"Out of the East": Reveries and Studies in New Japan

"Out Of The East"

Reveries And Studies In New Japan

Lafcadio Hearn

Author Of "Glimpses Of Unfamiliar Japan"

"As far as the east is from the west--"

Boston And New York

Houghton, Mifflin And Company

The Riverside Press, Cambridge

1895

To

Nishida Sentarō

In Dear Remembrance Of

Izumo Days

Contents

I. The Dream of a Summer Day II. With Kyūshū Students III. At Hakata IV. Of the Eternal Feminine V. Bits of Life and Death VI. The Stone Buddha VII. Jiujutsu VIII. The Bed Bridal IX. A Wish fulfilled X. In Yokohama XI. Yuko: A Reminiscence

"The Dream of a Summer Day" first appeared in the "Japan Daily Mail."

Out Of The East

I

The Dream Of A Summer Day

I

The hotel seemed to me a paradise, and the maids thereof celestial beings. This was because I had just fled away from one of the Open Ports, where I had ventured to seek comfort in a European hotel, supplied with all "modern improvements." To find myself at ease once more in a yukata, seated upon cool, soft matting, waited upon by sweet-voiced girls, and surrounded by things of beauty, was therefore like a redemption from all the sorrows of the nineteenth century. Bamboo-shoots and lotus-bulbs were given me for breakfast, and a fan from heaven for a keepsake. The design upon that fan represented only the white rushing burst of one great wave on a beach, and sea-birds shooting in exultation through the blue overhead. But to behold it was worth all the trouble of the journey. It was a glory of light, a thunder of motion, a triumph of sea-wind,--all in one. It made me want to shout when I looked at it.

Between the cedarn balcony pillars I could see the course of the pretty gray town following the shore-sweep,--and yellow lazy junks asleep at anchor,--and the opening of the bay between enormous green cliffs,--and beyond it the blaze of summer to the horizon. In that horizon there were mountain shapes faint as old memories. And all things but the gray town, and the yellow junks, and the green cliffs, were blue.

Then a voice softly toned as a wind-bell began to tinkle words of courtesy into my reverie, and broke it; and I perceived that the mistress of the palace had come to thank me for the chadai,[1] and I prostrated myself before her. She was very young, and more than pleasant to look upon,--like the moth-maidens, like the butterfly-women, of Kuni-sada. And I thought at once of death;--for the beautiful is sometimes a sorrow of anticipation.

She asked whither I honorably intended to go, that she might order a kuruma for me. And I made answer:--

"To Kumamoto. But the name of your house I much wish to know, that I may always remember it."

"My guest-rooms," she said, "are augustly insignificant, and my maidens honorably rude. But the house is called the House of Urashima. And now I go to order a kuruma."

The music of her voice passed; and I felt enchantment falling all about me,--like the thrilling of a ghostly web. For the name was the name of the story of a song that bewitches men.

[1] A little gift of money, always made to a hotel by the guest shortly after his arrival.

II

Once you hear the story, you will never be able to forget it. Every summer when I find myself on the coast,--especially of very soft, still days,--it haunts me most persistently. There are many native versions of it which have been the inspiration for countless works of art. But the most impressive and the most ancient is found in the "Manyefushifu," a collection of poems dating from the fifth to the ninth century. From this ancient version the great scholar Aston translated it into prose, and the great scholar Chamberlain into both prose and verse. But for English readers I think the most charming form of it is Chamberlain's version written for children, in the "Japanese Fairy-Tale Series,"--because of the delicious colored pictures by native artists. With that little book before me, I shall try to tell the legend over again in my own words.

Fourteen hundred and sixteen years ago, the fisher-boy Urashima Taro left the shore of Suminoyé in his boat.

Summer days were then as now,--all drowsy and tender blue, with only some light, pure white clouds hanging over the mirror of the sea. Then, too, were the hills the same,--far blue soft shapes melting into the blue sky. And the winds were lazy.

And presently the boy, also lazy, let his boat drift as he fished. It was a queer boat, unpainted and rudderless, of a shape you probably never saw. But still, after fourteen hundred years, there are such boats to be seen in front of the ancient fishing-hamlets of the coast of the Sea of Japan.

After long waiting, Urashima caught something, and drew it up to him. But he found it was only a tortoise.

Now a tortoise is sacred to the Dragon God of the Sea, and the period of its natural life is a thousand--some say ten thousand--years. So that to kill it is very wrong. The boy gently unfastened the creature from his line, and set it free, with a prayer to the gods.

But he caught nothing more. And the day was very warm; and sea and air and all things were very, very silent. And a great drowsiness grew upon him,--and he slept in his drifting boat.

Then out of the dreaming of the sea rose up a beautiful girl,--just as you can see her in the picture to Professor Chamberlain's "Urashima,"--robed in crimson and blue, with long black hair flowing down her back even to her feet, after the fashion of a prince's daughter fourteen hundred years ago.

Gliding over the waters she came, softly as air; and she stood above the sleeping boy in the boat, and woke him with a light touch, and said:--

"Do not be surprised. My father, the Dragon King of the Sea, sent me to you, because of your kind heart. For to-day you set free a tortoise. And now we will go to my father's palace in the island where summer never dies; and I will be your flower-wife if you wish; and we shall live there happily forever."

And Urashima wondered more and more as he looked upon her; for she was more beautiful than any human being, and he could not but love her. Then he took one oar, and he took another, and they rowed away together,--just as you may still see, off the far western coast, wife and husband rowing together, when the fishing-boats flit into the evening gold.

They rowed away softly and swiftly over the silent blue water down into the south,--till they came to the island where summer never dies,--and to the palace of the Dragon King of the Sea.

[Here the text of the little book suddenly shrinks away as you read, and faint blue ripplings flood the page; and beyond them in a fairy horizon you can see the long low soft shore of the island, and peaked roofs rising through evergreen foliage--the roofs of the Sea God's palace--like the palace of the Mikado Yuriaku, fourteen hundred and sixteen years ago.]

There strange servitors came to receive them in robes of ceremony--creatures of the Sea, who paid greeting to Urashima as the son-in-law of the Dragon King.

So the Sea God's daughter became the bride of Urashima; and it was a bridal of wondrous splendor; and in the Dragon Palace there was great rejoicing.

And each day for Urashima there were new wonders and new pleasures:--wonders of the deepest deep brought up by the servants of the Ocean God;--pleasures of that enchanted land where summer never dies. And so three years passed.

But in spite of all these things, the fisher-boy felt always a heaviness at his heart when he thought of his parents waiting alone. So that at last he prayed his bride to let him go home for a little while only, just to say one word to his father and mother,--after which he would hasten hack to her.

At these words she began to weep; and for a long time she continued to weep silently. Then she said to him: "Since you wish to go, of course you must go. I fear your going very much; I fear we shall never see each other again. But I will give you a little box to take with you. It will help you to come hack to me if you will do what I tell you. Do not open it. Above all things, do not open it,--no matter what may happen! Because, if you open it, you will never be able to come hack, and you will never see me again."

Then she gave him a little lacquered box tied about with a silken cord. [And that box can be seen unto this day in the temple of Kanagawa, by the seashore; and the priests there also keep Urashima Tarō's fishing line, and some strange jewels which he brought back with him from the realm of the Dragon King.]

But Urashima comforted his bride, and promised her never, never to open the box--never even to loosen the silken string. Then he passed away through the summer light over the ever-sleeping sea;--and the shape of the island where summer never dies faded behind him like a dream;--and he saw again before him the blue mountains of Japan, sharpening in the white glow of the northern horizon.

Again at last he glided into his native bay;--again he stood upon its beach. But as he looked, there came upon him a great bewilderment,--a weird doubt.

For the place was at once the same, and yet not the same. The cottage of his fathers had disappeared. There was a village; but the shapes of the houses were all strange, and the trees were strange, and the fields, and even the faces of the people. Nearly all remembered landmarks were gone;--the Shintō temple appeared to have been rebuilt in a new place; the woods had vanished from the neighboring slopes. Only the voice of the little stream flowing through the settlement, and the forms of the mountains, were still the same. All else was unfamiliar and new. In vain he tried to find the dwelling of his parents; and the fisherfolk stared wonderingly at him; and he could not remember having ever seen any of those faces before.

There came along a very old man, leaning on a stick, and Urashima asked him the way to the house of the Urashima family. But the old man looked quite astonished, and made him repeat the question many times, and then cried out:--

"Urashima Tarō! Where do you come from that you do not know the story? Urashima Tarō! Why, it is more than four hundred years since he was drowned, and a monument is erected to his memory in the graveyard. The graves of all his people are in that graveyard,--the old graveyard which is not now used any more. Urashima Tarō! How can you he so foolish as to ask where his house is?" And the old man hobbled on, laughing at the simplicity of his questioner.

But Urashima went to the village graveyard,--the old graveyard that was not used any more,--and there he found his own tombstone, and the tombstones of his father and his mother and his kindred, and the tombstones of many others he had known. So old they were, so moss-eaten, that it was very hard to read the names upon them.

Then he knew himself the victim of some strange illusion, and he took his way hack to the beach,--always carrying in his hand the box, the gift of the Sea God's daughter. But what was this illusion? And what could be in that box? Or might not that which was in the box be the cause of the illusion? Doubt mastered faith. Recklessly he broke the promise made to his beloved;--he loosened the silken cord;--he opened the box!

Instantly, without any sound, there burst from it a white cold spectral vapor that rose in air like a summer cloud, and began to drift away swiftly into the south, over the silent sea. There was nothing else in the box.

And Urashima then knew that he had destroyed his own happiness,--that he could never again return to his beloved, the daughter of the Ocean King. So that he wept and cried out bitterly in his despair.

Yet for a moment only. In another, he himself was changed. An icy chill shot through all his blood;--his teeth fell out; his face shriveled; his hair turned white as snow; his limbs withered; his strength ebbed; he sank down lifeless on the sand, crushed by the weight of four hundred winters.

Now in the official annals of the Emperors it is written that "in the twenty-first year of the Mikado Yuriaku, the boy Urashima of Midzunoyé, in the district of Yosa, in the province of Tango, a descendant of the divinity Shimanemi, went to Elysium [_Hōraï_] in a fishing-boat." After this there is no more news of Urashima during the reigns of thirty-one emperors and empresses--that is, from the fifth until the ninth century. And then the annals announce that "in the second year of Tenchiyō, in the reign of the Mikado Go-Junwa, the boy Urashima returned, and presently departed again, none knew whither."[1]

III

The fairy mistress came back to tell me that everything was ready, and tried to lift my valise in her slender hands,--which I prevented her from doing, because it was heavy. Then she laughed, but would not suffer that I should carry it myself, and summoned a sea-creature with Chinese characters upon his back. I made obeisance to her; and she prayed me to remember the unworthy house despite the rudeness of the maidens. "And you will pay the kurumaya," she said, "only seventy-five sen."

Then I slipped into the vehicle; and in a few minutes the little gray town had vanished behind a curve. I was rolling along a white road overlooking the shore. To the right were pale brown cliffs; to the left only space and sea.

Mile after mile I rolled along that shore, looking into the infinite light. All was steeped in blue,--a marvelous blue, like that which comes and goes in the heart of a great shell. Glowing blue sea met hollow blue sky in a brightness of electric fusion; and vast blue apparitions--the mountains of Higo--angled up through the blaze, like masses of amethyst. What a blue transparency! The universal color was broken only by the dazzling white of a few high summer clouds, motionlessly curled above one phantom peak in the offing. They threw down upon the water snowy tremulous lights. Midges of ships creeping far away seemed to pull long threads after them,--the only sharp lines in all that hazy glory. But what divine clouds! White purified spirits of clouds, resting on their way to the beatitude of Nirvana? Or perhaps the mists escaped from Urashima's box a thousand years ago?

The gnat of the soul of me flitted out into that dream of blue, 'twixt sea and sun,--hummed back to the shore of Suminoyé through the luminous ghosts of fourteen hundred summers. Vaguely I felt beneath me the drifting of a keel. It was the time of the Mikado Yuriaku. And the Daughter of the Dragon King said tinklingly,--"Now we will go to my father's palace where it is always blue." "Why always blue?" I asked. "Because," she said, "I put all the clouds into the Box." "But I must go home," I answered resolutely. "Then," she said, "you will pay the kurumaya only seventy-five sen."

Wherewith I woke into Doyō, or the Period of Greatest Heat, in the twenty-sixth year of Meiji--and saw proof of the era in a line of telegraph poles reaching out of sight on the land side of the way. The kuruma was still fleeing by the shore, before the same blue vision of sky, peak, and sea; but the white clouds were gone!--and there were no more cliffs close to the road, but fields of rice and of barley stretching to far-off hills. The telegraph lines absorbed my attention for a moment, because on the top wire, and only on the top wire, hosts of little birds were perched, all with their heads to the road, and nowise disturbed by our coming. They remained quite still, looking down upon us as mere passing phenomena. There were hundreds and hundreds in rank, for miles and miles. And I could not see one having its tail turned to the road. Why they sat thus, and what they were watching or waiting for, I could not guess. At intervals I waved my hat and shouted, to startle the ranks. Whereupon a few would rise up fluttering and chippering, and drop back again upon the wire in the same position as before. The vast majority refused to take me seriously.

The sharp rattle of the wheels was drowned by a deep booming; and as we whirled past a village I caught sight of an immense drum under an open shed, beaten by naked men.

"O kurumaya!" I shouted--"that--what is it?"

He, without stopping, shouted back:--- "Everywhere now the same thing is. Much time-in rain has not been: so the gods-to prayers are made, and drums are beaten." We flashed through other villages; and I saw and heard more drums of various sizes, and from hamlets invisible, over miles of parching rice-fields, yet other drums, like echoings, responded.

[1] See _The Classical Poetry of the Japanese_, by Professor Chamberlain, in Trübner's _Oriental Series_. According to Western chronology, Urashima went fishing in 477 A.D., and returned in 825.

IV

Then I began to think about Urashima again. I thought of the pictures and poems and proverbs recording the influence of the legend upon the imagination of a race. I thought of an Izumo dancing-girl I saw at a banquet acting the part of Urashima, with a little lacquered box whence there issued at the tragical minute a mist of Kyōto incense. I thought about the antiquity of the beautiful dance,--and therefore about vanished generations of dancing-girls,--and therefore about dust in the abstract; which, again, led me to think of dust in the concrete, as bestirred by the sandals of the kurumaya to whom I was to pay only seventy-five sen. And I wondered how much of it might be old human dust, and whether in the eternal order of things the motion of hearts might be of more consequence than the motion of dust. Then my ancestral morality took alarm; and I tried to persuade myself that a story which had lived for a thousand years, gaining fresher charm with the passing of every century, could only have survived by virtue of some truth in it. But what truth? For the time being I could find no answer to this question.

