The Japanese Empire

CHAPTER IV LIVING WITH THE JAPANESE — A Japanese Meal — How They Sleep in Japan — Up with the Sun — Japanese Hotels — A Scarcity of Furniture — All Expect Tips

When my family and I reached Tokyo, the largest hotel in the city had recently burned down. Since there are few “foreign” hotels in the capital, and many foreigners had come for the cherry-blossom season, we could not get a room. Fortunately I had a letter of introduction to a Japanese business man, and when he had telephoned to every foreign hotel he could think of, without success, he asked one of his employees to give us lodging. The man sent word to his wife that we were coming, and by and by we were taken to our host’s home in the merchant’s automobile.

The house was in Ushigome-ku, one of the most densely populated wards in the Japanese capital. It was much like the homes of thousands of his neighbors, resembling a large wooden box with a tile roof, and set back from the street in a pretty little garden. Across the front of it was a veranda, raised about two feet above the ground and carpeted with grass mats, like those in the Japanese shops.

When we approached, the whole family came out to the edge of the veranda to greet us. There was the old grandmother, the wife, and three children, all dressed in kimonos and in their stocking feet. Even 46the man, who had hurried home ahead of us, now wore a kimono. For, while many of the business men of Japan, and the government officials, wear European clothing at their offices, they change to their more comfortable native costume when they get home in the evening. All the family stood in a row and bowed very low to us several times, each time rubbing their thighs with their hands, which is a form of Japanese politeness. We had to sit down on the edge of the veranda and take off our shoes. To go into a Japanese house with shoes on is very bad manners indeed. We were ashamed to find that there was a hole or two in our stockings. That never happens among the Japanese, for they know that the feet of their stockings will be seen by other people many times a day. When we had left our shoes on the ground along the edge of the veranda, we went inside.

Downstairs this family had a small living room with a wooden floor. In it were a foreign table and chairs, contrary to the Japanese custom. Bowls of sweetmeats—candied fruits, preserved ginger, and other Japanese delicacies—were set before us. The family were very kind, but as we could not talk to them we had to do the best we could with signs. The Japanese do not often use signs, and they had hard work understanding ours. If we pointed at a thing, they might come and examine the finger we were pointing with, rather than notice what we were pointing at. Our little boy became very restless and wanted to run about the house. But we had to stop 47him, because all the inside walls were made of paper and he might have run through them.

© E. M. Newman, from Publishers Photo Service

Japanese ladies in their best dress gathered about the tea service or dinner, which is always eaten on the floor.

By and by we were taken to our room upstairs, reached by a very steep and narrow stairway. It was large enough for a dozen people, yet there was not a single piece of furniture in it, nor anything else! The floor was covered with thick, soft grass matting, the walls were of rice paper on little wooden frames, and the ceiling looked quite frail. On some of the walls bamboos and flowers and birds were painted. These surroundings interested us, but we were all hungry and we looked forward eagerly to supper.

Presently a servant girl entered noiselessly with three cushions and laid them on the floor. We were expected to kneel on these instead of sitting on chairs. Quite a time went by, and then the girl appeared again, carrying a little table, with legs hardly a foot high. Before long she slipped in a third time and brought us food. There was a small wooden tub with a cover, which she placed on the floor beside the table. On the table itself she put several dishes of strange looking food and, kneeling down beside us, began to serve our dinner. When she took the cover off the wooden tub we saw that it was full to the brim of steaming hot rice. She ladled some of this into three bowls, using a wooden scoop, and set them before us. There was no sugar, no milk, no water, no salt and pepper, no butter, no bread; and there were no knives, forks, or spoons. Instead, we were each given two slender sticks, like long lead-pencils. Fortunately we also had a utensil made of porcelain that looked something like a spoon, or our small boy, at least, might not have been able to eat at all.

We were supposed to begin with bowls of soup, an almost raw egg in each. Then we had stewed seaweed, black beans that rolled around as we tried to pick them up one at a time with the chopsticks, and several other things that were not at all like our American food. The pickled raw fish we simply could not eat. Our distaste for this dish amused the servant. She kept filling our rice-bowls from the 49wooden tub every time we had eaten a few mouthfuls of the soft but almost dry rice. The Japanese often eat five or six bowls of rice at a meal, and the servant could not understand our small appetite for what in Japan takes the place of bread. If you have been used to bread all your life you will be surprised to find how hard it is to eat a meal without it. There is some rather poorly baked bread in Japan, but outside the foreign hotels not many people eat it.

In time we became quite used to Japanese food, and liked some of it, especially the omelets that are not very different from ours. But that evening I am afraid we went to bed rather hungry, in spite of the kindness of our hosts. It was a long time before we got to bed, too, and to tell the truth what we finally lay down on were not really beds at all. The servant carried out all the food, all the dishes, and even the table. While we squatted rather forlornly in the middle of the big bare room, my son fell asleep, with his head on his cushion.

To pass the time we stepped to the half-open paper wall at the back and looked across the garden and a little gorge behind the house, upon the crowded ward of Ushigome. Hundreds of electric lights shone among the thousands of little wooden houses, especially along the streets lined with shops. There a great crowd seemed to be moving back and forth, for we could hear the scraping of thousands of geta, mingling together like a great chorus. Later I went out to one of the shopping streets and found it completely filled with Japanese, all in their native costumes, 50from one side of open shop-fronts to the other, so that it looked like an endless river of people flowing back and forth.

Photo from Keystone View Co., Inc., of N. Y.

A Japanese bedroom, which will be a living room in the daytime. The bed consists of quilts laid on the mat-covered floor, with a pillow as hard as a brick to protect the women’s hair-dress.

But at last the servant came in again, this time bringing a huge armful of thick quilts. She laid these, one on top of another, on the floor, and placed at one end of the pile three hard little bags that 51seemed to be filled with dry beans. These we were expected to use as pillows. The Japanese are so fond of hard pillows that many of them use wooden ones. Then she put up a huge mosquito-net, fastening its corners to the corners of the room, which was almost completely filled with it. Before she had quite finished, however, the grandmother came in and ordered her to take all the quilts out again. Though we could not understand the old lady’s words, we made out from her actions and her voice that she was scolding the servant for having given guests from far-off America cotton quilts instead of the best silk ones. The girl then brought beautiful silk-covered quilts and made the bed all over again.

The grandmother gave us to understand that there was a bathroom downstairs, and I decided to have a bath before retiring. I found a long narrow room, with a wooden floor containing several little tubs. One side was taken up by a large square wooden tank filled to the brim with steaming water and almost five feet deep. This water was heated by a fire under the tank, beneath the house, and it was so hot that I nearly scalded a foot when I started to step into it. The Japanese like their baths very hot, and they get used to bathing in water which an American could hardly dip his hands in. Their way of bathing is to fill one of the little wooden tubs with hot water from the tank, soap and scrub themselves thoroughly, rinse, and then get into the tank and soak until they look as if they had been boiled. When the soaking is finished, the bather 52pours cold water over himself with another of the little wooden basins, and dries and dresses himself. Several persons may use the tank at the same time, but we do the same thing in our swimming pools.

When I returned to our room it seemed very “stuffy.” I found that the servant had closed all the paper walls, and also the sliding wooden walls on the outside of the house. These wooden walls are made of many sections, and during the day are kept in narrow spaces partitioned off for them at the corners of the house. At night everything is shut as tight as a drum, for the Japanese think it is not good for the health to let night air into a sleeping-room. I noticed that the bright electric light hanging from the ceiling had not been turned off and remembered that most Japanese do not like to sleep in complete darkness. There are many people like that, in all lands, just as there are millions who shut out the night air when they sleep.

As our family’s likes and dislikes were the opposite, I turned off the light and found a way to open the wooden outer wall. But our hosts must have been watching, afraid, perhaps, that some harm would come to us under their roof. For I had hardly dropped asleep when I heard someone come in, close the wall again, and turn on the light. I saw it was the grandmother. Two or three times more I switched off the light and let in some air, but the worried old lady would not let us run such risks. At last I took the electric bulb out of its socket, and she finally seemed to understand that we did not like to 53sleep in a lighted room. But I could not find any way to persuade her to let the night air come in, and we therefore had a very restless sleep.

We were not allowed to lie abed late in the morning. Almost before daylight, we were awakened by a great banging and slamming, and found the servants opening the outer walls and putting them away section by section in the places for them at the corners of the house. The shoji, or paper walls, were also opened all about us, and we felt so embarrassed, lying on the floor in the center of the open house, that we quickly rose and dressed. The tub of steaming rice, and some other food much like that of the evening before, was brought in, and we did our best to breakfast on a meal that was not in the least like the one we would have had at that hour at home. It was delightful now to sit on the soft mats and cushions—for the servant had carried off the quilts and beanbags that had formed our bed—and look out into the garden, its flowers and shrubs brilliant in the sunshine, a bird here and there gaily singing.

We decided that there are pleasant and unpleasant things in every land. When I am asked in which of the many countries I have visited I would prefer to make my home, I answer that I would like to take certain things from this country, and that country, and other countries, and put them all together into one that would have only pleasant features and 54no unpleasant ones. Some of the nice things I would borrow from Japan. For instance, it seems very good to leave one’s shoes, with all the dust and mud of the street, at the door rather than to bring them into the house. Frail paper walls are fine when a bright sun is shining through them, or when they can be opened wide on a pretty garden. But it is not so pleasant to have to be careful all the time not to put your hand or your elbow through the wall of the house! It is convenient to be able to fold one’s bed and lay it away out of sight during the day, and furniture sometimes is a bother. Still, one would like a few bureau drawers and closets and hooks, instead of having to hang everything on the floor, so to speak. Those of us who have not been trained to it from childhood find it rather difficult, also, to squat on our haunches on a cushion instead of sitting in a chair. When the average American man stands up in a Japanese house he feels enormous, like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. Perhaps the most unpleasant thing about Japanese living, to us of the western hemisphere, is that there is never any privacy about it. Nobody knocks and there are no doors to lock. Anyone in the house may push aside the walls of your room and leave it no room at all! Someone may even walk into the bathroom when you are taking a bath! The Japanese think nothing of being seen without their clothing, perhaps because they have lived all these centuries in paper houses, with sliding walls. Then, too, the houses are seldom quiet. You can hear everyone else every 55time he moves or speaks. So, though the Japanese are not a noisy race, seldom quarreling and not much given to chatter, people who mind noise will not enjoy living in a Japanese house.

We never again lived in the home of a wholly Japanese family, but in traveling about the country I stopped in many a Japanese hotel or inn that was quite like that Tokyo home. The hotels for foreigners in Japan are stone or brick or wooden buildings such as we have in America. I always feel sorry, however, for the traveler through the Japanese Empire who stops only in these, living much as he would at home. He misses a great deal that is interesting by not staying in genuine Japanese inns, which he would find not at all bad when he got used to them.

The typical Japanese hotel is a building much like one of the family homes, except that it is larger. It has the same sliding paper walls, the same wooden outer walls that can be pushed aside during the day. The floors are covered with mats, the chairs are cushions and the beds are quilts piled one on top of another. As in the home, the electric lights are kept blazing all night and not a crack is left for the night air.

Let us suppose that we have just stepped off the train in some Japanese city where there is no foreign hotel, or that we have decided to stay at a Japanese inn. We might call the city Hiroshima, since that is where all that is to follow first happened to me, 56many years ago. As I was weary of sitting still on the train, I declined the offers of the half hundred rickshaw-men at the station, and walked to the hotel. I knew I should have to depend on the sign language there, but I thought I could manage it. The front of the hotel I chose was wide open, with a raised, mat-covered floor the whole length of it. I had hardly stepped up to this when the hotel owner or manager, several young men who seemed to be his assistants, and half a dozen servant-girls ran forward noiselessly and all began bowing to me, over and over again. They were all smiling, for it is a part of Japanese politeness to show only a happy exterior, no matter how sad one may be.

This time my shoes, and the geta of the other guests, were put into a kind of closet near the door; perhaps to prevent their being stolen, for of course there are thieves in Japan, as in every other country. The room to which I was taken upstairs was very much like that in the home of our Tokyo hosts. Along one side of it was a little veranda overhanging a large and busy street of the town. On the opposite side was another veranda, above a pretty little courtyard which was completely surrounded by the hotel. In this courtyard there were dwarf pine trees and other small trees trained into strange shapes, a little fountain with its jet of water flashing in the sunshine and, of course, many flowers and some birds.

In Japanese hotels there are no dining rooms. Each guest has his dinner served in his room, at any 57hour he likes. When he wants it, he merely claps his hands together three times, and a nesan, or “older sister,” appears. That is merely a polite Japanese name for the hotel servant. She falls on her knees, bows her head almost to the floor matting, and then goes to bring the dinner.

© E. M. Newman, from Publishers Photo Service

Many Japanese homes, as well as hotels, parks and other public places, have little ponds, fountains, evergreen trees, flowers, lanterns, and other things to beautify them. This is the garden of the hotel at Miyajima. (See Chapter XI.)

The food and the way it was served were much the same in that Hiroshima inn as in the Tokyo home. The servant-girl kept filling my rice-bowl before it was half empty, and as soon as I had drunk my tea from the little cup without a handle, she 58poured out more. This time there was no seaweed, but there were pickled radishes and lily bulbs, and a kind of salad made of the heart of a small palm tree. One or two of the hot dishes were so much like some we have in American restaurants that they hardly looked strange at all. All the food was brought on a little lacquered tray, except of course the tubful of steamed rice. Then the dining service was whisked away again, and the quilt bed was made up.

There is little more furniture in a Japanese inn room than in one at a home. Sometimes there is a kind of clothes rack, and a curious wooden thing upon which to rest your elbow while you squat on a floor cushion. Possibly there is a tiny writing desk without legs. If it is cold, the servant will bring in a hibachi. This is a big brass vase or a square wooden box, filled half with ashes and half with glowing charcoal, which takes the place of a stove in heating a Japanese room. The Japanese have no furnaces, and their houses have no chimneys. Yet all except the more southern islands of the empire have real winters, with snow and ice. Having only these poor little charcoal burners, the people would suffer severely from the cold if it were not for another custom. As the weather becomes colder and colder, they put on more and more cotton-padded kimonos one outside another, so that in midwinter the Japanese look like a much fatter race than they do in summer. 59Even so, their costumes, their paper houses, and many of their customs are not suitable for wintertime. This fact has made some scientists think that the Japanese must originally have come from islands farther south, where it is always summer.

Before turning off the light in my hotel room at Hiroshima, and crawling into my stack of quilts, I noticed that the paper walls were painted not merely with trees and flowers and birds, but with several upright rows of Japanese letters. These were sacred texts or moral sayings taken from the classics, or perhaps pretty poems, all meant to make the guest feel more comfortably surrounded. In the morning the usual early noises wakened me, for the Japanese do not believe in sleeping late, though they often doze during the day.

When a guest in a Japanese hotel pays his bill, he must remember that everyone who has in any way served him expects a tip, not even excepting the owner or manager himself. Guests in Japanese inns often pay out as much in presents to the people who have waited on them as they do for the night’s lodging and food. The inn people will all be there to wish the traveler good-by, just as they welcomed him, all standing in a row at the door, bowing low and rubbing their thighs politely. In olden times no guest ever left a yadoya, or Japanese inn, without also being given a present. It might be a fan, a small towel with a bit of Japanese scenery painted 60on it, or a brightly colored yard of cloth for carrying small articles in the way they often are carried in Japan. But things have grown so expensive in Japan, just as they have in other countries, that now the innkeeper can hardly afford to give a departing guest any souvenir more expensive than a tissue-paper napkin or a painted card. Yet he cordially invites the guest to come again.

There are some things about Japanese hotels with which a fussy person can find fault. There are a few things that are very annoying. But of one thing the guest may be sure—there will be no indifference shown him by the hotel people. All, from the manager to the coolie or nesan who tries to help him take his bath, will do their best to serve him perfectly, foresee his wants, and keep cheerful and smiling in his presence. Therefore one does not begrudge the tips.

CHAPTER V THE JAPANESE AT WORK AND PLAY — A Display of Toys — The Schools of Japan — The Use of the Abacus — Fencing and Jiu-jitsu — Other Games — The Wrestlers of Japan — Wrestling in a Queer Way

When we landed in Japan from our voyage across the Pacific, huge, gaily colored paper fish were flying like banners in the breeze above thousands of houses. Some were in clusters; some were so large that they might have been taken for whales. When we inquired, we learned that they were displayed in honor of the boys. In Japan each person does not have an individual birthday, but certain dates in the year are considered the anniversary of everyone, no matter on what particular day each was born. A Japanese baby born in December is said to be two years old in January, because it was regarded as a year old as soon as it was born and everyone is considered to be a year older each New Year’s Day. But the birthday celebrations of the girls are in March and those of the boys in May. Therefore, as it was now May, every family with a boy, especially a new baby boy, flew a paper fish in his honor.

This fish is supposed to be the carp, though the big paper things, swollen out with the wind that blows in from the sea, sometimes look as much like pickerel or bullheads. The carp is a sturdy fish, which fights its way even up high waterfalls, and is 62not easily discouraged. Therefore it is regarded by the Japanese as a symbol of courage. They think, quite properly, that all boys should be as brave and persevering as the carp.

During the Boys’ Festival, every family in which there is a boy honors him by flying a paper fish.

If we had gone into some of the houses over which the fish were flying, we should have found all sorts of toys and boyish treasures laid out to make the boys happy. The Japanese are great makers of toys. There are whole shops given over entirely to playthings, most of them very gay in color. Because they are more easily broken than our toys, the boys become more careful of them. The usual reason for their flimsiness is that they are sold very cheaply. Some of the things that are laid out on the “fifth day of the fifth moon,” as the Boys’ Festival is called, are very old, for they are handed down from father to son, sometimes for many generations. Most of the toys are military ones, such as soldiers, weapons and flags. The Japanese have always been warriors, and every boy is expected to become a soldier, if necessary, and fight for the Mikado. As it is not much more than half a century since the Japanese began to dress, equip, and drill their armies like those of America and Europe, many of the old toys represent the curious armor, swords, and gaily dressed generals of the ancient days.

At the Girls’ Festival in March, dolls take the place of the paper fish. This time all the dolls in the house, some of them old ones that have been used for many generations, are set out. They remain for three days, and the girls pretend to feed them three times a day. Some of the dolls represent the Mikado and the Empress and the royal princes. These are especially honored.

No one can be long in Japan without seeing groups of children on their way to school. Every child in that country is expected to stay in school at least until he finishes what we would call the grammar grades. Girls in school do not wear kimonos, as they do at home, but skirts, jackets, long stockings, and usually leather shoes like ours. On their way to and from school they wear hats, although at other times they do not.

Boys and girls both carry their books and other school things in knapsacks held by a strap over one shoulder. If a pupil came to school carrying books under one arm, or swinging them from a strap, he would be scolded by the teacher and perhaps be punished. Because the Japanese are a very orderly people and like things done in an almost military way, the boys and girls on their way to school remind one of squads of soldiers. The boys often wear a kind of uniform, of dark cloth in cold weather and usually white during the summer. But whether or not they wear a complete uniform, almost every schoolboy, from the first grade to the last year at the university, has a uniform cap, something like those of our policemen, or of the officers of our navy. The teachers, who are nearly always men, also often have a kind of uniform. In some parts of the empire the teacher wears a sword, but this is only a sign that he is an officer of the Mikado. (You will find pictures of Japanese pupils and a teacher in Chapters XII and XIII.)

