means to get rid of the Imperator or its Rex " by divine right " when the occasion arose. A little casuistry or defect in genealogy greasing the ways for his descent. To the East however the divinity lay in the monarch. He was not part and parcel of the community. He was above it and separated from it and representative of the gods who made it. This divinity was inherent in him, not a gift or spirit granted to him on his becoming head of the state. A laying on of hands, so to speak, which is the only sense that the " divine right of kings " ever attained in the West. To our minds of to-day it is hard to judge the illogical standpoint of a seeing, moving, active man in all his relations take IWASHIRO WAY 93 on this attribute of divinity as an inherent part of his nature. He is just as much a descendant of the gods in his previous condition as when he occupies the throne. His divine nature has not changed. In the tvvinkhng of an eye all the former conditions change, and the man who a short time previously led his soldiers in triumiDh through the streets as a successful general, by the accident of death to his predecessor, becomes death to any mere mortal who looks on the divinity of his face. Let us turn to good old " down- right " Montaigne where he makes Antigonus answer the poet Hermodorus who has compared him to Phoebus : " My friend, he that emptieth my close stool knoweth well, there is no such matter." The full development of this idea of divinity is probably due to China. In common with all eastern nations and some western ones the Japanese early attributed divine origin to their leaders, but many of the episodes of the prehistoric and early historic times anything but endorse the more extended views taken later on. With the adoption — sometime subsequent to the fourth century A. D. — of Chinese ideas in every department of thinking, Chinese ideals were made the standard, and the teachings of Confucius on the subject of the relation between inferior and superior, parent and child, husband and wife, became the religion, so to speak, of the country. With the retirement of the Emperor from the field of active politics, practical expression of loyalty became centred on the military leader, and an ofifence against that leader became an offence against the moral code by which the samurai was direct- ing his life. Such loyalty driven to its logical conclusion was likely to lead him in two directions to an impossible position. Where he would find his will in collision with his lord ; here the only choice lay between becoming a ronin or masterless man, for few would care to harbour him thereby bringing the vengeance of his master down on them ; or he could commit suicide. Again, his duty lay in following his master to the end of any course he chose to take, and avenging him if he survived him. This would infallibly lead him to a collision with the governing power of the land, for an inferior had no right to raise his hand against a superior. As 94 SAKURAMBO vengeance however was specifically required by the Confucian code, the morality of the vendetta was admitted and the form of execu- tion took the kinder one of suicide. Hence suicide passed from simply a form of death sought to escape intolerable surrounding conditions to become part and parcel of the Code of Honour. It was the necessary concomitant between a code of morals which sanctioned and enforced the vendetta, and the punishment required by outraged law, law necessary for the stability of any community. Here in distinction from implied condemnation of suicide we have its apotheosis in public opinion. And views on the subject have not changed in those modern days. Published excuses of modern hara-kiri are usually based on the ground that by the suicide the man's usefulness is extended. Living, such usefulness is ended, but by his death he can inspire his companions. The officer who is wounded in a charge commits hara-kiri, thereby relieving his men of the necessity of taking care of him and inspiring them to vengeance. I think it is quite sure that Japanese troops would need no such inspiration, and in the West instances are common where the fall of an officer leading his troops has had quite the reverse effect to terminating his usefulness. They have obe3fed his orders to go forward and with just as much readiness to avenge him. The government view of it is not very evident. There is no external sign of disapproval, although trained men have such value in these latter days of scientific warfare that it is hardly to be supposed that the gratuitous loss of a man they have been at no small trouble to educate to his present efficiency is regarded as balanced by considerations of the effect his suicide may have on the morale of the service. For the morale is certainly not maintained by any such anachronism as hara-kiri. If so, so much the worse for the service. It is a fact however that harz-kiri finds general support even among men of scientific training on just such grounds of expediency. On economic grounds it will die out, but it will die hard and then purely on the ground that it is detrimental to enforce such a code when men are valuable. There is one curious feature about the Japanese suicide that shows up the ultra-conservatism of IWASHIRO WAY 95 the nation. It is still maintained in all its strictness as a form of a code. It is not only the end sought, but the means to that end have remained unchanged since the early days when it came into practice. As its origin is remote so it retains but slight trace of any refinement in that early race that adopted it. That part of the body whose influence on the brain is most clearly indicated is the belly, and the Japanese in common with other primitive nations made it the seat of Ufe or the soul. Uncertainty of hand may spoil the attempt to take life by reaching the heart or other vital organs. With the deficient surgery of old days however the slashing of the entrails was an absolutely certain means of ensuring death, and, in the manner as performed by the Japanese, a speedy one. From its primitive intention simply of taking one's life it has passed into a formula still to be adhered to by this more enlightened age. Wakamatsu however has more cheerful sights than these blood-stained mementoes. Coming down the hill from the temple I was soon bowling along the hills to a little side valley some three miles from the town, and in which was located the little hot spring known locally as Higashiyama (East Mountain). If the Japanese town in the plain is not inviting, often these mountain hamlets built along the sides of a ravine present picturesque elements. Whether from the decided flatness of the architecture — there is but little pleasing about a Japanese home externally except the roof — and lack of the many old picturesque bridges such a common feature in the West, they are however at a disadvantage compared to European towns of the same class. Higashiyama was up to the average. The road wound along the bank of the brawling little river and up the narrowing valley, until near the head came in sight a group of roofs lining both sides of the stream. The houses beneath them were mainly inns, and devoted to the refreshment of both the outer and the inner man. Just across the bridge at the upper end of the hamlet was a very attractive looking one, on the edge of the stream and looking down the valley and across the huddled mass of rocks below. Kami San gave me a pleasant welcome, arid transfer to the apartment on which I had had my eye 96 SAKURAMBO for the last quarter of a mile was a matter of the few minutes necessary to remove shoes. The feast was ordered, and donning a bath-robe, I was soon on my way to the bath below. Here let me say that I have heard some things about the Japanese bath that I have not found so universal as one is led to believe. The Japanese do not bathe half a dozen times a day. And the Japanese does not spend a large portion of the day in a bath-tub. They are a deci- dedly cleanly people. In fact, there is no particular reason why they should not be. Nature has been very lavish with them in the matter of hot water, and it takes very little courage to get up an inclination for that kind of bathing. I have seen a Japanese using the cold bath in summer, as supplied by the river, but I never heard of one breaking the ice in the tub to get his plunge on a winter morning, a by no means unheard of feat among Anglo-Saxons. In fact, if only cold water is available, the Japanese labourer will fight as shy of it as the most unwashed peasant of southern Europe. There are hundreds of houses in the city of Yokohama without a tub to bathe in, and many a household would find it absolutely impossible to find the funds for the charcoal necessary to heat the water. It is even said among people resident in Japan that their servants do not use the tub. Now this too is a fact, but does not imply that the occupants of the hundreds of little houses and the said servants do not use the bath. They do, but it is at the public bath-house which is found in every cho or ward, and its chimney begins to pour out smoke about noon and its swinging lamp marked Furoba is the mecca of a stream of people from early afternoon until late at night. The Japanese not only bathes but he bathes in public, and enjoys not only the hot water but the chatter of his surroundings. In a sense it is a social gathering. A resort — for the lower classes — just as much as among the Italians in the old Roman days. As with our plunge baths, found in so many eastern cities and on the Pacific coast and at some springs, the bath is for common use and therefore requires some preHminaries before entering it. Kami San took me to an apartment in which was a large square IWASHIRO WAY 97 wooden tub fifteen feet to a side and about two feet deep. It differed from the ordinary Japanese bath in that hot water from the spring was constantly entering it and running out by an over- flow. All around this tub and nearly on a level with it — the edge of the tub being a couple of inches only above the floor level — the floor sloped to the tub, leaving however a crack about ar inch wide around it. Disrobing, I put myself in the hands of the inn boy, and after being thoroughly soaped and scrubbed from head to foot was drenched with hot water until every trace of soap was removed, the soap and water of course running off through the crack to the drain below the tub. Then I was ready for the real bath, and getting into the tub stewed at pleasure. Higashiyama was not a particularly severe test as the water was but little, if at all, above 40° C. These natural hot springs have at least this advantage, that nature regulates the heating apparatus and is a far more regular guide than nesan, whose only criterion of excessive tem- perature is boiling. There is a certain consideration due one's fellow travellers that makes me somewhat chary of adding cold water to the bath, and thereby spoiling it for the^ Japanese who are accustomed to take it much hotter than Europeans. They do not hesitate to do that themselves, but the standards are so different that the mean puts it out of use for them until it can heat up again. I should say that the love of hot water seems to date from the dawn of history, for in the very twilight period of the gods, their divinityships had to content themselves with the ordinary facilities afforded to him who travels in waste places, and perform their ablutions in the river and mountain streams — with fearfully prolific results if the old legends of their offspring thus born are to be given any credence. Izanagi, the creator of Japan, thus gave rise on his return from Hell to some score of deities. While my bath was in progress O Kami San had fished a trout out of her fish-pond, knocked together a little omelet, and was ready to provide the inner as well as the outer man with raiment, and very pleasant memories of the little inn were those I took away with me. From Wakamatsu my way lay south through the mountains 7 98 SAKURAMBO to Nikko. The next morning I left very comfortable quarters at the Shimizuya — one of the better class of Japanese inns and beautifully gotten up in its appointments. Polished wood, natural fretwork, beautiful screens, were the more material surroundings, and the human machinery was noticeable for neatness, completeness, and quietness. The publican does not differ much the world over and Japanese inns furnish the usual types, ranging from the modest establishment of some fishing village where the clientele are the smaller commercial man stopping for the convenience of some little coasting steamer, or the countryman on one of his minor mis- sions — purchases at the local centre or to meet the aforesaid drum- mer — to the aristocratic establishment whose clientele is drawn from the upper stratum of the land and where coarseness or noisy merriment would be as much out of place as in one of our own more recherche hotels. The life of a Japanese inn rarely begins before the close of the business day. The Japanese travels very light, his personal impedimenta consisting of a very small grip or what will readily be folded into a large handkerchief, the more frequent companion of his travels and usually more or less pleasing in colour. All day he is busy on his rounds. If a drummer, his samples go with him on his own back in the shape of a huge pile of boxes in which economy of space has been made a fine art, or on the back of a porter if too elevated to do that part of the labour himself. Only at nightfall does he seek an inn and a Japanese commercial house then takes on a great bustle. The nesans are busy running with tea trays and kimonos, for the first thing after getting fairly ensconced with his modest belongings is the bath, and the inn relieves him of any necessity for providing garments for that purpose. In a country where privacy is unknown, and social interference may be said to have become as much a part of the natural life as with the assemblages of our zoological gardens, where the overpowering interest of the individual, so prominent in western life, are not the isolating medium as with us, the inn is one big family. Often, if crowded, three, four, or more are chummed together in one room. Sake and geisha and talk while IWASHIRO WAY 99 away the evening hours, and such an estabhshment, where paper screens are the only partition wall, give but small chance of sleep until the last merrymakers have gone to rest and the tinkle of the samisen has ceased for the night. To see a Japanese curled up on his futons and sleeping next door to the most merciless racket is such a common occurrence that one is led to believe that they must be much less sensitive to noise than the average European. At Shimizuya however there was no such experience to go through. In the morning nesan appeared with the pickled plums and tea and the more valued assurance that in spite of threatening appearance it was not likely to rain, which prophecy held good until near the end of the day and the journey; and breakfast over, I was sent speeding south over the plain at the moderate pace that two coolies would take who had nearly a three days' job in front of them. The Japanese coolie is by no means so bad as he is painted — or so good. His ethical standard is not extravagantly high, in fact it is scandalously low at times, and it is just as well the average foreigner is unable to understand the full nature of the subjects of conversation and the jests which give rise to so much merriment among his coolies and passersby, for the exchange of compliments among them is by no means always suited to delicate ears. His occupation however is greatly aided by his wits, and while dragging a ricksha is by no means a highly intellectual pursuit, capturing his prey and squeezing it to the last go sen is an accomplishment. Fares are regulated by the police, and the guilds of ricksha men are sharply checked up ; but indiscriminate appeal to the police is not always advisable. The men have their bounds and cannot be made to go out of them, and a traveller's reputation goes ahead of him by a system of wireless telegraphy. Given the proper conditions and an unreasonable disposition one can well find himself under the necessity of shouldering the baggage and march- ing out of some untravelled spot as best he can. Coolies of every kind have disappeared like magic, the field labour (at 30 sen a day) has become so impoi'tant that four and five times that amount can- not tempt a man, a cow, or even a woman to come forward. The 100 SAKURAMBO ricksha man is usually to be found in a town of any size, and which of necessity has communication by highway with the outside world, but he is not often found in the small villages of mountain districts, and simply reaching such a place, even if on a highway, is no guar- antee that one can exchange one's legs for an easier means of progress. Incidentally one feature of travel in Japan can be re- ferred to, and that is safety. People often complain of the blank which is brought to them to be filled out with information for the police. The questions at times seem superfluous — as to age, in- tended route, and family relations even unto the third and fourth generation — and at times they are followed up by a personal inter- view, particularly in the case of a foreigner, so as to make it troublesome. As a matter of fact and largely as a matter of form, Japanese have to fill out the same blank, and whatever the motive of being so particular in the case of foreign travellers it can be passed over in the knowledge that it makes his travelling very safe. It would be very difficult for a foreigner to disappear in Japan. His personal appearance differs so from the native that, among a people who spend their time in noting all the petty details going on around them, some one is bound to have observed his movements even in such frequented places as the treaty ports. Nay, even in visits to the Yoshiwara and such places his entrance and exit are reported to and noted by the police ; which fact would be clerical and female sight-seers can bear in mind. In the country he could not disappear. He is registered from hotel to hotel. The ricksha men who take him are known and are responsible for his delivery at the other end of his journey. As all are not saints in any calling of life so the ricksha man is by no means free from black sheep among his flock, but the opportunities of such gentry are confined to the petty fleecing that they can efifect by their wits, and in which they are white as driven snow compared to the honourable fraternity of cab drivers. They are well up in the points of interest along their own particular stamping ground, and no better guide is to be found than a kurumaya who takes an interest in his fare. The kuruuia or IWASHIRO WAY 101 ricksha as a means of conveyance, I think, has been grossly over- praised. It is the best there is in the country, but there its good quahties end. The motion partakes somewhat of that of a dog- cart. One must absolutely recline or sit bolt upright, and when hours are to be passed on the road both of these attitudes are by no means unqualified joy. When travelling through the moun- tains where real work is to be done it is necessary tO' have the hood up so that the pushman can get some purchase on the vehicle. There is no substitute for it however but one's legs, which indeed are to be recommended when time permits and they are available. A horse would be as troublesome as Wang's elephant, as to pro- viding provender and finding shelter for it when the day's journey was finished. The first part of my route lay over the Wakamatsu plain. Near the end of the valley, then narrowing to the Funakotoge (pass), we took to the hills and soon had risen to some height. The view toward Bandaisan and Wakamatsu was beautiful. The road was well graded and only near the top of the pass was it necessar.y to do any walking. It was a pretty ride, winding under the trees, around the little ravines, and giving bits of sylvan scenery much like home, perhaps because of the absence of houses and tea- sheds and such marks peculiar to the particular species of the genus homo inhabiting the land. It is remarkable how man puts his mark on a land. The summer days spent in wood or field, lying on turf or rock, idly chewing a blade of grass and without set purpose letting the eyes roam over the surroundings, is stamping on boy- hood's mind a standard landscape that will never be forgotten. A landscape containing a host of minute details of which at the time the observer has no consciousness, even if it be but a blurred image of some distant house or a column of smoke rising from some unseen habitation but whose familiar outlines he can easily frame in his mind's eye. Unconsciously in these early years he is adding to his sense impressions, to the photographs stored away in mem- ory, the bias of his race mentality. He is adding that element, external to the scene in front of him, and from which he never will 102 SAKURAMBO be able to free himself. Hence certain types of scenery have the pleasing familiarity of old friends. We are at home in them and drop our mental alertness or unconsciously critical attitude of com- parison. This same effect can be carried into other countries. In such a wide range as between England and New Zealand the land- scape bears the same stamp of familiarity to our minds, the same vistas of sea and shore, and we feel at home beside a Welsh brook or looking down from the heights of Dunedin. Some of this sense of familiarity is lost among peoples whose kinship is not so close to us — as on the continent of Europe, but a good part remains. Lit- erature, our reading, is partly responsible for this. One never has this sense of familiarity in Japan. The landscape always remains strange, and involuntarily the faculty of comparison — essentially a hostile faculty — is at work within us. In part this is due to Nature herself. Japan is a volcanic country and a small country, where Nature has seen fit to cram a good deal of material into a limited space. There is a paucity of the rounded outline so familiar to American or European eyes. Nature does not seem to have had time to soften down her outlines. To an Hawaiian the outline of the Japanese hills would seem familiar. The main difficulty is however the human element, and a thatched roof, a glimpse of tataini, or the barley or wheat spread on mats and lying in the sun, at once casts an unfamiliar outre tint over the landscape. Add the blue cotton tights of the native himself, and even if one has been successful in mentally eliminating. the bamboo-grass springing up between the oaks, chestnuts, and birches, we are at once back in Japan and half way round the world again from our old home. Lying on the border of a Maine lake or on the bank of the Merced River in the Yosemite we have the sense of restful familiarity, a feeling that never is felt by the side of any Japanese stream. On this walk I saw for the first and only time a mamushi, the only poisonous snake found on the main island of Japan. It is of the viper species, and the particular specimen was about a foot in length, of inconspicuous markings and a dirty brownish yellow colour. I had sttetched out my hand to pick a flower growing in the IWASHIRO WAY 103 cleft of a rock and noted him just in time, for he was coiled close by and with no idea of making off. A blow from my stick soon settled him and the ricksha men identified him. The peasants have curious superstitions about them. I had described to me by a witness the process of skinning the wriggling living serpent, cutting off the head and gouging out and eating then and there the eyes, the rest of his snakeship going into the peasant's basket for some ■subsequent occult proceedings. The lucky finder by this perform- ance was ensured against sickness for the rest of the year. I omitted the ceremony. They figure largely in the pharmacopoeia of the lower classes, and pickled mamushi fresh and stale are a matter of sale and barter. There was no view from the top of the pass and the road down the other side became decidedly worse. The rest of the day's journey was through most picturesque river and valley country, settled enough to add human interest to the scene, and with the contrasting beauty of man's cultivation of the soil and the wild and rugged on Nature's side with smiling, peace- ful touches. At one point we left the rickshas and walked through one of the numerous gorges along a path in places supported by arms resting against the rock wall towering above us, and the river boiling along some twenty feet below, crossing back again and rejoining our vehicles near a hamlet called Yadoshima. At places through this mountain country I ventured to refill my water bottle. I say " ventured " advisedly, for one must be able to get a very good idea of the source of the water. There may be a little plateau' above draining its poisonous irrigation canal into the sparkling brook. Some miles of this mountain country brought me to a wider valley in the centre of which was the little town of Tajima, twenty-five miles from Wakamatsu. Just how many the inn could .accommodate " though puzzling was not beyond conjecture." Two tiny rooms were cut off at one end, and when we were ensconced we filled the house. As a matter of fact " one mat, one man " measurement would enable quite a large party to find quarters. A great deal of tobacco is grown all through this district, and every iarmhouse through the country and in the suburbs of the town 104. SAKURAMBO seemed to be engaged in drying and curing the leaf. Tobacco is one of the foreign importations to which the Japanese early took a great affection. It was introduced by the Portuguese during the early intercourse of the sixteenth century. We will not hold the Portuguese responsible for the present product. As in other direc- tions the native has presumably modified it to his taste. Japanese tobacco hardly deserves the name of that noble plant (not weed), and it is unfortunate that they did not disguise it under a native name. French tobacco and the still ranker product of the Italian monopoly are odours of " Araby the Blest " compared to it. In the form of snuff I have not heard of its use; a practice by the way very common among the mountaineers through the Allegheny region of the United States, although its use elsewhere has almost died out. Western ideas have full sway and much better enforce- ment among the Japanese as to the use of tobacco by minors, and there is trouble ahead for the boy's parents who have been warned against allowing their children to smoke. The policeman keeps a sharp eye on such youngsters and as the registration system is very complete the age is a matter of easy and prompt determination. The next day was a repetition of the previous treat of river. gorge, and mountain scenery, bringing me at night to a prettily situated little inn which makes up the hot spring resort known as Kawaji. The bath was a large pool close to the bank of the river, and was swarming with Japanese, male, female, and kodomo created he them. The river itself looked very tempting on the hot August afternoon. There was a convenient eddy, a natural basin, and it was much to be preferred to the swarm of humanity close at hand, so I " tubbed " there to my own great satisfaction and aroused curiosity of my neighbours. The Japanese are convinced as to the more or less " eccentricity '* (politely speaking) of the foreigner, but here was a convincing case under their eyes. Not only a deliberate immersion in cold water but a deliberate choice of an unnecessary evil. If the question de lunatico inquirendo had to come before that jury of "Japs" I would have no show. We got out of the mountains the next day, through more fine scenery IWASHIRO WAY 105 and over as bad a road as I have travelled in Japan. Walking was out of the question as the road was ankle deep in mud from side to side, through which treacherous depths yawned, such ruts as only the years of traffic of a Japanese road can produce. Stones and bowlders were hidden under this glutinous covering, making the road resemble to some degree the bed of a mountain torrent. In places the ricksha men lifted the whole apparatus, vehicle and rider, and carried it on to the next piece of dry ground. They were a hardy mountain lot of men, very different from the same fraternity as found in the large towns of the plain. Individually they were most of them going to get but little beside their " gift money " at the end of the trip. At Tajima they had gambled most of the future away and the lucky man, hiring a substitute, had hied him back to Wakamatsu to blow it in on ease and sake. Gambling is most strictly forbidden and relentlessly pursued by the government. And justly so, for the lower class Japanese has but little idea of the future ; any more than the Thomas cat on the back fence. He lives strictly for to-day and lets to-morrow take care of itself, and a surplus in hand proceeds to blow it in at once. The government does its best to correct this spirit of improvidence so fatal to the material progress of the nation. We came out on the plain and crossed the river at Naka-iwa, a well known picnic resort near Nikko. The scene- is here very picturesque, looking up and down the river which is divided by an island, and hence the name — " centre rock." There is no tea-house worthy of the name, but an hour's run across the plain took me into Imaichi, a town on the railway, and the Reiheishi Kaido, that famous avenue leading into Nikko. IV THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE " E poi il dolore e un gran ricostituente dell' uomo credete e in certi casi e un confortante indizio di vitalita morale, perche dove non vi e dolore, vi e cancrena/' — Malombra. From Imaichi to Nikko is one of the most striking sections of a grand highway that stretches across the country for more than twenty miles. The very narrowness of the roadway adds to the great height of the ancient cryptomerias closely lining the sides and walling it in from the surrounding country. In places sunk between grassy walls, gradually increased in height as the roadway between them slowly wore away beneath the feet of generations of travellers, it has the appearance of a long green tunnel, but this is soon relieved by the reappearance of the smiling countryside, the rushing river close at hand, and — to right and left — the forest- clad hills. One traveller, in days of the past, moved along this road unconscious even of the pomp surrounding him. The Sho- gun, carried to his tomb, recked little of the beauty of the world about him. Those who carried him probably thought more about their prospects under his successor. We of to-day can follow it with far lighter heart up through the long village of Hachi-ishi or lower Nikko to the stone steps mounting the slopes of the hill until, at the end of a broad avenue, we stand under a great stone torii and in front of the most beautiful temples in Japan. Here in close proximity lie buried two men who put their stamp on a nation as few men have done — lyeyasu the great and lyemitsu the little, grandfather and grandson. The system devised by the first and carried to perfection by the second so peculiarly fitted into the previous history of this island country that it is well worth going into such history to some little extent. Especially of that earlier portion of it of which comparatively little is heard in popular form. io6 THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 107 Previous to the close of the fifth century A. D. Japanese his- tory is extremely vague. There is no reason to beHeve that the people had any other means of recording events except by oral tradition. The accounts of those times are full of miraculous events and still more miraculous periods. Chinese and Korean notices begin about the first century of our era. China at that time extended her influence to northern Korea, and there were Chinese resident officials occupied, as usual, in scribbling wonderful information as to everything that they saw and heard for the benefit of the imperial throne. The Koreans themselves quickly took up Chinese learning, to hand it on some three centuries later to their neighbours, the Japanese. In the first four centuries there- fore of the Christian era we hear of the Japanese mainly in the unenviable light of piratical descents on Korea to get what plunder they can and to carry