Japan and Her People

Vol. I

Anna C. Hartshorne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429839535
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1902, this volume emerged contemporaneously with the Anglo-Japanese Treaty and explored the nation of Britain's newest allies from an American perspective. Anna Hartshorne took her readers from experiencing Japan as unreal to utterly normal. She provided a thorough traveller's guide including the voyage and first impressions, major locations and Japan's peoples, culture and history. This is presented in two volumes along with 50 illustrations.

JAPAN AND HER PEOPLE.
CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION.

 

NOWADAYS a journey to Japan is not at all a formidable matter; there are already six steamship lines crossing the Pacific, their voyages ranging from twelve days to three weeks, and once across travel is little more fatiguing than in Germany or Italy, and far less so from all accounts than in Spain. The chief difficulty for Americans seems to be to find out beforehand what to expect in the way of climate and physical conditions; when to go; what to take and what to leave behind; what there is to see and how much time is needed to see it.

The seasons largely control the choice of routes, the northern lines being most desirable for summer and early fall, the San Francisco ones for winter and March or April. The very best months in Japan, so far as weather goes, are October and November, and even most of December; the next best March to early June. Winter is short and sharp, a good deal like Southern Italy, and equally uncertain as to temperature and sunshine; summer hot and wet (except in the northern island, Yezo), especially in August and September, when there are the severest storms and a heavy, muggy atmosphere.

Was it a Londoner or a Philadelphian who said of his birthplace, “We don’t have climate here; we have weather?” Thanks to the monsoons, Japan gets both; that is to say, from June to October the wind is mostly south and wet, from October to May northwest and dry, with a lively period of unsettlement between changes. This brings the rain in June, just when it is needed for the rice, and blows it away at harvest time. Between the summer rains come bursts of hot sunlight, and everybody airs their houses and closets, and whatever is not already well dried and put away in air-tight chests; for no amount of care will save kid gloves and leather-bound books from spotting if they are left out in the moist heat.

After all, neither cold nor heat is extreme, but the dampness makes both rather trying to foreigners—that is to say, to non-Japanese. Americans miss their steam-heated houses, and shiver through a Tokyo February as if they were in Rome or Naples. But by a second winter, if they will stay on, they will learn to keep the house well open, wear warm clothing and depend on the sunshine, which never fails on really cold days, for the occasional winter rains are as warm as the May showers are chilly. Even August and September need not alarm any one used to American summers, for foreign residents pass them comfortably enough at the sea or mountain resorts, only it will not do to undertake much exertion or long journeys; the heat is relaxing, and the rains make the roads heavy or even impassable, while trains are liable to be detained by floods or broken embankments.

Just one caution needs to be writ large—namely, drink no unboiled water unless you know where it came from, and that no rice field has had a chance to drain into it. Remember that the Japanese do not drink cold water, and are consequently indifferent about keeping it pure; even ice is risky; but keeping this rule means health throughout the country at any time of year.

Spring, then, for the blossoms, for weather always uncertain and usually lovely, for that delight of new life felt so strongly in the south, and nowhere more keenly than in Japan; but autumn—October till Christmas—for a prolonged Indian summer, a season of unfailing sunshine and dreamy light, of frosty nights and still days, of rice-harvest and chrysanthemums and brilliant maples. Nine months in the year ladies need cotton or thin silk blouses for the day, and a wrap, not too thin, the moment the sun goes down; even in summer light woolen underclothes are needed on account of the dampness, and after Christmas furs and a steamer rug are necessities for long jinrikisha rides on frosty days.

All ordinary European clothing and personal as well as household goods can be bought in Yokohama or Kobe—not in Tokyo, where you find only such “foreign” things as the Japanese have adopted or adapted for their own use. Prices are about as in America, or even lower for the present, on account of lower duties; so it is better not to burden oneself with extras. Heavy trunks, if brought over at all, had better be stored on first landing, and only such small pieces taken along as can be piled on a jinrikisha and easily handled. In case of leaving from a different port, a shipping agent will take everything in charge and have it put on the proper steamer.