The heat had become very great; and I cried,--

"O kurumaya! the throat of Selfishness is dry; water desirable is."

He, still running, answered:--

"The Village of the Long Beach inside of--not far--a great gush-water is. There pure august water will be given."

I cried again:--

"O kurumaya!--those little birds as-for, why this way always facing?"

He, running still more swiftly, responded:--"All birds wind-to facing sit."

I laughed first at my own simplicity; then at my forgetfulness,--remembering I had been told the same thing, somewhere or other, when a boy. Perhaps the mystery of Urashima might also have been created by forgetfulness.

I thought again about Urashima. I saw the Daughter of the Dragon King waiting vainly in the palace made beautiful for his welcome,--and the pitiless return of the Cloud, announcing what had happened,--and the loving uncouth sea-creatures, in their garments of great ceremony, trying to comfort her. But in the real story there was nothing of all this; and the pity of the people seemed to be all for Urashima. And I began to discourse with myself thus:--

Is it right to pity Urashima at all? Of course he was bewildered by the gods. But who is not bewildered by the gods? What is Life itself but a bewilderment? And Urashima in his bewilderment doubted the purpose of the gods, and opened the box. Then he died without any trouble, and the people built a shrine to him as Urashima Miō-jin. Why, then, so much pity?

Things are quite differently managed in the West. After disobeying Western gods, we have still to remain alive and to learn the height and the breadth and the depth of superlative sorrow. We are not allowed to die quite comfortably just at the best possible time: much less are we suffered to become after death small gods in our own right. How can we pity the folly of Urashima after he had lived so long alone with visible gods.

Perhaps the fact that we do may answer the riddle. This pity must be self-pity; wherefore the legend may be the legend of a myriad souls. The thought of it comes just at a particular time of blue light and soft wind,--and always like an old reproach. It has too intimate relation to a season and the feeling of a season not to be also related to something real in one's life, or in the lives of one's ancestors. But what was that real something? Who was the Daughter of the Dragon King? Where was the island of unending summer? And what was the cloud in the box?

I cannot answer all those questions. I know this only,--which is not at all new:--

I have memory of a place and a magical time in which the Sun and the Moon were larger and brighter than now. Whether it was of this life or of some life before I cannot tell. But I know the sky was very much more blue, and nearer to the world,--almost as it seems to become above the masts of a steamer steaming into equatorial summer. The sea was alive, and used to talk,--and the Wind made me cry out for joy when it touched me. Once or twice during other years, in divine days lived among the peaks, I have dreamed just for a moment that the same wind was blowing,--but it was only a remembrance.

Also in that place the clouds were wonderful, and of colors for which there are no names at all,--colors that used to make me hungry and thirsty. I remember, too, that the days were ever so much longer than these days,--and that every day there were new wonders and new pleasures for me. And all that country and time were softly ruled by One who thought only of ways to make me happy. Sometimes I would refuse to be made happy, and that always caused her pain, although she was divine;--and I remember that I tried very hard to be sorry. When day was done, and there fell the great hush of the light before moonrise, she would tell me stories that made me tingle from head to foot with pleasure. I have never heard any other stories half so beautiful. And when the pleasure became too great, she would sing a weird little song which always brought sleep. At last there came a parting day; and she wept, and told me of a charm she had given that I must never, never lose, because it would keep me young, and give me power to return. But I never returned. And the years went; and one day I knew that I had lost the charm, and had become ridiculously old.

V

The Village of the Long Beach is at the foot of a green cliff near the road, and consists of a dozen thatched cottages clustered about a rocky pool, shaded by pines. The basin overflows with cold water, supplied by a stream that leaps straight from the heart of the cliff,--just as folks imagine that a poem ought to spring straight from the heart of a poet. It was evidently a favorite halting-place, judging by the number of kuruma and of people resting. There were benches under the trees; and, after having allayed thirst, I sat down to smoke and to look at the women washing clothes and the travelers refreshing themselves at the pool,--while my kurumaya stripped, and proceeded to dash buckets of cold water over his body. Then tea was brought me by a young man with a baby on his back; and I tried to play with the baby, which said "Ah, bah!"

Such are the first sounds uttered by a Japanese babe. But they are purely Oriental; and in Itomaji should be written _Aba_. And, as an utterance untaught, _Aba_ is interesting. It is in Japanese child-speech the word for "good-by,"--precisely the last we would expect an infant to pronounce on entering into this world of illusion. To whom or to what is the little soul saying good-by?--to friends in a previous state of existence still freshly remembered?--to comrades of its shadowy journey from nobody--knows--where? Such theorizing is tolerably safe, from a pious point of view, since the child can never decide for us. What its thoughts were at that mysterious moment of first speech, it will have forgotten long before it has become able to answer questions.

Unexpectedly, a queer recollection came to me,--resurrected, perhaps, by the sight of the young man with the baby,--perhaps by the song of the water in the cliff: the recollection of a story:--

Long, long ago there lived somewhere among the mountains a poor wood-cutter and his wife. They were very old, and had no children. Every day the husband went alone to the forest to cut wood, while the wife sat weaving at home.

One day the old man went farther into the forest than was his custom, to seek a certain kind of wood; and he suddenly found himself at the edge of a little spring he had never seen before. The water was strangely clear and cold, and he was thirsty; for the day was hot, and he had been working hard. So he doffed his great straw hat, knelt down, and took a long drink. That water seemed to refresh him in a most extraordinary way. Then he caught sight of his own face in the spring, and started back. It was certainly his own face, but not at all as he was accustomed to see it in the old mirror at home. It was the face of a very young man! He could not believe his eyes. He put up both hands to his head, which had been quite bald only a moment before. It was covered with thick black hair. And his face had become smooth as a boy's; every wrinkle was gone. At the same moment he discovered himself full of new strength. He stared in astonishment at the limbs that had been so long withered by age; they were now shapely and hard with dense young muscle. Unknowingly he had drunk at the Fountain of Youth; and that draught had transformed him.

First, he leaped high and shouted for joy; then he ran home faster than he had ever run before in his life. When he entered his house his wife was frightened,--because she took him for a stranger; and when he told her the wonder, she could not at once believe him. But after a long time he was able to convince her that the young man she now saw before her was really her husband; and he told her where the spring was, and asked her to go there with him.

Then she said: "You have become so handsome and so young that you cannot continue to love an old woman;--so I must drink some of that water immediately. But it will never do for both of us to be away from the house at the same time. Do you wait here while I go." And she ran to the woods all by herself.

She found the spring and knelt down, and began to drink. Oh! how cool and sweet that water was! She drank and drank and drank, and stopped for breath only to begin again.

Her husband waited for her impatiently; he expected to see her come back changed into a pretty slender girl. But she did not come back at all. He got anxious, shut up the house, and went to look for her.

When he reached the spring, he could not see her. He was just on the point of returning when he heard a little wail in the high grass near the spring. He searched there and discovered his wife's clothes and a baby,--a very small baby, perhaps six months old!

For the old woman had drunk too deeply of the magical water; she had drunk herself far back beyond the time of youth into the period of speechless infancy.

He took up the child in his arms. It looked at him in a sad, wondering way. He carried it home,--murmuring to it,--thinking strange, melancholy thoughts.

In that hour, after my reverie about Urashima, the moral of this story seemed less satisfactory than in former time. Because by drinking too deeply of life we do not become young.

Naked and cool my kurumaya returned, and said that because of the heat he could not finish the promised run of twenty-five miles, but that he had found another runner to take me the rest of the way. For so much as he himself had done, he wanted fifty-five sen.

It was really very hot--more than 100° I afterwards learned; and far away there throbbed continually, like a pulsation of the beat itself, the sound of great drums beating for rain. And I thought of the Daughter of the Dragon King.

"Seventy-five sen, she told me," I observed;--"and that promised to be done has not been done. Nevertheless, seventy-five sen to you shall be given,--because I am afraid of the gods."

And behind a yet unwearied runner I fled away into the enormous blaze--in the direction of the great drums.

II

With KyūShū Students

I

The students of the Government College, or Higher Middle School, can scarcely be called boys; their ages ranging from the average of eighteen, for the lowest class, to that of twenty-five for the highest. Perhaps the course is too long. The best pupil can hardly hope to reach the Imperial University before his twenty-third year, and will require for his entrance thereinto a mastery of written Chinese as well as a good practical knowledge of either English and German, or of English and French.[1] Thus he is obliged to learn three languages besides all that relates to the elegant literature of his own; and the weight of his task cannot be understood without knowledge of the fact that his study of Chinese alone is equal to the labor of acquiring six European tongues.

The impression produced upon me by the Kumamoto students was very different from that received on my first acquaintance with my Izumo pupils. This was not only because the former had left well behind them the delightfully amiable period of Japanese boyhood, and had developed into earnest, taciturn men, but also because they represented to a marked degree what is called Kyūshū character. Kyūshū still remains, as of yore, the most conservative part of Japan, and Kumamoto, its chief city, the centre of conservative feeling. This conservatism is, however, both rational and practical. Kyūshū was not slow in adopting railroads, improved methods of agriculture, applications of science to certain industries; but remains of all districts of the Empire the least inclined to imitation of Western manners and customs. The ancient samurai spirit still lives on; and that spirit in Kyūshū was for centuries one that exacted severe simplicity in habits of life. Sumptuary laws against extravagance in dress and other forms of luxury used to be rigidly enforced; and though the laws themselves have been obsolete for a generation, their influence continues to appear in the very simple attire and the plain, direct manners of the people. Kumamoto folk are also said to be characterized by their adherence to traditions of conduct which have been almost forgotten elsewhere, and by a certain independent frankness in speech and action, difficult for any foreigner to define, but immediately apparent to an educated Japanese. And here, too, under the shadow of Kiyomasa's mighty fortress,--now occupied by an immense garrison,--national sentiment is declared to be stronger than in the very capital itself,--the spirit of loyalty and the love of country. Kumamoto is proud of all these things, and boasts of her traditions. Indeed, she has nothing else to boast of. A vast, straggling, dull, unsightly town is Kumamoto: there are no quaint, pretty streets, no great temples, no wonderful gardens. Burnt to the ground in the civil war of the tenth Meiji, the place still gives you the impression of a wilderness of flimsy shelters erected in haste almost before the soil had ceased to smoke. There are no remarkable places to visit (not, at least, within city limits),--no sights,--few amusements. For this very reason the college is thought to be well located: there are neither temptations nor distractions for its inmates. But for another reason, also, rich men far away in the capital try to send their sons to Kumamoto. It is considered desirable that a young man should be imbued with what is called "the Kyūshū spirit," and should acquire what might be termed the Kyūshū "tone." The students of Kumamoto are said to be the most peculiar students in the Empire by reason of this "tone." I have never been able to learn enough about it to define it well; but it is evidently a something akin to the deportment of the old Kyūshū samurai. Certainly the students sent from Tokyo or Kyoto to Kyūshū have to adapt themselves to a very different _milieu_. The Kumamoto, and also the Kagoshima youths,--whenever not obliged to don military uniform for drill-hours and other special occasions,--still cling to a costume somewhat resembling that of the ancient bushi, and therefore celebrated in sword-songs---the short robe and hakama reaching a little below the knee, and sandals. The material of the dress is cheap, coarse, and sober in color; cleft stockings (_tabi_) are seldom worn, except in very cold weather, or during long marches, to keep the sandal-thongs from cutting into the flesh. Without being rough, the manners are not soft; and the lads seem to cultivate a certain outward hardness of character. They can preserve an imperturbable exterior under quite extraordinary circumstances, but under this self-control there is a fiery consciousness of strength which will show itself in a menacing form on rare occasions. They deserve to be termed rugged men, too, in their own Oriental way. Some I know, who, though born to comparative wealth, find no pleasure so keen as that of trying how much physical hardship they can endure. The greater number would certainly give up their lives without hesitation rather than their high principles. And a rumor of national danger would instantly transform the whole four hundred into a body of iron soldiery. But their outward demeanor is usually impassive to a degree that is difficult even to understand.

For a long time I used to wonder in vain what feelings, sentiments, ideas might be hidden beneath all that unsmiling placidity. The native teachers, _de facto_ government officials, did not appear to be on intimate terms with any of their pupils: there was no trace of that affectionate familiarity I had seen in Izumo; the relation between instructors and instructed seemed to begin and end with the bugle-calls by which classes were assembled and dismissed. In this I afterwards found myself partly mistaken; still such relations as actually existed were for the most part formal rather than natural, and quite unlike those old-fashioned, loving sympathies of which the memory had always remained with me since my departure from the Province of the Gods.

But later on, at frequent intervals, there came to me suggestions of an inner life much more attractive than this outward seeming,--hints of emotional individuality. A few I obtained in casual conversations, but the most remarkable in written themes. Subjects given for composition occasionally coaxed out some totally unexpected blossoming of thoughts and feelings. A very pleasing fact was the total absence of any false shyness, or indeed shyness of any sort: the young men were not ashamed to write exactly what they felt or hoped. They would write about their homes, about their reverential love to their parents, about happy experiences of their childhood, about their friendships, about their adventures during the holidays; and this often in a way I thought beautiful, because of its artless, absolute sincerity. After a number of such surprises, I learned to regret keenly that I had not from the outset kept notes upon all the remarkable compositions received. Once a week I used to read aloud and correct in class a selection from the best handed in, correcting the remainder at home. The very best I could not always presume to read aloud and criticise for the general benefit, because treating of matters too sacred to be methodically commented upon, as the following examples may show.

I had given as a subject for English composition this question: "What do men remember longest?" One student answered that we remember our happiest moments longer than we remember all other experiences, because it is in the nature of every rational being to try to forget what is disagreeable or painful as soon as possible. I received many still more ingenious answers,--some of which gave proof of a really keen psychological study of the question. But I liked best of all the simple reply of one who thought that painful events are longest remembered. He wrote exactly what follows: I found it needless to alter a single word:--

"What do men remember longest? I think men remember longest that which they hear or see under painful circumstances.

"When I was only four years old, my dear, dear mother died. It was a winter's day. The wind was blowing hard in the trees, and round the roof of our house. There were no leaves on the branches of the trees. Quails were whistling in the distance,--making melancholy sounds. I recall something I did. As my mother was lying in bed,--a little before she died,--I gave her a sweet orange. She smiled and took it, and tasted it. It was the last time she smiled.... From the moment when she ceased to breathe to this hour more than sixteen years have elapsed. But to me the time is as a moment. Now also it is winter. The winds that blew when my mother died blow just as then; the quails utter the same cries; all things are the same. But my mother has gone away, and will never come back again."

