Glimpses of Japan and Formosa

III

I ought really not to say a word about Japan, I suppose, with only six weeks of scurrying to and fro in it. “Old-timers” of the former treaty-ports, to say nothing of the more experienced ones of the interior, would be scathing at the suggestion that so brief a stay could give the slightest food for thought. But “old-timers” the world over rarely deign to pour out on paper their own distilled wisdom, and such bits as are conversationally dropped by those who have spent at least half a lifetime in an alien land often suggest that their few immediate trees have long since cut off any clear view of the woods. At any rate, though China was our real goal, there seemed no good reason to dash blindly past the still interesting, if better known, empire which adjoins it to the east; and, once there, no serious harm can be done by recording a few fleeting impressions.

I am quite willing to have charged to the brevity of our sojourn the notion that Japan is sometimes overrated,—that Matsushima and Toba are, to be sure, pretty, pine-clad clusters of islands, but in no way superior to scores of similar, yet rarely mentioned, scenes of our own broad land: that the Inland 14Sea is beautiful, yet no more so than many a stretch of water along our northern border which has not had its tithe of publicity; that Enoshima is, after all, a commonplace handful of earth with some trees and caves and shrines on it; that Miyajima really consists of a single torii picturesquely set only partly above high tide—and of absurdly high prices for unpleasing accommodations; that many a sea-flanked strip of sand, viewed undignifiedly through the outspread legs, is as genuine a “bridge of heaven” as Ama-no-hashidate.

Yet to say that and cease would be to leave the falsest of impressions. A wrathful Englishman we ran across within the shadow of the giant Buddha of Kamakura voiced the conviction, born of a two months’ commercial struggle with its often exasperating people, that “Japan is nothing more than camouflage, clever publicity, the deliberate spreading abroad of false notions.” In certain moods it would be easy to agree with him. With the exception of France, and perhaps of Italy, Japan is, partly by chance, partly by design, the most advertised country on the globe; and much preinformation leads inevitably to swollen anticipations. But once the heat of experience has shrunk these to normal size, once the traveler realizes that it is delicacy of detail which he must look for, that intensive cultivation of all they have is natural, almost inevitable to the crowding people of this constricted island nation, his disappointment 15will lessen, perhaps disappear. It is surely to his credit rather than otherwise that the little brown Nihon-jin makes the most of his opportunities, and not particularly reprehensible to have sung, or caused to be sung, to the world praises of what to him are beloved and genuinely peerless scenes. For the Japanese truly and frankly loves the beauties of nature. He has a scenery-worship as well as an ancestor-worship, and his lack, in the great majority of cases, of a point of comparison sometimes leads to the veritable adoration of places, scenes, and vistas which for the world at large are commonplace. At his worst he is an improvement upon those of some other lands who spend their energies in decrying the paucity of attractions in their native habitat, treating nothing as worthy of enthusiasm that is not separated from them by sea or frontier. And, when all is said and done; if even the mammoth outdoor Buddha looked absurdly small in comparison with its world-wide fame, and the canal-boat trip through a tunneled mountain proved a school-boy’s wonder; whatever else Japanese may seem petty and overdrawn, there is always Fujiyama—except on those many days of the year when he chooses to veil his peerless face in the clouds.

IV

One need not go to the records of her patent-office to confirm the wide-spread impression that the Japanese mainly imitate. Merely to skim through one of the phrase-books so carefully compiled to give the casual traveler all the words and phrases except those he will really need is to unearth ample evidence on this score. Philologically speaking, if one may convict on such slight testimony, the Japanese language is visibly a hodgepodge, a potpourri, an ollo podrida; in other words, a mess. I cannot carry the curious reader back to their gleanings from the Malaysian fields from which perhaps they sprang, from the Yemishi, or “hairy Ainu,” whose place in the sun they usurped, nor yet do more than repeat the common knowledge that they fish new words from the Chinese classics far more freely than we of the West help ourselves to a needed tidbit of Latin or Greek. But their later history can be sketched with a handful of words chosen almost at random from one of these simple vocabularies-for-travelers, words which bring back to mind the days when the Portuguese, the Dutch, then the English-speaking races, and finally, in restricted fields, the Germans and the French spread out linguistic displays for their choosing.

The American-like main street of Sapporo, capital of Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan proper

A street-lamp, a mail-box, and an American-copied baby-carriage before a shop of Sapporo

The old Ainu chief who threatened to crown me with a plow

The younger Ainu chief of another village, in ceremonial garb

17Could, for example, a fat volume on “Japanese Cleanliness through the Ages” say more than does the fact that their word for “soap” is “shabon”? The Portuguese brought it, of course, and they did not “discover” Japan for the Western world until exactly half a century after Columbus sighted the West Indies. To this day “pan” remains the Japanese word for “bread”—or for the horrible dough-balls which their semi-Europeanized cooks occasionally perpetrate. If the Lusitanians brought them the Western substitute for rice, they were repaid by carrying back tea, which in the Portuguese tongue is to this day known by the Japanese—or Chinese—word “cha.” Reminders of the two and a half centuries during which a dozen Dutch traders, imprisoned on a little swampy island in their westernmost port, were the only white men permitted to come into contact with the Nipponese are still scattered through the speech of the masses. The children of Nagasaki still call Europeans indiscriminately “Orando-san” (Mr. Hollander); it would probably be unearthing no scandal to conclude that the tabako and beeru so generously stocked throughout the island empire came from the same source. At length came the Americans, and the English, with their ships and railways, and all the complicated paraphernalia of modern civilization—and one inquires 18one’s way to the suteishon, perhaps to ask the uniformed coolie who is lighting a rampu there for a matchi with which to incinerate one of the miserable maki-tabako inflicted upon its people by the Japanese Imperial Government Tobacco Monopoly.

It is a rare Japanese even to-day who uses a hankechi in place of a wad of soft native paper; and though aisukuriimu now and then offers to minister to a parched and dusty throat, it may be better on the whole to await one’s return to Philadelphia. The letter l is for the Japanese tongue the greatest stumbling-block in Western speech; hence one is warned that predatory mosquitos may cause marariya, that the train is about to enter a tunneru, that there is not a hoteru in town, but only Japanese inns. Newboys occasionally announce their ability to supply the “Mairu” as well as the “Taimusu”; in the first- and second-class waiting-room of important stations may be found, in a cover with large embossed gold letters, the “REGURATIONS” of the Imperial Government Railways.

German, say those who should know, is sometimes heard in barracks and on drill-field, localities with no welcoming smile for the foreigner, and here and there it has left its impress upon the schoolroom; but the casual traveler will be more likely to run across it in the realms of physicians and druggists, should misfortune turn his attention thither. In a land where virtually all others interested in attracting 19a foreign clientele announce themselves in what purports at least to be English, the native leech with the excuse for his presumption of a visit to Germany, or of a Berlin correspondent, calls himself a “Praktische Artz” and his establishment an “AugenundohrenheilAnstalt.”

When the desk-man of a Japanese inn comes to obliterate his legs and bow his head on the more or less spotless matting of the room assigned you and discovers to his horror that you cannot write—in the crippled hieroglyphics with which he is familiar—the information demanded by the ever-inquisitive police, he still declines to believe that the printed questions on the tissue-paper register in his hand are worse than Greek to you. Many a time I have had a hotel “boy” give up hope of making me understand some verbal remark, only to see him triumphantly jot it down for me in his irrational ideographs, or invisibly write it with a finger on his open palm. A Chinese or Korean would no more catch the meaning of his spoken word than I, but they would almost certainly recognize its conventionalized picture; therefore why should not also this other gwai-koku-jin, or “outside-country man”? A roughly drawn square means a mouth or opening, an entrance or an exit, to all three races, though their respective verbal terms for it may be utterly devoid of similarity—merely to mention one example among thousands.

20Travelers in at least as good a position as I to know have reported the Japanese excellent linguists. My own brief experience implies quite the contrary. The study of English is obligatory in the higher schools, yet I have rarely found even a square-capped, beskirted university student capable of understanding three consecutive words of my native tongue, or of comprehensively pronouncing half a dozen nouns. I looked in vain for any improvement in this respect since I first wandered through Japan a score of years ago. If there is any, it is among the higher officials of those government departments or large industrial enterprises where it is indispensable, and with whom the average traveler rarely comes in contact. Among the rank and file, even of the educated, with mild exceptions in favor of what were once treaty-ports, there are now and then unexpected oases of comprehension, but almost never anything dependable. I am quite ready to admit myself in error, but I carried away the impression that the average American school-boy retains more French or German from a two-year course than does the newly graduated Japanese youth from his five or six years of English.

The comparison is, I hasten to admit, not entirely fair. An Oriental language is far more widely separated from our own than is any of the important tongues of Europe. If the Japanese student struggling with English finds his way beset with as great 21difficulties as I found mine in attempting to piece together a minimum vocabulary of Japanese, it is small wonder if he loses heart. Probably he is as much dismayed by the incredible brevity of our tongue as we are by the redundant elaboration of his. To be informed that our brief “I” becomes in Japanese watakushiwa is likely to be even more disheartening than the mere necessity of turning one’s thinking topsyturvy and attempting to assert that “Watakushi no tsuma wa hoteru no Shimonoseki ni des-ka”—“Me of dishonorable wife in the nominative case hotel of Shimonoseki in is question mark.” For like some other Orientals the Japanese have the charming custom of pronouncing their grammatical distinctions and quotation-marks along with the rest of the sentence.

It is partly their policy of “Japan for the Japanese” that makes them so backward in speaking a tongue which they strive so assiduously to teach themselves, for though they constantly emphasize the necessity of knowing the most wide-spread Occidental language they refuse to hire more than a handful of foreign teachers. The teaching of English is, with almost negligible exceptions, left to natives who could not, though starvation stared them in the face, make themselves understood in a New York quick lunchroom. For one thing English or American teachers demand several times the pittance paid Japanese pedagogues—Lafcadio Hearn is not the only man 22to learn that the granting of Japanese citizenship reduces the beneficiary to the Japanese scale of salaries—with the army and navy eating the lion’s share of the national revenues. Strange as it may seem, too, bashfulness is a noticeable Japanese characteristic, though in groups and in predicaments where no one speaks English the difficulty is made several times worse by many thinking they can.

However, I must admit that I wandered over all Japan, from the primeval forests of the thinly inhabited north island to the southernmost town of Formosa, on nothing but a faulty phrase-book, more than once passing a full week without meeting a fellow-Caucasian, yet saw and procured all there was to see or procure which was worth a little persistence. But it was not always a simple task. The Japanese lack completely that quickness of comprehension under difficulties which flowers best perhaps in Spanish-speaking peoples. Pronounce the commonest of his words a score of times, and if your pronunciation is in the slightest degree faulty he will stare blankly at you until doomsday. His own speech being utterly devoid of gestures, those simple motions which carry the tongue-tied traveler far in many another country convey to him no meaning whatever. Pick up an egg and a frying-pan, pretend to break the former into the latter, light a match under it, and make the elsewhere universal sign for eating by feigning mastication, and you will unquestionably 23succeed in gathering the entire village as an amazed and intently amused audience to your strange outlandish antics, but under no circumstances will a single bystander guess that you harbor an innate desire to partake of a pair of fried eggs. This characteristic is so ingrained that all the pointing in the world will never call the attention of your auditor to the near-by object you are attempting to indicate, though it may cause him and the throng which quickly gathers behind him to examine with meticulous care your outstretched finger. The kingpin of all possible misunderstandings in attempting to wrestle with this more than alien tongue, however, is the difficulty of distinguishing “yes” from “no.” Ask your waiter, “Is there no bread?”—or shall I play upon the popularity of the day and say “bananas”?—and his violent nodding of the head, accompanied by a very positive “Hai!” which the phrase-book translates as “Yes,” may cause you to wait long in vain before you discover that what he really meant was, “Yes, you are perfectly right; there is no bread.”

V

My impression that Japan is only a little country after all somewhat evaporated during a visit to its slightly known northern island. This was no doubt partly due to the almost Oriental leisureliness of Japanese trains, and it is perhaps as much the long day’s ride from Tokyo to the northern end of the main island as the uninviting aspect of the steamers which set one across to Hokkaido that causes the overwhelming majority of visitors to confine themselves to the well-beaten track from Nikko to Nagasaki and miss a region amply worth while.

Beyond beautiful Volcano Bay with its smoking cones lies quite another Japan, inconspicuous on the world map yet of a surprising vastness. Hakodate, the chief landing-place, burdened with that silly Japanese rule forbidding photography within modern cannon-shot of fortifications which the most slow-witted of spies could easily find some other means of picturing, calls for nothing more than the unavoidable halt of an hour or two. But on the long day’s journey northward from there to Sapporo one’s coming is already rewarded. Though May will 25soon be half gone, it is cold enough for an overcoat, and the Imperial Government Railways are still heating their trains. Low huts, with heavily thatched or rusty-tin roofs, held down by scores of stones that testify to the occasional violence of storms, hug the ground closely, in a way unknown in the main island. Instead of rice-fields, the rich black soil is given over mainly to corn and potatoes, corn shocked as it is in the United States, as weatherbeaten cones of it that have stood through the long, arduous winter still testify. Now and again the train rumbles for an hour or more along the very edge of this or that magnificent bay, through collections of miserable huts, with thatched fishing-boats and millions of herring split in two and hung on lines to dry in the sun, and millions more in heaps and bales ready for shipment. There is a genuine Japanese atmosphere, not to say scent, about these clusters of toilsome poverty, though certainly there is little of that cleanliness which the mind habitually associates with the Japanese.

But these familiar touches, like the rare glimpse of an aged wife with unsightly blackened teeth, are merely the reminders of the old well-known Japan which give contrast to the real Hokkaido. New England landscapes of hills, then low mountains dabbled with snow, finally big white patches beside and below the track, succeed one another as the train struggles inland. At length come rugged, snowcovered 26peaks rising into the clouds; before long all the mountains in view, more than can be counted on the fingers of both hands, are blanketed with snow, great fields of which lie in the hollows far below us. Yet, as I have already said, May was well along. It required a distinct mental effort to keep in mind that this was still Japan.

Lower down again there was a profusion of wild flowers, though the buds did not seem so far advanced as they are along our northern border on the same date. There came whole hours of primeval forest, with at most a rare patch of clearing, then broad vistas of charred stumps and the primitive conditions that go with them, finally some square-cut cultivated fields, but these only in the dead-flat lands, as if there were far too much room available to trouble with hilly ground. On the whole, the fields, though still small to the American eye, were ten times the size of those of Japan’s main island. Also there was much plowing with shaggy horses, instead of mud-wading men and women with hoes, goodly herds of cattle grazing here and there—in short, a landscape in which a rural American from our Northern States would have felt almost at home.

Yezo, as the island which the Japanese, for some political reason, have renamed Hokkaido is still best known to the outside world, has never kept pace with the rest of Japan. Though the primitive Ainus were reduced to serfdom at least a dozen centuries ago, 27the north island was an almost unknown wilderness even when the Japanese resumed their intercourse with the outside world in the middle of the last century. A plan to make it an independent fief of the crumbling Tokugawa shogunate at the time of the imperial restoration having been bloodily upset a year later, various schemes of government under an executive appointed from Tokyo finally crystallized in 1886 in an independent administration, with Sapporo as the capital. To the already American aspect of the landscape were added, through the initiative of the first governor, charged with the task of colonizing the island, a group of American agricultural experts, who brought with them machinery, seeds, trees, and other aids of a similar nature. To-day Hokkaido produces, for instance, an ample supply of American apples for all Japan—and incoming travelers must hand over to courteous but stern custom officials the last remnants of this fruit in their possession, though a case of oranges or a month’s supply of raisins pass duty-free.

It was these same American experts who laid out the capital, Sapporo, thereby wholly depriving it of the picturesqueness of genuine Japanese towns and giving it the spaciousness, convenience, and solidity of an American city. Its wide, squarely intersecting streets—a hundred and sixty feet from wall to wall, if you must have statistics—have not merely sidewalks but rows of trees to delimit them 28from the roadway that is the common battle-ground of pedestrians and vehicles in the rest of Japan. Lawns and lawn-mowers, men shingling the roofs of clapboard houses, even government barracks built in similar fashion, elms and maples in lieu of the rugged and distinctive Japanese pine-tree, the big campus of an agricultural college copied after that of Massachusetts, with a snow-capped mountain background to its broad baseball, track, and tennis field, are but a few of the reminders of Sapporo’s origin. Even the women have almost abandoned the elaborate and costly coiffure of their southern sisters, and dress their hair in American fashion. Paper walls are all but unknown; baby-carriages—but what gain are these in a land where children come so thick and fast that every perambulator seems to hold twins, to be indeed evidently designed for them, while a still later arrival dozes on the propeller’s back? With its big fruit-stores, its self-sufficient, well-supplied people, an extent seeming to belie its mere half-century of age, Sapporo looks almost a transplanted bit of our own land, for all the rickshaws racing noiselessly through its wide streets and notwithstanding some of the unfortunately still Japanese personal habits of many of its inhabitants—and by the same token it does not, of course, offer the mere traveler a tithe of the interest of almost any village of the real Japan.

Beyond Sapporo lies nearly the whole island, wonderful 29plains of black loam soil almost as flat as our prairies, now stretching from the distant sea on one hand to faintly delimned ranges of snow-capped mountains on the other, now filling some vast basin between whitened rival ramparts which merge in either direction into the horizon. The great valleys now and again pinched out between brown hills littered with charred stumps, growing gradually into heavily wooded mountains, with many a snow-capped peak more massive and well nigh as symmetrical as Fujiyama itself, yet thus far doomed to fameless isolation. Big rivers brought down thousands of fresh-cut logs, whole acres of which gathered in placid back-waters. But the fertile plains always soon came again, now with wigwam-like stacks of hop-poles recalling Bavaria in spring,—Sapporo beer is famous throughout Japan,—now mile after mile of fields completely flooded, though plainly not destined for rice, with plowing horses and their drivers wading thigh-deep in the cold mud and water. It was a land like the richest sections of Illinois or Kansas; yet gangs of women were piling up great logs, a score of them supplied the motive-power of a primitive, singsong pile-driver, and half-starved fisher-folk still battle for existence along the coast. It seemed as if the few inhabitants, accustomed for countless generations to the crowded struggle for existence farther south, were mentally incapable of taking advantage of the wide and fertile 30opportunities all about them, of casting out the centuries-old sense of inequality they brought with them and enjoying the fulsome prosperity of ample elbow-room.

There are signs everywhere that the Japanese Government is doing its best to turn Hokkaido into a cleared and settled land. A hundred telegraph or telephone wires, on half a dozen rows of posts, parallel the track, not to mention an important power line; pine, or at least evergreen, nurseries cover a sloping hillside here and there; much forest has recently been denuded and burned, with somewhat less wasteful methods than those in vogue before the spreading sugar-fields of Cuba. But of all the obstacles its people set against the laborious efforts of the Government more nearly to equalize the density of population of this great north island with the rest of the empire, the dread of battling with the rigorous climate stands first. The man of Japan is not on the whole adaptable. He hesitates at the limits of heat and cold to which his frail type of architecture and his thin, flowing garb are unfitted; he is, by temperament, no pioneer, but resembles those militant birds that prefer to settle down in the warm, well-feathered nest built by some other species. If he goes to a new and undeveloped land, it is, by choice, as an economic hanger-on, as shopkeeper or official, rather than to do his share in the rude labor of reducing the primitive to the cultivated. No one, 31I believe, has ever accused the Japanese of laziness; it seems to be rather his inherent dread of the primeval, of great unpeopled spaces, that leaves Hokkaido, large and fertile enough to support in unaccustomed style a third of the people of all Japan, with a scattered population barely one fifth that of the city of Tokyo.

VI

But things are progressing, if slowly, in the general direction of official desires. Asahigawa, for example, north of the geographical center of the island, in what was at the beginning of the present century an unpeopled wilderness, is already a “whale of a town,” spreading for miles across the floor of a splendid valley, with a great row of snow-clads all along its far eastern horizon. There is scarcely a typical Japanese building in it, only a Shinto shrine or two, hardly a shoji or a tiled roof. Yet the spirit of Japan has in no way been lost in the transplanting. That courteous yet subtle something which tells the foreigner that he is welcome as a visitor but as nothing more, that seldom spoken yet ever-sensed insistence on “Japan for the Japanese,” are as evident here as in the most crowded portions of the main island.

An Ainu who has come into close contact with Japanese civilization

An Ainu girl of the younger, unmustached generation

The older Ainu women of the primitive tribe of northern Japan have flaring blue tattooed mustaches—but they are almost invisible to the camera

Preparing to propitiate the gods, and the neighbors, in favor of a new building in Hokkaido, where religious custom remains even if architecture changes; this ceremony seems always to take place at sunset

Surely, too, the public ceremonies I chanced upon were strictly national. It seemed to be dedication day for new buildings, a propitious phase of the moon perhaps; and at least half a dozen unfinished structures scattered about the town, still in their two-by-four skeleton form, were preparing to receive 33the blessings of the gods. The gangs of carpenters simultaneously left off toward five in the afternoon the work of erecting and took to raising instead, with a plethora of amateur assistance, various symbolic contrivances at the tops of the structures. First to be placed were five big upright banners, respectively red, saffron, white, green, and purple in color. Then there arose a central support bearing a small mirror—unfailing symbol of Shintoism—and a fantastically misshapen doll god in a red bib. A rude platform having been laid across the joist high up under this improvised chapel, and various other minor preparations being concluded, there gingerly ascended the sagging ladder a Shinto—priest, I suppose we must call him, for want of a more exact term. His shaven head, topped by a sort of mitered cap from which undulated what seemed to be the old Tokugawa head-dress, its projecting tail-like afterpiece apparently made of window-screening, his brilliant green robe and purple sash, and variegated minor decorative paraphernalia, gave him an appearance strikingly out of keeping with the generally matter-of-fact Asahigawa style of architecture and costume. It was much as if an actor in a Shakspere rôle had suddenly emerged in full costume among a Broadway crowd.

While the owner of the new structure and a dozen of his assistants or male relatives sat down on their heels along the improvised platform, high above the 34increasing throng in the street below, the Shinto functionary set up beneath the banners several little conventionalized houses or shrines of baked clay. Of the numerous antics in which he indulged during the succeeding half-hour the most conspicuous was the frenzied shaking of one of those bundles of white paper strips on a handle, like a feather-duster or fly-dislodger, that abound in Shinto shrines, apparently for the purpose of driving off the host of evil spirits which might menace the new building. Finally he sprinkled everything and every one within reach with a sprig of pine branch dipped in a bowl of what may have been mere water, but which more probably was sake, the rice wine of Japan. With that his fee seemed to be earned, though he remained long enough to grace the beginning of the last act of the ceremony before speeding away in a rickshaw to the next skeleton structure in need of his administrations.

The now large and jostling throng in the street below was plainly, and quite naturally, most interested in the final formality. From his point of vantage high above, the now broadly smiling proprietor held up a wooden ticket, made a speech which the crowd applauded with increasing evidence of pleasure and approval, then flung the token to the multitude. My subsequent discovery that it was exchangeable for a silk kimono accounted for the applause and the wild scramble for its possession that 35forthwith took place in the dust-deep street. Various less valuable and more perishable gifts followed, after which came a deluge of presents for every one. All the men on the platform began tearing open veritable bales of bonbons, those heavy white dough-balls inclosing a sort of jam, which take the place of candy in Japan, and took to flinging them in great handfuls in all directions. Fully a quarter of an hour the bombardment lasted, the several hundred townsmen of both sexes, of every age and social standing, engaging in a good-natured but riotous battle for possession of the tidbits. The purpose evidently was to make sure that every person within sight received a present, that he might vouchsafe the new building his blessing or good will, for when I showed no eagerness to engage in the scramble, one of the flingers made it his special task to throw bonbons at me until I had accepted one. The “housing crisis” is as acute in Japan as in the rest of the civilized world. If the country has no grafting contractors and labor-leaders—and rumor says it has—there seems to be at least the appreciable obstacle of dispensing in religious fees and community gifts a sum about equal to the cost of each unboarded building.

VII

The chief interest of the average casual visitor to Japan’s north island is, no doubt, in the remnants of its primitive people, the “hairy Ainu.” A cluster of them dwell in the outskirts of Asahigawa; there are scattered Ainu villages along the farther reaches of the Hokkaido coast, and here and there in the forested mountains. Subservient now to their conquerors as are our own Indians, their customs and even their language have taken on many things from the Japanese. In theory the mikado’s Government acts the rôle of altruistic guardian over the scanty twenty thousand of these aborigines which its records claim still survive, in Yezo, in the scattered Kuriles, and in the Japanese half of the once Russian island of Karafuto, or Saghalien, still farther north. There are no cases listed, however, of these helpless wards’ amassing pianos and automobiles from natural resources discovered on their reservations. Driven, if admittedly faulty historical records be accepted as veracious evidence, from their once solid foothold on the main island of Japan to the nooks and crannies of its frigid neighbors during the more than twenty-five centuries since their slant-eyed foes came upon them from somewhere to the south, the Ainus have lost completely their former rugged power of physical resistance to such aggression.

A typical Ainu hut—and kodak-shy Ainu children scrambling for coppers

In the American-like north island of Japan a Shinto shrine or a Buddhist temple here and there is almost the only touch of Oriental architecture

An Ainu working in his front garden

Ainus mending their fishing utensils

37The experienced traveler gradually learns that outward appearances are often deceitful; hence there is perhaps no proof of anything in the fact that the Ainu, even the defeated dregs of the race which survive to-day, are much handsomer specimens of the human family, at least to Western eyes, than their conquerors. The women, to be sure, are mainly slatterns, as is so often the case among primitive peoples, particularly those under the domination of what we fondly call civilization. But it was hard to realize that these sturdy, upstanding men, not merely more powerful but far more comely than the average Japanese, are little more than children in intellect. What seems to have been a sincere effort to educate a picked group of Ainu youths in Tokyo ended with an even more sudden relapse into savagery than was ever the case with our Indian-school graduates.

Such Ainu villages as I visited were outwardly distinguished mainly by the superimposed layers, like incredibly thick rows of shingles, of the thatch covering their roofs; that and earth floors, rubbish heaps, and a generally un-Japanese shiftlessness. Their clothing has almost completely succumbed to Japanese, or Japanese-Western, influence, even to the greater or less absence thereof on what, to Occidental races, would be embarrassing occasions. The 38features are blunt, the nose almost as negroid as that of lower-class Nipponese, but the eyes are unslanted and full-lidded, quite as we of the West expect eyes to be. As to their far-famed “hairiness,” the older men, to be sure, have patriarchal beards—the younger, disliking perhaps the notoriety which this feature has brought upon the race, are commonly smooth-shaven—and their sturdy bare arms and legs are generously adorned with black hair. But I have seen as goodly displays in American gymnasiums, and it is mainly their contrast to the effeminate-skinned Japanese that has given them their reputation for undue hirsute adornment. The children of Japan, in fact, and even uncultivated adults in their naughty moods, often greet any visitor of Caucasian race with the contemptuous term “keto-jin,” or “hairy foreigner.”

It is not the beards of the men but the magnificent mustaches of the women that will surprise the average traveler. It has long been the Ainu custom, now somewhat dying out, to begin decorating early in life the upper lip of the girls with a crude tattooing of what seems to be kitchen soot, treated later with some native concoction which gives it a bluish tint, so that by the time her early marriage-day comes the maid is adorned with a blue mustache having the flourishing upturned ends cultivated by the Italian dandy and giving her a dashing air somewhat out of keeping with her sex and the life of drudgery before 39her. Other decorations of a similar nature are now and then perpetrated on other parts of the body, notably a miniature Vandyke on the lower lip. While the custom may be merely fantastic in youth, it becomes hideous in old age. Like the young men, the women who have not yet outlived the sense of shame seem to resent this most notorious of their features and can with difficulty be induced to withdraw a corner of a garment from across their mouths when facing a stranger or a camera.

The Ainus live mainly by fishing and hunting and are noted for their valiancy, particularly for the feat of killing the savage brown bear of Yezo with a knife, or with bow and arrows. Crude sledges, scarcely large enough for half-grown children, leaning against their huts indicate that they are not house-bound during the long rigorous winters. Some of the chiefs who can afford it are said still to indulge in polygamy; the race has plainly a greater dread of soap and water than of fleas and ancient, fishy smells; the Ainu’s greatest desire in life is reputed to be a copious supply of Japanese sake, a craving which their self-constituted guardians make no frantic efforts to curb.

I might still have departed from Hokkaido with a lingering doubt of the inherent savagery of the Ainu in spite of the wide-spread testimony to the contrary, but for my last encounter with him. I had been sauntering for an hour or two about one of his 40villages, stalking for photographs—for a mixture of superstition and childish cupidity engendered by hurried, kodak-armed tourists has made the tribe somewhat camera-shy. A magnificent specimen of fully adult and hirsute manhood was almost on the point of falling into my trap when a sound between a grunt and a shriek from a rather surly boy whom I had not been able to shake off caused me to glance around. Down one of the sandy lanes serving as streets came striding the village chief—for such I had found him to be shortly after pilfering his likeness by a simple ruse. Having this already, I had no special interest in watching his approach, and turned back to my still uncaptured quarry. Suddenly I beheld the chief, physically a mighty man still for all his huge bush of almost snow-white hair and beard, scowling upon me with his broad nose all but touching my face and his liquid black eyes blazing. Exactly what was the cause of his quite evident displeasure there was no means of knowing, for though he was speaking voluminously in a voice which any orator might have envied, it was not even in Japanese, and no stray word gave me an inkling of the subject of his discourse.