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Photo from Maude W. Madden

Suppose we call the little Japanese girl who owns these dolls Haru-ko San. They are mostly ancestral dolls (she calls them O-hina-sama), with the Emperor and Empress at the top under the canopy, and lower down courtiers, court musicians and others. On the lowest shelf is probably such a figure as a maiden carrying a water pail to remind Haru-ko San of household duties. And on the floor are three ordinary “play” dolls, which perhaps she really loves best, for the others must not be played with. The ancestral dolls are often dressed in handsome brocaded robes, and may cost a great deal. They are kept very carefully so that once a year, in March when the Doll Festival occurs, they may all be brought out and displayed. With them are shown the lacquered chests, kimono racks, trays, tables, and vases that the ancestral dolls would need for housekeeping. These too are very beautiful.

66In the olden days Japanese schools were very different from our own. Then the pupils studied very much as many Chinese boys still do. That is, they all squatted on the floor, rocked back and forth, and shouted at the top of their voices the words they were trying to learn. These words were taken from the old Japanese or Chinese classics, the ancient books of the Far East. Even small children were expected to learn long sentences and sometimes whole pages from solemn volumes either of poems or of morals, resembling sermons. When they learned to write, it was by holding sheets of tissue paper in the hand and painting upon them with a little brush made of camel’s hair.

The Japanese school children still write with such a brush, but they also learn to use a pen and even the typewriter. In the schools, more than anywhere else, we can see the influence our Western world has had on Japan. In all the cities big stone and brick buildings that look almost as if they had been brought bodily from America are filled with school children. There are benches and desks, blackboards and chalk boxes. The lessons are on many different subjects, just as in our schools, and not merely the old classics. Nor do the children any longer shout their lessons and memorize long passages. They learn to read much as American children do, though it takes them longer, and no wonder! Japan still has the written language of the Chinese, with every word represented by a very intricate sign, instead of separate letters that can be made up into all kinds of words. In place of an alphabet of twenty-six letters, the poor Japanese pupil has 67to memorize hundreds, and later thousands, of these queer drawings. It is easier to write these with a little brush than with a pen. Gradually, however, the Japanese are getting away from the difficult Chinese signs. In place of them they use much simpler ones called cana, which look something like our shorthand. Much of what now appears in Japanese newspapers and other popular publications is printed in cana.

These lines, which to us look so odd, would mean a great deal to a Japanese child. Together, they make a poem on “Spring,” which was written on thin paper with a little brush and handed in by a schoolgirl as an exercise in penmanship. The girl was a pupil of an American teacher in Japan, Mrs. Maude W. Madden. You will be interested to know that this “writing” received a prize. Here is the poem, in English:

The study of arithmetic in Japanese schools is still very different from what it is in ours. That is because even grown-up people of Japan do not do their figuring with pencil and paper but on the abacus or soroban. This has a frame like that of a slate. In place of the slate, however, there are stiff wires running from one side of the frame to the opposite side and on these wires little wooden balls are strung like beads. When a Japanese schoolboy, or a Japanese merchant or business man, wishes to add or subtract, to multiply or divide, he moves these balls back and forth skillfully until he finds his answer. He has to think, of course, when he is doing a sum, just as we do. But the balls show the result of each operation and he does not write it down. He gets the answer quickly.

Keystone View Co.

Japanese schoolboys are very fond of flying kites. Do you see the “rising sun” of Japan on these kites?

69The soroban, or calculating-board, as it is sometimes called, is used not only in Japan, but all over China, and even in Russia. The Russians have much larger ones, as if the little wooden balls of the Japanese and Chinese were not large enough for their bigger fingers. It is amusing to see how helpless the people of any of these lands are when they are asked to do even a simple exercise in arithmetic with pencil and paper. But then, you can imagine that an American professor of mathematics would not do any better if he were told to add or subtract on one of these frames that the Orientals find so simple.

After reading, writing, and arithmetic have been learned, the upper classes in Japanese schools go on much as ours do. There are laboratories, and lectures, and oral and written recitations, and mid-term and final examinations. There are gymnasiums, too, for the Japanese believe as throughly in building up strong bodies as did the ancient Spartans. I am reminded of the Spartans because that is what the Japanese are trained to be. A boy is not expected to cry out, no matter how much he is hurt. Nor, for that matter, is a girl expected to cry. All through life the people show themselves cheerful, however they may feel. To let one’s face show suffering or sorrow is regarded as bad manners.

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Japanese youths become quite expert as baseball players in spite of their hampering costume.

One of the oldest forms of exercise in Japan is fencing. Japanese fencers do not use thin, slender foils such as are common in Europe and America. When the Japanese schoolboy goes to the gymnasium for a fencing lesson, he puts heavily padded garments about his head and shoulders and a kind of armor about his waist. He wears thick gloves with padded gauntlets reaching to the elbows and a mask much like that of a baseball catcher. All this protection takes danger out of the sport, though to see two boys at it you would hardly think so. Instead of the steel sword of ancient Japan, each boy is armed with a bamboo shaped like a sword. With this each tries to strike the other as often as possible over the padded head or neck, on the wrists, or in the ribs. That is because in real fighting those would be the most vital places. The players dodge and shuffle back and forth on their straw sandals or bare feet, thrusting and striking at each other, and parrying as many blows as possible. The bamboo swords make a terrific noise every time they strike. To add to the uproar, the masked fighters howl fierce warlike cries of olden days as they leap about. This is an excellent form of exercise, because it gives the boys both agility and strength. Not only in the schools, but in the army and 71navy and in young men’s clubs and other organizations, fencing is part of the training and recreation.

Even more common is what the Japanese call jiu-jitsu. Almost every man in Japan knows how to use this ancient form of self-defense. It is not boxing and it is not wrestling, though it sometimes looks like both. Jiu-jitsu is the art of knowing just when and how to use slight strength in a way to make a stronger opponent defeat himself. Suppose a large clumsy boy tried to bully a small agile boy. The small boy, if he had been trained in this Japanese science of tricks, would know just when to give the big boy a pull or a push that would make him sprawl. Or if the small boy, at just the right moment, were to twist the arm or the neck or the back of the big fellow, the latter might find himself down before his greater strength could help him. After the defeat of great Russia by little Japan in 1905, some people called that a case of jiu-jitsu among nations.

Other games and exercises on Japanese playgrounds and gymnasium floors are more like our own. Schoolboys and university students play some football, though it is rather the English game of soccer than ours. During the last few years baseball has come to be quite a favorite sport among students in Japan. One of the universities in Tokyo held the baseball championship of the Far East for several years, defeating even the American teams sent out there to play. Its 72team, in fact, came to America, and won about as many games as it lost. As they are small and sinewy and quick on their feet, it is natural that the Japanese should be good baseball players.

Before we leave the schools we must not forget to mention the military games and drilling given to all the boys, and sometimes to the girls, by their gymnasium instructors. Because Japan has been a nation of soldiers for many centuries, it is natural that these instructors should often be men from the army. Then there is swimming. Every boy and girl in Japan is expected to learn to swim, which of course is an excellent idea, especially for a people that live on islands. I have seen a whole class in a pond or a little lake in a Japanese city park. The swimming teacher stands at the edge of the pool giving his lesson very much as he would at a desk. Pupils who have not yet learned to swim well wear red caps, and go only a little way out into the pond. The teacher can see them easily, and quickly help anyone in danger of drowning. The children who have learned to swim wear white bathing-caps, and are allowed to swim as far out into the little lake as they wish. The Japanese will not graduate a pupil until he or she learns to swim.

There is little if any boxing or prize fighting in Japan. But wrestling is an ancient Japanese sport, and the men who become best at it are as popular as champion boxers are in the United States. All other 73games played by the Japanese are for amateurs, but the wrestlers are professionals—that is, they make a business of wrestling. In fact, they are in a class by themselves, quite separate from the rest of the people. This difference is quickly seen, for though the Japanese as a whole are small, wiry people, the wrestlers are enormous men, often six feet tall and heavily built. Not only are they easily recognized by their great size, but they have special marks on their kimonos and they wear their hair long. Before the coming of Commodore Perry, all Japanese men let their hair grow to its full length and did it up in a topknot at the back of the head. To-day a man with long hair is usually a wrestler, and in a crowd of modern Japanese he looks like someone brought back from ancient times.

A group of Japanese wrestlers strolling between bouts. They are aggressive beings, who look down upon the ordinary people.

Great wrestling matches are held in Tokyo twice 74a year. We had arrived at the time of the spring games, and managed to get seats quite close to the ring. This was a raised platform, made of what seemed to be bags filled with sand or earth. (Perhaps if it were made of wood the wrestlers would be more likely to get hurt.) It stood in the center of an enormous auditorium that was shaped much like a circus tent. Hundreds of rows of seats, rising from the platform in the center, surrounded it. There were a number of boxes partitioned off for parties.

Japanese wrestling pavilions remind one a little of an American circus tent. The banners or signs advertise the attractions.

The wrestling lasts from morning until late at night. During the evening, or even in the afternoon when the best wrestlers get together in the finals, the auditorium is packed with spectators. Then the uproar must be great, for even with a smaller audience 75there was as much excitement as at one of our Big League baseball games. Many of the audience seemed to stay all day and evening, for tea and food were constantly being brought them from little restaurants and booths around the edge of the arena.

The first two men to step into the ring were large, but they seemed small by comparison with those who came later. The bouts are arranged just as they are in our boxing rings, starting with the less important wrestlers and working up to the biggest and most famous ones. When he first stepped into the ring each wrestler had his hair very carefully oiled and combed and tied in its topknot, and he wore what looked like a big apron, made of thick, costly cloth and gorgeously embroidered in gold and bright colors. These aprons, which are a symbol of the vocation and highly prized, were taken off, and the wrestlers stepped toward each other clothed only in a stout pair of trunks and a heavy belt.

The Japanese way of wrestling is quite different from our own. As soon as the referee had given the signal, the two men began raising first one leg and then the other, bringing each foot down on the earth-bag floor with a great stamp. They did this so many times that they suggested angry bulls pawing the earth. Then each took some salt and threw it about him in the ring, for they have a superstition that they cannot win a wrestling bout unless they do this. Finally each crouched with his knuckles on the 76ground, in the position of “On your mark!” Instead of pitching into each other at once, however, they remained perfectly motionless, staring at each other, for some time. Then they shifted about, stamping their bare feet some more, but still did not lay hands on each other. In Japanese wrestling, starting properly and getting the right holds are considered more important than the wrestling itself. Several pairs of these men spent five, six, even ten minutes crouching and eyeing each other and shifting about, and sometimes hardly that many seconds in actual wrestling when once they had come to grips.

When they finally did begin, we understood why it is more necessary for Japanese wrestlers to be heavy than to be muscular and well trained. The men usually grasped each other by the trunks they wore or by the belt. There was a sharp, swift tugging and pushing, with a loud slap now and then as one struck the bare skin of the other with his open hand. Suddenly the bout would be over, for the instant one man makes the other fall inside the ring or touch a foot or a hand outside it, he has won. Therefore the man who is heaviest and bulkiest and hardest to move has the advantage. In spite of their weight, however, the wrestlers are very hard, for they train by beating themselves against posts, and by similar forms of exercise.

To be the greatest wrestler in Japan is much like being the champion heavyweight boxer of America. The best wrestlers make large sums of money, and as they are men who give more attention to their 77physical than to their mental training, they do not always use good sense in spending it. Groups of them may sometimes be seen strutting about town as if they thought themselves very much above the ordinary people. But when they are in the ring they always instantly obey the referee, even though he is armed only with an old-fashioned fan.

The ticket booth of a wrestling pavilion. Contrast the garb of the ticket seller, squatting, with that of the two patrons. Western hats and caps seem to be popular even though the kimono may not be discarded in favor of coat and trousers.

CHAPTER VI JAPANESE EVENINGS — Playing in a Way All Their Own — The Popular Movies — The Japanese Do No Kissing — The Geisha Girls of Japan — A Tea-House Dinner

Every land has evening entertainments of some kind. In Japan people go to theatres, including the movies, and attend banquets in tea houses where there are geisha singers. Plays in the theatre, however, often begin at noon and last until midnight. One evening a Japanese friend took me to the Meiji-za, a great theatre of Tokyo. First of all we had to check our shoes at the door, as we might our hats and coats in America. To reach our box we went up a passageway covered with grass or reed matting. It was quite a different box from those in American theatres, for it was only about a foot deep, and in place of chairs there were half a dozen cushions on the matting-covered floor. We sat down cross-legged on these and looked about us. Most of the house was filled with long, shallow inclosures divided by what looked like low, narrow benches, and the floor sloped gently toward the stage. But the hundreds of people who were watching the play did not sit on the benches. They all squatted in the shallow inclosures, and used the benches as tables. The aisles, instead of being lower than the seats, were wooden runways raised above them. Boys in bare feet, or wearing foot mittens, ran noiselessly back and forth along 79these aisles, carrying tea and rice and other kinds of food and sweetmeats to the spectators. Many of the people sat in family groups, men, women, and children, sipping tea and eating with chopsticks while they watched the actors.

All the actors were men, but some of them played women’s roles. They were dressed in strange and gorgeous costumes, such as are never seen now in real life in Japan. The Japanese have a different taste in plays from that of Western peoples. They do not seem to like plays on modern, everyday subjects, but prefer the stories of ancient times. Probably that is the reason the actors do not look or act or speak like the people of to-day. If a Japanese actor walked out upon the stage in ordinary clothing, and spoke as he would talk on the street or in his house, he would be considered a very poor actor, or no actor at all. There are now a few theatres in Japan where plays of modern life are given, but nearly all the people prefer the old kind.

Instead of speaking in his everyday voice, each actor tries to talk deep down in his chest, so that he sounds like a giant down a well. When the part he is playing becomes very exciting, as during a fight with another character, he may roar like a lion. If he is playing the part of a woman, or a comic role, he turns and talks with a falsetto screech that suggests a boy whose voice is changing. To foreigners all this seems very queer indeed, but the Japanese think it is just the thing to do, and the more a man roars or screeches the more he is applauded. When they are pleased, the 80people do not clap their hands, and of course they cannot stamp their feet. Instead they shout louder and louder words that mean “Good!” or “Well done!”

In the play we saw, there were battles on the stage, with many generals in ancient costumes and much waving of strange old flags. Soldiers armed with spears and other ancient weapons, and dressed as Japanese soldiers were a thousand years ago, swept back and forth across the bare boards. There was almost no scenery. A paper arch set up in the middle of the stage was supposed to represent the gate of a city encircled by a great stone wall, and half a dozen sticks represented a forest. Sometimes the actors ran back and forth along the raised aisles, still reciting in their strange voices. Several times two of them, or even whole bands representing samurai (ancient warriors), fought with swords out on the runways, right over the heads of the audience. The spectators did not seem to mind this at all, but continued to sip tea and eat food from little bowls.

No audience ever gave better attention, however, for all the eating and drinking. When rival bands of warriors fought, the people watched every movement of their swords, and shouted with excitement when one man or another pretended to be killed. In our plays such a man would have lain where he had fallen until the curtain came down. But here there was no curtain, and the dead man merely got up and walked off the stage. The play that seemed to affect 81the audience most was one having a scene between a small boy and his father, who had promised to let himself be killed for the Emperor. There was much blowing of noses all over the house, and many of the spectators were almost crying out loud. Yet the play was very old, and had been given so often that probably every one in the audience knew what it was all about and what would be the ending of it. When one play was over, another began immediately. In one of the great theatres of Tokyo there is a revolving stage, so that the instant one set of actors finishes playing another group is swung around before the audience. But I did not enjoy these strange plays as much as the Japanese audience did, and after watching them for a couple of hours we went out, recovered our shoes, and took a rickshaw home.

The Japanese like old stories in their movies also. Passing along one of the theatre streets of Tokyo, or of Osaka, the second largest city of Japan, you would see long rows of posters. But instead of showing modern people in everyday dress, using telephones and automobiles, the posters are pictures of actors in ancient costumes, with strange old weapons. Men, you can see, have played the women’s parts in the film, and even in the picture you can make out that the actors had their faces painted white, as do those on the stage. Nowadays one hears occasionally of a Japanese screen actress, but it will be a long time before many enter that field.

82If you went into one of these motion-picture houses with the gay posters and Japanese lanterns before it, you probably would not understand much of the picture. The titles, being in Japanese, you could no more read than you could read hen tracks in the sand. Besides, the story of those ancient days in Japan, with the queer customs and point of view the Japanese then had, would be very different from any American story. Yet probably it would be as familiar to the Japanese children in the audience as the story of Washington crossing the Delaware is to you, and they would understand it even if there were no titles at all.

Those same children, however, have almost as hard a time understanding the kind of film-stories Americans know so well as we would to understand theirs. There are now quite a number of Japanese makers of their own kind of motion pictures. But often, when there are not enough films on hand to fill out the evening, the manager puts on an American film or two. So thousands of Japanese children have seen our American movie stars. Since few of the audience can read the English titles of these films, a man usually stands at one side of the darkened stage and shouts out the story in Japanese as it goes along. But perhaps he also cannot read English, and is not very sure what some of the action in the picture means. In many little ways Americans act quite differently from Japanese, and all such things are puzzling to a Japanese audience when it sees them on the screen. For instance, the Japanese do not shake hands, but 83bow up and down to each other, rubbing their thighs. So the small boys in the audience wonder what in the world the strange people in this picture mean by grabbing one another by the hand. Perhaps they are going to wrestle! But no, they are smiling at each other, and look very friendly, and before long they let go, without either one having tried to throw the other.

In Japan a man and woman, if well bred, do not speak to each other on the street; a wife would not take her husband’s arm in public and they certainly would not kiss each other good-by at the railway station. The Japanese do not kiss, anyway; a mother shows affection for her child by rubbing her cheek against his, and even that she does not do when strangers are looking. So you can imagine how odd American or European films seem to the Japanese, especially to the boys and girls, or to those grown-ups who have never traveled in other countries or read much about the ways of other people. Of all the motion pictures America sends abroad, the Japanese, and a great many other foreign peoples, seem to like best the Wild West films in which there is much horseback riding across rough and mountainous country. Perhaps this is because such films are easy to understand, as well as because any people as sturdy as the Japanese like what we sometimes call red-blooded action. It is interesting to know that such films are as popular in Japan as they are in America.

Keystone View Co.

Geisha girls in their gay costumes on their way to entertain guests.

When a Japanese business man wishes to entertain a client from another city, he does not invite him home to dinner, nor even to his club. Instead, he offers him an expensive meal at a restaurant or tea house, and has several geisha, or “accomplished persons,” in to help amuse his guest. The geisha are a class of women who sing and dance and play on instruments such as the koto and samisen, perform the elaborate tea ceremony that has come down from olden times in Japan, and do other things of that kind. Although they are, in a way, actresses, they do not appear on the stage, but at evening parties. The Japanese business man would almost certainly not bring his wife or daughters with him to the dinner he had arranged. He would, however, have at least one geisha 85to do nothing but wait upon his guest, to pour out his tea or wine, help him to choose the best food from what the regular waiting-girls of the restaurant brought, and so on. Others would arrange the flowers, squat on their cushions and thrum the samisen, sing the queer music of Japan; some, probably the youngest and most lively, would dance.