off slaves. They are described as a brave, hard drinking, hard fighting people, inhabiting very roughly built huts or houses, moving their habitations from place to place, and spending most of their time in the chase or in wars between the petty tribes. In fact, at the corresponding period, they resemble in many ways our Anglo-Saxon ancestors before they left their German home to settle in Britain. At the end of the fifth century, however, an embassy from Korea included teachers and a present of the Chinese classics. This first introduction of learning, more probably the means of learning, like the introduction of Christi- anity among the Saxons, had an immediate and wonderful effect. The accounts of a more complex social system are very specific. The full effect, however, was not obtained until the reign of Kim- mei (540-571 A. D.). In 552 A. D. the embassy from Korea included a gift from the king of Kudara of a statue of Buddha, together with the holy books. Now this introduction of Buddhism had a far more reaching effect than appears at first glance. As in the case of Christianity ten centuries later. Buddhism had to fight for its ground. His councillors warned the Emperor — " Our kingdom is of divine origin, and the Emperor has already many gods to worship. If we adore those of foreign kingdoms, 108 SAKURAMBO our own will be angered." Intimidated therefore by this advice he gave these presents to one of his ministers, Soga no Iname, who much taken with the new cult established the worship of the image at one of his temples. An epidemic, however, following soon after, was attributed to the new religion and the temple was burnt to the ground and the image cast into the river. This seems to have been only a temporary check, for in the next reign Buddhism is again violently suppressed. It seems to have taken a strong hold in the family of Iname, for we find his son and successor Umako petitioning to be allowed to maintain the cult privately for his own peace of mind, which was granted him ; but there are already two parties in the land based on the very radical ground of differing religion. There is an incident of some interest re- ferred to in this reign of Bidatsu (572-585 A. D.), namely, the reception of a letter from Korea written in invisible ink, presumably some cobalt salt, for the writing appears on exposure to heat. A development quite as important as Buddhism is to be attrib- uted to Bidatsu reign. When he first appears in history the Emperor is, in plain terms, a Mongol chief, fighting at the head of his tribe, and it is only after wars and strife that his tribe establishes its supremacy over the tribes of kindred nationality. At the time we are speaking of the system had apparently been reduced to a condition not unlike the days of the Heptarchy in England. As in most eastern nations, the head of the state was recognized as of divine descent, but his real physical power depended much on his ability to maintain himself in his position of supremacy. A system of government had, however, been thoroughly established, and already in 550 A. D. we find the Emperor surrounded by council- lors whose opinions have much weight, and furthermore that precedents are being given their value. It is generally assumed that the first disappearance of the Emperors dates from Fujiwara times. Umako, who seems to have been a very able man, was however practically a Mayor of the Palace. He had supreme in- fluence over the Prince Regent Umaya. On the death of Bidatsu there was a dispute over the succession, apparently between the THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 109 Buddhists and the supporters of the native reUgion. Umako gained his point, had his antagonist put to death, placed a friendly prince on the throne, and practically reigned as minister. Sujun, the succeeding Emperor, showed a tendency to rebel against this subjection, but Umako removed him by assassination and estab- lished the female line in his place. When he died about 625 A. D. Buddhism not only was triumphantly established in the land but Umako's son, Soga no Yemisi, succeeded his father in the manage- ment of the kingdom. As in many nations of primitive times the priesthood at this date seems to have been hereditary in two families. One of these was known as the Nakatomi. Soga no Yemisi as prime minister carried things with c|uite as high a hand as his father. He asso- ciated his son Iruka with him, who was still more disliked than his father. Neither the nobility or the Imperial House took kindly to this supremacy of Soga and Iruka in the Government and the reign of Kokyoku (642-4 A. D. ), sister and wife of the preceding Emperor Yomei, was marked by a series of barons' wars in which the Minister had decidedly the best of it. A conspiracy of, the princes of the Imperial House was given practical direction by Nakatomi Kametari, and at the height of his power and security, Iruka was assassinated in the very presence of the Empress. The conspirators then completed their work by promptly attacking the house of Soga himself, in the flames of which he perished together with part of the imperial archives. Nakatomi stepped into his shoes as far as influence in the Government went, and up to the time of his death in the reign of the Emperor Tenji (662-672 A. D. ) he is a prominent feature in everything that related to the Government. It is worth stopping here to note a marked differ- ence in the tone of the annals of these reigns. Before the intro- duction of Chinese influence they show palpably the roughness of the times. Habits are gross and ceremonial is very slack. Both improve very rapidly after the sixth century, and ceremonial, evi- dently copied from Chinese models, becomes the prominent feature in the accounts given, of these monarchs. Offices multiply, and the 110 SAKURAMBO person of the Emperor is soon to gain a sanctity which certainly before that time it did not possess. Certainly the rough and ready time of Yuriaku (457-477 A. D.) had little to do with the pomp and ceremony with which a white pheasant is brought and pre- sented to the Emperor Kotoku ( 645-654 A. D. ) . The year name is changed on account of this auspicious event and all the prisoners in the Empire are set at liberty. Yuriaku would have eaten the bird and made a few more prisoners if it had disagreed with him. The reign of Tenji (662-672 A. D. ) could pass without note. There was apparently an unsuccessful attack on Korea which was repulsed, but which furnished a complement of slaves, an element particularly needed in the new civilization of the nation still sadly lacking in skilled workmen as teachers. One important event marks the supremacy of old Nakatomi Kametari, who on his death is given the family name of Fujiwara, and to whose family passes all his honours. The part this family played and plays in Japanese annals makes this a notable event. We should also remark here two important features of Japanese life which add much to the strength of the family as compared with Europe. Namely, polyg- amy and adoption. To us, this would only imply the same blood in the first case, polygamy. Plurality of wives and concubinage is a great safeguard to maintain a family name in existence, and when this is bolstered up by adoption — from a cadet branch if pos- sible, or a stranger if necessary — it practically ensures it. As at this point we enter on what can be described as the Golden Age of Japanese art and literature, and it is worth while to tcike a glance at the attendant conditions which in some ways differentiate Japan from the western world. The conditions under which Japan and the western nations started on their careers were radically different. So much so as to give a peculiar stamp to the civilization evolved and due to these attendant conditions. If the Roman Empire had fallen under the blows of a single powerful antagonist, it is fair to presume that the onward course of civiliza- tion would have had but little check. Rome, however, fell under the onset of different nations, and, their task accomplished, the THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 111 brunt of defending their spoils against rivals fell on these different nations. The fall therefore of the Empire was marked by a hurly- burly, of which South Europe was the battleground. After the Goth, the Lombard; who in turn succumbed to the Frank. The Franks might have developed at this early date — the eighth century — a great literature and art, and as they began to do three centuries later, but they were too busy on their frontiers, and the division of the kingdom on Charlemagne's death was the signal for another wild struggle covering the whole of Europe from what is now kpown as Russia to the waters of the Atlantic. A point to be noted here is that this is a struggle of nations. Internal strife will halt and impede the development of a nation. Foreign strife absolutely puts an end to it. The struggle is too serious. It is one of national existence, and in that age one of life and death to the men engaged in it. But little respect was paid to anything attached to an enemy. His very memory was to be rooted off the surface of the earth. Hence any art that a conquered nation had succeeded in developing was marked for destruction, and it was only with time, and as the conqueror had opportunity to come under the influence of the superior civilization of the conquered, that the few wrecks that were left were viewed with an eye to their possible usefulness. Venice, however, early in the ninth century was noted for its metal working, its woven textures in silk and wool, in velvet and in brocade, its beautiful dyes, and its glass work famous to this day. As Mr. Molmenti tells us, " the goldsmiths especially reached the dignity of a most exquisite art in those little masterpieces of figures, imitated from the byzantine, in those ornaments of gold and pearl, of which mention is made in the will of the Doge Giu- stiniano Partecipazio in 829, and in those gold chains, the chosen ornament of ladies as of the Venetians in general." Literature, however, was all in Latin, and swamped under the scholasticism which followed Charlemagne's times. Only in the tenth century and in northern France did the native tongue make itself timidly heard in the chansons and in the earlier Arthurian legends of Brit- tany. In the eleventh century we have the ripened development of 112 SAKURAMBO this ballad literature in Provence. Proven(;al literature worthily represents the refinement of the earlier times, and is the nursery of the future Italian and French literatures. In the face of the existence of neo-latinism and the Provencal literature it is an exaggeration to say that Europe was a collection of barbarous tribes, and that learning was only kept alive by the Saracens. To these latter Europe did owe much, but it can be added that they were also a positive hindrance to the peaceful development of the great Frank kingdom, continually threatening one of its flanks. It was not until the twelfth century that modern Europe fairly began to take shape, and from that time on a development of art and literature was not only possible but an actual fact. It had to take place largely under the shadow of the church, for Europe was still not only a battleground but suffering from the warlike habits incurred by the ages of disorder, and the church was slow in removing the ban placed on beauty by early Christianity. It is not to be denied that Europe in some ways gained much by the very rough education through which it had passed. The very complexity, the friction of nations, produced a width of range, a liveliness of thought, a curiosity of imderstanding, a fellowship among its learned men, that was most beneficial, and which when the time came for its development has placed it far ahead of anything which the East has been able to develop on its much narrower lines. The physical geography of Japan is by no means peculiar. It occupies a position strictly analogous to that of Great Britain. The difference lies in its neighbours. The Chinese are a sluggish, peaceful people, and perhaps the only race in which the profession of the soldier is held in contempt. Their Tartar conquerors were no sailors. The Koreans carried the same qualities to a greater exaggeration, and also they were split up into small kingdoms singly as inefficient as any member of the Heptarchy. If there was no other evidence, it would be hard to believe that any form of strong central government existed among the warlike Japanese, from the fact that no effort was made to come in contact with their THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 113 neighbours, which necessarily in the early period of their history would have taken the form of conquest. From lack of pressure therefore, internal and external, they were left to develop in their island kingdom with only such outside influence moulding their civilization as they chose to adopt. Communication with China, their greatest neighbour, was always very spasmodic. No great trade ever sprang up between the two peoples, and the interchange was mainly directed to the adoption of Chinese ideas on ethics and politics. These were adopted and adapted wholesale ; not so much in a continuous stream of influence, although through priests and travellers a fairly constant communication was maintained, as at set periods during which there was a fashionable rage for Chinese models in art and literature. During the whole period of their national existence therefore the Japanese were left to themselves, without external pressure of any kind, to develop these models as was most pleasing to them and their national genius. What pres- sure existed was of an internal nature, due to disturbances in the state. This will hamper, and in Japan did hamper, the continuous and peaceful development of its art and literature, but these were never broken ofif and crushed until there remained for revival nothing but a tradition. Also, in the peculiar nature of the political structure another preservative element existed. Namely, the Im- perial Court. Separate from the political struggles ft was always the centi-e of the refinement of the country. It underwent periods of neglect and depression, but as such it was sacred against direct attack, and it is owing to the existence of this peculiar institution that much of Japanese ancient art and literature was encouraged and preserved. The period to which we have now come however had an added advantage. It was one of comparative peace. Barons' wars there were but they rarely threatened the imperial throne. They were mainly struggles of ambitious nobles getting a foothold on the outskirts of the Empire, and to develop later into that ominous power which displaced the old Imperial line and relegated it to a high priesthood in the nation. The Yemishi or barbarians 114 SAKURAMBO had been driven into the northern part of the main island, and wars with them had little more importance to the court at Kyoto than the fighting with Indians on the western plains in the fifties and sixties had to the eastern United States. Time enough had elapsed — over three hundred years — for the native art to develop, and it was now prepared to establish a school with Kose Kanaoka as its master. Later to develop into the Tosa School, to this day taking first place in Japanese contributions to art. The same peaceful conditions, combined with a brilliant court, greatly aided the development of a literature, which in its description of manners, in its short stories, in the delicate fancy displayed in its poetry, and in its comparatively clean lines of thought, compares favourably with the most brilliant part of the Yedo period. In connection with this period which we have been discussing, and that which we are now to discuss, a few dates from English history will not be out of place. We will pass over such a landmark as Gariononum or Burgh Castle in Norfolk, for this is of Roman times. In Bede's time, however, the founda- tion of St. Albans was four hundred years old. Bede himself chronicles the first council of the English Church held at Hertford in 673 A. D. and presided over by Theodore, seventh Archbishop of Canterbury. Ely's foundation dates from 670 A. D. In fact, in the year 700 A. D. the Saxon kingdoms of Britain compare favour- ably with the island Empire in Japan as far as all material civiliza- tion goes. But where the Japanese have in front of them a period of peace in which to develop the civilization obtained from their continental neighbours, the Saxon is to face the Dane and the Northmen before he is brought into contact with the civilization of southern Europe introduced by the Norman French. But to return to Fujiwara and the course of the Empire. If the Emperors were as yet real monarchs in their kingdom they had all the drawbacks of such real authority. On Tenji's death in 671 A. D. there was a disputed succession between nephew and uncle, which seems to some degree to have been started by the suspicions of the former as to his uncle's real intentions. After a number of pitched battles the nephew's (Otomo) army was finally routed THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 115 and dispersed, and to avoid capture he hung himself. Temmu, the uncle, who reigned until 686 A. D., gives us some idea of the increasing ceremonial and luxury. Fetes and dances are a feature of the court life. His reign is also marked by the discovery of silver in Tsushima, the island lying between Japan and Korea. It is in the reign of Mommu (697-707 A. D.) however that the intimate connection between the Imperial House and Fujiwara began. This Emperor married a Fujiwara and with few excep- tions the wives of the succeeding Emperors were all taken from this family. Fujiwara are often referred to as the first Mayors of the Palace, but in a sense they have but little connection with the great ruling families that succeeded them — Taira, Minamoto, Hojo, Ashikaga, and Tokugawa. In fact, the Emperor becomes so indistinguishable in blood from this family that they can claim as much to sit upon the throne as any Bourbon or Hapsburg. The Emperor is really their representative, and up to the twelfth century it is a genuine rule of the head of this family, acting mainly as regent ; but sometimes, at the end of the regime, reappearing in the person of the Emperor himself. This is a very dififerent thing from the essentially hostile interests as represented by the later usurpers, who had no connection whatever with the Imperial House except as its vassals. It is to be noted that in the early period of their power the Fujiwara really did govern. The Court established at Nara and later at Kyoto was the scene of elegance and luxury, but these men took their turn and for four years exiled themselves to the outer provinces, spending their time in warfare against the barbarians, and in trying to maintain control over the fast increas- ing but as yet scattered units who were building up semi-indepen- dent baronies which they ruled from their strongholds far from the central power and with small regard to its wishes. These Goshi, some of them officials themselves, some of them merely strong independent men, we shall hear something of later. They are to be the framework on which the feudal system is to be built. The reign of the Empress Gemmyo (708-715 A. D. ) is marked by the discovery of copper in Musashi, a province of the 116 SAKURAMBO Kwanto and in which is situated much of the Tdkyo plain. Copper was the coinage of Japan for centuries and a native mintage dates from this period. Until modern times gold and silver while a basis of currency were but little circulated. The supply of copper seems always to have been behind the demand. Holy enthusiasm was in one sense a cause, as the many large statues of the many Buddhas used up a great part of the metal mined. In Shomei's reign ( 724-748 A. D. ) gold was discovered in Tsushima and also a great Daibutsu was erected. The statue is one of Japan's great works of art as it still stands in the Todaiji at Nara, and it is not without interest to learn that at a fete given in its honour by the Empress Koken (749-758 A. D.) it opened its eyes, perhaps on the change of manners that was going on around it. Things have much sobered down. We are reminded of a passage in Rabelais, where Ponocrates for the diversion of Gargantua " thought fit, once in a month, upon some fair and clear day tt) go out of the city be- times in the morning, either toward Gentilly or Boulogne, or St. Clou, and there spend all the day long in making the greatest cheer that could be devised, sporting, making merry, drinking healths, playing, singing, dancing, tumbling, on some fair meadow." So we find the Emperor Saga (810-825 A. D.) goes to view the flow- ers, and makes the round of the various temples for a similar pur- pose and to recite poetry with the priestesses. In Nimmyo's reign (834-850 A. D.) there is a similar account of his diversions to which are added hunting and fishing, and the Emperor spends much of his time away from the actual scene of government which seems to have fallen into the hands of officials. All is not smooth, how- ever, for two attempts are made on his throne, and brigands swarm in the land. On the whole, he is put down by the old chronicle as " a good Emperor," and something is made of the discovery and present to him of a white tortoise, " a thing so extraordinary that all the functionaries went to compliment the Emperor who gave a new name period (nengo) to his reign in recognition of the happy augury." With all this life of pleasure however we are approaching a time THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 117 critical to the history of these emperors. Montoku (85 1-858 A. D. ) had much the taste of his predecessors. His weak health would not allow the more boisterous exercise of the chase. He confined him- self much to visits among his subjects, and to excursions to see the bloom of the cherry-trees and other flowers. With such excursions were combined poetry making. There is an amusing episode attached to a charlatan priest who claimed that by divine interposi- tion he could get along without food. For a time he had much credit as a wonder and was lodged in the Imperial Palace, but by a very natural process better imagined than described he was soon detected and expelled in disgrace from the palace. It is to be feared that the people themselves by no means led the idyllic lives of their monarchs. We hear much of famines and pestilence, both of which seemed to be almost periodical in their operation. Fuji also was at this time an active volcano, and in Seiwa's reign (859- 876 A. D.) there was a very violent eruption, rocks being hurled into the sea, and many houses wrecked and people killed. The youth of this monarch is to be noted. He was nine years old when he ascended the throne, and his successor but one was but eight years old. This latter, Yozei (877-884 A. D.) developed into a very bad lot. Ordinary libertinage degenerated into the worst cruelty, and when he summoned men and women to the palace to furnish a mark for his arrows the Regent interfered. Fujiwara Mototsune inveigled him out of his palace and quietly carried him off. On the unexpected death of his successor, Mototsune set up another child Uda (888-897 A. D.) The crafty old man soon presented himself with the wish to be relieved of his charges of office, and the inexperienced young monarch was naturally only too anxious to have him remain and carry on the government as in the past. This reducing the Emperor to a mere figurehead how- ever makes itself felt. Rebellion, not unfrequent before, becomes almost chronic, and in Shugaku's reign (931-946 A. D.) Taira no Masa in the Kwanto and Fujiwara nO' Sumitomo in lyo were only defeated and killed after serious fighting. These two names at this period are suggestive. The one as that of the coming rulers 118 SAKURAMBO of the empire and the other as showing that the ruhng house was losing its sohdarity. The throne itself for a long time seems to have been anything but a desirable goal. When not forced out, the emperors abdicated from choice. Kwasan (985-986 A. D. ) soon had enough of it. He was an amorous young man with three wives, to one of which he was passionately attached. She died, however, and one evening the Emperor disappeared from the palace. All night they searched for him and the palace was in a turmoil. The next day he was found with shaven head in a neighbouring monastery. He had turned monk. This was by no means an unusual step. It was often taken by the emperors to enable themselves to play a real part in the political struggles of the time. This of course brought the religious orders into politics, and they soon became anything but a means of withdrawal from the world to lead a life of devotion. We have said little of the Church, hot because they did not deserve mention but because they were bound soon to compel attention in the annals by some very stren- uous deeds. Since Denkiotaishi on Hiesan and Kobodaishi on Koyasan had founded, in the ninth century, their great monasteries, these priests had developed into a great military power. As yet we hear little of them, but in Go-Shuyaku's reign (1037-1045 A. D. ) the monks of Hieisan raised riot in front of the Mikado's palace, a most heinous offence. From that time on they usually have a hand, on one side or the other, in all the disturbances so frequent near Kyoto as the central power weakened. There was little control over the great barons ruling the outer provinces, who fought each other for supremacy with cheerful indifference to the interests of the Empire. Fujiwara had only been too glad to depute its duties to outsiders, who building up feudal strongholds by conquest of their neighbours had become, in a number of cases, powerful chieftains. For twelve years Yoriyoshi and Sadetao fought for the supremacy of the great northern province of Dewa, with small thought of the central power, and Minamoto Yoriyoshi emerged triumphant. Meanwhile the Emperor was diverting him- self with flowers and poetry and jewels. THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 119 The lack of proper timber in the house of Fujiwara finds application in Go-Sanj5's reign (1069-1072 A. D.)- This Em- peror renewed the practice of hearing petitions himself, and his successor, Shirakawa (1073-1086 A. D.), although he abdicated, kept the power in his own hands. He replaces the Fujiwara as actual head of the Government. And so with his successors. These make way in order to rule through their sons and grandsons. Through custom the Emperor has become a figurehead, and custom is all powerful in Japan. The times were marked by great dis- order. Barons' wars in the north and west, and fighting between the great monasteries around Kyoto. In fact, without Taira and Minamoto and the monks of Hieisan, things would have been dull. In 1081 A. D. the monks of Hieisan burnt Miidera to the ground, and they repeated this operation again in 1140 A. D. Miidera is the well-known temple on the hill above Otsu on Lake Biwa, and this "peaceful" retreat for religious men fairly represents the church militant of the times. We can take a last glimpse of the other side of the picture under the reign of Shutoku (1124-1141 A. D.). He and the former Emperor went to view the spring flowers, " many ladies of the court accompanying in carriages ; their cortege was very brilliant. With gentlemen on horseback, bands of musicians, and many women destined to sing before the two Emperors." At this point when the existing regime of Court and Emperor are about to retire to make room for a very dififerent set of actors on the political stage, let us look backward and forward to take some account of the men and means which are to supplant them. The old patriarchal household consisted, as in most other countries, of head, blood relations, and slaves. These last were regarded as goods and chattels. They were not as yet attached to the land and were a matter of sale and barter. To some extent this class was probably made up of such of the aborigines (Ainu) who chose to remain on the land with their conquei-ors, and of Chinese and Korean captives. Slaves were also recruited from men who through crime or debt or ofifences against the rulers were reduced 120 SAKURAMBO to that condition. In that rough time the size of a man's household had much to do with his safety and importance, and the man who collected around his dwelling a numerous band made up of sons and son's sons, brothers and their sons, together with the numerous slaves needed for the menial work of some large landed property, soon became a power to be reckoned with. These landed proprie- tors, known as kumitsuko, differ in the amount of their holdings, the tendency being for the larger to swallow the smaller. They owed no feudal service to the Emperor, although subject to his taxation. Their property belonged to them of right and descended to their heirs without any additional ceremony of investiture. Their own original investiture seems to have been, irj many cases, of the informal nature of the squatter, although a more formal title was later obtained. In fact, they seem hardly to be distin- guished from the men known later as goshi, and which in the times we have now reached — Taira and Minamoto — ^begin to play the important part In many cases these goshi seem to have been offi- cials who taking up large grants of land — free from taxation — threw them open to settlement on terms naturally much more advantageous than the taxed land of the imperial government. The peasants eagerly flocked to such cheap land; there was no power to check these powerful, almost independent lords, and the imperial revenues dwindled to almost nothing. Meanwhile the barons with their adherents waxed fat and became a power in the land. In other cases they seem simply to have been men, who, from natural abilities taking a leading position in their village com- munity, acquired wealth, influence, and adherents, by which they were enabled to dispense protection to those who were weaker and who sacrificed independence to security. It is a distinct instance of the almost natural position that a feudal system plays in the political development of man, very much at variance with the theories of our present degeneration from a condition of ideal love and justice as found in primitive man. A love and justice, it can be added, which, like that found among the Australian aborigines of to-day, was largely dispensed with a club. Now the military THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 121 force of these early days, and almost up to Tokugawa times, was drawn from the general population. A chief led to war the strong- est and best of his retainers. His sons and nephews rode by his side and the sturdiest of his slaves tramped behind with clubs and spears and short swords. There seems to have been but little modi- fication of this system except that in time the peasantry became attached to the soil and were transferred with it, and slavery in name at all events disappeared from the land. With the accession of Go-Shirakawa (1156-58 A. D. ) civil war broke out, in which the two candidates were variously sup- ported by the two great baronies, Taira and Minamoto. The Emperor de facto found at his side Taira Kiyomori and Minamoto Yoshitomo who sided against his clan. Whilst other nobles hast- ened to the camp of his opponent, these two great captains provided for the defence of the palace. The general breakdown in this strife is a source of trouble to the old chronicler. " Father fought against his son, relation against relation, and lords against their subjects." Ability was on the side of the Emperor and his oppon- ents were crushed. Two such men as Yoshitomo and Kiyomori, both ambitious for power, could not long get on together. Yoshi- tomo soon conspired to get rid of Kiyomori, but was defeated and subsequently assassinated by his own relatives. His sons by his wife shared the same fate, except Yoritomo, then fourteen years of age, who was banished by Kiyomori to the neighbourhood of the Kwanto — k most shortsighted procedure on the part of this ordi- narily astute man. The beautiful concubine of Yoshitomo, Tokiwa, saved the lives of her family and her three children by submitting herself to Kiyomori and becoming his concubine. The other scourge of the Taira family, Yoshitsune, was one of these children. From 1 1 66-1 181 A. D. Kiyomori was supreme in the Govern- ment, which was filled with his relatives and supporters. Towards the end, however, the defeated Minamoto again raised their heads. This first revolt was easily crushed, and Kiyomori, first burning Miidera as a warning to the monks to keep out of politics, sent an army against Yoritomo, who, aroused by his rela- 122 SAKURAMBO tives in the South, had raised an army in the Kwanto. In a battle near Lake Hakone, Yoritomo's handful of men were soon dispersed, and he himself only escaped through the faithlessness of one of his pursuers. He had taken refuge in a hollow tree and was found there by this man, who however reported that there was no sign of him, and that the opening in the tree was crossed by spiders' webs, showing no use of it as a place of concealment. Small events sometimes turn the course of Empire, and Yoritomo escaped to Awa and set himself to work to rouse the whole Kwanto. Ban- ished at the age of fourteen, he was now thirty years old. He soon centred a powerful force at Kamakura, and the army sent by Kiyomori to break up this camp did not dare to attack him. Yoshitsune joined him with all the Minamoto forces he could raise in the South, and his cousin Yoshinaka threatened Kyoto' close at hand. The priestly bands took sides with Yoritomo. Just at this critical period Kiyomori died, and the Taira, pressed on every side, abandoned Kyoto with the infant Emperor. Yoshinaka marched into the city, set up a new Emperor and incidentally himself also. This by no means was on Yoritomo's programme, and Yoshitsune's effective force soon suppressed him. He was killed by an arrow in one of the battles around Kyoto, and this friendly discussion among relatives ended with his death. Yoshitsune's task was by no means ended with breaking up Yoshinaka's power in Kyoto. The Taira — or Heike as they are better known in Japanese history — had ' retreated with the young Emperor into the western provinces along the Inland Sea. Yoshitsune promptly followed them up and scattered them. The campaign was not pressed, however, and he soon returned to recruit his forces at Kyoto, and to strengthen his brother's govern- ment at that vital point. This done, the third and last campaign against the Taira was entered upon. Hemmed in by the forces of Kyiishu friendly to Yoritomo, and by Yoshitsune advancing west- ward with his flotilla, they made their last stand near Shimonbseki. No compromise was thought of on either side. Taira were greatly outnumbered and opposed to the greatest general Japan had as yet THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 123 produced. In their desperation, however, the battle even showed signs in their favour. Yoshitsune is said to have invoked the divine assistance of Hachiman, the God of War. More Hkely he invoked the divine assistance of his heavier battahons and ordered up his reserves. The enemy were totaUy broken. The great majority perished in the sea. Many stories are told of the end of the little Emperor, Antok. A wanderer for two years, he was now but eight years of age. His nurse led him to the side of the ship, and bidding him make his prayers to the Gods beguiled him with the pretty tale of the beautiful palace beneath the sea which they were about to visit, and where his divine ancestors were wait- ing to receive him. Clasping his little hands, the Emperor gravely went through the ceremonial form of prayer, with all the gravity of a child that seemed to pierce the real design of his nurse and which his dignity taught him to accept. Clasping him in her arms she then jumped overboard and so ended this strife of the Imperial houses. But few of the Taira clan escaped. Those who did so concealed themselves under other names. They disappeared from Japanese annals until Ota Nobunaga, one of Japan's great trium- virate, resuscitated the glory of his house and again ruled the country. The fate of the victor was no better. Made jealous by his brother's success, Yoritomo forbade his approach to Kamakura. Of the loyalty of Yoshitsune at this period there seems to have been not the slightest doubt. There is a good deal of the court of the second Mahmout about old Japan. Y'oshitsune's safety lay in his own right arm and we soon find the two brothers in arms against each other. Fortune favoured Yoritomo and Yoshitsune's fleet was scattered by a storm. His army broken up, he fled to the north and took refuge with a retainer whom he had reason to trust. Urged by Yoritomo, however, this man surprised and sur- rounded him. Yoshitsune having killed his wife and children, himself committed hara-kiri. Y'oritomo promptly turned on the traitorous retainer, and despatching a force against him punished him for his misdeed by destroying him and his family and confis- cating the fief for one of his retainers. 