The following, also, was written in reply to the same question:--

"The greatest sorrow in my life was my father's death. I was seven years old. I can remember that he had been ill all day, and that my toys had been put aside, and that I tried to be very quiet. I had not seen him that morning, and the day seemed very long. At last I stole into my father's room, and put my lips close to his cheek, and whispered, '_Father! father!_'--and his cheek was very cold. He did not speak. My uncle came, and carried me out of the room, but said nothing. Then I feared my father would die, because his cheek felt cold just as my little sister's had been when she died. In the evening a great many neighbors and other people came to the house, and caressed me, so that I was happy for a time. But they carried my father away during the night, and I never saw him after."

[1] This essay was written early in 1894. Since then, the study of French and of German has been made optional instead of obligatory, and the Higher School course considerably shortened, by a wise decision of the late Minister of Education, Mr. Inouye. It is to be hoped that measures will eventually be taken to render possible making the study of English also optional. Under existing conditions the study is forced upon hundreds who can never obtain any benefit from it.

II

From the foregoing one might suppose a simple style characteristic of English compositions in Japanese higher schools. Yet the reverse is the fact. There is a general tendency to prefer big words to little ones, and long complicated sentences to plain short periods. For this there are some reasons which would need a philological essay by Professor Chamberlain to explain. But the tendency in itself--constantly strengthened by the absurd text-books in use--can be partly understood from the fact that the very simplest forms of English expression are the most obscure to a Japanese,--because they are idiomatic. The student finds them riddles, since the root-ideas behind them are so different from his own that, to explain those ideas, it is first necessary to know something of Japanese psychology; and in avoiding simple idioms he follows instinctively the direction of least resistance.

I tried to cultivate an opposite tendency by various devices. Sometimes I would write familiar stories for the class, all in simple sentences, and in words of one syllable. Sometimes I would suggest themes to write upon, of which the nature almost compelled simple treatment. Of course I was not very successful in my purpose, but one theme chosen in relation to it--"My First Day at School"--evoked a large number of compositions that interested me in quite another way, as revelations of sincerity of feeling and of character. I offer a few selections, slightly abridged and corrected. Their naïveté is not their least charm,--especially if one reflect they are not the recollections of boys. The following seemed to me one of the best:--

"I could not go to school until I was eight years old. I had often begged my father to let me go, for all my playmates were already at school; but he would not, thinking I was not strong enough. So I remained at home, and played with my brother.

"My brother accompanied me to school the first day. He spoke to the teacher, and then left me. The teacher took me into a room, and commanded me to sit on a bench, then he also left me. I felt sad as I sat there in silence: there was no brother to play with now,--only many strange boys. A bell ring twice; and a teacher entered our classroom, and told us to take out our slates. Then he wrote a Japanese character on the blackboard, and told us to copy it. That day he taught us how to write two Japanese words, and told us some story about a good boy. When I returned home I ran to my mother, and knelt down by her side to tell her what the teacher had taught me. Oh! how great my pleasure then was! I cannot even tell how I felt,--much less write it. I can only say that I then thought the teacher was a more learned man than father, or any one else whom I knew,--the most awful, and yet the most kindly person in the world."

The following also shows the teacher in a very pleasing light:--

"My brother and sister took me to school the first day. I thought I could sit beside them in the school, as I used to do at home; but the teacher ordered me to go to a classroom which was very far away from that of my brother and sister. I insisted upon remaining with my brother and sister; and when the teacher said that could not be, I cried and made a great noise. Then they allowed my brother to leave his own class, and accompany me to mine. But after a while I found playmates in my own class; and then I was not afraid to be without my brother."

This also is quite pretty and true:--

"A teacher--(I think, the head master) called me to him, and told me that I must become a great scholar. Then he bade some man take me into a classroom where there were forty or fifty scholars. I felt afraid and pleased at the same time, at the thought of having so many playfellows. They looked at me shyly, and I at them. I was at first afraid to speak to them. Little boys are innocent like that. But after a while, in some way or other, we began to play together; and they seemed to be pleased to have me play with them."

The above three compositions were by young men who had their first schooling under the existing educational system, which prohibits harshness on the part of masters. But it would seem that the teachers of the previous era were less tender. Here are three compositions by older students who appear to have had quite a different experience:--

1. "Before Meiji, there were no such public schools in Japan as there are now. But in every province there was a sort of student society composed of the sons of Samurai. Unless a man were a Samurai, his son could not enter such a society. It was under the control of the Lord of the province, who appointed a director to rule the students. The principal study of the Samurai was that of the Chinese language and literature. Most of the Statesmen of the present government were once students in such Samurai schools. Common citizens and country, people had to send their sons and daughters to primary schools called _Terakoya_, where all the teaching was usually done by one teacher. It consisted of little more than reading, writing, calculating, and some moral instruction. We could learn to write an ordinary letter, or a very easy essay. At eight years old, I was sent to a terakoya, as I was not the son of a Samurai. At first I did not want to go; and every morning my grandfather had to strike me with his stick to make me go. The discipline at that school was very severe. If a boy did not obey, he was beaten with a bamboo,--being held down to receive his punishment. After a year, many public schools were opened: and I entered a public school."

2. "A great gate, a pompous building, a very large dismal room with benches in rows,--these I remember. The teachers looked very severe; I did not like their faces. I sat on a bench in the room and felt hateful. The teachers seemed unkind; none of the boys knew me, or spoke to me. A teacher stood up by the blackboard, and began to call the names. He had a whip in his band. He called my name. I could not answer, and burst out crying. So I was sent borne. That was my first day at school."

3. "When I was seven years old I was obliged to enter a school in my native village. My father gave me two or three writing-brushes and some paper;--I was very glad to get them, and promised to study as earnestly as I could. But how unpleasant the first day at school was! When I went to the school, none of the students knew me, and I found myself without a friend. I entered a classroom. A teacher, with a whip in his hand, called my name in a _large_ voice. I was very much surprised at it, and so frightened that I could not help crying. The boys laughed very loudly at me; but the teacher scolded them, and whipped one of them, and then said to me, 'Don't be afraid of my voice: what is your name?' I told him my name, snuffling. I thought then that school was a very disagreeable place, where we could neither weep nor laugh. I wanted only to go back home at once; and though I felt it was out of my power to go, I could scarcely bear to stay until the lessons were over. When I returned home at last, I told my father what I had felt at school, and said: 'I do not like to go to school at all.'"

Needless to say the next memory is of Meiji. It gives, as a composition, evidence of what we should call in the West, character. The suggestion of self-reliance at six years old is delicious: so is the recollection of the little sister taking off her white tabi to deck her child-brother on his first school-day:--

"I was six years old. My mother awoke me early. My sister gave me her own stockings (_tabi_) to wear,--and I felt very happy. Father ordered a servant to attend me to the school; but I refused to be accompanied: I wanted to feel that I could go all by myself. So I went alone; and, as the school was not far from the house, I soon found myself in front of the gate. There I stood still a little while, because I knew none of the children I saw going in. Boys and girls were passing into the schoolyard, accompanied by servants or relatives; and inside I saw others playing games which filled me with envy. But all at once a little boy among the players saw me, and with a laugh came running to me. Then I was very happy. I walked to and fro with him, hand in hand. At last a teacher called all of us into a schoolroom, and made a speech which I could not understand. After that we were free for the day because it was the first day. I returned home with my friend. My parents were waiting for me, with fruits and cakes; and my friend and I ate them together."

Another writes:--

"When I first went to school I was six years old. I remember only that my grandfather carried my books and slate for me, and that the teacher and the boys were very, very, very kind and good to me,--so that I thought school was a paradise in this world, and did not want to return home."

I think this little bit of natural remorse is also worth the writing down:--

"I was eight years old when I first went to school. I was a bad boy. I remember on the way home from school I had a quarrel with one of my playmates,--younger than I. He threw a very little stone at me which hit me. I took a branch of a tree lying in the road, and struck him across the face with all my might. Then I ran away, leaving him crying in the middle of the road. My heart told me what I had done. After reaching my home, I thought I still heard him crying. My little playmate is not any more in this world now. Can any one know my feelings?"

All this capacity of young men to turn back with perfect naturalness of feeling to scenes of their childhood appears to me essentially Oriental. In the Occident men seldom begin to recall their childhood vividly before the approach of the autumn season of life. But childhood in Japan is certainly happier than in other lands, and therefore perhaps is regretted earlier in adult life. The following extract from a student's record of his holiday experience touchingly expresses such regret:

"During the spring vacation, I went home to visit my parents. Just before the end of the holidays, when it was nearly time for me to return to the college, I heard that the students of the middle school of my native town were also going to Kumamoto on an excursion, and I resolved to go with them.

"They marched in military order with their rifles. I had no rifle, so I took my place in the rear of the column. We marched all day, keeping time to military songs which we sung all together.

"In the evening we reached Soyeda. The teachers and students of the Soyeda school, and the chief men of the village, welcomed us. Then we were separated into detachments, each of which was quartered in a different hotel. I entered a hotel, with the last detachment, to rest for the night.

"But I could not sleep for a long time. Five years before, on a similar 'military excursion,' I had rested in that very hotel, as a student of the same middle school. I remembered the fatigue and the pleasure; and I compared my feelings of the moment with the recollection of my feelings then as a boy. I could not help a weak wish to be young again like my companions. They were fast asleep, tired with their long march; and I sat up and looked at their faces. How pretty their faces seemed in that young sleep!"

III

The preceding selections give no more indication of the general character of the students' compositions than might be furnished by any choice made to illustrate a particular feeling. Examples of ideas and sentiments from themes of a graver kind would show variety of thought and not a little originality in method, but would require much space. A few notes, however, copied out of my class-register, will be found suggestive, if not exactly curious.

At the summer examinations of 1893 I submitted to the graduating classes, for a composition theme, the question, "What is eternal in literature?" I expected original answers, as the subject had never been discussed by us, and was certainly new to the pupils, so far as their knowledge of Western thought was concerned. Nearly all the papers proved interesting. I select twenty replies as examples. Most of them immediately preceded a long discussion, but a few were embodied in the text of the essay:--

1. "Truth and Eternity are identical: these make the Full Circle,--in Chinese, Yen-Man."

2. "All that in human life and conduct which is according to the laws of the Universe."

3. "The lives of patriots, and the teachings of those who have given pure maxims to the world."

4. "Filial Piety, and the doctrine of its teachers. Vainly the books of Confucius were burned during the Shin dynasty; they are translated to-day into all the languages of the civilized world."

5. "Ethics, and scientific truth."

6. "Both evil and good are eternal, said a Chinese sage. We should read only that which is good."

7. "The great thoughts and ideas of our ancestors."

8. "For a thousand million centuries truth is truth."

9. "Those ideas of right and wrong upon which all schools of ethics agree."

10. "Books which rightly explain the phenomena of the Universe."

11. "Conscience alone is unchangeable. Wherefore books about ethics based upon conscience are eternal."

12. "Reasons for noble action: these remain unchanged by time."

13. "Books written upon the best moral means of giving the greatest possible happiness to the greatest possible number of people,--that is, to mankind."

14. "The Gokyō (the Five Great Chinese Classics)."

15. "The holy books of China, and of the Buddhists."

16. "All that which teaches the Right and Pure Way of human conduct."

17. "The Story of Kusunoki Masaskigé, who vowed to be reborn seven times to fight against the enemies of his Sovereign."

18. "Moral sentiment, without which the world would be only an enormous clod of earth, and all books waste-paper."

19. "The Tao-te-King."

20. Same as 19, but with this comment. "He who reads that which is eternal, _his soul shall hover eternally in the Universe._"

IV

Some particularly Oriental sentiments were occasionally drawn out through discussions. The discussions were based upon stories which I would relate to a class by word of mouth, and invite written or spoken comment about. The results of such a discussion are hereafter set forth. At the time it took place, I had already told the students of the higher classes a considerable number of stories. I had told them many of the Greek myths; among which that of Œdipus and the Sphinx seemed especially to please them, because of the hidden moral, and that of Orpheus, like all our musical legends, to have no interest for them. I had also told them a variety of our most famous modern stories. The marvelous tale of "Rappacini's Daughter" proved greatly to their liking; and the spirit of Hawthorne might have found no little ghostly pleasure in their interpretation of it. "Monos and Daimonos" found favor; and Poe's wonderful fragment, "Silence," was appreciated after a fashion that surprised me. On the other hand, the story of "Frankenstein" impressed them very little. None took it seriously. For Western minds the tale must always hold a peculiar horror, because of the shock it gives to feelings evolved under the influence of Hebraic ideas concerning the origin of life, the tremendous character of divine prohibitions, and the awful punishments destined for those who would tear the veil from Nature's secrets, or mock, even unconsciously, the work of a jealous Creator. But to the Oriental mind, unshadowed by such grim faith,--feeling no distance between gods and men,--conceiving life as a multiform whole ruled by one uniform law that shapes the consequence of every act into a reward or a punishment,--the ghastliness of the story makes no appeal. Most of the written criticisms showed me that it was generally regarded as a comic or semi-comic parable. After all this, I was rather puzzled one morning by the request for a "very strong moral story of the Western kind."

I suddenly resolved--though knowing I was about to venture on dangerous ground--to try the full effect of a certain Arthurian legend which I felt sure somebody would criticise with a vim. The moral is rather more than "very strong;" and for that reason I was curious to hear the result.

So I related to them the story of Sir Bors, which is in the sixteenth book of Sir Thomas Mallory's "Morte d'Arthur,"--"how Sir Bors met his brother Sir Lionel taken and beaten with thorns,--and of a maid which should have been dishonored,--and how Sir Bors left his brother to rescue the damsel,---and how it was told them that Lionel was dead." But I did not try to explain to them the knightly idealism imaged in the beautiful old tale, as I wished to hear them comment, in their own Oriental way, upon the bare facts of the narrative.

Which they did as follows:--

"The action of Mallory's knight," exclaimed Iwai, "was contrary even to the principles of Christianity,--if it be true that the Christian religion declares all men brothers. Such conduct might be right if there were no society in the world. But while any society exists which is formed of families, family love must be the strength of that society; and the action of that knight was against family love, and therefore against society. The principle he followed was opposed not only to all society, but was contrary to all religion, and contrary to the morals of all countries."

"The story is certainly immoral," said Orito. "What it relates is opposed to all our ideas of love and loyalty, and even seems to us contrary to nature. Loyalty is not a mere duty. It must be from the heart, or it is not loyally. It must be an inborn feeling. And it is in the nature of every Japanese."

"It is a horrible story," said Andō. "Philanthropy itself is only an expansion of fraternal love. The man who could abandon his own brother to death merely to save a strange woman was a wicked man. Perhaps he was influenced by passion."