The same man who had his employee take us into his house invited my wife and me to a tea-house dinner in our honor. There were of course polite servants at the door to take our shoes, as well as our hats and coats. Soon we were all kneeling on cushions in a very fine room ten or twelve mats square, as the Japanese would say, and with beautiful paintings on the oiled paper walls. Three young women, in much more gay and costly kimonos than one sees on the streets or in the homes, at once began making us comfortable. They had their jet-black hair done up in the elaborate Japanese fashion, like a great Russian wool cap, with a few flowers in it. They showed much surprise at and interest in my wife, for Japanese wives do not come to dinners given for their husbands, and it seemed very strange to them that foreign women could. They stared a great deal, for that is not considered impolite in Japan, and they asked many questions about the foreign clothes that looked so queer to them. They wished to know whether there were geisha in America also, and were very curious about all our customs.

86While we ate, the oldest girl played and sang, the other two serving us tea and food. The head geisha acts as hostess, and does her best to make her guests enjoy the evening. When the two younger ones began to dance, their dancing was not what we would call by that name at home. They moved slowly back and forth, squatted, bowed down to the ground, rose again, slipped to and fro across the matting in their foot-mittens, opened and closed and waved and turned a fan that each held in her hand. When it was time for us to go, all three saw us to the door, and kneeled to touch their hair to the floor as a way of saying sayonara, the Japanese good-by. Though we had not seen him do so, we knew that our host had given, or would give, them plenty of money for their evening’s entertainment. For though they had smiled and acted all the time we were there as if they were high-class ladies who took great pleasure in entertaining us, they make a business of hospitality.

Girls who are to become geisha begin their training early, often when they are eight or ten. There are training schools for them, where they are usually taken by their parents. The head of the school pays for everything, but the geisha girl must pay him back after graduation. It is often ten years or more before she has earned enough to be out of debt for her training and can begin to give money to her parents. The Japanese hold their fathers and mothers in great honor, and most of the girls who become geisha do so either to save their parents from supporting them or in order to be able to take care of their parents in old 87age. So, under the smiles and the cheerful exterior of the geisha who sings or dances for you, there may be deep sorrow. When their youth is gone and they are no longer attractive to hosts and guests, some of the geisha marry and go back to their native village; others become head geisha, and help in the training and managing of the younger ones.

One of the favorite actors of the Japanese stage, in his most famous role. In Japan, the old national legends are played over and over, year after year, and the people never tire of them.

CHAPTER VII I TRAVEL INTO THE NORTH — On the Way to Hokkaido — A Western City in Japan — Sweets for the Boys and Girls — Long Distances in a Small Country

We took the train out of Tokyo one morning and started for the big northern island of Yezo, or Hokkaido. My wife and little boy went only as far as Nikko, because traveling in Yezo is not very comfortable. Nikko is one of the sacred cities of Japan, and a very beautiful place besides. It is among high hills, about five hours by train from Tokyo, and is surrounded by evergreen forests. Some of the trees are hundreds of years old, and those called the cryptomeria are enormous, reminding one of our California redwoods. There is an old road leading to Nikko that runs for twenty miles between rows of these great trees. Their branches, arching high above it, make it seem like the aisle of a cathedral.

About three hundred years ago Nikko was chosen as the burial place of the warrior who founded the Tokugawa dynasty. The Japanese, who consider him one of their greatest heroes, have made a god of him. About his tomb have been built many splendid temples, to which thousands of pilgrims come every year. The temples are set back against the wooded hills across a little river from the town of Nikko. A red lacquered bridge crosses this river, but no one except the Mikado is allowed to use it. For ordinary people 89there is a simpler bridge. Hundreds of stone steps lead up to the temples, which are on different levels, so that at the topmost a person is high above the town. The temples are made of wood, with tile roofs, but are so wonderfully carved and painted that it is hard to believe the materials are so simple.

This sacred red lacquered bridge across the small stream between the town of Nikko and the temple and monastery grounds to which thousands of Japanese pilgrims come every year, is opened only for the emperor or Mikado, an ordinary bridge for ordinary people being available near by.

All sorts of strange Japanese gods, of wood and stone and bronze, gaze placidly at the pilgrims who come to pray and the tourists who come to see the wonders of Nikko. One of the most famous things there is a frieze with three stone monkeys on it. One has its hands over its eyes, another over its ears, and 90the third over its mouth. They point a moral, which is, “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” That, of course, would be a good motto for any people. The Japanese hold these temples and tombs in such reverence that, though the public is allowed to go anywhere in them, not a thing has been stolen or even damaged in hundreds of years.

The scenery of Japan is beautiful almost everywhere, and the ride from Nikko to the northern end of the largest island is through very attractive country. On the way I stopped to visit Matsushima, as most travelers do and should. Matsu means “pine trees” and shima means “islands.” The journey by small boat among the scores of little islands covered with evergreens will be remembered all one’s life. The Japanese call Matsushima one of the four scenic wonders of their country.

When we found this ugly stone man of long ago in Nikko, my naughty son called him “Dada”—though how much he resembles me you can easily guess.

91

A Shinto priest in full regalia before one of the great temples of Nikko.

But because I like best to see places that few other people have seen, I was very much on the alert when, next morning, a not very comfortable Japanese steamer carried me across Volcano Bay to the big northern island. Not one in a hundred foreign travelers in Japan ever sees it. As I could see three volcanoes smoking, it was easy to understand why the Japanese had given this bay its name. Hakodate, where we landed, was similar to other Japanese cities, but the train soon carried me away into a country that was quite different from the older and better known parts of Japan. Here it was still cold at the end of May, though most of the Empire 92was having summer weather. Instead of the rice fields the traveler sees everywhere on the main and southern islands, Hokkaido grows corn and potatoes. I saw corn shocks like those of the United States still standing in the fields. In some places spring plowing had already begun, and shaggy little horses were doing the work—a contrast to the little rice fields of the south, where men and women with hoes wade in mud up to their knees. Herds of cattle, hardly ever seen in the rest of Japan, gave the landscape still more the appearance of America.

A quiet corner among the temples of Nikko, sacred city north of Tokyo. Here thousands come in pilgrimage every year, yet they never do the buildings any harm, because they consider them holy.

Sometimes, however, the train went along the edge of the sea, and then I realized that I was still in Japan. The towns were crowded collections of small, poorly 93made huts, the kind of houses that might do well enough farther south, but too flimsy for the long, cold winters of the big northern island. The Japanese do not like very cold weather, any more than they do the tropics, so Hokkaido has not nearly so many inhabitants for its size as the old and more familiar part of Japan. The efforts of the government to persuade people to go to Hokkaido where land is plentiful have not entirely succeeded.

The poor villages along the seacoast could not only be seen but could be smelled from the train. For the inhabitants live almost entirely from fishing, and there were thousands upon thousands of herring, split in two and hung on lines to dry. But we were soon back in an American landscape again, sometimes with hills that reminded me of New England. Gradually, high mountains, their tops and sometimes their whole sides covered with snow, began to surround us. Some of these mountains were so high that their peaks were lost in the clouds, and there was one almost as symmetrical as Fujiyama, the famous “peerless mountain” of the main island of Japan. But while Fujiyama is known the whole world round, this close rival is unknown even to most Japanese, because no poets have sung about it and no steamship lines have advertised it.

It was evening when I reached Sapporo, capital of the northern island. That city, too, reminded me of my own country, and I soon realized why. When the 94Japanese Government decided to induce people to migrate from the crowded part of the country to thinly populated Hokkaido, they employed American experts to help them. Some of these laid out the capital with streets that are wide and straight, with American street cars along them.

There are sidewalks, and rows of trees between them and the roadway, clapboard houses with shingled roofs, an agricultural college copied, even to its baseball field and cinder track, after that of Massachusetts, and many other reminders of our own land. Paper walls are not used. Instead of carrying their babies in a kind of hammock on their backs, most of the Japanese women of Sapporo use baby carriages. Many even do their hair almost in American fashion, instead of in the elaborate Japanese style, which costs so much in both time and money. American apples grow almost as well near Sapporo as at home, and that can hardly be said of any other place in the Orient.

To be sure, there are still many Japanese customs left in Sapporo. There are rickshaws, and two or three Shinto temples; and perhaps as many of the men still wear kimonos as have adopted Western clothing. One scene which I saw was very Japanese indeed. Several new buildings were being put up, and when the framework was finished each had to be blessed by Shinto priests, according to old custom, before the work could go on. The carpenters had erected a platform along the rafters, and had placed several flags and banners bearing Japanese text above and about them. A Shinto priest, with a shaven head and a 95garb that reminded me of a gaudy dressing gown, climbed up to this platform and held a kind of church service. The workmen helped him, like altar boys, and all the children and most of the grown people in the city formed a congregation down in the streets below.

The streets of Sapporo, capital of the northern island, Hokkaido, are quite American, though the rickshaw and the native style of street-sprinkler, and Japanese shops, are still in vogue there.

There was good reason for the children being there, I soon found. For when the more solemn part of the ceremony was over and the priest had climbed down to go to another building ready to be blessed, the men left on the platform opened sacks of Japanese candy and began throwing it in handfuls to the crowd below. 96There must have been at least two bushels of sweets thrown down upon us. The throwers seemed to want everyone to have a share, for when I let the children near me catch all the pieces that came our way, two of the workmen began throwing at me alone until I had caught and eaten some. Evidently they wanted everyone present to feel grateful so that all would wish the building and its owner good luck. Besides the candy for everyone, there was one valuable present for whoever in the crowd was most agile and lucky. It was a silk kimono, but as that could not be thrown to us like the candy without being torn to bits, a wooden ticket with a Japanese character written on it was used instead. The owner of the building himself threw this, after smilingly making a speech to the applauding throng below; and the scramble for it in the dusty street was very much like what a football game would be if all the spectators should come down from the stands and take part.

Small as Japan seems on the map of the world, I rode another whole day by train northward from Sapporo without coming to the end of the island. Farther north still there are smaller and smaller islands. Some of the smallest of these islands are not inhabited at all, and the others have only little villages of fishermen.

Since Japan’s war with Russia, the Japanese have also owned the southern half of the slender island of Sakhalin, long considered a part of Siberia. There 97are many minerals in it, as well as plenty of farming land, and the Russian Government seems willing to lease the rest of the island to the Japanese. But if the Japanese dislike cold weather so much that they have left even Hokkaido as thinly settled as our western prairies, it is easy to see why only a few fishermen and miners, with the shopkeepers and others who cater to them, have left the comfortable if crowded part of Japan for this still colder island. Hokkaido is no farther north than Maine or Minnesota, but Sakhalin is as snowbound during the long winters as northern Canada.

CHAPTER VIII AMONG THE “HAIRY” AINU — Queer Customs of the Ainu — An Amusing Occurrence

The most interesting thing about Hokkaido or Yezo, the big northern island of Japan, is that it is the home of the Ainu. This primitive race are not at all like the Japanese. No one knows exactly where they came from. They have no written language of their own and therefore all that is known about their history is in the form of legends and traditions told by father to son, or mother to daughter. The Ainu were living in almost all the islands of Japan when the Japanese came up from the south, or wherever it was they came from, and conquered them.

If you see an Ainu and a Japanese side by side, the Ainu looks larger and stronger, with features more like our own. He does not have almond-shaped eyes. But his race was no match for the Japanese. They were like prize fighters or football players who have trained only their bodies and given little attention to their minds. While the Japanese were studying and becoming more and more civilized, the Ainu were improving only their muscles, so that when the clash came they were almost helpless against the more clever invaders.

Hundreds of years ago the Japanese drove them entirely off the main island, and now Japanese settlers 99are crowding them still higher into the hills of the cold northern island, planting the fertile lowlands themselves. So you find hamlets, clusters of huts, of the Ainu among the uncultivated hills, and in places along the seacoast of Hokkaido, and sometimes even on the Kuriles and Sakhalin. In a way they are treated by the Japanese as we treat the Indians on our reservations; but they are left more to shift for themselves.

An Ainu house, thatched with straw, looks very primitive. The children look primitive too, but very likely they are just as happy as if they lived in a more civilized way.

I visited several Ainu villages during my journey through Hokkaido. You can tell them as far off as you can see them, because the houses are different from those of the Japanese. The walls are usually 100made of reeds, almost like cornstalks, set upright and bound together with poles. The roof is made of coarse straw, and generally put on in thick layers overlapping one another, so that at a distance it seems to be covered with huge shingles. Inside, there is no floor, only the earth, and few beds or other furniture. There may be a small garden about the house, tended by the women more often than by the men. However, the men are good fishermen, and groups of them could be seen mending their nets and big trays woven like baskets, which are used for the drying of fish. The Ainu men are brave hunters, often using only spears, or knives, or bows and arrows to kill the big savage brown bears that inhabit the forests of Yezo. Curiously enough, they not only kill and eat bears but worship them. Their religion is a very simple one, a kind of nature-worship, such as the traveler often finds among people who have always lived out of doors. A part of their worship is to put a bear cub in a crude log cage before the house and fatten it at the same time that they worship it, finally killing it for a great religious feast and putting another cub in its place.

This curious tribe is often called the “hairy” Ainu and sometimes the “white men of Japan.” Though their features are heavy and their noses blunt, some scientists think that they are really Caucasians, like us, rather than Mongolians, like the Japanese and Chinese. But we would hardly call them white men, though a few generations of living indoors and using soap and hot water might make a great difference. Nor did they seem to me especially hairy. To be sure, 101the old men all had long thick beards, but such beards used to be popular among old men in America. The young Ainu seem to be sensitive about this reputation for hairiness, and most of them now shave, and dress like the Japanese. But to their Japanese conquerors, who, like the Chinese and other Mongolian neighbors, hardly have any need for a razor, these primitive bearded men seem very hairy.

Ainu fishermen mending their trays for drying fish.

I was not nearly so much surprised by the beards of the Ainu men as by the long mustaches of the women! For hundreds of years it has been an Ainu custom to tattoo the faces of the girls, especially on the upper lip. It is said that kitchen soot is used for this, along with some native dye that gives it a bluish color, so that by the time she marries, the Ainu girl 102has a blue mustache flaring up at the ends in a very jaunty way. Sometimes there is a little tattooed beard on the lower lip also, and blue decorations on other parts of the face and body. But the Ainu girls seem to be giving up this interesting custom, and even the old women often hold a corner of their garments across their faces to hide their mustaches from the stranger.

Here is an Ainu who has welcomed Japanese ways and adopted some of the clothing introduced from Europe and America.

The Ainu, especially the old chiefs, have some very ceremonial ways. If the visitor knows how to win the friendship of primitive people, he may persuade the chiefs to put on their elaborate tribal robes instead of the commonplace, everyday garments they seem to have taken partly from the Japanese and partly from the Western world. The women have gaudy costumes that include huge beads and queer earrings. When the men visit one another and engage in formal conversation, they spread a grass mat, take off their sandals, and squat with their feet in front of them, not on their heels, like the Japanese. When they meet, they show politeness by stroking their beards and rubbing their own palms together.

The Ainu are decreasing so rapidly that scientists fear they will soon disappear entirely. Their miserable straw huts without floors are not suitable dwellings for the long, cold Hokkaido winters. They have no doctors, and when a man, or even a child, falls ill they do nothing but wrap him in a blanket and let nature cure him if it can. The typical Ainu are disappearing also because many of them have intermarried with the Japanese, and their descendants have some of the qualities of each race. But the chief cause of their decrease is that they drink too much hard liquor.

Anyone who gives or sells liquor to our Indians is likely to be severely punished; but the Japanese do not take so serious an attitude toward strong drink. Their Indians, as we might call the Ainu, drink on every 104possible occasion. Drinking is a part of the ceremonial at weddings, funerals and religious feasts. The drink is usually sake, or Japanese rice-whiskey, and for the ceremonies there are very elaborate wooden cups, with a thin flat stick to keep the beard and long mustache out of the way, reminding us of the “mustache cups” that used to be given our bearded grandfathers at Christmas and on their birthdays. The men drink slowly, but as they also drink often and usually for long periods, they do themselves much harm.

The women are not allowed to drink, at least during ceremonies; besides, they have very little time for such things, because they have to do almost all the work, except hunting and fishing. In some parts of Hokkaido they still make the ceremonial garments of elm bark, weaving and embroidering it to look like cloth. But most of the Ainu now wear cheap Japanese cotton, and are losing many of their picturesque customs.

The Ainu did not seem at all savage, but rather friendly. It would have been hard for me to realize that they are really savages, had it not been for a certain experience with one of their chiefs. I had been wandering most of the afternoon about a large village, taking photographs. Some of the people ran away at sight of my camera, and some merely stared at it as if wondering what that strange little machine could be. But many people in other parts of the world act in 105the same way. Either they do not know what photography is or they are afraid that anyone who gets a picture of them on a film can do them harm by hurting the picture.

The old Ainu chief who later threatened to strike me with a plow, standing before a typical Ainu house roofed with overlapping layers of thatch.

Suddenly an old chief who must have been a very strong man indeed in his prime, came running down one of the sandy lanes that take the place of streets in an Ainu village. A small boy who had been following me made a queer noise that was part grunt and part shriek, as if he were trying to warn me of trouble. I 106had already photographed this old man, so I could not imagine what had made him angry, unless perhaps he had just discovered what my camera was. He walked up to me and thrust his face so close to mine that I could feel his breath and see the separate hairs in his great bushy snow-white beard and his long uncut locks. His liquid black eyes, which reminded me of the eyes of a wild animal, were blazing with rage. He did not seem to know a word of Japanese, so the little I knew of that language did not help me to find out what he was angry about. In a great bass voice that could be heard all over the village, he shouted something in his own tongue, which, of course, I could not understand.

Apparently he was ordering me to do something, and became more and more angry because I did not do it. Suddenly he ran to a house near by and picked up a plow! It was merely a wooden plow, with no iron about it, yet it was heavy for all that. But this sturdy old man lifted it high above his head in one hand and acted as if he were about to strike me with it. Because it makes any American feel cowardly to run away, I stood my ground, half turning to close the camera before he could break it, ready to dodge if the plow began to descend. The chief was shrieking like a true wild man, quite different from the angry tones of civilized races. Yet he had perhaps been somewhat tamed by being all his life under the rule of the Japanese, for instead of striking me he merely continued to flourish the plow. Finally he threw it down and grasped me by my coat lapel.

107I tried to pull away, but his grip was like that of a tiger’s claw. I caught him by one thumb and gave it a quick twist, as boys in a quarrel sometimes do. He grunted with pain and let go. As I walked away, he continued to bellow, with most of the people of the village gazing at us from their doorways. Savages are like children in many ways, and this one acted so much like a boy who wanted to fight but was afraid to do so because the teacher might catch him at it, that I could not help laughing.

Generally the Ainu are such simple, kindly people, even though the Japanese do call them “barbarians,” that I was sorry not to be able to understand and obey the old chief. I had no desire to offend this ancient leader of a much abused yet very likable race. But you will agree with me that no one likes to have a plow waved over his head.