All at once the notion seemed to strike him that I had no intention of complying with his wishes, whatever they were. With a sudden short, shrill scream which instantly betrayed the savage, he dashed off a few paces and caught up the first manly weapon 41within reach, which chanced to be nothing more or less than a complete wooden plow! Raising this above his head in one powerful hand, he sprang toward me with a shriek of uncontrolled anger and a contorted expression of rage such as no doubt scores of the big brown bears of his native mountains had beheld during the last moments of their existence.

The part of wisdom, of course, would have been frankly to take to my heels. But there are few things more difficult for the average Caucasian than openly to show fear of an opponent of an admittedly inferior race, particularly when a score of persons of that race are peering out through the doors and walls to behold his discomfiture. Moreover, I was busily engaged in seeing that my kodak be returned to its case before serious harm came to it. I stood where I was, therefore, instinctively turning my back to catch the expected blow where it would do me the least damage—and when I looked up again my howling savage was brandishing the plow over my head, yet somehow hesitating to bring it down upon me. The taming influence, no doubt, the forced repression of centuries of stern Japanese rule, the ability to glimpse the consequences, with which long generations of vicarious contact with the ruthless justice of civilization had tinctured his savage soul, stayed his hand. Denied the privilege of completely following his instinct, he was helpless. From the roaring savage he became an angrily shrieking child. The 42plow he still grasped in his mighty right hand, but its end rested on the ground. With his left he caught the lapel of my coat in a grip which mere yanking never would have loosened. But when I gave him what school-boys of my day called the “thumbtwist,” he grunted with the sudden, unexpected pain, released his hold, and, though still bellowing in his magnificent oratorical voice, watched me walk away without following.

VIII

There is, perhaps, no good reason why the stranger should be often astounded, rather than merely amused at the contrasts of Japan. Any nation, particularly so far removed and individualistic a nation, hedging itself round for more than two centuries with a Chinese wall of seclusion, then suddenly emerging into the sunlight of to-day and making frantic efforts to overtake its modernized fellows, could not but present a similar spectacle. Yet I confess myself still not immune to shocks of this nature. To stroll from the mammoth wrestling pavilion of Tokyo, with its wholly un-Occidental pastime, throng, contestants, point of view, to the commonplace field a gunshot distant where a group of Japanese youths in baseball uniforms were defeating at our national game a similar group from one of our own universities, was like stepping across a thousand years of time in a single stride. Side by side there travel, carouse, and worship men of whom one seems no farther removed from us either in garb or mentality than a Frenchman, while the other might that very moment have stepped forth from a daimyo’s train in the “Cipangu” of Marco Polo. In the heathenish interior of an Asakusa temple, 44most popular with the rank and file of all Tokyo’s myriad places of worship, there pause to toss a copper coin into the enormous grated hopper, to clap their hands thrice and call the wandering attention of the gods to their prayers, even to buy tissue-paper charms written by a Buddha-faced priest, men in faultless Broadway attire who have spent the day in modern offices between telephone and stenographer. Under the fantastic garb of a wandering pilgrim, with his jingling bells and his prayer-written staff, is often concealed a doctor or a lawyer of Western training, with perhaps a fluent command of English.

Among the cabin-passengers on the Nippon Yusen Kaisha liner that brought us across the Pacific was a brilliant young Japanese who had been teaching the intricacies of a medical specialty in one of the oldest and most famous of our universities. Outwardly, at least, nothing remained of his Orientalism except a hint of foreign accent in his English, and his telltale eyes. Even his point of view on matters large or small seemed that of the American colleagues he had left behind. On the dock at Yokohama he was met by his future wife, properly chaperoned, shrinking subserviently within her modest kimono and pillow-like obi. The pair bowed solemnly to each other at some two yards’ distance, he moderately, she almost to the stone flagging; then as he stalked away she clattered behind him in her wooden clogs, lugging his American hand-bag.

The sacred red lacquer bridge at Nikko

A quiet corner of the temples of Nikko

45Our passage had been enlivened also by a naval engineer from one of Japan’s great government shipyards, who was returning from two years of study and observation among those of America and Europe. He was to have remained a year longer, but both his father and his fiancée had suddenly died. I visited him one day at his home in Tokyo, one of those frail little houses of the capital set in its quaint, inevitable garden. His latest European garb had been altered only by the removal of his shoes; but an elder sister kowtowed profoundly at his curt, quick command and hurried away, to prostrate herself before us on the matted floor a moment later with a tray of tea and sweetmeats.

He would be going away in a few days, I suggested, to the naval base to which he was attached?

“As soon as I have arranged my marriage,” he replied.

“But,” I said, “your fiancée is no longer living?”

“Ah, yes, that one died,” he answered, in an expressionless monotone, “but my sister has picked out three other girls for me to choose from, and in a few days I will decide....”

“And the marriage?”

“In about three months, as soon as everything is prepared. You see, my father having died, I have become the head of the family, and I must marry quickly.”

IX

Were facetiousness toward so solemn a people permitted, one might say that the Japanese are imitators at top rather than at bottom. The nation has apparently almost no notions of its own in the matter of head-dress; but certainly no one can accuse it of copying its footwear from extraneous sources. Fortunately the “derbies” and “bowlers” which topped off kimonos and European garb alike a decade or two ago seem to have passed into the limbo befitting such eyesores; but the foreign adaptations that have taken their place are little less incongruous. A group of Japanese males in their native costume, to which three out of four of them still cling more or less unalterably, and wisely, look as if they had been suddenly beset by a whirlwind in a foreign land, and had borrowed for the return journey whatever head coverings their hosts could spare them. Fedoras, caps, slouchy felts, particularly, now that summer was spreading northward across the empire, stiff straw hats, loomed forth on every hand—or head. Is it because the Restoration caught them with nothing between the fantastic hair-dress of shoguns and samurai, still retained in a modified form by 47their hog-fat wrestlers, and the parasol-like sun- and rain-shades of the peasants, that most of the nation copies with such poor success our Western styles of head-dress? Personally I much prefer the bareheaded tooth-brush pompadour or closely clipped pates of most boys and of no small number of men of old-fashioned or indifferent attitude. The distinctly national feminine coiffure, too, never covered with anything but a parasol or an umbrella, helps to save the situation.

The two-toed human biped, reminiscent of the primitive horse, the cloven-hoofed mortal who shuffles his way in many millions through the islands of Japan is, however, unknown in all the rest of the round world. No other race has had the genius—to use a polite word—to evolve that cross between a stocking-foot and a foot-mitten, the great toe separated from the rest, which rounds off Japanese bare legs, irrespective of sex. Beneath this may be seen every manner of makeshift, always gripped by the independent great toe,—wooden clogs of many shapes and sizes, getas ranging from flat boards to veritable stilts that raise the wearer a foot above the ground in the rainiest muddy weather, matted-topped sandals of wood, slippers—if a mere sole with a V-shaped cord as upper may be so called—for house wear, of a score of different forms and materials, slippers for the hallways, others for certain unmentioned chambers, special rubber slippers for the 48bath-room, crude straw waraji for pilgrims and peasants, worn-out examples of which lie strewn along any traveled road, varied and special footwear for every time, place, and occasion.

In the old days when this was all, when man, woman, or child stepped instinctively in or out of his multifarious sole-protectors with unhesitating ease, it was a mere question of knowing the intricate etiquette of footwear. But now, with Western shoes wide-spread among the men and making headway among school-girls, there is often physical labor involved in the Japanese persistence in his peculiar footwear habits. At the “semi-European” hostelry where we sojourned for a week in Kyushu, southernmost island of Japan proper, the sub-manager laced or unlaced his shoes thirteen times in showing us our Japanese quarters. No wonder the island empire is the favorite dumping-ground for congress gaiters!

A Shinto priest (if the word fits) of Nikko

The tomb of Iemitsu, founder of the Nikko shrines, and the holy of holies of its great group of temples, photographed only by stealth

Not a palace garden, but the entrance to a house of prostitution in Tokyo’s Yoshiwara

The front of a Yoshiwara house in Tokyo, with the usual advertising features of large framed photographs of the inmates, two of whom appear in person behind the railing, one hiding behind a newspaper rather than be photographed; the sign reads “3-yen two-storied natural inn”

The Nipponese take extraordinary care to keep their feet off the ground. Even the peasants, market-women, boys and girls whose weather-toughened supports have never been subjected to the effeminate niceties of the toed-sock-foot, almost invariably wear at least straw waraji out of doors. Pleasing custom, and a wise one, too, in a land where nothing that may enrich the land is wasted. But I believe I am giving no proof of extraordinary perspicacity in asserting that to her footwear is largely due the poor roads and the abominable streets of Japan. Her people are not 49great believers in pavements; they can easily hobble and scrape through life on their clumsy stilts without them. If it rains—and there are weeks on end when it does, indeed—until the shoe-clad foreigner cannot stir out of doors without covering himself to the ankles with paste-like mud, the native merely steps into higher and higher getas and stumps serenely on. In the classic speech of recent years, “he should worry.” Before it fell in a crash one Saturday noon there was scarcely a square yard of street even in Tokyo that was not deep in dust or deep in mud, according to the weather. The municipal fathers had recently threatened to spend forty million yen toward giving the capital a modern pavement. If the threat is made good, now that the opportunity for general improvement is so excellent, Tokyo will no longer seem Japan, for dust and mud are as national as getas and kimonos. When a stretch of Japanese street becomes really impassable, a few loads of sea-shore stones are spilled into it—to the still greater discomfiture of the shoe-shod foreigner.

At least one class of Japanese profits by this atrocity of streets and roads. Scores of what would be pleasant strolls, were there anything fit to stroll on, must be abandoned, to the advantage of the rickshaw-man. If he had no such allies, it is doubtful whether this human horse of the Orient would not already have passed from the stage in Japan, for there his constantly increasing demands have made 50him almost a luxury. To be jogged about Tokyo for a short day of sight-seeing or shopping costs even the initiated ten or twelve yen, which is almost half as bad as if it were American dollars. No extraordinary reward in these times, perhaps, for a hard day’s toil. Let us not, however, in our fairness to the physical toiler, lose sight of the fact that it is what he accomplishes, not how greatly he exerts himself, which counts; and your rickshaw-man moves you from place to place but little faster than you could walk, and not much more comfortably.

Personally, I found riding in a kuruma—which is a politer, more ladylike Japanese word for rickshaw—an unpleasant, almost a humiliating experience, as if I were being impressed with the notion that the man trotting in the shafts before me was more sturdy than I—which in Japan at least he usually wasn’t. Or my mind harked back to the origin of this unseemly means of conveyance, to the American—we admit we are an inventive nation—missionary who, half a century ago, converted—in addition, we trust, to many parishioners—a baby-carriage into a means of giving his invalid wife an occasional outing. Even the glistening wire wheels and the plump pneumatic tires to which the contrivance has since advanced cannot blot out that unmanly derivation.

Perhaps it is true also that no rickshaw-runner survives his tenth year in the profession, but as some of those I have ridden behind were plainly over fifty, 51and the speed of the majority in Japan by no means killing, I found this no great contributing cause of my displeasure in rickshaw riding. But often the choice is narrow,—a mud bath, a coating of dust and perspiration, a small and ancient type of tram-car with a floor as muddy or dusty as the street outside and inevitably packed beyond any American conception, possibly a limping, asthmatic, purse-flattening exile from our most popular automobile factory, or—the spider-mannered kuruma-ya, sitting on his own dashboard, awaiting a victim. The miniature member of our family became instantly fond of “widin’ man,” fortunately, for his walking was still limited; the unofficial head thereof recognizes the rickshaw’s domestic convenience, in spite of her constant dread that the runner’s reputedly brief span of life will end between the shafts sustaining her; but I, the minority, prefer stretching my legs to cramping them.

X

It is nearly a score of years now since the many private “iron roads” of the island empire were combined under a cabinet minister, yet when all is said and done the Imperial Government Railways of Japan are a refutation of an almost universal experience elsewhere, that trains will not run properly under government ownership. Perhaps it is the combination of religion and patriotism of which Shintoism seems to be concocted, the semi-deification of the mikado and all his belongings; perhaps it is due to mere habit, or racial temperament; the fact remains that government ownership and employment do not mean carelessness and neglect, indolence and waste, in Japan. One has, to be sure, the impression, at sight of the swarms of men and boys in the dull-blue railway uniform, that the system is over-staffed; but nothing, one recalls, is more plentiful in Japan than human beings. If improvement and extension languish a bit, there are reminders that the railways, like schools and many another ward of the mikado’s Government, must often be content with modest rations, that its favorite sons, the army and navy, may lose none of their sturdy corpulence.

Approaching the great Buddha of Kamakura which stood through the earthquake of September 1, 1923

Thus the great Buddha has gazed down through the ages with what strikes the Western beholder as indifference to the woe or weal of puny mankind

53A narrow gauge is not conducive to reckless speed; the Japanese express-train that covers a mile in two minutes congratulates itself on a feat, while the locals that fulfil most of the promises, nearly always to the minute, of a bulky national time-table consume an incredible amount of time both at stations and between them. But few sports in Japan are far beyond the reach of rail, and the risk to life and limb is negligible. The adolescent squeal of the European-copied locomotives may be annoying to Americans, who will probably regret that the two car-length cushions on either side in first- and second-class are better suited to squatting on one’s heels or stretching out at full shoeless length than to ease in viewing the passing landscape; one may question the Japanese conception of certain indispensable conveniences, but such as he conceives them they are always in order. Diligent scrub-women at the terminals are no more so than the train-boy, in no way related to the commerce-minded nuisance of the same name in our own land, who come hourly to sweep out the carriages with but slight disturbance to its occupants, and several times a day to mop them. All cars are smoking-cars; there is no division by sex even of wash-rooms. But in what other land does the guard, whom we would call conductor, uncover with a regal bow as he enters to announce the regretful necessity of troubling the honorable passengers to display their respectable tickets, or pause to 54rearrange a rug over a sleeping traveler and to set aright the shoes, clogs, sandals, getas, and slippers scattered along his way through the train?

The experienced traveler rarely brings his lunch with him on a Japanese railway journey; he knows that he will find frequent and fresher supplies along the way, and at prices no higher than in his own street. Prices can sprout wings in Japan quite as easily as elsewhere, but it may be due to a frowning government that the wide-spread custom of considering travelers by train temporary prisoners, to be mulcted during the confinement of as great a portion of their financial solvency as possible, has not yet taken root there. In the very likely event of there being no dining-car, with tolerable European meals of four or five courses at a scant seventy cents each, there is a system of station venders more frequent and more dependable perhaps than anywhere else in the world. Never does a train halt at a place of any importance that the singsong cry of “O-bento!” does not call attention to green-capped youths marching up and down the platform offering for sale all that a reasonable traveler can demand in the way of food and drink.

It is conceivable that the foreigner may not at once take kindly to the “honorable bento,” the staff of life of Japanese travelers; but with persistence he will come to endure and even to relish it. Two fresh wooden boxes tied together with a paper ribbon contain 55the collation, which is uniform in cost,—forty sen, the half-cents of Japan, everywhere now, since the war,—and almost so in contents and quality. On top clings a paper napkin and a paper-sealed pair of chop-sticks, the virginity of the latter assured by their being but half split in two, with—such is the Japanese genius for unexpected little details!—the inevitable toothpick tucked between them. The larger box contains hot boiled rice, all a native cares to eat at one sitting and more than the normal American can. The several little compartments of the other hold a piece of fish—fortunately not usually raw, as the Japanese like it—perhaps a bit of meat, some slices of cold potato, a cut of sweet omelet that is most likely of all Japanese viands to appeal to the average Western taste, two or three unknown vegetables, some boiled, the others pickled, perhaps some brown beans to give one chop-stick practice, and a shaving of red ginger to lend the rest seasoning. Variations on this menu, according to the locality and the things each place is famed for, are pickled lily- or lotus-root, black mushrooms, bean-curd, shrimps, steamed eel, edible seaweed, sliced octopus, and even stranger sea-foods.

If all this does not suffice, one may summon other wearers of the green cap. There is the tea boy, the hot milk boy, fruit sellers, venders of rice-cakes, of the dough-ball sweetmeats of Japan, of wood-wrapped native jams, of California raisins, a trifle 56cheaper than at home, a hawker of cigarettes, periodicals, beer, and more doubtful thirst-quenchers, perhaps even an incongruous purveyor of near-bread and sandwiches. Hot boiled milk in bottles holding a scant glassful is expensive; tea, on the other hand, is almost given away. For eight sen, a bare four cents, the boy furnishes an earthenware tea-pot with cover and handle, crudely glazed, like the tea-cup that goes with it, and fills it with hot water from his traveling buffet—furnishes everything, in fact, except tea, in lieu of which the purchaser finds merely a sack-inclosed handful of leaves that do the water no harm if one prefers to throw them out and add real tea of one’s own, some bouillon cubes, or whatever individual taste suggests. Most traveling Japanese deceive themselves into believing that this tasteless hot water is really their indispensable beverage. The stranger cannot but wonder how all this can be supplied at so slight a price, and why the pot and cup cannot be retrieved at some other station. They never are, however, but, like the bento boxes and all the rest of the waste which Japanese travelers cast under the seats, and never out of the window, they are periodically swept up by the train-boy and dumped as the train passes over some river or arm of the sea. Where these are shallow, one may see thousands of broken tea-pots and cups heaped up at the bottom. Thus, for a yen at most, a rugged appetite can be tamed into submission for several hours. 57To be sure, the Imperial Government Tobacco Monopoly cigar, which may sometimes be had to top off with, sadly belies even its misspelled Spanish label; but one may be so fortunate as still to have left a few of the fifty genuine smokes which the Japanese customs generously allow the traveler to bring into the country with him—and what boots it to worry about to-morrow?

To-night, however, is a more serious matter. All the horrors of the American so-called “sleeping-car” are as nothing compared with the bitter tragedy in many acts of a night spent in one of the poor imitations thereof that ramble up and down Japan. The natives, I believe, find little fault with them, and there is no reason that they should be remodeled to fit the few foreigners who might use them. For it is mainly a question of fit, so far at least as the Anglo-Saxon is concerned. By day second class differs from first only in the color of the upholstery, and perhaps a bit more companionship. But not only is the normal second-class berth built to Japanese specifications; the so-called “large size” ones are merely wider, which is very slight advantage to the full-length man. Granted, however, that he has succeeded in stowing himself away, there are other inconveniences. The Imperial Railways being narrow-gauge, it is inevitable that some portion of the average Western anatomy shall more or less continually protrude into the aisle. The 58flimsy curtains that satisfy the atrophied sense of privacy of the Japanese are always half open for one cause or another; there is no real dressing-room; if one is so daring, dexterous, and determined as to disrobe inside a berth, where the retention of a tooth-brush means overcrowding, one must resort to the customary Japanese custom of hanging one’s clothes on the floor—and the only floor available is that of the aisle. Worst of all, perhaps, the sleeping-car of Japan is never really that but a day-coach with furnishings which runs at night. The lights blaze unabated; short-distance passengers stalk in or out of the car at every station and chatter and smoke incessantly between them; trainmen are constantly marching through, and never fail to slam the four or five noisily sliding doors; at every halt brazen-voiced youth walk back and forth along the platform outside insistently repeating the name of the station—in short, there is even less likelihood of a bit of sound sleep than in a Japanese inn.

First class ought to be better, but it is not unlikely to be worse. Yokels along the way, or in third class, are curious to see the rare personage who travels thus, and the magnificence about him; the scarcity of occupants makes it the favorite rendezvous of the train-crew as work-, play-, or catnapping-room; the other half of the same coach is not infrequently the dining-car and all-night café; 59and the train-boy will die at his post rather than permit a window to stay open for an instant on the hottest night. Old travelers who know the ropes often make their night trips in first class without taking a berth. Their sleeping-place is the same that it would be with a berth-ticket, in some ways all the better for not being made up—and there is a saving of seven yen.

It is perhaps natural that “boys” in hotels and on trains have no realization of the advisability of quieting down toward midnight in a land where the most courteous seem to have no respect for the sleeper, where even husbands habitually wake their wives or children at any hour of the night on the flimsiest provocation. A nation accustomed since time immemorial to paper walls, overcrowding, and uncomfortable substitutes for beds probably is not conscious of the value of long, sound slumber. The passing foreigner who sees ill-slept faces all about him and notes the tendency to nap by day whenever a chance offers realizes that a wise people should be as insistent on restful sleep as in avoiding dyspeptic food and unhealthful eating habits. Our impression is that the Japanese are careless in both these respects.

XI

Along Broadway complaints have been heard during recent years of the almost dishonest brevity of some plays. Of all the things that may be said against theatrical performances in Japan, that would be the most unreasonable. I pride myself on a certain amount of endurance, in any good cause, but I confess to a kindly feeling toward that Tokyo friend who did not take me to the “Meiji-za” until the show was half over. Not that it was so far beyond me, or that I am incapable of appreciating, even of enjoying at times, things wholly foreign to our American point of view; but even Fred Stone, I fancy, would begin to grow wearisome if he cavorted about the stage almost incessantly from two until midnight.

Venders of food and religious trinkets line with their shops the shaded walks of the island of Enoshima

The leglessness of Japanese houses! A corner of our room in the Japanese hotel at Kozu

The façade of a moving-picture theater in Nagoya

By the time we had checked our shoes in one of the adjoining tea-houses—for to do so at the door of the theater itself means a long and severe struggle to recover them—and were shown to a box six inches deep and furnished with cushions and a tray of tea, most of the crowded house had already had four and a half hours’ worth of the admission fee. For most of them it was supper-time, and 61scores of men and boys flitted back and forth along the “aisles,” level with the tops of patrons’ heads, serving meals contained in lacquered boxes, the inevitable tea, and white vase-like bottles of warm sake. Unshod and experienced, they caused little or no annoyance, especially to an audience accustomed to see actors often enter or leave the stage by these same polished wooden runways. In the gently sloping balcony the rice-fed multitude, gathered in family groups in similar square, shallow, mat-floored inclosures, piled about them the plentiful waste of their lunches without for a moment letting their attention waver from the stage.

Unchaperoned not merely by a Japanese but by one capable of appreciating and mitigating a foreigner’s difficulties, the performance would have been as meaningless and unintelligible to me as a baseball game to an Englishman. But a few well-chosen words of explanation now and then disclosed as many unsuspected fine points as pass unnoticed by a novice at a Spanish bull-fight. The one thing the Japanese actor must avoid above all others, it transpired, was “acting,” in the Western sense. The more nearly, apparently, he acts like a normal, genuine, every-day human being, the lower he is rated in histrionic ability. There are, to be sure, topical farces and the like in modern Japan; but the national drama, patronized by the great mass of the recreation-seeking, and offering the greatest 62stage fame, consists of little more than endless elocution, accompanied by certain stilted actions cut and dried for centuries, any deviation from which diminishes by just that much the player’s applause. His every step, gesture, and inflection is stereotyped by age-long custom and repetition, and his highest goal is to approximate as nearly as possible those steps, gestures, and inflections which won the undying fame of some bygone king of the stage.

That does not mean, however, that the Japanese actor has no chance to develop and display personal advantages. The more nearly, for example, he can make his voice sound like an enraged giant imprisoned in the pit of his stomach the greater will be the uproar that greets the conclusion of one of his speeches. He is given, too, frequent opportunities to imply by facial expression alone the thoughts that are supposed to be passing through his mind, which are often expressed at the same time by a sort of Greek chorus of three or four men dimly seen behind wooden bars in a kind of raised box on one side or the other of the stage, who declaim in a curiously unrhythmic rhythm as they pick at native instruments. The koto and the samisen, by the way, are not the last word in musical contrivances, but I confess to a decided preference for Japanese “music” over American “jazz,” and for much of her theater to the unsuccessful 63striving for originality which often afflicts our own.

There is a reminder of the three thumps which announce the raising of the curtain in France in the beating together of two sticks of wood so hard that they have almost the resonance of bell-metal, faster and faster, until it reaches a deafening crescendo, which constitutes the signal for the next act in Japan. There is lacking the perfect imagination of a Chinese audience, which makes a property-man in black or coolie-blue invisible, or the stick on which a new moon is raised above the cloth horizon quite in keeping with the poetic spirit of the drama; but the scenery is decidedly elementary, and many conventions which strike the Western visitor as ludicrous pass quite unnoticed. Not merely do the actors often make their entrance or exit along the raised aisles through the audience, declaiming as they come or go, but bands of them, representing the samurai of rival shoguns, now and then wage pitched battle far out on these passageways, to the seeming peril of the lacquered rice-dishes of auditors beneath them. If a wall or a fence is indicated in the scene, only the gate or door, standing in dignified isolation, is actually in evidence, and must be carefully opened and closed whenever a character passes through it. There is something curiously incongruous between such medieval contrivances 64and the ultramodern revolving stages of the best Tokyo theaters, on which a group of actors, suddenly coming to the end of their scene, relapse into motionlessness and are spun around in plain sight of the audience until the next group and setting are disclosed and put into action.

But these after all mainly mechanical differences are not the chief ones between the Japanese and American stage. It is more surprising to find that the two corner-stones of our theater, novelty and the sex appeal, are wholly unnecessary to the Nipponese playwright. “Old stuff” pleases best, even in the “movies.” Month after month, year after year, one might almost say century after century, the Japanese playgoer is content to witness the same dramas, to follow with breathless interest some national legend, some event in the history of the island empire as well known to its every school-boy as is Washington’s crossing of the Delaware to us. He is not merely satisfied; he prefers these ancient tales, dressed in the elaborate costumes of shogunal days, ruled by the curious morality of long ago, when parents slew a beloved son for some intangible point of honor, and suicide was considered, under certain circumstances, the height of virtue. The Japanese is decidedly not a demonstrative race, yet the suppressed sobs and blowing of noses of the “Meiji-za” audience all but drowned out the stentorian, cavernous voices of the actors at the climax of a scene between a self-doomed father and his infant son, though every native present had heard the story a hundred times.

Farming in Japan rice-fields is a great life—if you don’t weaken

A Japanese woman enjoying her pipe and the seascape at Toba

Little girls of Yamada-Isé dressed in a riot of color, topped by hats of real flowers, for the twenty-one-yearly rebuilding festivities

A peasant woman of Japan up to her knees in work

65The same themes suffice for the now fairly numerous Japanese motion-picture producers. The old familiar kimono-clad figures, whitened faces, and well-tried situations all but monopolize the posters before “movie” houses. As on the speaking stage, the rare female rôles are most often played by men; in the few cases where they are not, the women never under any circumstances give the slightest reminders of the appeal of sex. The result is that when, to fill out its program, the cinema flashes an American or a European picture on the screen, this unfailing motif fairly shrieks at one from the very first foot of film. The traveler from the West is suddenly astounded by the realization of the omnipresence of this appeal in the dramas, good and bad, high and low, of our own land. What would have been at home the most innocent of flirtations, the purest youthful love-story, becomes all at once, sensed in the curiously tense atmosphere of the Oriental audience about one, the height of indecency. If the film is of the type the Westerner would regard in his home land as mildly risqué, a burning sense of shame surges up his spine; he feels an all but overwhelming desire to rise and shout to the now gaping audience that it is completely misunderstanding, to hurry back home and demand that 66laws be framed to forbid the exporting for the amusement of peoples so utterly different from ourselves of screen-stories which cause them completely to misjudge us, to the appreciable widening of that gulf between nations that so much largely futile effort is being made to narrow.

Misunderstandings of this sort, however, are inevitable. Honest Japanese themselves admit that they are no models for the average of other nations in relations between the sexes, but with them there is almost no indication of this fact on the surface. Nor is this hypocrisy; it is age-long custom, and temperament, for they are above all things outwardly undemonstrative. For a man and woman to shake hands, to take an arm, fills the untraveled Japanese with amazement; for husband and wife to exchange the most perfunctory of kisses in public at parting or greeting is more scandalous than in holy Zion City itself. Even to show such signs of affection to one’s children where others may see is extremely bad form.

“Do Japanese man and wife never kiss?” I asked one of my Tokyo acquaintances.

“Never!” he replied, with an amazement at the question that showed through his habitually expressionless face. “Of course,” he added a moment later, with the air of a man who would be truthful at all costs, but with the cynical smirk of one treading 67lewd ground, “they sometimes do, but only in the privacy of their chamber.”

It was this same man who, more familiar with the speech of England than with our own, explained that the only outward manifestation which distinguishes a geisha from her more respectable sisters is “too much swank.” Certainly her public manners and personal appearance give no other indication of her calling. Japan’s very yoshiwaras, these walled and sternly policed restricted districts of her larger cities, are outwardly models of propriety; the big framed photographs of the inmates, displayed to attract passing clients, invariably show them as properly attired as the most circumspect of dowagers. It may be that the frank, casual disclosure of what in Western lands commonly remain hidden charms, in the public baths and the naturally rather disclosing garb of Japan, makes the Japanese callous to any such incitements.