"No," I said: "you forget I told you that there was no selfishness in his action,--that it must be interpreted as a heroism."

"I think the explanation of the story must be religious," said Yasukochi. "It seems strange to us; but that may be because we do not understand Western ideas very well. Of course to abandon one's own brother in order to save a strange woman is contrary to all our knowledge of right. But if that knight was a man of pure heart, he must have imagined himself obliged to do it because of some promise or some duty. Even then it must have seemed to him a very painful and disgraceful thing to do, and he could not have done it without feeling that he was acting against the teaching of his own heart."

"There you are right," I answered. "But you should also know that the sentiment obeyed by Sir Bors is one which still influences the conduct of brave and noble men in the societies of the West,--even of men who cannot be called religious at all in the common sense of that word."

"Still, we think it a very bad sentiment," said Iwai; "and we would rather hear another story about another form of society."

Then it occurred to me to tell them the immortal story of Alkestis. I thought for the moment that the character of Herakles in that divine drama would have a particular charm for them. But the comments proved I was mistaken. No one even referred to Herakles. Indeed I ought to have remembered that our ideals of heroism, strength of purpose, contempt of death, do not readily appeal to Japanese youth. And this for the reason that no Japanese gentleman regards such qualities as exceptional. He considers heroism a matter of course--something belonging to manhood and inseparable from it. He would say that a woman may be afraid without shame, but never a man. Then as a mere idealization of physical force, Herakles could interest Orientals very little: their own mythology teems with impersonations of strength; and, besides, dexterity, sleight, quickness, are much more admired by a true Japanese than strength. No Japanese boy would sincerely wish to be like the giant Benkei; but Yoshitsune, the slender, supple conqueror and master of Benkei, remains an ideal of perfect knighthood dear to the hearts of all Japanese youth.

Kamekawa said:--

"The story of Alkestis, or at least the story of Admetus, is a story of cowardice, disloyalty, immorality. The conduct of Admetus was abominable. His wife was indeed noble and virtuous--too good a wife for so shameless a man. I do not believe that the father of Admetus would not have been willing to die for his son if his son had been worthy. I think he would gladly have died for his son had he not been disgusted by the cowardice of Admetus. And how disloyal the subjects of Admetus were! The moment they heard of their king's danger they should have rushed to the palace, and humbly begged that they might be allowed to die in his stead. However cowardly or cruel he might have been, that was their duty. They were his subjects. They lived by his favor. Yet how disloyal they were! A country inhabited by such shameless people must soon have gone to ruin. Of course, as the story says, 'it is sweet to live.' Who does not love life? Who does not dislike to die? But no brave man--no loyal man even--should so much as think about his life when duty requires him to give it."

"But," said Midzuguchi, who had joined us a little too late to hear the beginning of the narration, "perhaps Admetus was actuated by filial piety. Had I been Admetus, and found no one among my subjects willing to die for me, I should have said to my wife: 'Dear wife, I cannot leave my father alone now, because he has no other son, and his grandsons are still too young to be of use to him. Therefore, if you love me, please die in my place.'"

"You do not understand the story," said Yasukochi. "Filial piety did not exist in Admetus. He wished that his father should have died for him."

"Ah!" exclaimed the apologist in real surprise,--"that is not a nice story, teacher!"

"Admetus," declared Kawabuchi, "was everything which is bad. He was a hateful coward, because he was afraid to die; he was a tyrant, because he wanted his subjects to die for him; he was an unfilial son because he wanted his old father to die in his place; and he was an unkind husband, because he asked his wife--a weak woman with little children --to do what _he_ was afraid to do as a man. What could be baser than Admetus?"

"But Alkestis," said Iwai,--"Alkestis was all that is good. For she gave up her children and everything,--even like the Buddha [_Shaka_] himself. Yet she was very young. How true and brave! The beauty of her face might perish like a spring-blossoming, but the beauty of her act should be remembered for a thousand times a thousand years. Eternally her soul will hover in the universe. Formless she is now; but it is the Formless who teach us more kindly than our kindest living teachers,--the souls of all who have done pure, brave, wise deeds."

"The wife of Admetus," said Kumamoto, inclined to austerity in his judgments, "was simply obedient. She was not entirely blameless. For, before her death, it was her highest duty to have severely reproached her husband for his foolishness. And this she did not do,--not at least as our teacher tells the story."

"Why Western people should think that story beautiful," said Zaitsu, "is difficult for us to understand. There is much in it which fills us with anger. For some of us cannot but think of our parents when listening to such a story. After the Revolution of Meiji, for a time, there was much suffering. Often perhaps our parents were hungry; yet we always had plenty of food. Sometimes they could scarcely get money to live; yet we were educated. When we think of all it cost them to educate us, all the trouble it gave them to bring us up, all the love they gave us, and all the pain we caused them in our foolish childhood, then we think we can never, never do enough for them. And therefore we do not like that story of Admetus."

The bugle sounded for recess. I went to the parade-ground to take a smoke. Presently a few students joined me, with their rifles and bayonets--for the next hour was to be devoted to military drill. One said: "Teacher, we should like another subject for composition,--not _too_ easy."

I suggested: "How would you like this for a subject, 'What is most difficult to understand?'"

"That," said Kawabuchi, "is not hard to answer,--the correct use of English prepositions."

"In the study of English by Japanese students,--yes," I answered. "But I did not mean any special difficulty of that kind. I meant to write your ideas about what is most difficult for all men to understand."

"The universe?" queried Yasukochi. "That is too large a subject."

"When I was only six years old," said Orito, "I used to wander along the seashore, on fine days, and wonder at the greatness of the world. Our home was by the sea. Afterwards I was taught that the problem of the universe will at last pass away, like smoke."

"I think," said Miyakawa, "that the hardest of all things to understand is why men live in the world. From the time a child is born, what does he do? He eats and drinks; he feels happy and sad; he sleeps at night; he awakes in the morning. He is educated; he grows up; he marries; he has children; he gets old; his hair turns first gray and then white; he becomes feebler and feebler,--and he dies.

"What does he do all his life? All his real work in this world is to eat and to drink, to sleep and to rise up; since, whatever be his occupation as a citizen, he toils only that he may be able to continue doing this. But for what purpose does a man really come into the world? Is it to eat? Is it to drink? Is it to sleep? Every day he does exactly the same thing, and yet he is not tired! It is strange.

"When rewarded, he is glad; when punished, he is sad. If he becomes rich, he thinks himself happy. If he becomes poor, he is very unhappy. Why is he glad or sad according to his condition? Happiness and sadness are only temporary things. Why does he study hard? No matter how great a scholar he may become, what is there left of him when he is dead? Only bones."

Miyakawa was the merriest and wittiest in his class; and the contrast between his joyous character and his words seemed to me almost startling. But such swift glooms of thought--especially since Meiji--not unfrequently make apparition in quite young Oriental minds. They are fugitive as shadows of summer clouds; they mean less than they would signify in Western adolescence; and the Japanese lives not by thought, nor by emotion, but by duty. Still, they are not haunters to encourage.

"I think," said I, "a much better subject for you all would be the Sky: the sensations which the sky creates in us when we look at it on such a day as this. See how wonderful it is!"

It was blue to the edge of the world, with never a floss of cloud. There were no vapors in the horizon; and very far peaks, invisible on most days, now-massed into the glorious light, seemingly diaphanous.

Then Kumashiro, looking up to the mighty arching, uttered with reverence the ancient Chinese words:--

"_What thought is so high as It is? What mind is so wide?_"

"To-day," I said, "is beautiful as any summer day could be,--only that the leaves are falling, and the semi are gone."

"Do you like semi, teacher?" asked Mori.

"It gives me great pleasure to hear them," I answered. "We have no such cicadæ in the West."

"Human life is compared to the life of a semi," said Orito,--"_utsuzemi no yo_. Brief as the song of the semi all human joy is, and youth. Men come for a season and go, as do the semi."

"There are no semi now," said Yasukochi; "perhaps the teacher thinks it is sad."

"I do not think it sad," observed Noguchi. "They hinder us from study. I hate the sound they make. When we hear that sound in summer, and are tired, it adds fatigue to fatigue so that we fall asleep. If we try to read or write, or even think, when we hear that sound we have no more courage to do anything. Then we wish that all those insects were dead."

"Perhaps you like the dragon-flies," I suggested. "They are flashing all around us; but they make no sound."

"Every Japanese likes dragon-flies," said Ivumashiro. "Japan, you know, is called Akitsusu, which means the Country of the Dragon-fly."

We talked about different kinds of dragon-flies; and they told me of one I had never seen,--the Shōro-tombo, or "Ghost dragon-fly," said to have some strange relation to the dead. Also they spoke of the Yamma--a very large kind of dragon-fly, and related that in certain old songs the samurai were called Yamma, because the long hair of a young warrior used to be tied up into a knot in the shape of a dragon-fly.

A bugle sounded; and the voice of the military officer rang out,--

"_AtsumarÉ!_" (fall in!) But the young men lingered an instant to ask,--

"Well, what shall it be, teacher?--that which is most difficult to understand?"

"No," I said, "the Sky."

And all that day the beauty of the Chinese utterance haunted me, filled me like an exaltation:--

"_What thought is so high as It is? What mind is so wide?_"

V

There is one instance in which the relation between teachers and students is not formal at all,--one precious survival of the mutual love of other days in the old Samurai Schools. By all the aged Professor of Chinese is reverenced; and his influence over the young men is very great. With a word he could calm any outburst burst of anger; with a smile he could quicken any generous impulse. For he represents to the lads their ideal of all that was brave, true, noble, in the elder life,--the Soul of Old Japan.

His name, signifying "Moon-of-Autumn," is famous in his own land. A little book has been published about him, containing his portrait. He was once a samurai of high rank belonging to the great clan of Aidzu. He rose early to positions of trust and influence. He has been a leader of armies, a negotiator between princes, a statesman, a ruler of provinces--all that any knight could be in the feudal era. But in the intervals of military or political duty he seems to have always been a teacher. There are few such teachers. There are few such scholars. Yet to see him now, you would scarcely believe how much he was once feared--though loved--by the turbulent swordsmen under his rule. Perhaps there is no gentleness so full of charm as that of the man of war noted for sternness in his youth.

When the Feudal System made its last battle for existence, he heard the summons of his lord, and went into that terrible struggle in which even the women and little children of Aidzu took part. But courage and the sword alone could not prevail against the new methods of war;--the power of Aidzu was broken; and he, as one of the leaders of that power, was long a political prisoner.

But the victors esteemed him; and the Government he had fought against in all honor took him into its service to teach the new generations. From younger teachers these learned Western science and Western languages. But he still taught that wisdom of the Chinese sages which is eternal,--and loyalty, and honor, and all that makes the man.

Some of his children passed away from his sight. But he could not feel alone; for all whom he taught were as sons to him, and so reverenced him. And he became old, very old, and grew to look like a god,--like a Kami-Sama.

The Kami-Sama in art bear no likeness to the Buddhas. These more ancient divinities have no downcast gaze, no meditative impassiveness. They are lovers of Nature; they haunt her fairest solitudes, and enter into the life of her trees, and speak in her waters, and hover in her winds. Once upon the earth they lived as men; and the people of the land are their posterity. Even as divine ghosts, they remain very human, and of many dispositions. They are the emotions, they are the sensations of the living. But as figuring in legend and the art born of legend, they are mostly very pleasant to know. I speak not of the cheap art which treats them irreverently in these skeptical days, but of the older art explaining the sacred texts about them. Of course such representations vary greatly. But were you to ask what is the ordinary traditional aspect of a Kami, I should answer: "An ancient smiling man of wondrously gentle countenance, having a long white beard, and all robed in white with a white girdle."

Only that the girdle of the aged Professor was of black silk, just such a vision of Shintō he seemed when he visited me the last time.

He had met me at the college, and had said: "I know there has been a congratulation at your house; and that I did not call was not because I am old or because your house is far, but only because I have been long ill. But you will soon see me."

So one luminous afternoon he came, bringing gifts of felicitation,--gifts of the antique high courtesy, simple in themselves, yet worthy a prince: a little plum-tree, every branch and spray one snowy dazzle of blossoms; a curious and pretty bamboo vessel full of wine; and two scrolls bearing beautiful poems,--texts precious in themselves as the work of a rare calligrapher and poet; otherwise precious to me, because written by his own hand. Everything which he said to me I do not fully know. I remember words of affectionate encouragement about my duties,--some wise, keen advice,--a strange story of his youth. But all was like a pleasant dream; for his mere presence was a caress, and the fragrance of his flower-gift seemed as a breathing from the Takama-no-hara. And as a Kami should come and go, so he smiled and went,--leaving all things hallowed. The little plum-tree has lost its flowers: another winter must pass before it blooms again. But something very sweet still seems to haunt the vacant guest-room. Perhaps only the memory of that divine old man;--perhaps a spirit ancestral, some Lady of the Past, who followed his steps all viewlessly to our threshold that day, and lingers with me awhile, just because he loved me.

III

At Hakata

I

Traveling by kuruma one can only see and dream. The jolting makes reading too painful; the rattle of the wheels and the rush of the wind render conversation impossible,--even when the road allows of a fellow-traveler's vehicle running beside your own. After having become familiar with the characteristics of Japanese scenery, you are not apt to notice during such travel, except at long intervals, anything novel enough to make a strong impression. Most often the way winds through a perpetual sameness of rice-fields, vegetable farms, tiny thatched hamlets,--and between interminable ranges of green or blue hills. Sometimes, indeed, there are startling spreads of color, as when you traverse a plain all burning yellow with the blossoming of the natané, or a valley all lilac with the flowering of the gengebana; but these are the passing splendors of very short seasons. As a rule, the vast green monotony appeals to no faculty: you sink into reverie or nod, perhaps, with the wind in your face, to be wakened only by some jolt of extra violence.

Even so, on my autumn way to Hakata, I gaze and dream and nod by turns. I watch the flashing of the dragon-flies, the infinite network of rice-field paths spreading out of sight on either hand, the slowly shifting lines of familiar peaks in the horizon glow, and the changing shapes of white afloat in the vivid blue above all,--asking myself how many times again must I view the same Kyūshū landscape, and deploring the absence of the wonderful.

Suddenly and very softly, the thought steals into my mind that the most wonderful of possible visions is really all about me in the mere common green of the world,--in the ceaseless manifestation of Life.