124 SAKURAMBO Yoritomo was not merely a great general. He was playing for higher stakes than simply that of being the most influential of a number of vassals. The name was little — or rather was impos- sible—but the power was much, and he sought to govern Japan, not through the medium of the Court, but directly as by right of his position. For this purpose the Court must be eliminated. This could not be done directly, for the Emperor was a sacred figure in the eyes of the nation. Yoritomo and his successors never tried to eliminate the Emperor. Their object was to make him the merest figurehead, and this they succeeded in doing. Once permanently retired from the active government custom or precedent in Japan would quickly fasten the role on the Imperial puppet. With the exception of one instance to be mentioned later he now becomes a name, even as a fountainhead of honours. All honours are centred in the Emperor. They are derived from him, always are derived from him ; but in their issuance he is merely the mouthpiece of the Shogun's government. In the early days there are signs of rebel- lion against this role, but in the rough days of Ho jo and Ashikaga guch recalcitrancy is met by removal and substitution of a more pliant instrument. Most of them are very young, and as soon as they reach a reasoning age are removed (abdicate) and are replaced by another child. The sacred character, be it added, is more and more enhanced. The Emperor soon disappears from the scene altogether, and it is said that in Tokugawa times he was rarely seen by anyone except his women, communication with the Court taking place with the intervention of a screen to conceal the majesty of the august Imperial countenance. The history of Japan is no longer the history of its emperors but of the ambitious men who in turn succeeded in grasping its rule. A singularly uninter- esting history, for Japan had no international politics, had no devel- opment of a great political or economic system. Up to the time of Ota Nobunaga they are admirably instanced by the history of the barons' wars of Stephen's time or the War of the Roses. These have their interest in their influence on England's position toward continental Europe. No such interest attaches to the intestine feuds of Japan. THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 125 The divinity therefore which hedged about a king and so •much enhanced his power in Europe had just the opposite effect in Japan. It contributed to his personal safety, it took away his per- sonal importance and stripped from him all real power in the State. Having reduced the Emperor to the position of an hereditary Pope without any of the Pope's power, Yoritomo proceeded to consoli- date his position. By his " advice," military governors were established in all provinces, side by side with the civil governor appointed from the Court. These aids " to maintain the peace " soon deprived the civil governor of any shadow of power. Their appointment lay in the Shogunate and was used simply as a basis of the feudal system they built up, and the means through which the various fiefs with their obligations of military service were distributed. This is so exactly similar to that of Europe that details are unnecessary. A great fiefholder subdivided his fief, and so down to the retainer who held property and attended the call of his lord with his half a dozen men at arms called from their farms to fight or fetch and carry. The roughness of the times is well illustrated by the story of Sukenari and Tokimune, two brothers whose father had been killed in one of the petty barons' wars which were an incident of the time. Their father's slayer was in Yori- tomo's train and they forced their way even into the prince's hunt- ing lodge. They succeeded in their object and killed their enemy. It seems to have been almost a general attack. The whole palace was aroused, and the two desperate men almost reached Yoritomo's presence. Many attendants were killed in this nocturnal fray, and Yoritomo himself, roused by the alarm, was only restrained with difficulty from taking part in the fray. One brother was killed and the other captured. They have gone down to history as the Soga brothers, and the monument raised in commemoration of their pious act on the Hakone road near Ashinoyu is still an object of veneration. A far more significant mark of the times is the disappearance of woman. In the days of the Kyoto court she has been a prominent feature in literature. Now she sinks back into a breeding machine and disappears entirely from public life. In 126 SAKURAMBO fact, the arena of politics and society had no place for a woman. Yoritomo's regime lasted but a short time. He was killed by the fall from a horse, and if it was the noble beast nine feet high, said to have been presented to him, we can understand the serious- ness of such an accident. Both his sons were incapable. The first Yoshiye was a debauched young man given to pleasure. He abdicated in favour of his brother and was subsequently despatched by assassins. Sanetomo, as- soon as he reached the age of govern- ment, was assassinated by Yoshiye's son. The real power, how- ever, had lain since Yoritomo's death in the hands of Hojo Toki- masa, their uncle. No change was made in the regency but a suc- cession of Shoguns, partly Fujiwara and partly younger members of the Imperial house, succeeded under the power of this able but unscrupulous family. That the Hojo ruled with the strong hand is true. That they were the first to treat the Emperor and his Court with the greatest disregard of any of the imperial wishes is also true. But in this they merely led the way, and there is nothing to distinguish their conduct toward the Imperial house from that of their immediate successors in Ashikaga times. The same problem hardly figured for the Tokugawa. In Japan, precedent soon forms a rule, and once accepted, the new position of the Imperial house passed into a formula of government. In Hojo times this however was not the case, and efforts of the Court to restore the power of the Emperor were met by summary removal and banishment. It was only toward the end of the period, when, with that peculiar substitution or acting through an agent carried to excess in Japanese life, we not only have a Regent of the Shogun but a Regent of the Regent, that the disorderly feudal barons began again to disturb the peace of the home provinces. It was H5j6 Tokimune, however, who met the great Tartar attempt at invasion in 1280 A. D. The Tar- tars had been already heard from since 1269 A. D., but their threats were disregarded and the latest embassy was put to death to the last man. This was no treatment for the representatives of the great Kublai Khan, but he certainly made a grievous tactical THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 127 error when he sent but a hundred thousand men against the island empire. If the necessity had arisen Tokimune could have matched easily this army man for man. As it was it was not necessary. Storm scattered the enemy's fleet and only thirty thousand of them ever reached Japanese soil. Both Japanese and Chinese accounts well agree as to this point. They were overwhelmed by the Jap- anse and were put to death with the exception of three who were sent home to tell the tale. The Italian traveller, Marco Polo, gives us the absurd tale current in China as to this invasion. According to this account these men were landed without arms on one of the outlying islands. Meanwhile the storm raged, and the Chinese general to save his fleet weighed anchor and left these unfortunates to get along as best they could. Concealing themselves on the approach of the Japanese flotilla, they waited until the enemy had disembarked and were searching the island for foes. Then these Tartars seized the unguarded ships and sailed away, turning the tables on their foes. The Japanese king, deceived by the banners, admits them to his capital, which they seize and drive out all the natives except the women. After undergoing a siege of half a year, without hope of succour, they compound with the foe and save their lives. It is the strange and unknown even in these modern days that gives rise to wildest conjectures on which the slightest tinge of fact is magnified into detailed accounts of supposed eye witnesses. Every unknown country has figured in turn as an Eldorado, and Japan is no exception. Although the Khan's letter was couched in terms of complaint against Japan's inhospitable behaviour to the rest of the world, the real reason for his invasion may perhaps be found in the rumours as to the great wealth of the country, rumours which we know now were more than absurd. Marco Polo gives much information current at the time in China concerning the Jap- anese. Some of it very uncomplimentary, and some of it very marvellous. One phrase is well worth giving. In fact, his whole account as given in Klaproth's comprehensive note is most inter- esting, but too long for quotation. " The people are fair, fine 128 SAKURAMBO looking and of gentle manners. . . . They have gold in great- est abundance, hence it is here found out of measure and the king does not allow it to be carried away; but few merchants come here and rarely the ships of other nations. . . . They say, who have knowledge of this country, that there is a great palace entirely covered with plates of gold, as we cover houses and churches with lead, and all the ceilings of the reception rooms and of many chambers are of little tablets of pure gold very thick and even the windows are ornamented with gold. This palace is so costly that no one could even estimate its value. There are also in the island numberless pearls, which are red, round, and very large, and worth as much as the white, and more. And in this island some are buried when dead, and some are burnt. But of those that are buried, one of these pearls is placed in the mouth, this being their custom. There are also many precious stones." The mineral wealth of Japan to-day cuts anything but a figure in the world's assets and its present deficiencies are by no means due to exhaustion through previous working. A house divided against itself will fall, and this seems to have had much to do with the decline of the Ho jo. In any case the times were beyond them. An exceptional man was needed to bring this disorderly period under the rule of his strong hand, and per- haps it was necessary that disintegration should advance to such an extent as to make its evils felt before such man would find the materials ripe to his hand. Meanwhile Ho jo influence had so fallen that when for the first time we find an emperor of ripe age on the throne — Go-Daigo who became the Emperor in 13 19 A. D. at the age of thirty-one years — we also find the court at Ky5to begin- ning to raise its head. Once more the Emperor is heard of in public life. He receives petitions, relieves the distressed with his bounty, which unexpected action is the more enhanced by the severe famines which seemed to have become almost periodical. Go-Daigo sought and obtained support from the priests. His first effort in 1331 A. D. was a failure. He was badly beaten, cap- tured, and exiled to the island of Oki. In his place, Hojo Takatori THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 129 substituted the Emperor Go-Murakami. Go-Daigo escaped and the monks rose in his favour. Although these militant friars were beaten they g-ave the signal for a general uprising. The forces of Nitta Yoshisada and Ashikaga Takauji, acting for the Emperor, drove the Kamakura forces out of Kyoto. In 1333 A. D. Kama- kura itself fell before the assault of Nitta's army. A great and ■populous city, the once capital of the Empire, is now a little fishing village set among picturesque hills by the side of the sea, and adorned with handsome temples and the most beautiful statue of Japanese art. All sadly out of proportion with its present condi- tion. If Go-Daigo had been a very great man or even a mod- erately great Emperor, the Imperial house might now have recov- ered its pristine glory. He was neither, and failed to rise to the occasion. Bound by custom he could only think of perpetuating the existing system by the distribution of fiefs among his already too powerful supporters. In the quarrel which ensued between Nitta and Ashikaga he, perhaps justly but inadvisedly, sided with the former. Nitta was defeated ; and failing any loager to protect his Emperor, cut off his own head ! The Emperor was captured. He escaped, however, and took refuge in Yoshino, now famous for its cherry-blossoms. Ashikaga Takauji promptly declared the throne vacant, set up a new emperor and for some years the two courts existed in close proximity to each other. One change was made by the transfer of the Shogunate to the Ashikaga. The real centre of the government was again at Kyoto, and' the North was again abandoned to its own devices at a time when the unruly barons of that part of the country most needed a strong hand to keep them in order. The Ashikaga Shogunate still less than any of its predecessors was likely to produce the man fit for the times. Its history is extremely uninteresting even if instructive. The country was broken up into a number of warring barons. The origin of many of these daimyo was in the goshi class. As has been said these men, often farmers and adventurers, made themselves a centre of influence, and by the process of swallowing their neighbours became 9 130 SAKURAMBO the masters of the surrounding territories. They had no connec- tion with the court, whose adherents without influence or resources were in some cases almost destitute. The period of war of course had a great influence on the arts of the country. That they were kept alive is simply due to the inherent artistic taste of the Japanese people. These rough soldiers would turn from hacking off each others' heads to the contemplation of a scroll by one of the later Tosa school ( strongly influenced in recent times by Chinese ideals), to the intricacies of the tea ceremony, to the high moral and martial principles of some of the No or dramatic representations which were the peculiar delight of this military class. This class had not taken that exclusiveness that they did later on. A strong man could yet make his way into it, and brains or skill in the use of his weapons was as yet a highway to fortune. They have strongly ingrained in them all the coarseness that belongs to men who have had, to make their way by contact with the gross motives that rule the struggle for supremacy in this world. To the end they retain that coarseness. The whole history of the samurai class, which is at this period being evolved from somewhat heterogeneous ele- ments, is that of the man who is not born to the purple ; he is the soldier ,^ not the courtier, which perhaps accounts for the incongrui- ties of the warrior immersed in the doctrines of justice and benevo- lence as laid down in the pages of Confucius and Mencius, and at the same time glowers rapturously at the still gory head of his enemy — fruit of his recent vengeance. This alternation of savage passion arid study of the sages typifies the life of the period. The Ashikaga Shoguns were none of them great men; but they were great encouragers of the arts of the time, and the graver's tool and the manufacture of china and pottery became of importance under their rule. It was Yoshimitsu who built the Golden Pavilion at Ky5to. It was Yoshimasa who built the Silver Pavilion and gave the greatest encouragement to all the fine arts and aesthetics of his day. Of the people themselves it is probable that they suffered horribly. Famines and pestilence were common in the land. A village or hamlet that afforded THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 131 refuge to an enemy was burnt to the ground as punishment by the victor, although the helpless peasant was involved in no fault. However, they had not yet become beasts of burden. In fact, the general disorder of the times, the loosening of the bonds of author- ity, had probably much ameliorated the condition of those of the lower classes sprung from the old time serfs. When a man's strong arm was of value his individuality counted for much, and the peasant was not confined within the iron circle of his caste. It would be interesting to know the effect that these constant wars had on the ratio between men and women in Japan. Much of that influence would be offset by the practice of concubinage which has always been a feature of Japanese civilization. Woman's position is decidedly lower than under the old regime, and perhaps this is not entirely to be attributed to the growing influence of the Chinese classics, a particular object of study and admiration to the warrior class through its elevation of the dogma of loyalty. Not that other means of keeping down the surplus were not adopted, for both child murder and abortion were expedients by no means uncommon. That in these chivalric days — the days of Bushido — but little con- sideration was shown to the weakness of sex is perhaps not badly instanced by a contemporary account * given by an old lady of her experiences when a young girl during the uncertain times fol- lowing Hideyoshi's death in 1598. They were besieged in a castle belonging to their master, and in preference to being present at the taking of the castle and being subjected to the brutality of the rude soldiery, the women made their escape under conditions of peculiar hardship. It is to be doubted if either the honour or the weakness of woman received any more consideration in those flourishing times than it did from the adventurers found in " our armies in Flanders " when a town was taken by assault. At the middle of the sixteenth century disintegration had i-eached its extreme limit. A central government could be said tc be non-existent in fact. In theory, however, its shadow was ^Translated by Professor B. H. Chamberlain. Trans. Asiatic Soc. Japan, vol. vii. pt. 2. 132 SAKURAMBO always before men's eyes, and the man had come who conceived the idea, not of simply snatching a few square miles of territory from his neighbours but of restoring the actuality of the central government — with himself of course as the head. Ota Nobunaga started his career on very limited means. He was master of a small fief in the province of Owari. This he gradually enlarged in the usual manner until he was master of the whole province. A long, lanky, slab-sided, loose- jointed man, he was a born soldier, and as enthusiastic over his men as Frederick the Great. That he was a man of no mean political ability was shown in his ambitious ideal and the skill with which he selected his agents to carry it out. At his right hand moreover was a man who had all of Frederick's ability, political as well as martial. A peasant's son named Toki- chiro, afterwards known as Toyotomi Hideyoshi. A pretext for further extension was found in the march on Kyoto of Imagawa, lord of the provinces of Suruga, Totomi, and Mikawa. Nobunaga was ridiculously overmatched, but soldiership won the day and Imawaga's host was utterly broken. lyeyasu, an inferior daimyo, made terms with Nobunaga and the alliance between them was from this time never broken. lyeyasu had Nobunaga's support in the North and protected Nobunaga's rear, no light task against any attacks from the powerful barons of the North, especially Takeda Shingen, of Kai, Uyesugi Kenshin in the Northwest, and Hojo Ujiyasu in the Kwanto. The assassination of the Shogun Yoshi- teru by one of his retainers, and the exclusion of his brother Yoshi- aki, gave Nobunaga the opportunity to widen his field. He em- braced Yoshiaki's cause, marched on Kyoto, scattered the conspira- tors, and ruled in Yoshiaki's name as Vice-Sh5gun. The period was one of continual warfare. He first turned his attention to the country immediately to the north of Kyoto and crushed resistance there. The monks who had made common cause with his enemies were the next point of attack, and Hiesisan was practically wiped out in fire and blood in 1571. In 1573 Yoshiaki tried to rebel against his subjection. Nobunaga deposed him and henceforth ruled alone. His next move was against the powerful Mori family THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 133 who were masters of practically all western Japan. Hideyoshi at the head of a large army was sent against the province. Every- where successful he sat himself down before Takamatsu, a castle on the Inland Sea in the province of Harima. To complete his difficult task without the aid of Nobunaga would have been dan- gerous, and on the point of victory Hideyoshi sent for him. Nobu- naga left his fine castle of Azuchi on Lake Biwa, built on European models, and sending his army ahead stopped for a short time at Kyoto. In a moment of horseplay he had grievously ofifended one of his retainers, Akechi Mitsuhide. This man, with his supporters, left the army on its march, hastened back to Kyoto and attacked the temple in which Nobunaga was lodged. Seeing no means of escape, Nobunaga set fire to the building and committed hara-kiri. In some respects he was an immense loss to Japan. A man of the noble class he commanded the respect of his rank. If he could have lived for some years, with the assistance of Hideyoshi as his minister, it is possible that the succession of a line of Shoguns trained under that able and liberal hand might have written the history of Japan in succeeding ages very differently from what was written. The news of Akechi's act soon reached Hideyoshi. Coming to terms with Terumoto, lord of Takamatsu, he started for Kyoto to punish the assassins. He soon collected a large army, caught Akechi at a place called Yodo near Kyoto, and utterly defeated him. Akechi escaped, but wandering in the mountains was killed by the peasantry and his head brought to Kyoto. Hideyoshi assumed the regency for Nobunaga's grandson. There were, however, two sons by concubines. These found adherents and there was much severe fighting before Hideyoshi settled himself firmly in the seat of government. He adopted the policy of Henry V of England. Knowing the warlike restless habits contracted by centuries of war- fare he directed this restless element on to Korea, and the bones of thousands left bleaching across the sea materially lightened the task of his successor. Hideyoshi's career has been drawn by many writers, and they are practically agreed that he, son of a peasant, 134 SAKURAMBO was the greatest man that has ever ruled Japan. In like manner the greatest king that ever sat on the English throne subsequent to the days of the fifth Henry was a commoner — Oliver Cromwell ; and the greatest man that ever occupied the throne of France was a bourgeois — Napoleon Bonaparte. In his latter days Hideyoshi had but little internal strife to contend with. The last recalcitrant was Ho jo Ujimasu, and with his fall the whole Kwant5 came into the hands of the central gov- ernment. Hideyoshi turned it over to Tokugawa lyeyasu with instruction to move the capital from Odawara to the fishing village of Yedo at the head of Yedo Bay. He died in 1598 without full knowledge of the failure of his plans as to Korea, although it can be said that he mistrusted the ability or the pertinacity of his suc- cessors in carrying them out. His last instructions were to bring these troops back to Japan. The guardianship of his young son was left to a council of which lyeyasu was the head. This soon split, nominally at least over the more or less good intentions of lyeyasu as to the regency. With a vastly inferior army lyeyasu met the enemy at a place on the Nakasendo called Seki-ga-hara. Fortune wavered for a time, but with the aid of a little treachery settled on the Tokugawa. From that time, 1600, the government of Japan rested in the hands of one family, up to the restoration of the Imperial house in 1867. For fifteen years lyeyasu was busy in consolidating his interests which were mainly threatened by Hide- yoshi's son and his partisans, but the capture of Osaka castle and the death of Hideyori in 1615 put an end to the last pretensions of any but the Tokugawa as to the government of the Island Empire. Based on precedent the whole of lyeyasu's system was directed to maintaining the " status quo " and the supremacy of the Toku- gawa family. Any form of innovation was a source of danger. His idea was to take present customs, well understood of the people, and making an iron frame thereof to pour society into it and allow it to stiffen as in a mould. With this rigid unvarying formula, errors and weaknesses inherent in individual rulers would be re- duced to a minimum. That he did his work well is shown by the THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 135 test of time, which for two hundred and fifty years maintained the working of the machine in an unbroken period of peace. That he was not only a great legist but a statesman is shown by his evolving such harmony out of the chaos of interests preceding his time. That he had a true genius of perception of the principles lying at the bottom of Japanese institutions is shown by the skill in which these heterogeneous principles were moulded into one organic whole. He found the thread running through them all — loyalty. That Hideyoshi was head and shoulders over him is also equally clear. lyeyasu's system is purely selfish. Paramount to every- thing is the Tokugawa family. For that he devised the scheme of ■exclusion of all contact with foreign nations. It is safe to say no such idea would ever have entered Hideyoshi's brain..' He had fai- more reliance on himself and on the Japanese people. In place of ■excluding the Spaniard he would have met him sword in hand on the soil of the Philippines rather than on that of Japan. Every action of Hideyoshi showed that he was for a national Japan. The aggrandizement of the individual was to be based on the aggran- dizement of the nation. A succession imbued with the ideas of Hideyoshi, not cramped by petty personal aims, would have made the history of Asia very dififerent reading from what it is to-day. This seventeenth century was a critical period in the world's history. lyeyasu's system, however for what he designed it, was very perfect. The great dahnyo, Satsuma, Choshu, Tosa, were little •disturbed in their internal government, but the Tokugawa fiefs ■were scattered all over Japan. These subordinate Tokugawa daimyo were not strong enough to be dangerous and yet were, a thorn in the side of their great neighbours and a constant spy on their actions. The same balance was kept in the vast fief, the personal property of the Tokugawa family. A very strict eye was kept over these more personal adherents. They were freely re- warded or punished for good government or misgovernment by translation to other fiefs better or worse as their conduct called for. They were held to strict account in Yedo for the conduct of their 136 SAKURAMBO fiefs. On the whole the supervision from headquarters was vigi- lant, and the people suffered less from arbitrary exactions under the Tokugawa than they did under the larger independent daimi- ates, where they were more subject to the caprices and necessities of a man who was purposely driven to great expenses by his jealous overlord in Yedo. Theoretically, the peasant was amerced in the Tokugawa fiefs four-tenths of the produce of his farm, although this was often raised by forced loans to the lord from the farmers. In the independent daimiates these figures in some cases rose to eight-tenths of the product. In addition, however, especially within a certain radius of the great post roads along which the daimyo travelled