CHAPTER IX WESTWARD HO! — Through an Interesting Country — The Rice Harvest — How Silk is Obtained — Manufacturing in Japan

Back once more in Tokyo, we took an express train westward. We might have traveled by automobile, though the bridges of Japan are small and the roads not very good, or we might even have gone by rickshaw. But the part of Japan west of the capital is quite modern, with many trains, and large cities, and so many telegraph wires on several rows of poles along the way that you wonder how they can all be needed. Most travelers to Japan know this part of the country along the Tokaido, the route between the new and the old capital. There you are much more likely to meet people from your own land than in the northern or the southern islands.

As we wanted to see everything worth seeing we had to stop often. There was Kamakura, for instance, a pleasant little town with a sea beach, not far from Yokohama. It is famous all over the world because of its great bronze Buddha, so large that even grown men look like Lilliputians beneath it. Then we had a very pleasant day strolling on the island of Enoshima. The Japanese, living on larger islands, are very fond of this tiny one at the shallow edge of the Pacific. Many thousands come to visit its temples and shrines cut in the rock and to wander along its streets of 109booths, shaded by arbors. Women as well as men keep the little open-front shops, and sell religious trinkets and all kinds of Japanese things to eat. When we saw, down on the rocky edge of the little island, fishermen busy at their calling, we were reminded that Japan, with its thousands of miles of seacoast and its many bays and gulfs, is perhaps the greatest fisherman’s country in the world. No wonder the Japanese almost always eat fish with their rice and very seldom taste meat.

The Daibutsu, or great bronze Buddha at Kamakura, not far from Tokyo, is one of the sights of Japan.

110Some of you might have been more interested in Nagoya than we were. It is a big industrial city, with modern factories and great mills into which thousands of workmen pour every morning and out of which they pour every evening. While we were glad to know that Japan is as up-to-date in her factories as other modern countries, naturally we did not care much about seeing the same sort of things that we could see at home. We were more interested in the ancient castles of Nagoya, and in the men who hauled boats along her canals by poles over their shoulders.

Japanese women as well as men work in the deep slime of the rice fields, wearing a parasol-hat made of last year’s rice-straw.

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Plowing in southern Japan. Domestic animals are so rare in Japan that this peasant is in luck to have one to help him prepare his rice field. Most of his neighbors have to do the work by hand, with the help of their wives and children.

Yet as we rode on westward through endless rice fields, with tea bushes climbing some of the hills, and mulberry orchards for the silkworms between, we were forced to realize that Japan is a great industrial and commercial country, as well as a land of delightful scenery and quaint customs. Especially when we reached Osaka we saw how modern it had become. Not only is Osaka the second largest city in Japan, but there are only three cities in the United States that are larger. Its factory chimneys belching smoke and its docks heaped with imports and exports, its noise and its rush, made us feel almost as if we were in Chicago or Pittsburgh. But we had only to step into a rickshaw, or stroll along Theatre Street, with its rows of strange posters before the many movie 112houses, to recall that we were still in Japan. Just a little farther on is Kobe, the greatest port of Japan, which is also quite modern, and rather ugly.

Generally the sheaves are brought in on the backs of men or women in Japan, but this peasant near Beppu in the southern island of Kyushu is wealthy enough to own a young steer.

As we looked out of the car windows on our journey, we noticed that the peasants do not live at all like our farmers. There are no houses standing alone on their own farms. Even the country people are crowded together in villages. That is because land that can be cultivated is precious in mountainous Japan, and the mouths to be fed are many. So the people build their villages on hillsides or rocky ridges—anywhere within reach of their fields—so as not to waste useful land. The fields are so small compared to ours that American 113farmers would probably consider them gardens. On this largest island there are a great many farmers and not much fertile land for any one owner. Yet because of the cold they do not like to go to the northern islands where there is much more room.

A Japanese usually threshes his rice by beating out the heads on a stone in the little courtyard of his house. Then the grain is winnowed by throwing it up into the air with a wooden scoop, and finally it is spread out on grass mats to dry in the sun. So the Japanese peasant really earns his “daily rice.”

Since his farm is so small, the Japanese peasant usually has no animals to help him work it. We seldom saw a horse or an ox. Most of the farmers, both men and women, were wading about their fields, up to their knees in water and mud, working with hoes or with bare hands. The planting and weeding of rice can perhaps best be done by hand. As rice is almost the only crop, and it is so thirsty a plant that it must 114be covered with water all the time it is growing, most of the country looks like a great shallow lake, or as if the rains had been so heavy that all but the hills had been flooded.

After it has been threshed by beating the heads out on a stone, and winnowed by throwing it up in the wind, the rice of Japan is laid out on grass mats to dry in the sunshine.

If we were to come back through Japan a couple of months later, we should find the fields no longer flooded but waving with a yellow grain that would remind us of wheat. By June or July the rice is ripe, and then it is no longer thirsty. But the peasants of Japan do not use reapers or binders, any more than they do tractors and threshing machines. When the proper day comes, the farmer and his wife, even his older 115children, go out into the little field with curved sickles hardly a foot long and cut down the rice handful by handful. As for planting, in Japan and throughout the Far East every sprig of rice is set out by hand. Bundles of half-grown rice from crowded seed beds are thrown out into the flooded fields, to be poked into the soft earth stalk by stalk. By the time we had seen thousands of miles of rice fields in Japan and the countries on the mainland, all planted in the same way, we realized that the country people of eastern Asia can hardly be called lazy.

Water runs this old mill for hulling rice, in the country district near Beppu, the “Hot Springs” of Kyushu. A small stream flows into the paddles or boxes of the crude homemade wheel and turns the mill-stone.

When the rice has been cut by hand and tied into bundles, the Japanese peasant still has much hard work to do. He has no wagon on which to bring the 116grain home, and he will be luckier than most of his neighbors if he has one little horse or even a cow over whose back he can hang a few bundles. Most Japanese farmers, bent nearly double as they toil across the fields to the communal village, bring in the sheaves on their own backs. Sometimes the farmers let their wives carry the heavy burden. Then comes the threshing, but with no engine, no threshing machine, no neighbors or hired men to help. The Japanese peasant threshes his rice by catching a handful of it at a time by the butts and beating the heads off on a round stone or other good striking-block. The paddy, or unhulled rice, thus beaten out is then swept up with a broom on the bare hard earth of the threshing ground. It is winnowed by throwing it into the air with a shovel, so that the wind will blow away the chaff, and then it is spread on grass mats to dry in the sun. Finally it has to be hulled, by another laborious process. The Japanese peasant works harder for his daily rice than most of us do for our daily bread.

On the hillsides, where rice cannot grow, one sees women who appear to be picking berries. Closer examination shows that there are no berries at all on the waist-high bushes, planted so carefully in parallel hedges, but that the women are picking the leaves, and stuffing them into sacks at their waists. Recalling what is one of the most important exports from Japan to the United States, one suddenly realizes that these women are all picking tea. It is easy work, surely, compared to wading in the rice fields, with the water throwing the blazing sunshine into their faces.

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Photo from Maude W. Madden

Big trays made of straw matting are filled with silkworm cocoons. The cocoons desired for breeding purposes are picked out and put on another tray. The others go into a pot of boiling water to prepare them for having the silk unreeled.

A Japanese journey at the right season will show men and women, boys and girls, picking other leaves, this time from small trees. If one follows them home, he will find the people feeding the leaves to worms. Whole buildings are filled with crudely made trays, set one above another on racks, and in the trays are quantities of great whitish worms. They are very hungry worms, all eating the mulberry leaves as ravenously as a healthy baby drinks from its bottle. The tiny eggs from which the worms are hatched are laid on the bamboo shelves covered with sheets of coarse paper. Especially at the time of hatching, the temperature must be carefully controlled. Japan has grown so modern that a thermometer is now generally 118used; but in olden times a man stripped off his clothes and entered the room naked to test the heat. This is still done on the Asiatic mainland. By and by, when they have eaten their fill of mulberry leaves, the worms will begin to spin a sort of house about themselves—a cocoon we call it—in which to sleep, and if left alone they would, some day, suddenly burst out as butterflies. But these worms will never reach that stage. While they are sleeping snugly in their winter coat, someone will throw them into boiling water and begin to unwind the fine tough threads of the cocoons. Thus we get our silk, much of which comes from Japan. In Japan the dead worms are usually thrown away, but in China they are eaten, being considered a great delicacy.

Photo from Maude W. Madden

The silk as it is unwound from the cocoons is first rewound on large reels, then onto smaller ones. If it is to be used as thread, it is wound on spools, if as embroidery silk, it is made into skeins. If it is to be used in weaving, it is wound on great bobbins ready for the factory machines. In this picture the woman is rereeling onto small reels.

The Japanese make coarse brown paper out of rice-straw by soaking and then rolling it out into sheets spread on boards set upright, as in this case, or sometimes on smooth banks of earth.

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A Japanese saw-mill, the common way of making lumber not only in Japan but in Korea and China. It takes days to saw up one large timber.

Besides the employees in her great modern factories, and her hard-working peasants, Japan has millions of village craftsmen. That is, in almost every village larger than a mere farm hamlet, men and boys, and often women and girls too, make many things by hand, just as they have done for centuries. Here we see a wood carver making jewel-boxes, or miniature figures of people. He squats on his heels on a mat, perhaps with no front wall between him and the crowd clacking up and down the narrow street outside in their wooden geta. Farther on, a number of men and boys are making paper lanterns, pasting the paper over little ribs of split bamboo, and painting figures and characters on them. Even the paper is probably made 121of bamboo, and certainly it is made by hand. In many villages of Japan the chief occupation of the people is to shave bamboo strips as fine as hair, soak the shavings in water, and roll them out into sheets like our brown wrapping paper. These sheets, still soaking wet, are then laid on walls or upright boards, until they are dried and ready for use. Small or large, delicate or massive, the things made by Japanese craftsmen are so well done that we marvel at the dexterity of their fingers no less than at their endless oriental patience.

CHAPTER X SOME HOLY PLACES OF JAPAN — Famous Temples of Kyoto — Shinto Temples — A Great Celebration — Hauling Logs for the Temple — Pilgrims to Koya-san — Entertained by Buddhist Priests

The Japanese go to church quite as much as do most other peoples. In their case, however, it is really to the temple, for while there are thousands of Japanese Christians, there are more than a hundred and fifty times as many who are not Christians. Sunday is not different from any other day in the temples of Japan. On certain days of the year special celebrations or festivals bring larger crowds, but most temples have their worshipers every day of the week. Very seldom is there anything like a sermon, or what we would call a service, and hymns are not sung.

Instead, the Japanese boy or girl who goes to a temple finds priests in long robe-like kimonos, generally with shaven heads, sitting or strolling in various parts of the great building. They sell prayers written on tissue paper, and other religious things which the worshipers may want to buy. Sometimes they do hold a kind of service, at which they chant. But such a service is usually for themselves, with few if any in the “congregation.” Each worshiper himself calls upon the gods, which are represented by great gaudy images, some of them gigantic. In many of the temples there are wooden slats in the floor before the altar. The man or woman, and even the child, who is 123about to pray to one of these gods claps his hands three times to call the god’s attention, drops a copper coin between the slats into the hollow underneath, and then bows low several times and goes away, perhaps to pray to another god farther on.

Most of the Japanese are Buddhists or Confucianists, that is, followers of the Hindu philosopher Buddha, or the Chinese philosopher Confucius, who lived thousands of years ago. But they are also nearly all Shintoists, seeing no reason why they should not have two religions. Shintoism is really patriotism turned into a religion. The Mikado or Emperor is called the Son of Heaven, and many of the Japanese still believe that their ruler is descended from the gods. Just how sacred they hold their Mikado is shown by the proclamation issued in Formosa, the most southern island of Japan, when Crown Prince Hirohito, who became Emperor in 1926, stopped there. The people were ordered:

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

To fly the Japanese flag from every building along the Prince’s route.

To dress neatly, to wear their stockings and geta, to take off their hats when the procession was passing, and not to use spyglasses or look down upon the Prince from upstairs or any other elevation.

Kyoto, which means “western capital,” as Tokyo means “eastern capital,” has the finest temples in 124Japan. No one who visits the Japanese at home should fail to see that splendid city of sacred buildings; and you may be sure we did not. For all its size, it is a quiet, gentle city, that center of the Buddhist faith in Japan. Formerly the mikados lived there, and travelers are allowed to visit the imperial palace, now seldom used. A great wall and moat surround it, and there are large gardens with many trees and flowers. The palace itself is also large, though much simpler than we expect emperors’ palaces to be. The floors are covered with thick mats, like any other Japanese floor, and on the paper or frail wooden walls are painted bamboos and trees and flowers, with birds here and there. Even the room where the Emperor or the Crown Prince sleeps when he comes to Kyoto contains nothing that Westerners would consider furniture.

Within the grounds of the finest of Kyoto’s temples.

125But the temples, some of them with one great tile roof above a lower one, are the chief sights of Kyoto. In them are some of the most artistic things in Japan—big, richly colored statues of the gods, or of the disciples of Buddha. These disciples correspond to the saints in the Christian religion. The altars of carved wood, the great pillars, the brightly colored yet restful interiors, are all worth going a long way to see, and we were tempted to stay longer than we should. There are gnarled pine trees, spreading cherry trees said to be hundreds of years old, thousands of goldfish swimming in the sacred ponds. All in all, the ancient capital is a place where the days seem to slip past without regrets.

Not far from Kyoto there is a mountain river with many rapids down which it is great sport to shoot, in little boats cleverly handled by expert Japanese boatmen. Nor should one leave the region of the city of magnificent temples without a trip to Lake Biwa, returning by canal. This canal runs straight through a mountain, and for nearly half an hour you can imagine yourself in the heart of the earth, or in a gigantic watermain, riding along as smoothly and pleasantly as if on an outdoor river.

My small son still remembers Nara, another city of pine forests and many temples, an hour or two by train south of Kyoto. Nara is noted for its tame deer, and one of these in a playful mood bowled the boy over and gave him the scare of his young life. It is forbidden 126to harm the pretty brown deer of Nara in any way, for they are considered sacred. Up in the shaded hills of Nara is one of those enormous bells that are to be found among the temples of Japan. I cannot tell you just how many tons it weighs, but it is so large that half a dozen of you could crowd together inside it. This bell is rung by striking it with a great pole, like the mast of a ship, suspended horizontally beside it, and its boom can be heard for many miles in every direction.

In Nara the sacred deer run everywhere about the town. They have been so carefully protected and are so well treated that they are as tame as pet dogs.

By accident I came to Yamada-Ise, the Shinto center of Japan, just in time for a great celebration that 127takes place only once in twenty-one years. I could hardly have waited around for the next celebration if I had missed this one. Many thousands of pilgrims were already there and thousands more were arriving on the trains. In general, the Japanese are great travelers, often going on pilgrimages to their holy places. Even school children go on pilgrimages, and, far from trying to stop them, the government helps them by offering very low excursion rates on the railroads. The rulers of Japan are wise in considering travel an important part of education.

The Shinto temples of Yamada-Ise are made of wood, and in theory they are rebuilt every twenty-one years. The thousands of pilgrims had come to see, and take part in, this important ceremony. Those who had come on foot, as true pilgrims are supposed to do, were washing their weary feet in wooden tubs in the many small inns. In the street in front of these inns, and in the shops selling food and sacred relics, were men who acted like “barkers” at our American fairs, all shouting for customers at the top of their voices. You can imagine what an uproar there was in this placid village that had suddenly become an overcrowded city.

The holy city of Yamada-Ise is divided into twenty-one wards, and the people of each division vie with those of the other wards in doing all they can for the rebuilding ceremony. Each ward makes a great cart with solid wooden wheels on which to haul logs from the river to the temples that are to be rebuilt or repaired. I came upon one of these soon after I arrived, 128a cart so heavy that it seemed to crush the cobblestones in the streets. A huge rope, nearly a quarter of a mile long, was attached to it, and on this nearly all the inhabitants of the ward were pulling. First there were little girls, then larger girls, then little boys and larger boys, then hundreds of men, pulling for all they were worth. Yet even so the cart moved very slowly. It was gaily decorated, but not yet loaded, for the logs were still down on the bank of the river on which they had been floated from the imperial forests farther upstream.

One of the many sacred timbers at Yamada-Ise, each carried on a huge cart, and pulled by the united strength of many men.

That evening each ward paraded with a great float. In some of them men and women and children stood 129motionless, grouped in tableaux. In others there were musicians, playing and singing as they were pulled along; or sometimes they were only pretending to be pulled along as they walked inside the float. The musicians and those in the tableaux wore costumes such as were worn in Japan hundreds of years ago. In the morning nearly all the people of the town, but especially the boys and girls, appeared in queer, gay garments. Some of the girls had big baskets of flowers on their heads in place of hats. Most boys carried one of the symbols of Shintoism, a stick with a bundle of torn papers attached to one end of it—somewhat resembling a feather duster.

A family in the town of Yamada-Ise dressed up for the celebration which takes place there every twenty-one years.

There are two great shrines, miles apart, at 130Yamada-Ise, each with many old and new temples among great pine and cryptomeria forests. Just inside the outer gates of the most important shrine flows a sacred river, and every pilgrim stops to wash in it before going on to the temples. These are huge structures, made entirely of wood. In a way Shintoism holds forests sacred, and the Japanese are very wise in conserving their great woods. When the forests begin to thin out, trees from nurseries are brought and replanted. This shrine at the base of a mountain was in a park of immense trees, bigger than any we have outside California. Because superstitious Japanese believe that the bark of these trees is a protection against evil spirits, the government has erected tree guards, similar to those in our parks, but made of bamboo splints instead of wire. These make it difficult for pilgrims to injure the trees.

The temples must not be painted, and the builders of new ones must follow the old architecture. For this reason, not only the aged and weather-blackened temples but the gleaming new ones just built look very old-fashioned indeed. In one of the temples there was a sacred horse. Once you have seen how scarce horses are and how much horse-work the Japanese peasant has to do himself, you do not wonder that many Japanese almost worship them. But the pilgrims did not bow down before this horse, or do any of the other things which the more superstitious Hindus do before their sacred bulls. They only halted to buy and feed him a penny’s worth of beans, much as you might offer peanuts to a monkey or an elephant at the zoo. I wonder 131if travelers from far-off lands who see Americans doing that suppose we worship elephants and monkeys.

Two girls of Yamada-Ise, the sacred Shinto city of Japan, dressed for the great log-hauling festival. Their hats are covered with real flowers.

When I got back to the town of Yamada itself early that afternoon the great festival was at its height. Each ward had taken its ponderous cart down to the river, stripped off all the decorations, and loaded one of the logs for the rebuilding of the temples. These 132great logs are of hinoki wood, cut in the imperial forests, and they are considered so sacred that they were all wrapped in grass mats to keep them from being injured. Not only the carts but even the people pulling them had done away with their finery and looked very serious and determined. The small girls and boys, who might have been more hindrance than help, were no longer pulling. But all the larger boys and young men in the ward were tugging at the great rope. Clouds of dust surrounded them. Sweat poured down their grimy faces. The great carts ground over the cobblestones, groaning under their heavy loads. The crowd of people was so great that policemen had to drive them back often—and those same policemen tried to prevent me from taking photographs.

At the foot of the sacred mountain of Koya-san this Japanese boy asked for the job of carrying my baggage to the top, thus earning a yen, worth about half an American dollar.

Finally each cart was dragged into the grounds of the second most important shrine of Yamada-Ise, and the pullers could lie down on their backs and rest. But the next day and the next would be the same, for this ceremony lasts a full week. Then the pilgrims recede, like a retreating tidal wave, and leave the village of Yamada to twenty-one more years of quiet.