Ever and everywhere, from beginnings invisible, green things are growing,--out of soft earth, out of hard rock,--forms multitudinous, dumb soundless races incalculably older than man. Of their visible history we know much: names we have given them, and classification. The reason of the forms of their leaves, of the qualities of their fruits, of the colors of their flowers, we also know; for we have learned not a little about the course of the eternal laws that give shape to all terrestrial things. But why they are,--that we do not know. What is the ghostliness that seeks expression in this universal green,--the mystery of that which multiplies forever issuing out of that which multiplies not? Or is the seeming lifeless itself life,--only a life more silent still, more hidden?

But a stranger and quicker life moves upon the face of the world, peoples wind and flood. This has the ghostlier power of separating itself from earth, yet is always at last recalled thereto, and condemned to feed that which it once fed upon. It feels; it knows; it crawls, swims, runs, flies, thinks. Countless the shapes of it. The green slower life seeks being only. But this forever struggles against non-being. We know the mechanism of its motion, the laws of its growth: the innermost mazes of its structure have been explored? the territories of its sensation have been mapped and named. But the meaning of it, who will tell us? Out of what ultimate came it? Or, more simply, what is it? Why should it know pain? Why is it evolved by pain?

And this life of pain is our own. Relatively, it sees, it knows. Absolutely, it is blind, and gropes, like the slow cold green life which supports it. But does it also support a higher existence,--nourish some invisible life infinitely more active and more complex? Is there ghostliness orbed in ghostliness,--life within life without end? Are there universes interpenetrating universes?

For our era, at least, the boundaries of human knowledge have been irrevocably fixed; and far beyond those limits only exist the solutions of such questions. Yet what constitutes those limits of the possible? Nothing more than human nature itself. Must that nature remain equally limited in those who shall come after us? Will they never develop higher senses, vaster faculties, subtler perceptions? What is the teaching of science?

Perhaps it has been suggested in the profound saying of Clifford, that we were never made, but have made ourselves. This is, indeed, the deepest of all teachings of science. And wherefore has man made himself? To escape suffering and death. Under the pressure of pain alone was our being shaped; and even so long as pain lives, so long must continue the ceaseless toil of self-change. Once in the ancient past, the necessities of life were physical; they are not less moral than physical now. And of all future necessities, none seems likely to prove so merciless, so mighty, so tremendous, as that of trying to read the Universal Riddle.

The world's greatest thinker--he who has told us why the Riddle cannot be read--has told us also how the longing to solve it must endure, and grow with the growing of man.[1]

And surely the mere recognition of this necessity contains within it the germ of a hope. May not the desire to know, as the possibly highest form of future pain, compel within men the natural evolution of powers to achieve the now impossible,--of capacities to perceive the now invisible? We of to-day are that which we are through longing so to be; and may not the inheritors of our work yet make themselves that which we now would wish to become?

[1] _First Principles_ (The Reconciliation).

II

I am in Hakata, the town of the Girdle-Weavers,--which is a very tall town, with fantastic narrow ways full of amazing color;--and I halt in the Street-of-Prayer-to-the-Gods because there is an enormous head of bronze, the head of a Buddha, smiling at me through a gateway. The gateway is of a temple of the Jōdō sect; and the head is beautiful.

But there is only the head. What supports it above the pavement of the court is hidden by thousands of metal mirrors heaped up to the chin of the great dreamy face. A placard beside the gateway explains the problem. The mirrors are contributions by women to a colossal seated figure of Buddha--to be thirty-five feet high, including the huge lotus on which it is to be enthroned. And the whole is to be made of bronze mirrors. Hundreds have been already used to cast the head; myriads will be needed to finish the work. Who can venture to assert, in presence of such an exhibition, that Buddhism is passing away?

Yet I cannot feel delighted at this display, which, although gratifying the artistic sense with the promise of a noble statue, shocks it still more by ocular evidence of the immense destruction that the project involves. For Japanese metal mirrors (now being superseded by atrocious cheap looking-glasses of Western manufacture) well deserve to be called things of beauty. Nobody unfamiliar with their gracious shapes can feel the charm of the Oriental comparison of the moon to a mirror. One side only is polished. The other is adorned with designs in relief: trees or flowers, birds or animals or insects, landscapes, legends, symbols of good fortune, figures of gods. Such are even the commonest mirrors. But there are many kinds; and some among them very wonderful, which we call "magic mirrors,"--because when the reflection of one is thrown upon a screen or wall, you can see, in the disk of light, _luminous images of the designs upon the back._[1]

Whether there be any magic mirrors in that heap of bronze ex-votos I cannot tell; but there certainly are many beautiful things. And there is no little pathos in the spectacle of all that wonderful quaint work thus cast away, and destined soon to vanish utterly. Probably within another decade the making of mirrors of silver and mirrors of bronze will have ceased forever. Seekers for them will then hear, with something more than regret, the story of the fate of these.

Nor is this the only pathos in the vision of all those domestic sacrifices thus exposed to rain and sun and trodden dust of streets. Surely the smiles of bride and babe and mother have been reflected in not a few: some gentle home life must have been imaged in nearly all. But a ghostlier value than memory can give also attaches to Japanese mirrors. An ancient proverb declares, "The Mirror is the Sold of the Woman,"--and not merely, as might be supposed, in a figurative sense. For countless legends relate that a mirror feels all the joys or pains of its mistress, and reveals in its dimness or brightness some weird sympathy with her every emotion. Wherefore mirrors were of old employed--and some say are still employed--in those magical rites believed to influence life and death, and were buried with those to whom they belonged.

And the spectacle of all those mouldering bronzes thus makes queer fancies in the mind about wrecks of Souls,--or at least of soul-things. It is even difficult to assure one's self that, of all the movements and the faces those mirrors once reflected, absolutely nothing now haunts them. One cannot help imagining that whatever has been must continue to be somewhere;--that by approaching the mirrors very stealthily, and turning a few of them suddenly face up to the light, one might be able to catch the Past in the very act of shrinking and shuddering away.

Besides, I must observe that the pathos of this exhibition has been specially intensified for me by one memory which the sight of a Japanese mirror always evokes,--the memory of the old Japanese story _Matsuyama no Kagami_. Though related in the simplest manner and with the fewest possible words,[2] it might well be compared to those wonderful little tales by Goethe, of which the meanings expand according to the experience and capacity of the reader. Mrs. James has perhaps exhausted the psychological possibilities of the story in one direction; and whoever can read her little book without emotion should be driven from the society of mankind. Even to guess the Japanese idea of the tale, one should be able to _feel_ the intimate sense of the delicious colored prints accompanying her text,--the interpretation of the last great artist of the Kano school. (Foreigners, unfamiliar with Japanese home life, cannot fully perceive the exquisiteness of the drawings made for the Fairy-Tale Series; but the silk-dyers of Kyōto and of Ōsaka prize them beyond measure, and reproduce them constantly upon the costliest textures.) But there are many versions; and, with the following outline, readers can readily make nineteenth-century versions for themselves.

[1] See article entitled "On the Magic Mirrors of Japan, by Professors Ayrton and Perry," in vol. xxvii. of the _Proceedings of the Royal Society_; also an article treating the same subject by the same authors in vol. xxii. of _The Philosophical Magazine_.

[2] See, for Japanese text and translation, _A Romanized Japanese Reader_, by Professor B. H. Chamberlain. The beautiful version for children, written by Mrs. F. H. James, belongs to the celebrated Japanese Fairy-Tale Series, published at Tōkyō.

III

Long ago, at a place called Matsuyama, in the province of Echigo, there lived a young samurai husband and wife whose names have been quite forgotten. They had a little daughter.

Once the husband went to Yedo,--probably as a retainer in the train of the Lord of Echigo. On his return he brought presents from the capital,--sweet cakes and a doll for the little girl (at least so the artist tells us), and for his wife a mirror of silvered bronze. To the young mother that mirror seemed a very wonderful thing; for it was the first mirror ever brought to Matsuyama. She did not understand the use of it, and innocently asked whose was the pretty smiling face she saw inside it. When her husband answered her, laughing, "Why, it is your own face! How foolish you are!" she was ashamed to ask any more questions, but hastened to put her present away, still thinking it to be a very mysterious thing. And she kept it hidden many years,--the original story does not say why. Perhaps for the simple reason that in all countries love makes even the most trifling gift too sacred to be shown.

But in the time of her last sickness she gave the mirror to her daughter, saying, "After I am dead you must look into this mirror every morning and evening, and you will see me. Do not grieve." Then she died.

And the girl thereafter looked into the mirror every morning and evening, and did not know that the face in the mirror was her own shadow,--but thought it to be that of her dead mother, whom she much resembled. So she would talk to the shadow, having the sensation, or, as the Japanese original more tenderly says, "_having the heart of meeting her mother_" day by day; and she prized the mirror above all things.

At last her father noticed this conduct, and thought it strange, and asked her the reason of it, whereupon she told him all. "Then," says the old Japanese narrator, "he thinking it to be a very piteous thing, his eyes grew dark with tears."

IV

Such is the old story.... But was the artless error indeed so piteous a thing as it seemed to the parent? Or was his emotion vain as my own regret for the destiny of all those mirrors with all their recollections?

I cannot help fancying that the innocence of the maiden was nearer to eternal truth than the feeling of the father. For in the cosmic order of things the present is the shadow of the past, and the future must be the reflection of the present. One are we all, even as Light is, though unspeakable the millions of the vibrations whereby it is made. One are we all,--and yet many, because each is a world of ghosts. Surely that girl saw and spoke to her mother's very soul, while seeing the fair shadow of her own young eyes and lips, uttering love!

And, with this thought, the strange display in the old temple court takes a new meaning,--becomes the symbolism of a sublime expectation. Each of us is truly a mirror, imaging something of the universe,--reflecting also the reflection of ourselves in that universe; and perhaps the destiny of all is to be molten by that mighty Image-maker, Death, into some great sweet passionless unity. How the vast work shall be wrought, only those to come after us may know. We of the present West do not know: we merely dream. But the ancient East believes. Here is the simple imagery of her faith. All forms must vanish at last to blend with that Being whose smile is immutable Rest,--whose knowledge is Infinite Vision.

IV

Of The Eternal Feminine

For metaphors of man we search the skies, And find our allegory in all the air;-- We gaze on Nature with Narcissus-eyes, Enamoured of ourshadow everywhere. WATSON.

I

What every intelligent foreigner dwelling in Japan must sooner or later perceive is, that the more the Japanese learn of our æsthetics and of our emotional character generally, the less favorably do they seem to be impressed thereby. The European or American who tries to talk to them about Western art, or literature, or metaphysics will feel for their sympathy in vain. He will be listened to politely; but his utmost eloquence will scarcely elicit more than a few surprising comments, totally unlike what he hoped and expected to evoke. Many successive disappointments of this sort impel him to judge his Oriental auditors very much as he would judge Western auditors behaving in a similar way. Obvious indifference to what we imagine the highest expression possible of art and thought, we are led by our own Occidental experiences to take for proof of mental incapacity. So we find one class of foreign observers calling the Japanese a race of children; while another, including a majority of those who have passed many years in the country, judge the nation essentially materialistic, despite the evidence of its religions, its literature, and its matchless art. I cannot persuade myself that either of these judgments is less fatuous than Goldsmith's observation to Johnson about the Literary Club: "There can now be nothing new among us; we have traveled over one another's minds." A cultured Japanese might well answer with Johnson's famous retort: "Sir, you have not yet traveled over my mind, I promise you!" And all such sweeping criticisms seem to me due to a very imperfect recognition of the fact that Japanese thought and sentiment have been evolved out of ancestral habits, customs, ethics, beliefs, directly the opposite of our own in some cases, and in all cases strangely different. Acting on such psychological material, modern scientific education cannot but accentuate and develop race differences. Only half-education can tempt the Japanese to servile imitation of Western ways. The real mental and moral power of the race, its highest intellect, strongly resists Western influence; and those more competent than I to pronounce upon such matters assure me that this is especially observable in the case of superior men who have traveled or been educated in Europe. Indeed, the results of the new culture have served more than aught else to show the immense force of healthy conservatism in that race superficially characterized by Rein as a race of children. Even very imperfectly understood, the causes of this Japanese attitude to a certain class of Western ideas might well incite us to reconsider our own estimate of those ideas, rather than to tax the Oriental mind with incapacity. Now, of the causes in question, which are multitudinous, some can only be vaguely guessed at. But there is at least one--a very important one--which we may safely study, because a recognition of it is forced upon any one who passes a few years in the Far East.

II

"Teacher, please tell us why there is so much about love and marrying in English novels;--it seems to us very, very strange."

This question was put to me while I was trying to explain to my literature class--young men from nineteen to twenty-three years of age--why they had failed to understand certain chapters of a standard novel, though quite well able to understand the logic of Jevons and the psychology of James. Under the circumstances, it was not an easy question to answer; in fact, I could not have replied to it in any satisfactory way had I not already lived for several years in Japan. As it was, though I endeavored to be concise as well as lucid, my explanation occupied something more than two hours.

There are few of our society novels that a Japanese student can really comprehend; and the reason is, simply, that English society is something of which he is quite unable to form a correct idea. Indeed, not only English society, in a special sense, but even Western life, in a general sense, is a mystery to him. Any social system of which filial piety is not the moral cement; any social system in which children leave their parents in order to establish families of their own; any social system in which it is considered not only natural but right to love wife and child more than the authors of one's being; any social system in which marriage can be decided independently of the will of parents, by the mutual inclination of the young people themselves; any social system in which the mother-in-law is not entitled to the obedient service of the daughter-in-law, appears to him of necessity a state of life scarcely better than that of the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, or at best a sort of moral chaos. And all this existence, as reflected in our popular fiction, presents him with provoking enigmas. Our ideas about love and our solicitude about marriage furnish some of these enigmas. To the young Japanese, marriage appears a simple, natural duty, for the due performance of which his parents will make all necessary arrangements at the proper time. That foreigners should have so much trouble about getting married is puzzling enough to him; but that distinguished authors should write novels and poems about such matters, and that those novels and poems should be vastly admired, puzzles him infinitely more,--seems to him "very, very strange."

My young questioner said "strange" for politeness' sake. His real thought would have been more accurately rendered by the word "indecent." But when I say that to the Japanese mind our typical novel appears indecent, highly indecent, the idea thereby suggested to my English readers will probably be misleading. The Japanese are not morbidly prudish. Our society novels do not strike them as indecent because the theme is love. The Japanese have a great deal of literature about love. No; our novels seem to them indecent for somewhat the same reason that the Scripture text, "For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife," appears to them one of the most immoral sentences ever written. In other words, their criticism requires a sociological explanation. To explain fully why our novels are, to their thinking, indecent, I should have to describe the whole structure, customs, and ethics of the Japanese family, totally different from anything in Western life; and to do this even in a superficial way would require a volume. I cannot attempt a complete explanation; I can only cite some facts of a suggestive character.