XII

The undoubtedly many attractions of the island empire for the mere traveler are, unfortunately, greatly offset by the high cost of living there. The rapidity with which letters of credit are depleted turns almost to naught the well nigh frantic efforts of such publicity agencies as the diligent Japan Tourist Bureau to attract visitors. Two or three years ago those who cater to and depend upon the passing foreigner comforted themselves with the thought that his scarcity was merely a temporary aftermath of the World War. Now that he still fails to come in appreciable numbers, there is dismay in such quarters, though it is characteristic of the Japanese temperament to assert that “the increase is gratifying.” Word has drifted to the ear of many a prospective tourist that life is unreasonably expensive in Japan, or he hears proof of that fact in crossing the Pacific and goes on to China without landing, or cuts to a fraction the time he planned to spend in the mikado’s realm. If even Americans feel that way about it, one can easily imagine the sensations of those from war-impoverished lands with a feeble currency.

69Some of this raising of prices is justifiable; much of it is not. The Japanese working-man has recently won a wage commensurate with a citizen instead of a serf, and the consumer must take care of it. But the war engendered the profiteer there as elsewhere; it left behind newly rich to set bad examples and crowd the heels of their more honest brethren; a great increase in taxes has popularized the pastime of seeing how much of them can be passed on to the next man. Then there is what a Tokyo editor calls “expensive face-saving.” In olden days the Japanese “saved face” in other ways; it is no doubt in keeping with the general westernization of their standards that the modern method of doing so should be by ostentatious extravagance. The ordinary Japanese business man who would keep up with the procession and not give his colleagues and his clients the impression that he is hovering on the verge of insolvency must waste much money on mere show. Completely separate wardrobes for the four seasons, often European as well as native style, are indispensable. When he entertains his friends or customers he can scarcely invite them to his home, not so much because of domestic seclusion as because it is the fashion to have such gatherings in a tea-house, where geisha-girls may be summoned to serve or dance. Not only do the more famous of these expect an opera-singer’s fee, but the chaya itself has boosted its prices to the new-rich level. Then 70there is the very serious matter of tipping. In the United States this vicious importation from Europe has swollen almost beyond recognition of its origin, but the extra fees exacted there are mere flea-bites compared with the chadai, or “tea-money,” of Japan. On the amount of it depends the reputation for importance of the giver, and it is a common failing to wish to impress the world with one’s importance. The Japanese of any standing who puts up in a native hotel, for example, and is handed a bill for twenty yen at the end of a three-day stay, is expected to send at least half that amount as a tip to the proprietor, to give another five yen to the maid who brought his food and kept his room in order, and generously to remember the bath-boy and the shoe-man. “Is there any other country,” asks the irate editor, “where such a ridiculous custom as tipping to eighty per cent of the bill prevails?”

All this, of course, is reflected in general prices. But what has particularly aroused the wrath of travelers is the almost universal Japanese custom of expecting the foreigner, particularly the Caucasian visitor, to pay higher prices for the same things than the native. Perhaps this is merely an extension, almost flattering, of the notion that one pays according to one’s importance. The fact remains that the American and the European are sometimes frankly and naturally, more often surreptitiously, made to pay more than the Japanese, a custom which 71ignorance of the language, among other things, makes it next to impossible to combat. In some cases this, too, is justifiable. An American staying in a native inn is likely to require more attention, to call for stranger foods, to be more careless with the floor-matting than the Japanese guest—and he is almost certain to be ignorant of, or to scorn, the native custom of exorbitant tips. But the overcharging is not confined to justifiable cases; among those who habitually come into contact with foreign travelers it has become a fixed habit, and has spread to a considerable extent to the rank and file. I have already mentioned the high cost of kuruma-riding. In the slang of the rickshaw-man and his class, a foreigner is a kane-mochi, a “possessor of money,” in other words, a rich man, and whenever it is possible he is treated accordingly. Wherever he moves, except by the government railways or the strictly public means of conveyance, the tourist has the feeling that his money is being taken away from him with unjust rapidity; whenever he stops he is likely to be quickly impressed with the nation that it is better for his financial constitution to move on again.

It is not the Japanese alone who are to blame for this baiting of the visiting traveler. The score of more or less foreign hotels throughout the country which cater especially to such clients have been joined together in a price-fixing association, mainly by the 72efforts of the typically American manager of the most pretentious of them, situated in a busy “treaty-port.” In the best few of these the virtually uniform charges are not entirely out of reason; but to come upon a run-down or poorly constructed and badly provided member of the association, far from the beaten track, only to be confronted by the same inflated rates, is likely to turn one’s attention once more to the train schedule. It would perhaps be unfair to suspect that the typical American hotel man above mentioned resorted to a manœuver time-honored in his native land in order to remove an incentive for travelers to desert his own ostentatious and necessarily high-priced establishment for more modest ones in out-of-the-way places; but the Japanese, for all his reputation for cleverness and foresight, is often dense.

There are many Americans, to be sure, who would not consider the foreign hotels of Japan high-priced, though they might express dissatisfaction at what they get for their money. But I am one of the firm believers in travel for persons of modest means, and not merely for the wealthy or those shielded from financial worries by an expense account. There are many who can, and should, and do go to see foreign lands, who still cannot, will not, and should not continually pay at least six dollars a day for a place to sleep and three heavy meals which they often do not wish to eat—plus constant increases 73for bottled water, for many services that should not be regarded as extras, for clever manipulations of the stated daily rate, and the high tips expected at their departure by a long line of more or less useless servants. Yet there is often no choice but to patronize the sometimes flea-bitten members of the hotel association or stay at home. One may not have the courage, or even the ability, to live in Japanese inns, and even these have in many cases caught the hint and greet the foreigner with “special rates,” on the pretense that they are furnishing him with silk- instead of cotton-covered futons, and “European food,” though they are as ignorant even of the appearance of the latter as a Tennessee mountaineer is of Japanese viands. Their own overreaching is depriving those who long to do business with him of the patronage of the modest traveler, and the immodest are too scarce to bring them a livelihood.

All that has saved some of these ill-advised exotic hostelries from disaster is an increasing Japanese patronage. Men who have been abroad sometimes prefer to live in foreign style, or at least to show their families a sample of it; some find it cheaper to pay the high rates and low tips of these establishments than the low rates but high tips expected of “persons of importance” in native hotels; the war-rich make them new forms of ostentation and overrun some of them with their geisha parties. Hence 74it is a rare dining-room that does not contain a few men faultlessly European from the neck down, audibly enjoying their soup, tea, or toothpick in Japanese fashion or striving to conceal their chagrin at the unadaptability of wives still distinctly native in garb and manners. For if the Japanese smile at our clumsiness with the chop-sticks, we recover the amusement with interest among the native sojourners in these so-called European hotels. Daintily kimonoed ladies clutching forks upside down in the wrong hand, grasping the body of a tea-cup for fear the handle to which they are unaccustomed will prove too frail, paring their fruit backward with what is to them a clumsy knife, unconsciously trying to draw their feet up on their chairs—and often succeeding—the while avoiding the eye of inwardly wrathful though outwardly imperturbed husbands, enliven many a meal. That their mishaps are not confined to the detested public place of eating is suggested by the unfailing anecdote of those traveled Japanese who are given to admitting personal discomfiture of how they fell out of their first bed.

It is as much as anything the commonplace atmosphere and stereotyped menus of these exorbitant imitations of Occidental hotels that make one inclined to hurry through Yokohama, Nagoya, Kobe, even temple-rich Kyoto, and spend such time as one can afford in smaller and less sophisticated places. There—almost anywhere off the one well-beaten 75track, in fact—one must endure the unconscious bad manners of a race which, for some unexplainable reason, always quickly gathers about a foreigner, though a hundred others have passed within a fortnight, and giggles childishly at him if he speaks, though the study of his language is compulsory in every higher school and, except that his eyes do not squint, his appearance is scarcely a whit different from many of the gigglers themselves. But there are compensations, in glimpses of unsophisticated corners, unadvertised bits of picturesqueness, semi-survivals of customs that carry one back to the days, not yet nearly a century distant, when to wander in a land now as safe as any on the globe would have been to lose one’s head forthwith by order of some wrathful daimyo. Nor does one ever tire of seeing the velvety Japanese landscape, its rugged misshapen pines, its terraced hillsides, and its crazy-quilt rice-fields cut up into absurd little patches so carefully tended that there is hardly a weed in the whole country, or of the laborious, uncomplaining, mud-wading men and women who spend their lives in them. Fields pink with Chinese clover that is to be plowed under to enrich the soil change to white stretches of daisies doomed to the same undignified end as one rambles southwestward; otherwise, there is a picturesque sameness which nevertheless does not grow wearisome.

XIII

It was by mere lucky chance that I happened down to Yamada-Isé on the very day her great celebration began. In theory, as I understand it, Shinto shrines are rebuilt every seven years; in practice, at least in this most venerated center of the cult, as sacred to millions of Japanese as Jerusalem, Mecca, or Benares to men of other faiths, some of the holy edifices are actually reconstructed, and new ones added, every twenty-first year. In the springtime, when sap and pilgrims are on the move, one may expect to find many of the trains of Japan crowded, but I had certainly not looked forward to fighting my way amid such throngs as poured with me down to this chosen terrestrial abode of the gods that watch over the island empire. There had been no warning, so far as I was concerned, that another twenty-one years had passed and that the generation-separated festivities were again on the point of beginning.

The multitude which disgorged through the station exits was a mere handful compared to the endless welter of humanity that already surged along the few streets of the little city, a city as far removed 77in some respects from westernized Kobe or Yokohama as the moon. Yet every train that arrived as long as I remained was packed beyond anything we of the Occident would believe possible. Pilgrims, devout and otherwise, nearly all in strange, fantastic garb, eddied back and forth through the town, while the keepers and employees of inns, of eating- and drinking-places, of shops crammed with displays of the myriad queer trinkets sold to the pious in holy places, raced up and down along the edges of the human stream frantically shouting the merits of their establishments or their wares. It was not difficult to believe the naïve assertion of the home-made local guide-book that “the occupation of the people of Yamada is to feed peacefully upon pilgrims.”

Some of the latter sat on the polished floors of the wide-open anterooms of inns, tending their dusty and weary feet; the overwhelming majority, however, had confined the physical exertions of their pilgrimage to the purchase of a railway ticket. In the overcrowded, paper-walled hostelries, in some cases on the train itself, they changed their every-day garb for curious costumes supposed to fit the occasion, until one might have fancied a mammoth outdoor fancy-dress ball was under way. Many of the townspeople were already similarly decked out, with a certain uniformity that still did not preclude individual touches. There was, too, a quaint and 78apparently unwitting mixture of the ancient and the modern,—caps of to-day topping off bizarre kimonos of samurai times, the familiar Japanese imitation of a thermos bottle riding on the hips of youths garbed in a way that might not have been out of place here a thousand years ago.

In the midst of all this maelstrom of incongruity, a bare two minutes from the station I came upon what I took to be the nucleus of the festivities, but which proved later to be but a small detail of them. From a narrow side street there suddenly emerged upon the principal artery of the town, to the accompaniment of an uproar of strange music and a babel of orders and warnings, the ends of two mammoth ropes, grasped, first by two men in strange attire, then by two rows of little girls, crowded as closely together as they could walk, dressed in combinations of flowers and brilliant clothing quite beyond the power of mere man to describe, and singing a chorus of un-Occidental rhythm. Behind them came scores of little boys, then larger girls, youths of ever-increasing size, and finally, the ropes seeming to have no end, two long lines of men, all in wondrous garb, all chanting weirdly as they advanced tugging at the big rolls of hemp. At last, when the head of the procession was already out of hearing, there came creaking and grinding around the corner, with the assistance of sturdy young men excitedly applying great wooden levers, a very Juggernaut 79of a car, its two mammoth wheels some two feet thick and so weighty that they crushed like eggs the stones from the sea that had been strewn along the way, the body so ponderous that it suggested a moving house. High up on this was a float, a fantastic scene taken from Japanese legend, with several living figures posing as motionlessly as the jolting and swaying of the cart permitted, and with as many mechanical assistants, in incongruous working clothes, performing unknown labors in half-concealed corners of it.

But it is time to explain. The holy city of Yamada and its environs, location of the two great shrines of Isé, are divided into twenty-one wards or sections. At the time of the rare rebuilding festival each of these must, by ancient custom, furnish a cart to bring up from the two near-by rivers the timbers to be used in the reconstruction. These are specially selected hinoki, a sturdy cousin of the pine or spruce, felled in the mikado’s private forests amid elaborate religious ceremonies, in order that they may be properly consecrated, then floated down the rivers with similar formalities. So great is the reverence for this sanctified wood that the mammoth logs are commonly wrapped in reed mats to prevent the slightest injury, and arrive in Yamada thus protected. The shrines themselves, dedicated to the divine ancestors of the mikado, principal gods of the Japanese people, are so sacred that carpenters 80engaged upon them are said to be required to bathe and put on spotless white garments before coming to work, and to discard either wood or clothing on which falls a drop of blood or other stain incident to their labor.

But custom and century-old tradition have made the wheeled contrivances furnished by the wards much more than mere timber-hauling carts. The different sections vie with one another in constructing mighty vehicles, in surmounting them with elaborate tableaux, in providing music and the like to accompany them. Long before it is time actually to go down to the rivers for the logs the twenty-one processions set out for a round of the little city, some invisible master of ceremonies preventing collisions. The wards are small; the vehicles must be drawn entirely by man-power; hence every family is required to send at least one member to assist in the pulling. Many a household reports intact, decked out in the requisite costumes, and prepared to spend the day and the night, if necessary, in tugging at the ropes with Japanese patience.

Residents of Yamada Isé garbed for the cart-drawing festival. Brilliant colors characterize the clothing; the torn paper “duster” is a frequent Shinto motif

Inside the grounds of the Naigu, most sacred of all the Shinto temple groups of Japan, all pilgrims purify themselves by washing in the sacred river before proceeding to their devotions; photography is strictly forbidden

A small section of the long line of rope-pullers returning with a sacred timber from the river to the temple rebuilding

At last the sacred timber itself, wrapped in grass mats to prevent any injury, came creaking and grinding around the corner of a narrow winding street

81The darkness which fell upon the long May day increased rather than lessened the festivities. From my hilltop lodging the whole region pulsated with weird music, groaned with the straining of mammoth wheels over sea-stones, flickered far and wide with fantastic paper lanterns. When I descended once more to the town almost every one of its narrow streets was blocked by a cart and all that went with it. Directly behind each vehicle now was a band or orchestra, if words so inaccurate to the occasion be allowed. They consisted of rectangular, flower- and silk-bedecked, canopied affairs on tiny wheels, in which the score of musicians seemed to be sitting, but inside which they were really walking. In some cases these were all women, in others all men; sometimes the genders were mixed; a few venturesome wards even sought to carry off the palm with more or less trained bands of shy and awkward children.

Every ten yards or so each cart halted, the great tapering lines of rope-holders fell into the position of “at rest,” and the musicians struck up queer yet enlivening noises on their dull-toned drums, metallic-voiced bars of wood, and misplaced fiddle-strings. During the halts as well as the advances the living figures of the float-tableaux strove to hold their poses, hour after hour. Not a few of these groupings suggested real artistic ability. I was particularly taken with a scene of olden times in which a woman, garbed and rice-powdered to the exact likeness of a wax figure preserved from shogunal days, knelt on the floor of the car, while two men decked out to perfection as two-sword samurai of the old swash-buckling era stood on either side of her. It was some time before I realized that they were living persons, so unblinking was their expression, so 82nearly motionless their bodies even during the pitching and swaying of the ponderous cart. One of the pseudo-samurai in particular had been given a pose that seemed physically impossible for any length of time—until I made out a loop of fine wire with a padded bottom sustaining his outstretched right arm. Even with that assistance he was displaying a patriotism or a civic spirit quite beyond any I ever hope to attain.

How far into the night this rivalry continued I cannot say, for I am one of those unfortunates who require a certain amount of sleep even on extraordinary, twenty-one-yearly occasions. Certainly, unless dreams deceived me, Yamada did not once during the night fall wholly silent, and with dawn the festivities again steadily increased in volume. The carts had gone down to the rivers, but the ever-growing throngs of pilgrims were taxing the capacity of the town and completely swamping its transportation facilities. Tram-cars, automobiles, horse-drawn bashas, rickshaws raced back and forth along or beside the wide new gravel-strewn highway between the inner and outer shrine, four miles apart, and still the overwhelming majority were forced to stump out or back in their curious and clumsy footwear.

The distant Naiku shrine was best worth the visiting, in its great mountain-base park amid immense trees considerably resembling redwoods, the 83more accessible of which were protected by split-bamboo jackets to prevent the aggressively pious from stripping them of the bark that is reputed to be a protection against evil spirits. The unpainted shrines of hinoki wood, set back within inclosures shut off from the general public, were of a primitive, undecorated style said to represent the purest and oldest form of Shinto architecture. Here and there gleaming new shrines, and inclosures of the same white wood, had already been erected, and a few matting-wrapped logs from the imperial forest lay awaiting similar use. Every one of the swarming pilgrims, of high or low degree, who crossed the sacred bridge into the shaded grounds paused to kneel at the edge of a clear little river and purify himself before proceeding farther into the holy precincts. Such is the absence of fanaticism, or at least of intolerance, in the faiths of Japan that the foreigner may mingle freely with believers, getting physically as near the gods as they, without once catching a hint of resentment. Neither my own ablutions at the sacred river, though from a somewhat different motive than theirs, nor my purchase of a copper’s worth of beans for the sacred horse—which closely resembled the rather overfed and underworked buggy-steed of a Kansas farmer—aroused more than a slight, fleeting attention from my fellow-pilgrims.

When I returned from island-studded Toba by a 84stroll through Futami-no-Ura, with its far-famed sacred rocks connected by a rope bridge, the last act of the timber-hauling was reaching its height. Up the long, sloping road from the river, where they had been loaded with religious rites, came the carts. Their now dust-covered and perspiring rope-clutchers strained toilsomely through the narrow Yamada streets, the girls and many of the younger boys fallen out along the way. There was grim determination in the faces of the sturdy youths, who were mainly left now, to finish the task, that their wards might not be discredited. When at last the carts themselves appeared they had been stripped of all the fanciful decorations of the night before—tableaux, floats, silken drapery, the following clusters of musicians were all gone; the mere vehicles, bare as a wrestler girded for the contest, ground crushingly over the loose stones, each laden with one massive hinoki log. Clouds of dust half hid them and the struggling pullers, even in the blazing sunshine; scores of the solemn little sword-bearing policemen of Japan lined the way along which they were to pass, to hold back the multitudes from pressing too closely upon the sacred timbers, to prevent, as far as possible, irreverent foreigners from photographing them, so sacrosanct are they and the shrines that are built from them. As each cart groaned into the hallowed precincts—this time the Geku, or outer shrine, on the edge of Yamada town itself—the entrance 85was barred from behind it even to the reverent throngs, and none but Shinto functionaries and local or visiting notables were permitted to follow it to its final goal.

Though cremation is much more common than burial, a Japanese cemetery bears no small resemblance to one of our own

Within the grounds of the finest of Kyoto’s temples

Hundreds of semi-sacred deer roam at will about Nara and vicinity, recalling the sacred bulls of India

The entrance to the ever-higher temples of Nara

86For a full week the same scenes were to be enacted daily, and it is small wonder if the inhabitants of holy Yamada-Isé surreptitiously heave a sigh of relief when their strenuous labors are over and the town has settled down again to feed peacefully upon the pious, who will arrive constantly but in less overwhelming multitudes during the coming twenty-one years.

XIV

It was fitting that a pilgrimage to Koya-san should follow my unexpectedly well-chosen visit to Yamada-Isé. As the latter is the holy of holies of Shintoism, so is the sacred mountain-top of Koya, also situated on the southernmost peninsula of the main island, perhaps the most venerated center of Buddhism in Japan. This time there was no special occasion to swell the pilgrim ranks, but the less accessible sanctuary enjoys a constant popularity, and almost as great a one as its rival over the mountain range to the east. I was, therefore, far from alone at any time during the journey, even though I had abandoned the less mobile two thirds of my family in delightful Nara.

For those moderately accustomed to walking uphill it is three hours’ steady climb from the railway to the hallowed summit of Koya-san. Before long the flat, dusty, rice-growing plain gives way to rugged foot-hills, then to real, if not especially lofty, mountains, up which clambers a more than well-worn trail that is almost a highway. Along this lower stretch those who grew weary of their burdens could pick up a porter at will, and to suit any 88load, for they range from eager boys of eight to powerfully legged men who have made carrying a life’s work. The carriers are of both sexes, too, and the frequent sight of a haughty man of wealth, easily recognizable for all his pilgrim garb, burdened only with a fan and a towel, and followed by a sun-browned woman bowed half double beneath his baggage, kept one reminded that this was Japan. Here also those who can climb only by the exertions of others engage their kagos, a cross between a traveling-chair and a hammock swung on a single bamboo pole. But the gods are evidently not kindly disposed toward those who thus ease their pilgrimage without just and sufficient cause, and I passed many—the ailing, the lame, the blind, tottering old women—who were taking no chances of thus jeopardizing celestial favor.

The typical pilgrim garb of knee-length kimono, inner sleeves ending in a kind of fingerless glove, brilliant sash, white drawer-stockings and straw sandals, a huge woven-reed hat, on the chest a wooden alms-box inscribed with Chinese characters, with a sack to hold donations of food below it, a formally folded pack on the back, a bell, a kind of scepter, and a rosary in one hand and a long staff topped by jingling rings in the other, was frequently seen in its entirety, and did not always cover one who actually lived on alms, though the genuine pilgrim is expected in theory to do so. But modifications of 89this get-up, ranging all the way from slight variations to full European attire, were to be seen in the almost unbroken lines of climbing and descending Japanese. Here a pilgrim’s smock and a coolie’s straw head-shade—one or both of them stamped with intricate characters indicating each temple visited—disguised a merchant or a dentist from near-by Osaka, a doctor of Tokyo, the principal of one of Japan’s important higher schools. Women in full Japanese dress, their skirts drawn high about their bare legs in the frank and natural manner of the country, their faces still waxen with rice-powder in spite of their flushing exertions, more likely than not disfigured with the clumsy gold teeth so general in Japan as to be almost the rule, strained their way upward with a difficulty that would have evoked laughter from their laborious country sisters, did not the barriers of caste and an inexpressive temperament prevent it. A short-haired widow, a plump and comely nun, who, in her black garb and closely clipped head, might easily have been mistaken for a man, an aged peasant with a deep sorrow in his eyes, a man and woman of wealth fulfilling some vow made in time of stress—the wife, of course, plodding in the rear, as the social standing of the sex requires—city youths and school-boys making the pilgrimage a combination of lark, duty, and mountain excursion—there is no class or age or condition in Japan that was not represented. Descending, 90satisfied pilgrims sometimes suggested yeomen suddenly stepping forth from the days of King Arthur; now and again a kago came down bearing an inert, white-faced man for whom the exertion of the climb had been too much.

The basha is still the most rapid and aristocratic means of conveyance in many parts of Japan

Some of my fellow-pilgrims on the climb to Koya-san; it is as usual to hire women carriers as men in this part of Japan

No small number of pilgrims to the sacred mountain climb by the exertion of others

91The entire ascent was well-, indeed over-supplied with the indispensable requirements of travelers,—food, drink, and even lodgings. Sometimes the open-front shops lined unbrokenly both sides of the way, until it seemed a city street; there was not a single projecting point, not a solitary place of vantage along it, that did not have its tea-house with an ever-spreading view of the world below. This was splendidly wooded in the steeper portions, fantastic with patchwork rice- and wheat-fields wherever cultivation was possible. A river serpentined through the middle distance; a rugged and in places bare range of hills formed the horizon. Here and there lay a compact little town, but a Japanese village pitched on a mountain-side is disappointing, because, while an almost unbroken green usually surrounds it, there are no red, or maroon, or old-rose tile roofs to contrast with this, but only dull-gray ones, which with time blend almost imperceptibly into the landscape.

For several miles, more than half-way up, and so distinct in limits as to suggest that they were forbidden elsewhere, the pleasure of the climb and the view were ruined by scores of horribly diseased beggars 92along the roadside, creatures as dreadful as any to be seen in China or India, and many times more conspicuous, for they were the first I remembered meeting anywhere in the country. It is the Japanese way to thrust infirmity out of sight; in Japan, unlike the rest of the Orient, begging is not only frowned upon but is neither customary nor often necessary; but here foreign visitors are few and piety quite ready to assist in the support of the helpless. Leprous women with babies already rotting from the same disease, men plainly far beyond the assistance of medicine, children with hairless scalps and great suppurating sores where skin should have been, horrors that one would avoid any effort to recall, writhed and gurgled appeals in the sun-scorched dust, or trailed whiningly after each passer-by.

Most of the pilgrims, no doubt with a certain amount of the self-seeking which distinguishes almsgiving by the pious the world over, took care to toss something to every one who asked, for which purpose every shop along the way offered, for slightly more than their value in modern money, stacks of old copper coins, worth a fourth or an eighth of a cent. Only a man of wealth could have afforded any real relief to the scores after scores of unfortunates, and I made the error of trying to pick out a few of the more deserving cases. For no sooner 93had I dropped ten sen, equal to an American nickel, into the hand of a mother of three leprous children than the word of the extraordinary benefaction spread from end to end of beggars’ row. Every mendicant thereafter who was still able to walk, even on hands and knees, stuck to my heels long after his precinct had been left far behind, and I quickly became known all over the mountain-side as the eccentric and wealthy foreigner who gave ju sen at a throw.

Japan seems to have no tramps in the American sense, but her pilgrims take the place of them. The youth—and even the unyouthful—who suddenly feels the call of the road has only to slip into some fantastic garb, clutch a handful of jingling bells, and set off for some famous shrine or temple. If he is more than a “gay cat” by nature and the wandering life proves the one above all others he prefers, he may remain perpetually on a pilgrimage. He who openly “panhandled” or halted at houses to demand, tramp fashion, a “hand-out” or a “set-down” would quickly catch the unwelcome attention of the omnipresent Japanese police. But let him grasp a tinkling staff at his waist, and he may safely and permanently appeal to charity anywhere without even the exertion of opening his mouth. Far be it from me to assert that this ruse is widely practised, but few people are more persistent travelers 94within their own land than the Japanese, and by no means all of them are financially in traveling circumstances.

Not far from the end of the climb I fell in with a group of professional and business men from Osaka—though it would have been hard to recognize them as such under their pilgrims’ disguise—led by a young Buddhist novice who had come a little way down the mountain to meet them. The latter, for all his priestly garb and manner, was something in the nature of a hotel runner, and at sight of me he bowed low, rubbing his thighs Japanese fashion, and asked, with an ingenuous smile, whether I had chosen a stopping-place. When I answered in the negative, he replied in his chipped English, as if that fully settled the matter, “Then you will stay in my temple.”

All Koya-san is a Buddhist sanctuary, without layman inns to minister to the wants of visitors, and any who spend the night there must put up in one of the score of monasteries, technically as invited guests. While these make no actual charges, it is the custom, rarely overlooked, to leave as a donation to the adjoining temple an amount at least equal to what one would pay in a first-class inn—hence the competition of novice runners. Japanese are usually assigned to this or that group of priests, according to the part of the country from which they hail, but foreigners are fair game for any of them, and the first to establish 95contact with such a windfall becomes henceforth his undisputed host. I had no choice, therefore, as well as no other desire, than to accept the proffered hospitality.

Pilgrims—in real life lawyers, doctors, dentists, business men of Japan’s second largest city—climb Koya-san with all the customary accoutrement, led at the end by the young Buddhist priest who took me in as guest

Women pilgrims arriving at the entrance to the miles of temples, tombs, and the like on Koya-san, a point beyond which, up to half a century ago, no member of the fair sex was allowed to pass

Two pilgrims to Koya-san

The shrine in our garden at Beppu

96Would that all hotel-runners were as solicitous for the welfare of the guests they capture as was this girl-faced priest-to-be. From the moment of laying claim to me until he handed me back my knapsack and bade me farewell at the beginning of the descent next morning, he never for a moment relaxed his efforts to anticipate my slightest want. There may have been a touch of selfishness in his attention, for the Japanese who longs to learn English is diligent in the pursuit of travelers on whom to practise; but there was nothing to suggest that his hospitality would not have been as sincere had I turned out to be one of those rare visitors to Japan who are neither Orientals nor yet speak what no small number of Nipponese consider the universal tongue of the West.

From the curious old back gate, main entrance to Koya-san since the coming of the railway, the ground sloped gently down into a shallow dish-shaped mountain-top filled with more temples, monasteries, royal tombs, and similar religious edifices than one could have counted in a day. Until half a century ago no woman was allowed to pass the first shrine within the gate, where she must say her prayers and return. Contact with the modern world has 97softened much that is still essentially Japanese, however, and the numerous female pilgrims are now housed by the priests quite as freely as are male visitors. Shopkeepers, too, have gradually invaded the once wholly non-secular residence, lining the broad central street with all the odds and ends that find sale among pilgrims, and some of them have brought their families with them, so that the once strictly monasterial aspect of the town has largely disappeared. I was surprised to learn, also, though perhaps I should have known it, that during the last few years the Buddhist priests of Japan have been permitted to marry. My informants all added, however, that few do so, because there is a conviction that a man with family cares cannot give his full energies to priestly duties, and those with ambitions for high place refuse to handicap themselves. As I have a passing acquaintance with the sternly celibate Buddhist votaries of other parts of the Orient, it was hard to picture this essential change, until I recalled that even the Roman Catholic clergy has been deprived of legitimate family joys, and worries, only since the days of Pope Gregory VII.