Not very far away from sacred Yamada-Ise is another very holy place. It is Koya-san, or as we might say “Mount Koya,” at the top of which is the most venerated shrine of Buddhism in Japan. I climbed the mountain on foot, along with hundreds of pilgrims. But those who do not like three or four hours of steady climbing have to be carried up in a sort of hammock swung from a big bamboo pole that is carried on two men’s shoulders. Most of the pilgrims walked, but the more wealthy ones at least hired a porter to carry their baggage. There were many of these porters, women and boys as well as men, ready for such a job anywhere along the foot of the mountain.

Japanese women reaching the top of the long climb to the sacred Buddhist shrine of Koya-san, in kagos, or mountain chairs borne on the shoulders of stout coolies.

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Two pilgrims to Koya-san. The one on the left has just arrived by train at the foot of the sacred mountain and is about to begin the ascent. The pilgrim on the right has equipment consisting of a staff with bell, a sack for food, and a box of sacred images. See how well the hats protect their wearers from the sun.

135Before I finished my pilgrimage to Koya-san I found that there were all kinds of people among the pilgrims—doctors, professors, business men from Osaka, steamship managers from Kobe. But you could hardly have guessed it from their appearance, for they all wore queer pilgrim costumes that made them look like peasants on a holiday. On every little piece of projecting ground along the mountain road stood a tea house or an outdoor restaurant, where climbers could rest in the cool breeze and look down upon the great carpet of rice fields far below.

Beggars sat here and there asking for charity. Some of them were badly crippled or had dreadful diseases, but they were not so unfortunate as thousands we saw later along the way to pilgrimage places in China. Some of them were comedians, and tried to win coppers by amusing the pilgrims. One fellow wearing white fingerless “mitts” had slung around his neck a great wooden box with a coin-slot in it, and walked on geta so high as to be almost like stilts.

Before I reached the top of the mountain I had made friends with some pilgrims from Osaka, and not far from the summit we were all met by a young Buddhist priest, who invited us to come to his monastery. Formerly no women were allowed to enter Koya-san; they had to say their prayers and turn back from the ancient gate. Now women are gaining more freedom in Japan, and the two in our party went on to the monastery with us.

136The rooms where we were invited to take off our shoes and squat on cushions were much like those of a good Japanese hotel. In fact, some of the monasteries of Koya-san might be considered hotels, for though the monks invite pilgrims to be their guests they expect them to pay. After a very good Japanese dinner, which of course I had to eat with chopsticks, two of the young priests took us on a tour of the place. There were many aged temples, rather different from the Shinto temple at Yamada-Ise. Some of them contained wonderful examples of old Japanese art. There were tapestries, paintings, illuminated texts, carvings by a famous man named Unkei who lived hundreds of years ago. But most of the summit of Koya-san is a great cemetery. It did not look much like our cemeteries. Not only are Japanese tombstones different from ours, but most of these had been standing since long before our forefathers came to America. So, of course, they were blackened with time, and some looked ready to drop of old age.

Every great man of old Japan, from mikados to famous monks and priests, has a tomb at Koya-san. This does not mean that they all are buried there, but that in memory of each a tomb has been erected under the great cryptomeria trees. Since even the ordinary Japanese likes the idea of having some reminder of himself in this sacred spot after his death, a Kotsu-do, or “Hall of Bones,” is provided where every year a bone, or perhaps only a lock of hair, of each of thousands of dead Japanese is thrown. Thus they also have a share in the great national Buddhist graveyard 137beside the remains of the monk who founded this sanctuary of Koya-san nearly eleven hundred years ago.

One of the beggars on the climb to Koya-san wore a strange costume and high geta having one support instead of two, in order to appeal to the charitable.

But life is not all funereal at the great cemetery of Koya-san. The young monks in my temple had their jokes and their games, much like youths in other parts of the world. One of them was the tennis champion of all Koya-san; for there were a number of tennis courts among the monasteries. The young monks were very friendly, too, and sat, or rather squatted, 138with me in my room until bedtime, telling me stories in the little English that some of them knew.

Next morning, however, they were very solemn during the early service that I had been invited to attend. Dressed in their most religious robes they paraded with the older monks round and round an altar, some of them ringing bells and all of them chanting old Buddhist texts. Sometimes they all sat down on their heels before the altar, and then got up and slowly marched around it again. There were only a few pilgrims at this ceremony, and toward the end of it their names were called out one by one and each stepped up to the altar and sprinkled a pinch of incense into a bowl where more incense was burning. If I understood the explanation of one of the young monks who spoke a little English, these pilgrims were saying prayers for the souls of their ancestors.

Then we had breakfast back in my room, and half a dozen of the younger monks put on their sandals and went with me to the beginning of the road down the mountain. During the ceremony and in the guest rooms they had, of course, been in their stocking feet. They all bowed low and bade me sayonara (good-by), and then shook hands in our Western fashion. This “strange foreign custom,” as it naturally seems to the Japanese, made several of them giggle with amusement. But as I made my way down through the splendid forest toward the rice field plain below, I could not help wondering if American boys would have been as kind and hospitable to a stray Japanese traveler who visited one of our out-of-the-way villages.

CHAPTER XI WESTERN AND SOUTHERN JAPAN — On Foot Through the Mountains — Kyushu Island

Those who leave the beaten track of foreign travelers through Japan, that is, the main route between Nikko and Nagasaki, find that the Japanese are generally polite but have great curiosity. Sometimes they are angry at Americans, as when we pass laws to keep them from migrating to our country, and then they are not so courteous to us for a few weeks. In the ports and large cities, where many foreigners are seen, some of the Japanese men and boys are rude. But perhaps that is partly the fault of foreigners, who sometimes forget that visitors in another people’s country should be as careful as if they were visiting in another person’s home.

Most of the time the Japanese of all classes show great courtesy to travelers and to one another. It is very interesting to see a group of them bidding a friend good-by at a railway station. As the train starts they bow low, all together, so many times that they make you think of a field of wheat with strong gusts of wind blowing over it. Often when I have been walking through parts of Japan where foreigners are seldom seen, a whole village would leave its work or its play to crowd about me. The inhabitants were merely curious, without any intention of being 140rude. Many of the boys and girls, and sometimes even a few of the men and women, would follow me out into the country. It made me feel like the Pied Piper of Hamelin!

This queer vehicle is called a basha. In out-of-the-way parts of Japan it is still the most rapid and aristocratic means of conveyance.

But that was long ago, and now the Japanese everywhere are a little more familiar with foreigners. Yet crowds often surrounded us on our later trips. They might be only schoolboys, in their uniform caps and queer plaid kimonos. Nearly every pupil in the high schools of Japan wishes to learn English, and they are not so bashful or diffident about it as many American boys and girls are in practising a foreign language they are studying. They take every opportunity to learn more English 141by trying out, on any foreigner they see, what they have learned in school. So we were often surrounded, even on railway platforms, by boys who were speaking English slowly and often poorly, yet who did not give up even when the others giggled at their efforts. On the whole perhaps the Japanese are less bashful than we are. Or it may be that they are so much more eager to learn that they swallow their bashfulness. We were also often surrounded because of our small boy, for many Japanese have never seen a foreign child. The fact that his hair is very blond doubtless increased the size of the crowds, because many Japanese seem to think that only jet-black hair is real.

© E. M. Newman, from Publishers Photo Service

Fujiyama, the “Peerless Mountain” of Japan, is a perfect cone, perpetually capped with snow and ice and often reflected in the lakes near its base.

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© E. M. Newman, from Publishers Photo Service

A happy crowd of Japanese children near the great torii of Miyajima.

Walking is a pleasant and a profitable way to travel almost anywhere, but particularly in Japan, that empire of mountainous islands. One especially beautiful section, about in the center of Honshu, the largest island, is called the “Japanese Alps.” If ever you go to Japan, do not forget to spend a few days tramping in those splendid forested mountains, inhabited by simple, good-hearted people. Another delightful walking trip is to roam about the base of Fujiyama, the “Peerless Mountain,” so dear to the Japanese that they almost worship it. On a clear day the traveler may see that perfect snow-capped cone even before he reaches Yokohama, and behold it all the way to Kyoto, perhaps, though it often hides its head in the clouds for weeks at a time. It is hard work, yet very much worth while, to climb to the top. That, however, can only be done in midsummer, when the snow cap is not so deep.

Whether you ride or walk along the shore of it, or take a steamer through it, you will always remember the Inland Sea of Japan. It is a great stretch of blue water, dotted with islands and sailboats, between the western end of Honshu, the largest island, and Shikoku, the fifth largest island of Japan. One of the most beautiful sights along it is Miyajima, a 144kind of holy village, with a wonderful old torii, or Japanese square arch, standing out in the sea at high tide but on land at low tide. Miyajima is one of the “Great Sights” of Japan. First and foremost among these is of course Fujiyama. The others are Matsushima, those pine-tree islands off the coast in the Bay of Sendai, and Ama-no-hashidate, on the western coast of the biggest island. The name of this last one means “Bridge to Heaven.” There is a Japanese legend that the god Izanagi stood on this “bridge” when he shook from his spear the drops of water that turned solid and became the islands of Japan. It is really a narrow pine grove on a sand bar, and the Japanese make it look like a bridge to heaven by stooping down and gazing at it between their outspread legs. The name of Ama-no-hashidate and the legend show how imaginative are the Japanese.

The Inland Sea of Japan at Miyajima, showing the famous torii reflected in the water at high tide. The picture on page 142 is a nearer view and gives a good idea of the great size of this religious arch of which the Japanese are so proud.

My son at the Japanese shrine in the garden of the native hotel at Beppu, where there are natural hot baths for everyone.

Most foreign travelers in Japan either do not see Kyushu, the big southern island, at all or they hurry across it to or from Nagasaki. We spent more than two weeks on it. At Beppu, celebrated for its hot mineral baths, using water from a near-by volcano, we found a hotel where we could live in a little Japanese “annex” set in a garden of flowers and pine trees, with the privilege of bathing in a great tank of naturally hot water and of eating in the foreign-style 146main building. You can always have your bath as hot as you like at Beppu, without heating it. Thousands of Japanese go there every year to soak themselves in the hot water or hot mud from the volcano and cure themselves of rheumatism and other ailments. In places the peasants do not have cooking stoves, for they have only to set their kettles over steaming fissures in the rocks. There are many of these natural hot baths in Japan, because it is a mountainous country with many volcanoes. Next to going on religious pilgrimages, the Japanese travel most to such “water cures” as Beppu.

I think the new railway down the eastern side of Kyushu is finished now, but when I traveled over it there were still half a dozen tunnels to be dug in the great granite mountains. Railroad travel in Japan sometimes seems like a succession of smoky tunnels. I had to bump along a bad road in an old Ford between the two parts of the line that were running. In this part of Japan there were many little rice fields laid out like shelves or stairs on the terraced hills. The blue sea looked so like a great mirror whenever we caught sight of it that it seemed as if a steamer or sailboat would scratch it.

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In Kagoshima, southernmost city of Japan proper, the work horses wear elaborate harnesses, gaily decorated in red and gold. Perhaps the owners are more pleased with such display than the horses are.

There is another and older railway line down the other side of Kyushu, and both that and the new one end at the famous old city of Kagoshima. For centuries this was the most southern Japanese city, and it was there that St. Francis Xavier, the first Roman Catholic missionary to Japan, landed centuries ago, before Japan turned hermit and shut itself off from the outside world for more than a hundred years. There also, according to Japanese legend, the divine couple from whom the emperors of Japan descended, landed to found the great empire of Nippon. Queerly enough, though Kagoshima was the first place to welcome foreigners, or at least Westerners, it was there that the last stand was made against copying the modern Western world. The 148Satsuma lords of Kagoshima who opposed the other rulers of the country in this matter were defeated, and committed suicide. But their rebellion is completely forgiven now, and statues of the greatest of them, in ancient shogun costumes, rise among the trees and ponds in the hillside park of Kagoshima.

Looking across Nagasaki, one of the best known cities of Japan, which is built on a number of hills.

As a city Kagoshima was hot and dusty, now that May was almost over, and many of its people went nearly as naked as the Hindus. What made it seem still hotter was that the volcano island of Sakurajima out in its harbor was smoking as if there were a great furnace beneath it. Kyushu is so far south that great quantities of bamboo grow there. That 149most useful plant, which sometimes shoots up a foot in twenty-four hours, is one of the best friends Japan has. If I merely listed the things the Japanese make of bamboo, I could cover several pages.

At Nagasaki, Japanese women as well as men work in loading coal onto ships. Two passengers on my ship were so curious that I had to include them in the picture—partly.

Even though one leaves Kyushu by another way, one should not fail to visit Nagasaki, its principal port. It is not only a pretty city among its many wooded hills, but it has a very interesting history. During all the years that Japan was closed to the outside world, a few Hollanders were allowed to live on a tiny island in Nagasaki harbor and trade with the Japanese. They could not go anywhere else in 150Japan, and only the merchants who had business with them could visit their little island, which is now just a commonplace part of downtown Nagasaki. So they sat and smoked their pipes with Dutch patience, waiting for the day when they would be rich enough to go back to Holland. Though it is many years since Japan opened its doors to the outside world, the children of Nagasaki still call any foreigner they see, “Horando-san,” that is, “Mr. Hollander.”

The traveler who goes in or out of Nagasaki on a steamer will probably see one of the strangest sights in Japan. There is so much coal in the island of Kyushu that even our American warships on the way to or from the Philippines stop there for it. But as Nagasaki still has no modern coal chutes, the coal all has to be loaded by hand. There are almost as many women as men among the hundreds of workers who swarm down to the ship that is to be loaded. They look like human ladders on the gangways, for when the barges arrive the coal is passed in baskets from one person to another, over their heads, and the empty baskets are thrown down upon the barge again. With a dozen of these lines all working as fast as possible, the air seems to be full of baskets, and the workers get so thoroughly covered with coal dust that you might almost think they were negroes.

CHAPTER XII FORMOSA, JAPAN’S TROPICAL ISLAND — A Tempest in a Teapot — A Modern City in an Old Country — A Hot Meal in Wooden Boxes — Who Likes “Aisucureemu”?

Although it is very old, the Japanese Empire is still growing. In 1895 the Japanese had a war with China, and before they would make peace they forced the Chinese to give them the largest island belonging to that ancient country. Perhaps they thought that as their empire was entirely made up of islands they could govern this one better than the Chinese had done. The truth is that the Chinese had not governed it very well, and in many ways its people are better off under the Japanese.

I have already told you how the Japanese took the lower half of the island of Sakhalin from the Russians. That was ten years after they obtained the largest Chinese island. Later I shall explain how in 1910 they added a whole country. So you see the Japanese Empire has been growing even during our own days.

If only our legs were long enough, we could use the string of little Japanese islands the Spaniards named the Ladrones (“Robbers”) as stepping-stones from Kyushu to Formosa. But as they are not, we are more likely to find a steamer for Formosa sailing from Nagasaki than from Kagoshima. The Portuguese gave Formosa the name we know it by; it is their 152word for “beautiful.” The Japanese also at first called it “beautiful island,” in their language Takasagoshima; but now they call it by its Chinese name of Taiwan, or “Terraced Bay.”

Beautiful things are sometimes hard to manage, and this egg-shaped island, about as large as Massachusetts, and in one place barely a hundred miles from the coast of China, has given the Japanese plenty of trouble. In fact it has always had a troubled history. The Portuguese and the Dutch fought over it; the Dutch quarreled about it with the Chinese; a great Chinese pirate captured it; the United States ruled it once for a year; and now the Japanese are not finding it easy to control. Half in the tropics and half in the temperate zone (the Tropic of Cancer crosses the middle of it), Formosa is full of mountains, jungles, and savages. The mountains are heaped up until the topmost is reached in Mt. Morrison, which the Japanese call Niitakayama, 14,270 feet in height. This is the highest point in the Japanese Empire, almost as high as our Mt. Rainier. When an island reaches such a height as this it means that most of it is very mountainous. At first sight of it from the sea I was not surprised that at least two different races called it “Beautiful Island.”

Though Takao at the southern end of the island has a fine harbor, and there are a few other ports, almost everyone who comes to Formosa lands at Kiirun on the northern end. There is a saying that it rains in 154Kiirun four hundred days a year! I passed through it twice without seeing a drop of rain; still, I did not stay twenty-four hours either time, so perhaps the saying is almost true. The Japanese have made Kiirun, which the Chinese call Keelung, a very modern port, with wide paved streets and big brick buildings, landing wharves and drydocks. But what surprises the traveler still more perhaps, especially if he comes from China, so backward in such things, is to find that there are fourteen passenger trains a day to the capital, eighteen miles away.

Taipeh or Taihoku, capital of Formosa, is sometimes called the most modern city in Japan. After the Japanese took the island, they tore down the old Chinese slums and anything else they did not like, and rebuilt the city according to the latest ideas. They could not have rebuilt a city of old Japan so well, for the owners of houses and shops would have kept them from tearing down as much as they wished. Taipeh has wide, straight streets, crossing one another at right angles. They are well paved, and most of them are lined by fine trees or parks. Down in the business section the sidewalks are covered with arcades built out from the shops. In so hot a country it is very pleasant to be able to stay in the shade while shopping among the modern Japanese stores. Besides a great government building, there are museums and banks, excellent school buildings, a botanical garden, modern water supply and sewers, and many other 155things to prove that the people of Formosa have gained much by being taken over by the Japanese.

Taipeh, or Taihoku, capital of Formosa, is very up-to-date under the Japanese; in fact, with its wide business streets lined by arcades, it is called the most modern city in Japan.

There are no street cars in Formosa, but good Japanese railways run the whole length of the island. Several trains every day cover the 257 miles from the northern to the southern port between daybreak and dark. The trains are like those elsewhere in Japan, for all are government owned. The first and second class cars have upholstered benches along the sides, the third class have hard wooden ones arranged like the seats in our trains. The Japanese remain polite even down here in their hottest island. At the door of each car the guard or conductor takes off his hat, bows, and says he is sorry to trouble the honorable 156passengers to show him their tickets. Now and then a train boy comes through, but he is not the kind of train boy we have in the United States, for he has nothing to sell. Instead he keeps the cars always clean by using a broom and dustpan, sometimes a sprinkling can, and collecting rubbish left by passengers.

In Japan the people who sell things to passengers are not on the trains but on the station platforms. Boys in green caps or bearing other signs of their business, march back and forth past the train windows, selling tea, hot milk, fruit, rice cakes, California raisins, native jams and doughy candy, cigarettes, beer, newspapers and magazines, and especially O bento. Among Japanese travelers the “honorable bento” takes the place of our dining cars. It is a package of two very thin wooden boxes, one containing hot rice and the other several kinds of Japanese food, such as fish, raw or cooked, omelet, beans, pickled bamboo, and many other things familiar in Japan. With this package comes a fresh pair of chopsticks, not quite broken in two, so that we know no one can ever have used them, and between them (“like the baby between mamma and papa,” the Japanese sometimes say) a toothpick! The Japanese consider a toothpick very necessary after a meal. There are paper napkins, too, and once you get used to the food of Japan and learn to use the chopsticks you will enjoy one of these station meals.