on their compulsory journeys to Yedo, the exac- tions of forced labour of men and horses were most severe. At times hundreds and even thousands of men were called on to supply transport for the great trains of these nobles. As we have said lyeyasu's system was conservative. For this purpose local cus- toms were touched as little as possible. On the contrary, every effort was made to crystallize them and make them still more bind- ing by incorporating them into the code. One great source of disorder in the State had been the virile but disorderly men, who taking advantage of the times, had forced themselves to the front, and to whom changes of the times were their opportunity. This element was carefully eliminated by the formation of a caste system. The warrior class was now carefully limited in its mem- bership. Degradation was possible. Elevation was almost im- possible. Peasants, artisans, merchants were carefully limited to their own classes. Their rights and especially their duties were carefully defined. The personal equation was almost eliminated, and abstract justice had as little application to a case arising under the code as ever arose under the old Roman law of the Twelve Tables. What strikes the observer of old Japanese systems is not underorganization but overorganization. The Tokugawa did not originate this, but simply codified it. The most striking feature is the thoroughness with which the people are set to watch each THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 137 other. The go-nin-kumi, or five family system, is lost in shades of antiquity. A village, for instance, was made up of these little five-house units, the members of which might be and probably were widely separated in the social scale, the system being based on con- tiguity alone, and were responsible for the acts of each other. One member was chosen as the local representative, these heads of kumi selected members for the council, and this council had its head or Mayor, often hereditary, sometimes elected, and a survival it is considered of the former bailiff of the lord's fief. The lord himself was represented by an overseer (daikwan) who had charge of sev- eral villages, and appeal could be made to him if disputes arose which could not be settled by the villagers themselves. Usually they reached no farther as the overseer was supposed to consult the head authorities. However, under certain conditions in the Toku- gawa fiefs cases could reach Yedo itself. This seems a very efficient system with a broad basis of appeal. Let us see how it worked. The last thing intended was that the authority of the lord should be sapped by indiscriminate appeal to Yedo. The peasants in the case of gross injustice could so appeal; with the certainty of punishment more or less severe if they did so. Disputes in first instance were to be settled by arbitration. If between mem- bers of a kumi by the head of the kumi; if between the members of a village community, by the council ; if between neighbouring vil- lages, it might reach the daikwan. In some cases even this source of justice was polluted or too busy in enforcing the harsh exactions of the lord. In such cases the peasants assembled, marched to Yedo, and besieged the gate of their lord's yashiki or town resi- dence until their petition was received. An appeal to the Shogun's Council was even possible, although it meant certain stripes and imprisonment. Such an act as that of Sakura Sogoro — thrusting a petition into the Shogun's litter — meant death under the cruelest torture. In this case his whole innocent family were crucified with him. Fair as the law reads, I think we can say under these circumstances that the right of petition was somewhat limited. That much misery was caused by extravagance of the lord and 138 SAKURAMBO oppression of the peasantry, to pay for the extensive competition set up in Yedo and fostered by the Tokugawa with the specific pur- pose of keeping the daiinyo poor, is patient enough from the accounts that have come down to us from those still recent times. That however an effort was made to administer justice between man and man by painstaking officials is also just as patent. The fault lay not with them but with the inhumanity of the system they had to administer. Some of them exercise all their powers of casuistry to soften the harsh code. I will give one instance cited by Arai Hakuseki in his autobiography. He was acting as official of the Shogun in 171 1, and the following case was referred to him for an opinion. It is typical of the law and its general application which is based on duty and filial conduct. A woman whose hus- band was missing found a body floating face downward near the bank of the river. On appeal, her father and brother refused to turn the body so that she could see the face. She then appealed to the headman of the village, who turned the body which was that of her husband. Circumstances led to the arrest of the father and brother. They confessed the crime and were executed. The woman was imprisoned and sentenced to be sold as a slave, on the ground that she was guilty of unfilial conduct in informing against her father. Hakuseki stood alone in his opinion that the woman should be released. He exercises a great deal of casuistry to show that such a judgment would involve treason to a lord in favour of a father, and took the more specious ground that the woman could not have been guilty of unfilial conduct as she did not know at the time that it was her husband's body, and that the father was the murderer. A harsh code, a harsh interpretation, but at least one earnest kindly mind at work to modify its harshness. The vvonian was released and became a nun. The practice of arbitration of their differences among them- selves was therefore not only encourag-ed by the Government, but was impressed on the lower classes by the harsh if just treatment they received if they dared to trouble their superiors with their difficulties. Hence at a veryearly period we find the trades .settling THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 139 all their difficulties in this manner, and with the seventeenth cen- tury what can properly be described as guilds governed the whole mercantile community. We have no idea in these days of unre- stricted movement how terrible could be the tyranny of these organizations. He who did not submit to the decision of his guild became even worse than an outcast, for even the outcasts had their organization. He was an outlaw. One in law as well as in fact if he left his native place to seek support elsewhere, for no man could move without a passport. To spend the night outside his own house required the production of the proper papers certifying to the legitimacy of his mission. No wonder that under such a crushing tyranny the individual became an automaton merely to register, mentally and physically, the will of the men in whose hands lay his livelihood. The leaders of the guild were chosen, it is fair to say, not only for wealth but for ability, but in those uncertain times the two were almost synonymous. So strong has been the impression created by this early training that it has practically full sweep to- day. This paramount importance of the guild had its good points. An offence against the avowed rules of the guild, which of neces- sity must be based on fair play between the members, enforced in their dealings inter se perhaps as much integrity as would be found in any other local mercantile community system. That it, however, nourished any such ideals as are found in our western commercial systems was not the case. It was an integrity sim.ply confined not to general principles but to the membership of the guild. The guild's rules furnished no ground for fair play in dealing with the stranger outside the guild. That in their limited scope the system worked well is shown by the great extension given to a credit system. But few transactions were carried on in cash. Osaka was the great wholesale port and shipped to Yedo, the great consumers' mart, tons of produce which was carried by a line of junks in almost constant movement between the two points. Yedo shipped great quantities of grain from the Kwanto south- ward. Districts on the Sea of Japan once or twice in the year sent their little fleet with the accumulated produce of the district to 140 SAKURAMBO Osaka as the centre of distribution. Banks and exchange offices flourished and all kinds of commercial paper were freely circulated. When time came for settlement Osaka or Yedo struck the balance and the gold was shipped from one to the other according to the debit side of the ledger. There was a very large trade carried on, and the men who conducted it were naturally men of no mean ability. Apart from any encouragement of the Government to settle differences out of court we can understand, although Mr. Wigmore seems to think the influence overrated, the reluctance of these men to enter those sacred precincts, where at the entrance they were required to prostrate themselves on their bellies face to the ground, and so humbly drag themselves into the judgment chamber. The Tokuwaga Shogunate was a government built therefore on force. As we would say in these modern times, it rested on bayonets. Let us turn for a moment to the military caste to which lyeyasu gave much attention as the important prop of his house. The samurai class have no exact counterpart in European life. In Europe it was the Nobility and the Commons. The intervening class, the Bourgeois, were connected with the latter and most dis- tinctly were not men of the sword. Europe reversed the order of its Commons and placed the man of brains above the tiller of the soil; a sequence by the way that had tremendous political results. The European Noblesse corresponded closely with what in Japan was known as the kuge class of great families attached to the court of the Emperor. No matter how wide the range between them, from a peer of France to a cadet son of an impoverished country gentleman who had nothing but his sword for patrimony, they all belonged to the same caste. This was by no means the history of the Japanese samurai. It did include a large number of men of noble family, but its real basis was laid during the adventurous times which ushered in the Minamoto Shogunate near the end of the twelfth century. For nearly four hundred years it is in gradual formation as a class but its elements are anything but stable. It is a distinctly warrior class. Its connection is with the Daimyo and the Shogun in sharp contradistinction to the kuge grouped around THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 141 the Emperor. Perhaps in European Hfe the nearest counterpart to them are the free companies which in the fourteenth century begin to make their appearance in Italy, and to the vigour of whose arm and the disorders of the times more than one petty prince owed his principaUty or duchy, and who rewarded his followers according to the plunder he obtained by the aid of these Pretorians. This class of men lyeyasu took and formed into a caste whose rules were made most severe as their privileges were enlarged. To prevent warfare from degenerating into savagery some form of code must ■exist to govern the relations between the men engaged in it. lye- yasu devised nothing new. He simply classified the existing rules which were based on a study of the Chinese classics, whose severely simple and rational form were especially attractive to a class of men who by profession would naturally be little given to speculation. Where the adjustment of private differences must be left largely to the action of the individual, as even to this day is to some degree permitted in the West, it can be seen that if principles of justice and right conduct are to rule, and to prevent a degeneration to the right of the strongest, it is necessary to inculcate a code which is gov- erned simply by " esprit de corps." Not the punishment of the law is to visit offenders against this code but loss of honour, degra- dation from the caste, to which is to be preferred death. Such a ■code will command a respect that no written law can command. Aided by the fact that those to whom it appeals are men under an iron military discipline, where unity of thought and purpose is ■enforced from highest to lowest, it can be seen that each one will keep a jealous eye on its infractions. In Japan this code was given the name of Bushido. The code has had its eloquent expounders. Courage, tender- ness for weakness and misfortune, courtesy, unswerving truth, a keen sense of personal honour, self-control in the moment of vic- tory as in the moment of defeat. All these had their place in Bushido. Its philosophy was of a high quality. Its whole tone was duty not pleasure. To face the trials and combats of this world, not to shirk them by retirement. Its requirement was not 142 SAKURAMBO to temporize or circumvent a difficulty but boldly to face and over- come it. Life was a secondary consideration entirely, the accom- plishment of the knightly task was the first, the only consideration. No one can cavil at the precepts of Bushido. Where it falls to the ground, the fatal weakness in its structure to western minds, lies in its ideal. Bushido does not fail to take some great moral pre- cept as its foundation. It rests on Loyalty. But loyalty to what ? To one's lord. To his chief the samurai is to be loyal to the death, and only survive him in order to avenge him. In other words, the centre of this grand system is made the petty actions and gross motives of a man whose interests, material and political, may lead to fishing in very doubtful waters. There is no compromise here. The faithful samurai can remonstrate if he disapproves of his lord's course. He can commit suicide if he is forced to condone what he does not approve. But there is no alternative between suicide and giving active support to his master when called on. With this in mind we can understand the strange incongruities of noblest actions and basest crimes performed in the name of Bushido. Contrast for a moment the knightly code of Europe with the code of Bushido. There is not a single attribute of that code that is not found in the western code of knightly honour and duty. Courage, benevolence, relief of the poor and distressed, courtesy, truth, honour, loyalty, were all a sine, qua non to the European knight; but in his ideal there lay a vast difference. His war cry was " For God and the King " and he never reversed the order, and the good knight never confounded them. It is only fair to say that in this he found a valuable supporter in the Church, which no matter how it acted in politics and practice always in theory pre- sented a very high standard to its followers. Unlike the Church in the East — Buddhism — it preached practical religion, not dreamy renunciation. Hence the militant idea of the Church, justice and mercy between men, ruled over and above the rights of kings and princes, and in the end the Church stood as arbitrator of questions of moral right and wrong. The result was a class of men who were absolutely inconceivable under the Japanese code of Bushido. THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 143 The knight-errant, passing from place to place, setting up his shield with invitation to those who had woes and wrongs to be redressed to appeal to his right arm and the Judgment of God. I am not now speaking of the practice of knight-errantry. That it must fall widely short of its ideal was a foregone conclusion. But we cannot help feeling a tenderness for it as we listen to its exposition from the mouth of its last representative. Don Quixote has already laid the basis of the system in the Golden Age, but it is at the table of the Duchess that he expounded the principles and prac- tice of knight-errantry, and we can well leave its defence to his lips. If it were not for his irregular unbridled temperament it could be said that in the Japanese samurai in action we find more of Cyrano de Bergerac than any other European type. Bayard the Knight, sans peur et sans reproche, faithful to his king heavenly and earthly, finds no place in the theory of Bushido. Much stress is laid on this element of loyalty to prince in Japanese Bushido, as if it were an exceptional quality or exception- ally developed in Japanese life. To me it seems as if it was due more to narrowness of range than loftiness of ideal. Treason is an extremely rare occurrence in western annals. There is but one instance in American history — Benedict Arnold; for the actions and schemes of Aaron Burr were more those of an adventurer than of a man meditating wrong to his country. . And when we take into consideration the history of the times and the divided allegi- ance possible under the conditions, the constancy of men and lead- ers is surprising. Once their stand is taken they stood by the cause through good and evil fortune. In European history we look almost in vain for the man for revenge or profit to betray his country. Count Julian's name stands practically alone in Spanish annals. There was a wide field for such operations in European politics. A man had frequent opportunities to turn his political coat, and, on the debatable ground where a man hardly knew what nationality was, often did so to save his skin if not his property; but men clung closely to the political fortunes of their leaders, and conquest by the rising States of Europe soon settled boundary lines. 144 SAKURAMBO and wars became national not ' personal. There is one feature of Bushido that necessarily attracts attention. The almost savage indifiference to life as exemplified in the numerous — one could say trifling — occasions from which suicide was the only exit. It seems almost impossible that men should have been able to live under a system which practically forbade one to take thought of the mor- row. And yet they did so, and men do so to-day. Men in Europe go about their business and their pleasures, although the intrigues of unscrupulous ambitious men may in twenty-four hours call the lawyer from his office, the clerk from his desk, and the mechanic from his bench, to undertake the uncongenial task of cutting the throat of his vis-a-vis across the international boundary. Men dance and work and amuse themselves on the top of a mine of dynamite, which a spark may explode and make the whole of Europe a battle- ground such as has not been witnessed for fifteen hundred years. Beauty of thought is no test of civilization. Some of the most beautiful thoughts are to be attributed to the savage tribes of the North American Indian. Let us turn for a moment to the practice of Bushido. That the system is fair to look upon we will grant. That it was any better than the system that was and is in force in the West we will deny. And that in the day of its glory the application was any more vigorous East than West we will also deny. Fortunately we cannot blame Bushido for the development of Japanese history any more than we can blame Chivalry for the many questionable acts done in its day. In both cases history is made up in the early days of many acts of violence, alliances and intrigues due to most questionable motives, and a disregard for the rights of the weak and oppressed, that were the very reverse of the principles inculcated by both codes. In Japan as in Europe Front de Boeuf was the usual character, not Ivanhoe. Many noble characters display themselves in the barons' wars of Japan, but violence, intrigue, treachery, assassination, was not only the common weapon among political rivals, but often found its way into a man's household. Enough has been said as to the actual condition of the theoretical heads of the State — Emperor and Shogun — to THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 145 show that loyalty to them is very theoretical indeed. For a time as lyeyasu tightened the hold of the Government over these men the interpretation of the code was left to a class better qualified to direct its application. As, however, the hand of the Government weakened its lack of real moral bases made itself felt, and the code of the Samurai as expounded by the lower members of that class during the middle of the nineteenth century was anything but edify- ing. What are we to think of a code which justifies murderous attacks on unarmed foreigners and in one case on a woman ? The plea is entered that it was to punish violation of the custom of the country. So much the worse for a country to be guided by such a code. If these attacks, if the numerous political assassinations, had been made by roughs or by the dregs of the populace, we could understand them as due to weakness of the Government and inabil- ity to keep order in the community. The Government was weak, and the very men who took advantage of such weakness to engage in these cowardly attacks were rhen who swaggered about " the honour of a Samurai." The knight in Europe met his foe face to face, weapon in hand. Japanese history is too much a series of lying in ambush, hiding under bridges, taking every opportunity to rush upon the enemy by surprise and cut him down before he had •opportunity to resist. Bushido so much heard of at present is a regeneration more in the nature of the regeneration of Shinto. Not the actual continuance of an always existing spirit of the nation, but the revivification of a long lost unity of patriotism •dulled for ages by the existence of the feudal system. And such a Bushido is worth a thousand times the old loyalty to a petty chief, this transference to the nation itself through the symbol of the head •of the State and Emperor. But the unbroken sequence iseems to me to be historically false in the one case as in the other, more so in that of Bushido than in that of Shinto. There is one other point worth going into in this connection, for it is sometimes brought up against our modern western civiliza- tion. How far is it based not on high moral principle but on the maxim that "honesty is the best policy?" That altruism is a 14-6 SAKURAMBO keynote of the West it is hardly necessary to take the trouble to prove, as the history of philanthropy is a standing monument to it. But more than that, a very wide spirit of trust has prevailed through the community the very extent of which has been marked and proved by the efforts to punish breaches of such confidence in the public uprightness. Turning to the pages of a great English writer, Sir Henry Maine says, " but the very character of these frauds shows closely that, before they became possible the moral obligations of which they are the breach must have been more proportionately developed. It is the confidence reposed and de- served by the many which afifords facilities for the bad faith of the few, so that, if colossal examples of dishonesty occur, there is no surer conclusion than that scrupulous honesty is displayed in the average of transactions which, in the particular case, have supplied the delinquent with his opportunity." Legal honesty among the western commercial classes cuts a veiy small figure in the total. The general spirit of fairness in the community is a far more important item. You can base this ultimately on utilitarianism if you wish, but it can be pointed out that you can also reduce any system of morals — even that of Confucius or Mencius, or Bushido itself — to the same basis of Mill's philosophy. And advocates of the said systems of morals can equally say, one to another : " Do you bite your thumb at me, sir? " The comprehensive mind of lyeyasu laid down the broad outlines of the system. lyemitsu devoted himself to filling in the chinks and crannies through which might filter influences dele- terious to the family interest. Not only were foreigners excluded from Japan, but the Japanese on penalty of death were forbidden to leave Japan, and all vessels were cut down to a size only fit for the coasting trade. Ocean traffic ceased. Wrapped up in their isola- tion the Japanese developed a wonderfully complete civilization. During this peace of two hundred and fifty years their art reached a minuteness of detail, and a skill and certainty in execution of that detail, that is marvellous. Philosophy and letters, together with a refined but almost grotesque etiquette, filled the time of their upper THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 147 classes. What their Hterature seems to have lacked was breadth of view. Turned in to literally feed on itself, forbidden to engage in new fields, the virility of able minds turned itself to form. With the pomp and finish of an elaborate etiquette carried into the minutest details of life there was mingled luxury and extravagance. Men who wasted their substance in maintaining great households and rivalry in display were little to be feared, and the Shogunate deliberately enforced a style of living beyond the means of those who might be feared as possible rivals. Only on the lower classes was sobriety and frugality enforced. The great nobles were ex- pected to uphold their rank with small regard to their revenues. These were the days of the magnificent embroidered and brocaded robes of which the traveller sees so many specimens, some genuine and many manufactured for to-day's demands. The luxury of living reached into every crevice of the national life. It was the age of decadence, and sometimes developed into c[uestionable paths better described in the pages of Juvenal and Suetonius than in a book of to-day. It was very picturesque these trains of daiinyo and their retainers, the minutiae of their tea ceremony and of their incense parties, their careful study of the aesthetics of flowers or of a garden, their absorption before some masterpiece created by comparatively few strokes on the shining silk. No wonder artists mourn over its downfall, but any civilization thus turned in on itself was bound to decay. Nations, as people, must have the sins and shortcomings of others held up before their eyes to realize their own. Shut up within themselves, as was the case with Rome and with the old regime of France, their system had become ripe and had to be either regenerated or amputated. Wt cannot of course compare the brilliant court of the Grand Monarque with the much narrower development of an aristocracy as found in Japan. The broad life and interests, the gay and malicious wit of the Salons seeking food for its intellect no matter at what cost to the future, the generous philosophy with mankind for its object, finds no proto- type in Japan ; but the old regime in France was too much ahead of its contemporaries. It too was turned in on itself to feed on its 148 SAKURAMBO own vices until, by a species of self-poisoning well understood in medical science, came first enervation and finally destruction. All this luxury at the court of the Tokugawa had of course to be paid for and there remained but one source from which to raise the revenue — the people. If gayety and extravagant living was the rule in Yedo we hear of riots and agrarian uprisings in town and country. Professor Droppers tells us that within one hundred and fifty years there were twenty-two famines, of which eleven were very destructive. We will take some details from his translation and that of Mr. Gollier of the report made by Rakuo, Minister of Finance under the Shogun lyenari. It refers to the great famine of 1783. " The famine made itself felt especially in the North. A witness worthy of faith reports to me that of five hundred houses of a village thirty only had means of subsistence. The inhabitants of the rest had perished." They not only eat cats and dogs, " all eat the dead, but, as the bodies of the dead became rotten, many killed the dying, to pot the flesh in order to preserve it longer." . " A farmer went to his neighbour and said, ' My wife and one of my sons have already died from want of food. My remaining son is certain to .die within a few days, so I wish to kill him while his flesh is still eatable, but being his father, I do not dare to raise the sword against him, so I beg you to kill the boy for me.' The neighbour agreed to do this, but stipulated that he should get a part of the flesh as reward for his service. This was agreed to and the neighbour killed the boy. As soon as the deed was done, the farmer, who stood by, struck his neighbour with a sword and killed him, saying that he ' was very glad to avenge his son and at the same time have double the quantity of food.' " , . . " The cities are to-day full of incendiaries and male- factors, for the greater part from the provinces, that misery has driven from their villages. If the provinces were not oppressed, if they preserved the old family relations, the peasants would not come into the towns but for exceptional reasons; when they did not find work, they would hasten to return to their homes. But the provinces are in distress; all rush to the towns. Driven by an THE CENTRE OF SHIMOTSUKE 149 extravagant mode of luxury, the princes, the functionaries, the rich, put Hveries on all these people. Their antechambers are filled with a crowd of servitors who do nothing but drink and play. The best of these lackeys are content to get drunk and to allow the house to take fire ; the others steal and set fire to it to conceal their misdeeds. The true cause of these crimes is to be sought in the carelessness of the masters and their insensate luxury." These are not words from the pages of La Bruyere or of Arthur Young describing the France of pre-revolutionary days. They are describing the great famine of Temmei and the land of Japan in the heyday of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Those " happy days "' of old Japan so lamented by artists. After all it is the republican leaven lying at the bottom of all of us in the West that has been the salvation of the people. It is our heritage from Ancient Rome and our Germanic forbears with- out taint of subjection to anything but the pressure of Mother Nature herself. It is this spirit at the bottom that has enabled the people to carry on their long and persistent struggle against envi- ronment. Such a struggle is never a matter of an emeute. The short and sharp shock that sometimes takes place at the end is really the culmination of centuries of silent effort in which the people have never lost sight of their rights. The fight over insti- tutions in the Italian cities lasted for centuries before the Com- munes were triumphant. They flowered too early and the condi- tions of the age were not such as to permit their continuance, but the length of the struggle and the former glory of the people remained stamped on their minds. The precedent of the past was always before their eyes to guide and to justify future efforts. And they owed much to the men sprung from their own loins. Men who appealed directly to the minds of the people. When Cervantes directed his kindly ridicule against the past he not only- swept the ground from under the old conditions but he brought into disrepute its living descendants. " Don Quixote " was a firebrand. It was quickly translated into French and English. Italy and Ger- many were closely connected with Spain. The influence of the 150 SAKURAMBO book was simply immense, for how could men appeal to the com- mon sense of an age so unmercifully laughed out of existence. To tell the truth it was nothing but our ancestor worship that saved it, and of this Cervantes left nothing but the shell. We have had to get a long way off from that age, and it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that we again dared to rear a pedestal to mediaevalism and the Age of Chivalry. The writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries devote themselves almost entirely to picturing the life of their own times. And very glad are we that they have done so. Japan, unfortunately for her, had no Cervantes to point the finger of derisive praise at the unwieldy figure of her Samurai, their exaggerated etiquette, their question- able motives, their lack of connection with reality, the incongruity of their position in such times of absolute peace; in plain terms, no one to show how artificial and unnatural was the whole existing system. Japanese writers seem to think that in 1853 affairs were approaching a climax even in Japan. Whether a truly popular revolution was possible at that date is perhaps a matter of doubt, but that the system hurt and hurt outrageously of that there is no doubt. We cannot close this lengthy chapter better than by