Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (2 page)

Elfish everything seems; for everything as well as everybody is small,
and queer, and mysterious: the little houses under their blue roofs, the
little shop-fronts hung with blue, and the smiling little people in
their blue costumes. The illusion is only broken by the occasional
passing of a tall foreigner, and by divers shop-signs bearing
announcements in absurd attempts at English. Nevertheless such discords
only serve to emphasise reality; they never materially lessen the
fascination of the funny little streets.

'Tis at first a delightfully odd confusion only, as you look down one of
them, through an interminable flutter of flags and swaying of dark blue
drapery, all made beautiful and mysterious with Japanese or Chinese
lettering. For there are no immediately discernible laws of
construction or decoration: each building seems to have a fantastic
prettiness of its own; nothing is exactly like anything else, and all is
bewilderingly novel. But gradually, after an hour passed in the quarter,
the eye begins to recognise in a vague way some general plan in the
construction of these low, light, queerly-gabled wooden houses, mostly
unpainted, with their first stories all open to the street, and thin
strips of roofing sloping above each shop-front, like awnings, back to
the miniature balconies of paper-screened second stories. You begin to
understand the common plan of the tiny shops, with their matted floors
well raised above the street level, and the general perpendicular
arrangement of sign-lettering, whether undulating on drapery or
glimmering on gilded and lacquered signboards. You observe that the same
rich dark blue which dominates in popular costume rules also in shop
draperies, though there is a sprinkling of other tints—bright blue and
white and red (no greens or yellows). And then you note also that the
dresses of the labourers are lettered with the same wonderful lettering
as the shop draperies. No arabesques could produce such an effect. As
modified for decorative purposes these ideographs have a speaking
symmetry which no design without a meaning could possess. As they appear
on the back of a workman's frock—pure white on dark blue—and large
enough to be easily read at a great distance (indicating some guild or
company of which the wearer is a member or employee), they give to the
poor cheap garment a fictitious appearance of splendour.

And finally, while you are still puzzling over the mystery of things,
there will come to you like a revelation the knowledge that most of the
amazing picturesqueness of these streets is simply due to the profusion
of Chinese and Japanese characters in white, black, blue, or gold,
decorating everything—even surfaces of doorposts and paper screens.
Perhaps, then, for one moment, you will imagine the effect of English
lettering substituted for those magical characters; and the mere idea
will give to whatever aesthetic sentiment you may possess a brutal
shock, and you will become, as I have become, an enemy of the
Romaji-Kwai—that society founded for the ugly utilitarian purpose of
introducing the use of English letters in writing Japanese.

An ideograph does not make upon the Japanese brain any impression
similar to that created in the Occidental brain by a letter or
combination of letters—dull, inanimate symbols of vocal sounds. To the
Japanese brain an ideograph is a vivid picture: it lives; it speaks; it
gesticulates. And the whole space of a Japanese street is full of such
living characters—figures that cry out to the eyes, words that smile
or grimace like faces.

What such lettering is, compared with our own lifeless types, can be
understood only by those who have lived in the farther East. For even
the printed characters of Japanese or Chinese imported texts give no
suggestion of the possible beauty of the same characters as modified for
decorative inscriptions, for sculptural use, or for the commonest
advertising purposes. No rigid convention fetters the fancy of the
calligrapher or designer: each strives to make his characters more
beautiful than any others; and generations upon generations of artists
have been toiling from time immemorial with like emulation, so that
through centuries and centuries of tire-less effort and study, the
primitive hieroglyph or ideograph has been evolved into a thing of
beauty indescribable. It consists only of a certain number of brush-
strokes; but in each stroke there is an undiscoverable secret art of
grace, proportion, imperceptible curve, which actually makes it seem
alive, and bears witness that even during the lightning-moment of its
creation the artist felt with his brush for the ideal shape of the
stroke equally along its entire length, from head to tail. But the art
of the strokes is not all; the art of their combination is that which
produces the enchantment, often so as to astonish the Japanese
themselves. It is not surprising, indeed, considering the strangely
personal, animate, esoteric aspect of Japanese lettering, that there
should be wonderful legends of calligraphy relating how words written by
holy experts became incarnate, and descended from their tablets to hold.
converse with mankind.