Some of the words used by the Japanese for modern things are taken from our own language. If we listen closely we may be able to understand what the boys on the platform mean by “matchee,” “tabako,” “see-dare,” “beeru,” and “aisucureemu!” On the important station platforms there are long rows of washbasins with towels. The names of all stations are written on large signboards in English as well as in Japanese. These same signboards tell the distance to the last and to the next station and mention, also in English, all the places of interest that can be seen near by. In this respect Japanese railroads are more enterprising than our own.

Formosan schoolgirls jumping the rope between classes, in the yard of a former Confucian temple that the Japanese have made over into a school.

On the way south we shall see the famous old city of Tainan, capital of the Dutch and then of the Chinese 158pirate leader, and a dozen or more other cities and large towns, all made very clean and modern by Japanese rule. Perhaps we shall find some Confucian temples made over into schools, and here and there an old city gate standing as a kind of monument of Chinese times, the wall having been torn down. We may even catch glimpses of Japanese and Formosan boys and girls, with their leather book sacks on their backs or over a shoulder, going to school in the same kind of uniforms the school children of old Japan wear during the hotter months.

Japanese schoolboys in Formosa, in the uniforms most Japanese pupils wear, with the sacks in which they carry their books.

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Japanese girls on their way home from school in Formosa. They wear much the same uniform as the girls in Japan proper, and like the boys they carry their books in orderly knapsacks.

More interesting than the towns, perhaps, are the country scenes along the way. There are fields of sugar cane as well as rice; many banana plants show their huge leaves and big purple blossoms; tropical bamboos as big as trees wave their plumes lazily in the breeze. The country women are dressed so much like the men that we can hardly tell them from their husbands. Descended from Chinese immigrants, perhaps several generations back, they have the Chinese women’s custom of wearing trousers. But there is no foot-binding among the women of Formosa; that dreadful custom the immigrants left behind. The women along the way are therefore able to work side by side with the men, carrying loads on poles across their shoulders and pushing cars of country produce 160on tiny railroads that run toward the mountains. Some of the women in the train, especially on the hard benches of third class, have their hair done up in a very elaborate fashion, as if trying, not very successfully, to imitate the ceremonial hair dressing of Japanese ladies or of geisha.

Educated Formosan youths. They had been members of the same class in school in one of the interior towns, and had come together for a reunion.

After we have passed Kagi and the signboard that marks the Tropic of Cancer, we find many of the people chewing betelnut. It is not really that, though that is the name by which we call it in Europe and America. It is really the nut of the very slender arec palm and the leaf of the betel vine that climbs it, mixed with a little lime. Betelnut chewing is common 161among both men and women in the oceanic part of Asia.

All day long we notice that the government railways of Formosa stay close to the seacoast and on level ground. The fact is that the Japanese have modernized only the flat fringe of the country. Here there are modern towns and railways and roads and capable police, and all the other usual evidences of civilization. But the three-fourths of the island which piles into the sky in great forest-covered mountain ranges is much as it was before the Japanese came; in fact, much as it was thousands of years ago. Among the foothills there are the Hakkas, a kind of Chinese people, who plant and cultivate, like the real Chinese of the lowlands. But among the mountains live the wild tribes that were there when Formosa was all a wilderness. It is these that make beautiful Formosa so troublesome to the Japanese. In order to find out what the problem is, suppose we leave the tame level coast lands and climb into the mountains. There is a little risk involved, as you shall see, but we know that genuine travel, like any other real accomplishment, has its toils and its dangers.

CHAPTER XIII JAPAN’S WILD MEN — A Campaign Against Head Hunters — Fencing in the Wild Men — My Trip to a Camphor Camp — Civilizing the Savages — How Camphor Is Obtained

No one knows surely the origin of the wild tribes living in the forest-covered mountains of Formosa. Scientists think they are of the Malay race and came centuries ago from other islands farther south. Perhaps they are related to the wilder tribes of the Philippine Islands. Some people, indeed, believe that the Formosan tribes were originally of the same race as the Japanese, but that they got lost in the mountains and remained savages while the others, led by the ancestors of the Mikado, went on to less mountainous islands and became the civilized Japanese of to-day. It is true that if you dress one of the wild men of Formosa in Japanese clothes even a Japanese can hardly tell him from one of his own people.

Because of this possible race connection the Japanese should have a double desire to civilize the Formosan natives. The principal reason, however, for looking after them is to prevent their interfering with something very important to Japan. There are all kinds of tropical trees in the great crumpled-up part of Formosa, but one of them is more important than all the others—the camphor tree. You may know that moth balls contain camphor, but did you know that six million pounds of camphor are used every year in 163making celluloid, two million in perfumery, a million in drugs, and several million in other ways? When you discover that the world uses twelve million pounds of camphor every year for these various purposes, and then find that Formosa produces nine of those twelve million pounds, you will see why the Japanese were forced to tame the savages.

The camphor trees grow only in the mountains. There are a few single trees down on the narrow flat edge of the island, just as there are a few huge ones about the temples of China. But in order to get even thousands of pounds of camphor, to say nothing of nine million pounds every year, the Japanese had to send their camphor gatherers high up into the mountains. There the wild men used to attack them; even now they sometimes descend upon a camphor camp and kill the workmen or destroy the simple machinery.

For this reason the Japanese were forced to start a regular campaign against the wild tribes. The worst of them are head-hunters, like some of the people living in the wilder parts of the Philippines. The various tribes have had wars among themselves for centuries, and when they kill a man they carry home as a souvenir to prove their bravery, not his scalp, but his whole head! At home the savage lays his enemy’s skull away in his “skull shelf.” This is made of flat pieces of stone and has many pigeon-holes, somewhat like the boxes at the post office. In former times at least, the man who had the most skulls was 164considered the bravest, and became chief of the tribe. The Japanese have sent soldiers into the mountains to destroy the skull shelves, but some of them still remain.

It is only the men and boys who hunt heads, but the women and girls are partly to blame. No girl will marry a youth until he has gone out and killed at least one man and brought home his head. So the young Formosan who falls in love must hide in the woods along the “guard line” of the Japanese, and stay there until he can shoot a tame Formosan or a Japanese or some savage of another tribe than his own. Then he can march home in triumph, knowing he will no longer be treated as a child by his tribe or (particularly) by the lady of his choice.

The guard line is a wide cleared strip through the forest, with sentry posts and provision houses at intervals, and in some places with barbed wire fences that can be charged with a deadly electric current. When the Japanese first tried this scheme of fencing in the wild men among their high mountains, several head-hunters were killed by the electrified wires. But savages are not fools—they can learn by experience even if they do not go to school—and those of Formosa soon found that it was dangerous to touch the wire fences. They have for many generations built very clever bamboo bridges across the torrents and chasms of their mountains, so now they build a stile over the electrified fence, or dig a tunnel under it, and 165still occasionally take a head on the other side. No one knows how many they take inside their inclosure.

The head-hunting savages of Formosa build their houses of flat slabs of stone.

When I was in Formosa, not long ago, the government records showed that thirteen heads had been taken during that year, not counting those the head-hunters took from one another. Two of the victims were Japanese. The others were savages who had submitted to the new rulers and were allowed to live outside the guard line, or descendants of Chinese immigrants who lived among the foothills or down on the flat edges of the island. No one has ever heard of the Formosan savages taking the head of a white man. Whether this is because they do not consider 166the white race enemies or merely because a white man has never come near enough to risk his head, we are not sure. So far no American or European has volunteered to go inside the guard line to find out.

As a matter of fact, the Japanese would not allow the traveler to risk his life among the savages, even if he wished. There are so few white people in Formosa that it is easy for the government to keep track of them all, and before the traveler can even visit a camphor camp he must get permission from the foreign office in Taipeh. It is hard to believe that the wild tribes are so close to the capital of the island that if they had field glasses they could almost make out the despised tame people down in the streets. The places where one is allowed to go into the mountains are all farther south. Up Arisan, a mountain peak almost as high as Mt. Morrison, runs a cog-wheel railroad that brings down valuable timbers from the interior. But as the savages are now almost tamed in that region, I obtained permission to go instead to a camphor camp farther north.

Early in the morning a servant came to me in the Japanese inn room where I had spent the night and said that my “train” was waiting at the door. I found it to be a little wooden platform about five feet square, mounted on wheels made to run on a track. A kind of chair was fastened on it. This is what the Japanese call “first class” travel on the little narrow-gauge railways that run up into the foothills. The 167main purpose of these railways is to take supplies to the camphor camps and bring down the camphor products. The same car without a chair is called “third class” and is used by the natives, who pay much less than a white man.

My “engine” was a stout coolie, one of the tame immigrant Chinese people of the coast, who ran behind and pushed the car, now and then jumping on and riding a little when there was a down grade. For two hours he trotted across an almost flat plain, nearly all planted with rice. Then came a village that must have been a division point, for there I changed “locomotives.” Farther on, where it became more and more hilly, I had two “engines,” just as our trains do in going through the Rocky Mountains. Sometimes a man and his wife, dressed so much alike that it was hard to tell them apart, pushed at the same car. Now and then we met other push-cars, nearly all loaded with freight. They were shooting down the mountain side with a man clinging to a kind of baseball bat used as a brake. As it was a single-track railway, we were in danger of being hit before a descending car could stop. Because I was a first-class passenger, the cars we met all had to be lifted off the track to let me pass, unless they were so heavily loaded that it was impossible, or were coming down the mountain side so fast that we had to snatch our car off to avoid a wreck.

It made me think of the difference between the inhabitants to see the lower hillsides covered with tea bushes in such exact rows as to look as if the landscape had been tombed with a gigantic comb; while 168the mountain tops reminded me of the savages’ uncombed mats of hair. But the tea plantations from which the famous Formosa tea comes are not so exciting as the camphor camps higher up, both because tea is grown in many more parts of the world than camphor is, and because it is only at the camphor camps that there is any danger.

A tea plantation in the Formosan foothills. The tea bushes are planted in long even rows, up among the hills that are too steep and high for rice, yet not high enough for head-hunters.

It was after noon when I reached the camphor camp, a large village of several hundred people. Most of them had once been savages, but having surrendered to the Japanese they were allowed to live outside the electrified guard line. As fast as a new village promises to give up its head-hunting and behave, the guard line is moved beyond it, so that the savage territory is gradually becoming smaller.

A Japanese teacher and his class of mountain savages. The fathers of the children were all once head-hunters, and some still are. The teacher wears a sword because he is an officer of the Mikado. The man on the teacher’s right was in the same class, the first grade, as his own small son who stands in front of him.

In this camp there was a kind of boarding school for savages. Of the forty or fifty children of wild men who attended it, nearly all lived in a row of wooden huts on the edge of the school field. The chief Japanese teacher wore a white military uniform and carried a sword, and evidently he was very busy, for he had not shaved in a week. The boys and girls were dressed in Japanese school costumes—dark skirts over gay kimonos; but not all the pupils were boys and girls, though this was a primary school. Some of the men and women savages who could no more read 170and write than their children could, had come to school also. In a single class there were boys of ten and men of twenty; and in what we would call the first grade a man and his little six-year-old son were both learning their Japanese letters out of the same book.

A Japanese official who kindly asked me to stay with him while I remained in the village went out with me later to see some of the wild men. Most of the afternoon the rain poured in torrents. The paths to the savages’ houses were narrow trails up steep mountains, and downpours of rain covered them with mud as slippery as ice. Besides, Formosa is far enough south to be very warm during the day, even if the nights are cold high up in the mountains. So this was not an easy trip. At last we came, soaking wet and smeared with mud, to some one-room huts built entirely of flat stones, with a crude slate roof on top. Some of the tamer savages, who worked for the Japanese in the camphor stills, were quite friendly. They even joked with us, and offered us the long pipes with tiny bowls that both the men and the women smoked. These particular savages had completely surrendered, sending their children to the Japanese schools and themselves working at gathering camphor. Some become so tame that they go down to the cities, even to Taipeh the capital, and become rickshaw-pullers.

Not far beyond we found some untamed men. But they did not dare do us any harm, because they were allowed on the Japanese side of the guard line only on the understanding that if they started any trouble the Japanese and Formosan soldiers would treat them 171like wild animals. The Japanese like to have a few of the wild men at a time visit their camphor camps, and even the cities down on the plains if they can be coaxed that far from home. For they hope in that way to get word to the people of the mountains that they will have an easier life if they submit to the new rulers. But there is something in the black eyes of those visitors which makes one feel that they would like to take a few heads back home with them.

Real wild men of the head-hunting tribes of the Formosan highlands. They looked as if they would not mind taking a head or two home with them, but before being allowed outside the electric-wired guard line put up by the Japanese, they had promised to behave in a civilized manner.

A brick-kiln in Formosa. The bricks made here are much the same as in southern China, no doubt because the Formosan lowlanders are almost all descended from Chinese immigrants. The bricks are larger than ours, dull gray in color, and rather soft.

Nothing would have been more interesting than to have gone on up into the mountains, if the Japanese had allowed it. As they would not, nothing was left but to see how camphor is gathered. Camphor trees have become very large during the centuries when only the savages lived among them. Now they are chopped down, to be cut up into little chips with a small scoop-shaped ax. These chips are put in bags and carried down to the push-car railway, from which part are transferred to a steam railway and taken to the capital. Sometimes the camphor is distilled in the field, that is, in towns like this one I was visiting. I saw stills roughly made of mud and bricks and looking like Chinese brick-kilns. In these the chips are boiled, 173and the liquid that comes from them is run through bamboo pipes to be cooled. This colorless camphor oil is put in tins or cans like those in which American gasoline and kerosene come to Asia, and is shipped down to Taipeh.

Camphor is a government monopoly in Formosa. Therefore no one can sell either camphor chips or camphor oil to anyone except to the government officials in the capital. The Japanese Government puts whatever price it sees fit on the nine million pounds of camphor furnished to the world every year. So you see it has been worth while for the Japanese to take over the island which the Chinese ruled so badly. Whatever else the visitor to Formosa may see or miss, he should not fail to go through the warehouses of the Monopoly Bureau in Taihoku, containing tons of snow-white camphor in great bins. While he wonders how men can shovel the stuff back and forth all day in air that seems filled with the pungent odor of millions of moth balls, he will realize why Formosa is so important a part of the Japanese Empire.

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CHAPTER XIV KOREA OR CHOSEN — American Trains in a Far-away Land — Countryside and City — Seoul, the Capital City — Funeral Customs

Though her specialty is islands, Japan now has a large slice of the continent of Asia in her empire. During her war with Russia she found that the peninsula we usually call Korea was a “convenient springboard” from which her enemies could jump upon old Japan. Also the Koreans, who were formerly a part of the great Chinese Empire, had a very corrupt government. So the Japanese decided that it would be safer for themselves, and perhaps better for the Koreans, if they took charge of the peninsula. First they called it a “protectorate,” and left the old Korean Emperor on his throne in Seoul, requiring him to reform his government so as to be more like their own. But in 1910 the Emperor was deposed and the Japanese made Korea a part of their own empire, with a Japanese governor-general as the chief ruler.

From Shimonoseki, at the western end of the largest Japanese island, it was a comfortable one-night trip by a big Japanese steamer across to Fusan, at the southern end of Korea. We found this latest addition to the empire very different from the rest of Japan. The Koreans in some ways resemble the Japanese and in others the Chinese, yet they are enough different from either to be quickly recognized. Moreover, 176their costumes and customs and indeed the landscape of their peninsula are quite new to one who has been traveling through Japan.

Instead of the little Japanese trains with long upholstered seats on either side of the cars, Korea has regular American trains. Hearing the loud whistle of a locomotive made in Philadelphia, so different from the screeching little engines of Japan proper, we could almost imagine ourselves back home again. But the people in the train, and the scenes that raced past the windows, were not a bit American. Korea is a land of villages that look like clusters of great mushrooms, for their roofs are thatched with rice straw. There are a few cities, and in them many buildings have tile roofs and resemble the houses of China. The continental part of the Japanese Empire, almost as large as its biggest island, yet only about half as large as our similar peninsula of Florida, has a very much greater population. Most Koreans are peasants living in villages near their fields; so you can understand why those mushroom villages are so numerous.

It was June now, and the sun beat down from a sky without the least little cloud in it, upon almost endless rice fields. The Koreans grow cotton and tobacco also, and some wheat, millet, and barley in the northern part of their peninsula. But we might have fancied, seeing these fields hour after hour, that they grew nothing but rice. If we could have seen the peasants 177eating their dinners we might have formed the same impression, for the great mass of the people eat very little except rice.

There were almost no trees to break the sun-flooded rice lands. One of the weaknesses of the old Korean Government was that it let the people cut down all the trees. Knowing that the loss of forests means that there will be both droughts and floods, the Japanese protected theirs, so that they not only have much finer scenery than either Korea or China but they possess the water supply so necessary for growing food. In Formosa they even replant camphor trees to take the place of those they cut down. In Korea the Japanese have started tree nurseries, like those of Germany, and in time they hope to have the peninsula well forested again.

One thing about Korea that strikes every traveler from America or Europe is the scarcity of real roads. Before the Japanese came, there were only trails in most parts of the peninsula, so that travelers had to go on foot or horseback, and produce on animals’ or men’s backs or on wheelbarrows. Now the Japanese are building modern roads, but they are not very good road-builders, and floods in a treeless country quickly fill the rivers and tear out the bridges. We did not see an automobile all day long, and very few other vehicles. Later I found that Fords sometimes run to towns at a distance from the railway. But even those often have hard work getting over the rough 178earth roads, and have to be ferried across rivers where bridges have been washed out or have never existed.

Two Korean salesmen on the streets of Seoul. The one on the left has a load of firewood (small branches of evergreen trees), which he has brought to the market-square on the back of his patient bull. The peddler on the right has chickens to sell. The fowls are carried in a network frame or cage which has legs so that it may be set down when a customer is found. The roosters crow as if they enjoyed the ride.

A Japanese woman (in front) and a Korean woman (behind) in the streets of Seoul show rather different costumes.

We rode ten hours on our American train, reaching Seoul, the capital of Korea, only as the sun set. Yet this city is in the middle of the country, and it takes even longer by train to get to the northern boundary. Once Seoul had a great wall all around it, like the cities of China. But the Japanese do not believe in city walls. They know those old walls that were once so useful in 180warfare are of no use whatever against the great guns of to-day. Moreover, they say the Koreans cannot fight unless behind walls, and naturally they would not want their new subjects to have any advantage in case of a possible attempt to drive the Japanese out of the peninsula. So the picturesque walls of old Seoul have all been torn down. Some of the great ornamental gates have been left, but only as monuments.

Those who came to Seoul fifteen or twenty years ago found the streets very narrow, and deep either in mud or in dust, depending on the weather. Even rich people went about the city on foot or on horseback, or perhaps in sedan-chairs, and it took them hours to get from one part of town to another. Some of these quaint little streets are still left; but there are many wide paved streets now, with automobiles, and electric street cars running from one end of town to the other.

The Koreans like to sleep during the hottest part of the day in summer, and they can sleep almost anywhere, with the ground as a bed and a brick as a pillow. When the street cars first came, Koreans who wanted a nap thought the high rails made a fine pillow, and some of them were killed by the cars. All that is changed now, and Seoul is a busy and quite a modern city.