People who wish to be spared all trouble join one of Cook’s or Raymond’s parties, which go usually in the spring and fall, mostly in round-the-world tours, giving about a mouth to Japan; or engage a guide on arriving, who will act as courier and plan everything if desired. A month is the ordinary tourist allowance, and it is just enough to get around the more important sights, probably not more hastily than most travelers go through Europe. There is this difference though, that while Europeans and Americans know a great deal about each other beforehand, and their civilization is practically one throughout, East and West have no such common inheritance, no such knowledge of each other’s heroes and ideals, and they cannot at a glance understand one another. Therefore, it is well worth an effort to read up a little beforehand, for to those who do not, much of Japan must be quite meaningless, and either “how funny!” or “how absurd!” Books are plenty enough; for instance, Miss Scidmore’s “Jinrikisha Days,” Mitford’s “Tales of Old Japan,” Griffis’ “Mikado’s Empire,” Lafcadio Hearn’s books, and among the latest and best Mrs. Hugh Fraser’s delightful “Letters from Japan” and “The Custom of the Country.” These are a few out of many that serve well to beguile Bross-continent journey and voyage, while Chamberlain’s “Murray” (there is no “Bædeker”) and his “Things Japanese” are inseparable necessary companions on the spot, and such works as Rein’s “Industries of Japan” and others of the heavier sort become most interesting for reference.

The (London) Traveller for August, 1900, gives an apt piece of advice—namely: “No tourist visiting Japan should fail to put himself in touch with the Kihin-kai, or Welcome Society, which, for a nominal fee, will very materially assist him in traveling and sight-seeing in the islands of Japan. The Society, which was formed in 1893 on the initiative of certain Japanese noblemen and distinguished foreign residents, will supply the traveler with trustworthy guides, see that he is not cheated by innkeepers and others, put him in the way of obtaining genuine objets d’art, if such be his desire, besides, by virtue of its special privileges, passing him into government buildings, imperial gardens and many other places of special interest where it would be quite impossible for him to gain admittance as a stranger.”

The Canadian Pacific steamers sail from Vancouver, the Northern Pacific from Tacoma, the Japan Steam-ship Company (Nippon Yusen Kaisha) from Seattle, connecting with the Great Northern Railroad, the Pacific Mail, Occidental and Oriental, and Toyo Kisen Kaisha (Orient Line) from San Francisco. All make through tickets or returns in connection with the transcontinental railroads at nearly uniform rates. Accommodations compare very fairly with the average Atlantic lines; some arrangements may be less elaborate, but the quick, silent Chinese and Japanese “boys” furnish a better and far more ready service than the high-minded and high-tipped stewards who rule the other sea. All the steamers of the San Francisco lines now call at Honolulu, making a weekly service between them, and their tickets are interchangeable, allowing you to stop over one or more trips if you wish. The steamers usually stay about twenty-four hours in port at the Sandwich Islands, giving time for a run ashore and a glimpse of the tropics. The voyage by Honolulu is never too cold, but is sometimes too hot, and this fact, as well as the shorter voyage—twelve days against eighteen—sends many travelers to the Canadian route, which is always cool, often cold and—well, just as likely to be rough as any other sea voyage. But of these matters the steamship companies and railroad offices will cheerfully supply all particulars, corrected to date, and present beside a whole library of maps and illustrated folders; while, on the other side, hotel runners meet the steamers and attend to all the details of your going ashore. Indeed, if you permit him, the hotel runner will take you in hand and pass you safely and happily from one to another of his fellows throughout the length and breadth of Japan.

As for the country, the Japanese say it is a huge catfish, with his tail down at Kiushiu and his head up at Yezo, and a backbone of mountains running through, and when he wriggles people say there is an earthquake. Moreover, at the Imperial University in Tokyo, and in caves and on mountains, Prof. John Milne and his clever followers have set their delicate seismological instruments, mapping down every jump and every quiver of the big volcanic heart; and they tell us that whereas the earth’s crust is never quite still, Japan, being rather new, is one of the thinnest and shakiest parts. However that may be, small earthquakes come very often, and volcanoes are much in evidence, though most of them, like Fuji, are no longer active; and the fish is a very big fish, some fifteen hundred miles from tip to tip, and that without counting in the Kuriles, all ice and fire, or the Lu Chu Islands and Formosa, reaching nearly down to our vexed Philippines. On the other hand, the country is very narrow, nowhere above two hundred miles across from sea to sea; a strip of the Atlantic coast from Maine to Florida, taking in most of the New England States, New Jersey, Maryland, and so on down, would be much the size and shape of Japan. But the strip would have to be sliced up into islands; Yezo at the north, then the main island, Honda or Nippon, reaching from Boston nearly to Charleston, and the rest into five large and any number of small and still smaller islets, with the Inland Sea locked in among them. The upper half of the strip trends north and south; the lower takes a sudden turn near the middle of the main island, and sweeps off to the west and a very little south, so that Nagasaki, in southern Kiushiu, is only three degrees of latitude below Tokyo. Consequently more than half the coast on the Pacific side lies open to the south and the warm Black Current—the Gulf Stream of Asia—while the mountains form a break against the chill winds that blow down from Siberia, and make the west coast dreary and desolate. The result is a climate much like Southern Europe for all the lower half of the country, a little warmer at Nagasaki, a little colder in Tokyo; and only when you get some two hundred miles further north, say at Sendai, the change to more temperate conditions begins. And, in fact, till nearly the middle of the sixteenth century all north of Sendai was pretty much left to the aboriginal Ainu; as for Yezo, it belonged to them and the bears, except for a castle town or two and a few squalid fishing villages, till the government undertook to open the country and encourage emigration, some thirty years ago. Now colonists go up by forty and fifty thousand a year, and Hokkaido, “The North” (literally, “Northern Road”), is new, enterprising, and on the whole prosperous, very American and very unlike the rest of Japan.