XV

The monastery and temple to which my self-appointed host was attached did not differ greatly in appearance from any large and high-class Japanese dwelling, dull and time-worn without, to be sure, but spacious, pleasing, and comfortable within. Word of the unexpected “distinguished guest” had evidently gone ahead, for as we turned into the grassless courtyard six or seven members of this particular group—in other words, half of it—lined up along the groove of the open sliding wall to bow me welcome. One of them wore the modern hair-cut and ordinary kimono of the Japanese layman, and was, as his appearance suggested, no priest or priest-to-be, but a temporal business manager—“bookkeeper,” my guide, with his limited English vocabulary, called him—such as attends to the worldly affairs of each temple. Besides him there were a dozen inmates, ranging from the head bonze, whose rank made him invisible to casual visitors, down to my cicerone, latest and therefore lowest in rank of the several youthful novices. When he had exchanged our shoes for slippers, these in turn to be abandoned in the polished wooden hallways at the entrance to the 99mat-carpeted rooms, and had washed from bamboo dippers at a sort of sanctified water-trough filled with glass-clear water from a spring up the hillside, the group from Osaka, three women among them, and I were shown to cushions in a matted room. The paper walls of this were decorated with painted bamboo branches, peacocks, and various species of birds that were no mean examples of the best Japanese art. Later on, when the other guests had departed, I was assigned to an adjoining suite of two rooms such as no Japanese inn I have ever inhabited can boast, and distinctly superior in decoration, size, and specklessness to the quarters reserved for the royal family in another monastery, which I was shown later in the day.

Descending, satisfied pilgrims sometimes suggest the knights of ancient days

In short, there was nothing about the establishment, except the close-cropped heads, black robe-like kimonos, and rosaries of the inmates, to distinguish it from a sumptuous private residence accustomed to receive frequent guests. The three women, with that indifference to public exposure characteristic of the Japanese, changed from their road-worn kimonos to more decorative ones from their bags, merely turning their backs on us during the process. Boys as wooden-faced as the serving-lads of any layman inn, and hired in the same way for the same purpose, brought us the noonday meal with all the requisite kneeling and bowing of such service. I know not how often Caucasian visitors come to 100Koya-san, except that I saw no other foreigners than a group of Koreans during my whole pilgrimage, but certainly I was the sight of the town, with inmates of other monasteries constantly calling on one pretext or another to see this queer fellow and hear his giggle-producing speech. But there were evidences, too, of real culture, and certainly hints of European influence had crept in at some time, for though all the novices escorted me to the bath-room, they did not come inside to help me into the big square wooden tub of scalding water, or to pour it over me with the little wooden buckets scattered about the flooded floor. In fact, they even permitted me, almost without argument, to bathe before, instead of immediately after, the evening meal, sure proof of something un-Japanese.

Beggars along the ascent to Koya-san have all sorts of schemes to attract attention and charity

But I am getting ahead of the story. Koya-san is strictly vegetarian in diet, as befits true Buddhists, though visitors often surreptitiously break this rule by fishing in their knapsacks. I felt no such inclination, however, by the time we had finished an excellent Japanese luncheon. Long experience had evidently taught the monks how to live well in spite of the injunction not to kill any living creature. While we—ladies and all, of course, though not the inmates—were topping off the meal with ephemeral native cigarettes, I noticed the men from Osaka were conferring in undertones with the temple “bookkeeper” and slipping into his hands a considerable 101sum of money. Not wishing to shirk my share, I called one of them aside and asked if this were a “donation” to cover the meal. No, it was merely for the purchase of a brace of prayers for their dead fathers and mothers; any donations to the temple in return for its hospitality could be made when I left. For a moment there seemed something strangely incongruous in this buying of priestly mummeries by doctors, lawyers, and merchants from a great city smudged by belching factory chimneys, some of whom read, and to a limited degree spoke, English. But do not millions of our own fellow-countrymen also purchase priestly prayers for their dead fathers and mothers?

I am writing no guide-book; hence I shall not tell in detail of the great monasteries, temples, “ancestral” and “golden” halls, and what not that I visited during the afternoon under the guidance of another “bookkeeper,” eager to improve his scanty and halting English. What stands out most clearly in memory is the taking of tea in plain but priceless Satsuma ware with the urbane head priests of several monasteries, and the private view of a large, newly constructed, yet strictly old-Buddhist building filled with the chief treasures of all the temples on the mountain-top,—tapestries, paintings, illuminated texts, statues, carvings by the famous Unkei, a whole résumé of the heyday of Japanese art. Then there was the long stroll through the great cemetery, more 102than a mile beneath towering hinoki and massive evergreens of venerable age, in the shaded stillness of which are the myriad tombs, stone monuments of every size and age, blackened by time and in some cases decrepit with neglect, of the great men of bygone Japan,—mikados, shoguns, daimyos, samurai, monks, priests, and famous heroes. Not that they are all buried here, but it was, and is, the custom even of the strictest Shintoists among them to provide for a monument, with perhaps a lock of hair or one of their stray ribs under it, in the most sanctified Buddhist spot in the island empire.

There is no gain in running the risk of choosing wrong between two rival faiths; besides, who can say where Shintoism leaves off and Buddhism begins in Japanese mysticism? Perhaps the intermingling may be best expressed in the words of one of my traveled friends of Nippon, that “all Japanese must be Shintoists”—for what is Shintoism, after all, but an almost chauvinistic patriotism?—but that “there is no reason in the world why they shall not be Buddhists also, or Christians, or even Christian Scientists for that matter.” If Christianity can overlook a certain amount of ancestor-worship among its disciples, as at least one branch of it seems able to do in the Orient, the statement is hardly an exaggeration. There is certainly no lack of the outward manifestations of their religion, be it single or multiple, among the Japanese, yet one looks almost in vain for any indication 103of what is referred to in the West as the “spiritual life.”

The garden variety of Japanese mankind follows the lead of their haughty nobles and rulers, and those of the rank and file who can do so inter some portion of themselves in the mammoth cemetery of Koya-san. Behind the “Hall of Ten Thousand Lamps” at the end of the long, funereal, yet peaceful avenue is the “Innermost Temple,” containing the remains of Kobo-Daishi, the China-trained monk who founded this great sanctuary some eleven hundred years ago, and beside it is the Kotsu-do, or “Hall of Bones.” Through the slatted door of this paper-prayer plastered and gruesome circular edifice is tossed a bone or a wisp of hair of those who have not attained the dignity of a monument, or even of a grave, on the sacred mountain-top, yet who wish to improve their chances in the next existence by lying, even in part, beside the holy founder of Koya-san.

The great painting of a hell worthy of the imagination of the most savage of medieval Christians, with devils gleefully forking naked sinning souls into the bottomless brimstone pit, and all the rest of the ridiculous Dante-esque details, which decorates the wall of one of the smaller temples particularly popular with the rank and file, need not have caused any great surprise had I recalled how even widely separated religions are prone to steal their most effective thunder from one another. What was really more incongruous was to come upon a score of the younger monks and novices, stripped to slight garb that displayed their athletic forms to advantage, finishing off their day of university curriculum on the monasterial tennis-court. In fact, it transpired, the most modest and retiring of the young recluses in “our” temple was the tennis champion of all Koya-san. As I may have remarked before, there is no one like the Japanese to mix casually the old and the new, the prehistoric with the latest thing of the day.

Three Buddhist novices and a temple “bookkeeper,” my guides, philosophers and friends during my stay there, bid me farewell to Koya-san

Pilgrims descending from a train on their return from Koya-san

Dotombori, the theater and “moire” street of Osaka

Osaka Castle is perhaps the most impressive in Japan

104One would scarcely have recognized these tennis-players, or the rather diffident youths who squatted about their foreign visitor all that evening, in the gorgeously attired and self-confident monks and novices who performed the impressive Buddhist service early next morning. I had asked permission to attend this, even though it meant being called at five. It was nearer six when all was ready, and in the meantime I was graciously granted an audience by the chief bonze of our temple. This yielded little beyond the giving and taking of politenesses through an interpreter, and the fact that the chief himself set the rest of the monastery a bad example in the matter of shaving. I was reminded that of all the miscellaneous information pumped out of me by the more youthful of my hosts during my stay what seemed to create the greatest wonder was the assertion that I, and millions of my fellow-countrymen 105like me, made it a practice to shave every day. Had a similar custom prevailed within the monastery, the faces of the solemn dozen who gathered at length about the altar in a dimly lighted interior room would have seemed less out of keeping with their rich and florid robes and their apocalyptical occupation.

The service lasted for an hour, but as I have no gift for proselyting I shall make no attempt to explain its inner mysticism. The “bookkeeper,” who knelt between me and the three other pilgrims who made up the congregation, mentioned that it was dedicated to the ancestors of all those present, and through them, I suppose, back to the Kami, the original gods of the Japanese people. For the first half-hour the dozen robe-wearers sat motionless on their feet about the four sides of the barbarically intricate and richly glittering altar, incessantly chanting responses to the singsong intonations of the head priest, occupying the central position. The author of these quatrains evidently had not strained his sinews of originality, for most of them consisted of the endless repetition of the same few meaningless words. Lest I yield unwittingly to the soporific effect of this incessant droning, I took to studying the countless details of the altar. My ecclesiastical learning is limited, however, and I could find no meaning in, nor even English words for, any of them, except half a dozen chickens cut out of paper. What in the name of religion have chickens to do 106with one’s ancestors? Reminders of their favorite dish, or their calling, or perhaps their chief vice, or....

But the dozen gorgeous figures, weary at last perhaps, even though they were Japanese, of sitting on their feet, rose and took to parading entirely around the altar. Their stockinged feet made not a sound on the soft matting, but their chanting never for a moment hesitated, while the ringing of bells and the striking of cymbals steadily increased, and more incense clouded the already dimly seen room. The youths, who had shown a tendency to giggle at the sound of English, or even less provocation, the day before, refused now to catch a hint of my amusement at their antics, and continued their march with the solemnity of ancient stone images. Now and again one or the other of them became for a brief space the soloist, while the rest of the group chanted the responses. Toward the end of the ceremony the names of the three Japanese pilgrims squatting beside me were chanted out one after the other, and they rose one by one to sprinkle a pinch of incense into a smoldering bowl, and to receive a package of tissue-paper prayers or indulgences. They were doing this, whispered my cicerone, in honor of their own individual ancestors.

Perhaps it is not a bad idea after all, this ancestor-worship, at least in Japan, where the bygone are cremated instead of robbing the living of badly needed 107acreage. Most of us owe the old fellows something, and at least such ceremonies serve to keep them in mind. Running back through as much of my own as was awake, I was startled to find that I could only remember, or at least vizualize into a real being, a single one of my own departed forebears—since female ancestors count for nothing whatever in the Orient—and while I felt sure that the old gentleman would keenly have enjoyed the incense of a good Habana cigar, I could not see what....

But about that moment, fortunately, the service came to an abrupt end, and a much more important one, contained in lacquered cups and rice-bowls, was announced. An hour later the “bookkeeper” pocketed my donation in so unworldly a spirit as not even to count it, while the younger of my hosts donned their every-day black robes preparatory to seeing me off on my journey to the world below.

XVI

A few weeks’ stay among them is, of course, not sufficient time to judge any people. But there are some things which make themselves as apparent in days as in years. Perhaps what impressed itself most strongly upon us were the mistakes we commonly make about the Japanese, false impressions, which have come to be accepted among us almost as truisms. Because they have shown themselves clever—“cribber,” one of my Japanese acquaintances pronounced it, and there seemed something amusingly significant in this form of the word; because they have shown more than a Yankee cuteness in copying the point of view and the institutions, the articles and the trade-marks, of other civilizations—many of us have hastily concluded that they are a very intelligent people. Because we hear with wondering interest that they never enter their houses with their shoes on, that they are always bathing, we think of them as a very cleanly people. Therefore it was something akin to a shock to us to find that in the mass the Japanese seem stupid, and that they are by no means as clean as we fancied.

109To give the less important precedence, even their famous mat floors, untouched by shod feet, are often so dirty that to walk across them means to carry off a black sole. Frequent bathing is all very well, but when dozens habitually do so in the same water, Western notions may suggest quite another descriptive adjective. No wonder a Japanese doctor startled the medical world a few years ago by the assertion that bathing is unhealthful! Having in mind the skin-diseases alone that are passed along in Japanese bath-rooms, he was easily within the bounds of reason. Not even to mention the unspeakable Oriental manner in which they fertilize their fields, the “cleanly little Japanese” are more indecent in public customs than even the Spanish, even more frank about certain natural functions. But perhaps it is all in the point of view. These same public bathers consider our hand-shaking a dirty habit, especially prone to spread disease; they are shocked at the custom of blowing the nose and carrying the soiled handkerchief along—though not at the intolerable noses of nearly all small Japanese youngsters, even of the higher classes.

Quite aside from the difficulties of the language, we had frequent distinct examples, and the testimony of almost every frank and observing foreign resident with whom we talked, of Japanese stupidity. The rank and file at least are slow-witted—or shall I say, in order to be wholly on the safe side 110and avoid any false impression of wishing to give offense, that they are a surprisingly slow-thinking people? They catch an idea with exasperating sluggishness, by no means as quickly as more than one “wild” tribe with which I have come in contact. There are constant evidences of this mental deliberation,—their dragging, never-ending theatrical performances, for example. Observers in a position to know assure me that the Japanese are extremely poor aviators, because their minds will not work with the swiftness required in such a calling; or they suddenly let go of the controls to “look in the book and see” what they should do next. In the average interview their single-track minds run round and round in the same small circle, and nothing short of a mental earthquake will shake them out of it. With patience you can get them just so far in their thinking, and then you run again and again up against a stone wall. No doubt there are cases in which they make a pretense of this in order to avoid committing themselves or giving information which they are not sure has been released by the powers-that-be higher up; but that after all is only another proof of limited intelligence, since a brilliant people would find some smoother means of covering the retreat.

But perhaps our experience was limited as to class as well as in time. I have been assured by men who come into contact with Japanese in high places that these are unusually sharp-minded men, 111who at the same time admitted that the masses are stupid even by the standards of our own. I have heard this from several reputable sources; I have had a few hints of it myself. But I have yet to meet a dozen Japanese men whom I can vizualize as worthy opponents across a conference-table of even our own homespun diplomats and statesmen. Is there perhaps something in the Japanese form of government which brings the more brilliant men to the top more often than in our own; or is there naturally a wider gulf between the masses and the bright few? In this connection one recalls that the really oblique eye, which most of us assumed to be universal in Japan, is almost rare; and this is said to be the mark of the patrician, of the aristocratic, intelligent handful which built up Japan on the broad base of the heavier featured, the racially quite different, plebeian, gullible millions.

In building a Japanese bridge the first thing needed is a compact framework of bamboo tied with vines

Making paper from mulberry-leaves by spreading the sheets on boards out in the blazing sunshine of southern Japan

Stripping off the kozu, or mulberry-leaf paper, when dry; among other things it is used in making Japanese parasols

Bringing in the sheaves from a Japanese rice-field

Of course it is partly their long-winded Japanese formalities that give the impression of mental inertness. Unless they have lived long abroad they cannot understand our abrupt way of asking or giving directions or of making arrangements. They prefer the circuitous route of ultra-politeness—or ultra-deviousness; they accuse us of being “fire-engines” because we expect a ten-word instruction to be interpreted in less than that many minutes. It is really, I suppose, the long set forms in which they must address one another, their endless honorifics, 112that take much of the time and the energy which might otherwise express itself in mental alertness. Greetings and farewells of the most casual, meet-on-the-street kind are interminable, accompanied by innumerable low bows at strictly fixed intervals. A formal conversation reminds one of a Broadway musical comedy of some years back in which a foreigner talked incessantly for ten minutes, at the end of which the “interpreter” informed the audience that “He said, ‘Yes.’” We got the impression, too, that it is difficult to hold the average Japanese to the point, whether because of a naturally wandering attention or the custom of making mental side excursions into recesses to which the Westerner is never admitted.

As to that far-famed Japanese courtesy, it was, of course, in constant evidence. Groups of a dozen or a score of men often stood on railway platforms bowing to a departing friend in exact unison, like a field of wheat over which strong gusts of wind are passing, until the train carried him out of sight. Leave a native inn and you will have the whole personnel bobbing up and down at the threshold and wishing you until you are out of hearing a continued life of ease and prosperity—provided you have remembered every one in your parting distributions. Yet, like some of the European nations famed for their politeness, theirs is largely a courtesy of forms rather than a genuine consideration for the rights 113and convenience of others. There is often much more real courtesy among peoples who take fewer pains to show it outwardly.

I have mentioned the complete disrespect for the sleeper, whether in train, inn, or home. The street manners of Japan are not on the whole good; when it comes to public conveyances they are almost barbaric. The same man who has bowed himself nearly to the ground a score of times in parting from the kowtowing group of friends on the platform will not have the slightest compunction in stretching out across four seats and letting three fellow-travelers stand for a hundred miles. As far as our observations carry, the giving up of a place to a woman is unheard of; even if she has a baby on her back she has been so well trained to take second place that astonishment would overwhelm her if the rule were broken. It is a rare foreign visitor, I am sure, who has not had the humiliating and probably anger-producing experience of entering some important establishment, or one announcing itself grandiloquently in English, not only to find no one with the slightest knowledge of that tongue, but to have the entire staff leave its typewriters and desks and come to laugh at him, as at some ungainly creature escaped from the zoo. This form of rudeness is so common in Japan as to suggest that it is not recognized there as such, any more than is their frank, incessant staring; but it is one of the things that is most likely to leave 114resentment in the soul of the traveler long after he has departed. I wonder what habits of our own offend, entirely “unbeknownst” to us, the visitor to our own land. As to the silly giggling that often besets the Japanese when they hear, or particularly when they attempt to speak, our tongue, we should not forget that under their skins they are as timid and self-conscious as any civilized race on earth.

On the other hand it would not be difficult to make up quite a long list of the good qualities of the Japanese. Their unbounded patience might head it—though that has also the germs of vice in it. Rarely indeed is a Japanese visibly angry; to show wrath or impatience is the height of ill-breeding, as with several other Oriental peoples; which perhaps is why the Westerner who complains about anything, who even asks to have the slightest custom altered, is more or less secretly ranked as “queer” or of low social standing. Many a passing traveler forgets this, to his and his country’s disadvantage. They are a remarkably uncomplaining people; there is said to be no profanity in the language—which is enough in itself to make the national pace slow. Their quietness is as pleasing as is their almost complete lack of jewelry. They certainly have none of the indolence of so many Oriental races—unless the multitudes of monks and bonzes squatting in motionless contentment in temples and monasteries is evidence of it. They certainly are not expansive, be that a fault or a virtue; 115life on the whole is very solemn to the Japanese, and only once in a blue moon does the visitor meet one with a suggestion of the saving sense of humor. A joke goes a very long way without exploding, and except among those who have traveled abroad it is quite likely never to reach its goal. Not only is life itself no joking matter with them; I can recall no people, either in frock-coats or loin-cloths, that takes itself, its customs, and its institutions more seriously.

Even the children have little fun in them. Young or old they are a disciplined people, in great contrast to their near neighbors, the Chinese, to the Latin-American, who keeps constantly recurring to my mind in this connection, and to a large extent to us Americans. That this may be due as much to temperament as to centuries of training was often suggested. The striking difference of deportment between our, I believe, quite normal American small son and Japanese children of similar age was constant evidence on this point. While he showed endless curiosity at everything about him, and incessant inventiveness in satisfying it, or in amusing himself with whatever chanced to be available, the kimono-clad youngsters in trains or street sat hour after hour without speaking or playing, almost without moving, their minds apparently wholly dormant. A nurse-maid could have taken care of ten of them more easily than of one of him. Yet it is not, I feel sure, because they are unduly suppressed, but because they are born that way.

Japanese threshing usually consists of beating the heads of bundles of grain on a round stone

After it has been winnowed by the wind and swept up, the rice or other grain is spread out on the grass mats to dry in the sunshine

The never-failing picturesqueness of Miyajima

After all this is almost all there is worth while at Miyajima nowadays

116Though their code of morality deviates considerably from our own, we did not find the Japanese, for all the assertions one hears to that effect, particularly in the East, especially dishonest, or at least no more so than the average of most races. The time-worn statement so often quoted as evidence of their untrustworthiness, that even in their own banks they find it necessary to use Chinese cashiers, is mainly nonsense. I know of no American or European bank in the Far East that does not recruit its personnel chiefly among the Celestials, and I am sure it is not because of their extraordinary honesty. Japanese banks, on the other hand, even in China, choose by far the majority of their employees from among their own people. It is quite true that one soon learns not to intrust the development of important films to Japanese photographers, finding by sad experience that they are very likely to fade a few weeks later even if they seem well done at the time, and that any unusual successes among them may shortly afterward appear for sale on news-stands, or in the pages of Japanese periodicals. It is equally true that Japanese factory imitations of either their own once excellent products or of foreign wares are prone to prove great disappointments. But let us be charitable and believe that this is due to Western notions too hastily swallowed to be thus far properly 117digested, as well as to their great anxiety to gather quickly the large sums demanded by their gluttonous army and navy, under the perhaps mistaken impression that only their armed strength will save them from domination or complete absorption by Western nations.

XVII

Persons in a position to know something about the subject tell us that Japanese husbands are “almost all” unfaithful. I take it that they refer to those who can afford to be; certainly the great mass of haulers and carriers, of mud-wading rice-growers, would scarcely have the time or the means to indulge in extramarital relations. The facts seem to be that rather a large number of men of means maintain two and even three households, usually in at least a pretense of ignorance of each other; and that the almost government-owned yoshiwaras in every city of size are prosperous, while questionable hotels abound from end to end of the empire. Part-Japanese women we met asserted that they would under no circumstances marry Japanese men, not even to gain high rank, alleging that the average native husband is not only maritally untrustworthy but treats his wife brutally—whatever that may mean. As some of these ladies had already stuck it out bravely to the beginning of middle age, we are forced to give their testimony due weight. Yet there is certainly little active outward evidence of all this, but the appearance of model propriety everywhere—except in one notorious respect.

119Even the cynical traveler comes to the conclusion that, for all the striking differences between their ways and our ways, the Japanese are really civilized—until he sees a man in faultless European attire, carrying a portfolio that suggests he may be a cabinet minister, calmly take off everything except his scanty underwear and change to a kimono in a first-class car occupied by ladies. Among men somewhat lower in the social scale, yet far enough above the brute to know better, personal exposure often reaches the incredible. It may be pleasant in summer to wander across town or the length of an empire in bath-robe and slippers, but there are times and places that the unconcealed human form is out of place. I am no prude, and I realize that in some matters we English-speaking people are secretive to the point of silliness; but certainly in this respect the Japanese are as much at fault in the other direction.

Their unseemly exposure or behavior is, to my mind, another form of discourtesy to woman, another evidence of her unimportance in the Japanese scheme of things. For, however often they may assure us that we misjudge because we do not understand, we of the West—I think I may safely make the statement general—do not admire the Japanese conception of the position of women. While one of that sex is to a large extent the power behind the throne of a mad mikado, and there is considerable copying, at least outwardly, of Western manners 120among the profusion of nobility, the wealthy, and the traveled, to the overwhelming mass of the nation a wife seems still to be merely a married servant. I shall not soon forget the half-horrified, even though subtle, expression of astonishment of our Tokyo host because my wife had not stayed up to tuck me into bed when I returned from a theater toward midnight. I have no choice but to judge from his manner that Japanese wives always do. In Japan a woman is trained never to sit down until all the men present have done so; and with a Westerner suddenly introduced into a Japanese household the variance of custom in this respect is likely to result in a standing-match. This relative position is maintained all down the line; the men are always first. Again it may be only a difference in point of view; even the Japanese woman would consider it highly immodest to precede her husband or a male relative. Nor am I sure where the greatest wisdom prevails,—in Japan, where they spoil the men, or in the United States, where we do our best to spoil the women. Adversity, however, is said to be beneficial to the character, and Japanese women are almost superhuman in maintaining a cheerful demeanor and a smiling countenance under any and all circumstances.

The Japanese have so often been called “Oriental Prussians” or “Germans of the Orient” that we found it amusing to trace evidences of similarity between the two races. These are, to tell the truth, 121rather numerous. Both countries have—unless one of them has lost it since the World War—a docile, hard-working population accustomed to little individual thinking in political matters, ruled by a powerful oligarchy of overlords with a very warlike past and traditions. Like the Germans, the Japanese might use the word “kriegen” interchangeably as “to obtain” or “to make war”; both fought their way to the top—or to wherever they are to-day. In both countries the military man considers himself, and strives, not infrequently by rudeness, to make others consider him, the lord of creation. Both are forced to resort to emigration or expansion to ease the over-pressure of a prolific population and of excess energy within their borders. Both are a disciplined people; in both countries what seem to us questionable methods are used to twist the gullible mass mind into the shape which best suits the ruling class; both are likewise given to another form of propaganda in the hope of increasing their national stock abroad; both indulge in what we might frankly call spying, though they may think it merely gathering useful information about their neighbors. Every Japanese, like every German, is potentially a spy—or shall we merely say an agent?—of his government wherever he may be; for you may be sure that any slightest item of information of interest to that government which he may run across will be duly communicated to it. With both nations patriotism seems to be 122above mere personal morals; in the ancient Japanese language “government” and “worship” were the same word.

One might continue picking up likenesses, on minor as well as on important matters. As in Germany, a man or a woman stands at military attention holding a flag at a prescribed angle whenever a train passes a grade-crossing. The same unhilarious conscript soldiers, and haughty officers who do not often deign to return their exaggerated salutes, their bullet heads emphasized by close-cropped hair, overrun both countries. Students in uniform caps, a great prevalence of thick eye-glasses that are reminders of the similar intricacy of their printed pages—if one took time to hunt out all the resemblances the list would be endless.

Some of the Germanness of Japan, such as her army and her medicine, is frankly copied; no small amount of it is unconscious yet perfectly natural, in view of the considerable similarity in their histories and their temperament. For, remember, Japan has always been militant, has always been fighting, if only between her own clans, ever since she took the islands that now constitute the empire from the Yemishi, or Ainus, or whoever held them first. Likewise there has never been a let-up in learning, nor a lack of bravery and similar virtues. We are so accustomed to speak of the “sudden rise” of Japan that we are prone to think of the Japanese as did the 123ignorant Portuguese and Spanish conquistadores who “discovered” them, as did the bigoted churchmen who followed those forceful adventurers,—as heathen “gentiles” much like the Indians of America. Indeed, they probably looked upon these newfound islands as quite like newly discovered America, or the neighboring Philippines, as filled with savages whom it was not only their privilege but their duty to bespoil to the best of their ability, and incidentally to reduce to the “true faith.” Whereas Japan had been a civilized land centuries before the Portuguese and the Spanish emerged from barbarism—and the mere fact that, disgusted with the “true faith” brought by these rapacious and narrow-minded wanderers, they drove them out and shut themselves up within their own boundaries for more than two hundred years is no reason to have supposed that they could not adopt modern civilization, at least in its more graspable aspects, quickly, especially as they had long been accustomed to imitate, to take whatever seemed good to them, from China or Korea or whatever other neighbor had something to offer. No wonder the Japanese policeman detailed to attend a Fourth of July celebration in Japanese territory, when he received the answer to his query as to how long ago this independence that was being celebrated had been won, greeted it with the Nipponese form of “Good Lord! Is that all?”

There are no rickshaws on the island of Miyajima; hence we had to trust even our most precious belongings to a ninguruma, or baggage-cart

A view of Beppu, famed for its hot springs at the head of the Inland Sea, on Kyushu, southern island of Japan proper

A Shinto monument, with the famous watering-place of Beppu in the background

But the mere fact that they are so capable of imitation, 124so able to profit by the experience of others, is curbing their militant spirit, if I have not misread the signs. They see the point of recent events; even their stiff-necked and short-sighted military oligarchy seems to be coming to realize that they are half a century too late to enlarge their place in the sun by mere force of arms, that other no less strenuous, if less bloodthirsty, methods have come, perhaps permanently, to the fore. Thus though one still now and then sees, or at least feels, the old samurai spirit among the militarists of Japan, the wish to take the short cut by force, the frankness of primitive man peering out from beneath their pride and their superimposed reticence and their rather stupid politenesses, one has the feeling that the nation perhaps is getting over it, though it may still have a long way to go. Imitation is double-edged, however, and let the world turn its back on what it recently professed to believe is a bygone form of rivalry and there is but little doubt that the Japanese will be able to execute an about-face quite as quickly as any other nation. That the old tendency to think first of a resort to arms whenever national desires are crossed, and only later to consider wiser counsels, was recently shown in the quickly wide-spread demand for war with the United States over the Supreme Court decision on the California land laws and congressional insistence on curbing the admission of Japanese immigrants.