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Beneath this famous old kiosk of Seoul, with the lines of monkeys in tile running along its four ridge-poles, there is a monument on a great stone turtle. The turtle, which means long life to Koreans and Chinese, is often seen as a monument or as the pedestal of a carved slab of granite.

Yet one still finds much that is picturesque in the capital. The palaces of the former rulers, where the deposed Emperor (who has since died) lived even after the Japanese took his power away from him, are very gaudy buildings, with flaring tiled roofs, inside high walls with ornamental wooden gates. Quaint old temples filled with statues of gods and demons in all the colors of the rainbow still peer out from among the low houses and from groves on the surrounding hillsides. But the big modern government buildings of the Japanese overshadow the old palaces, and when you climb a hill and look down upon Seoul you will be much less likely to see the temples than the bulking red brick churches built by Christian missionaries. The mythological stone animals of the old Korean city are not nearly so conspicuous as the big new wheel-shaped prison built by the Japanese, and the once 182sacred Temple of Heaven is now an ice-cream pavilion in the garden of the best Japanese hotel!

Sometimes we heard in the streets those weird sounds which the Koreans think are music, and looked out to see a funeral passing. The Korean hearse has no wheels but is carried on men’s shoulders. Although some of the mourners now may ride in rickshaws, most of the people behind the hearse are on foot. At least half of them are men and boys hired to carry the many strange things that must go in a Korean funeral procession. They are dressed in red and green and other gaily-colored garments, sometimes rather worn and dirty, which belong to the director of the funeral rather than to those who are wearing them.

Once I followed one of these queer funerals out over the hills. When it had left the city it moved more and more slowly. Some of the mourners and other followers dropped out and went back home. Far out among the rice fields the rest of the procession sat down for a while to rest, and then went on again, the queer music still howling and squeaking and banging. In former days the Koreans buried their dead wherever the “wise men” who make that their business told them to, so that the hills about Seoul are covered for miles and miles with little green knolls. But now the Japanese allow them to bury only in certain places, and are inducing some to follow the old Buddhist custom of burning corpses. Many of these processions end at an ugly brick building with a tall chimney, 183looking like a little factory lost among the green hills. There the bodies are cremated.

Korean hearses are made so that they can be taken apart. After each funeral, those in the procession wander back to Seoul by short-cuts over the high hills, the pallbearers each carrying a part of the bier, and laughing, chatting, and smoking their little pipes. In among the hills there are little monasteries, where Korean Buddhist monks with shaven heads lead rather an idle existence, though they pray often before their gaudy wooden and plaster gods. Here and there is a royal tomb, quite different from the simple grass-covered and often unmarked graves of ordinary people. There was one of these royal tombs on the trail we sometimes followed from the city to the home of the missionaries with whom we lived beyond the hills. First, behind a wooden memorial arch, there was a great cut-stone platform with two or three stone steps leading up to it. Part of this was covered by a small wooden temple topheavy with its great tile roof. It is here that the spirit of the little dead prince who is buried farther back is supposed to make its home. But we could see, through the torn paper panes that took the place of glass in the doors and windows of the temple, that there was nothing but a dirty bare floor inside.

Higher up on the grassy hill, a hundred yards from the temple, was the green mound of the grave itself. It was several times as large as the grave mounds of ordinary Koreans. There was a high gravestone, with a few words in Chinese characters and a top 184that looked like a roof, or a hat. Around the grave stood the guardians of the dead prince, all badly made of stone. There were two horses, two sheep, two queer things supposed to be lions, and several other pairs of protectors. The most imposing and best made were two stone mandarins, or high officials, in long robes and high headdresses, who gazed kindly at the grave of the little prince, without ever taking their eyes off it from one year’s end to another.

Such strange stone figures as these guard a royal grave in Korea.

Back of the grave was a semicircular brick wall, such as the Koreans think protects the dead against evil spirits coming from the north; and surrounding the place was an old pine forest, with a caretaker’s house set in the edge of it. The Koreans, who have destroyed their trees nearly everywhere else, are very careful of the sacred groves.

CHAPTER XV HOW THE PEOPLE OF KOREA DRESS — Always “Spick and Span” — Queer Hats

Sometimes, returning to Seoul from over the hills, we stopped at a shaded spot to look down upon and listen to the city which spread far and wide in the valley below. Did you realize that different cities have different voices, just as people do? Seoul’s voice is rather quiet, except that there is a constant rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, reminding one of an automobile engine with too much carbon in its cylinders. You can hear that rat-a-tat all day long, Sundays almost as much as week days, more or less of it even at night—not only in Seoul but all over Korea, wherever many people live. I am sure it will surprise you to learn that this noise is made by the women ironing clothes! The ironing is done not with flatirons but with sticks that look like small baseball bats.

Among grown-up Koreans, the everyday clothes are white, in winter as well as in summer. In the islands of Japan and in China to wear white means that one is in mourning, and this used to be the case in Korea. But because the Korean people were expected to mourn for three years not only after a member of their family had died, but after the death of each royal person, the wearing of white came to be habit with them. (Now, for mourning, the Koreans wear a light brown 186coarse cloth.) In winter the white garments are padded with cotton, like our quilts. Children, especially girls, sometimes have bright garments of green, pink, and other gay colors. But their parents and other adults almost always dress in white—farmers as well as city dwellers. If it were not for variety provided by their hats, and by the dress of Japanese and foreigners, a Korean crowd would look like a snowdrift.

This is the way the women and girls iron clothes in Korea. You can hear the pounding of these small baseball bats or policemen’s billies in any town day or night.

White clothes are so easily soiled that a great deal of washing is necessary. The Korean housewife does not care so much about her own appearance as she does about her husband’s. When he goes out into the street, to squat on his heels with his cronies and smoke his pipe, she would be ashamed if his long coat and his baggy trousers were not at least as clean as those of 187her neighbors’ husbands. So every day you will find her down at the bank of the river, or at the edge of some little pond, washing clothes by pounding them with a flat stick like the Englishman’s cricket bat. The dull thump-thump of this pounding is not so noticeable as the rat-a-tat of ironing, but it is just as familiar a sound in Korea.

Wash day in Korea. Korean women wash their clothes, and especially those of their husbands, by beating them with wooden paddles on flat stones on the bank of some stream or pond.

Most of the white clothing of the Koreans is made of what we call grass cloth—woven from the fibers of a kind of wild pineapple leaf. I do not suppose it is really easier to iron this cloth by folding it over a roller and beating it, but the Korean woman still clings to her bats when she could have flatirons if she wanted them.

188Although the national dress is not one of the really important things about any country or people, travelers are almost sure to notice strange costumes first. They could not help doing so in Korea, for in some ways the Koreans dress more oddly than any other people on earth. In summer many of the men keep their thin white garments away from the body by wearing rattan underwear! They have an undergarment shaped like our vests, long detached cuffs, and a high collar much like the ruffs worn in Queen Elizabeth’s day, all made of splints, loosely woven. Japanese and foreigners who have tried this basket underwear say that it is very cool, but I did not try it.

Sometimes the Korean costume does not quite meet in the middle, though it must be snowy white if the wearer is not to be considered a very low person, indeed.

The very loose white trousers, which may be bound close about the ankles with black bands, are covered by a long garment called the turamaggie. It is the tails of this that probably give the Korean wife the most washing and ironing to do, for whenever the husband squats 189down to gossip with his neighbors he spreads the turamaggie out behind him without always picking a clean spot. The women wear a very short waist and a long skirt that is pulled up under the arms. Formerly all the better class women covered themselves from head to foot in a great white cloak out of which only an eye peeped as they made their way through the streets.

Some of the country boys of Korea still wear their hair long and in a braid, as all men formerly did until they were married, when it was put up in a topknot.

I have left to the last the most astonishing part of the Korean costume, the hat. The women do not wear any, except sometimes a kind of straw parasol when working in the rice fields. The boys, we notice, often have their hair cut. But that is a very recent custom, brought in by the Japanese and foreigners. A few years ago no boy in Korea ever thought of letting anyone cut his hair, and in the country districts he often does not yet. Many a Korean mother has wept and many a father has been very 190angry when a son, returning either from Japanese public school or from one of the schools of the Christian missionaries, has appeared with short hair.

The old Korean on the left is wearing the horsehair hat which most men in Korea still wear, in the belief that it will protect their topknots from evil spirits. The Korean on the right, by wearing a big straw or bamboo-splint hat, shows that he has lost a relative within three years. In Western lands, the parallel of this custom is the wearing of mourning veils by women who have recently been bereaved.

191So precious was the braid of hair once worn by all Korean men and boys, and still very general among the men, that a special hat was contrived to protect it. As soon as he was engaged to be married, often by the time he was fifteen, the Korean boy’s braid was twisted into a tight knot four or five inches high, standing upright on his head. At the same time a wide black band was placed so tightly about his head that at first the boy had an all-day headache. This band is not something to put on in the morning and take off at night or indoors. It is put on “for keeps,” and the great majority of Korean men wear one to the day of their death.

Over the topknot which many Korean men still have goes a funny little skull cap, and above that a hat shaped much like the high silk hat that Western men wear with formal evening dress. But the Korean “plug” hat is much too small for the head and has to be held on by a string under the chin. Both it and the skull cap are made of loosely woven horsehair, so that they look like fly traps made of mosquito screening. There is a narrow brim on the hat, not wide enough to shade the face. Most Korean faces are burned a deep brown by the cloudless summer sun, especially those of the men and women who toil in the rice fields.

The fact is that the Korean hat is not for the same purpose as our hats. It is worn merely to protect that precious topknot from the evil spirits which, according 192to the Koreans, are always flying through the air, though they cannot be seen. If he were to hear a radio, I am sure the Korean peasant would believe the sounds came from those unseen spirits. Since the hat is a horsehair screen, the topknot can always be seen, so that the owner need never worry about its safety. Many Korean men, especially of the cities, now have short hair, but most of them go on wearing the queer hat, just as we keep up old customs after the reason for them is forgotten.

You can easily imagine how queer it looks to see farmers who are wading up to their knees in the paddy-fields, or threshing their rice with flails much like ours, or carrying a load on their backs on a wooden framework called a jicky, dressed in white clothes topped by a high black hat. Yet they are seen all over Korea. The white garments and the “plug” hat are worn even by a blacksmith at his forge and by the teacher of the old fashioned Korean school at his desk. In fact, Korean men become so used to these hats that they wear them even while they sleep, pillowing their heads on a brick or a stone that does not interfere with them.

There are other queer hats in Korea, though few by comparison. When a man is in mourning, he wears a hat much like a bushel basket, clear down over his face, so that others shall not see his grief, which is supposed to last for three years. The farmers sometimes wear another hat almost as big, as a protection against the blazing summer sun. Until a few years ago, the girls of some parts of the peninsula were supposed to hide their faces modestly under immense 193hats. When entering a church they used to pile up these hats outside, covering the ground about the building. At the other extreme in size, is the rainy day hat-parasol, yellow in color and about as big as a quart jar, though cone-shaped. Every Korean man carries one of these, folded up to the size of a ruler, and whenever rain threatens to ruin his precious horsehair hat he slips this tiny waterproof parasol over it. The rest of him does not matter, for the thin white garments will soon dry out again.

If it rains the least bit, out comes the yellow waterproof hat-parasol which the Korean man carries folded up.

CHAPTER XVI HOW THE KOREANS LIVE — Some Contrasts — Korean Food — Interesting Street Scenes — Koreans as Christians

If the peninsula of Korea were moved to the western hemisphere it would stretch from Massachusetts to North Carolina. So of course there are differences in its climate. But on the whole it is very cold in winter and very hot in summer. Sometimes there are heavy rains and often severe droughts. Once, toward the end of July, when we were still living over the hills from Seoul, the rains were so heavy that all the lower part of the capital, along the Han River, was flooded, and we could get to town or to the railroad only by wading, sometimes up to our knees, in mud and water.

In a great many ways the Koreans are a sort of halfway people between the Japanese and the Chinese. This is especially true of their homes, which are not well adapted to the climate. The Chinese have chairs, but Koreans squat on the floor like the Japanese. Their wooden floors are raised above the ground, again like the Japanese, but they are covered with a kind of heavy varnished brown paper, instead of the thick straw mats of Japan. At one end is the kitchen, with a very crude mud-brick stove and oven, and in place of a chimney a flue carries the heat and smoke under the house and out at the other end. This device, 195which is used also in the north of China, warms the floor, and as the Koreans sleep on the floor, like the Japanese, it keeps them warmer than if they used the little charcoal-burning hibachi of the Japanese. Foreigners, however, sometimes wake up on a Korean floor dreaming that they are on top of a stove. In summer this scheme is not at all good. Of course it is just as necessary to cook in summer as in winter, and the flue from the kitchen keeps right on heating the floor-bed and the house when they are already too warm without it. Perhaps that is why we saw so many Koreans sleeping out on their porches, or sitting up talking at all hours of the night. Whatever the reason, Koreans are regular nighthawks.

The interior of a Korean house. The floor, raised above the ground, is covered with heavy paper. Koreans take off their shoes in the house, as do Japanese.

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If grandfather and grandson are too old or too young to work in the fields, they can at least be baby-carriages.

Korean babies, like those of Japan and China, are not put into cribs or cradles but are tied to the back of mother, grandfather, or a small brother or sister. So they learn to sleep under any conditions, even while the mother is going about her work in the rice field or house or hurrying along the road. Naturally, when they grow up they can sleep anywhere, at any time. They do not have to have a soft bed and a dark, quiet room with everything just right, as most Americans do. Korean mothers do not send their children to bed with the chickens. They do not seem to care when the youngsters go to sleep, or when they get up. We 197often saw children suddenly lie down on the floor under everyone’s feet and go soundly to sleep, and almost as often we heard them talking in the middle of the night. It may be, too, that the curious old Korean custom of making the men stay home after the city gates were closed at nightfall and allowing only the women to go out after that gave the Koreans the habit of gossiping so much when other people would be sleeping.

A Korean washerwoman takes her son along to the stream where she will beat out her clothes on the rocks. Carrying burdens on the back or on the head is easy for Koreans.

The houses of the Koreans are small, one-story cabins of from three to five rooms. They are generally half as wide as they are long, with no doors or windows in the back wall. The better-class houses have sliding walls, as in Japan, so that the whole house can quickly be made into one room, or the whole front of it can be opened when the weather is fine. But the dwellings are more solidly built than those of the Japanese, stones and mud, or mud bricks, often being used in construction. More wooden than paper walls are used. When he enters his house the Korean steps out of his 198shoes, or rather his slippers. These slippers turn up at the toe in a way that makes one think of a Venetian gondola. For rainy weather and mud the Koreans have, in place of the Japanese geta, boat-shaped wooden shoes, much like a Hollander’s. The carver, in making these, leaves on the bottom two stilts several inches high to lift the wearer above the mud.

For all their white garments, the Koreans are not so clean as the Japanese, though they are cleaner than the Chinese. As they have no bathrooms in their houses, or even in their public inns, the daily bath of the Japanese still seems very strange to them. In olden times they were careful to bathe on a certain day every year, because it was part of a religious ceremony, and I am afraid there are some who even now do not take baths at other times.

Just as the children of Korea sleep anywhere, and at any time, so they eat anything and everything. Mother never seems to worry about the smallest infant getting the colic. Babies not old enough to walk munch cucumbers or turnips or anything else they get their hands on. Foreigners often do not enjoy Korean food. First of all there is rice, boiled soft but eaten almost dry, as in Japan and China. Like his neighbors the Korean eats with chopsticks, but he uses a flat spoon for his rice. His various vegetables are not very different from our own, but he prepares them in styles we might not like. Fish, cooked in several 199queer ways, is eaten by everyone who can afford it, and the mass of Koreans probably eat more meat than the Japanese do.

A jar store in Seoul. The Koreans use a great many brown earthenware jars of all sizes, especially for preserving their kimchee, a kind of Korean sauerkraut, made of turnips, cabbages, and other vegetables. This is put up every fall and eaten with great relish during the winter.

Brittle sheets of seaweed cooked in oil, black lettuce, pickled vegetables, hot red peppers, and some other things that do not even have a name in our language are found on the Korean table—or, more exactly, floor—along with such familiar vegetables as celery and green onions. Koreans hardly use sugar at all. In place of salt they are very fond of chang, a sauce made from pressed and fermented soya beans. Most Koreans dip every chopstickful of food in a bowl of this on the way to the mouth. Unlike both the Japanese 200and the Chinese, they do not often drink tea, but they like plain water or water in which barley or millet has been cooked. Some of them are rather too fond of sool, an intoxicating drink made of rice. It corresponds to the sake of Japan and the chiuh of China.

Market day in a town of interior Korea brings out strange displays of all sorts of new and second-hand wares.

It is always interesting to wander along the streets of Seoul, or the other large cities of Korea. Not only are there always many strangely dressed people constantly passing in rickshaws or on foot, but all the queer things they wear and eat and use are displayed in the long rows of shops. As in most of the Orient, the shops have no front walls, at least during the day 201and evening, when they are open for business. The stroller can see, and handle too, if he likes, the wooden mud-shoes and horsehair hats, the tiny chests of drawers bound in brass, the great brown jars for pickling vegetables, and the thousand and one other queer Korean things that are offered for sale. If it is one of the old-fashioned shops that are still most common, the shopkeeper and his clerks will probably be squatting on the varnished-paper floor, just as they would in their homes. But nowadays there are also many quite modern Japanese stores.

This is a shop and factory of Korean “plug” hats, such as nearly all the married men in the peninsula still wear. The horsehair from which these strange transparent hats are made is kept in rolls until it is needed.

The Koreans, like the Ainu, are larger than the Japanese who have conquered them, but they are a 202more simple and childlike people. Until the Japanese put a stop to it, their favorite game was throwing stones. Two gangs or two villages would line up against each other, much like American boys in a snowball battle, and throw stones until one side or the other was driven off. The women picked up stones and piled them in heaps where the men could reach them, and often these battles became so savage that men were not only seriously hurt but sometimes killed. You might think that with all this practice for generations, perhaps centuries, the Koreans would make good baseball players. Possibly they will some day, but at present they are not nearly so clever at it as the Japanese.

Korean coolies carrying grain to a ship in one of the most important harbors of the country keep track of their loads by getting a little bamboo stick as a tally on each trip.

203In his readiness to make and laugh at jokes, the Korean is more like the Chinese than the Japanese, although you cannot make him laugh as easily or as heartily as you can the hard-working people of China. But one little story will show that he is born with a sense of humor. An American missionary stepped off the train in Seoul and, having an appointment somewhere soon, looked at his watch. It was a large, old-fashioned watch which had been given to the missionary by his grandfather years before. Near by was a Korean boy with a jicky on his back. Immediately the boy backed up to the missionary and with a very solemn face asked him if he did not want the watch carried!

The Korean girls who entertain dinner parties by singing and dancing are called keesang, but they are not so well trained as the Japanese geisha, and the custom seems to be rather dying out. Now there are the movies, a Y. M. C. A. building (given by an American), and other modern attractions to draw the young men of Seoul away from the keesang entertainments. Another class that is disappearing are the old women whom we would call sorceresses, since they pretend to drive sickness out of children and evil spirits out of insane people—by dancing and shrieking and waving swords and spears and other weapons about them. The building of modern hospitals by the Japanese and by American and British missionaries has brought medical care to take the place of sorcery.