My kurumaya calls himself 'Cha.' He has a white hat which looks like the
top of an enormous mushroom; a short blue wide-sleeved jacket; blue
drawers, close-fitting as 'tights,' and reaching to his ankles; and
light straw sandals bound upon his bare feet with cords of palmetto-
fibre. Doubtless he typifies all the patience, endurance, and insidious
coaxing powers of his class. He has already manifested his power to make
me give him more than the law allows; and I have been warned against him
in vain. For the first sensation of having a human being for a horse,
trotting between shafts, unwearyingly bobbing up and down before you for
hours, is alone enough to evoke a feeling of compassion. And when this
human being, thus trotting between shafts, with all his hopes, memories,
sentiments, and comprehensions, happens to have the gentlest smile, and
the power to return the least favour by an apparent display of infinite
gratitude, this compassion becomes sympathy, and provokes unreasoning
impulses to self-sacrifice. I think the sight of the profuse
perspiration has also something to do with the feeling, for it makes one
think of the cost of heart-beats and muscle-contractions, likewise of
chills, congestions, and pleurisy. Cha's clothing is drenched; and he
mops his face with a small sky-blue towel, with figures of bamboo-sprays
and sparrows in white upon it, which towel he carries wrapped about his
wrist as he runs.

That, however, which attracts me in Cha—Cha considered not as a motive
power at all, but as a personality—I am rapidly learning to discern in
the multitudes of faces turned toward us as we roll through these
miniature streets. And perhaps the supremely pleasurable impression of
this morning is that produced by the singular gentleness of popular
scrutiny. Everybody looks at you curiously; but there is never anything
disagreeable, much less hostile in the gaze: most commonly it is
accompanied by a smile or half smile. And the ultimate consequence of
all these kindly curious looks and smiles is that the stranger finds
himself thinking of fairy-land. Hackneyed to the degree of provocation
this statement no doubt is: everybody describing the sensations of his
first Japanese day talks of the land as fairyland, and of its people as
fairy-folk. Yet there is a natural reason for this unanimity in choice
of terms to describe what is almost impossible to describe more
accurately at the first essay. To find one's self suddenly in a world
where everything is upon a smaller and daintier scale than with us—a
world of lesser and seemingly kindlier beings, all smiling at you as if
to wish you well—a world where all movement is slow and soft, and
voices are hushed—a world where land, life, and sky are unlike all
that one has known elsewhere—this is surely the realisation, for
imaginations nourished with English folklore, of the old dream of a
World of Elves.

The traveller who enters suddenly into a period of social change—
especially change from a feudal past to a democratic present—is likely
to regret the decay of things beautiful and the ugliness of things new.
What of both I may yet discover in Japan I know not; but to-day, in
these exotic streets, the old and the new mingle so well that one seems
to set off the other. The line of tiny white telegraph poles carrying
the world's news to papers printed in a mixture of Chinese and Japanese
characters; an electric bell in some tea-house with an Oriental riddle
of text pasted beside the ivory button, a shop of American sewing-
machines next to the shop of a maker of Buddhist images; the
establishment of a photographer beside the establishment of a
manufacturer of straw sandals: all these present no striking
incongruities, for each sample of Occidental innovation is set into an
Oriental frame that seems adaptable to any picture. But on the first
day, at least, the Old alone is new for the stranger, and suffices to
absorb his attention. It then appears to him that everything Japanese is
delicate, exquisite, admirable—even a pair of common wooden chopsticks
in a paper bag with a little drawing upon it; even a package of
toothpicks of cherry-wood, bound with a paper wrapper wonderfully
lettered in three different colours; even the little sky-blue towel,
with designs of flying sparrows upon it, which the jinricksha man uses
to wipe his face. The bank bills, the commonest copper coins, are things
of beauty. Even the piece of plaited coloured string used by the
shopkeeper in tying up your last purchase is a pretty curiosity.
Curiosities and dainty objects bewilder you by their very multitude: on
either side of you, wherever you turn your eyes, are countless wonderful
things as yet incomprehensible.