To begin with, then, I may broadly state that a great deal of our literature, besides its fiction, is revolting to the Japanese moral sense, not because it treats of the passion of love per se, but because it treats of that passion in relation to virtuous maidens, and therefore in relation to the family circle. Now, as a general rule, where passionate love is the theme in Japanese literature of the best class, it is not that sort of love which leads to the establishment of family relations. It is quite another sort of love,--a sort of love about which the Oriental is not prudish at all,--the _mayoi_, or infatuation of passion, inspired by merely physical attraction; and its heroines are not the daughters of refined families, but mostly hetæræ, or professional dancing-girls. Neither does this Oriental variety of literature deal with its subject after the fashion of sensuous literature in the West,--French literature, for example: it considers it from a different artistic standpoint, and describes rather a different order of emotional sensations.

A national literature is of necessity reflective: and we may presume that what it fails to portray can have little or no outward manifestation in the national life. Now, the reserve of Japanese literature regarding that love which is the great theme of our greatest novelists and poets is exactly paralleled by the reserve of Japanese society in regard to the same topic. The typical woman often figures in Japanese romance as a heroine; as a perfect mother; as a pious daughter, willing to sacrifice all for duty; as a loyal wife, who follows her husband into battle, fights by his side, saves his life at the cost of her own; never as a sentimental maiden, dying, or making others die, for love. Neither do we find her on literary exhibition as a dangerous beauty, a charmer of men; and in the real life of Japan she has never appeared in any such rôle. Society, as a mingling of the sexes, as an existence of which the supremely refined charm is the charm of woman, has never existed in the East. Even in Japan, society, in the special sense of the word, remains masculine. Nor is it easy to believe that the adoption of European fashions and customs within some restricted circles of the capital indicates the beginning of such a social change as might eventually remodel the national life according to Western ideas of society. For such a remodeling would involve the dissolution of the family, the disintegration of the whole social fabric, the destruction of the whole ethical system,--the breaking up, in short, of the national life.

Taking the word "woman" in its most refined meaning, and postulating a society in which woman seldom appears, a society in which she is never placed "on display," a society in which wooing is utterly out of the question, and the faintest compliment to wife or daughter is an outrageous impertinence, the reader can at once reach some startling conclusions as to the impression made by our popular fiction upon members of that society. But, although partly correct, his conclusions must fall short of the truth in certain directions, unless he also possess some knowledge of the restraints of that society and of the ethical notions behind the restraints. For example, a refined Japanese never speaks to you about his wife (I am stating the general rule), and very seldom indeed about his children, however proud of them he may be. Rarely will he be heard to speak about any of the members of his family, about his domestic life, about any of his private affairs. But if he should happen to talk about members of his family, the persons mentioned will almost certainly be his parents. Of them he will speak with a reverence approaching religious feeling, yet in a manner quite different from that which would be natural to an Occidental, and never so as to imply any mental comparison between the merits of his own parents and those of other men's parents. But he will not talk about his wife even to the friends who were invited as guests to his wedding. And I think I may safely say that the poorest and most ignorant Japanese, however dire his need, would never dream of trying to obtain aid or to invoke pity by the mention of his wife--perhaps not even of his wife and children. But he would not hesitate to ask help for the sake of his parents or his grandparents. Love of wife and child, the strongest of all sentiments with the Occidental, is judged by the Oriental to be a selfish affection. He professes to be ruled by a higher sentiment,--duty: duty, first, to his Emperor; next, to his parents. And since love can he classed only as an ego-altruistic feeling, the Japanese thinker is not wrong in his refusal to consider it the loftiest of motives, however refined or spiritualized it may he.

In the existence of the poorer classes of Japan there are no secrets; but among the upper classes family life is much less open to observation than in any country of the West, not excepting Spain. It is a life of which foreigners see little, and know almost nothing, all the essays which have been written about Japanese women to the contrary notwithstanding.[1] Invited to the home of a Japanese friend, you may or may not see the family. It will depend upon circumstances.

If you see any of them, it will probably be for a moment only, and in that event you will most likely see the wife. At the entrance you give your card to the servant, who retires to present it, and presently returns to usher you into the zashiki, or guest-room, always the largest and finest apartment in a Japanese dwelling, where your kneeling-cushion is ready for you, with a smoking-box before it. The servant brings you tea and cakes. In a little time the host himself enters, and after the indispensable salutations conversation begins. Should you be pressed to stay for dinner, and accept the invitation, it is probable that the wife will do you the honor, as her husband's friend, to wait upon you during an instant. You may or may not be formally introduced to her; but a glance at her dress and coiffure should be sufficient to inform you at once who she is, and you must greet her with the most profound respect. She will probably impress you (especially if your visit be to a samurai home) as a delicately refined and very serious person, by no means a woman of the much-smiling and much-bowing kind. She will say extremely little, but will salute you, and will serve you for a moment with a natural grace of which the mere spectacle is a revelation, and glide away again, to remain invisible until the instant of your departure, when she will reappear at the entrance to wish you good-by. During other successive visits you may have similar charming glimpses of her; perhaps, also, some rarer glimpses of the aged father and mother; and if a much favored visitor, the children may at last come to greet you, with wonderful politeness and sweetness. But the innermost intimate life of that family will never be revealed to you. All that you see to suggest it will be refined, courteous, exquisite, but of the relation of those souls to each other you will know nothing. Behind the beautiful screens which mask the further interior, all is silent, gentle mystery. There is no reason, to the Japanese mind, why it should be otherwise. Such family life is sacred; the home is a sanctuary, of which it were impious to draw aside the veil. Nor can I think this idea of the sacredness of home and of the family relation in any wise inferior to our highest conception of the home and the family in the West.

Should there be grown-up daughters in the family, however, the visitor is less likely to see the wife. More timid, but equally silent and reserved, the young girls will make the guest welcome. In obedience to orders, they may even gratify him by a performance upon some musical instrument, by exhibiting some of their own needlework or painting, or by showing to him some precious or curious objects among the family heirlooms. But all submissive sweetness and courtesy are inseparable from the high-bred reserve belonging to the finest native culture. And the guest must not allow himself to be less reserved. Unless possessing the privilege of great age, which would entitle him to paternal freedom of speech, he must never venture upon personal compliment, or indulge in anything resembling light flattery. What would be deemed gallantry in the West may be gross rudeness in the East. On no account can the visitor compliment a young girl about her looks, her grace, her toilette, much less dare address such a compliment to the wife. But, the reader may object, there are certainly occasions upon which a compliment of some character cannot be avoided. This is true, and on such an occasion politeness requires, as a preliminary, the humblest apology for making the compliment, which will then be accepted with a phrase more graceful than our "Pray do not mention it;"--that is, the rudeness of making a compliment at all.

But here we touch the vast subject of Japanese etiquette, about which I must confess myself still profoundly ignorant. I have ventured thus much only in order to suggest how lacking: in refinement much of our Western society fiction must appear to the Oriental mind.

To speak of one's affection for wife or children, to bring into conversation anything closely related to domestic life, is totally incompatible with Japanese ideas of good breeding. Our open acknowledgment, or rather exhibition, of the domestic relation consequently appears to cultivated Japanese, if not absolutely barbarous, at least uxorious. And this sentiment may be found to explain not a little in Japanese life which has given foreigners a totally incorrect idea about the position of Japanese women. It is not the custom in Japan for the husband even to walk side by side with his wife in the street, much less to give her his arm, or to assist her in ascending or descending a flight of stairs. But this is not any proof upon his part of want of affection. It is only the result of a social sentiment totally different from our own; it is simply obedience to an etiquette founded upon the idea that public displays of the marital relation are improper. Why improper? Because they seem to Oriental judgment to indicate a confession of personal, and therefore selfish sentiment For the Oriental the law of life is duty. Affection must, in every time and place, be subordinated to duty. Any public exhibition of personal affection of a certain class is equivalent to a public confession of moral weakness. Does this mean that to love one's wife is amoral weakness? No; it is the duty of a man to love his wife; but it is moral weakness to love her more than his parents, or to show her, in public, more attention than he shows to his parents. Nay, it would be a proof of moral weakness to show her even the _same_ degree of attention. During the lifetime of the parents her position in the household is simply that of an adopted daughter, and the most affectionate of husbands must not even for a moment allow himself to forget the etiquette of the family.

Here I must touch upon one feature of Western literature never to be reconciled with Japanese ideas and customs. Let the reader reflect for a moment how large a place the subject of kisses and caresses and embraces occupies in our poetry and in our prose fiction; and then let him consider the fact that in Japanese literature these have no existence whatever. For kisses and embraces are simply unknown in Japan as tokens of affection, if we except the solitary fact that Japanese mothers, like mothers all over the world, lip and hug their little ones betimes. After babyhood there is no more hugging or kissing. Such actions, except in the case of infants, are held to be highly immodest. Never do girls kiss one another; never do parents kiss or embrace their children who have become able to walk. And this rule holds good of all classes of society, from the highest nobility to the humblest peasantry. Neither have we the least indication throughout Japanese literature of any time in the history of the race when affection was more demonstrative than it is to-day. Perhaps the Western reader will find it hard even to imagine a literature in the whole course of which no mention is made of kissing, of embracing, even of pressing a loved hand; for hand-clasping is an action as totally foreign to Japanese impulse as kissing. Yet on these topics even the naïve songs of the country folk, even the old ballads of the people about unhappy lovers, are quite as silent as the exquisite verses of the court poets. Suppose we take for an example the ancient popular ballad of Shuntokumaru, which has given origin to various proverbs and household words familiar throughout western Japan. Here we have the story of two betrothed lovers, long separated by a cruel misfortune, wandering in search of each other all over the Empire, and at last suddenly meeting before Kiomidzu Temple by the favor of the gods. Would not any Aryan poet describe such a meeting as a rushing of the two into each other's arms, with kisses and cries of love? But how does the old Japanese ballad describe it? In brief, the twain only sit down together _and stroke each other a little._ Now, even this reserved form of caress is an extremely rare indulgence of emotion. You may see again and again fathers and sons, husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, meeting after years of absence, yet you will probably never see the least approach to a caress between them. They will kneel down and salute each other, and smile, and perhaps cry a little for joy; but they will neither rush into each other's arms, nor utter extraordinary phrases of affection. Indeed, such terms of affection as "my dear," "my darling," "my sweet," "my love," "my life," do not exist in Japanese, nor any terms at all equivalent to our emotional idioms. Japanese affection is not uttered in words; it scarcely appears even in the tone of voice: it is chiefly shown in acts of exquisite courtesy and kindness. I might add that the opposite emotion is under equally perfect control; but to illustrate this remarkable fact would require a separate essay.

[1] I do not, however, refer to those extraordinary persons who make their short residence in teahouses and establishments of a much worse kind, and then go home to write books about the women of Japan.

III

He who would study impartially the life and thought of the Orient must also study those of the Occident from the Oriental point of view. And the results of such a comparative study he will find to be in no small degree retroactive. According to his character and his faculty of perception, he will be more or less affected by those Oriental influences to which he submits himself. The conditions of Western life will gradually begin to assume for him new, undreamed-of meanings, and to lose not a few of their old familiar aspects. Much that he once deemed right and true he may begin to find abnormal and false. He may begin to doubt whether the moral ideals of the West are really the highest. He may feel more than inclined to dispute the estimate placed by Western custom upon Western civilization. Whether his doubts be final is another matter: they will be at least rational enough and powerful enough to modify permanently some of his prior convictions,--among others his conviction of the moral value of the Western worship of Woman as the Unattainable, the Incomprehensible, the Divine, the ideal of "_la femme que tu ne connaîtras pas,_"[1]--the ideal of the Eternal Feminine. For in this ancient East the Eternal Feminine does not exist at all. And after having become quite accustomed to live without it, one may naturally conclude that it is not absolutely essential to intellectual health, and may even dare to question the necessity for its perpetual existence upon the other side of the world.

[1] A phrase from Baudelaire.

IV

To say that the Eternal Feminine does not exist in the Far East is to state but a part of the truth. That it could be introduced thereinto, in the remotest future, is not possible to imagine. Few, if any, of our ideas regarding it can even be rendered into the language of the country: a language in which nouns have no gender, adjectives no degrees of comparison, and verbs no persons; a language in which, says Professor Chamberlain, the absence of personification is "a characteristic so deep-seated and so all-pervading as to interfere even with the use of neuter nouns in combination with transitive verbs."[1] "In fact," he adds, "most metaphors and allegories are incapable of so much as explanation to Far-Eastern minds;" and he makes a striking citation from Wordsworth in illustration of his statement. Yet even poets much more lucid than Wordsworth are to the Japanese equally obscure. I remember the difficulty I once had in explaining to an advanced class this simple line from a well-known ballad of Tennyson,--

"She is more beautiful than day."

My students could understand the use of the adjective "beautiful" to qualify "day," and the use of the same adjective, separately, to qualify the word "maid." But that there could exist in any mortal mind the least idea of analogy between the beauty of day and the beauty of a young woman was quite beyond their understanding. In order to convey to them the poet's thought, it was necessary to analyze it psychologically,--to prove a possible nervous analogy between two modes of pleasurable feeling excited by two different impressions.

Thus, the very nature of the language tells us how ancient and how deeply rooted in racial character are those tendencies by which we must endeavor to account--if there be any need of accounting at all--for the absence in this Far East of a dominant ideal corresponding to our own. They are causes incomparably older than the existing social structure, older than the idea of the family, older than ancestor worship, enormously older than that Confucian code which is the reflection rather than the explanation of many singular facts in Oriental life. But since beliefs and practices react upon character, and character again must react upon practices and beliefs, it has not been altogether irrational to seek in Confucianism for causes as well as for explanations. Far more irrational have been the charges of hasty critics against Shintō and against Buddhism as religious influences opposed to the natural rights of woman. The ancient faith of Shintō has been at least as gentle to woman as the ancient faith of the Hebrews. Its female divinities are not less numerous than its masculine divinities, nor are they presented to the imagination of worshipers in a form much less attractive than the dreams of Greek mythology. Of some, like So-tohori-no-Iratsumé, it is said that the light of their beautiful bodies passes through their garments; and the source of all life and light, the eternal Sun, is a goddess, fair Amaterasu-oho-mi-kami. Virgins serve the ancient gods, and figure in all the pageants of the faith; and in a thousand shrines throughout the land the memory of woman as wife and mother is worshiped equally with the memory of man as hero and father. Neither can the later and alien faith of Buddhism be justly accused of relegating woman to a lower place in the spiritual world than monkish Christianity accorded her in the West. The Buddha, like the Christ, was horn of a virgin; the most lovable divinities of Buddhism, Jizo excepted, are feminine, both in Japanese art and in Japanese popular fancy; and in the Buddhist as in the Roman Catholic hagiography, the lives of holy women hold honored place. It is true that Buddhism, like early Christianity, used its utmost eloquence in preaching against the temptation of female loveliness; and it is true that in the teaching of its founder, as in the teaching of Paul, social and spiritual supremacy is accorded to the man. Yet, in our search for texts on this topic, we must not overlook the host of instances of favor shown by the Buddha to women of all classes, nor that remarkable legend of a later text, in which a dogma denying to woman the highest spiritual opportunities is sublimely rebuked.