The popular feeling of Japan toward our own 125people seems constantly to swing like a pendulum. As I write, there is considerable anti-American agitation; a bare year ago there were marked professions of friendship; the year before that we were in their black books because of some other now forgotten incident; the American traveler in Japan can no more gauge the feeling toward him on any given day than he can guess the rate of exchange between his money and that of Europe. Nor will it often matter much; at worst the superficial Japanese courtesy may wear thin, their gift for red-tape gymnastics reach its highest rather than its lowest ebb. Certainly he will be in no more physical danger than at home, and his money will always be welcome to the sourest face he meets. When I first journeyed through Japan, a score of years ago, even the rickshaw-men were offensively cocky over the defeat of the Russians, which they considered proof of their superiority over all the white race. To-day the nation seems to take a somewhat more modest view of its achievements, though by no means unaware of its progress and, at bottom, probably just as convinced of its place in the vanguard of mankind, if something less given to publicly announcing it.

For a time at least there was a strong run of sentiment in our favor, on account of the international conference on disarmament, the results of which seem to have been on the whole pleasing to every one except the militarists—who, it must be remembered, 126are often the most vocal. The fact that there has as yet been no reduction in the heavy burden of taxation under which the nation has long staggered has not made it possible for the man on the street to hope that there soon will be, and the belief is wide-spread, even if not freely expressed to strangers, that what might almost have amounted to national bankruptcy has been averted by the Washington agreement. Not that the man on the street gives much thought to the actions of his Government, by our standards, or considers his personal opinion on national affairs, if he has one, of any importance. It is said that there is considerable liberalism and even radicalism under the surface of the placid, mikado-worshiping life of the Japanese; but in so far as any frequent visible evidence of it is concerned, all Japan suggests some of the hotels and public gathering-places of South America, which bear large placards to the effect that “The discussion of politics is strictly forbidden.” Some of the editors of native newspapers are occasionally outspoken, notably in the “Osaka Mainichi,” which at times has the aspect of a really free press; but these are concerned rather with individual men and very general issues than openly with the government; and it is significant that the slightest hint of levity toward the mikado or anything pertaining to him is frowned upon by all classes.

Undue attention to any subject is prone to enlarge it beyond its natural proportions. As a nation we 127have come, with our national tendency for exaggeration, to think of the Japanese either as supermen or devils—depending largely upon the part of the country from which we hail. They are neither, but merely human beings, perhaps a bit superior to the average, take the world as a whole; of moderate intelligence, high diligence, strong imitative ability or an unusual capacity to realize that the experience of others may be worth profiting by; of a national homogeneity and loyalty equal to that of a well-knit family; prone, like the rest of us, to be spoiled by too much power over those they consider, perhaps rightly, their inferiors; with a tradition of getting things, nationally, by force; extremely distrustful of the intentions of others; and with the very human trait of trying to put their best foot forward, even to the extent of an occasional falsehood. Not easily gauging the psychology of other races, at least of the West, they are somewhat clumsy with the propaganda they carry on in their own favor, such as newspapers of their own in English in the Far East, under the sincere belief that they are compelled to combat by some such means the hostility of their neighbors and the jealousy of trade rivalries. Like some other over-sensitive persons and peoples, they want only good said about them, as if the world might thereby be made to believe that they are terrestial angels.

We may not like the Japanese; the great majority 128of Westerners in the Far East are vociferous in proclaiming that they do not, and certainly they have some unlikable qualities. But what would we do in their shoes? Sixty million of them are crowded into a space equal to one of our Western States, with the sight constantly before them of Occidental aggression taking virtual possession, even if only in the name of “protectorate” or “sphere of influence,” of almost all the Orient, and the realization that they are virtually the only strictly self-governing nonwhite race on the globe—it is small wonder if they seem over-wary. Most Americans who are conscious of any opinion at all on the subject profess to have more liking for the Chinese or the Koreans than for the Japanese—and I rather think I am one of them. But with our national trait for rooting for the under dog are we not sometimes given to squandering our sympathies on weak and whining people and of distrusting strong, self-reliant races? Perhaps the Japanese are worse than I judge them to be after a brief sojourn among them; but few civilizations have equaled them in unity and longevity, in the sense of race loyalty, and a willingness to sacrifice themselves on the altar of good citizenship—for all the recent ugly stories of “graft” worthy of anywhere in the West; and, whatever else they may be, we must give them credit for being to-day the only self-contained and constructive civilization in almost half a world of weakness and semi-anarchy.

XVIII

We had left Tokyo before the latest catastrophe overwhelmed her and the surrounding section of Japan, and threw into greater relief some of her most striking national traits. Among the stories of the great earthquake and fire which have been confirmed, perhaps the most astounding to us was the refusal of the captains of Japanese war-ships and transpacific liners to rescue the refugees who appealed to them for succor, while foreign ships near-by were making every effort to save them. But—they were waiting for orders! The Japanese mind, particularly of the official class, is not trained to function on its own initiative. Their superiors seem to partake of some of the divinity of the superior of them all, the being so sacred that he can only be referred to indirectly and by inference as “mikado,” the “honorable gate”—behind which he reigns. Besides, the Japanese are Orientals, and nowhere does the Oriental soul seem to quiver with anything like the profundity of our own at the sight of suffering and violent death. The longer one has lived in the East, provided it has been in actual living contact with its strange peoples, the less impossible it will be 130to visualize those stern Japanese captains in Yokohama Harbor unflinchingly dooming to death under their very eyes scores of their own race because they considered it their solemn duty not to take them on board until they had received official instructions to do so.

That extreme Japanese reticence on questions concerning their own country, less often adroitly sidestepped than deliberately refused as a subject of conversation even by those readiest to talk, and inquire, freely on any other, is exemplified in the secrecy that still prevails over their losses. We shall never know how many perished in that great earthquake and fire of 1923 even if the Japanese themselves ever work it out exactly; we shall particularly remain in all the ignorance in which they are capable of keeping us as to the amount of damage done to their navy and their great naval base at Yokosuka. We also might have attempted—though probably it would not have struck us as worth the trouble—to keep the results of such a disaster in our own land from the rest of the world, but we certainly should not have succeeded. We have no such training in national reticence.

Underneath their protestations of thankfulness for our national and individual help during their hour of trial, say those who were in close contact with the Japanese at the time of the catastrophe and immediately afterward, there was no real gratitude at 131all; they accepted our help as something naturally due them, as if we were merely instruments of the Kami or national gods that watch over them. I am in no position to confirm or deny this statement, but it is wide-spread enough to be worth reporting. After all, how genuine is gratitude, East or West? I certainly can name several races, in both hemispheres, that do not have a visible trace of it. But it was surely adding insult to injury not only not genuinely to thank us but to suspect us of the worst motives in aiding them. Perhaps that is still more typical of the race. Knowing them even imperfectly it is not hard to imagine them asking themselves what these foreigners were up to, why they were coming into their harbors, not only the open commercial ports but into those officially closed to outside nations, merely on the pretext of wishing to help their suffering people. Surely there must be some real reason behind this apparently gratuitous altruism,—a chance in a lifetime to get secret information about their precious country, possibly even to photograph those inviolate “strategic zones”, that had turned gray so many officers assigned to protect them from kodaking tourists—something up their sleeves, certainly. It needs no comment to show what such a people would evidently have done under similar circumstances; we suspect others particularly of what we do or would like to do ourselves.

A peasant’s house near Beppu, with hot water for bathing and heat for cooking furnished by nature, there being a live volcano near at hand

The terraced hills of Kyushu are even more remarkable than those of the main island

A glimpse of Nagasaki through the loggia of a hilltop temple

It is quite as typical of Japan to find that Tokyo is 132being rebuilt with astonishing rapidity, and its complex business of life resuming. But no less so is the order in which it is being reconstructed. No part of the destroyed capital has been so artistically, so thoroughly, and so quickly resurrected as its yoshiwara, the official segregated district out beyond the temple of Kwannon, goddess of mercy and most popular of all with the Japanese masses. One of the great holocausts of that horrific first day of September took place there. Hundreds of the women of the yoshiwara who escaped from the crashing houses and devouring flames took refuge in a shallow artificial pond, perhaps fifty by thirty feet in size, within the inclosure, one of the decorative features of the high-walled precinct about which the courtezans used to place their tutelary gods and goddesses. There was soon hardly standing-room in it, and the flames rose ever higher. The water of the pool became tepid, then hot, then took to boiling. When squads of soldiers and workmen could get near the place on the following day there was little left but an enormous caldron of cooked bodies. A granite stone roughly carved with Chinese characters recalls the tragedy to those who can read them, but it seems already almost forgotten, though from the stone rises intermittently the smoke of incense, a tribute perhaps from their successors to those who so miserably perished there.

But there seems to be no particular difficulty in securing women for this degrading “necessity” in 133Japan, any more than in getting right of way for the rebuilding of the district. The houses in which the new oiran are housed are among the finest in phenix-like Tokyo, much finer than the dwellings erected for mere citizens, while the barracks put up for the homeless are pigsties in comparison. Trees and flowers have been planted to give the place an air of quiet dignity and respectability; the streets are straight, broad, and clean, which is more than can be said of the commercial and industrial part of Tokyo; the houses are artistically constructed on Japanese-Chinese lines; inside of each of them is a miniature landscape garden with little altars where each inmate burns a candle or a lantern to her particular god. Street peddlers again sing their multifarious wares gaily from brothel to brothel, flattering the women on their appearance, and showing them how to improve it with trinkets from their stocks; out in the wide portico beside the inviting photographs two men sit like spiders, warming their hands over a hibachi as the night chill advances, and scanning each passer-by with a furtive eye to business. Those who can get them to talk on the point will be assured that “business is as flourishing as ever, perhaps more so, for the women are nearly all new, and all the houses have agreed upon a flat rate of a yen and a half an hour, so that many a fine sturdy young fellow has regretfully to leave for lack of accommodations.”

It was an appalling disaster, that latest of Japan’s 134misfortunes, in the front rank of those that have befallen mankind; yet it was not the first of its kind, not only in Japan but in Tokyo itself, and a people so familiar with its own long unbroken historical records should have been at least subconsciously prepared for it. Besides, no small part of Tokyo ought to have been destroyed, anyway; those noisome old shacks along dirty narrow streets down near the muddy bank of its alleged river, for instance, were unworthy of the capital of an enlightened people. Though it already boasted some quite modern skyscrapers, a considerable portion of the city was so built that once a fire started it must sweep an enormous area. For a year an American expert in city planning had been laying out on paper a new Tokyo, which the disaster will make it so much more simple to carry out—though I believe no one has been cynical enough to assert that the earthquake was made to order. Yokohama is gone; whether or not it is rebuilt, it was only an insignificant little fishing village when it was first opened to foreign trade in 1859, an ephemeral thing indeed in the long history of Japan.

A dreadful calamity, there is no question. But I like to dwell on the comedy rather than the tragedy of life, and the picture that recurs most often to my mind is not of little children pinned under fallen timbers and awaiting the licking flames, not that giant cooking-pot of the yoshiwara, but of that haughty English lady living on the bluff at Yokohama, who 135was just taking a bath before sitting down to luncheon, on what must have been a hot and dusty day, when the crash came—and who promptly tobogganed in her tub down the long slope of the bluff to the sea-shore, as easily and as unhurt as Minerva riding the waves. I cannot find absolute court-room proof of the story—ma, si non è vero è ben’ trovato.

A stream which languishes through Nagasaki furnishes a drying-place for new parasols

A glimpse of Kagoshima, southernmost city of Japan proper, with its island volcano of Sakurajima in its splendid harbor

XIX

Until familiarity dulls the attention, one misses the sight of animals and of pastureland in Japan except in Hokkaido to the north. Perhaps there are a few more horses to the square ri in half-tropical Kyushu than on the long main island, but even there mankind furnishes the great majority of beasts of burden—and of milch animals, too, one might be so frank as to add, for Japanese children are habitually, and unsecretively, suckled long after they can walk and talk. Japan, like South America, outside the narrow llama-zone, was not supplied by nature with four-footed assistants. The first horses are said to have reached the islands from Korea late in the third century of the Christian era, and they are still far from numerous. With a people doomed to do nearly all its own hauling and carrying, it is not so strange that the horse is a kind of sacred animal of Shintoism.

Without horses there was no great reason for roads, and to this day the Japanese do not fully realize the importance of good highways and solid bridges, so that the automobile has not been much of a relief to their horseless condition. Besides, the 137Government seems to regard this new contraption from the West as a luxury to be kept out of the hands of the people, and to be saddled with a staggering proportion of the tax-returns. In addition to a heavy import duty and all that goes with it, the yearly licence-fee for an automobile in Tokyo is three hundred dollars. One might easily suspect a policy of keeping the government railways free from competition, and be thankful that at least these only serious means of transportation by land in the empire are being steadily extended.

The line down the east coast of Kyushu is complete now, except for twenty miles of the most execrable road extant, linked up by the ubiquitous, omnivorous, all-suffering Ford. The railway is mainly tunnels, so frequent in Japan, with wonderfully terraced hills or vistas of blue tropical waters between them, seas so mirror-clear that it seems a sacrilege to scratch the surface of them with an occasional steamer. Along it, too, lies Beppu, landing-place of three shipwrecked Portuguese sailors in a rowboat half a century after the discovery of America, where multitudes of Japanese come now to bake or boil, sporting the naïve garb of Adam and Eve, in the overflow from smoking Aso-san behind. The peasants of Kyushu were already harvesting their grain in May, though frogs still croaked in choruses in the flooded rice-fields. Fancy our farmers working under umbrellas, and tilling their soil at sunset 138on Sunday. Above each scattered village along the way still floated in the wind the huge fish of gaily colored cloth that are put up on boys’ festival day early in May over every house in the empire in which a boy has been born within the past few years. Its open mouth fastened to a bamboo pole, and filled with wind, each seemed to be swimming in the air high above the lowly abodes it honored. They are emblematic of the carp, it seems, which to the Japanese personifies perseverance, a fighter to the end, and hence a fitting example or spiritual guardian for the rising male generation.

Kagoshima, in the far south, was dusty and uninteresting as a city, and so hot that its people were more indecent in exposure than Hindus. But the famous island volcano in its harbor gave it a suggestion of Naples, and the place teems with history. Here, legend has it, the divine pair which founded Japan landed; or, if you will have none of mythology, there is the reality of that probably Malay race with paper houses and no chairs making this the first stepping-stone to a modern empire. Kagoshima was the first to greet and the last to accept the Occident. Father Xavier, the Jesuit, set foot here seven years after his wind-blown fellow-countrymen drifted upon the empire at Beppu; here, not yet half a century ago, the Satsuma lords made the last stand against the influx of Western ways that had followed the restoration—a final rebellion of the old loose-jointed 139order opposed to strong centralized government, which ended for the defeated leaders in seppuku, a politer term for harakiri. There are statues of these forgiven rebels now in the hillside park above the town still in their curious shogunal dress. Only those of retentive memories can recall how many times Kagoshima town and castle have been destroyed. Usually it was by their own fellow-countrymen, but England did likewise in 1863, because of the killing of an Englishman near Yokohama by a vassal of the Satsuma lord. It was by such outspoken methods that the Western world brought Japan to her modern knowledge of the rights of foreigners within her borders. And through it all Kagoshima continued to make its famous Satsuma ware, looking to the uninitiated like the checked and cast-off crockery of a ten-cent store, until Kyoto wrested the art from her.

We are apt to forget that Japan did not hermetically seal herself up for more than two centuries from mere hermit temperament, but because she had tried the faith and the ways of the West and found them wanting. The Jesuits were welcomed, and had everything their own way for a long time. Then came the Franciscans and the Dominicans, aggressive Spanish priests who refused to recognize the pope’s award of this region of “heathen gentiles” to their Portuguese rivals; and the bewildered Nipponese sought in vain to reconcile the practice of deadly 140quarreling with the preaching of brotherly love of these strange beings from an outside world. Finally, in 1600, the Protestant Dutch came, led by the Englishman, Will Adams, and mutual slander became the order of the day. Ever more puzzled, the rulers of Japan sent a man to Europe to investigate these strange things at their source, and after seven years he came back to report what Japan was already concluding, that Christianity was vicious and the ways of the West to be avoided. Rumors of rough doings in the unfortunate New World seem to have drifted in, too, and brought the astonished realization that this handful of Spanish and Portuguese friars and traders dreamed of conquering this ancient empire and of forcing upon it their own corrupt faith, as upon other “barbarians.” There followed increasing orders for them to retire, and justifiable, even if too bloodthirsty, punishments for disobedience, culminating in beheadings and crucifixions which supplied the church with a long list of martyrs and saints. All foreigners were at length forbidden to move about in Japan, “for fear that Portuguese would travel with Dutch passports.” Then finally, in his wrath, the ruling shogun commanded that so long as Japan should be Japan any Christian who had the temerity to set foot upon it should forthwith lose his head; and for long afterward his threat was approximately made good. Even books from the Western world were forbidden, and when, more than a century 141later, they were again permitted, it was on condition that they contain nothing concerning Christianity.

It must have been a dreary life to the handful of Dutch traders who were allowed to remain, imprisoned on the little flat island of Deshima in what is now the heart of Nagasaki. Perhaps, being Dutch, they smoked their pipes contentedly in their sea-level patch of earth, indifferent to the lure of winding trails climbing away out of the hill-girdled harbor. About them Nagasaki grew from a mere fishing-village to a center of commerce with the outside world, though even that did not mean much by modern standards. The forbidden faith, too, seems to have dug in and remained, awaiting a more propitious occasion to reassert itself; for of the seventy-seven thousand Roman Catholics now credited to Japan fifty-seven thousand are in and about Nagasaki, as against only ten thousand even in Tokyo. The count is stretched, of course, after the Catholic-mission custom of crediting the church with a family of five members whenever one of them is baptized, even though the other four be non-existent or totally ignorant of the existence of churches; but, assuming that the fraud is evenly practised, the proportions are suggestive. No doubt it was by the same intensive methods of census that the martyrs of the sixteenth century won the reputation of having made more than a million converts in sixty years. To-day, though there are about thirteen hundred Christian 142missionaries of all sects on the field in Japan, and the Protestants claim almost twice as many converts as the older branch of the faith, and the Greek orthodox Church nearly half as many, there is barely one confessed Christian among one hundred and fifty-eight persons throughout the island empire.

The Nagasaki we saw was dull and considerably down at heel, dusty and hot and dirty, by no means the busy city even of my first visit early in the century. Women, repulsive in their rags and soot as beings from the infernal regions, still load passing ships with coal by handing endless baskets of it over their heads along steep gangways; and establishments of the “Madame Butterfly” type may still be found here and there in the hilly, sometimes flower-scented suburbs. Next year, they say, the inauguration of a daily twenty-four-hour steamer service to Shanghai will give the place new life, but in the meanwhile changes in world routes have left it sad and discouraged. Even the rickshaw-men stop our American quartermaster in the street to ask, as does the governor, whether there is not some way of getting American transports to come there again for coal, instead of putting in through Hyasaki Strait to a port nearer the mines. The Washington Conference was almost the last straw, forcing Nagasaki’s great shipyard to give up a mammoth warship-building contract. Speaking of the conference, there lay in Nagasaki Harbor at the time of our visit a newly 143launched forty-million-yen battle-ship, still in her first red coat of paint, which was actually and visibly being dismantled—unless, as a cynical foreigner long resident in Japan put it, they tow the hulk up some creek and throw their convenient pall of military secrecy about her until she has been rebuilt. But cynicism, after all, is not the trait most needed in the world just now. Besides, June had come, the golden-yellow biwas were ripe, and the long rainy season was upon us; it was high time we pushed on to throttled Korea and topsyturvy China.

A memorial in the park of Kagoshima to the old-fashioned men who perished in the Satsuma rebellion, an attempt to halt the restoration and keep Japan closed to the outside world

The workhorse saddles of Kagoshima are gaily decorated in red and gold

Government House at Taihoku, capital of Formosa

One often wonders if the Japanese have not made the streets of Formosan cities too broad for its tropical climate

XX

Had I come directly from Japan proper to Formosa, instead of by way of several months in China, my impression of its Japaneseness might not have been so acute. But that interim in the quite different, even though neighboring, land of Confucius made the changes which its present rulers have wrought upon the long-Chinese island during the thirty years since they took possession of it stand out in striking relief. No doubt a journey in the reverse order, from Japan through Formosa to China, would have emphasized instead the likenesses between the island and the former Celestial Empire. For at least in its thickly inhabited western coastland Formosa is still as much Chinese as Japanese, and the little-accessible mountainous bulk of the country is a world apart, where neither of the great nations chiefly concerned in the history of the island has left many traces.

A cross-wave journey from Foochow through the habitually turbulent waters of the shallow Formosan channel kept our small Japanese steamer rolling like the proverbial log, all night and all day, to the very mouth of Kiirun Harbor. After the often Elysian 145freedom of life in China—for the foreigner enjoying the rights of extraterritoriality—the realization came almost with a shock that I was back in a mikado-ruled land again. The literal-minded little police officer, for instance, who kept me courteously but firmly imprisoned on the ship during the two hours necessary to telephone the “foreign office” in the capital and get me “special permission” to land, because some t or i in my passport had not been properly crossed or dotted, called attention to a grave error in my guide-book. Cameras, he carefully pointed out, are not merely “regarded with suspicion in Kiirun,” as the red-faced volume had it, but they are strictly forbidden! In fact, most of his conversation during that stupid two hours was on this important point. I trust the ordinarily exact, though often human, compiler thereof will take care in future not to permit other serious mistakes of this description to sully his excellent pages. The notion that the writer might have meant the statement to be mildly facetious could not, of course, have occurred to a matter-of-fact little Nipponese mind.

Luckily there are fourteen passenger-trains a day to the capital, eighteen miles inland from Keelung—as in Korea most places in Formosa have two names, for the Japanese and their neighbors will never agree on the proper pronunciation of the same ideographs, and l is as great a bugbear to one race as r is to the other. The weather, too, was kind; for though 146this northern and chief port of the island boasts itself one of the rainiest spots on earth, with some twelve feet of rainfall a year, there was nothing worse during the hour I waited for the next train than a sincere promise of rain soon to come. Not that a deluge would have mattered much; there is very little of interest in Kiirun for the mere wanderer, except those fourteen trains,—a small bay with a breakwater, several unphotographable forts, some quite modern streets lined by brick Japanese-Western hybrid-looking buildings that are both shops and residences, all closely surrounded by lightly jungled hills, was all that appeared on the surface before the train sped away with me still in time to have luncheon in the capital. There are also fourteen daily trains back from there to Keelung, which somehow suggests that the capital was purposely built within scampering distance of the coast, an impression that is enhanced by the discovery that there is a village of the head-hunting Taiyal tribe within five miles of it.

Taipeh or Taihoku, Japanese capital of Formosa, is often mentioned as the most modern city in Japan. There was no difficulty in compelling the Chinese or Formosan inhabitants of the island to tear down wherever improvements were desirable, whereas the same thing does not quite apply to the Japanese at home. Physically at least it is nearly all that a city should be, an astonishing place for the Far East and almost within the tropics. Spreading over a large 147area, with wide, well-paved streets—far too wide and hard, in fact, for this latitude—with fine parks, splendid government buildings, a great botanical garden out in the southern suburb, it is indeed in many ways better than most Japanese cities, and an improvement on no small number of American ones. Certainly the Chinese quarter has nothing like the filth of the least dirty of purely Chinese towns and it is probably cleaner than some tenement districts of New York.

The business streets of Taihoku and other modernized cities throughout Formosa are lined by shady and more or less cool arcades

Japanese field-day in the streets of the Formosan capital

Formosan ladies of the well-to-do class

It takes a sharp eye to tell the country women of Formosa from their husbands and brothers, since there is almost complete equality of garb and work

Yet Taihoku gives one a queer, almost an uncanny feeling, after months in China; for here all is orderliness in complete contrast to Chinese disorder on the other side of the channel, a Prussian exactness which Prussia never attained. Japanese life makes one direct from China feel very staid and orderly. The Nipponese, it is quickly impressed upon such a visitor, hate any suggestion of irregularity as bitterly as the Chinese seem to love it. One wonders that the orderliness, the almost military discipline of life, does not get even on Japanese nerves. Formosa has not been under martial law for years, yet military precision, perhaps unconsciously, reigns everywhere. The “foreign office,” outwardly courteous and inwardly suspicious of strangers, sent a graduate of the Middle School to show me about the city, and he was visibly distressed whenever we fell out of military step—or rather, when I did. That is the atmosphere of all Taihoku. Even little school-girls, 148in their uniform garb, their uniform knapsacks hung just so over one shoulder, walk like trained soldiers, some in wooden getas that scrape noisily along the modern macadam, more of them with shoes, the heels of which strike the pavement with hard Prussian exactness. The very streets dare not deviate from their fixed course; the bicycles rolling silently along them seem to steer by the compass; the big foreign horses on which diminutive, solemn-faced Japanese men bob like manikins jog with formal punctiliousness; the parks, the botanical gardens are laid out precisely; one has the feeling that the big fish in their artificial ponds dare not caper except as provided by law. Every article in the fine shops beneath the precise shady arcades that flank every business street has the air of being in its exact place; the very leaves on the trees that fill the city with such a profusion of vegetation compared with wood-greedy China seem to hang in a prescribed way; even the mountains in the near eastern distance look orderly, though that of course is illusion, for there disorderly head-hunters reign supreme. With the Nipponese worship of discipline how those head-hunters must grate on Japanese nerves!

Perhaps those recent months in haphazard China lead me to exaggerate; but at least the Japaneseness of Taihoku is striking. Uniforms or European clothes with Japanese modifications cover most men; even the women are considerably given to more or 149less Western dress, for the silken obi and the professional hair-dresser are often out of reach in these days of inflated prices. But judo, which we know better as jiu-jitsu, and the samurai style of fencing, seem to be the favorite sports—or, since the Japanese looks upon these games with almost sacred patriotism, let us call them the chief forms of personal physical discipline. “Annonei! An-n-no ...” and “So des-ka!”, the “moshi-moshi” of the telephone-booth, the whistling intake of breath without which the typical Japanese cannot reflect on the slightest subject, are heard everywhere. The revered shrine of Taiwan Jinsha, of a branch sect of modern Buddhists, overlooking a big lotus pond from the base of a wooded hill in Maruyama Park, might have been brought bodily from Kyoto; the few Shinto temples scattered about the city exude a Japanese cleanliness which would be wholly incompatible with a Chinese place of worship.

Rickshaws, commonly the traveler’s first personal contact with any city of the Far East, are much higher, both in build and price, than in China. One feels up in the air in them—and correspondingly let down when the time comes to pay them off. Even the rickshaw-men are all in uniform,—clean and whole jacket-shirt and trousers, white even to their mushroom hats, an extraordinary contrast to the cheerful ragamuffins across the channel. Here the runners are all Formosans, that is, Chinese immigrants of 150not more than a few generations back, occasionally interbred with the aborigines, or sometimes pure “reclaimed” savages who not long since “were seeking whom they might decapitate,” but who have left off head-hunting for the less picturesque vice of yen-hunting. There is nothing in the appearance of any of them, however, to suggest anything but cleaner, better paid, very much more disciplined Chinese. Formosans in general seem to be merely domesticated, repressed, quieted, and more frequently bathed Celestials, with here and there some aboriginal blood in their veins.

There are no tramways in Formosa, so that the capital is astonishingly quiet for so large a city; there are said to be a hundred and twenty thousand Formosans and half as many Japanese in it. Evidently the rickshaw-men are not allowed to solicit fares, and do so only in low tones and cautiously, so that after dark they remind one of the slinking women of the night who prowl the streets in too many of the cities of the West. This is a contrast indeed to noisy China, where a howling mob of human horses surges pell-mell down upon every possible client, and where at least one of them is always shrieking along in the wake of the foreigner who dares to walk a block. Here, even as they run, they make scarcely a sound. But they expect at least eighty sen an hour, four yen a day, and are correspondingly slower than their Chinese counterparts. The rule is not absolutely 151fixed, but still it is a rule in the East that the more you pay a coolie of any calling the less work you get out of him. Besides, the rickshaws themselves, made of necessity in Japan, cost from three to five hundred yen, against eighty dollars “Mex” in Peking, so that the cleaner uniforms and the better-fed bodies are not the only reasons for the higher charges.

But that is one of the sad things about Formosa under the Japanese: prices are approximately twenty-five per cent higher than in Japan itself, and to the traveler from China they are atrocious there. With all its excellencies, too, there is scarcely a hint of picturesqueness about Taihoku. The imposing Japanese hotel for foreigners is sumptuous, but absurd in its charges, distressingly standardized and chiefly full of emptiness, like so many of Korea and Japan proper. It, too, owes its predicament largely to that American hotel-man of price-fixing temperament, for it belongs to the iniquitous hotel association that standardizes life for the Occidental traveler throughout the Japanese Empire, and makes living seem a luxury rather than a mere necessity.