repeat- ing the quotation we have placed at the head of it; " and then, believe me, pain is a great regenerator of man; and in certain cases is a comforting indication of moral vitality, for where there is not pain, there is gangrene." THROUGH KOTSUKE " Per la sua bocca non parlerebbe il furor d'un dio presente nel tri- podo ma si bene il genio delle stirpi custode funereo d'innuraerevoli destini gia compiuti." — Romami del Giglio. We have been having a little domestic comedy to add to the gaiety of the nations assembled at one of the, tutelary shrines more particularly devoted to the needs of foreigners at Nikko. An American mother of overpowering proportions and authority, evi- dently much impressed by the attractions of Japanese girls and much alarmed for the virtue of her two sons — aged eighteen or twenty or thereabouts — marched on Nikko. Well did she keep her eyes (in daytime) on those boys. When the army marched she was the rearguard and all defiled in front of her. The boys did not care to look at Nesan who regarded the operations of Madame with wonder, not understanding her manoeuvring, and seeing " men " treated like children. All this in daytime. Alas! as the shades of night fell and dinner was a thing of the past, as the evening progressed evening dress disappeared, and two youthful but manly figures disguised in flannels disappeared around the corner of the hotel — villageward. Mother sent the boys to bed in due season, but I fear they lost their way. At all events they managed to scrape up a very tolerable acquaintance with half the geisha in the place. The boys were really good company and took their mother's hectoring in good part, and without observance beyond the bounds of good sense. ' Now this good lady doubtless had heard or read some travel- ler's tales which are better put down as springing from misconcep- tion rather than exaggeration. That , is, they have described the facts that came under their observation without taking the trouble 151 152 SAKURAMBO to go much into their real relation to the public life. The Japanese themselves are partly to blame for the wholesale idea foreigners get as to the virtue of Japanese women. There is no doubt about it that women do not hold the position in men's minds that they do in the West. At bottom, no matter how much respect and affection a man may have for his womenkind, his ground work is the idea of woman as a breeding machine. The western idea of woman as man's companion never occurs to him, except as subsid- iary to the first basic principle on which to him rests the relations of the sexes. Hence up to the establishment of the new Civil Code concubinage had a regular standing, and while not recognized by that Code it has a practical standing to-day. Now to this lowered ideal of woman is to be added the fact that in daily life less mystery is thrown about her person. Climate and life in the Japanese home do not conduce to that ultra-development of privacy so conspicuous a feature in western home life. Not that the Jap- anese woman is a whit less pure and modest thereby than her western sisters; but there is a difference of standard in reference to acts of necessity, particularly in conversation, and to which free- dom of reference being accustomed from childhood she sees no offence in its due place. Again, the Japanese marries very early in life, and marriage to him is by no means the formality it is in the West. He is not restricted in his relations to other women as in the West, where the contract is supposed to imply chastity on the part of both man and woman in their future married life. This is only implied on the woman's part and lapses from it among Jap- anese married women are rare. Also, the Japanese have carried on from their ancient system the custom of licensing public women. This system, while akin to certain systems in force in Europe for the regulation of vice only, carries the resemblance on the surface. Where women were so severely guarded and had no public rights or means of support outside the family, it is not hard to see that she could not be held responsible for lapses from virtue of which there was but little opportunity. Lapses of virtue in the wife, who was the only woman with any degree of freedom, were punishable THROUGH KOTSUKE 153 with death, and the husband could take the law in his own hands. The girls, therefore, that filled — and fill — the brothels of the Yoshiwara and the pleasure quarters of the large towns were not women who had made a " mistake," or women of depraved moral character, but mainly were women whose means of support had failed them or their families, and whose only resource was to sell themselves to a life of shame. It takes courage to take the only other remedy left to them — suicide — but many did, and do to-day, take that course in preference. Where the relief of necessitous parents iS concerned such course would not be open, for the first duty is to their parents, no matter at what cost, and many a romance has been wOven around the Yoshiwara in this connection. Unfor- tunately the -excuse of such necessity is often to keep some miser- able old man in his daily allowance of " rum." The consent of the girl is supposed to be obtained before they enter on such a life, but they are sold as a rule very young, at sixteen or seventeen, and the value of the implied consent in such cases does not amount to much. Advantage is often taken of the Imperial Order allowing them to abandon all such contracts at pleasure, but the Courts have thrown safeguards around the brothel-keeper, holding the girl still liable for the money loaned. As she has no other means of paying, and the brothel-keeper can come down on her parents, the result can be imagined. There is also a police regulation that the brothel- keeper must sign the release, and although presumably he can be forced to do so, he can put obstacles in the way and gain time to bring every kind of pressure on the girl. It is hardly necessary to say that the women found in the Japanese brothels are a very differ- ent class from the tough, drunken, and obscure creature that plays the same role in Europe and America. The Joro naturally has no credit even in Japan, their lives being passed amid degrading influ- ences, but the veil of charity is thrown over them by pity for the motives which lead many of them to such a life. Where her motives are respected, and where she is carefully protected against the vices of a licentious life, particularly drunkenness — for the police supervision of the brothel-keeper is severe on such points • 154. SAKURAMBO she can retain much of the charm of her womanhood, her grace and gentleness of manner. An exception is to be made in reference to the former treaty ports. If the prostitute of the western, stamp is found anywhere in Japan it is in those ports and in places fre- quented by Europeans. It is a curious fact, and the reverse of " complimentary " to the advanced intelligence of the European, that as one approaches the beaten track the women servants give place to men performing the offices usually turned over to " elder sister " (nesan). Local writers handle the subject rather, daintily, but I think it can be said that the European Japan has been made so by the European himself. Concubinage, unfortunately so prev- alent, casts a shadow over the Japanese woman, as foreigners get the impression that unchastity is the rule and not the exception, and encounters in inns and gay tea-houses fosters the idea. Vice as a rule is strictly localized by the police, but a good deal must be winked at. It is safe to say that the accommodating woman found in the less reputable inns is not one of the inn girls at all. In Japan, as elsewhere, the line is drawn hard and fast and those who do not seek the girl of easy access do not have her thrust upon them, but when they do seek her a licensed woman is readily obtained to meet the demand. Many women are so licensed or are connected with tea-houses in places too small to make worth while to maintain an official pleasure quarter. It is not safe to judge Japanese women by the Yoshkvara standpoint or the tea-houses of the summer and health resorts. One is quite likely to land in serious complications, or bag and baggage in the street, if such preconceived ideas are acted on elsewhere. In a respectable Jap- anese Yadoya, and at the tourist resorts to which foreign residents and their wives and children go in the summer season, any laxity on the part of nesan if known — and they always hunt in couples — would mean instant dismissal. This is based on the legal licensing of prostitution. Any house or hotel in which it is illegally prac- tised can be closed for two months on simple police order. Nesan is a capital hand at a bargain. Her parents have apprenticed her THROUGH KOTSUKE 155 for a term of years to the hotel, and during that time she carefully regards their interests. And besides she is a good little girl. Nikko is a charming place to rusticate. At its social best in August and early September; its physical best in October and early November. In the summer it is very rainy, and one must acquire web feet, an absolute indifference to getting soaked through, and a stock of ancient garments. The clouds were hang- ing over Nantaisan on the morning when I started for Lake Chu- zenji, a favourable prognostic according to the local weather sharps, as the prolonged wet spells usually come across the range which lies seaward. From preference I took the upper road as far as the Dainichido garden, passing over the site of what was once one of the prettiest spots in Nikko. There is still some beauty in it, especially when the azalea is in blossom in early July. x\mong the many disastrous rises of the Daiyagawa that of 1902 was one of the worst. It had been raining for days and the Lake was sending a cataract over the Kegon fall. A great landslip from Nantaisan sent a tidal wave down the valley, sweeping away every- thing in its path. The Dainichido, situated on the brink of the river near Nikko, was devastated, only one of the little temple buildings escaped ; but farther down, houses were swept away and the inmates with them. The c|uaint little Buddhas of Gamman-ga- fuchi were terribly banged about and the sacred bridge went down under the flood of waters carrying away everything below by the impact of its heavy timbers. This lower road along the river always goes to pieces during these freshets, and is always patched up again in the same spot to have the experience repeated. Why the upper road is not developed on the fairly level ground there afforded is one of the mysteries of the local engineering corps. This part of the river valley while pretty is decidedly common- place. It is not until the Ashio road is left behind at Futamiya and we advance up the gorge that the scenery becomes striking. Most pedestrians take to the short cuts on their way up the moun- tain. This I think is a mistake, for all the fine views down the valley and the towering mass of Nantaisan on the right are missed. 156 SAKURAMBO Just before reaching Naka-no-chaya, the view is obtained of the great cleft reaching almost from the summit of the mountain to the bed of the Daiyagawa, and is well worth the long curves of the ricksha road. The change to the level of the little plateau lying between Nantaisan and the head of the lake is very sudden, and all sense of being in the wilderness of the Japanese central mountain range is cut off and one could well imagine oneself taking a woodland walk on the plains below so thoroughly are the sur- rounding slopes screened by the trees. If one walks a hundred feet back of the Kegon tea-house a fine view is obtained down the valley we have been climbing for the past few hours. This is a magnificent splash of gold, yellow, and red, in early October when the trees of the higher elevations take on their autumn tints. A good deal of this is due, not to the trees but to a creeper very common all through these woods and which takes a fine red colour. Modern times have sadly stripped the gods of their powers. Among the numbers of people we have passed or who have passed us on the mountain there are a goodly proportion of women. Some tramping sturdily along, for the Japanese woman is no mean pedestrian. Others carried in kago, the favourite means of con- veyance of the native among the mountains even when ricksha is available. Now Nantaisan is a very holy mountain. Most moun- tains are holy in Japan, and this Futaara shrine one of the holiest. Up to very recent times women were forbidden to climb the moun- tain, and they could only view it from the level of the lake, a proceeding which most of them are very sensibly satisfied to do even at this date. There is no royal road to Nantaisan, which is regarded as a most fatiguing climb from the steepness of the path and the great number of steps making the grade still more severe. In ancient times we could believe the prohibition still more rigorous and their presence even on this lower slope of the mountain not admitted. That is, if we can believe the following veracious legend. Many, many years ago, a little nun belonging to the Futaara shrine at Nikko made up her mind possibly that since so many men found something to see on the slopes of Nantaisan there THROUGH KOTSUKE 157 must be something there she would hke to see too ; and perhaps find out by a personal interview whether the god to whom she had devoted her services was really such a woman-hater as he had the reputation of being, or whether the prohibition laid on her sex was simply another device of selfish man to keep the key of the closet of good things to himself. A view doubtless supported by the gay life of her ecclesiastical superiors of those early days and going on under her own eyes. At all events, tucking up her kimono care- fully out of dust's way until only the red underskirt formed her outer conspicuous garment, and with her broad pilgrim's hat and a stafif she started on her long climb. Intentions doubtless count for much — faith as well as works. Our little nun was a kagura dancer — one of the sacred temple dances is called by that name — but while her little feet were skilled in the sacred measure they had had little practice in walking. In time, therefore, she grew very tired, and when she had climbed the mountain and reached the spot just opposite where now the bridge crosses to the Lakeside Hotel at Chxizenji she stopped to rest. Here was the god's chance to punish this outrageous intrusion on his shrine. At once she was turned to stone, and there she sits yet, a plain and palpable proof of the legend, safe from storm and rain, and ensured an eternity of fame far beyond the ephemeral existence of Lot's wife. The proof of the legend is certainly ad hominem. There the maiden is, and the only thing that carping critics could bring against the \'eracity of the tale is the fact that the village is supposed to have existed and prospered some eleven hundred years now, and even in Japan a village cannot exist and prosper for a much shorter time without the due proportion of the fair sex. Let us try to get some idea as to what this religion is that has led our little nun to take such fearful risks involving her undoing. It is no easy matter to get at just what is the condition of the Jap- anese mind regarding religion. Every religionist colours his views according to the cult that he professes. If you are to believe the Buddhist, then the supremacy of the creed of Shaka Muni is unquestioned. With no little reason they point to the many 158 SAKURAMBO temples sprinkled over the land, and to the priests engaged in their service. To them there is no cause to bestir themselves. Their opponents on the contrary, especially Christian, say that Buddhism is a dead creed in the country; that it has remained behind with the ideals of the past ; that it has not kept pace with the expanding of the Japanese mind; that it has no real life and only needs a push to send the whole structure to the ground. In the early part of the eighteenth century much was heard of Shinto, the original cult of the nation and which had dropped into oblivion before the effective organization of the Buddhist propaganda. There is but little argument as to Shinto now. Its polemics have dropped out of sight. But this mainly because Shinto as the national cult has triumphed. There was no contest of supremacy in the nation at large. Some commentators in studying the ancient books chose to ask the question does Shinto still live in the hearts of the Jap- anese people, and the answer was unanimous, for it was not so much a question of religion as a question of national identity and once understood the answer was a foregone conclusion. Now Shinto in one sense is Nature Worship. There are gods without end, enough to cover all the phenomena that has come or is likely to come to man's knowledge- in the future. Whether eight hun- dred or eighty or eight myriads of them is a matter of little im- portance, for the term " myriad " is very elastic and they are always growing. But the important point is that the basis of the system is Ancestor Worship. All these gods and goddesses are directly connected with the genealogy of the Mikados. This is so much the case that one is somewhat led to doubt whether there has ever been a genuine nature worship in Japan, entirely free and independent of this Ancestor Cult. The cut-and-dried genealogies however of the Kojiki and Nihongi are so obviously a compilation made for effect that one can just as well attribute their nature to a readjustment of an old nature worship lost in the mists of time as to take the ground above that Nature Worship has sprung from Ancestor Worship. Whichever way it is we have at the dawn of history a cult which embodies both elements but of which the THROUGH KOTSUKE 159 Ancestor element has taken the predominant position. To the Chief of the Nation is attributed a divine ancestry, and an elaborate genealogy has been worked out which is made the basis of the body, politic and religious. But the deification by no means stops there. As the Chief of the Nation rules by right divine so the chiefs of the tribes are of divine origin, younger cadet branches of the Imperial house. The same allegiance that is owed by all to the head of the nation is owed by the tribe to its individual head. It is to the deification of these chiefs after death that most authorities attribute the origin of the I6cal gods, the Uji-no-kuini, and the centre of the tribal worship was the temple raised in honour of the common ancestor, and probably at the time its worship was confined entirely to the members of the tribe. In fact, at that time habitat was very restricted and the dwellers in a district were related by ties of blood, a condition of affairs moreover which in some places has lasted down to the present day. In course of time there was change. With the development of a feudal system in place of a family system fiefs were often changed and chiefs removed to distant parts of the country. Great care was taken to maintain the cult of the Uji-no-kami which had now become the local divinity, and whose worship now included many not connected in any way as members of the tribe. The last stage was when the Uji-no-kami became confounded with or merged into a local Nature God, always be it remembered retaining as basis his right to worship as an Ancestor and so confounding the two forms of belief — Nature and Ancestor Worship — as to prevent the develop- ment of any idea of a god as apart from the ancestral cult. Now in ancestor worship the most important feature is the maintenance of the family line, the necessity of an heir male to continue the family worship. Woman has always been excluded from exercising the higher religious rites of the cult. Also she has been regarded practically as a chattel. When she leaves the house to go to her husband she also leaves the family to become a member of her husband's family. Only under certain circumstances does she play any part in relation to the family worship and that 160 SAKURAMBO is when through lack of heirs male a stranger is adopted into the family for the purpose of marriage so that her issue may continue the hlood line in the worship of the ancestor. Every Japanese house has the kamidana or god shelf where the mortuary tablets of the family ancestor are placed and before which offerings are made. This in itself would be evidence that the basis of the Japanese system is Shinto. Many Japanese are Buddhists. All are Shinto- ists. It is not so much a belief in dogmas — for Shinto dogmas may be said to be non-existent they are so very shadowy — as a sym- bolic representation of the unity of the race, and it is as such that it has such strong hold to-day on all classes of Japanese. The intense earnestness of this religious feeling among the Japanese does not seem to have attracted the attention it really deserves, although the evidence of it is continually under one's eyes. This is to some ex- tent due to the relationship existing between the worshipper and the God. He is the god of the race, not a universal god. There is just as much fierce pride of possession in the gods as in the old exclusive cult of Jehovah among the Israelites of old, a race by the way to which the Japanese have no little resemblance. The Japanese god, however, is not a being apart from and above all mankind. To them the universe is Japan, and they have never extended their cult to take in a wider range than it did in the times when the race first appears in history. The Japanese therefore approaches his god as in times past he approached his chief, humbly and reverentially but with a feeling of the blood tie that exists between them, and that he feels most intensely. Mr. Lowell, in his " Occult Japan," has described their " hypnotic possession " of which the race make such a practice, and the very extent of which is the best of evidence as to their intensity of feeling. As a Jap- anese writer has described it, they always feel the presence of the kami. They are as much a part of the land as the living and surround the living on every side, entering into all their pleasures and griefs. So much for the daily practice of religion; but for the future they turn to the developed Buddhistic philosophy. THROUGH KOTSUKE 161 Here they have something far more tangible to grasp than anything that Shinto can give them. From the very earhest days the importance of worship has been emphasized by Imperial edicts. Shinto to-day is the State religion and thoroughly believed by the great mass of Japanese who, it is safe to say, are as confident that their ancestors were present at the Battle of Tsushirha to encourage their descendants and throw confusion and terror into the hearts of the enemy, as when the Tartar horde of former days descended on the shores in the days of Hoj5 Tokimune. But we ourselves worship our ances- tors. We are as much concerned to-day to uphold the name they have handed down to us as if we had invested them with all the attributes of the Japanese Kami, and among the upper classes of the western world it is far more fear of disgrace brought on the family name than fear of religion that upholds the social code. Some old moss-covered blurred slabs have more influence than the church under whose shadow they rest. An ancestor worship, properly speaking, is pride of race. The intolerance of race is well known, and the long seclusion of the Japanese have intensified racial feeling among them to an extent that western Utopianism with its brother- hood of man — and which we sometimes hear expressed among Japanese — will never break down. They are a peculiar people, made so by their physical and political isolation; just as the Hebrew of old, made so by his religious isolation. There is an interesting feature in the rituals used by the Shinto priests. As in so many religions, they have become unintelligible with the lapse of time. Of course once they had a meaning, but much of it is lost, even to the priest who recites it much as many an ignorant monk of the middle ages mumbled his Latin prayers. The latter, how- ever, always admitted of an interpretation elsewhere, if the Frere Gorenflot of the occasion could not master its meaning. The Shinto formula, however, often only admits of endless controversy, the choice of whose interpretations is a matter for the commentators. There is another form of Japanese religious feeling among the lower classes, and that is the grossest superstitions. Nothing of 162 SAKURAMBO importance is done without the interposition of the priest who deals in charms of all kinds, whether to catch a thief or a husband, for defence against disease or against a ghost. Charm books and almanacs govern the course of any undertaking, and unlucky days therein marked are carefully avoided. Shinto has built up an inter- esting folklore around it. It is childish and crude compared to the folklore of the West. For instance, Jason and the Golden Fleece and the beautiful myths found all through Homer. It deals much with wonderfully strong children found in unusual places, of strange transformations of spirits good and evil into human shape, and the number of ghost stories are uncomfortably large. The Japanese child gets his fill of Bake Mono San ( Honourable Mr. Ghost). The fox among animals especially fills an unpleasant role in his pranks and " possessions." They are reticent about it, and it takes some little time to find out that many of the lower classes (particularly women) avoid the Yokohama Koyenchi (park) on account of a fox which is supposed to haunt it at night. Whether one leaves the Lakeside Hotel by the pretty shaded road which follows all the windings of the lake or pushes on by boat to Shohu no hama near the upper end, the first striking feature to meet the eye is the scarred track of the great landslide of 1902. This stretches from just below the upper third of the mountain to the base, spreading out fan-shaped to a width of over a hundred yards. The temple buildings stood in the track of the slide and were crushed and buried beneath it There was warning of the danger and there does not seem to have been loss of life, although the native on that point wavered somewhat between plain igno- rance and the wish to adorn a tale. The uncertainty left in the mind is somewhat akin to that of the elder Mr. Weller after his upset in driving down to Eatanswill. He found the old gentleman's hat, but was uncertain whether or not the owner's head was in it. This experience with the mountain, however, has been taken as a warning, and advisedly if the palpable signs of landslip seen else- where are any indication of the frequency of this occurrence. The temple has been rebuilt on the opposite side of the lake and THROUGH KOTSUKE 163 standing on the shore under its torii is had one of the finest views , of Nantaisan across the water that can be had anywhere on the circumference of the mountain. A Japanese temple usually implies a view. This is so much the case that the temple forms part of the mise en scene, and the exquisite harmony between it and its surroundings arouse the admiration of everyone who visits this eastern land. Now we can admit the genius to which its develop- ment is second nature, but after all scenery is not architecture and taking the temple out of its environment the result is disastrous. The origin of Japanese temple architecture is referred by competent authorities to the native hut or house, its main features being economy of space and beauty in the curved lines of the roof. As it was nearly fourteen hundred years ago, so it is to-day, with little change except as to the decoration with which Buddhism in some cases has loaded it. Now it is the idea that is back of the temple that influences its development, and it has been the Japanese idea of these Kami, of these forefathers of the race, the domesticity of their cult, that has directed its external form. Their gods are their kinsmen, the most recent of these hardly being any more removed from those of the race now walking the earth than the freshest canonization emanating from Rome. We have no record of such an influence in ouf Aryan mythologies. Traces there are indeed of ancestor worship in all religions and they are found in the my- thologies of Greece and Rome, and in the latter influence private worship down to the latest days of the Empire. The hosts of heaven are peopled with progenitors of their kings and heroes, but such members of the celestial hierarchy play always a subordinate part. There is no bond between the great gods of the Indian, the Assyrian, the Egyptian, the Greek, and the Roman mythology, and their worshippers. They are beings apart entirely from the human race. Man to them is their sport and plaything. Hence, even if the gods were endowed with many of the malicious frailties of men, and of which men's misfortunes seemed to imply the existence, the feeling inspired was one of awe and fear, and such feeling would seek expression in the architecture and rites of the temple where 164 SAKURAMBO such gods were worshipped. Placing God so far beyond him and outside of him, the rehgious man of the West has developed a cor- responding architecture, as far in advance of the East as the idea of an extra-human God is in advance of ancestor worship. And mark that it is the idea that influences here. That the nearer it approaches to unity, the greater the concentration of its architec- tural development. The Greeks worshipped many gods it is true, but in the grandest age of Greece — the age of Pericles — the idea at the root of all Greek philosophy was the unity of the universe as they knew it and of which they were seeking an expression. In fact, whenever we find religion based on that idea of unity, a religion trying to seek in its esoteric expression a formula to explain that universe by a single first cause we find a great temple architecture. The great Assyrian temples of Bel and Ishtar at Nineveh and Babylon, of Isis and Osiris at Thebes and Memphis, the Parthenon at Athens, Jupiter Capitolinus at Rome, are all the expression of man's idea of the power in whose hands he felt lay his fate. The position of Christianity was peculiar. A new development of an old religion on hostile soil, it naturally rejected the architectural form of that religion. In some ways the basilica — a development itself of the Roman house with its otriitin — has influenced early Christian architecture, but it soon found this unsat- isfactory and broke into its own lines. These were to some extent modified by the introduction into the old Hebrew idea of Unity of the Godhead of the mystic idea of a Trinity, which, with the devel- opment of " Mary Worship " and worship of the Saints, necessi- tated chapels adjunct to the main church and radically influenced the architecture. Therefore Christian architecture has never reached the beauty of the Greek ideal which after all was essen- tially single in its basis. Temple architecture is racial just as the Church is racial, and in so far as the western mind has raised the ideal of an awful omnipotent first cause as God, and sought to express that awfulness and beauty in wood and stone, so it has gone beyond those nations who have confined their speculations within the range of their immediate environment; and as these THROUGH KOTSUKE 165 always lived in the past, made the past their ideal to which the present must conform, so their architecture conforms to the same primitive belief. This tyranny of the past has wrapped the Far East in swaddling clothes. After the first enthusiasm over Buddh- ism had worked its effect the land sank back into its numbing sleep. There was none of that fermentation of ideas, that hetero- geneity to which the West owes so much. Their renaissance of faith was of the nature of scholastic disputes, rather than such as inspired Europe ,from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries to cover the land with magnificent cathedral churches. The practice of Christianity in requiring frequent worship of the people en masse necessitated the presence of the Church as near the centre of popu- lation as possible, and which can account for the fact that natural surroundings do not play the prominent part that it does in the setting of the Japanese temples. This however has not always been the case ; in many western countries it is not the case to-day, and everybody knows the care and thought the architect is expected to give to the question of making the best