In the eleventh chapter of the Sutra of the Lotus of the Good Law, it is written that mention was made before the Lord Buddha of a young girl who had in one instant arrived at supreme knowledge; who had in one moment acquired the merits of a thousand meditations, and the proofs of the essence of all laws. And the girl came and stood in the presence of the Lord.

But the Bodhissattva Pragnakuta doubted, saying, "I have seen the Lord Sakyamuni in the time when he was striving for supreme enlightenment, and I know that he performed good works innumerable through countless æons. In all the world there is not one spot so large as a grain of mustard-seed where he has not surrendered his body for the sake of living creatures. Only after all this did he arrive at enlightenment. Who then may believe this girl could in one moment have arrived at supreme knowledge?"

And the venerable priest Sariputra likewise doubted, saying, "It may indeed happen, O Sister, that a woman fulfill the six perfect virtues; but as yet there is no example of her having attained to Buddhaship, because a woman cannot attain to the rank of a Bodhissattva."

But the maiden called upon the Lord Buddha to be her witness. And instantly in the sight of the assembly her sex disappeared; and she manifested herself as a Bodhissattva, filling all directions of space with the radiance of the thirty-two signs. And the world shook in six different ways. And the priest Sariputra was silent.[2]

[1] _See Things Japanese_, second edition, pp. 255, 256; article "Language."

[2] See the whole wonderful passage in Kern's translation of this magnificent Sutra, _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xxi. chap. xi.

V

But to feel the real nature of what is surely one of the greatest obstacles to intellectual sympathy between the West and the Far East, we must fully appreciate the immense effect upon Occidental life of this ideal which has no existence in the Orient. We must remember what that ideal has been to Western civilization,--to all its pleasures and refinements and luxuries; to its sculpture, painting, decoration, architecture, literature, drama, music; to the development of countless industries. We must think of its effect upon manners, customs, and the language of taste, upon conduct and ethics, upon endeavor, upon philosophy and religion, upon almost every phase of public and private life,--in short, upon national character. Nor should we forget that the many influences interfused in the shaping of it--Teutonic, Celtic, Scandinavian, classic, or mediæval, the Greek apotheosis of human beauty, the Christian worship of the mother of God, the exaltations of chivalry, the spirit of the Renascence steeping and coloring all the preëxisting idealism in a new sensuousness--must have had their nourishment, if not their birth, in a race feeling ancient as Aryan speech, and as alien the most eastern East.

Of all these various influences combined to form our ideal, the classic element remains perceptibly dominant. It is true that the Hellenic conception of human beauty, so surviving, has been wondrously informed with a conception of soul beauty never of the antique world nor of the Renascence. Also it is true that the new philosophy of evolution, forcing recognition of the incalculable and awful cost of the Present to the Past, creating a totally new comprehension of duty to the Future, enormously enhancing our conception of character values, has aided more than all preceding influences together toward the highest possible spiritualization of the ideal of woman. Yet, however further spiritualized it may become through future intellectual expansion, this ideal must in its very nature remain fundamentally artistic and sensuous.

We do not see Nature as the Oriental sees it, and as his art proves that he sees it. We see it less realistically, we know it less intimately, because, save through the lenses of the specialist, we contemplate it anthropomorphically. In one direction, indeed, our æsthetic sense has been cultivated to a degree incomparably finer than that of the Oriental; but that direction has been passional. We have learned something of the beauty of Nature through our ancient worship of the beauty of woman. Even from the beginning it is probable that the perception of human beauty has been the main source of all our æsthetic sensibility. Possibly we owe to it likewise our idea of proportion;[1] our exaggerated appreciation of regularity; our fondness for parallels, curves, and all geometrical symmetries. And in the long process of our æsthetic evolution, the ideal of woman has at last become for us an æsthetic abstraction. Through the illusion of that abstraction only do we perceive the charms of our world, even as forms might be perceived through some tropic atmosphere whose vapors are iridescent.

Nor is this all. Whatsoever has once been likened to woman by art or thought has been strangely informed and transformed by that momentary symbolism: wherefore, through all the centuries Western fancy has been making Nature more and more feminine. Whatsoever delights us imagination has feminized,--the infinite tenderness of the sky,--the mobility of waters,--the rose of dawn,--the vast caress of Day,--Night, and the lights of heaven,--even the undulations of the eternal hills. And flowers, and the flush of fruit, and all things fragrant, fair, and gracious; the genial seasons with their voices; the laughter of streams, and whisper of leaves, and ripplings of song within the shadows;--all sights, or sounds, or sensations that can touch our love of loveliness, of delicacy, of sweetness, of gentleness, make for us vague dreams of woman. Where our fancy lends masculinity to Nature, it is only in grimness and in force,--as if to enhance by rugged and mighty contrasts the witchcraft of the Eternal Feminine. Nay, even the terrible itself, if fraught with terrible beauty,--even Destruction, if only shaped with the grace of destroyers,--becomes for us feminine. And not beauty alone, of sight or sound, but well-nigh all that is mystic, sublime, or holy, now makes appeal to us through some marvelously woven intricate plexus of passional sensibility. Even the subtlest forces of our universe speak to us of woman; new sciences have taught us new names for the thrill her presence wakens in the blood, for that ghostly shock which is first love, for the eternal riddle of her fascination. Thus, out of simple human passion, through influences and transformations innumerable, we have evolved a cosmic emotion, a feminine pantheism.

[1] On the origin of the idea of bilateral symmetry, see Herbert Spencer's essay, "The Sources of Architectural Types."

VI

And now may not one venture to ask whether all the consequences of this passional influence in the æsthetic evolution of our Occident have been in the main beneficial? Underlying all those visible results of which we boast as art triumphs, may there not be lurking invisible results, some future revelation of which will cause more than a little shock to our self-esteem? Is it not quite possible that our æsthetic faculties have been developed even abnormally in one direction by the power of a single emotional idea which has left us nearly, if not totally blind to many wonderful aspects of Nature? Or rather, must not this be the inevitable effect of the extreme predominance of one particular emotion in the evolution of our æsthetic sensibility? And finally, one may surely be permitted to ask if the predominating influence itself has been the highest possible, and whether there is not a higher, known perhaps to the Oriental soul.

I may only suggest these questions, without hoping to answer them satisfactorily. But the longer I dwell in the East, the more I feel growing upon me the belief that there are exquisite artistic faculties and perceptions, developed in the Oriental, of which we can know scarcely more than we know of those unimaginable colors, invisible to the human eye, yet proven to exist by the spectroscope. I think that such a possibility is indicated by certain phases of Japanese art.

Here it becomes as difficult as dangerous to particularize. I dare hazard only some general observations. I think this marvelous art asserts that, out of the infinitely varied aspects of Nature, those which for us hold no suggestion whatever of sex character, those which cannot be looked at anthropomorphically, those which are neither masculine nor feminine, but neuter or nameless, are those most profoundly loved and comprehended by the Japanese. Nay, he sees in Nature much that for thousands of years has remained invisible to us; and we are now learning from him aspects of life and beauties of form to which we were utterly blind before. We have finally made the startling discovery that his art--notwithstanding all the dogmatic assertions of Western prejudice to the contrary, and notwithstanding the strangely weird impression of unreality which at first it produced--is never a mere creation of fantasy, but a veritable reflection of what has been and of what is: wherefore we have recognized that it is nothing less than a higher education in art simply to look at his studies of bird life, insect life, plant life, tree life. Compare, for example, our very finest drawings of insects with Japanese drawings of similar subjects. Compare Giacomelli's illustrations to Michelet's "L'Insecte" with the commonest Japanese figures of the same creatures decorating the stamped leather of a cheap tobacco pouch or the metal work of a cheap pipe. The whole minute exquisiteness of the European engraving has accomplished only an indifferent realism, while the Japanese artist, with a few dashes of his brush, has seized and reproduced, with an incomprehensible power of interpretation, not only every peculiarity of the creature's shape, but every special characteristic of its motion. Each figure flung from the Oriental painter's brush is a lesson, a revelation, to perceptions unbeclouded by prejudice, an opening of the eyes of those who can see, though it be only a spider in a wind-shaken web, a dragon-fly riding a sunbeam, a pair of crabs running through sedge, the trembling of a fish's fins in a clear current, the lilt of a flying wasp, the pitch of a flying duck, a mantis in fighting position, or a semi toddling up a cedar branch to sing. All this art is alive, intensely alive, and our corresponding art looks absolutely dead beside it.

Take, again, the subject of flowers. An English or German flower painting, the result of months of trained labor, and valued at several hundred pounds, would certainly not compare as a nature study, in the higher sense, with a Japanese flower painting executed in twenty brush strokes, and worth perhaps five sen. The former would represent at best but an ineffectual and painful effort to imitate a massing of colors. The latter would prove a perfect memory of certain flower shapes instantaneously flung upon paper, without any model to aid, and showing, not the recollection of any individual blossom, but the perfect realization of a general law of form expression, perfectly mastered, with all its moods, tenses, and inflections. The French alone, among Western art critics, seem fully to understand these features of Japanese art; and among all Western artists it is the Parisian alone who approaches the Oriental in his methods. Without lifting his brush from the paper, the French artist may sometimes, with a single wavy line, create the almost speaking figure of a particular type of man or woman. But this high development of faculty is confined chiefly to humorous sketching; it is still either masculine or feminine. To understand what I mean by the ability of the Japanese artist, my reader must imagine just such a power of almost instantaneous creation as that which characterizes certain French work, applied to almost every subject except individuality, to nearly all recognized general types, to all aspects of Japanese nature, to all forms of native landscape, to clouds and flowing water and mists, to all the life of woods and fields, to all the moods of seasons and the tones of horizons and the colors of the morning and the evening. Certainly, the deeper spirit of this magical art seldom reveals itself at first sight to unaccustomed eyes, since it appeals to so little in Western æsthetic experience. But by gentle degrees it will so enter into an appreciative and unprejudiced mind as to modify profoundly therein almost every preëxisting sentiment in relation to the beautiful. All of its meaning will indeed require many years to master, but something of its reshaping power will be felt in a much shorter time when the sight of an American illustrated magazine or of any illustrated European periodical has become almost unbearable.

Psychological differences of far deeper import are suggested by other facts, capable of exposition in words, but not capable of interpretation through Western standards of æsthetics or Western feeling of any sort. For instance, I have been watching two old men planting young trees in the garden of a neighboring temple. They sometimes spend nearly an hour in planting a single sapling. Having fixed it in the ground, they retire to a distance to study the position of all its lines, and consult together about it. As a consequence, the sapling is taken up and replanted in a slightly different position. This is done no less than eight times before the little tree can be perfectly adjusted into the plan of the garden. Those two old men are composing a mysterious thought with their little trees, changing them, transferring them, removing or replacing them, even as a poet changes and shifts his words, to give to his verse the most delicate or the most forcible expression possible.

In every large Japanese cottage there are several alcoves, or tokonoma, one in each of the principal rooms. In these alcoves the art treasures of the family are exhibited.[1] Within each toko a kakemono is hung; and upon its slightly elevated floor (usually of polished wood) are placed flower vases and one or two artistic objects. Flowers are arranged in the toko vases according to ancient rules which Mr. Conder's beautiful hook will tell you a great deal about; and the kakemono and the art objects there displayed are changed at regular intervals, according to occasion and season. Now, in a certain alcove, I have at various times seen many different things of beauty: a Chinese statuette of ivory, an incense vase of bronze,--representing a cloud-riding pair of dragons,--the wood carving of a Buddhist pilgrim resting by the wayside and mopping his bald pate, masterpieces of lacquer ware and lovely Kyōto porcelains, and a large stone placed on a pedestal of heavy, costly wood, expressly made for it. I do not know whether you could see any beauty in that stone; it is neither hewn nor polished, nor does it possess the least imaginable intrinsic value. It is simply a gray water-worn stone from the bed of a stream. Yet it cost more than one of those Kyōto vases which sometimes replace it, and which you would be glad to pay a very high price for.

In the garden of the little house I now occupy in Kumamoto, there are about fifteen rocks, or large stones, of as many shapes and sizes. They also have no real intrinsic value, not even as possible building material. And yet the proprietor of the garden paid for them something more than seven hundred and fifty Japanese dollars, or considerably more than the pretty house itself could possibly have cost. And it would be quite wrong to suppose the cost of the stones due to the expense of their transportation from the bed of the Shira-kawa. No; they are worth seven hundred and fifty dollars only because they are considered beautiful to a certain degree, and because there is a large local demand for beautiful stones. They are not even of the best class, or they would have cost a great deal more. Now, until you can perceive that a big rough stone may have more æsthetic suggestiveness than a costly steel engraving, that it is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, you cannot begin to understand how a Japanese sees Nature. "But what," you may ask, "can be beautiful in a common stone?" Many things; but I will mention only one,--irregularity.

In my little Japanese house, the fusuma, or sliding screens of opaque paper between room and room, have designs at which I am never tired of looking. The designs vary in different parts of the dwelling; I will speak only of the fusuma dividing my study from a smaller apartment. The ground color is a delicate cream-yellow; and the golden pattern is very simple,--the mystic-jewel symbols of Buddhism scattered over the surface by pairs. But no two sets of pairs are placed at exactly the same distance from each other; and the symbols themselves are curiously diversified, never appearing twice in exactly the same position or relation. Sometimes one jewel is transparent, and its fellow opaque; sometimes both are opaque or both diaphanous; sometimes the transparent one is the larger of the two; sometimes the opaque is the larger; sometimes both are precisely the same size; sometimes they overlap, and sometimes do not touch; sometimes the opaque is on the left, sometimes on the right; sometimes the transparent jewel is above, sometimes below. Vainly does the eye roam over the whole surface in search of a repetition, or of anything resembling regularity, either in distribution, juxtaposition, grouping, dimensions, or contrasts. And throughout the whole dwelling nothing resembling regularity in the various decorative designs can be found. The ingenuity by which it is avoided is amazing,--rises to the dignify of genius. Now, all this is a common characteristic of Japanese decorative art; and after having lived a few years under its influences, the sight of a regular pattern upon a wall, a carpet, a curtain, a ceiling, upon any decorated surface, pains like a horrible vulgarism. Surely, it is because we have so long been accustomed to look at Nature anthropomorphically that we can still endure mechanical ugliness in our own decorative art, and that we remain insensible to charms of Nature which are clearly perceived even by the eyes of the Japanese child, wondering over its mother's shoulder at the green and blue wonder of the world.