XXI

Several trains run day and night the whole length of Formosa, covering the 257 miles between the northern and the southern port in ten or twelve hours. Besides, there are branch-lines, and growing extensions above Keelung and below Takao in the south, while over on the precipitous east side of the island work is progressing on the system that before many years will encircle it entirely. But the railway confines itself everywhere to the edges of the island, like Japanese control and orderliness, and nowhere penetrates very far into the magnificent mountainous interior that makes up three fourths of the area and nearly all the beauty of Formosa.

Against the almost anarchistic background of travel, even by rail, in the China of to-day, these real Japanese trains were like a return to the modern world again. One could overlook the meter-gauge, as of Japan proper, and the screechy, ear-torturing whistles of the locomotives copied from Europe; for the trains take the time-table seriously; ticket-collectors uncover and bow at the door even of third class—the patronage of which is quite possible to the traveler without “face” to lose and the habit of 153stretching his money over the greatest possible distances; the constant watering and sweeping of the car-floors is an enormous gain over China, where none but a few special first-class coaches can vie in cleanliness with the cheapest class here, though the mass of Formosans has not yet by any means reached the Japanese stage of pulchritude. On the other hand it is not they who strip to scanty underwear in the first- and second-class coaches.

Whether it is due to fear of the savages beyond or that more desirable land is plentiful, the hills do not seem to be cultivated even near Keelung and Taihoku. They are densely green, but with low shrubbery rather than crops, while rice spreads everywhere across the bottom-lands where they are not already covered with graves—acres of graves that are merely green mounds, recalling Korea; graves of stone, horseshoe-shaped, recalling southern China. Wide roads rather cheaply paved, with unsubstantial-looking bridges, parallel and cross the track, bearing bicycles, once in a long while an automobile, above all bullock- and coolie-carts, which take the place of pole-burdened carriers jogging along the narrow, winding, stone-flagged trails across the channel.

Here even the fields are orderly, the rows of beans or sugar-cane, of sweet potatoes and indigo, stretching away in unwavering military lines, sometimes clear to the distant foot-hills. Discipline is so omnipresent 154that even the traveler direct from China soon ceases to be surprised that there are no riots at stations between those getting on and off the train, no bullying soldiers and other ticketless persons of influence or special privileges crowding out honest passengers. Instead the stations are so exactly alike, so standardized, that one feels sure the resplendent station-master’s honorable chop-sticks inside are pointed in such a direction—perhaps northeastward toward Tokyo. The very station trees are disciplined, in military alignment and trimmed as precisely alike as the hair of boys in an orphanage. Men stand at petrified military attention at crossings and switches, a green flag in the hand toward the approaching train, a red one on the side toward which, by their gracious permission, it is permitted to proceed.

But out in the country there is some of the picturesqueness of China. Rags on the ends of fish-poles, manipulated by old women, by broken grandfathers, by children too young to wield a hoe, or merely by the wind, do their best to scare away the crop-destroying birds. The locomotive fronts of water-buffaloes now and then challenge the screeching trespasser upon their domain, always to think better of it in time and flounder away through the muddy rice-fields, perfect pictures of the better part of valor. But at the larger stations men in red caps wait discreetly, as in Japan, beneath the eaves 155to carry off the baggage of travelers who summon them to life, and venders in green caps parade the platform offering the ubiquitous “O-bento!” and crying other wares which any one knowing English can, listening carefully, recognize by ear,—“Matchi! Tabako! See-dare! See-tron! Bee-ru! Aisucureemu!”

Toward the center of the island the main line divides, to come together again a hundred miles farther on, and that section close along the barren seacoast is a dreary trip, the dirty low water only rarely showing a patch of blue far out, a long region covered as far as the eye can see, or to dismal mountain foot-hills, with cobblestones of all sizes, only now and then a tiny oasis of thin cultivation among them. Splendid dikes, made of these same cobblestones held together with wire netting, protect the right of way against rivers undoubtedly turbulent in the rainy season. The numerous streams of Formosa are short, but they all lead merry lives while they last. Tunnels, of which the Japanese seem inordinately fond, abound; and where else are telegraph-wires so numerous as in the islands of the Nipponese? It is as if they were suggestive of a spying disposition.

The south-bound traveler in Formosa comes at length frankly into the tropics. Banana-groves become numerous; rice and sugar-cane stretch to the very base of sometimes distant mountains; bamboos 156wave their plumes languidly in the tepid air and dispute with palm-trees for foothold on jungled hillsides that are gashed with precipitous stony watercourses down which rage torrents in the season of the rains. Geographically, too, the temperate zone has been left behind; for a sign-board just below Kagi marks the Tropic of Cancer, which distributes the island almost equally between the cool and the equatorial divisions of the earth.

By this time the fair highways with poor bridges have degenerated into dirt roads that grow rather pathy farther south, though four-wheeled wagons, with tiny wheels in front and huge ones behind, drawn by water-buffaloes at their own chosen speed, continue to the end of the island. Chinese roofs cover the compact villages modestly, as if they dared not toss their corners so picturesquely aloft as in the land whence they came. Throughout the island there is but little color—or odor—compared with China, but there is a certain gaiety in feminine costumes, varying more or less by districts. These mingle together on the railway, so that Cantonese women with flowers in their hair, Foochow field-women with their historic three-dagger head-dress, women from Amoy and Swatow with their own peculiar notions of propriety in personal adornment jostle Formosan country women with still other ideas on this important subject. For a considerable distance through the center of the island the native 157women dress their coarse jet-black hair into what looks like a clumsy imitation of the exaggerated style of Japan, so that they suggest modest countrified geishas; but the custom is said to be autonomous, and no daughter of Taiwan so low as to copy from the women of their unloved rulers.

Below the imaginary line dividing the tropics from the less ardent zone nearly every one except the Japanese takes to chewing the betel-nut, as we miscall it. It is really the betel-leaf, from a climbing vine which, for convenience sake, is often planted beside the areca-palm, the most slender member of the palm family. The nut of this, together with lime and sometimes other ingredients, added to the betel-leaves which are the base and most important part of it, makes up the substance of this repulsive habit. The gaping mouths of the Chinese are ugly enough under normal circumstances; when they drivel with betel-juice they are a sight to go far to avoid. Perhaps it is because the areca-palm and its affectionate climbing companion will only grow in the tropics that the people of a small island are geographically divided as to the habit, though that is not a particularly satisfying explanation.

Persimmons, which the Japanese call khaki, papayas and pumalos, those giant members of the citron family of which strangers do not always grow so fond as the geta-wearing race, abound in southern Formosa. Up and down the island country women, 158in the trousers, jacket, and mushroom hats which make them all but indistinguishable from their husbands, shovel cobble ballast along the railway. How our “straw bosses” would shriek with laughter at that, or turn the circumambient air a dense blue, according to their individual temperaments!

XXII

I have already given it as my humble opinion that the Japanese are not particularly adaptable. This was impressed upon me once more in Takao, principal port of southern Formosa and the end of the main line of the railway. The island is small; American or European visitors are rare; the “foreign office” in the capital had insisted on showing me special attention—which of course was not entirely mere courtesy. As I descended from the train at Takao, the government official who met me turned out to be one of those charming gentlemen into which the brighter pebbles of Japanese humanity can be polished under favorable circumstances, who spoke English perfectly, and who was a Christian into the bargain, whatever difference that may make. He made the inexcusable error of mistaking me for a person of importance, and we were soon spinning away in his high-powered motor-car to the best inn of Takao. It was the absolutely unchanged Nipponese character of this hostelry which emphasized the old impression that the people of Japan do not readily adapt themselves to a new environment. From its arched entrance to the tiny back garden the principal inn of Takao might have been 160in the heart of Tokyo—and in the depths of midwinter. There were the same polished wooden floors between the step-shelf at the door where one exchanged one’s footwear for inn slippers; the square, mat-floored room with almost as large an antechamber to which I was assigned had been as hermetically sealed as paper shoji and sliding wooden outer walls could make it. The three or four quilts spread on the floor in the middle of the room would have been an excellent bed in northern Manchuria in January; on an early October night in the tropics a sheet would have been a much more welcome covering than the arctic quilt in the form of a kimono, the invariable one under which the guest of the Japanese is forced to smother himself in all climates and latitudes, or go uncovered. For toward morning there is a mild chill even in southern Formosa, which the immense mosquito-net all but filling the large room could not entirely shut out. To say that the inn was Japanese is also equivalent to mentioning that electric lights blazed throughout it during the night, glaring fiercely in upon the pseudo-sleeper even though he may have found some means of turning out the one immediately over his head.

But if every other suggestion had been lacking, the bath alone would have proved how thoroughly Japan has been transplanted to this southernmost point of the empire. The lady of the house herself 161conducted me to the place of public ablutions; no respectable Japanese hostess would leave to a mere servant-maid this courtesy toward a guest whom the attentions of the government proved a distinguished personage. She was as comely a young woman as an uncomely race ordinarily produces, eminently respectable, I am sure, in the Japanese sense of the word, with a plump baby of the vintage of the previous summer, and a husband who would certainly not have endured with equanimity any suggestion of unseemly conduct, from his Nipponese point of view, on the part of his wife. A shadow projected upon the glazed glass of the bath-room door showed that it was occupied. I know of ladies who might have turned back under the circumstances; my Japanese hostess slid the door wide open and courteously invited me to enter with her.

In the middle of the wet floor, between the big steaming wooden tub and the small wooden bucket with which he had been rinsing his parboiled body, stood a young man, a stranger for the night, like myself, as I gathered from the subsequent conversation. He was clothed in a wet skin and a welcoming smile. On the wall within reach of him hung a large towel that would have covered him completely; he might even have turned his back; but he was too well bred a Japanese gentlemen to indulge in selfish personal activity while receiving guests, as it were, in a temporary abode. He bowed 162courteously to us, begging me with a gesture and a word to make myself at home, then stood smiling as serenely as if he had been arrayed in a frockcoat gleaming with the order of the Rising Sun.

The more old-fashioned and circumspect of American ladies might perhaps by this time have found some fitting excuse to discreetly withdraw; my hostess could not, of course, think of subjecting me to such a discourtesy. She had still to show me where the soap was kept, to indicate the tub of steaming water, to point to the wooden wash-basins strewn about the floor and to the cold-water faucets from which to fill them when I wished to cool my cooked skin, and to imply that all these things were at my disposal, though it would surely not have required genius to guess all this without her immediate personal assistance. Meanwhile she had opened conversation with the gentleman garbed in the welcoming smile. He had found his chamber comfortable, she hoped, my scanty knowledge of Japanese told me. He had indeed; and would she be good enough to have him called in time for the early morning train south? From this auspicious beginning social intercourse went smoothly on, through what seemed to be a comparing of the number of friends, or enemies, lost in the great earthquake, and such other matters as might come up between a lady and a gentleman at a dinner-table or in a ball-room. Then at length the dripping 163guest, having fulfilled the proprieties by showing no unseemly haste to attend to his own insignificant affairs in the face of social requirements, strolled across to the towel-rack, thrust his feet into rubber slippers, bade us a courteous good evening, and shuffled out into the hallway.

My hostess showed no indication of following, but waited politely for me to slip off the newly laundered kimono that had been laid out for me upon my arrival. There was in her manner no suggestion of a Chinese curiosity to know how foreigners bathe, or whether their skins are that color all over; such questions she had probably long since solved. She was merely waiting upon me like an attentive servant, quite as she might have waited to pour out my beer or to fill my bowl with rice at dinner. Perhaps she meant to soap my back or.... Luckily her husband looked in at last, to bow ceremoniously to me and to tell his wife that new guests had arrived, requiring her attention, if I would be so good as to excuse her. Nor was this, of course, the trumped-up story of a suspicious husband, as the sounds of thrice-clapped hands throughout the house indicated. Truly a Japanese would have felt as completely at home in the principal inn of Takao as within sight of the moat of the Imperial Palace; even the charge of five yen for the privilege of lying a few hours on the floor would have struck him as home-like in its exorbitance.

The Japanese build Shinto shrines in every Formosan town of importance, but they have made little progress in making Shintoists or mikado-worshipers of the inhabitants

The Chinese type of temples and demon-propitiating are still dearest to the hearts of the Formosans

XXIII

Takao by day proved to be a small Gibraltar, with a dredged harbor, a modern Japanese quarter built mainly on reclaimed land on one side of the little bay, and on the other a Formosan Chinese town of the customary toned-down disorder and odors, both soon petering out among some rather barren hills. Monkeys scamper through the shrubbery on the tops of these, no doubt pausing now and then on a swaying branch to gaze down upon the works of their more developed but less care-free prototypes below; palm-trees here and there stand out against the dense tropical sky-line; flowers grow in a certain profusion in Japanese gardens and in the modified jungle beyond the outskirts. Seasons vary greatly within short distances throughout Formosa, and at Takao the rains come in July and August, even then only in torrential afternoon showers, so that for all its two and a half degrees of greater propinquity to the equator life is less dreary there than in constantly raining Kiirun.

Steamer-loads of timbers from the forests of Arisan in the heart of the island were being shipped from Takao for the rebuilding of Tokyo. Under 165ordinary circumstances Japan furnishes her own lumber and that of Formosa goes to China and adjacent lands. The Takao coolies handling it earn an average of a yen a day; farmers and Chinese in the surrounding country districts get forty sen, an improvement on the home-land of the latter, who are no doubt glad to escape trouble-ridden China at any price. It is but a short journey across the Formosan channel from Takao to Amoy—where returning Chinese, armored with Japanese citizenship picked up in Formosa, which brings with it the rights of extraterritoriality, make great trouble for the local authorities; but that is another story. So, too, is the unoccupied group of unpainted wooden buildings specially erected to house the prince regent during a recent two-day visit, which are so sacred that they cannot even be photographed. Nor, thanks to the dreadful secrecy that hangs over all fortified zones in the Japanese Empire, can the rather pretty scene below, with the well-laid-out little modern town at one’s feet, the more haphazard old one across the blue harbor, from out of which through the miniature Pillars of Hercules a pathetic little knock-kneed Portuguese steamer under a Chinese captain was just at that moment hobbling, recalling that once, three or four centuries ago....

Heito, farther south, is also reached by rail, through pineapple—“groves,” one is inclined to miscall them—with Chinese well-sweeps to irrigate the 166rice-fields bizarre against the background of an immense wireless station. But even when one has come this far south there is little more to be seen than a standardized Japanese town in Formosa—southern Formosa, one might specify, since the mouths of all the non-Japanese population are ugly with betel-juice. Japanese school-boys and girls, in their respective uniforms and their unfailing knapsacks, and in strictly segregated groups, step—one might almost say strut—through the wide, mildly dusty street in the refreshing early morning or at sun-baked noon, for the youngest of them is quite conscious that he belongs to the ruling race in this verdant tropical isle. Formosan children, too, wear a species of uniform when they attend school, so that at times it is difficult to tell the two races of pupils apart at a glance; but the self-sufficient air of the one and the disorganized, straggling temperament of the others, who seldom march in formation even to or from school, are alone indicative. Meantime their respective fathers sit languidly in their shops or diligently wield brush, pen, or typewriter in the office of the local government, drag laden carts and jog under pole-balanced burdens through the streets, or sternly patrol them in police uniforms; their mothers either squat and haggle in the cement-floored market-place or scrape along the pavement to and from them in wooden sandals, shuffle in kimonos fairly familiar with the 167wash-tub about neat little wooden houses with sliding walls, shaded by a tree or two and brightened by flowers wherever there is space for a root to gather nourishment, or huddle in Chinese homes of mud bricks as uncleanly and uncomfortable as the laws of Japan will allow—all according to the same racial division. Bicycles and lofty, pneumatic-tired rickshaws flash not too swiftly past; in the outskirts sway the more than pencil-slender palms without which the streets and the floors of the Formosan houses could not everywhere be flecked with reddish patches of drying saliva.

Other cities up and down the tamed and cultivated western side of Formosa are much like this one, varying mainly in size. Tainan, the former capital, still preserves the remnants of a solid old medieval fort as a reminder of Dutch days, and several mementos of the reign of Koxinga, the pirate chief. Its neighboring wastes, stretching to the horizon, are divided into shallow fields in which sea-water evaporates to what looks more like heaps of whitish sand than like the refined product that finally emerges from them. Three hundred million pounds of salt a year are taken from the sea on the western coast of Formosa, and all of it is consumed in Taiwan or Japan. In all these towns, in all Formosa, one is struck, as in Hokkaido, with the fact that the Japanese are not pioneers, that they are officials or merchants, government employees 168or petty shopkeepers, exploiters or capitalists, but rarely tillers of the soil or clearers of virgin woodlands.

Tainan has kept perhaps the most evidences of its Chinese origin, but Shokwa and Taichu, Shinchiku and Toyen have them also. Here and there an old city gate transformed into a merely ornamental monument recalls the Chinese walls that once inclosed all Formosan cities; temples confusedly dedicated to Confucius, Buddha, and Lao-tze, but really sacred to the myriad devils of the spirit world, draw hordes of joss-burning adherents; wailing, garish Chinese funerals plod their way through the unnaturally wide streets, all the ragamuffins of the town carrying some form or other of the multicolored paraphernalia that must accompany even these exiled Celestials to their graves. The Chinese sections of these interior towns have no more cleanliness or conveniences than the Japanese have forced upon them. Water-carriers do not slop their way through them from a neighboring river, as in China, because the new rulers have put street-hydrants within reach of every household. Of these and a score of other labor- and disease-saving improvements the typical Chinese would no doubt say that they throw coolies out of work and leave their families to starve. Similar noises issued from bartenders and type-setters when prohibition and the linotype forced their way into our own land. How false the contention 169is demonstrated by the appearance of the Formosan Chinese, well fed and clothed in state compared to the masses struggling for mere existence throughout the length and breadth of continental China.

It was in Shokwa that misfortune sentenced me to spend a night in a Formosan inn, thereby bringing out the sharp contrast between this miserable type of accommodation and the luxury of Japanese hostelries. It is true that one surrendered one’s shoes at the foot of the ladder-like stairway leading upward from the earth-floored shop where the innkeeper sold some noisome form of food, but there any suggestion of Japanese influence ended. The shoes were forthwith chucked into a broken-down cupboard along with the footwear of fellow-guests with whom one would have been quite satisfied not to mingle so intimately, and out of which one might be fortunate enough to claw them in the morning. How many generations of unwashed feet had already mounted the unswept stairs in the decrepit slippers that were offered to those finicky guests to whom the feet as nature left them are not sufficient I make no pretense of knowing.

Along the second-story hallway, so narrow that one unconsciously turned the shoulders sidewise, were several shallow alcoves, almost entirely taken up with sections of floor raised about three feet above the rest and covered with thin straw mats. On each 170of these Chinese notions of a bed lay a man and a woman, fully dressed, for it is not a Chinese habit to disrobe merely to sleep, but in no way concealed by the long-unwashed counterfeits of curtains that hung limply about the openings. All these fellow-guests were smoking; most of them were quarreling, or at least conversing in the distressingly querulous voices of Chinese domestic intercourse; a few of them were already covered with the uninviting quilt that in most cases constitutes the sum total of Chinese bedding. But at least there was no bath-room indecency here—for the excellent reason that bathing was quite foreign to the establishment and, one felt instinctively, olfactorily, to the general run of its clients. The nearest approach to the steaming vat of the Japanese was a clogged sink off a narrow corner of the narrower stairway, in which dishes, clothing, slop-jars, proprietor, servants, and guests shared indiscriminately a fouled faucet. In short, my one night in a Formosan inn almost carried me back to China.

XXIV

But it is not in her flat, thickly inhabited, modernized western plains that the traveler looks for anything worth the trouble of coming to Formosa to see; that lies rather up among the mountain ranges that bound his field of vision wherever he looks eastward from along the railway. Before we venture into the hills, however, whence we may never return, the story of Formosa may be unfamiliar enough to those who have not been there to be worth the sketching. When the Portuguese first caught sight of the island they named it in an exclamation of admiration “Ilha Formosa!” In earlier days the Japanese, too, called it Beautiful Island (Takasagoshima); later they used the Western term, but finally came back to the old Chinese title of Taiwan (Terraced Bay), which is the official name to-day. Of those who inhabit it probably not one in ten thousand has ever heard the Portuguese name by which the island is still known to the world at large.

The Chinese “discovered” Taiwan during the Sui dynasty, about six centuries after Christ. In those days there was no one to dispute Celestial claims, 172and for a thousand years China more or less ruled over it. Then the Spanish and the Hollanders respectively found it worthy of their attention, and in 1624 the Dutch East India Company took formal possession. Tradition records that when the Dutch first landed they came upon a group of Japanese already established in the southern part of the island and claiming full ownership. Rather than dispute with them, the Hollanders, harking back perhaps to their school-day memories of the history of Carthage, modestly asked for as much ground as they could cover with an ox-hide, on which to build themselves a resting-place. Perhaps the verb “to cover” is not identical in the two languages; or possibly international honor was not so perfect during those dark days as in the present model age. At any rate the Dutch took what must have been the hide of a dinosaur, or at least of its modern prototype, a water-buffalo, cut it as the Chinese to this day cut a hide, in one narrow strip, and inclosed space for the building of Fort Zelandia.

Nemesis overtook the wily Dutchmen, however, in the shape of Koxinga, and a few months after this piratical son of a Chinese father and a Japanese mother drove the Hollanders completely off the island there was scarcely a trace of their forts and “factories,” their schools and chapels, to show that the West had ever set foot there. Eventually, in a typically Chinese way, the island came back to 173China, but from Koxinga’s death in 1663 to the Sino-Japanese War life in Formosa was one long period of bloody struggles with the head-hunting aborigines and of ceaseless rebellion among the Chinese settlers themselves, without safety for any one anywhere in the island. It is not without interest, though of no visible importance, that during one of those more than two hundred troubled years, at about the time Admiral Perry was coaxing and bluffing Japan to open her doors to the outside world, Formosa was under American rule.

The present, and to all appearances enduring, status of Taiwan dates from 1895, when a treaty was signed on a Japanese war-ship in the outer harbor of Keelung, which forthwith became Kiirun. That part was easy; a few presents to corrupt Manchu officials, according to the Chinese, and the wicked deed was done. But the subjugation of the Formosans was another matter. Enraged by what they considered a cowardly act of the Peking Government, through its corrupt spokesmen, in turning them over like chattels to a despised foreign race, they bade defiance to the new claimants. The Japanese, however, were not dismayed by the general uprising of “Formosan rebels”; they had been in the ring before and were still in training. Within a year the Chinese population, commonly called Formosans, though the self-sufficient mountaineers who have inhabited the main portion of the island in 174almost complete independence as far back as recorded history mentions it seem better entitled to the name, turned in their arms and acknowledged themselves subdued.

So far so good; but behind these recent immigrants, mainly from Amoy and vicinity on the neighboring mainland, who had run true to form in settling on the fertile lowlands along the west coast, lived the Hakkas, a foot-hill people who had crossed from the continent at an earlier date. They, too, were used to fighting. For generations they had been the buffer between the coast dwellers and the savages of the mountainous interior, and their unremitting efforts to save their heads from adorning the skull-shelves of the wild tribes had given them experience in, and perhaps a taste for, warfare. At any rate the Hakkas had become experts at the chief Formosan pastime. They also could stalk their enemies night and day along the precipitous border-land. The incentive to success was perhaps even stronger with them than with the head-hunting aborigines, for whereas the latter were merely in need of new skulls to prove their prowess, the Hakkas developed a taste for savage flesh, under the belief widely current among slightly civilized races that it is not merely a choice viand but that their own bodies absorb the courage and the strength of the men they eat. Perhaps, too, their commissary department was poorly organized or full of corruption 175during these border raids. Whatever the origin of the habit, they had long been accustomed to feast on a savage carcass with relish and apparently without unpleasant after-effects.

Now they turned their attention around upon the Japanese. An impartial observer might have foreseen the result. It was modern science against primitive courage and weapons. General revolt dwindled at length to local uprisings, the last of which, in 1913, resulting in the beheading, this time by another type of head-hunters, of nearly a hundred Hakkas. Since then the foot-hill dwellers have been more or less model citizens, leaving the Japanese only the task of subduing the real Formosans, the wild men of the mountains, a chore in which they are engaged to this day.

Concurrently the efficient little men of Japan got busy in the lowlands where they had already made their possession effective. They introduced, at least in theory, the queer notion of general education; they encouraged agriculture by taking land away from absentee owners and turning it over in perpetuity to the actual occupants. Two decades of their industry have brought great changes. The world at large probably still thinks of Formosa, if at all, as a land of savages and jungles and high, almost inaccessible mountains. These the island has to this day, but it has also great modern buildings, fine streets, railways, motor-bus lines, model schools, and 176departments of sanitation. Under the Japanese it has developed from one of the most dangerous to one of the safest dwelling-places on the globe—so long as one keeps out of reach of the mountain-bound head-hunters. The contrast between modern comfort and primitive man still hunting the heads of his neighbors, almost within sight of each other on any clear day, will no doubt remain the chief romance of Taiwan for some time to come.

Of late years there has been much more or less loose talk about the probability—not a few call it the necessity—of some outside power taking over China, either lock, stock, and barrel, or under the euphonistic title of “protectorate.” Granting that such a thing were possible, and after that desirable, in view of the semi-anarchy which reigns to-day over that vast land, Formosa gives a fairly clear idea of what China would become under the Japanese, as Indo-China suggests what it would be under European “protection.” There can be no dispute as to the material advantages which the Japanese have brought the Formosans; there remains the question as to whether life as a whole is an existence more worth living for these forced wards of alien guardians. For one gets the impression that the Celestial, wherever he may be, loves dirt and disorder and “squeeze” and constantly fluctuating currencies. Besides is it not the very confusion of China, even the dangers of banditry and undisciplined 177soldiery, which gives it much of its charm, and not merely the saving sense of humor of the Chinese, their irrepressible cheerfulness, and their several other un-Japanese characteristics?

XXV

The Taiwan of to-day is a military and commercial outpost of the Japanese Empire. The visitor who erroneously mistakes it for anything else exposes himself to surprise if not to disappointment. The Japanese rule Formosa for the benefit of the Formosans exactly so far, and not a hair’s-breadth farther, as it is to the advantage of Japan and the Japanese to do so. Though it may appear otherwise on paper, the supremacy of the civilian authority is quite nominal, and one constantly feels the influence of the real military rulers underneath. Let a dispute on policy arise between these two factors and there is never the iota of a doubt as to which one will impress its will over the other. Economically the island is as strictly under Japanese exploitation for the Japanese as it is politically under the rule of Japanese militarists.

What are erroneously called Formosans make up the great bulk of the population of the island. When the Japanese came thirty years ago this Chinese element, whose connection with the island for the most part dates back only a few generations, was reckoned at three million; to-day the “Formosans of 179Chinese race holding Japanese registration” number about half a million more than that. The most casual observer cannot but quickly note that these so-called Formosans are really exiled Celestials. Their temples, their graves, their superstitions, their costumes, almost their every point of view toward life or death are those of China, of the adjoining Fukien coast in particular, modified only in minor degrees by their longer or shorter sojourn in this semi-tropical isle. I found no one ready to testify that there are still in Formosa Chinese or Hakkas of cannibalistic tastes; but few on the other hand were ready absolutely to deny it. Such things still exist here and there in China, at least in times of famine. As in China, too, and by no means confined to the lowest classes, in fact probably less prevalent, per capita, among them, is the equally unpraiseworthy practice of living on a wife’s immorality. The Chinese are always picturesque in their phrasing, and the house in which such things occur is known among the neighbors as the “half-closed gate,” while the man who hires out his women is gently referred to as a “guest husband.” Those Formosan Chinese who can afford the expense involved, or who cannot otherwise acquire the male heir necessary to carry on their precious family and the worship of its ancestral tablets, take concubines. Class distinctions are also much the same as across the channel; actors, barbers, butchers, chiropodists, funeral musicians and servants are regarded with contempt, as outcasts whom no respectable woman will marry. Among countless other details going to show that the Formosans are merely transplanted Chinese is the fact that they will tell missionaries who come to work among them what extraordinarily distinct Chinese they speak, what wonderful linguists they must be to have learned the miserable language of the speakers so perfectly—and then turn around to ask the missionary’s teacher what on earth these western barbarians are trying to say.

Formosan school-girls waiting for classes to begin in an ancient temple of Confucius which the Japanese have turned into a school

After all, girls are girls, whether they go to school in Ward No. 1 or in a former temple of Confucius in Formosa

A group of reassembled Formosan classmates in a small interior town, ranging now in social scale from shopkeepers to professors in the capital

All the Japanese have left of the old city walls of Formosa is here and there an ancient gate for decorative purposes

180I ran across several of the Protestant missionaries, of British nationality, scattered about Formosa, and one day I chanced upon a Spanish priest who had been nearly forty years in the island. These two branches of proselyters were far more in agreement upon the good and bad effects of Japanese rule than is ordinarily the case on controversial questions between the two principal divisions of Christianity. The delight at speaking his native tongue, which he had to a noticeable degree forgotten, partly accounts no doubt for his greater picturesqueness of language and the emotion that spread in ripples down the long white beard of the padre of—but I must not be too specific. Suffice it to say that he had been stationed in one of the larger interior cities since some years before the Japanese took over the island.