From end to end the whole surface of the country is broken up; there is not only the central mountain chain, but peaks, ridges, tumbled hills everywhere. River valleys there are, some wide, and a great deal of lowland near the sea; two true plains only—the great stretch north of Tokyo, and once part of Yedo Bay, and the region south of Mount Fuji—one also in the Hokkaido. There are no towering granite cliffs, no bold and awful heights; thanks to a light soil and abundant rainfall, Japanese landscape is everywhere gentle, varied and lovely, full of wonderful lines and curves—curves, most of them, just a little concave—“eine der zartesten Linien,” said Grimm. Such are the lines of Fuji San, the mountain of mountains, that will always get into one’s mental background at the word Japan. As for the coast line, not even Greece is more cut and jagged, more deeply folded into promontories and bays and steep-sided inlets.

In such a land everything grows with delight; England is not greener. Mountain ranges and headlands are heavily wooded with chestnut and pine and evergreen oak, and a dozen kinds of maple, gorgeous in autumn; oranges flourish in the south, palmetto and bamboo as far north as Tokyo. Tall bamboo grass roots wherever it can get a chance; where timber has been burnt off the hillsides, and through the northern provinces, there are miles of such reedy waste, empty and desolate; for barely one-seventh of the whole country is actually under cultivation. Rice, of course, is the staple crop, and it must be irrigated; every scrap of ground that can be leveled and have a stream turned upon it is dug over and enriched, and made to yield to the uttermost—green with barley all winter, after the rice has been gathered in, bordered with beans or a bit of yellow rape in the springtime. Wheat is grown, especially in the southern provinces, a good deal of millet, also cotton, flax and various vegetables. Rice, wheat, beans, millet and sorghum are the “Five Staples,” Go-Koku, of Japanese writers. Not much fodder is needed, there are so few animals; though horses, of course, there were and are, for the knights in old times, for the rich and the cavalry now. Cattle are used only for draught, and that but sparingly, since the Japanese are not flesh-eaters, and even milk and butter are innovations they have not taken to very much; as for cheese, they feel towards it as foreigners do to daikon, the huge Japanese radish, which grows two feet long and has flavor and scent in proportion. That merry engineer, Holtham, calls the daikon “a most ingenious pickle,” for, he declares, after once getting its flavor well over your mouth, you will eat anything to get rid of the taste!

A railroad runs the length of the main island, and a yearly increasing network of branch lines connects it with the west coast and the more important cities, and beyond the Strait of Shimonoseki down through Kiushiu. At the northern end a line of steamers connects across in eight hours to Hakodate and the Hokkaido lines, all well patronized, for the Japanese are indefatigable travelers. The railroad tickets are printed both in English and Japanese, and must be shown at the gate, as well as when baggage is checked. Sixty to eighty pounds of free baggage is allowed, and the system of registering is like the European one—that is to say, you receive a paper check, stamped with the number and weight of your pieces, which is of course given up when you claim your goods at the end of the journey.