use of environment. In ancient days this was carried to a great extreme, as the picturesque and harmonious surroundings of many an old French and English Abbey show. It would be a bold man to say that the ruins of Furness or Fountains Abbey in England were out of harmony with their surroundings. There are few finer scenes than the latter as viewed from the distance. Beauty in this pile is not dependent on its surroundings. Milan cathedral, that beautiful monument in white marble of man's devotion to an idea, would be quite as harmonious amid a setting of Nature as it is ini the streets of the great city which lies around it and worships in it. Exquisite as is the decoration of the Nikko temples, will anyone seriously rate them as equal to the Sistine Chapel or the Pope's Apartments in the Vatican. The one the work of Michael Angelo Buonarotti, the other of Raphael Sanzio? Is there any music to be found in the Japanese liturgy to compare to that poured out by the grand organs of Europe? After all architecture is a question of mathe- matics and mechanics. It is the work of men's hands, and one 166 SAKURAMBO will hardly seriously compare the Nikko and Hongwanji temples with the Duomos of Milan and Florence, of Amiens, Cologne, Burgos, Toledo, Lincoln, or Salisbury most graceful of English temples. They are not comparable. Nikko has the beauty of one of the jewel boxes of Cellini; Milan, Florence, and Rome, possess not only the beauty of Cellini but the grandeur of Michael Angelo. Japanese religious architecture is exactly expressive of the people themselves. For generations their ideal has been limited in its general outlines. All their force has been expended on the elab- oration of detail. One turns away from Nikko with a feeling of dissatisfaction, a feeling that it does not express the fulness of a great idea such as is found in the temple architecture of India, of the Moslem races, or the cathedrals of Europe. As a mausoleum it is exquisite. As an expression of faith, infinitely finite. As we push a little further on into the lake a break in the mountains is seen on the left. This is the Asagatatoge, a pass which leads across to Ashio and the Akagi range of which more anon. Suffice it to say here that a very indifferent footpath leads to it and that a fifteen minutes' climb to the top gives a beautiful view, particularly on the lake side. The path on the other side leads down to Dozan or the mining town at Ashio. Mining towns are usually what can be called " tough " and Dozan is no exception to the rule. It is quite refreshing to find this touch of universal nature. It — and some few other things — reminds us that our Japanese hosts are part of the human race after all. The general term of address elsewhere in Japan to the foreigner is Jinsan, which as a term of reproach is of the mildest character. Dozan, how- ever, never reaches such a point of etiquette. Jin is as far as its higher education has gone, and the commoner term as the stranger wanders along its long and dirty street is ijin and tojin or ke-tojin, which according to the animus of the speaker can be translated " barbarian," " hairy barbarian," or " foreign pig." The plant of the copper company is a very extensive one. Concentrators, smelters, reverberatories, tunnels driven in every direction into the bare hillsides, the shriek and rattle of the mine trams, the hard, THROUGH KOTSUKE 167 sullen faces of the people, and the reign of absolute ugliness set Dozan apart as a mining town. Just as other mining towns else- where bear their characteristic marks. Below the town of Ashio — the secular portion of the settlement — is the filter plant to filter the mine waters. These have given much trouble to the farmers below who have sought redress from the Government and Diet in Tokyo, rather than by damage suits or injunctions from the Courts, a usual procedure in the West. Filtration has been adopted as the remedy. The agitation was carried on with the usual exaggera- tion, there being no particular reason to believe that affairs were ■worse than they had been for years, the sudden cry of danger to health of those living below on the river being rather specious. The fact that no effort had been made, however, to remedy the evident disadvantages of such a careless system as running the mine waters direct into the river seems to show that remedial legislation in such directions had made but little progress. At Shobu-no-hama our road leaves Lake Chuzenji to ascend some seven hundred feet to the level of the moorland of Senj5-ga- liara. Near the village it passes through a pretty piece of wood- land which reminds one much of our own woodland at home. The Ryuzu-ga-take or Dragon's Head Fall is a beautiful cascade. This whole district is subject to sudden risings during the heavy rains ■of August, and it is at such times that these falls are at their best. In early October this place is a blaze of red and yellow. The Senjo-ga-hara is a broad valley surrounded by mountains and •one of the most American pieces of scenery in Japan. There is but little sign of native life and one feels translated to a scene of our western country. In early July the Shobu or Iris dots this moor in every direction. This Shobu is not to be confounded with the Shobu of Shobu-no-hama. They are written with differing ideo- graphs. And as thereby hangs a tale, perhaps it is worth telling. Many, many years ago — mukashi, zundo noo-mukashi ne, as the Japanese say — the God of Akagisan who had been casting longing eyes in this direction determined to try conclusions with Futarra- -sama, the God of Nantaisan ; and so he came striding across the 168 SAKURAMBO hills and kicking a dent in them at that very Asa-gata^toge, which we have just left behind; and the two, gods met on this Senj5-ga- hara or " Moor of the Battlefield." Terrible was the combat and few the details handed down to gaping mortals, but the result was that Akagisama fled back in confusion and distress over the hills, and Futaarasama to show his joy over the victory established games and general festivities on the piece of flat ground near the head of the Lake, whence the name Shobu-no-hama or strand of the games. To this day once a year the priests come up from Nikko to the Temple at Chozenji, and early in the morning with full canonicals and ritual shoot an arrow into the Lake in the direction of Akagisan and in token of the defiance of their god. I know there is a more prosaic explanation which attributes the name of the moor to a battle fought between partisans of the North and South Empires during the Ashikaga Shogunate, but why should men seek such a " hole and corner " place to " have to do " with each other, as old Mallory says? One can take their choice — the old legend of the battle of the gods, or the official legend of the battle of the men. The only visible sign of a battle is a long mound rising in the plain to the left. The road across the moor is very willingly left behind. In ordinary bad weather it is a mudhole, and in wet weather it is under water. At such times nolens volens one must abandon " Shank's mare " for a more suit- able conveyance. On the other side of the moor by a short detour from the Yumoto road we reach the prettiest cascade in this Nikko district. The Yu-no-taki is, properly speaking, that rather rare feature a waterslide. Something such as little Jan Ridd staggered up and down in his excursions to reach the Doone valley, and which by the way only existed in Jan's vivid imagination. It is the direct outlet of Lake Yumoto, and set in exquisite green plunges most abruptly from the sky, so to speak. One gets a better idea of its height — 200 feet — as they struggle up the steep path beside it to rejoin the road a few minutes along which brings one into Yumoto. The road winds under the trees along the picturesque little lake and soon opens up on the left the Konseitoge leading THROUGH KOTSUKE 169 across to Higashi Ogawa and the valley of the Katashinagawa, to Numata and Ikao. Yumoto is a very isolated primitive little place. Purely and simply an Onsen, or bathing resort. Many foreigners resort to it not only for its baths but for the beautiful surround- ings, and the elevation of nearly five thousand feet ensures cool- ness in summer. But it is very much out of the vi^orld. In spite of its walled-in appearance there are several ways of getting out of Yumoto, although only two are what can be called popular. One road we have just come over, but it is possible to return to Nikko by the trail between Omanago and Nantaisan and come down near the Jikwan waterfall. Again, surmounting the little ridge just behind the village to the north a pretty walk of three miles through the woods brings one to a little mountain tarn absolutely deserted except for a wood-cutter's hut, an enter- prising native who -has established a rough tea-shed in addition to his normal occupation. Climbing up and across a great land- slide the summit of the Toyotoge pass is reached 1300 feet above Yumoto. There is a fine view here over the forest-clad country to the north. If maps are to be relied on this trail can be followed to the Kinugawa, bringing one ultimately at Kawaji, which lies on the road between Wakamatsu and Nikko. For those whose object is the hot springs of Kusatsu the way out is over the Kon- seitoge and a few minutes before seven in the morning saw me on my way along the rather rough trail, which, rising gradually through the forest, wins much ground before the final pull up the zigzags of the saddle, there being a last steep climb of 600 feet to the top of the pass 1825 feet above Yumoto. There is a fine view of Na;ntaisan on the Yumoto side, but the rest of the day's walk was down through forest and over a bad trail which required constant attention to footing, so soft and full of roots is it. The country seems absolutely uninhabited, no side trails running off until nearly down to the valley of the Ogawa. Just below the saddle is a little mountain lakelet which gives a glimpse of the open. I had noted horse droppings near the top of the pass, and just beyond this lake was not surprised to meet a train of horses 170 SAKURAMBO being driven up in the direction of Yumoto. Now it is well under- stood that horses are not taken across Konseitoge. There are one or two places where it would be more than advisable to lead the animal but otherwise the trail is feasible for them, but a nega- tive answer is usually given. People who do not wish to walk can take kago, the native litter, otherwise there is no recourse but to one's legs. The horses I saw mounting the trail were all fine well-groomed animals and looked like cavalry mounts. They were the only incident in the nine miles to the peasant's hut at the head of the Ogawa Valley. Here the scenery improves. There are remnants of mining operations, and just before reaching Higashi- Ogawa an abandoned copper mine is passed to the left. A little after noon I came into the pretty mountain hamlet, having come down some 3600 feet from the top of the pass. It can be added that the yadoya along this route have the reputation of furnishing a minimum of foreign convenience with a maximum of European prices, a deal table or a chair being supposed to warrant a con- siderable advance in the usual charges. The next morning at half-past six I started down the valley on " Shank's mare " for Numata, twenty-three miles away. Horses are supposed to be available at Higashi-Ogawa, but in the Japanese mountains everywhere one must be prepared to fall back on one's legs as the last resort, for they are quite likely to be called on. A few miles below Higashi-Ogawa the Ogawa is crossed and we enter the valley of the Katashinagawa. There is a beautiful view up and down from the top of the hill just beyond the school- house, even in this out of the way place that substantial institution being a prominent feature. All down the valley is a succession of pretty landscapes and at Okkai is a fine gorge picturesquely seen from the bridge. This road is good all the way. At Ohara the inn had gone out of business, an event that often happens in the country. A farmhouse, however, offered the temporary shelter necessary for tiffin. If one could judge by external appearance there was a good deal of substantial wealth all through this dis- trict. The farm buildings were large and elaborate, mainly half THROUGH KOTSUKE 171 timber and plaster work and with far less of the ■ flimsy wooden work that is a common feature of the towns. There was a great deal of silk spinning going on everywhere. There is a peculiar feature which can be referred to in connection with Japanese clean- liness in other directions, and that is the habit of spreading grain and fruit on mats and exposing them to dry in the sunshine. In town and in country this is carried on by the side of the public highway, and such products are exposed to all the contamination that the dust and dirt of such a place furnishes, and uncovered cesspools placed in close proximity to the public highway for con- venience of passersby add to the danger. The latter, as has been said, are a very necessary feature of Japanese farm life, for night soil is the universal fertilizer. They are often elaborately pre- pared cisterns dug at the foot of a hillside in the soft sandstone or clay so widely distributed through the land. Here the compost is allowed to concentrate and ripen for weeks before using, and pro- tected from the weather by the overhanging rock wall, or when built in the open, by the thatched shed erected around it. The Kazusakatoge had temporarily gone out of business owing to a landslide which removed a section of the road, so I turned sharply to the right and began the ascent of a little pass just behind Ohara. A sunny but not very steep climb of eight hundred feet took me to the top, from which there was a beautiful view over toward the Haruna ranges at Ikao. A long and pretty woodland walk down leads to the orchards around Takahira. In the season when the fruit is ripening the Japanese orchards are a funny sight. In- stead of, as the poets sing, the beautiful fruit " turning its blushes to the sun," every peach, or pear, or apple, is carefully wrapped up in a paper bag to protect it from the attacks of insects. This is no particular advantage to the fruit which needs the sun to ripen properly, but the native fruit-grower is " between the devil and the deep sea " on this question. They take this trouble with the nashi. The name usually given this in English is " pear." The fruit itself can be described as a coarse, watery, woody, slightly sweet turnip, without the tail usually attached to that estimable 172 SAKURAMBO and far more useful vegetable. An experience with the nashi is of that fibrous nature that one experiences in chewing sugar-cane — with the sugar left out. Some people may say that this is hor- rible. So it is, but the Japanese are very fond of the nashi. Per- haps a development in another field of their fondness for the gro- tesque. Most Europeans will prefer the fragrant and beautiful Bartlett or Catherine pear, just as they prefer Apollo Belvedere or Donatello's Faun to the frowning countenance of Emma O or the twisting and scaly dragons. Fortunately for the walker the distances given in the guide-book are certainly liberal, as I came into Numata but ten minutes over the hour from Takahira. Ricksha are supposed to be available at the latter place but are not to be relied on unless returning to Numata. After eight hours of walking, half-past three in the afternoon brought me to the large and excellent commercial house which is the main inn of the place. Emphasis is to be laid on the fact that Konseitoge is to be taken in this direction. By the time Yumoto is reached from Nikko much of the ascent has already been accomplished, and after climbing Konseitoge it is substantially all down-hill with the exception of the short pass beyond Ohara. Numata itself lies at 1500 feet elevation or 5200 feet below the top of Konseitoge. It is a large, busy Japanese town and a distributing centre for the silk produced in the district, and lies on the plateau which here forms a series of bluffs along the Tonegawa, giving the town the appearance of being hoisted in the air. It is like most Japanese towns, and would never be mistaken for the hanging gardens of Babylon. The shortest way to Nakanojo on the Kusatsu road is straight across the hills on one's legs or on horseback. The gorge of the Tonegawa just below Numata is, however, well worth the detour, and half-past six saw me bowling down the broad road which makes a straight plunge down to the river bed, a piece of roadway often seen in America or Europe but seldom seen in Japan, where a narrow cart track zigzagging up the face of a hillside is the more frequent means of negotiating a grade. At the foot of the hill the river is crossed, and we followed a fine piece of macadam running THROUGH KOTSUKE 173 between towering cliffs with the broad green river boihng along below them. At the mouth of the gorge my men turned off cross country for a mile to strike into the Nakanojo road, another fine piece of metalling and with an easy grade following up the wide valley of the Agatsumagawa ; Ikao and the Haruna Mountains line the opposite side of the river, and we are running along the foot of the Nakayama range. Ahead is the mountain district of Kusatsu, which includes the big fellows lying to the east of the Nagano plain. The ride is a very picturesque one but is not shaded, and when about noon I reached the comfortable inn I was glad to rest for a couple of hours. Nakanojo is quite a large village, and when one has to traverse its interminable length on a hot summer day before the shelter of the Nabaya is reached, a very graphic impression is obtained as to its proportions. The town was getting ready for the great midsummer festival of the Japanese (and Chinese), the Bon Matsnri, or " Feast of the Dead," at which time for three days the spirits are supposed to return to their former haunts on earth. Lanterns therefore must be prepared to light the way for them. These lanterns are usually plain white without even the decoration of a few Chinese ideographs. It is the great time for visiting temples and graves, and the priests are kept busy reciting memorial services. Flowers and offerings of food are placed on the graves, the latter with no idea that the spirits partake of it except in so far as the odour is agreeable to them. The stoppage of business while not so complete as at Shogetsu (New Year's) makes a very respectable second to that great fes- tival. New clothes are prepared and the Bon kimono and ohi (dress and sash) are quite as important to the women as its mid- winter predecessor. Bon Matsuri is a beautiful festival and the idea behind it a beautiful idea ; for if one omits the lanterns from the scene it is plainly and simply the " All Saints' Day " of our western world, when, especially in Roman Catholic countries the visit to the graves of beloved dead, and the placing of flowers thereon is carried out in very much the same way as is going on at this midsummer date in Japan. Religions do not differ much 174 SAKURAMBO in the general trend of these celebrations. The Japanese Matsuri's are on the whole rather sober in their tone, the only element of excitement being offered when at times the " God Car " is carried in procession through the street and the worshippers get wrought up to a point beyond their own control. There is, however, no such outbreak of general license as is seen in Carnival season in some cities of southern Europe, no such painful sights as the processions of Holy Week. It is hardly in the Japanese to muti- late and maul his person for religious purposes. His gods are closely connected to him by blood. He is in practice if not in theory a good deal of a materialist, and attributes the same utili- tarian habits of thought to his ancestor in the spirit that he does to the living generation. Juggernaut could develop in the South, but not on Japanese soil. The hair shirt and the scourge have as little place in this family intercourse with the gods. Meditation and introspection, however, quite suits their oriental habit. The fate of the Bodai Daruma, who sat in meditation for nine years until his legs dropped ofT, is far more likely to overtake the Jap- anese " religious " than that of the Stylites of old or the modern Indian fakir. Bon Matsuri is a landmark in other ways, as one takes it in city or country. In the country it is celebrated according to the old calendar and comes in the middle of August. In the Tokyo district " Bon " is celebrated by the new calendar in the middle of July and hence comes before the Doyo or hot wet season. It is the signal for a scamper to the hills by everyone who can get away from the plain cities. Previous to that period cool weather has been the average and while sprinkled with intensely hot days the Nyubai or cold rainy season, lasting up to the first ten days of July, often gives some chilly rainy days, even towards its end. For a couple of weeks the hot dry season follows on and then comes the trying period of the year Doyo, the heat of which breaks rather sharply towards the middle of September, although the rains continue for another six weeks. Then follows the cold dry season up to the nasty sleety weather of the end of February ushering in the spring THROUGH KOTSUKE 175 rains. As therefore one takes Bon in country or city he is resigned to the discomforts of an approaching steam bath or he is looking forward to rehef within measurable distance. The Tokyo sum- mer, however, is by no means as bad as the latitude would give reason to suspect, for the climate being insular there is usually a lowering of temperature after midnight and a cool breeze from the sea. It is infinitely better than that found for instance in the eastern United States, and which in its turn is celestial compared to the Mississippi Valley, which resembles a climate the exact reverse of celestial. The road divides at Nakanojo, both branches going to Kusatsu, and both having their vigorous partisans. I took the road to Sawatari. Beyond Nakanojo it is much inferior to the fine highway up the river valley. The rise is not very heavy but the two men have plenty to do when they get a short distance away from Nakanojo. It is a very pretty ride, soon entering and twisting among the intricacies of the hills. Two hours after the start one man dropped behind, and I found myself being carefully lowered down a steep village street, which, with the overhanging eaves and general chalet appearance of the houses was so startlingly like a bit of Switzerland that I was involuntarily carried back a score of years at a jump. This was Sawatari. The impression remained for some time even after the familiar open structure of the Japanese house had regained its ascendency in the physical pict- ure, but the mental picture long remained. Sawatari is situated at the bottom of a bowl and should be intolerably hot, but was not on this occasion. Perhaps the elevation (1900 feet) had some- thing to do with it. It is a resort for the victims who have been taking the acid baths of Kusatsu, its waters alleviating the terrible sores and eruptions often caused thereby. They fill the inns, of which with a few large farmhouses the place consists. Kami San killed the fatted calf (or chicken) for the foreigner, and as the plucking took place before the killing she did not add thereby to his appetite. Unfortunately in Japan as elsewhere the exigencies of the occasion, or the ignorance of the native, allows but little time between " grace " and " meat," and does not teach them that 176 SAKURAMBO freshly killed meat boils into tough strings fit for a fiddle rather than a Ulet. However, they meant very well, and having a whole upper floor available threw it all open to whatever breeze there was on this hot August day. There are three methods of progress beyond Sawatari : horse- back, one's legs, and the native kago. I now swear by the first two. In a moment of confidence and a rubbed foot I selected kago and four sturdy bearers, and at six-thirty in the morning started on the day's ride which was to land me at Kusafsu, and once more amid foreign surroundings. Now for the first fifteen minutes as one lies curled up in the litter its easy swinging is the poetry of motion. One feels they could ride for days — with bearers at forty-five cents a day. In half an hour one has misgivings, and in an hour full conviction that he has found the original model of Cardinal Balue's cage. An ache and a cramp develops in every limb. If one stretches their legs outside the vehicle then they are brought into contact with the natural cushions of the forward bearer, which much impedes his efforts and is likely to ruffle his temper. The frame excoriates the backbone, or soon raises an artificial hump as uneasily one shifts from shoulder to shoulder. The position, in fact, is that utterly impossible one assumed by those aborigines who figure so tragically behind the glass cases of the Government Museum in Washington, having long since done with this world. This doubling of the body is also a favourite method of preparing the cadaver among the Japanese, and perhaps the kago was invented as a sort of vicarious preparation for their future condition. The idea of riding for days in this conveyance is quickly dispelled. I had nine hours of it, and postpone the rest for the next world. The kago has its irritations moreover entirely apart from its own defects of construction. Every hundred yards the forward man's pole goes out in signal to change. With a jerk you are swinging between the two staves while the bearers change places and shoulders. A hundred yards is not much in twenty odd miles and one soon gets nervously anxious to measure the distance and watch for that signal, and contracts a personal THROUGH KOTSUKE 177 enmity against the leader and his staff which that patient creature hardly deserves. The road to Kusatsu from Sawatari winds among beautiful hills and finally ascends a pretty ravine, crossing a not very high pass from which a view is had across to the high plateau of Kusatsu now close at hand. The bare bald cone of Shiranesan marks the site of the village which lies at the base of the mountain. Between us, however, there is a great gulf fixed. Down the bearers go. There are green hills, rushing mountain streams, choice bits of woodland, and glimpses of some real pasture land, and always looming up ahead the dim purple outline of the roughly carved mountain mass in front of us. The scene quickly changes as we drop down through the picturesque moun- tain hamlet of Namasu, clinging to the side of the steep hill above the Kusatsugawa. The view up and down the gorge here is beautiful and the mountain masses tower up all around us. It is now twenty-eight hundred feet dead pull up to the plateau on which Kusatsu lies, and the stops of the kago men become frequent on the steep zigzags. However, everything must come to an end, and at last we emerge on the breezy upland. The grade across this rises easily. If it were not for its somewhat;^ospital-like surroundings Kusatsu would be one of the pleasantest resorts in Japan, but the place is a great resort for the lame, the halt, and the blind, of this part of the world. Far back in the sixteenth century it was known as a health resort. Perhaps longer. The Japanese have for a long time made medicinal use of the abundant hot water with which Nature has supplied them. They, too, have their legend of Bath and Prince Bladud, so to speak, for the somewhat legendary and dissipated Prince Karu was exiled by his brother to the hot springs of Dogo in lyo which interesting event took place in that still dubious period of Japanese history, 457 A. D. I was soon riding— not in state, for nine hours of " the cage " had left very little dignity — through the streets of the town. It is mainly a collection of inns together with the supply stores necessary for the large number of people who yearly flock here. The inns and the European hotels supply private baths, a very necessary 178 SAKURAMBO condition considering a class of patients which resort to the cure. Having deposited my goods and chattels, I wandered through the town which one notices at once is most efficiently policed. In the back ways and by places there is a most unpleas- ant display of cotton wadding going through its daily washing and drying in the sun. Looking under the surface of its Japanese exterior one could see that Kusatsu was a resort of the first rank in importance. The inns were large and on elaborate scale, but Kusatsu was essentially a place where the earnest business of people is to get well, and there were a very large number of them engaged in that pressing occupation. There was of course plenty of tinkle of the samisen and the gay laugh of the geisha, but the real stern business was health and everything was subordinated to that end. There was none of that dolce far niente air shrouding it and so conspicuous in places more frequented as summer resorts, such as Ikao and Miyanoshita and Shuzenji. There is far too large a proportion of real suffering in Kusatsu to make it agreeable as a pleasure resort. In the lower part of the town is the leper settlement separate from the rest of the community. There were no really bad cases exposed to view, although there may have been many within the houses. Swollen glistening faces, shapeless noses and lips, puffed eyes, and the little purple black dots from the moxa marking the skin, were everywhere to be seen, walking the streets and pursuing their ordinary avocations. It is, said that while leprosy is not cured at Kusatsu, it is held in check, and those resort- ing to the baths at stated intervals can so maintain their present, condition. I took my way back to the centre of the town thor- oughly disgruntled with the shadow the place throws over one. The business of disease is so palpably marked. The hot steam from the springs was rising in a great cloud in the centre of the square and from a public bath-house on the right came a great shout every now and then and a continual clatter. This was the Jikan Yu or time bath. They say that this carries a temperature of 60° C. (140° F.), but I was assured by an habitue that it was not often above 50" C. (122° F. ). The bathers work away at it THROUGH KOTSUKE 179 for nearly an hour, beating it with long boards to cool it, and then slowly immerse themselves in squads. The bath lasts five minutes and in the tender condition of their cotton-swathed bodies the contact of the hot acid water must be very painful. One man took three and a half minutes of his five minutes before he was fully immersed. Clenched jaws and strained faces showed what many of them were undergoing. The foreign hotel at Kusatsu is a primitive little place, but nicely kept and situated at the, farther end of the village, within easy access and yet removed from its more unpleasant features. One cannot help contrasting the develop- ment between this great Japanese watering place and similar devel- opments in the West. It is a fair comparison between what the Japanese in their isolation have managed to evolve from their social habits and what the westerner has evolved from his social habits. When one considers the great gay life of Carlsbad, of Homburg, of Aix-les-Bains, of Biarritz ; centres of music, art, literature, of every device by which poor humanity has tried to get away from the burden of its flesh and the realities of things ; and contrasts it with the narrow little round of this Japanese hot springs one cannot help feeling how far the Japanese have been left behind in the development of their social life. The pretty little geisha with her artistic posturing and her samisen is a very poor substitute for the music of the great European masters inter- preted daily by expert hands in the hundreds of Casinos sprinkled through the Bads of Europe. The former rouses the race en- thusiasm of her hearers, and it is no mean thing to say that they are capable of being so aroused, but the latter rouse the soul enthusiasm of their hearers, between which there is all the difference of thing? material and things eternal. The Japanese seems always the species " Japonicus." He never rises mentally to the genus " homo." Apart from, or rather in connection with the hot springs, the active volcano of Shiranesan is the most interesting object in the neighborhood of Kusatsu. Eruptions are quite