181He had found all Japanese with whom he had ever come in contact intellectually slow as compared with the Formosans, even when they were better educated. Yet the more stupid Japanese always gets any available government job first, he went on, can rise higher, and is paid from fifty to eighty per cent. more for the same work than Formosans. Until quite recently the Japanese man who married a Formosan became himself a Formosan, but the Formosan woman who married a Japanese did not attain Japanese citizenship. Japanese life, the padre asserted, is ostentatious with modern superficial improvements,—roads, schools, hospitals, sewers, running water, electricity, the telegraph and the telephone—he spoke of these things with the scorn which the Spanish as a race still feel for them—but as soon as you dig under the surface of all this.... There is far more immorality of all kinds than in the old pre-Japanese days. Merchant ethics are much lowered; Formosan girls of the class which a generation ago would have been immaculate in social behavior parade the streets in gay, insufficient garb, most of them ready at anything like sufficient provocation to give or sell their favors to any male who longs for them.

I had myself seen no small number of these Formosan “flappers,” girls above the peasant and coolie class, gaudy and conspicuous in their numerous hair ornaments, their flower-embroidered silk jackets, and 182trousers reaching hardly below the knees—perhaps this was what the padre referred to as “insufficient”—their silk stockings ending in little gay-colored cloth shoes. There is scarcely any foot-binding, by the way, among the younger generation in Formosa; the Japanese do not actually forbid it, but the southern coast of China, from which most “Formosans” come, is not greatly given to the custom so nearly universal elsewhere in the former Manchu Empire. But from personal experience I only knew that there was more spontaneous gaiety, more freedom of life in the Western sense, among this new generation of the downtrodden sex. The padre insisted that I had not delved deeply enough into the situation. Perhaps I lack the keen Latin flair for such things. There are also in Formosa, it seemed, many Japanese women of not the strictest morals, but as they confine their affections to their own race, the priest was evidently not much worried by them.

Certainly Formosa has made rapid strides for the better in most things material, he admitted; certainly the Japanese had done away with banditry and made it safe for any one, whom they are willing shall do so, to go anywhere in the island—outside the wire fence that incloses the head-hunters. Even the Protestant missionaries who were there before the change, often harsh but fairly just critics, in a position to know whereof they speak, hasten to bring the Japanese that mead of praise. But “in 183matters moral and spiritual,” some of them go on, “we fear there has been no progress”; or, “materially Formosans are undoubtedly better off under the Japanese; morally they are undoubtedly worse.” Prostitution, for instance, virtually unknown in polygamous Formosa, was introduced by the new rulers, as was to be expected, legalized through the Japanese form of segregation, and “has brought moral disaster to many of the inhabitants of Taiwan, Japanese as well as Formosans.”

There are more than enough schools in Formosa, the priest went on, sumptuous ones at that—for the Japanese. There have never been enough for the Formosans, and wherever it is possible to avoid building new ones for them they are assigned to old Confucian temples and the like. Primary schools for the Japanese and the Formosans are separate, but the Formosan children must learn Japanese, since teachers are forbidden to give their classes in the “Formosan language,” a Fukien dialect most nearly resembling that of Amoy. In other words, no Formosan child can go to a government school unless he can speak Japanese, and henceforth, according to a new ruling, no more private schools can be opened. There are still a few tutor schools, but even in these some Japanese must be taught. The Catholics have given up attempting to have schools for their parishioners in Taiwan, and in the humble opinion of the Spanish padre the Protestant missionaries 184are wasting money on them. It is forbidden to mention religion in the class-room. The Protestant mission school in Taihoku is quite an institution, however, and there the Formosan language is mainly used. But, as in Korea, the knowledge of the old classics is rapidly disappearing from the island. Missionaries vehemently assert that a Formosan university is badly needed, because Formosan youths sent to Japan to complete their education come back badly corrupted in morals. The Japanese probably have another idea on the subject, such as,—what is a little looseness of morals compared with a chance to impress with the greatness of the “mother-country,” to Japanize, the new generation in Formosa?

A well-to-do Formosan family in a typical upper-class railway carriage, identical with those of Japan

In third class there are usually several Formosan country women with a striking head-dress suggestive of, yet on close examination quite different from, those of the ladies of Japan

To our Western eyes the women of Formosa are seldom striking beauties

Baby rides in Formosa much as he does in Japan

185Plagues have been wiped out, my Spanish informant continued, but there is more consumption, and more diseases of the brothel. There are fewer poor Formosans now than before the Japanese came, but fewer rich also. Personally I should list this among the improvements, but the priest gave it as an example of Japanese exploitation. The poor people have more money in silver or paper under the new order of things, but not so much in food. Perhaps so, yet one gets the impression that merely the numerous good trains in which a formerly house-bound population may run about the island at will tend to make life less drab; and certainly the number of popular excursions and travels for pleasure bear out the notion. One of the padre’s bitterest 186complaints was that all foreigners, however long they may have been in the island and however altruistic the labor they may have done for its people, are incessantly looked upon with suspicion by the Japanese. Every time he left town to visit one of his out-stations, when he went on any journey whatever, he had to give the police authorities detailed information as to where, when, and why he was going; and still they never failed to send spies behind his back to ask whom he had talked with, what he had said, and so on to the end of patience. Rumors, which, he had many proofs, were instigated by the authorities, scared the timid natives away from Christianity; by their spy methods, by making fun, or worse, of the children who go to church, they made conversion impossible. Yet the same authorities constantly assert that there is complete religious liberty wherever the mikado rules—a yarn for outside consumption.

Certainly there were too many points of similarity between his complaints and those one hears in Korea to dismiss them all as the false impressions of an overworked zealot. The mass of the Japanese, particularly those in official positions, do not look with favor upon the advance of Western religion, and with it Western notions of political liberty, in their possessions. On the other hand I have known Protestant missionaries in Formosa to say that “we question whether any country enjoys a larger measure 187of religious liberty than do the Formosans. Unfortunately, like the people from which they sprang, indifference to the moral demands of any practical religion are manifest; often the most ardent devotees of what to them is religion are the most immoral persons in their districts.”

Some Formosan men adopt the Japanese custom, especially the footwear, and, being taller and more stately in appearance, look strange indeed. I cannot recall ever having seen a Korean in getas and kimono. Have the Formosans forgotten the disgrace of being conquered; do they live farther enough south to be more easy-going, or was there less of the old Chinese culture and pride of race among these comparative immigrants, so that they never did much care that they are ruled by an alien race? Missionaries and other foreigners, long residents in the island and familiar enough with its language to know something of the minds of the people, assert that the Formosans really hate the Japanese, but that the new generation is so used to them that, thanks to the passiveness, not to say fatalism, in the Chinese character, they do not actively think of what life would be without them. Besides, if they are at all in touch with their ancestral home-land the former Amoy coolies who make up so large a proportion of the population of Formosa probably prefer some Japanese exactitude, much as it may grate on their nerves, to being 188robbed or impressed into unpaid service by bandits and soldiers across the channel. Thus, while there is very much of a “Korean question” and, only two hundred miles south of Formosa, an active “Philippine question,” there is apparently no longer a “Formosan question.” Independence, if it is ever considered at all in Taiwan, is evidently regarded as hopeless, not even worth thinking about.

XXVI

Not merely do the authorities of Formosa look upon all foreigners with suspicion, but the tendency to impress the island with the greatness of Japan has led to a marked decline in courtesy toward them. They habitually treat Caucasians at least as at best unwelcome interlopers. The racial clannishness of the Japanese stands out with double clarity in their southernmost island. Bare statistics speak volumes; of the nearly four million inhabitants credited to Formosa by the latest census a hundred and seventy-five thousand are Japanese, and only one hundred and fifty are foreigners—except some thirty thousand non-subject Chinese. The Japanese have never really allowed foreigners to acquire land in Formosa, any more than in Japan—queer noises those against the California land laws under the circumstances—and the naturalization at least of Westerners is rare and difficult. Politically the Japanese Empire is like Brahmanism and Judaism among religions—not open to other people; yet the little brown men complain bitterly if the rule is made to work both ways.

Not only are they scarce there, but in Formosa the precedence of Caucasians is exceedingly low. 190The three foreign consuls were the last persons presented to the prince regent at the time of his recent visit; they were the only foreigners invited to meet him, and they were got rid of before the speech of welcome by the governor-general. I had the amusing privilege of attending the public reception of a new governor-general, whom a war-ship had deposited on the island the day before I landed. Thanks to the fact that national mourning in our own land made available the formal dress which would otherwise have adorned our official representative in the island, I was able to run the gauntlet of Japanese official requirements. In the auditorium of the imposing foreign-style hotel of Taihoku not a foreigner had a seat, of which there were several hundred, during the feudal ceremony of welcome, and no attention whatever was paid to the invited foreign guests at the atrocious stand-up cold supper—at three yen a plate—which followed. I could not but note the contrast between this positively ill-bred treatment and the attentions showered upon foreigners by Chinese authorities, though the latter in many cases like us no better than do the Japanese.

Since Japanese consuls in foreign countries have much military intelligence work to do, it is impossible to convince the authorities and people of Japan that our consuls confine themselves to the commercial side of their calling. Even when a duly credited representative of a Western nation asks for 191such information as is commonly shared freely between all civilized countries, the Formosan government hedges and delays, and Japanese firms follow its lead. All reports to foreign consuls must go through a long succession of government bureaucrats for approval; every one is afraid to give the simplest information for fear the men higher up will not sanction it—and in Japanese firms and official circles the man higher up is indeed a being to be dreaded. All such information is subject to censorship, and to all possible delays at every turn, ending at military headquarters. Here the heart of the report is invariably taken out of it and the long-delayed and wholly emasculated reply is sent all the way back “through proper channels” to the originating bureau to be forwarded. Yet when some firms once answered a consul direct, the government demanded and kept the reports! The Japanese are such good copiers themselves that they seem to be mortally afraid some one will steal their own puny little ideas. On the other hand the clerk of our consulate in Formosa is a Japanese—which is enough said.

Japanese coastwise laws secure for Japanese bottoms virtually all shipping to or from Formosa. The Japanese import tariff applies, of course, to all the empire, which means that there is a high, in most cases a prohibitive, duty on all foreign goods coming into the island. Consequently one rarely sees 192in its markets anything but Japanese wares, including many imitations of Western articles. As in Korea, American residents who are given endless trouble to get shipments through the customs are asked why they do not at least have their goods sent from Seattle or San Francisco in Japanese ships, with the hint that this might save them some of their difficulties. The Formosan cargo open to foreign ships is very limited, so that rarely indeed does other than a Japanese steamer call at the island. This is surely short-sighted policy. If the great transpacific liners, all of which go almost within sight of Taiwan, touched there the tourist income of Formosa would increase a hundredfold. As it is, only a brave or a foolish traveler will take one of the Japanese coastwise steamers to and from the place to see it, even if he ever finds himself in a port from which they sail. Little trade can be indulged in by purely foreign firms in Formosa, unless they have at least an agency in Japan proper. Local firms do not know English, and they hesitate to run the risk of divulging trade secrets to outsiders by having such correspondence translated. These things, in addition to the American hesitancy to sell in the small lots that are required for such a market, plus the bad packing that seems to be a general and incorrigible American fault, do not leave much chance to find your favorite tooth-paste or wearable shoes in Formosan shops.

A Formosan funeral

After the low, squat ones of China, the Japanese rickshaws of Formosa seem lofty not merely in price

Flowers on their way to an ancestral temple

XXVII

Real enlightenment and emperor-worship are hardly compatible, complains a missionary in Formosa. He should have had no difficulty in recognizing, in far less time than he has probably spent there, that for all its outward garb the government of the island, if not of Japan itself, is a real shogunate still, a feudal type of thing, in which all men bow low before their official superiors, in which there is never any of the hearty frankness of modern life. The slowest-minded people ever to reach high estate are also the tightest little people on earth; compared to the Japanese the Chinese are open and aboveboard, as well as brilliant and overflowing with the sense of humor.

There is no free press in Taiwan; the barriers against one are mainly secrecy and dictatorship. If the government is concerned, there is virtually no chance of getting any news, or at least correct news; if it is outside news, and in the slightest degree concerns the government, a strict censorship will see that it is not shared with the public. Such information as one may find in Formosan papers, therefore, is true in just so far as the government wishes the 194truth to be known. “It is undesirable,” said a recent governor-general, “to see in newspapers comments and criticisms concerning the administration.” No doubt American politicians often feel the same way about it. The same mikado-appointed autocrat dissolved a society of Formosans who planned to introduce governmental reforms, with the placid remark: “To establish a legislature in Taiwan is against the constitution of Japan, and the constitution has never been amended. Any movement aiming at the conclusion of the laws of Japan from this island is against peace and order. The constitution of Japan allows freedom of speech and the organization of political societies, but people under a constitutional government should be moral and gentlemanly in their acts, and it is accordingly the duty of the state to correct persons who are unable to take such a gentlemanly and moral attitude.” A number of such persons, whose lack of gentlemanly morals consisted in attempting to organize one of the political societies permitted by the constitution, are being corrected in the big “model” prison of Taihoku, and incidentally learning to work with their hands instead of their heads.

In other words, though the Japanese have copied the constitutions of the West, by way of that of Bavaria, those of them at least who are governing Formosa have no real conception of what a modern free government with the consent of the governed 195means. Compare Japanese rule in their semi-tropical isle with Porto Rico or the Philippines, where even legislation and the courts are in Spanish! It is rather a pity that the group of islands not far south of Formosa over which the American flag still flutters cannot have a sample of Formosan rule to offset their complaints at their present status, and as a reminder of what may very easily happen to them if they win that independence for which certain of their political-minded citizens are clamoring.

But to come back to the complaining missionary and his charge of mikado-worship. “The Japanese constitution,” he continues, “guarantees to all citizens religious liberty; how then can the government require its officials, and every child in its government schools, be they Formosans or Koreans, to bow down before the picture of the emperor and to worship him in Shinto shrines? For certainly this is nothing more nor less than worship, so far as the word has any meaning in English or to the mere Western mentality, in spite of the clever but ineffectual explanation that ‘the government declares that all ceremonial observances which are officially obligatory shall not be regarded as religious but as patriotic.’”

It is easy enough for a stern government to order men to believe thus and so, but the human mind is sometimes perverse in its workings. Shintoism is taught in the schools of Formosa; gleaming new 196Shinto shrines are to be found throughout the pacified part of the island; but I have yet to see a Formosan enter one of them as a voluntary worshiper or to hear of one who has given his free-will adherence to the Japanese doctrine. The Chinese type of temples still holds the allegiance of the great non-Japanese mass of the population; and the majority of us are inclined to sympathize with them in their choice, even though their mainly devil-propitiating form of worship may be a lower one than pure Shintoism.

But is the charge of mikado-worship justified? I took the trouble one day to ask one of the most intelligent Japanese officials it has been my fortune to meet, a man educated in the West and with as liberal views as such officials ever seem to attain, what the more cultured Japanese thought of the suicide of General Nogi and his wife, that they might accompany the late mikado to the other world. He showed immense surprise that such a question could occur to me at all, and promptly assured me that “every” Japanese considered it a noble act, and one to be emulated. The house in which this ancient Nipponese sacrifice was committed was set aside by the government as a national museum, and squads of school-children were constantly being shown through it when we were in Tokyo, while their teachers preached to them on the ideal patriotism of Nogi’s life, and particularly of his death, striving to inculcate into their plastic minds, probably with considerable success, the same more than medieval ideas. The authorities are tireless in their attempts to bring the younger generation of Formosans to the same point of view, though there is no evidence that these efforts have thus far borne any fruit.

The Japanese furnish excellent school accommodations throughout Formosa, at least to their own children

Japanese boys on their way to school in southern Formosa

The Japanese say that they themselves cannot distinguish the reformed head-hunters of Formosa from their own country people; but for the teacher and two children in the front row these are all of the wild mountain tribes, the tallest man and his little boy in front of him being both in the first grade

Former head-hunters more or less domesticated during years of labor in the camphor camps of the Japanese

197Not long ago the prince regent of Japan made an official visit to Formosa, partly no doubt for this very purpose. There were months of preparation for the “epoch-making” occasion, preparations so intensive that neither the governor-general nor the government had much time left for less important matters. The group of buildings on the hilltop above Takao, of which I have already spoken, were specially constructed for the housing of the royal visitors. They are of wood, but spacious enough to accommodate a dozen large families. The prince spent two nights there, leaving them so sacred that no one else can enter, much less inhabit them. I had the luck to see translations of articles on the princely visit as they appeared in Formosan papers, though it was not, of course, intended that this evidence of the essentially shogunal character of modern Japan should be given out to the world at large. Among this mass of evidence unconsciously tending to bear out the charge that the Japanese consider their 198supreme ruler virtually a god a few are especially amusing. For, remember, this was merely the son of the divine mikado, not yet quite deified himself, I suppose, so that one can only surmise how much nearer the focus of absurdity matters might have gone if the sacred emperor had been mentally capacitated to make the visit himself. One horrified writer reports that the imperial personage “seemed to be most interested in water-buffaloes and sedan-chairs”! How that must have broken the hearts of the improvement-showing officials! Two hundred and seventy police in plain clothes were stationed along the road by which the prince traveled, but “they hid themselves behind trees and other things, because the authorities wished them to be so inconspicuous, if possible, as not to catch the imperial eye at all.” A long list of instructions were issued to the people of Formosa, a few of which will give the atmosphere of the occasion quite as fully as the whole document. The population was ordered:

1.

Not to get sick and start an epidemic during the imperial visit.

2.

To fly the Japanese flag from every building along the prince’s route, on penalty of severe punishment.

3.

To dress neatly and wear footwear; to take off their hats when the procession was passing; not to use telescopes or look upon the procession from up-stairs or any other elevated place—and 199so on, into the very depths of the proper conduct of mere man toward his gods. Obviously unofficial photography would have been almost a capital offense.

XXVIII

Taiwan is not merely a military and commercial outpost of the empire; it is also very much of a closed corporation, a greatly exploited island, “both legally and illegally,” an observing missionary puts it. In the slang of the day—unless the expression has died of old age since I left my inventive native land—“exploit is the middle name” of the modern Japanese. Perhaps he does it even unconsciously, as when he standardizes the existence of tourists passing through his country and sees to it that they pay and tip as much as the traffic will bear. All the important industries of Formosa are government monopolies, and the second-rate ones are strictly controlled by Japanese interests. Opium has been a monopoly of the government since 1896, camphor and salt since 1899, tobacco since 1905, and liquors since 1922. Even sugar is virtually so, though the Hakkas up in the foot-hills still operate crude sugar-mills of the iron-roller type, propelled by water-buffaloes. “All these monopolies,” says a government organ, “are for the good of the public, to check speculation, and to maintain a high uniform quality. As a matter of fact these monopolies have made considerable revenue for the government of 201Taiwan, though that was not the main object in establishing them.”

Fortunate accident, surely; for we read further on that during the first year of the newly established liquor monopoly the government lost 1,250,000 yen in liquor taxes—do not burst yet into tears of sympathy—but gained 5,500,000 yen on the monopoly. An improvident and impractical people, indeed, to have overlooked such an advantage until it was accidentally called to their attention! There are some things to be said in favor of government monopolies, as of most human or divine contraptions; but the trouble with them, as far as my inexpert experience goes, is not merely that they offer government officials strong temptation to peculation, but that each bureau burns with eagerness to push the sale of its product, however detrimental it may be to the consumer.

The Government Monopoly Bureau in Taihoku, where nearly all the world’s supply of camphor is refined, and where the opium smoked on the island is prepared, is worthy of a visit—provided one can get into it. Personally I could not gain admission to the opium section, and I have yet to meet a foreigner who has been more fortunate. I must take on hearsay also the assertion that the Japanese are stamping out opium smoking throughout the island.

How China was forced by Western nations to open her ports and markets to the opium trade is 202too old and discreditable a story to need repeating. Chinese immigrants brought the habit to Formosa, and when the Japanese took over the island a considerable percentage of the Formosan Chinese were users. The Japanese licensed smokers, provided severe penalties for those who indulged in the stuff without a license, and fixed a certain date after which no new licenses would be given out. Even this happy scheme was probably not entirely an original idea with them. Somewhere in the East, in a once well-governed province of China, I think, the authorities long ago provided each opium smoker with a license—in the form of a board several feet long on which the evidence of his weakness was set forth in large red characters, and which the licensee was forced to carry himself, uncovered, to the licensed opium establishment whenever he wished to smoke, even the most wealthy or influential not being permitted to let a servant do so. This admirable scheme, doubly effective in a land where “face” is lost with such poignant regret, has naturally been allowed to fall into desuetude, like so many excellent things in China. I will not go so far as to suggest that the idea might be of use in a land where costly efforts are being made to stamp out the use of intoxicating liquors, but there is no international copyright on ideas of government.

The Japanese did not carry things that far in Formosa, but by refusing new licenses and constantly 203raising the price of the drug they are reputed to be doing away with the habit. Unfortunately even officials cannot deny that cocaine, morphine, and opium products which are more injurious than the pure stuff are manufactured—in England and the United States, for instance, as well as in Japan—and smuggled by Japanese into Taiwan in large quantities.

Tobacco is used by both sexes, almost all ages, and all races in Formosa. Quite aside from whatever evil effects this dreadful weed may produce on the physical, mental, and moral system—you can see that I have been hobnobbing with Protestant missionaries—more money is spent on it by a people who could easily find a better use for their limited wealth than on opium at its worst. The Government Monopoly tobacco factory in Taihoku is a model establishment—though not so much can be said of the employment of hundreds of very young Formosan girls in it—hence it is one of those things which the “foreign office” is glad to show. Two Filipino youths do their best to make the cigars which issue from it a trifle less deadly than those to be had in Japan proper, but this is a mere side-line in a land where cigarettes and smoking-tobacco are an almost universal form of indulgence. Perhaps there is really nothing suspicious at all in the curious fact that Japanese cigarettes, which have a hollow mouthpiece that requires them to be made by hand, can be sold in Formosa at a considerably lower price than the 204machine-made cigarette, in which peanut-oil is mixed with the tobacco to comply with Chinese taste, that are manufactured there for the non-Japanese Formosans.

Many of the foot-hills of Taiwan are dotted with compact little bushes that at first glance are interesting only for the regularity with which they are spaced. Then one is reminded that between nine and ten million pounds of “Formosa oolong” go to the United States each year, though most of us supposed that tea is by no means the favorite American stimulant. Japanese transpacific ships stop at Taiwan for tea in the season, but just why this important Formosan product has remained merely a Japanese rather than an official government monopoly does not appear on the surface. Possibly it is because the Nipponese lack one of the faculties essential to its preparation, either by an oversight on the part of their ancestral gods or from overindulgence. At any rate the official tea-taster of one of the most important Japanese firms, whose daily chore it is for six months out of the year to sample scores of tray-loads of tea-leaves raw, infused, and in some strange concoction, comes from “the Bronix,” to the luxuries of which he retires during the other half of the year.

Though much coal is mined in Formosa, it is poor and full of sulphur, which makes it fortunate that unlimited electric power can be developed. One 205of the most agreeable trips into the interior under genuine Japanese control brings one to Lake Candidius, named for a former Dutch missionary, a beautiful sheet of water at a considerable elevation, amid delightful mountainous surroundings. A tunnel has been opened which lets into the lake a mountain stream that raises it sixty feet above its natural level, and with a drop of a thousand feet in the first two miles of the outlet it is planned to electrify the whole island. Just now the scheme is held up for lack of funds, like so many things, excellent and otherwise, in this expensive after-war world. The Japanese, by the way, show little respect for the foolish Chinese superstitions of the Formosans when they interfere with developing the natural resources of the island. Slowly, too, the Formosans learn, advancing beyond their continental relatives. The Japanese were digging for water in Taihoku some years ago, for instance, when the workmen unexpectedly struck gas. An old Formosan lady naturally supposed that this came from the nether world, and burned joss before it. It is reported that her startling experience has cured no small number of persons of being too hasty in concluding that infernal forces can always be propitiated in the orthodox manner.

The most valuable resource so far discovered in the great mountainous interior of Formosa is the immense camphor-trees. One sees them here and 206there in southern China, but usually in splendid isolation in a temple compound, or with a little shrine at the foot of the enormous trunk to show that the venerable growth is inhabited by benevolent spirits and is therefore sacred. But no such kindly superstitions spare those of Formosa from destruction; hence in this case the Japanese have a genuine monopoly. The production of camphor in Taiwan began two centuries ago, but it is only under the new rulers that this splendid source of revenue has been exploited in much more than a desultory manner. To-day Formosa produces nine of the twelve million pounds of camphor with which the world is yearly supplied, and Japan proper yields two millions more, leaving a bare million to be credited to China and to synthetic processes. Thus it is not difficult to figure out why you are almost forced to patronize the Japanese, whether you like them or live on the Pacific Coast, whenever you need moth-balls or an eye-shade, perfume or a “tortoise-shell” comb.

Let us descend for a moment frankly into statistics and see what becomes of the world’s twelve million pounds of camphor a year. Official Japanese records report that it is consumed by:

207In other words, if the Far East were not so devoted to its gods the price of smelling-salts might be several points lower—if the Japanese Government chose to have it so.

A visit to one of the camphor stations in savage territory can be arranged through the “foreign office” of Formosa, as the cheerful guide-book has it, “for the visitor who is willing to run the risk of leaving his head there.” Beside the little narrow tracks along which Formosan coolies push those to whom the loss of a head is no very serious matter two-bushel bags of camphor-chips, the not unpleasant smell of which strikes the passing nostrils, lie here and there at the foot of the steep, narrow paths down which they are carried on men’s backs to await wheeled transportation. The entire tree is chopped up with a little hollowed-out ax that makes the chips look as if they had been dug with a sugar-scoop. Little push-car loads of these come down to the railway, but a large quantity of the chips are boiled in the field, at camphor camps consisting principally of several mounds of earth and mud bricks resembling Chinese brick-kilns, with bamboo pipes for carrying the water of mountain streams through them, and others for drawing off the product. This almost colorless camphor oil is put in tins identical with those in which American gasolene and kerosene come to the Orient, and is shipped down to the capital. Private companies engage in the sometimes dangerous 208work of camphor-gathering, but they must sell all their product to the government, and not argue the price. The necessity of protecting the camphor camps from raids by head-hunters, however, requires a government police force and certain administrative buildings, so that all of them have a more or less official character. Down at the Monopoly Bureau in Taihoku the refined camphor, looking like snow-drifts, or, more precisely, like a lifetime supply of the purest white sugar on a very damp day, lies in great bins, and the densely camphorated air is so hard to breathe that one marvels at the endurance of the Formosan coolies who shovel the stuff back and forth for hours at a time.

While they are not necessarily monopolies, there are other Formosan products which are worthy of mention, and other dangers than head-hunters to dull the pleasures of life in this Beautiful Island of Somewhere. It is rich in aggressive venomous snakes, for instance. A man of altruistic tendencies has compiled a big volume filled with colored copies, as nearly life-size as possible, of all the deadly reptiles so far discovered by the new rulers, so that even he who cannot read may recognize them as he runs; and under each is the antidote to be used in case one is bitten by that particular species. Unfortunately, it is often a long way between drugstores in Formosa. White ants destroy one’s furniture, leaving a splendid-looking shell that is as 209hollow within as New Year’s resolutions; floods sometimes turn Taihoku itself into a lowland rival of Lake Candidius. Earthquakes are so common that no one but the newly arrived or the abnormally timid thinks anything of them. There are often several a day; nine hundred have been registered in a single recent year. “I’ll see you after the afternoon shake,” is said to be one of the fixed forms of rendezvous among the residents of the island—though they are not strong and frequent enough to save bartenders one of their principal exertions, as even a brief visit to the cozy foreign club of Taihoku, redolent mainly of tea export, will demonstrate. But, then, there would be little reason to travel if the dodging of untamed motorists were the chief peril the world over.

XXIX

There can be no dispute as to the justice of having named the chief stepping-stone between Japan and the Philippines “Ilha Formosa.” Even from the sea it is a beautiful island; no visitors, except those foolish enough to content themselves with a journey along its tame, railway-linked western flatlands, will be likely to forget in one brief lifetime its magnificent interior. Once it has decided, not far inland, to take to the clouds, Formosa rises very abruptly from the western foot-hills, range after range of blue mountains, their tops most often covered with clouds, the highest of them topped with snow in midwinter, vying with one another in their excited upward climb until they culminate in Niitakayama, known to the outside world as Mount Morrison. This giant of the Japanese Empire rears its head, though rarely showing it to the world below, more than thirteen thousand feet above the sea, on which it can look down in almost any direction. Many of its neighbors have an elevation of more than ten thousand feet. Then, as if their ambition for climbing had suddenly subsided, the ranges drop precipitously down to where the blue waters of the Pacific 211lap the solitary crags beneath. The cliffs on the east coast of Formosa are reputed to be the most headlong in the world, towering in places a sheer six thousand feet from the water’s edge.