But it is perilous to look at them. Every time you dare to look,
something obliges you to buy it—unless, as may often happen, the
smiling vendor invites your inspection of so many varieties of one
article, each specially and all unspeakably desirable, that you flee
away out of mere terror at your own impulses. The shopkeeper never asks
you to buy; but his wares are enchanted, and if you once begin buying
you are lost. Cheapness means only a temptation to commit bankruptcy;
for the resources of irresistible artistic cheapness are inexhaustible.
The largest steamer that crosses the Pacific could not contain what you
wish to purchase. For, although you may not, perhaps, confess the fact
to yourself, what you really want to buy is not the contents of a shop;
you want the shop and the shopkeeper, and streets of shops with their
draperies and their inhabitants, the whole city and the bay and the
mountains begirdling it, and Fujiyama's white witchery overhanging it in
the speckless sky, all Japan, in very truth, with its magical trees and
luminous atmosphere, with all its cities and towns and temples, and
forty millions of the most lovable people in the universe.

Now there comes to my mind something I once heard said by a practical
American on hearing of a great fire in Japan: 'Oh! those people can
afford fires; their houses are so cheaply built.' It is true that the
frail wooden houses of the common people can be cheaply and quickly
replaced; but that which was within them to make them beautiful cannot—
and every fire is an art tragedy. For this is the land of infinite hand-
made variety; machinery has not yet been able to introduce sameness and
utilitarian ugliness in cheap production (except in response to foreign
demand for bad taste to suit vulgar markets), and each object made by
the artist or artisan differs still from all others, even of his own
making. And each time something beautiful perishes by fire, it is a
something representing an individual idea.

Happily the art impulse itself, in this country of conflagrations, has a
vitality which survives each generation of artists, and defies the flame
that changes their labour to ashes or melts it to shapelessness. The
idea whose symbol has perished will reappear again in other creations—
perhaps after the passing of a century—modified, indeed, yet
recognisably of kin to the thought of the past. And every artist is a
ghostly worker. Not by years of groping and sacrifice does he find his
highest expression; the sacrificial past is within 'him; his art is an
inheritance; his fingers are guided by the dead in the delineation of a
flying bird, of the vapours of mountains, of the colours of the morning
and the evening, of the shape of branches and the spring burst of
flowers: generations of skilled workmen have given him their cunning,
and revive in the wonder of his drawing. What was conscious effort in
the beginning became unconscious in later centuries—becomes almost
automatic in the living man,—becomes the art instinctive. Wherefore,
one coloured print by a Hokusai or Hiroshige, originally sold for less
than a cent, may have more real art in it than many a Western painting
valued at more than the worth of a whole Japanese street.

Here are Hokusai's own figures walking about in straw raincoats, and
immense mushroom-shaped hats of straw, and straw sandals—bare-limbed
peasants, deeply tanned by wind and sun; and patient-faced mothers with
smiling bald babies on their backs, toddling by upon their geta (high,
noisy, wooden clogs), and robed merchants squatting and smoking their
little brass pipes among the countless riddles of their shops.

Then I notice how small and shapely the feet of the people are—whether
bare brown feet of peasants, or beautiful feet of children wearing tiny,
tiny geta, or feet of young girls in snowy tabi. The tabi, the white
digitated stocking, gives to a small light foot a mythological aspect—
the white cleft grace of the foot of a fauness. Clad or bare, the
Japanese foot has the antique symmetry: it has not yet been distorted by
the infamous foot-gear which has deformed the feet of Occidentals. Of
every pair of Japanese wooden clogs, one makes in walking a slightly
different sound from the other, as kring to krang; so that the echo of
the walker's steps has an alternate rhythm of tones. On a pavement, such
as that of a railway station, the sound obtains immense sonority; and a
crowd will sometimes intentionally fall into step, with the drollest
conceivable result of drawling wooden noise.