frequent, the last having taken place in 1897. The present crater lies a short dis- 180 SAKURAMBO tance off the Shibu trail and an early start from Kusatsu gives time for a glance and still to be able to reach Shibu in good time before night. If it is proposed, however, to push on to the top of the mountain this would hardly be possible. Although Kusatsu lies on the lower slopes of the mountain the summit is not visible from the village owing to some big grassy spurs which shut off all view just behind the place. An excellent horse trail runs as far as the peasant's house near Shirane, and there are beautiful views across the cut up country to the Shimotsuke ranges of which Nantaisan and the Yumoto Shiranesan are conspicuous objects. Incidentally it can be added that one should know something of the Japanese ki,na alphabet, at least to the extent of the word doku, for some of the streams in this neighbourhood are arsenical. Notices are posted, of course in the native script, and in the absence of further advice it is safer to avoid drinking from any of these streams. On the higher slopes we pass into the district devastated by the last eruption of the mountain. This apparently was mainly steam, for the trees have been killed outright but not overwhelmed by any debris from the volcano. Steam had not been given the credit due to it in this class of natural phenomena previous to the terrible experience with Mont Pelee in Martinique, when it showed how effectually it could kill without destroying its victims, whether animal or vegetable. The peasant hut is reached 2300 feet above Kusatsu. At this point a rough path leads off the main trail to the bald bare cone on the slope of the mountain which contains the present crater now occupied by a lake. This cone is a disin- tegrated pile of shingle without a trace of any lava flow from the lip. We follow the cone around to the former sulphur refining works in the southwest corner, a distance of something less than a mile from where we left the main trail. The refining works consisted of four or five small buildings, the framework only standing. A few marks of fire were visible but they have gone to decay more from neglect than any effect of the eruption. There was no evidence of an eruption of mud or cinder in this direction. The tramway running into the crater had decayed much from the THROUGH KOTSUKE 181 same cause — neglect — and was partly covered up by the washings of the soil from the cone above. They ascend the sharp crater slope obliquely at an easy angle and enter the crater by a cutting about twenty feet in depth. It does not furnish a good entrance now to the crater which is best reached by a path just behind the huts, and which leads to the edge of the crater and down into it by an easily graded path. Waraji, or straw sandals, are very useful. To the east, northeast, and southeast of the volcano the forest has been killed but not buried, the tree roots being plainly visible. The crater walls vary in height from fifty to a hundred feet or more. To the northwest beyond the present crater, which is situated on the slope of the mountain, the real summit of Shirane rises to 7500 feet according to geological survey figures. Stand- ing twenty feet above the lake the barometer reading was 2700 feet above Kusatsu or 6500 feet, the same as the elevation of the refining works outside the rim. The lake is in the northeast corner of the crater, roughly round in shape, although somewhat irregular. It washes the steep crater walls on all sides but the southwest. The floor of the crater on this side has a very gentle slope from wall to lake. A few drainage streams have cut down to the surface and are the only means of approaching the water. At this date (August, 1904), no steam was visible and in but few places was the water disturbed by any sign of rising gas. It was very turbid with washings from the sides of the crater. The width of the crater looks not more than 1500 feet of which the lake occupies about one-half. The southwest end of the crater narrows to a second basin containing a shallow lakelet. The level of this is purely due to rainfall. A barrier separates it from the central lake and it has cut a channel through the soft material, a stream at times connecting it by a small cascade ten or twelve feet in height with the central lake. There was no sign of outflow of fresh lava. The volcanic detritus was mainly a highly silicious tufa, sometimes very finely divided and forming a mud which on drying caked into dusty friable masses. A few fragments picked up were more basic, being highly ferruginous. The steam, evi- 182 SAKURAMBO dently emitted freely at times by the volcano, carried sulphurous gases — hydrogen sulphide mainly from the odour — and pieces of pure sulphur were found on the crater floor. Much of the tufa was sulphur coated, and where the rock had solidified into a natural cement sulphur was normally a constituent as such. From absence of lava ffows, Shiranesan apparently is to be classed at present with the explosive type of volcanoes. As with Bandaisan further north. The last eruption of Bandaisan (1888) was on a much larger scale than at Shirane. The general character, cinder and mud, is the same. There is no particular reason wh}' a horse should not eat rice, and yet it was interesting to see my nag's appreciation of the cooked article. A good deal of my tififin box was left untouched, and he ate it up to that last grain in one sniff. I spent some time on Shirane as I had no wish to " rush through " the volcano, and then returned to Kusatsu. For my onward journey the next day I substituted the foreign kago which differs from the native in pro- viding room for the foreigners' legs. It can be granted that it is an improvement on the native article, but pretty much anything is that. By slow degrees we again reached the peasant's hut at Shirane. The horse trail here strikes right up and across the ridge and is said to be very bad on the Shibu side. The kago trail, however, follows almost on a level along the ridge to a lower pass on the mountain, soon rejoining the horse trail in the descent. There is but little scenery, for the path mainly runs on the level through the forest, but on the Shibu side when a little way down there is a glorious view down the Aalley to the Negano plain nearly 6000 feet below. This is not seen as a flat plain spread out below the eye, but is framed in at the outlet of a wild gorge hemmed in by lofty mountains. The dark gloom of the natural setting and the valley below smiling in the sunlight were a picture long to remember. The Shibutoge is one of Japan's finest mountain passes. The long steep descent was very interesting in spite of the exasperating kago, and not the least so the sharp drop down into the picturesque plateau or mountain valley in which Shibu THROUGH KOTSUKE 183 lies. Shibu is deservedly much esteemed by those taking the after- cure of the Kusatsu baths. It has good inns, charming surround- ings, and itself is a clean pretty little mountain village. There is some down grade from Shibu, through a pretty country, but my kurumaya soon brought me down to the level of the Nagano plain, and crossing the broad Chickumagawa a hot and dusty ride brought me to the railway station at Toyono. In spite of its limitations as a town its yadoya was a very pretentious affair for a station house, and did a rushing business. It is only an hour into Nagano, whose great Zenkoji temple soon appeared, the conspicuous mark in the landscape. The streets were full of pilgrims in their white kimonos and broad mushroom hats. The inns and shops were jammed with them, and the venders of charms and rosaries lining the approach to the temple were doing a roaring trade. Bunches of these holy men were hanging around the shop front much like flies around sugar. Zenkoji is a very holy place. If native report could be believed it was founded at the beginning of the seventh century, and although elsewhere this part of Japan seemed still to be debatable ground with the Ebisu sullenly drawing off to the north, the monks of Zenkoji seemed to hold their own in this remote corner. It is the original resting place of the image of Shaka Muni, the Buddha presented to the Erriperor by a Korean king in 552 A. D. An image over which there was no end of trouble as the new religion had to fight its way before " the powers that were " agreed to smile upon it and tolerate the worship. " The powers that were " were badly split on the question, and it was only settled by considerable blood letting during which the issue was very uncertain. However, here they are supposed to rest now. The present buildings have no connection with such an- tiquity. They are comparatively old, however, for Japanese tem- ples, dating from the fifteenth century and later. One finds this frequently to be the case. New buildings on an old foundation, the temples at Nara giving some of the few instances of real age in parts of the Horyuji temple and the pagoda of Yakushi, and which really do belong to the seventh century. By the next after- 184 SAKURAMBO noon I was being shoved through the grimy tunnels of the Usui pass, with exasperating ghmpses of the roadway following the curves of the hills and giving beautiful views all the way from Karuizawa to Yokokawa. If this section is walked or ridden one would gain much in scenery and lose but little in time, for the cog- road is intolerably slow. Nightfall saw me settled in my inn at the foot of the fantastic rocks of Myogisan. It has been remarked by someone that Japanese scenery must be visited to really appreciate the great Japanese landscape painters. There is no better place than Myogisan to have an object lesson as to those fantastic shadow landscapes so common in Japanese pictorial art. When one sees the erratic peaks with their jutting crags and impossibly placed trees, hanging in a cloudland, so to speak, which shrouds their base from view, the inspiration of the Japanese artist is seen to lie not so much in his imagination as in his experience. And an early morning at Myogi, when the mist still lies along the low- lands, will furnish many such a view so familiar to us in Japanese kakemono. VI SHINANO WAY ■' Sufficiently hast thou demonstrated this proposition, considerable or otherwise: That the mythus of the Christian Religion looks not in the eighteenth century as it did in the eighth But what next? Wilt thou help us to embody the divine spirit of that Religion in a new mythus ? What ! thou hast no faculty in that kind ? Only a torch for burning, no hammer for building? Take our thanks then, and thyself away. " — Sartor Resartus. That common feature of a Japanese landscape at the begin- ning of May — strings of paper-fish ranging from three to a dozen feet in length and tugging away in the breeze like the living carp they represent — is the sign manual that boys are a feature of the household effects in the home over or before which they are flying. When the boys' festival comes around, the next following the new- comer's birthday, he gets a number of presents consisting of these paper-fish or of little groups of dolls representing the heroes of old Japan — Jimmu Tenno, Hideyoshi and his great general, Kato Kiyomasa, or the demon-haunted Shoki. The fish are hung out to the breeze which swells their paper bodies, and gives them a singu- larly life-like motion as they plunge and wriggle and undulate as if hooked in their natural medium. There may be one such fish and there may be a dozen. Every year they are so suspended from a pole towering above the housetop, and as years and weather do their work they gradually diminish in numbers, so that by the time the boy has reached manhood all the paper-fish have probably dis- appeared into the atmosphere, gently by a piecemeal process or forcibly by an exceptionally strong breeze and weak tackling. A cheap one can be bought for twenty-five sen and a large handsome one for a yen and a half. They are strongly put together and elab- orately decorated and last far longer than their frail material would 1S5 186 SAKURAMB6 give any reason to expect. .Girls are somewhat at a discount in a Japanese house, and this is due simply to the different position which the Japanese family occupies in relation to the State. In outward form the Japanese in this respect do not differ in any way from the western nations. They are at a different stage of devel- opment. Their usage differs from the present not the past usage of western nations. In these present days when we speak of our family in distinction from household in America, and to nearly the same extent in Europe, we refer to a bond which is confined to blood relationship, and which has very little connection left with the law except in so far as intestate succession is concerned. The family as far as we are concerned is a bond of social fellowship far more intimate than with the rest of the community; a public opinion which is likely to judge our failings far more leniently than the said community. Their support, however, in these days, is purely a matter of good will, and entirely apart from any legal compulsion to stand and fall together. This is due to the development of individualism among us, the placing on the man just as few re- straints as are compatible with the public peace and security of others. This condition is the result, however, of a long and gradual evolution from a very different state. Even in these days a man cannot stand entirely alone. This is recognized in every country no matter how free the individual has been left to make the best use of his powers that he can to his own advantage. Every man owes certain duties to the State in the form of personal ser- vice or taxes ; and the man without a country, while protected by a legal code far more far reaching than in olden days, is, at the last appeal, more helpless to-day than at any time in the world's history. In the early days when true histoiy dawns in a nation we find that man's first refuge, his first call for aid, is to the family. It is the origin of the State. Under the old Roman law the father was supreme head, chief and priest. Not only the fortunes but the lives of the family were under his control and subject to his will. Children or wife were as completely in his power as any slave in SHINANO WAY 187 the household. The law was not likely to be invoked except in case of some informality in procedure. The old law of the Twelve Tables was a formulated code. Provided procedure was accord- ing to the code from a legal point of view the justice of the cause was not involved. A judge could not enter into motives influ- encing action. Custom and the establishment of the Censorship were the only limitations on the father's power. In the Roman household as so constituted, where the father was supreme over the life and property of those constituting it, two questions were inevi- table : that of succession, and that of the woman. The question of succession was settled by giving preference to agnate heirs. That is, although a woman inherited equally with her brothers in her father's estate her control over such property, or rather the control of her husband, was limited to her dower rights and even over this she had power of testament so that she could return it to her family. By the time of the Empire the family had been very thoroughly disintegrated by the State, which had usurped most of the paternal police powers. Whereas the State had assumed the authority of the father in most particulars relating to property and the body politic, it kept woman still under thorough tutelage in reference to her property. This she could enjoy for her own uses but couM not use it for the benefit of others. She could assume obligations for herself, but not for others. As Professor Villari tersely puts it, she could " hold property, increase her fortune, make her will, lose her virtue ; but her dowry, guaranteed and kept intact by law, remains hers to the end of her life." Of course in modem times both man and woman have been practically freed from the family control here described. In Europe, especially in France, what is known as the Family Council, can intervene in affairs of its members, but only under the supervision of the Court by whom its decision must be endorsed. Or, as in Anglo Saxon countries, when relations usually call on the intervention of the Court in cases of incapacity requiring guardianship. This, however, is but the merest shadow left of the former power of the family council. It is to be noted that the family council had nothing but a moral 188 SAKURAMBO power over the Roman pater. Legally his position held good. This was markedly different from the system prevailing in the German tribes, and of which the power of the French family council still gives a remaining hint. With the same position as priest and chief the father's power was limited by the power of the family council made up of the able-bodied males, whose subordination to him was limited much as the subordination of the chiefs to the king. A strong tie in times of peril and a weak one as soon as the danger is passed. Here also the woman was under tutelage, but it was the tutelage now of the far less oppressive will of the coun- cil. Here, too, she had rights of inheritance, and her dower was protected against her husband. As she took it with her, so she took it away with her when the connection was dissolved by death or otherwise, and barring her own issue the law maintained the interest of her own family. In both the Roman and Germanic family it may be noted that while the family hearth is essentially religious in these early times all their regulations as to the power granted to the father and the family are directed towards property rights. The property of the family is not to be diverted if possible into other channels. In Anglo-Saxon countries, where man has reached his greatest centrifugal power, the predominant right of the agnate line of succession has died away completely, and descend- ants of the same degree inherit equally whether on father's or mother's side. The law of " entail," which under certain circum- stances can be broken in England, but which in some continental countries is very rigorous, is about the only modern instance of the ancient supremacy of the family. In comparing the Japanese family with these two forms which have so strongly influenced western development, a difference of such development can be noticed at once. Whereas all originated on a religious basis, the Roman and German family law quickly developed on the political side, the religious element soon disap- pearing from view. On the political side there has always been a struggle between Roman and German. The centripetal force of the former, which resulted in the gradual transfer of the family, SHINANO WAY 189 powers of the State, was brought into final concussion with the centrifugal tendency of the German tribes when the barbarians finally overwhelmed the western Empire in the fifth century. The State having gone to pieces, the Italian people had to fall back on the old family law based on the " patria potestas." In its centralizing power this was so much better an instru- ment than the looser family council of the Germanic tribes that in time it not only gained the supremacy but carried with it a great mass of the later Roman legislation still maintained in force among the conquered people; although the code the Germans introduced with them found place for a time side by side with it and more or less modified it. Hence in the ripened legislature of the Italian communes in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries such legislation is all directed to strengthening the family influence, although the " patria potestas " is much curbed. Very much curbed, the object being the unity of the family even to the extent of making them responsible for each other. To still further effect and maintain this unity property succession was made very rigid, and while the dower right of the woman was still in force, it was limited in value and still more limited — this being the real reason — in so far as such dower rights passed into the control of outsiders or members of another com- mune. Now in this supremacy of the family council here checked and strengthened by the Commune, together with the rigidity of the family bond itself, the Japanese family has much more in common than with either Roman or German family taken separately. In origin the reason is radically different. In the Italian communes it is purely political, the object being to make the family responsible for its members and hold the family under the immediate control of the Commune; the old religious basis as found in Rome and Germany has been eliminated. In Japan also it was the family that was to be held responsible for its members, it was the family with which the State dealt ; but its origin and its usages are purely religious. On its political side, however, the law took the family as the convenient unit, just as it would ha^•e taken the individual 190 SAKURAMBO as unit, or will take the individual as unit in the future if Japanese development continues on western lines. Even in the old days, while the father's power in Japan extended over the lives of his family he was subject to the family council, which, under the Jap- anese system, practically governed the family. There is no reason to believe that the system is not original with them. With the earliest records it is already found crystallized into shape, although the formula is probably adopted from China. Religion being Ancestor Worship, the most essential feature is the headship and the maintenance of the family. There must always be a representative to keep up the family worship ajid the law is all directed to effecting this object. Head succession goes according to a Lex Salique, failing which the course is adoption from cadet branches of the house or even of outsiders by mar- riage, that is the marriage of a daughter of the house and adoption of the son-in-law. The privileges of the headship are great. No member of the family can marry, divorce, or adopt without his> consent ; no member can change his residence or refuse to reside in the place appointed by the head ; he is the preferred heir to the property, receiving one-half if a lineal descendant and one-third if not a lineal descendant of the deceased predecessor ; and he is heir at law to all the family property not covered by the laws of suc- cession. The diasdvantages are great. The whole public duty of the family rests on his shoulders, and the support failing nearer kindred; he is not allowed to take action imperilling the family interests; or to resign his headship unless he has reached the age of sixty, or has obtained the consent of his successor to so abdicate. That his duties are no light task is evidenced plainly enough by the number who do abdicate when they get the opportunity. In fact, it is not hard to see that the somewhat narrow field of the individual is, in his case, still more rigidly confined, and he can hardly take any action without considering the effect it may have on the wider interests of which he is the guardian. To some extent he is aided by the family council, who at times deal with marriage, divorce, adoption, or family disputes. These matters were and are settled SHINANO WAY 191 within the family. In cases involving the interests of minors and orphans the family council is obliged to act. Appeal can be made from their decisions to the Courts, which on grounds of public policy will uphold the council if it is possible to do so. As m western life, property although a subsidiary interest, is an im- portant one. Hence marriage is one of the most important func- tions of the headship. Woman who cuts a subsidiary figure in the West here cuts none at all. Only under one condition does woman figure, and that is when owing to failure of heirs male she becomes the head of the house. Under all other conditions her exit from the family is a radical one. Her connection with it ceases with her marriage and she becomes part and parcel of her husband's family, and the ceremony of purification following her departure to her husband's house is akin to that following the removal of a corpse. Legally speaking, her name is erased from the register of her family and entered on that of her husband's family. Marriage therefore means the entrance or the loss of a member of the family, and hence comes under the power of the head of the family, and if marriage takes place without his consent he can expel the offending member and forbid his or her re-entrance into the family. A species of excommunication from the house- hold gods. In relation to illegitimates the Japanese family law is more akin to the German law than to the Roman or Communal code. Under the Roman code an illegitimate child could only be recognized by adoption, having in that privilege equality with a stranger. Under the Japanese law an illegitimate child recognized by the father becomes a co-heir with the legitimate children, although his share of the parents' estate is less than that taken by a legitimate child. Under the German code the illegitimate child also shared in the parents' estate, and in much the same proportion as under the present Japanese law — two-thirds to one-third — although the ratio depended within certain limits on the number of legitimate children. These are of course all measures to maintain the family in the blood line. But as in old Rome it was necessary to maintain the family in its relation to the State, so in Japan it has always 192 SAKURAMBO been held to be necessary to maintain the family in relation to worship of ancestors, and a means had to be found when lack of heirs in male line threatened its extinction. The remedy in both cases was found in adoption, limited according to the Roman law, and up to recent times unlimited by the Japanese law. Under the Roman law the adopted had to be so far removed in age from the adopter — fifteen years — as to be properly the adopter's child, and right to adopt was limited to those who had passed fifty years. Under the old Japanese code no natural relation in age was taken into consideration. A minor, even a child, could adopt an adult, the object in this case not being the succession to the property of the family but the proper maintenance of the family worship. Under the present code, however, the person adopted must be younger than the adopter, and the latter cannot be a minor. Jap- anese family law undoubtedly lays far greater stress on the im- portance of adoption than is found among western peoples, and in so far as the German law has modified the Roman law the breach here between East and West is widened. The peculiarity of Jap- anese law in this particular is due to the religious bias — ^worship of ancestors carried on by male descendants only. This has relegated woman to a position that had had no parallel in the western world.' In the Roman world the woman was sacred as mother. In the barbarian world woman was sacred as wife. If man did not regard the dignity of her position as the mother of the race he re- garded her weakness, and on that ground this rough society threw over her its protection. In the Middle Ages she was a valuable prize, and according to who obtained possession of her often went the government of provinces. In all cases she was under strict tutelage. In the East she has always been regarded merely as a breeding machine. That she is respected as parent is true. In spite of her motherhood is also true. As daughter she is subject to her father ; as wife to her husband ; as mother to her son ; and this for ages past not for any necessity of protection but simply for reasons of sex. For this reason she never has and never can take her position with man until she is made his companion. How the SHINANO WAY 193 Japanese man reconciles his mother's womanhood to his undoubted affection for her is probably an example of mental acrobatics only possible to eastern casuistry. But after all the world is ruled at bottom by brute force. With all nur knowledge of the germ theory of life, that we are as much our mother as our father, woman holds her position of inferiority. Must hold it as long as men's muscles maintain their supremacy. The world is a long way from beating its swords into ploughshares, and fortunately or unfor- tunately woman's brains do not march pari passu with her privileges. The most tedious perhaps of railway journeys in, Japan is the ride around Tokyo on the connecting railway between Shina- gawa and Akabane. Not that the distance is great, for it is some- what less than fourteen miles, or that the speed is abnormally low for the amount of jolting and shaking that one gets creates at least the impression that one is travelling with some degree of progress; but it takes an hour and longer to cover this wretched distance and at times the whole system seems suspended, the plat- form bare and deserted even by the pedlars of tobacco, news- papers, and kwashi. Anywhere else such periods of waiting are broken by the arrival of the train from the opposite direction. But not on this line. Apparently without any reason, or as if it had become tired on its own account, the engine wakes up with a snort to make a lazy plunge for the next station and prdbably to repeat the operation. I was using this road early one May on my way to Kofu and it was during one of these stops that a little plot of the ayame or early Iris caught my eye jammed in between the squares of the paddy fields. Now, on a preceding fourth of May at a country inn, I had come in contact with " Things Japanese." On entering the bath-room I found the tub decorated with Iris leaves, and after a little finessing managed to draw but the following explanation which can be taken as one form in which traditional ideas and superstitions still hang on in spite of the Jimelight of 13 194 SAKURAMBO science, newspapers, and the general tendency to materialistic ex- planation. In Japan as in most other countries the woman works in the fields, her occupation taking her into the hills and the woods and other such places which from time immemorial have been sup- posed to be the favourite haunts of various supernatural beings. Japanese gods are quite as frail as the gods of the ancient Greeks, and in Japanese folklore the story of Danae, of Lida, and of Europa has been often repeated and reproduced, although with but little of the charm that the old Greek fancy could weave about its legends. The evidence of such unexpectedly inconvenient honour was shown in the offspring, and the children carried some mark of their super- natural origin, such as excessive hairiness, great size, peculiarity of facial resemblance fancied or otherwise, to some animal whose form the god had assumed when he courted his victim. In this way the country people explained the many pranks that Nature often plays on man in his offspring. There was a remedy, how- ever, for such unsuspected violations. If the bath was decorated with the leaves of the shobu at this date those using it could after- ward go about their occupations on the hillside withovit fear of such accidents and hedged against any attempts of their divinity- ships. Tacked onto this superstition is the idea that the shobu leaf relieves headache and by binding it around the brows this unde- sirable adjunct to bad nerves or bad stomach can be driven away. A jerk of the train and all ideas as to Japanese traditions were quickly dispelled. None of the Japanese railroads are particu- larly distinguished by smoothness of roadbed and the Tokyo belt- line is no exception, although not so bad as the Northern Railway. Incidentally I will add that the roughest piece of roadway I have experienced, akin to a milk shake apparatus, has been in a country noted for the expense and Solidity of its railway construction ; but the branch line running from Stratford on Avon across country and passing through Towcester can, or could, equal any piece of temporary construction work put together even. in the States. At the time I speak of, this Kofu railway was only in operation as far SHINANO WAY 195 as Saruhashi. Although the line was a continuous one at Hachioji we passed off the rails of the government road and on to those of a private corporation. The idea of a traffic arrangement for pas- sengers did not seem to have entered the official brain, and it is pretty safe to say that it was not likely to do so spontaneously. At