One extremely narrow valley, between this great central mass of mountains and the smaller eastern coast range, stretches half the length of the island, in its central portion, and along this the Japanese are already completing a section of the government railways. This passes a few plantations and links together some unimportant towns, but runs mainly through semi-savage territory. The wild region to the north of it presents a serious problem to the engineers charged with completely surrounding Taiwan by rail. There are two trails by which the island can be crossed, one at the southern end, and another, unsafe without a large escort, nearly through the middle of it. Several hundred miles of push-car tracks thrust their way inland in perhaps half a dozen places, but none of them penetrate very deeply into the precipitous and savage interior, doubly romantic because it is forbidden territory.

One journey well worth the making is that up Arisan, where great forests of evergreen trees, some of which are believed to be fifteen centuries old, are being exploited by means of an exceedingly steep little railway that brings down mammoth logs for local building and for export. But wherever the traveler strikes inland he cannot fail to be rewarded 212by unusual scenic beauties, and sooner rather than later to run into the true Formosans. If these wild men have a sense of humor, they surely laugh at the world below, for they monopolize the invigorating climate of the mountains, while the despised little people who claim to rule over them, and, as far as the savages know, all the rest of the effeminate human race which considers head-hunting too hardy a pastime for its feeble nerves, must content themselves with the sea-level plains, even in enervating midsummer. The Japanese forbid travelers to visit these children of nature on the more or less sincere pretext that they may lose their heads; the fame of the head-hunters themselves proves a much more effective ban. It is conceivable that an experienced and resourceful explorer might escape the net of Japanese police so solicitous of his welfare, but nothing but good luck, and perhaps a disarming temperament or a taking way with savages, could save him from whatever the mountain-dwellers, who would be sure to pick him up soon after he crossed the guard-line, might choose to do with him.

A typical house of the savages of Formosa, built in a coast city as a lodging for those who can be induced to visit it

The savages and head-hunters of the Formosan interior build their homes of slate, sometimes filled in with slabs of wood and other stone

A semi-domesticated couple from the head-hunting tribes

It is typical of wild tribes the world over that the women do all the carrying and most of the other hard work

The hand-cars, by which are moved freight and those few passengers whose thighs or lack of time will not permit them to furnish their own transportation, consist of a platform five feet square set on a four-wheeled truck. For ordinary travelers a box or a bag thrown on this as a seat completes the arrangements for a journey into the interior. When a 213foreigner is captured, however, he has little choice but to travel “first class,” which means that he rides on one of these same hand-cars, surmounted by a superstructure of wicker or woven bamboo-withes, like a sentry-box with a seat, at least trebling the price of the trip. This has its advantages, though they are scarcely worth the money. Unless there is another first-class passenger, which seems rarely to happen, the distinguished victim has the conveyance to himself. It calls for him as near his inn as the little railway track will bring it, and at the hour he chooses to be ready; his pushers are a bit above the average, thanks to the double incentive of a hope of tips and the preference for the lighter work of passenger over freight service. When he meets another car he may sit stolidly in his place, while its lower-class passengers alight and their pushers lift it off the track, providing it is not laden with a heavy cargo from the hills that is even more immovable than a first-class passenger.

A single pusher trots one across the first dozen miles of plain, where the scenes are approximately the same as along the steam railway,—rice-fields, flooded or waving with ripening grain, according to the season, water-buffaloes, some of them slowly and ponderously performing their allotted labors, others leisurely grazing the scanty grass of grave-mounds and paddy-dikes, probably with a solitary black bird on their backs, or with a faded and somewhat tattered 214young Formosan stretched out at full length, his head equally comfortable on the neck or the rump of his phlegmatic beast. A village or a cluster of shops appears now and then, some of them division-points at which the traveler changes cars and crews—by having his superstructure set over upon another hand-car propelled by a new pair of legs.

The pushers are all Formosans, quite like any other Chinese coolies in outward appearance, except that they are better fed and less likely to be raggedly clothed. But before long the traveler recently from China will be struck by their taciturnity, their lack of Chinese cheerfulness, as if they had led a lifetime of repression, or had underneath their outer obedience a deadly hatred of all alien races, and not merely of the one ruling over them, which makes them unwilling to enter into conversation with foreigners beyond the few remarks necessitated by their calling. In short, they differ from their Chinese fellows across the channel just as alien-ruled peoples the world over differ from men who consider themselves independent.

At length the dead level gives way to slopes growing gradually steeper, with lesser descents between them, down which pusher and all coast at pleasant speed. The hitherto straightforward track begins to twist and wind in an effort to find the easiest ascents; there may come a long bridge of piles and bamboo, with so swift a climb into some town 215across the river that even a first-class passenger is expected to descend, and will have time to explore the place before his baggage has been pushed around the great circle by which the track mounts to it. Here two pushers man the car to which his private cabin is transferred, for the ascents will grow ever steeper, first over increasing foot-hills, then into actual mountains, while for half-hours at a time only the utterly dispassionate will fail to get out and walk.

Men and women working in couples push many of the freight-cars and nearly all the work-trains one passes on the way. Until one is close upon them it is all but impossible to distinguish one sex from the other among these country people of lower Formosa, dressed almost exactly alike, in a loose jacket-shirt, and cotton trousers reaching to the calves, topped by a mushroom hat of leaves and bamboo splints. With experience the eye learns that the slightly plumper, the bit less angular workers, those who swing their hips as they walk and take a trifle shorter steps, are the female of the species. Somehow one comes in time to know them by instinct, whether knee-deep in the fields or trotting in a row of coolies of mixed gender under undulating pole-borne burdens. Yet one is never ready to wager any great odds on the question until they are so close at hand that their often comely features and their distinctly feminine forms leave no ground on 216which an opponent would be willing to lay a stake. There is no downtrodden air about these women, any more than among the country women of Japan. With their sturdy bodies and uncrippled feet they are on physical equality with their men, and why should they take a back seat for them? At times they do, but only where feminine modesty requires it. Here is real domestic companionship, each car-pusher with his wife as a team-mate, perhaps with the rest of the family on her back to complete the picture.

Higher still begin the tea-fields, dense low bushes stretching in rather closely planted rows over hills and ridges, which here and there show evidences of recent reduction, probably by burning off the former jungle, from wilderness to cultivation. Somewhere about here, too, or just over the next high ridge yonder, one will begin to see scattered members of the mountain tribes. This far down they look anything but dangerous, rather too tame and over-friendly, in fact. The first one I came upon was a tattooed old woman who greeted me from beside the track like a long-absent brother, and had almost to be shaken off by force.

At the first camphor camp where I stopped for the night, in this case quite a town, with a Japanese sergeant of police and several shops, there were numbers of head-hunters who had more or less submitted to civilization. Some of them wore Japanese garb, 217especially a few women, who seemed to be keeping house for lonely men from Japan. From such camphor stations jungle paths strike inland in hardly accessible places, up slopes where civilized man would never expect to find a trail. These are difficult for effete shod humanity to follow under the most favorable conditions; when it rains, as it does often and generously in the mountains of Formosa, they are almost impossible. But they lead those who have the persistence and the prehensile capacity to climb them through magnificent forests, adorned with splendid ferns as big as many of our northern trees, to isolated clusters of huts that one recognizes at a glance as the dwellings of “wild” men. In some place these low shacks are built of rude slabs of wood; more often they are made of slate, with a smaller hut on stilts near-by in which food is stored. Probably the men cannot be trusted with food in the house itself while their women are away working to grow more of it for them. Even as near civilization as this one begins to run across youths dressed in a single blanket-like garment, carrying bow and arrows, a huge knife in the half of a section of bamboo as scabbard hanging at their thighs, who look easily capable of taking the head of any unwary traveler who ventures too far outside the protecting sphere of the Japanese.

XXX

The three principal mountain tribes of Formosa are in turn officially subdivided, for convenience’ sake as much as for any ethnographic reason, into nine groups, besides one semi-civilized tribe living under ordinary district administration among the Formosan Chinese and Hakkas. The latest census, taken partly, I suspect, by absent treatment, estimates the savages at 131,609, and credits them with living in 670 villages, large and small. It should be borne in mind, however, that three or four huts in some little, almost inaccessible clearing may constitute a village in the wild man sense; they do not go in for metropolises. I have my misgivings about the exactness of that final 9 in the population figures, and particularly of the precise 2999 men—with 2753 women—who are still reckoned as “uncontrolled.” Surely the enumerators might have found, or “estimated,” just one more man and made it a round number. However, there are few peoples more meticulous than the Japanese, and they inform us that 47,015 of the mountaineers are “under control and residing within administrative districts,” while 78,842 are “under control, but residing outside administrative 219districts.” The wisest travelers will probably not take too seriously the word “control” as applied to this last and latest group.

These tribes, who divide themselves into many clans, between which fighting and even head-hunting may be legitimate, hold more than half the island, even without rolling it out level, which would vastly increase their area. Of the three main divisions, the ferocious Taiyals, who tattoo themselves blue in the face, are the fiercest, the most persistent, and the most successful head-hunters; and they hold approximately the northern half of the wild territory. The others, perhaps because man grows less energetic toward the south, are more or less amenable to civilizing influences. Below the precarious trail across almost the center of the island all except some small groups about the foot of Niitakayama, who still occasionally perform barbarous acts, are virtually domesticated; and to-day the Taiyals are the only consistent head-hunters. With them head-hunting is the most important, the most glorious thing in life. Their effete southern neighbors engage mainly in agriculture, legitimate hunting, fishing, and cattle-raising; but the southern half of the mountainous territory is poor, too rugged to be arable in most places, yet even without any great amount of timber except about Arisan and Mount Morrison.

The Ami, through the length of whose district runs the railway on the precipitous east side of the 220island, are thought to be the most numerous of the nine tribes; but as the chaotic territory of the aggressive and powerful Taiyals has never been fully explored, it is impossible to be dogmatic on this subject. There are a few groups in the heart of the Taiyal region who have never come in contact with the outside world, except by hearsay. But the Taiyal territory is very rich in forest products; the valuable camphor-trees are probably still more numerous and immense as one penetrates into the interior; there is said to be gold—all of which will no doubt eventually be the undoing of these sturdy children of the wilderness. For while the mere desire to make good their claim of ruling over it might never lead even the aggressive Japanese to complete the conquest of Taiwan, the world must have its moth-balls and perfumes, and the camphor-tree grows too slowly to hope that the laying out of camphor plantations by the foresighted Nipponese will save the mountaineers of Formosa from destruction, whether in warfare or by the slower but quite as fatal method of submitting to civilization. Slowly but surely the effeminate non-head-hunting world is pressing in upon them; yearly the guard-line which surrounds them is shrinking.

For the savages are completely fenced in. The aiyu-sen, or guard-line, is a cleared space, from fifty to a hundred feet wide, climbing over hill and dale completely around the uncontrolled territory. It is 221started by cutting a road along the crest of a mountain, then destroying the vegetation on either side of this far enough back so that the guards can see attacking savages in time to defend themselves. This system dates back to the reign of Ch’ien-Lung, toward the middle of the eighteenth century, when the Chinese paid tamed savages to protect them against the others. Corruption grew up, as is inevitable in Chinese affairs, until the settlers were forced to establish guard-lines at their own expense, sometimes hiring the irregular troops commonly, and often erroneously, known in China as “braves,” sometimes doing the guarding themselves, turn and turn about. Similar things exist in many parts of the anarchistic China of to-day. There was little and at times no government supervision, and corruption increased. Those who became chiefs of the guards protected their own property splendidly but had no time to bother with that of others. Very little government guarding remained when the Japanese took over the island. They began by recognizing and paying the semi-public guards, but as soon as they had put down the “Formosan rebels” in the lowlands they took over the corralling of the savages themselves, and now all guards are government employees, members of the police force.

To-day the guard-line is about three hundred miles long. It is constantly being changed, as the Japanese conquer new territory in order to take in more camphor-trees 222or to punish a district that has grown too insolent to be endured, so that the savages are gradually but surely having their holdings reduced. Not infrequently, thanks to the naïveté of all savages, the Nipponese have reached an agreement with the wild men as to the advancement or the “rectification” of the aiyu-sen; sometimes they must fight for it.

This last resort is a hazardous undertaking. The abrupt condition of the mountain fastnesses of the Taiyals in particular is beyond the mere stay-at-home imagination to picture. There are sheer slopes cut with as many as eight hundred steps along the guard-line, almost perpendicular precipices of thousands of feet; sometimes it crosses great chasms by precarious bridges—there is one suspension-bridge of rattan and wire more than four hundred feet long. As water must be carried to the tops of the hills, in sections of bamboo, as well as everything else to be used by the expedition, the work is not only hard but dangerous, many coolies having been killed in the past; and the carriers are rarely volunteers. Hence there is a tithing system by which each village can be made to supply its quota of workmen, though these are paid good Formosan wages. Some of the tamer tribes can be made into baggage-carriers, and there are not a few savages as guardsmen, mostly if not entirely from the southern part of the island. The weather is as treacherous as the savages; sudden mist, torrential rain, and what the Japanese at least consider 223“bitter” cold, hamper the punitive expeditions. Yet the guards along the aiyu-sen are fighting somewhere more or less all the year around.

Except for the commanders, in comparatively safe places, there are now very few Japanese guardsmen; nearly all of them are Formosans, island-born Chinese or tamed savages, who, at last report, were paid from seven to fifteen yen a month, according to grade and length of service, an allowance during punitive expeditions, and a hundred yen for their grieving families if they were killed in line of duty. A favorite scheme has always been, even before Japanese days, to get one savage village to kill off another by putting a price on the heads taken, thus making it possible for the skull-gatherers to kill two birds with one stone, as it were. The Japanese will tell you that this has never been government policy but that “individual policemen do it, strictly against orders”—the same excuse we heard in Korea, and from our own pacifiers in Haiti. Outspoken Nipponese confess that some of the outrageous acts of the head-hunters, as when they rose one night not many years ago and slew all the Japanese in a border district, are due to the misconduct of the Japanese or Formosan guardsmen, particularly the world-wide and age-old misdemeanor of “fooling with the women.”

As a general rule, given the difference in temperament between the two divisions, suppression is the 224policy toward the fierce northern tribes and development toward the more gentle southerners, though there are mixtures of the two treatments. The Taiyals are treacherous, like all true savages, as well as ferocious and brave. These tattooed savages of the north had long experience with Chinese authorities before the Japanese came; hence they are adepts at chicanery. They make an agreement with the Japanese to let them into a new district, and then attack their camphor-stills, perhaps destroying the whole camp, cottages and all. When they have been generously filled with sake at some “savage-station” along the guard-line they have often turned upon their “benefactors” and carried their heads home as souvenirs of the festive occasion. There have been some real North American Indian massacres; they have been known to destroy entire Formosan villages; one battle with the Taiyals cost 272 casualties among the Japanese and their assistants—and in savage warfare the dead are far more numerous than the groaning. When these little misunderstandings become acute, the Japanese have two ways of clearing them up,—by sending out a punitive expedition or by blockading the savages, cutting off their right to barter with the outside world until they come to terms. By this latter method they have been made to rebuild camphor-stills and cottages, the whole camp complete.

At very frequent intervals along the aiyu-sen there 225are gates, a group of police buildings, and three or four guards. Every fourth or fifth of these is a “superintendent’s station,” with a Japanese commander, a doctor, perhaps another official or two. An inspector is in charge of each group of four or five of these superintendencies; there is, of course, a telephone system around the entire guard-line. It is only at these superintendents’ stations that the savages are allowed to barter with the outside world, and that barter is only permitted on condition that they obey the instructions of the authorities, furnish reports on various tribal affairs, and so on. Except for armed expeditions against them, which are costly in money and often in lives, the only effective punishment which the Japanese can mete out to naughty savages is to take away their right to barter their forest products and game for the things they covet or require. If they are good little children their overlords give them agricultural implements, seeds, medicine, medical treatment, and in some cases even allow them guns and ammunition. Neither savages nor those who live outside the guard-line are allowed to pass it without a special permit. Even against wild men with slight requirements and plenty of natural resources, who ought to be able to supply themselves everything they need, this economic pressure is often sufficient to make them behave. When it is not, there is nothing to do but “lose face” or fight.

Head-hunting, like many other sports, is double-edged, 226and the savages have long been familiar with the thought of losing their own skulls. Hence they are very formidable enemies. The Japanese have constructed bullet-proof, loopholed forts, barbed-wire entanglements, mines, and wire fences, the latter in some places locally electrified by harnessing mountain streams; hand-grenades, sometimes mountain- and field-guns, are used; on the east coast war-ships have occasionally been called upon to subdue belligerent villages. The electric barriers are widely notorious, but even those residents not very friendly to the Japanese admit that they use them to protect themselves, not in the hope of exterminating the savages whom they have not yet succeeded in subjugating. Besides, the savages are nobody’s fools. Perhaps one or two of them electrocuted themselves when the scheme was first introduced, more than a decade ago, but the burnt child of nature also learns to avoid the fire. Now they dig holes under the electrified fence, or build bamboo stiles over it—they are expert bridge-builders, as the many suspension-bridges of rattan and bamboo which they have thrown across great mountain chasms and torrential gorges testify—and men in need of heads come over or under the barrier in the dead of night, or at some momentarily unguarded spot, armed with rifles, with which they are suspiciously well supplied, though spears, long curved machete-like knives, and slender 227bows and arrows are perhaps more general, and lie in ambush for victims.

But it may be that a more modern method, one that has proved effective in many another land, will do away with the necessity of using armed force to complete the conquest of Formosa: drink is doing for the savages almost as fast as it is for those Americans who cannot bring themselves to accept prohibition. Among the Taiyals also wood-alcohol is said to be almost as free as air—except in price and after-effects. It is rumored that the Japanese are not insisting on complete abstinence in the mountains, and it would be more or less human if they look not too severely upon a certain amount of head-hunting among the tribes themselves, so long as they respect the taboo on those outside the guard-line. For the thinner the population the sooner the mountainous territory will be subdued and the greater the amount of it that can be exploited. The holders of Taiwan promise to set aside reservations for the savages as they take in more of their estate, and probably on the whole they are handling the situation as fairly and humanely and efficiently as we would; as we have, for instance, in Santo Domingo or the Philippines.

XXXI

There are distinct evidences of blood-relationship between the savages of Taiwan and the inhabitants of the southern islands of Japan proper. Japanese who have lived long in Formosa confess that they cannot tell a head-hunter from one of their own people merely by his features. To Westerners the mountaineers look almost exactly Japanese, except that the eyes seem a bit more liquid, a trifle wider open, with that wild something in them of untamed animals which distinguishes the genuine savage the world over. Not merely do their features suggest the same origin as their would-be rulers; they are of about the same size and build, perhaps a bit larger, thanks to their more open-air life. It is coming to be believed by many that they and the Japanese are both Malay tribes which history has driven in different directions. Possibly they are the same people, who fought their way up from the south, this branch getting side-tracked and lost among the mountain fastnesses of Formosa and going, or remaining, wild, while the head-hunting propensities of the other branch turned to more modern methods. It is a captivating thought, and 229would make the “Jap man’s burden” all the more justified—merely the task of reclaiming his own lost brethren.

Young braves of a wild Formosan tribe, whom he who cares to keep his head might do well to avoid meeting far from the protecting Japanese overlords

A Japanized woman from the mountain-dwelling tribes of Formosa

One might not think to look at her that her father probably had a dozen or more trophies in his slate-built skull-cupboard

230Certainly I had to look twice to recognize that the boys in a frontier school at one of the advance stations in Taiyal-land, dressed as they were in uniform kimonos of black and white plaid, were not what they seemed at first sight, but the sons of men who were recently, and in some cases probably still are, hunting the heads of their neighbors. In fact, there was one man among the two score boys who had the right to wear the hawk-feather of the successful hunter, a sturdy fellow of thirty, still with that peculiar wild-animal look in his eyes, who was in the same primary class as his son of six. It struck me that it would be a more thankful job to try to teach the son, an impression in which the Japanese teacher, in his pedagogue-gendarme uniform, bore me out.

In the camphor-camps and on the plantations where they accept employment as the first step toward giving up their chief tribal pastime, the savages work hard and are docile; those at least who are caught young learn moderately well in school, and they are on the whole not bad neighbors. In fact, we should get over the strange notion that because a man has the hobby of collecting the skulls of his fellows rather than postage-stamps or “old masters” he cannot also be in many ways quite an agreeable individual. I know many a man purporting to be civilized 231with whom I would much less rather go off on a camping-trip than with the fiercest head-hunter I have ever seen—once we got on a proper footing as to the inflated value I put on my own top-piece. It is said that doctors and teachers can go safely anywhere among them, if they carry proper and conspicuous credentials, and provided the Japanese will let them. The visitor who gets permission from, or evades, the government guards and goes at once to the chief of the tribe, makes himself popular by petting the children, treating the sick, and other forms of courtesy, until he has convinced his hosts that he is harmless, has rather a good chance of bringing his head back to civilization on his shoulders. Yet it is well not to gamble too recklessly. Though I have no illusions as to the utility of that portion of my anatomy about the neck, I several times had the feeling in Formosa that sturdy young men with disconcertingly piercing eyes and distressingly large knives at their waists were gazing at it with at least mild covetousness. Yet this may have been merely the result of a guilty conscience.

In short, they are not bad fellows, once one can overlook their little idiosyncrasy of gathering skulls that are not yet ripe for the garnering. They make good chauffeurs, for instance; certainly we all know chauffeurs who would make good head-hunters, and others whom we would be delighted to turn over to the innermost tribes of Formosa. I have already 232mentioned how no small number of these naïve children of the mountains have degenerated into rickshaw-runners, though I doubt whether they sprint between the shafts with anything like the vim that they did in pursuing or saving a head. Nor should we be too hard on them; for it is the old, old story,—the women are the cause of all the trouble. It seems that no self-respecting mountain girl will marry a youth who has not proved his male prowess by taking a head; and when life without a companion becomes too miserable to be endured there is nothing for the most kind-hearted young Taiyal to do but to dig or bridge his way over the electric barrier, bringing his weapons and his provisions with him, and wander up and down the border, perhaps for weeks, until the chance comes to bring home proof of his manhood. True, a human head is required on every other important occasion in savage life. A lad not only cannot win a bride but he cannot join the adults in the tribal “club-house” until he has performed this manly feat; the savages must have new skulls for the seed festival each autumn, for without them their gods would not give them good luck during the year to follow; they need them whenever they hold any religious rite or perform any of the ceremonies with which life is marked; when a dispute occurs between members of a tribe the decision goes to the one who first gets a head; the man with the most trophies in his “skull-shelf” becomes automatically the chief of 233his tribe. They have come to consider the custom indispensable to their existence, just as we do clothing or automobiles. Yet who can say that if the women did not force them to make that first start in the evil habit they would ever succumb to it on the later and less important occasions in life?

What a pity, too, that transportation is so costly and communication between kindred souls on opposite sides of the earth so difficult! Otherwise the head-hunters of Formosa might share the same heads with their brethren in the habit, the jívaros of the upper Amazon, and either reduce by half the consumption of raw materials or double the finished product. For whereas the jívaros remove all the bones and shrink the rest of the head down to the size of an orange, the Formosans care nothing for the flesh or the most comely face but prize only the bare, freshly boiled skulls. These are placed before the home of the proud hunter, upon or in a “skull-shelf,” sometimes a mere straight counter of bamboo, more often a cupboard made of slate, with a pigeonhole for each skull, quite like our post-office boxes, so that in calling upon your head-hunting friend you can tell his importance in the Taiyal scheme of things just as easily as one of our own countrymen can see whether or not there is any mail for him at last, without hindering the postmaster from weighing out sugar or cutting up plug tobacco.

But life has become bitter and drab indeed among 234some of the tribes of Formosa, especially near the guard-line, where they are so hard pressed by unkindly civilization that they have come perforce to be satisfied with monkey-skulls! I am not in a position to state what kind of wives these poor degenerates get, but the imagination easily pictures the old men of the tribe grumbling about the worthlessness of the new generation and telling the “club-house” that things were not like this in the good old days when men were men. The Japanese assert that their police or their troops have at one time or another been through virtually all the savage territory, in such force as was necessary, and that they have destroyed most of the “skull-shelves.” Thus monuments of art always suffer before the ruthless military conqueror! But the more genuine of the savages insist on starting new collections, and now and then it is the Japanese themselves who contribute trophies with which they have parted with the most poignant regret. The different tribes who still honor the ways of their forefathers continue to exchange heads between themselves; within the past year there are known to have been at least three Formosan Chinese heads taken, though the Japanese claim to have passed this twelvemonth without any such physical loss of face. There is no record of the savages of Formosa ever having taken a Caucasian head. It may be that they have heard rumors of recent doings in the Western world and have decided 235that such skulls cannot be of any use to them; or, again, the records may be incomplete, for this is one of the unkindnesses of man toward man which the victim very rarely has the face to report to the police.

XXXII

The savages of Taiwan raise excellent tobacco, profoundly scorning the Japanese Government Tobacco Monopoly Bureau; they make, and both sexes smoke, bamboo-root pipes, not of the very long, one-piece type so common among the Chinese, but much like our corn-cob, the bowl upright on a small stem. Most of them chew betel-“nut.” They are fond of peanuts, covering the floors of their “club-houses” with the shells; they grow some rice and more potatoes, and have a way of preserving the tubers for long periods. Their low houses are thatched but usually built of slabs of slate, laid flat, with carved beams under the eaves and, out in front, a wide veranda, or family club-house, floored with slate or flat stones, very much like the paepae of the South Seas. Their kitchen utensils are crude, including some shallow iron kettles, such as are widely used by the Chinese, and they pound their rice or millet with a wooden pestle in log-made mortars. Furniture is one of the least serious of their problems, so long as the family “skull-shelf” is kept in good condition. Children are carried papoose-fashion, and the bearing of other burdens, also almost exclusively 237the privilege of the women, is done on the back, with a “tump-line” or head-strap across the forehead, like our North American Indians and so many other primitives throughout the globe. In fact, it is astonishing how many customs are strikingly alike among wild people of opposite sides of the earth; at times they seem almost as unoriginal as their civilized brethren.

Even the women of the domesticated Taiyal head-hunters who hang about the camphor-camps have their faces tattooed in blue, with two broad bands in long diagonal lines, like symmetrical cat-scratches, from the corners of the mouth and nose to where they disappear in the hair near the ears. This makes them look astonishingly like the blue-mustache-wearing Ainu women at the other end of the Japanese Empire, though there is probably no relationship except savagery between the two races. Sometimes there are short marks of tattooing on the chin, and usually a column of short horizontal lines down the middle of the forehead. The men and the older boys have a narrow strip of horizontal blue lines from the hair to the bridge of the nose, while there are many individual and tribal variations on the general custom of making pictorial supplements of their faces. When the time comes that the youth or girl must be tattooed he or she is laid out on the ground, or on a reed mat, and experts, usually old women, strike the blue stuff in with a kind of coldchisel 238and hammer. The victim is said never to cry out, but the mother or some other kind friend generally volunteers to sit on him during the ceremony.

The tribesmen wear plenty of clothing, which they make themselves; for, unlike that portion of Formosa which the wild men leave to the weaklings of civilization, it is by no means always midsummer in the mountains. The men and the boys in most cases wear a single garment from shoulders to loins; on cold and rainy days they wrap themselves in a rough-woven blanket that seems to go entirely around them, like the proverbial barrel of the clothesless bather. Those who have taken a head wear a hawk-feather in the top of their own, which is sometimes covered with a cross between a hat and a cap but is more commonly bare, their long hair done up in various more or less fantastic forms of coiffure, according to the tribe, individual vanity, and the proximity of festival-time. The women, including those who come into the camphor-camps, dress in a loose kind of skirt and a cloak-waist open under the arms, showing the outer sides of their breasts. Like all habitual mountain-climbers, unburdened with shoes, both sexes have overgrown and widely separated great toes. Most Taiyal belles sport necklaces of what seem to be human teeth. Men and women alike have various ideas of ear-adornment, such as bamboo tubes thrust through the pierced and stretched lobes, and more or less universally deck 239themselves out in other wild-man forms of ornament. Some of the chiefs and their wives are very resplendent in their court regalia.

The plains to the south of the magnificent Taiyal territory are less inducive to independence of spirit, and both land and people peter out in interest, the far southerners becoming mere farmers, with many schools now among them. Some become assistant policemen and even rise to the height of assistant school-teachers, though they must teach only in the Japanese language and are considered civilized only in so far as they take on Japanese manners and point of view. There are still some small wild tribes scattered through the southern half of the island, but, in the main, pacification has ended there and development begun. The Paiwan of the extreme south, a more pleasant-looking people than most of the others, make crudely carved stone images, vaguely resembling totem-poles. They cradle their children by hanging them in baskets to vine-ropes swinging from the branch of a tree. Some of them have so far deserted their old ways as to build split-bamboo houses somewhat like those of the Japanese, and after a certain schooling are prone to mix their own garb with that of their conquerors. They make good guardsmen, but they, too, had until quite recently their “skull-shelves,” of the pigeonhole variety, and they still have their club-houses, commonly built high above the ground on bamboo scaffolding.

240Over on Botel-Tobago, one of the many small islands off the coast of Formosa, there is an extremely primitive race called the Yami. But there must somewhere be an end to everything, and I beg to be excused the arduous sea-going labor of visiting the Pescadores, the Kuriles, far-flung Yap, and the Marshall Islands, so recently forced to give allegiance to the divine mikado, merely to round out this hasty journey through some of the nooks and corners of the Japanese Empire.