"Now is the Japanese festival of the cherry blossom," said the guide. "All the people will be festive. They will pray too and go to the tea–gardens."
Now you might wall an Englishman about with cherry trees in bloom from head to heel, and after the first day he would begin to complain of the smell. As you know, the Japanese arrange a good many of their festivals in honour of flowers, and this is surely commendable, for blossoms are the most tolerant of gods.
The tea–house system of the Japanese filled me with pleasure at a pleasure that I could not fully comprehend. It pays a company in Osaka to build on the outskirts of the town a nine–storied pagoda of wood and iron, to lay out elaborate gardens round it, and to hang the whole with strings of blood–red lanterns, because the Japanese will come wherever there is a good view to sit on a mat and discuss tea and sweetmeats and saki. This Eiffel Tower is, to tell the truth, anything but pretty, yet the surroundings redeem it. Although it was not quite completed, the lower storeys were full of tea–stalls and tea–drinkers. The men and women were obviously admiring the view. It is an astounding thing to see an Oriental so engaged; it is as though he had stolen something from a sahib.
From Osaka—canal–cut, muddy, and fascinating Osaka—the Professor, Mister Yamagutchi,—the guide,—and I took train to Kioto, an hour from Osaka. On the road I saw four buffaloes at as many rice–ploughs—which was noticeable as well as wasteful. A buffalo at rest must cover the half of a Japanese field; but perhaps they are kept on the mountain ledges and only pulled down when wanted. The Professor says that what I call buffalo is really bullock. The worst of travelling with an accurate man is his accuracy. We argued about the Japanese in the train, about his present and his future, and the manner in which he has ranged himself on the side of the grosser nations of the earth.
"Did it hurt his feelings very much to wear our clothes? Didn't he rebel when he put on a pair of trousers for the first time? Won't he grow sensible some day and drop foreign habits?" These were some of the questions I put to the landscape and the Professor.
"He was a baby," said the latter, "a big baby. I think his sense of humour was at the bottom of the change, but he didn't know that a nation which once wears trousers never takes 'em off. You see 'enlightened' Japan is only one–and–twenty years old, and people are not very wise at one–and–twenty. Read Reed's Japan and learn how the change came about. There was a Mikado and a Shogun who was Sir Frederick Roberts, but he tried to be the Viceroy and—"
"Bother the Shogun! I've seen something like the Babu class, and something like the farmer class. What I want to see is the Rajput class—the man who used to wear the thousands and thousands of swords in the curio–shops. Those swords were as much made for use as a Rajputana sabre. Where are the men who used 'em? Show me a Samurai."
The Professor answered not a word, but scrutinised heads on the wayside platforms. "I take it that the high–arched forehead, club nose, and eyes close together—the Spanish type—are from Rajput stock, while the German–faced Jap is the Khattri—the lower class."
Thus we talked of the natures and dispositions of men we knew nothing about till we had decided (1) that the painful politeness of the Japanese nation rose from the habit, dropped only twenty years ago, of extended and emphatic sword–wearing, even as the Rajput is the pink of courtesy because his friend goes armed; (2) that this politeness will disappear in another generation, or will at least be seriously impaired; (3) that the cultured Japanese of the English pattern will corrupt and defile the tastes of his neighbours till (4) Japan altogether ceases to exist as a separate nation and becomes a button–hook manufacturing appanage of America; (5) that these things being so, and sure to happen in two or three hundred years, the Professor and I were lucky to reach Japan betimes; and (6) that it was foolish to form theories about the country until we had seen a little of it.
So we came to the city of Kioto in regal sunshine, tempered by a breeze that drove the cherry blossoms in drifts about the streets. One Japanese town, in the southern provinces at least, is very like another to look at—a grey–black sea of house roofs, speckled with the white walls of the fire–proof godowns where merchants and rich men keep their chief treasures. The general level is broken by the temple roofs, which are turned up at the edges, and remotely resemble so many terai–hats. Kioto fills a plain almost entirely surrounded by wooded hills, very familiar in their aspect to those who have seen the Siwaliks. Once upon a time it was the capital of Japan, and to–day numbers two hundred and fifty thousand people. It is laid out like an American town. All the streets run at right angles to each other. That, by the way, is exactly what the Professor and I are doing. We are elaborating the theory of the Japanese people, and we can't agree.
No. XV
Kioto and How I Fell in Love With the Chief Belle There After I Had Conferred With Certain China Merchants Who Trafficked in Tea. Shows Further How, in a Great Temple, I Broke the Tenth Commandment in Fifty-three Places and Bowed Down Before Kano and a Carpenter. Takes Me to Arashima - "Could I but Write the Things I See, My World Would Haste to Gaze With Me. but Since the Traitor Pen Hath Failed to Paint Earth's Loveliness Unveiled, I Can but Pray My Folk Who Read:-- 'for Lavish Will Take Starveling Deed.'"
We are consorting with sixty of the Sahib–log in the quaintest hotel that ever you saw. It stands on the hillside overlooking the whole town of Kioto, and its garden is veritable Japanese. Fantastically trimmed tea trees, junipers, dwarfed pine, and cherry, are mixed up with ponds of goldfish, stone lanterns, quaint rock–work, and velvety turf all at an angle of thirty–five degrees. Behind us the pines, red and black, cover the hill and run down in a long spur to the town. But an auctioneer's catalogue cannot describe the charms of the place or deal justly with the tea–garden full of cherry trees that lies a hundred yards below the hotel. We were solemnly assured that hardly any one came to Kioto. That is why we meet every soul in the ship that had brought us to Nagasaki; and that is why our ears are constantly assailed with the clamour of people who are discussing places which must be "done." An Englishman is a very horrible person when he is on the war–path; so is an American, a Frenchman, or a German.
I had been watching the afternoon sunlight upon the trees and the town, the shift and play of colour in the crowded street of the cherry, and crooning to myself because the sky was blue and I was alive beneath it with a pair of eyes in my head.
Immediately the sun went down behind the hills the air became bitterly cold, but the people in crêpe sashes and silk coats never ceased their sober frolicking. There was to be a great service in honour of the cherry blossom the next day at the chief temple of Kioto, and they were getting ready for it. As the light died in a wash of crimson, the last thing I saw was a frieze of three little Japanese babies with fuzzy top–knots and huge sashes trying to hang head downwards from a bamboo rail. They did it, and the closing eye of day regarded them solemnly as it shut. The effect in silhouette was immense!
A company of China tea–merchants were gathered in the smoking–room after dinner, and by consequence talked their own "shop," which was interesting. Their language is not Our language, for they know nothing of the tea–gardens, of drying and withering and rolling, of the assistant who breaks his collar–bone in the middle of the busiest season, or of the sickness that smites the coolie lines at about the same time. They are happy men who get their tea by the break of a thousand chests from the interior of the country and play with it upon the London markets. None the less they have a very wholesome respect for Indian tea, which they cordially detest. Here is the sort of argument that a Foochow man, himself a very heavy buyer, flung at me across the table.