all events, after a pretty ride over the Tdkyo plain which is always picturescjue with its clumps of woodland and the distant mountains, we were turned out for another long wait before con- tinuing our onward progress. The mountains are now close at hand, the range encircling Fuji to the north, and soon after leaving Hachioji we plunge into a valley gradually narrowing as the road progresses. The scenery now becomes very fine. The railway climbs along the slopes high above the river and a good deal of tun- nelling is necessary to negotiate the abrupter section of the gorge. Although I had made an early start it was late afternoon before I reached Saruhashi, a picturesquely situated mountain village. One hears much of fleas in Japan, but my experiences with that sprightly animal have been few and far between. Saruhashi tried to make up the deficiency, and here he swarmed, and the picturesque situ- ation of the inn close to the " monkey bridge " does not make up for this drawback. One's attention is withdrawn from the scenery to go flea hunting/ a too absorbing and immediate occupation to admit of any delay. The view from the bridge is very pretty. The narrow river is here confined between perpendicular walls relieved by much green vegetation. The name probably is derived from one of those crazy structures of bamboo still to be found in the mountain districts of Japan and which properly seem made for monkeys not men. I was kept too busy to thoroughly enjoy the hospitality of my Boniface and was glad to get on my way next morning. It was ten miles to the Sasaotoge, accomplished by ha^ha, or native omnibus, and over a most atrocious road which can hardly be classed as passable for ricksha, being mainly a con- glomerate of deep ruts, stones, and gulleys. The rougher hasha can fight its way through this stuff, but we had a wretched agent of locomotion in a poor, starved, overdriven, tottering horse that was 196 SAKURAMBO just able to maintain its footing. One does not have to go far afield to get illustrations of Japanese brutality towards animals. And the curious side of the question is that the more useful the animal, the less care seems to be taken of it. The dog has teeth and some disposition to use them, and anyhow has a strong family resemblance to his still wild relatives. The cat is a rather non- obtrusive animal that calls for no particular attention beyond some daily food. The dog gets more attention from children, although not to the extent that is lavished on him in the western world. His acuteness does not seem to have attracted notice if one can judge by the fables in which he plays a far less conspicuous and benevolent part than birds. Cats are strictly unpopular, per- haps due to Buddhist prejudice against them, the cat being the only animal that did not mourn the Buddha's death. Their useful side, however, is recognized and they are at least let alone if not petted. The horse, however, is a co-worker with the coolie, who seems to have gotten on a very superficial understanding with him. They do not recognize that the animal's efficiency and duration — in general terms, his usefulness — is enhanced by good treatment ; that it is a question ot economy to take care of him. The scenes wit- nessed on the Yokohama hills, when the unfortunate brutes zigzag up the slopes hidden under their staggering loads, are due strictly to a native inherent indifference to animal suffering. They will not eat meat on religious grounds, and will drive the animal until it drops of exhaustion. My particular Bucephalus was a mass of sores wherever his Joseph's coat of harness touched him, for it was made up of everything from iron wire, through scraps of leather, up or down to pack thread doubled and twisted many times to make it hang together. If the driver or betto had but little idea of the economical usage of his animal he had a keen knowledge of its tender points. After a few miles the poor brute stopped of exhaus- tion. He was then assisted along for another hundred yards by inserting a strap under his fetlock and giving it a sharp tug much like hitting a man sharply on the crazy bone. This ingenious device was the suggestion of a passing farmer. Another effective SHINAXO WAY 197 spur was beating him at his sore points. It was all done in perfect good temper. There was no display of anger or ill temper. The horse instead of being a mass of palpitating feeling flesh might have been a mechanical contrivance of which the problem was to find the spring that moved it. Protests merely occasioned a trans- fer to some other form of abuse, the acme being when the driver and some enthusiastic assistants among the wayfarers gleefully fell on him with a railway tie as persuader. We walked into Kuronota thoroughly disgusted and inwardly vowed to take any means of getting out of the district than basha. A society for the prevention of cruelty to animals is badly needed in Japan, but its work would have an unusually discouraging basis to start on, for the only hope of success would be by appealing to the argument of future economy and this has but little weight with the Japanese who lives essentially in the present. It is a steep but not long climb over a bad road to the top of the pass. The view from the sum- mit is not at all striking. A few miles down brings one into more picturesque surroundings and hence out on the Kofu plain. All this ride, however, is now obviated by the extension of the railway to Kofu. The Bosenkaku at Kofu was a delightful stopping place and one of the best examples of the better class Japanese inns. Placed at the entrance of a public park it has a pretty garden of its own, the inn running around it on three sides. They have a European scale of prices, perhaps because Kofu is much frequented by tourist foreigners who make it their starting point for the trip down the Fujikawa. While stopping here I had an opportunity to try some of the local vintage. Kofu is a noted place in Japan for grapes, although it hardly would attract attention elsewhere. The sample brought savoured decidedly of the unfermented juice and a conspicuously earthy taste found in the lower grades of Cali- fornia and Australia wines. There was more trouble with getting transportation onward, and the local worthies profited to the full extent of the necessities of their prize. I referred to this afterward on my return and I was told by Japanese that the Kai-Shinano dis- 198 SAKURAMBO trict was rather notorious for that sort of thing. From ancient times the lower classes have been noted for their roughness, and the floating element of " tough " hanging just on and outside the pale of the law has given more trouble here than elsewhere. In old days the kidnapping of country girls and forwarding them to the Yoshiwara of Yedo and to other cities was a profitable busi- ness to the men of Kai. It was good, that I got off early the next day, for my men were the very reverse of energetic. We had a long day before us and they practically walked the sixteen ri (forty miles) to Kami-no-Suwa. There are no passes on the way and the road is fairly level and good. The scenery is pretty but decidedly commonplace. It is a great silk district and every house had its women hard at work. It is those skilful little fingers of the women that are the backbone of this great industry and of many other industries, and without them Japan would be in a vei-y bad way economically. The full share of the manual labour falls on them. There is a good deal of factory life through the district and mills are a feature both of Kami-no-Suwa and Shimo-no-Suwa. In the old days all this work used to be carried on in the household, the product being taken to the middleman's agent, but modern exigencies have wrought this great and unpleasant difference, for it is only very recently that the Japanese seem to have worked up to the fact that legislation was needed to protect the employees. Long hours, few breaks in the monotony of their work, for the Japanese observation of a weekly rest day does not filter down to these establishments, and wages which even from the standpoint of Japanese living are trifling. A Japanese coolie at thirty sen a day is from his standard of living — by no means a bad one in food and clothing — getting a dollar and quarter a day. The carpenter and roofer at sixty sen a day are far more than doubling the rate for the list of superfluities that become necessities as we rise in the scale is but little extended in Japan. The old influence of a certain standard for each separate class still makes itself felt. A woman in the mills of Osaka gets ten cents a day. They are housed by their employers and the recent legislation has been SHINANO WAY 199 directed to regulating the abuse of this feature of their work and enforcing decent regard to sanitary conditions. Men's labour is better protected through their guilds. In fact, the guild is to-day such an important feature of Japanese commercial life that it is quite as necessary to take it in consideration as the Government itself. In the West, with its individualizing tendency, the guild has gradually been eliminated, although the latest socialistic doc- trines have been retrograding to the form in fact if not in theory. The East has carried this segregation of crafts to an extreme, even to the extent of appropriating parts of town and city to the exercise of particular forms of labour. As the political system eliminates the individual and deals with the family, so the economi- cal system eliminates the individual and deals with the guild. There is no life outside of the guild, hence the individual must bow to its orders on penalty of starvation. The Japanese guilds run through the whole gamut of society from the religious formalities of the ancient and honourable swordmakers lost in the mists of time up to the most complete and modern Labour or Capital Trust. Labour has always worked through the guilds and has known no other way, simply because the political and religious systems have prevented any development of individualism. In the face of mod- ern institutions this has given rise to a curious condition of affairs. As disputes between individuals are settled by the guilds, so dis- putes between the guilds are settled by arbitration, and although the courts are in full operation bold is the man who in either case appeals to them without the sanction of the guild. Cases are notorious where foreigners in dealing with Japanese have carried their case successfully through the devious and irritating channel of Japanese litigation to be met with the dictum of the guild, " Accept an arrangement, thus and so, or close business with the guild," which of course means cease business in Japan. There are plenty of examples in western commercial life where pressure of a kind is put on the smaller fry by the great corporations ; where a man is driven out of business by ruthless competition or by the more underhand method of threatening his customers' business if 200 SAKURAMBO they continue to deal with him. These we recognize and try to reach in every way possible to the lawmaker and against the lawbreaker. I doubt very much, however, if there is any corpora- tion in America so great that it would dare to send notice to a successful litigant that he must settle the case as decided by them, without reference to the court's decision, or cease dealing with them. Such contempt of court would receive drastic punishment. They might try and frame a way to avoid the court's decision or wriggle out of it as best they could, but on the face their submission would be absolute, and they would pay for any rash misinter- pretation they put on such decision. In the guilds we meet also with another feature which accents the radical difference between East and West. In the West while their basis was communistic, their action was mainly political. Under the western trade guilds the plebs make their appearance in the political life of Rome. Although under the crushing power of the emperors the collegia and sodalitia have but little power, still the main object is protection against outside encroachment on the rights of their members. Their object is not purely social. On the fall of the western empire they were probably the only means of protection to the lower classes in the frightful confusion that followed that fall, and the disintegration of any organized opposi- tion to the floods of barbarians pouring over Italy. And it is these organizations that in a political sense first raise their head against the oppression of the feudal system. Their object always is trade and its advancement, but this they are always seeking to grasp by means of the political power, so that in the thirteenth century A\'e find the most powerful of the powers dividing Italy to be a Commune of Guilds — Florence. The inherent right of a man to guide his own destiny, the democratic germ of modern Europe, has always lain within the wrappings of these guilds from the earliest times of western life. To be sure, in recent times the formation of the great labour and capital trusts have modified this sentiment, and the tendency of the leaders of both has been to split our western communities into a congeries of interests where the SHINANO WAY 201 circles touch each other but are not concentric. The labour leaders have abandoned the old struggle for freedom, which has been car- ried on through centuries and at the cost of so much effort and bloodshed. The right of a man to earn his daily bread in the way he finds best suited to him is to be transposed into the right of a man to work if the labour leader chooses to let him work. No new features are introduced into the scheme. Limitation of the number of apprentices admitted to the guild, and limitation of the output of work and hence the creation of an artificial demand. We seem to be returning to the old days when the guilds ruled the corporation of London with this difference, that the guilds of those days made the good quality of their products a great object and punished severely bad work, whereas the present guilds are directed to protecting the bad work at the expense of good work. The western world seems to hesitate at present as to whether the indi- vidualization has been carried too far; as to whether the weaker guilds (the labour iinions) are not to be supported against the stronger guilds (the capitalists). The people are likely in time, however, to find the balance, as they have often done before. Evo- lution does not work backward. Even if Nature staggers around a little trying to get its footing and producing some freak's in the process. It is much easier to be controlled by many with their various distracting interests, than to be under the guiding will of a single despot always at hand and with his whole attention con- centrated on a limited space to crush out any individualism that might arise. Individualism is too ground into the western mind and this return to the guild system carries the seeds of its death within it. The Capitalist Trust, the most vulnerable of the two, is always subject to the will of the majority. The Labour Trust by its very victory over Capital would dissolve. Its cause for existence would be cut away from under it. The Japanese guild does not bother — as yet — about the political side of the question. Individualism with its free man and free mind has no place in Japanese Absolutism. The guild has no relations with external or internal politics, but it has a very drastic control over its members, 202 SAKURAMBO and in this it has the Government support, which finds it easier to deal with and hold responsible the heads of the guilds than to deal with and hold responsible the individual units. Just how far they are laying up for themselves trouble in the future by nourish- ing this imperium in imperio will only appear when the guilds make their step forward into politics. The control of the guilds is a very important matter, and the men who gain that control direct the lives of many of their fellow citizens as a living is not possible outside of them. It was dark before I started down the hill above Kami-no- Suwa. This is the nearest approach to a pass on the whole stretch from Kofu north to the Nakasendo. The inn at Kami-noi-Suwa was a big commercial house with a beautiful garden, and from my room aloft I had a full sweep over the country toward the lake beyond, and just below my eyes the ground plan of the afore- said garden as seen from above. We were nearly " full up," and the evening was well advanced before the police book and supper came around. The inn people were invaluable in the ensuing struggle with the ricksha men. It was not advisable to press mat- ters too far with them for they could refuse to go beyond the mountain village of Wada, where it was undetermined whether other ricksha were to be found or not. I found out, however, from the inn people that I could get out of the district without troubling myself about ricksha men farther than a little town called Shiojiri, and in fact, if it had been convenient, basha was available all the way from Kami-no-Suwa. To Shiojiri therefore I departed the next morning, a pretty ride around the head of the lake and over a good road. I say a good road for the ricksha men chose to take a short cut over a very bad one. After giving them ample oppor- tunity to earn their "peculium " I clambered up the last hundred yards of the hill, leaving them to shoulder the ricksha for progress on wheels was impossible. The inn at Shiojiri was a pretty little place, a matter of some importance, for it lies on the Nakasendo road, which is one of the show routes for scenery in Japan. On foot is a charming way to go through the country, but it must be SHINANO WAY 203 understood that there are Hmitations to putting it into practice. For a party of young foreigners to go through the country in this way, as so many do through Switzerland and the Black Forest, for instance, would arouse the wildest suspicion in the eyes of the native, and they would quickly find themselves being held up and questioned by the police to their no small annoyance. Where the use of a camera even in the streets of Shimonoseki gives no end of trouble, and involves at least the forfeiture of the instrument, it can be imagined that sketching and photographing through the moun- tains even in permitted districts is sure to arouse the suspicions of the local Cerberus, who has large ideas as to his responsibilities and the full inclination to confiscate first and determine the legal bear- ing of the question' afterward. The foreign traveller desired in Japan is he who is accompanied by a native guide to carefully take him over the frequented routes, and where no new responsibilities are dumped on some official who finds himself presented with a case not covered by that part of the rules which are familiar to him and relieve him of the trouble of thinking. The foreign resi- dent also gives but little trouble. He usually speaks more or less of the language, and has business connections which quickly estab- lish him as a responsible person and within reach at all times and seasons. In such a fortified camp as Europe the military authori- ties only trouble themselves about fortified neighbourhoods, and what the native is allowed to sketch or photograph, the same privi- lege is extended to the stranger; in Japan such zones are ex- tremely liberal, and — to make a sort of bull which fits the situation however — where it is allowed it is safer first to get permission, even if it be the photographing of some harmless and battered Buddha surrounded by dirt and children and in the confined lanes of a crowded city where there are certainly no strategic features except to the eye of the official. In Japanese eyes everybody is a spy. In this they imply no discredit. It is ' their own general practice, and what they do themselves they naturally expect other people to do. There is none of that instinctive repugnance which the practice arouses in the western mind and which only the neces- 204 SAKURAMBO sity of occasion sanctions. With us the personaHty of the indi- vidual is his own concern, and we hesitate to intrude on it except in so far as is agreeable to him. Hence but little attention is paid to a man's actions in so far as there is no special reason. To the Japanese there is no such thing as privacy. They live in public, their individuality is crushed out by every custom that can be brought to bear on it, they have never gotten beyond the com- munal stage even in their home life. For a Japanese girl or boy, or even for a man or woman, to have a room to retire to as their own, sacred against the intrusion of others, is unknown. There are no doors, no locks, paper screens only through which a whisper can be heard from one room to ariother. Where, after the futons are rolled up and stowed away for the day, the whole establish- ment is thrown into one big common room for the whole household, where one's most private life is carried on therefore " coram pub- lico " from their first appearance, any such feeling of individualism as the West feels toward spying is not blunted but simply is unde- veloped. There is one feature of this trait that soon attracts the attention of the westerner. That is the intensely personal ques- tions that are asked by his casual eastern acquaintance, and which are usually set down to the " custom of the country," the interest that is supposed to be polite by taking in the well-being of the stranger. In part, it may be formula or has become formula, but at bottom these questions have little to do with politeness. They are part of the general system of being able to answer as far as possible as to everything that can be gleaned from the stranger. This is in part due to the nature of the relation between the govern- ing powers and the governed, the method employed being that of holding a man responsible for his neighbour. The system of local government is better considered elsewhere, but one feature of such responsibility has been the development of just this form of underhand inquisition. It is analogous to the position of the teacher who encourages tale-bearing among his pupils. It has indeed grown second nature with this people who are held in a kind of tutelage by their officials. In this sense it is often relieved from SHINANO WAY 205 that form of impertinence of which the shining example in western literature is " Paul Pry." But not seldom your kind inquiring acquaintance will march off to the police box adjacent, with his information, retailing it with a directness and gesture in your direc- tion which at least shows a sense of amusing guilelessness. Polite- ness certainly has little to do with many instances. Apart from the little irritation it arouses in the western mind, the practice does not work to the injury of any foreigner with legitimate pur- poses, and, as I have said before, it adds perceptibly to the safety of journeying through unfrequented by-roads and through iso- lated districts. But enough has been said as to the " politeness of the habit." It is worth going into this question of Japanese politeness, for it is an excellent instance as to the effect of an iron code on a people, which, originally purely disciplinary, has effected a change in the intimate nature of the people themselves. Let it be understood that the old code of etiquette in Japan was in no way intended as a school for politeness. It was to mark off caste from caste, the low man from his superior. It was not enough to mark the separation by occupation and increased privileges in the community, but the distinction must always be employed wherever the two castes come in contact. When the greater lord and his train met the lesser, the latter must draw to the side of the road and respectfully wait for him to pass. When the clown met his superior on his travels, he must crouch in the ditch with his face to the ground so as to avoid even the pollution of his glance to meet the cortege. One caste was not allowed to ignore the pres- ence of the other caste. The formulas were to be obeyed. No samurai was to be censured for cutting down a peasant who had failed in respect to him. Now this respect was based in first instance not on any moral code but on authority, and as consid- eration for those below by no means increases as we go down the scale, the lower classes would receive but little relief from pressure of those more immediately in authority over them. The kick that is handed down from the top is always passed on with a little 206 SAKURAMBO interest, and the last man probably kicks the dog. Another feature is that there is absolutely nothing democratic in the constitution of the Japanese people. Their organizations have been purely for trade. Politics were not only foreign to their purpose but were absolutely forbidden them. Hence the lower class Japanese got a full dose of authority, and such authority took care not to let them forget by ceaselessly putting before their eyes the practice of it on the peril of the most severe punishment — at times even death — if they failed in any particular. Under such training it was that the Japanese nation learned to be polite. Polite to all above him, polite to his equals, for as his government lay in the hands of his superiors so it was an offence to trouble that superior with their petty quarrels. Woe to the man who gave rise to some such disturbance on frivolous grounds. It was not only the law of the land that was offended but the magistrate himself, and it was " the rule of the Cadi," round measure did one or sometimes both of the litigants receive. Now this submission was not so difficult to force on the people inasmuch as the ground had already been broken for it by the existing religious code which made obedience to superiors a cardinal feature of such code. The Japanese peasant is ordinarily very religious, and in no way wishes to do anything that would offend or arouse the anger of the gods. And he car- ries this out in the very practical way of prayers and contribu- tions. Anyone who spends a little time in the grounds of some temple will note the large number of worshippers that come in this private manner to make their petitions to the divine power. They are of all grades of society, poor and rich, cotton and silk, men and women, and many young girls, and to pray for much the same things as they do in far-off Europe. The safe return of a son, for a male child in an approaching delivery, or for an obi or sash. Seated beside some little rural temple it is noticeable, the large proportion of the passersby who stop for a few minutes to offer up a prayer. Submissive to authority as a right, reinforced by sub- mission to authority as a duty, has made attention to the little de- tails of human intercourse a second nature to a class of peoplfe SHINANO WAY 207 whose daily life in close contact to and struggle with the soil would give but little occasion for such niceties, and which in other ways, in indifference to human suffering, or in cruel treatment of animals, and in practice of the grossest superstitions, shows its rougher nature and the usual effects of such contact. This harsh and exact- ing treatment has indeed made the mass of the Japanese a polite people. There is an instinctive feeling when brought in contact with it that it is not sincere, a feeling that the person practising it is using a code and is not speaking from the heart. It is not, however, the superficial politeness of the French, all smiles and bows while the wind sits in the right corner. Let conditions change and the Gallic storm is let loose with a range and boule- versement that staggers the onlooker from the colder and more self-contained North. The Japanese rarely lose control of them- selves. They can be as cold, harsh, malicious, and unforgiving toward each other as any race that has ever been planted on that trifling little planet Terra. I have chanced upon but one physical encounter in public and that turned out to be between Chinamen, who, far from being a pacific race individually, have the reputation of fighting " at the drop of a hat." Yakamashii (noisy) is a term of reproach among the Japanese. When their quarrels do reach the point of violence they too often end in the Quarter Sessions Court, not the magistrate's office. Feuds will go on in this way smouldering until the community is startled some day with the wholesale slaughter of a whole household, the original difference having started over some trifling matter that English or Americans would have settled with a few stiff punches. There is another feature in connection with Japanese politeness and that is the trans- lation of their honorifics. The honorific O is translated " honour- able," this being its proper meaning and often so used in our sense of the term; but one feels, living among the Japanese, that as used in common life — anything from Ichi San, " Honourable Miss First," to Neko San, " Honourable Mr. Cat," — it is purely conventional. It is in no sense a title, as when we speak of the Honourable Mr. X, member of Congress or of Parliament. Every 208 SAKURAMBO gesture and tone of the voice show that it has become a customary expression, and Oide and Goran nasai are simply used in the sense of " come here, please " and " look, please." The honorific abso- lutely disappears in Ohayo, " honourably early," which is " good morning," and nothing else. A foreign style hasha — that is, with seats — took me the few miles that still remained between Shiojiri and the terminus of the railway at Matsumoto. This is a large ugly Japanese town beauti- fully situated at the head of the picturesque valley which practically runs south all the way to Kofu. The mountain wall of Hida rises to the westward and it is cut off on the east from the valley of Nagano and the Chikumagawa by another lofty range. The railway was still very new to Matsumoto and the station had quite a crowd of townspeople and countrymen around it engaged in watching the shifting of the cars and other operations novel to many of them. After leaving Matsumoto the railway soon entered the hills, winding around among the valleys here not presenting the trim rice-fields and other features of farm life so common in Japanese scenery, but that of a sparsely settled district and a good deal of wild nature such as you see winding among the foothills of the coast range in California. These hills grew higher and more rugged, and after some fine gorge scenery we plunged into a tunnel to find on the other side one of the striking views of Japan. The whole broad Nagano valley lay far below at our feet, with the mountains of Kotsuke towering up in front on the other side. It was a beautiful scene of exquisite cultivation and rugged nature grandly harmonized ; of brilliant light with shadows cast by cloud and mountain; and the Japanese rice-fields are always pleasing, broken here and there by graceful clumps of trees shrouding some shrine or giving shade to some farmhouse. We were in such close quarters here on the mountain that a curve was out of the question, so reversing the train by a V turn we were backed down and gradually were brought to the valley level into the midst of this rich land which had been stretched under our eyes during the descent. As everywhere else, it is the land and those that live on SHINANO WAY 209 it that are the backbone of the Japanese nation, and, as if recog- nizing that the people who own the soil are those having the greatest stake in it, the Government in so far as it allows any voice in public affairs has always favoured the agriculturist. These farms sprinkled over Japan therefore answer the question as to what are these country people? How have they lived and how do they live? How is their property regulated and distributed? We all know what interest a stout old farmhouse presents in our own home landscape. A house which has weathered generations of change, not as in cities accompanied by the rise and fall of men's fortunes in the ephemeral forms of created wealth changing not only with men's needs but with men's habits, but in that solid permanency attached to the soil and which is an inherent quality of " landed property." The farmer in Japan always has been a person of some consideration. Even in recent feudal days he was ranked next to the samurai, although far below him, being the first in rank of the people, followed by the artisan class, and lowest of all the merchant class. Below the latter were the outcasts and the eta