Except the Hokkaido line, which is on the American plan, Japanese railroads are built and run on the English system, except that many carriages are not divided into compartments, but have long seats down the sides and across the ends. This is more comfortable to the people, who are not used to chairs, and soon get tired of sitting up straight, so stretch at full length if there is room, or drop their clogs and tuck their feet under them. The foreigner may be tempted to envy of a frosty morning, as he taps his boots on the hot-water tin—sole means of heating—and wishes a little warmth would reach his chilly toes. Sleeping-cars are being introduced very gradually, and without them travel at night is an uncertain pleasure. If the train is not full, well and good—blow up your air-cushion, tuck in your rug and join the chorus of snores. Nine journeys in ten there will be room to lie down, but the tenth will not be a restful experience. As to washing possibilities en route, the outlook is at least as good as on European corridor trains, perhaps better. But food for Westerners there is none—no dining-car, not even a station restaurant; instead, men parade the platforms with tea—Japanese, of course— and neat wooden boxes, each with a new pair of chopsticks on top. For a few sen (cents) they will leave you a pot of tea and a cup, or pour hot water on your own brew; the box costs some ten sen, and contains rice and pickles and other dainties, toothsome enough for those to the manner born; but let not the unwary Western traveler set his hopes thereon; he will reach his destination empty and sorrowful, and next time will accept the offer of a chicken sandwich from his hotel.

This is not to discourage any from trying to like Japanese food; but that is an art to be studied with care at a good tea house, not begun on a boxful of rice and cold fish, of which more anon. Let us first consider how to reach the empire.

CHAPTER II.

VOYAGE AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS.

CONCERNING voyages, for most people, probably “least said soonest mended.” After all, it is but a three weeks’ affair at longest, made as pleasant as possible by courteous and obliging officers, by cricket matches and chess tournaments, concerts and mock trials, a dance on deck or even a magic lantern exhibition some still evening. There is something almost uncanny about the gay life on board, particularly at night—the bright saloon, the music and the evening dresses, out there in the midst of that great lonely ocean, where in weeks you may scarcely sight another trail of smoke. For the Pacific is no such frequented highway as the Atlantic, at least as yet; birds though there are, beautiful gray and white gulls, and Mother Carey’s chickens, and the broad-winged frigate bird, wheeling and dipping like Homer’s sea fowl—

“Who through dread troughs of the unharvested brine,

Seeking his prey, drenches dark wings in the foam.”

The steamers which come from the northern ports sight first the lighthouse on a certain mountain island called Kinkwazan, standing in just near enough to signal and be reported, and then run down for another fifteen hours near, but not in sight of, the coast, till they reach the headland of Awa at the mouth of Yedo Bay. On the other hand, the lines touching at Honolulu come in from nearly due east, and their first indication of land is the thickening flock of fishing boats, with high stern and square mat or canvas sails, and the thin line of smoke from the never-resting volcano on Oshima or Vries Island, first and largest of a chain of islands stretching southward from the mouth of Yedo Bay. These islands figure in Japanese history and romance as places of banishment for criminals, usually political ones, the tale often turning on some marvelous escape or on a pardon and recall. They were used for this purpose from the twelfth century quite down to modern times. All are mountainous and wild, and little visited now, supporting only a few villages of fisher folk. Leaving Oshima to the south and rounding Awa, you steam across a corner of Sagami Bay into the Uraga Channel, and so into Yedo Bay proper. The shores here are low and green, especially to the right, where, except for the bold headland at its end, all the peninsula is flat and sandy nearly to Mount Tsukuba, sixty or seventy miles north. According to tradition, the creator god, Iwanagi, piled up Awa to keep off the beat of the ocean, and curiously enough the geologists say the story agrees quite closely with the facts, since only the promontory is old, the rest being of recent formation, a part of the great plain north of Tokyo which ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Chapter I. Introduction
• Chapter II. Voyage and First Impressions
• Chapter III. Yokohama
• Chapter IV. History—The Dawn and the Middle Ages
• Chapter V. The Tokugawa and the Restoration
• Chapter VI. Kamakura—A Forsaken City
• Chapter VII. Enoshima
• Chapter VIII. A Japanese Inn
• Chapter IX. From Yokohama to Tokyo
• Chapter X. Tokyo—The Castle and the City
• Chapter XI. Tokyo Streets
• Chapter XII. A Japanese Household
• Chapter XIII. Ikegami—A Typical Buddhist Temple
• Chapter XIV. Oji Maples
• Chapter XV. Karuizawa and the West Coast
• Chapter XVI. Ikao
• Chapter XVII. Nikko—The Shrines of the Shoguns
• Chapter XVIII. Nikko and Lake Chuzenji
• Chapter XIX. Sendai and Matsushima
• Chapter XX. The Oshiu Kaido
• Chapter XXI. The Hokkaido