"_He_" saith a Buddhist text, "_who discerns that nothingness is law,--such a one hath wisdom._"

[1] The tokonoma, or toko, is said to have been first introduced into Japanese architecture about four hundred and fifty years ago, by the Buddhist priest Eisai, who had studied in China. Perhaps the alcove was originally devised and used for the exhibition of sacred objects; but to-day, among the cultivated, it would be deemed in very had taste to display either images of the gods or sacred paintings in the toko of a guest-room. The toko is still, however, a sacred place in a certain sense. No one should ever step upon it, or squat within it, or even place in it anything not pure, or anything offensive to taste. There is an elaborate code of etiquette in relation to it. The most honored among guests is always placed nearest to it; and guests take their places, according to rank, nearer to or further from it.

V

Bits Of Life And Death

I

_July_ 25. Three extraordinary visits have been made to my house this week.

The first was that of the professional well-cleaners. For once every year all wells must be emptied and cleansed, lest the God of Wells, Suijin-Sama, be wroth. On this occasion I learned some things relating to Japanese wells and the tutelar deity of them, who has two names, being also called Mizuha-nome-no-mikoto.

Suijin-Sama protects all wells, keeping their water sweet and cool, provided that house-owners observe his laws of cleanliness, which are rigid. To those who break them sickness comes, and death. Rarely the god manifests himself, taking the form of a serpent. I have never seen any temple dedicated to him. But once each month a Shinto priest visits the homes of pious families having wells, and he repeats certain ancient prayers to the Well-God, and plants nobori, little paper flags, which are symbols, at the edge of the well. After the well has been cleaned, also, this is done. Then the first bucket of the new water must be drawn up by a man; for if a woman first draw water, the well will always thereafter remain muddy.

The god has little servants to help him in his work. These are the small fishes the Japanese call funa.[1] One or two funa are kept in every well, to clear the water of larvae. When a well is cleaned, great care is taken of the little fish. It was on the occasion of the coming of the well-cleaners that I first learned of the existence of a pair of funa in my own well. They were placed in a tub of cool water while the well was refilling, and thereafter were replunged into their solitude.

The water of my well is clear and ice-cold. But now I can never drink of it without a thought of those two small white lives circling always in darkness, and startled through untold years by the descent of plashing buckets.

The second curious visit was that of the district firemen, in full costume, with their hand-engines. According to ancient custom, they make a round of all their district once a year during the dry spell, and throw water over the hot roofs, and receive some small perquisite from each wealthy householder. There is a belief that when it has not rained for a long time roofs may be ignited by the mere heat of the sun. The firemen played with their hose upon my roofs, trees, and garden, producing considerable refreshment; and in return I bestowed on them wherewith to buy saké.

The third visit was that of a deputation of children asking for some help to celebrate fittingly the festival of Jizō, who has a shrine on the other side of the street, exactly opposite my house. I was very glad to contribute to their fund, for I love the gentle god, and I knew the festival would be delightful. Early next morning, I saw that the shrine had already been decked with flowers and votive lanterns. A new bib had been put about Jizō's neck, and a Buddhist repast set before him. Later on, carpenters constructed a dancing-platform in the temple court for the children to dance upon; and before sundown the toy-sellers had erected and stocked a small street of booths inside the precincts. After dark I went out into a great glory of lantern fires to see the children dance; and I found, perched before my gate, an enormous dragon-fly more than three feet long. It was a token of the children's gratitude for the little help I had given them,--a kazari, a decoration. I was startled for the moment by the realism of the thing; but upon close examination I discovered that the body was a pine branch wrapped with colored paper, the four wings were four fire-shovels, and the gleaming head was a little teapot. The whole was lighted by a candle so placed as to make extraordinary shadows, which formed part of the design. It was a wonderful instance of art sense working without a speck of artistic material, yet it was all the labor of a poor little child only eight years old!

[1] A sort of small silver carp.

II

_July_ 30. The next house to mine, on the south side,--a low, dingy structure,--is that of a dyer. You can always tell where a Japanese dyer is by the long pieces of silk or cotton stretched between bamboo poles before his door to dry in the sun,--broad bands of rich azure, of purple, of rose, pale blue, pearl gray. Yesterday my neighbor coaxed me to pay the family a visit; and after having been led through the front part of their little dwelling, I was surprised to find myself looking from a rear veranda at a garden worthy of some old Kyōto palace. There was a dainty landscape in miniature, and a pond of clear water peopled by goldfish having wonderfully compound tails.

When I had enjoyed this spectacle awhile, the dyer led me to a small room fitted up as a Buddhist chapel. Though everything had had to be made on a reduced scale, I did not remember to have seen a more artistic display in any temple. He told me it had cost him about fifteen hundred yen. I did not understand how even that sum could have sufficed.

There were three elaborately carven altars,-a triple blaze of gold lacquer-work; a number of charming Buddhist images; many exquisite vessels; an ebony reading-desk; a mokugyō[1]; two fine bells,--in short, all the paraphernalia of a temple in miniature. My host had studied at a Buddhist temple in his youth, and knew the sutras, of which he had all that are used by the Jōdō sect. He told me that he could celebrate any of the ordinary services. Daily, at a fixed hour, the whole family assembled in the chapel for prayers; and he generally read the Kyō for them. But on extraordinary occasions a Buddhist priest from the neighboring temple would come to officiate.

He told me a queer story about robbers. Dyers are peculiarly liable to be visited by robbers; partly by reason of the value of the silks intrusted to them, and also because the business is known to be lucrative. One evening the family were robbed. The master was out of the city; his old mother, his wife, and a female servant were the only persons in the house at the time. Three men, having their faces masked and carrying long swords, entered the door. One asked the servant whether any of the apprentices were still in the building; and she, hoping to frighten the invaders away, answered that the young men were all still at work. But the robbers were not disturbed by this assurance. One posted himself at the entrance, the other two strode into the sleeping-apartment. The women started up in alarm, and the wife asked, "Why do you wish to kill us?" He who seemed to be the leader answered, "We do not wish to kill you; we want money only. But if we do not get it, then it will be this"--striking his sword into the matting. The old mother said, "Be so kind as not to frighten my daughter-in-law, and I will give you whatever money there is in the house. But you ought to know there cannot be much, as my son has gone to Kyōto." She handed them the money-drawer and her own purse. There were, just twenty-seven yen and eighty-four sen. The head robber counted it, and said, quite gently, "We do not want to frighten you. We know you are a very devout believer in Buddhism, and we think you would not tell a lie. Is this all?" "Yes, it is all," she answered. "I am, as you say, a believer in the teaching of the Buddha, and if you come to rob me now, I believe it is only because I myself, in some former life, once robbed you. This is my punishment for that fault, and so, instead of wishing to deceive you, I feel grateful at this opportunity to atone for the wrong which I did to you in my previous state of existence." The robber laughed, and said, "You are a good old woman, and we believe you. If you were poor, we would not rob you at all. Now we only want a couple of kimono and this,"--laying his hand on a very fine silk overdress. The old woman replied, "All my son's kimono I can give you, but I beg you will not take that, for it does not belong to my son, and was confided to us only for dyeing. What is ours I can give, but I cannot give what belongs to another." "That is quite right," approved the robber, "and we shall not take it."

After receiving a few robes, the robbers said good-night, very politely, but ordered the women not to look after them. The old servant was still near the door. As the chief robber passed her, he said, "You told us a lie,--so take that!"--and struck her senseless. None of the robbers were ever caught.

[1] A hollow wooden block shaped like a dolphin's head. It is tapped in accompaniment to the chanting of the Buddhist sutras.

III

_August_ 29. When a body has been burned, according to the funeral rites of certain Buddhist sects, search is made among the ashes for a little bone called the Hotoke-San, or "Lord Buddha," popularly supposed to be a little bone of the throat. What bone it really is I do not know, never having had a chance to examine such a relic.

According to the shape of this little bone when found after the burning, the future condition of the dead may be predicted. Should the next state to which the soul is destined be one of happiness, the bone will have the form of a small image of Buddha. But if the next birth is to be unhappy, then the bone will have either an ugly shape, or no shape at all.

A little boy, the son of a neighboring tobacconist, died the night before last, and to-day the corpse was burned. The little hone left over from the burning was discovered to have the form of three Buddhas,--San-Tai,--which may have afforded some spiritual consolation to the bereaved parents.[1]

[1] At the great temple of Tennōji, at Ōsaka, all such bones are dropped into a vault; and according _to the sound each makes in falling_, further evidence about the Gōsho is said to be obtained. After a hundred years from the time of beginning this curious collection, all these bones are to be ground into a kind of paste, out of which a colossal statue of Buddha is to be made.

IV

_September_ 13. A letter from Matsue, Izumo, tells me that the old man who used to supply me with pipestems is dead. (A Japanese pipe, you must know, consists of three pieces, usually,--a metal bowl large enough to hold a pea, a metal mouthpiece, and a bamboo stem which is renewed at regular intervals.) He used to stain his pipestems very prettily: some looked like porcupine quills, and some like cylinders of snakeskin. He lived in a queer narrow little street at the verge of the city. I know the street because in it there is a famous statue of Jizō called Shiroko-ō,--"White-Child-Jizō,"--which I once went to see. They whiten its face, like the face of a dancing-girl, for some reason which I have never been able to find out.

The old man had a daughter, O-Masu, about whom a story is told. O-Masu is still alive. She has been a happy wife for many years; but she is dumb. Long ago, an angry mob sacked and destroyed the dwelling and the storehouses of a rice speculator in the city. His money, including a quantity of gold coin (_koban_), was scattered through the street. The rioters--rude, honest peasants--did not want it: they wished to destroy, not to steal. But O-Masu's father, the same evening, picked up a koban from the mud, and took it home. Later on a neighbor denounced him, and secured his arrest. The judge before whom he was summoned tried to obtain certain evidence by cross-questioning O-Masu, then a shy girl of fifteen. She felt that if she continued to answer she would be made, in spite of herself, to give testimony unfavorable to her father; that she was in the presence of a trained inquisitor, capable, without effort, of forcing her to acknowledge everything she knew. She ceased to speak, and a stream of blood gushed from her mouth. She had silenced herself forever by simply biting off her tongue. Her father was acquitted. A merchant who admired the act demanded her in marriage, and supported her father in his old age.

V

_October_ 10. There is said to be one day--only one--in the life of a child during which it can remember and speak of its former birth.

On the very day that it becomes exactly two years old, the child is taken by its mother into the most quiet part of the house, and is placed in a mi, or rice-winnowing basket. The child sits down in the mi. Then the mother says, calling the child by name, "_Omae no zensé wa, nande attakane?--iute, gōran._"[1] Then the child always answers in one word. For some mysterious reason, no more lengthy reply is ever given. Often the answer is so enigmatic that some priest or fortune-teller must be asked to interpret it. For instance, yesterday, the little son of a copper-smith living near us answered only "Umé" to the magical question. Now umé might mean a plum-flower, a plum, or a girl's name,--"Flower-of-the-Plum." Could it mean that the boy remembered having been a girl? Or that he had been a plum-tree? "Souls of men do not enter plum-trees," said a neighbor. A fortune-teller this morning declared, on being questioned about the riddle, that the boy had probably been a scholar, poet, or statesman, because the plum-tree is the symbol of Tenjin, patron of scholars, statesmen, and men of letters.

[1] "Thy previous life as for,--what was it? Honorably look [or, _please_ look] and tell."

VI

_November_ 17. An astonishing book might be written about those things in Japanese life which no foreigner can understand. Such a book should include the study of certain rare but terrible results of anger.

As a national rule, the Japanese seldom allow themselves to show anger. Even among the common classes, any serious menace is apt to take the form of a smiling assurance that your favor shall be remembered, and that its recipient is grateful. (Do not suppose, however, that this is ironical, in our sense of the word: it is only euphemistic,--ugly things not being called by their real names.) But this smiling assurance may possibly mean death. When vengeance comes, it comes unexpectedly. Neither distance nor time, within the empire, can offer any obstacles to the avenger who can walk fifty miles a day, whose whole baggage can be tied up in a very small towel, and whose patience is almost infinite. He may choose a knife, but is much more likely to use a sword,--a Japanese sword. This, in Japanese hands, is the deadliest of weapons; and the killing of ten or twelve persons by one angry man may occupy less than a minute. It does not often happen that the murderer thinks of trying to escape. Ancient custom requires that, having taken another life, he should take his own; wherefore to fall into the hands of the police would be to disgrace his name. He has made his preparations beforehand, written his letters, arranged for his funeral, perhaps--as in one appalling instance last year--even chiseled his own tombstone. Having fully accomplished his revenge, he kills himself.

There has just occurred, not far from the city, at the village called Sugikamimura, one of those tragedies which are difficult to understand. The chief actors were, Narumatsu Ichirō, a young shopkeeper; his wife, O-Noto, twenty years of age, to whom he had been married only a year; and O-Noto's maternal uncle, one Sugimoto Ivasaku, a man of violent temper, who had once been in prison. The tragedy was in four acts.

Act I. _Scene: Interior of public bathhouse. Sugimoto Nasaku in the bath. Enter Narumatsu Ichirō, who strips, gets into the smoking water without noticing his relative, and cries out,_--

"_Aa!_ as if one should be in Jigoku, so hot this water is!"

(The word "Jigoku" signifies the Buddhist hell; but, in common parlance, it also signifies a prison,--this time an unfortunate coincidence.)

_Kasaku_ (terribly angry). "A raw baby, you, to seek a hard quarrel! What do you not like?"

_Ichirō_ (surprised and alarmed, but rallying against the tone of Kasaku). "Nay! What? That I said need not by you be explained. Though I said the water was hot, your help to make it hotter was not asked."

_Kasaku_ (now dangerous). "Though for my own fault, not once, but twice in the hell of prison I had been, what should there be wonderful in it? Either an idiot child or a low scoundrel you must be!"

(_Each eyes the other for a spring, but each hesitates, although things no Japanese should suffer himself to say have been said. They are too evenly matched, the old and the young._)

_Kasaku_ (growing cooler as Ichirō becomes angrier). "A child, a raw child, to quarrel with _me!_ What should a baby do with a wife? Your wife is my blood, mine,--the blood of the man from hell! Give her back to my house."

_Ichirō_ (desperately, now fully assured Kasaku is physically the better man). "Return my wife? You say to return her? Right quickly shall she be returned, at once!"

So fa