The Korean coolie fastens a jicky, something like an artist’s easel, on his back, to carry loads. This one is armed with a fan to ward off sunstroke.

There are now many Christian churches in Korea and thousands go to them every Sunday as regularly as people do in the United States. Some think the Koreans are converted to Christianity more easily than the Japanese or the Chinese because they are sad and troubled at their country’s loss of independence. Others say the Koreans are easily led by kindness, and still others, especially the missionaries, claim that Christianity appeals to them as the true faith as soon as they learn about it.

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Korean girls leaving church. The American and British missionaries have had much success in Korea, and great numbers of the people go to church every Sunday, in their snow-white garments. Little girls may have garments of green, red, and other gay colors.

A Korean church service is very interesting, even if you cannot understand the language in which the foreign missionary or the native pastor in his snow-white garments is speaking. There are no chairs or other seats. Everyone sits on the floor. Behind the pulpit or along the walls beside it there may be one or two wooden benches, but these are for the few foreigners in the congregation. The Korean men keep their hats on, for it is nowhere the custom in Asia to uncover the head indoors. They do look odd in those bonnet-like little hats of theirs and their white garments, as they squat, gazing up very solemnly 206at the preacher. They alone are solemn. Hungry babies cry and squirm until they are fed, and small boys and girls play and whisper and even run about over the legs of the audience. This is not because they are naughty, but because the Koreans have had so many centuries of wandering through temples and saying their own prayers to the gods, that they do not know how to act in the way we think appropriate to a church. Besides, any child could be excused for becoming tired of squatting on the floor to listen to a long sermon, perhaps by a foreigner with a dreadful accent. But the Koreans are anxious to do as the missionaries wish. They have women in their churches whose business it is to run after scampering boys and girls and make them squat down again and behave themselves.

CHAPTER XVII KOREA UNDER JAPANESE RULE — Two Names for Each Town — Some Japanese Improvements

Those of us who travel often wonder about the names by which we know countries and cities. Where do they come from? If you mentioned the name Korea to a Korean he would have no idea what you were talking about, unless he had studied English in school. It seems that centuries ago the word “Korai” was used for a while, but even that meant only a part of the peninsula. Our custom of calling all the people Koreans is much like that of the South Americans in calling all of us in the United States “Yankees,” even those who live in Virginia or Texas. The real name of the country is Chosen, which means “The Land of Morning Calm.” That has been the correct name of the peninsula for hundreds of years, yet the Japanese are having a hard time getting the rest of the world to accept it.

The Koreans themselves and the foreigners in Korea—who are mostly missionaries—have much trouble about names. This has come about in a curious way. The Koreans have a very old civilization. Most of that civilization they got from the Chinese, and much of it they passed on to the Japanese, centuries ago. Therefore all three of these peoples have the same written language, made up of the queer 208Chinese characters that you all have seen. Each character means one particular thing, but as there are no letters in it there is no way of telling by looking at it how it should be pronounced. So the Koreans, and the Chinese, and the Japanese all pronounce those characters to suit themselves, and while they can write to one another they cannot talk to one another at all. It is very amusing to see a Japanese and a Korean, or a Chinese and an Annamese (from French Indo-China), talking to each other by pretending to write characters with a forefinger in the palms of their hands. In fact many a Japanese servant tries to talk that way to Americans who cannot understand his spoken words.

Now when the Japanese came to Korea they found each city and town with a name of one or two Chinese characters. But the Koreans pronounced those characters one way and the Japanese quite another. So each race continues to give them its own pronunciation, and the names in the Japanese time-tables are often so entirely different from those by which the Koreans and the missionaries know the same places that the poor traveler might easily lose himself entirely. Thus the Japanese call Seoul “Keijo”; Chemulpo is “Jinsen” to them; Song-do is “Kaijo,” and so on through every city and town and province in the peninsula. I once asked an old American missionary if he had ever been in Heijo. “Never heard of it,” he 209replied. “Oh, come!” I could not help saying; “it is the second largest city in Korea.” “Oh,” exclaimed the missionary, “you mean Pingyang! Why of course, I have lived there most of my life.”

It is hardly flattering to us to know that the ancient nations of the Far East did not at all want to be introduced to us upstart people of the West. Japan, Korea, even China, had to be pried open like oysters before they would have anything to do with Occidentals (that is, Westerners). You remember that it was our Commodore Perry who induced Japan to open her ports to American trade and travelers in 1854. Well, it was the United States again that opened Korea to the world, by the Treaty of Chemulpo, as recently as 1883. It is not strange if in some ways the Koreans are still more different from the rest of the world than are the Japanese. Chosen was shut up so long and so thoroughly that it was once known as the Hermit Kingdom. There was a time when foreigners were not welcome. But nowadays they can travel anywhere in the peninsula just as safely as in their own country, more safely in fact than in some American cities after dark. The Koreans may not love the Japanese, and some of them may even dream of driving out the conquerors and regaining their independence, but they are learning so much about good government that they would never again allow themselves to be ruled as corruptly as they were under the old emperors. They know more about sanitation, too, and about reforesting their treeless hills, and they realize how much better it is to have good schools than bad.

210The Japanese have done some foolish things in Korea, just as we have in our island possessions. They tried, for instance, to force the Korean men to cut off their topknots. The Japanese now admit this was a mistake. What does it matter, after all, how people wear their hair? To many foreigners it seems just as unnecessary for the Japanese to try to make all Koreans Shintoists, building Japanese temples and torii (square arches of evergreen logs) all over the peninsula. For while Shintoism means patriotism, loyalty to the Mikado, it is also a religion. Religion cannot be forced upon people, and patriotism is not worth much if there is no feeling behind it. You stand up and take off your hat when “The Star-Spangled Banner” is played because you respect and love your country, not because a policeman might arrest you if you did not.

Many Koreans already realize that Japanese rule has done them much good. They have good railroads, some good highways and bridges, modern streets, courts, and schools. Japanese and Korean policemen keep order in even the small towns. In Korea the Japanese find good commercial opportunities for their own people, but it should be said, in fairness, that the Koreans themselves now have better opportunities and are in less danger of being robbed of what they earn than they were under their old corrupt imperial government.

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An old-fashioned Korean school is a sad place. The boys sit on the floor and rock back and forth reciting the classics, which they do not understand, from dawn until dark, while the teacher drowses or smokes, and the flies swarm.

The difference between old Korea and the Chosen of Japan can quickly be seen in the two kinds of schools in the peninsula. You would be greatly interested to see one of the old-fashioned Korean schools, but you would certainly be glad you did not have to try to get an education there. Some such schools are still left, for a few old fathers in every large town think their boys should study the way they once did. These schools are miserable little hovels, with dirty floors and walls, swarming with flies in summer and bitterly cold in winter. The teacher squats at one end of the room, with a row of boys on the floor on either side. (Girls do not need an education, say old-time Koreans.)

212The boys come as soon as it is daylight and usually stay until dark, seven days a week, with sometimes no recess at all. Each has a tissue-paper book filled with those intricate Chinese characters which it takes so many years to learn. The books are not on subjects such as American boys are interested in, but are ancient Chinese classics, older than our Bible. Yet the teacher does not teach them; he merely squats at the end of the room, smoking his long pipe and sometimes dozing off to sleep. The boys rock back and forth, each one shouting at the top of his voice the characters before him. They may all be shouting different ones, and most of the pupils may not know what the characters mean. The only requirement is to keep on shouting. If the deafening chorus dies down for a moment, the teacher wakes up and rushes at the boys with a stick until they begin to shout again.

You can hear one of these old-time Korean schools blocks away. Is it any wonder that the boys who came out into the sunlight for me to photograph them looked pale and tired, and bewildered with the constant uproar in which they were expected to learn? Every week or every month each boy must bring the teacher some money, for the town does not pay him, and the teacher must have something with which to buy his rice and tobacco and a new white grass-cloth suit now and then.

The Japanese schools in Korea, in contrast, are big modern brick buildings. They have seats and desks, and laboratories and gymnasiums, and the teaching is 213very much as it is in your own schools. It is true that the Japanese have not yet built enough such schools to care for all the Korean children who want to attend. These have to take what room is left after the Japanese boys and girls are provided for. The language of the classes is Japanese, too, rather than Korean. For these reasons the American and British missionaries insist that they also be allowed to have schools for the Koreans. The Japanese, however, are building more and more modern schools, the teachers being paid by the government, and they say that the time will come when all Korean children will have the same educational opportunities as the Japanese children.

The primary school at Antung, built and owned by the South Manchuria Railway.

CHAPTER XVIII COUNTRY TRIPS IN KOREA — Rural Customs

One morning I left Seoul with an American missionary who had lived for more than ten years in a small Korean town far from the railroad. He had a Ford, but we were not sure we would ever reach his home in it. I have already mentioned that although the Japanese are trying to give Korea good modern roads they are not very expert road builders. Besides, the soil of Korea is a kind of half sand that does not stand up well under wheels or rains and in many places there is no stone near by.

It must be very disheartening to try to build good roads in Chosen, for in the rainy season whole treeless hillsides are sometimes washed away in a few hours, leaving no sign of a road that took long to construct. More than once my missionary friend had been compelled to leave his Ford and walk home. After I had seen at close range some of the bridges of Korea, I was not surprised that they are so often destroyed. Many of them were merely logs covered with branches and earth or sod, and even those of concrete usually had flimsy wood and earth foundations. The rivers in this mountainous country, rising several feet in a few hours, tear out such bridges easily. We saw some bridges which, although still standing, were left without 215approaches, the river having washed away the bank on each side. Such bridges are not of much use to the automobile traveler!

This is the Korean way of carrying water, with the help of the Standard Oil Company! In the Orient cans are used for every purpose after the kerosene shipped in them has been sold. The frame on the back is what the Koreans call a jicky.

During the day we crossed several rivers by crude ferries. The Ford would snort its way down through deep sand and out upon what looked like an old raft trying to be a boat. If the front wheels did not run off the far end of the ferry, or if our weight did not ground the odd craft, we would begin to crawl across stream, pushed by two or three countrymen using long bamboo poles. Then up the other bank we would 216snort through the sand. Sometimes we barely missed sliding off into the water between the ferry and the shore.

There are so few automobiles on the country roads in Korea that many of the people, especially the women and children, began to run as soon as they heard us coming. Some of them became so confused as our strange machine rushed down the road toward them that they dodged back and forth in front of the car like scared chickens, until we had to stop entirely. But automobiles are becoming more and more familiar to the country people of Korea and before long, no doubt, they will be taken for granted.

One of the many ways of irrigating the rice-fields of Korea is to hang a huge wooden spoon from a framework and have a man—or a woman—scoop up water all day long, carrying it from a lower field to a higher one.

Some Koreans, however, run in front of a moving train or automobile on purpose. They think that an 217evil spirit is always pursuing them and trying to do them harm, and that if they dodge in front of a moving vehicle the spirit will either attach itself to the people in the vehicle or become confused and lose track of the man or woman it has been pestering. Down in the island of Haiti off our southeastern coast the black people often do the same thing for the same purpose; and sometimes I wonder if the foolish boys in our cities who dodge in front of moving cars are risking their lives in order to get rid of their evil spirits.

Unlike the Japanese, the Koreans use flails similar to ours to thresh their rice, after which it is thrown up in the air with a wooden scoop so that the wind can blow away the chaff.

Foreigners who travel through Korea often go home thinking that the Koreans are lazy. But those who live among them for years (missionaries, for example) 218do not think so at all. It is true that in the cities you see many men squatting in the streets in their snow-white garments (making you think of penguins on a rocky coast) to dream and smoke or gossip with their fellow loafers. Some of these men are yangban, that is, nobles or officials under the old corrupt government, who learned to loaf while in government employ, and who now have no work anyway. The Japanese Government pensioned many of them, so that they are supported, and the others probably could not keep a job even if they could find one.

In preparation for rice-cutting, this Korean man is sharpening his sickle on a stone. Notice his topknot.

The man who thinks Korean workmen and farmers are lazy, just because he sees some of them taking a nap in the daytime, or because they do not rush around in the hot summer months, need only work with them 219for a day to find he is wrong. Would you think it easy work to drive a bull hitched to a plow through rice fields, knee deep, or claw all day long in the mud at the roots of the rice plants, with the lukewarm water throwing into your face the reflection of the sun that pours its rays down on your back? Or would you call the man lazy who carries on his back, sometimes all day long, a load weighing seventy or eighty pounds?

“The plowman homeward plods his weary way,” Korean fashion, carrying the plow and driving his unburdened ox before him.

In June the peasants were spreading over their fields the oak leaves they use as fertilizer. But now in early July most of them were transplanting rice. Bundles of young rice, about six inches high, were carried from the seed-beds and thrown out into the flooded fields. As the roots are heavier, each bundle landed 220right side up, and everywhere men and women, sometimes a dozen of them in a row, were moving slowly across the fields, transplanting the grasses one by one. As land is precious in so crowded a country, most of the peasants plant beans on top of the little mud dikes separating the flooded paddy-fields. One hears frogs croaking and sees a beautiful white bird called the ibis stepping about in the water on its long legs, looking for frogs to eat.

Shoeing a bull in Korea. The Koreans use big bulls and tiny stallions as their chief beasts of burden. In addition they have their own backs, and now some Fords. The author remembers his father, who was a blacksmith and horseshoer in his younger days, shoeing oxen in Michigan in much this manner.

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A Korean method of bringing in the sheaves. The carrying basket is made of bamboo splints.

No, you could not call the Korean peasants lazy, even if some of them do carry a fan while working in the fields. One of the hardest jobs in raising rice is to get enough water to flood the fields, and on this trip I saw all sorts of schemes of irrigation. One man had what looked like an enormous wooden soup spoon suspended on a framework, and all day long he spooned the water from a lower field that was too wet into an upper field that was too dry. How amused an American farmer would be by the sight of three men instead of one using a shovel to dig a ditch! One man held the shovel and thrust it into the ground, and the other two 222lifted out the shovelful of earth by ropes tied to the handle. But I have seen that in Syria, way over on the other side of Asia.

Grinding grain in Korea. The young ox marches round and round under the circular thatched roof, drawing a huge stone roller which is smaller at one end than at the other so that it will keep its place on the platform on which the grain—in most of Korea rice—is spread.

It made me think of Gray’s “Elegy” to see a Korean farmer carrying his big wooden plow home at night on his own shoulders and driving his unloaded ox before him. The Koreans are noted for the kindness they show their bulls and the little stallions which are their only draft animals. In the middle of the day we often had to stop suddenly because a man lay asleep in the middle of the road. Others slept on the paddy-dikes and in all sorts of positions that we should have found very uncomfortable. But to make up for 223this midday nap they begin work at the first peep of dawn and do not stop till the last flicker of twilight. I am sure you would have laughed with me to see men in the rice fields who, though naked to the waist, still wore their precious “plug” hats. Their skins were burned by the sun to the color of brown shoes. It was amusing also to see the village blacksmiths, in the missionary’s home town, dressed in white and squatting on their heels as they heated their irons in the forge.

The village blacksmith in Korea squats at his forge in white garments, his topknot neatly done up on top of his head, and sometimes with his black “plug” hat on.

Beside the road near the town there were stone monuments like gravestones with little roofs over them. 224Some of these were in honor of magistrates who formerly ruled the village. Although the Chinese characters on the stones tell those who can read the language that they were erected by the people “out of gratitude,” the truth is that often the magistrate was a thieving rascal who forced the people to contribute money for a monument to him after misruling them for years. Other stones were in honor of “virtuous widows,” that is, wives who had refused to marry again after their husbands died and who spent most of their time weeping for them or praying for their souls. In Korea and China such grief is considered one of the highest virtues, but how dismal we should find it to have so sad a person in the house!

When crops begin to ripen, watch towers spring up all over Korean fields. The old man stays here every night (and most of the day) in order to guard the fields against crop-thieves.

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An American carpenter would find the Korean adze awkward, for it is so much more crudely made than his own.

The missionary and his Ford were not going back to Seoul for a month or two, so I returned by autobus. It seems strange to think of anything so up-to-date in the ancient land that a few years ago was the Hermit Kingdom, but the autobus has come to stay. To see one piled full of Koreans in their native costumes looks queer indeed. The worry and hurry that make many people old before their time in our own land are rare in Korea. When we broke down, once in climbing a rocky mountain ridge and once in getting off a miserable old ferry, the Korean men did not show any signs of being angry because they were losing time. 226Instead they climbed out of the car and went to squat at the roadside until we were ready to go on again, placidly smoking their long-stemmed pipes.

Do you wonder that we sometimes had trouble in crossing a river on such a ferry as this?

Later in the summer, when I made another trip across Korea, I noticed that a great many little watch towers had sprung up over the fields. It seems that when the vegetables and fruit begin to ripen thieves come in the night. So the peasants build a platform on bamboo poles, eight or ten feet high, and put a thatch roof over it and sometimes straw walls around it. From up there they can see all over their fields and also catch the cool breezes. Sometimes a whole family sleeps in one of these tiny houses, one member sitting up to watch. The Koreans are much afraid of spirits, especially of those which they think fly 227about at night. So one of the persons in each watch-tower usually pounds on the edge of it every few minutes all night long, to frighten the spirits away. It is a very weird experience to walk across country in Korea long after midnight, as I once did, and hear the thump, thump, thump from dozens of little watch towers scattered all about in the darkness.

A Korean gentleman, in his flowing white turamaggie, enjoying practice in archery.

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Above: The living room of a Korean monastery, showing the drum which calls the monks to their prayers. Below: Korean gods, gilded and garbed in bright colors, in a monastery.

CHAPTER XIX THE DIAMOND MOUNTAINS AND NORTHWARD — The Scenery and Temples of Kongo-san — Wonderful Mountain Scenery — From Seoul Northward

Korea is quite a mountainous country, though not so much so as Formosa, or perhaps even old Japan. But it has one cluster of mountains that are considered more picturesque and beautiful than any others in the Japanese Empire. Yet few travelers through Korea see Kongo-san—the Diamond Mountains, we might call them in English—for they are far over on the eastern coast of the peninsula, many miles from the main railway line.

The branch line to Gensan, however, will bring you quite near them. You can either get off at a town along the way, taking a Ford or a rickshaw from there or traveling on your own feet, or you may go on to the end of the line, as I did, and catch a queer little Japanese coasting steamer down the edge of the peninsula. In either case you will soon find yourself in the midst of ancient Buddhist monasteries.

If the Diamond Mountains were in China, probably there would be coolies waiting to carry visitors all about them in chairs; and certainly if they were in Japan hundreds of tourists would come to them every year. But the Koreans do not like to carry people, and only those who are very good climbers and walkers can get about Kongo-san at all.

230I had the good luck to find a coolie to carry my baggage, however, and one who not only was good company but who could keep up with me. I happened to have only four days to spare, and it takes eight or ten to make the circuit of the mountains properly, so we had to move rapidly. I was very sorry for this, because nothing would have pleased me more than to be free to wander for a month through that wonderful cluster of mountains which so few people ever see.

Looking up a valley in the Diamond Mountains of Korea, where nature shows striking beauties that even the camera tries in vain to picture adequately.

Many centuries ago, when the Buddhist faith came 231from India across China to Korea, the kings of Chosen, as it was called even in those early days, all helped the priests and monks to build monasteries and temples in this fantastic group of peaks on the eastern coast. Later many of the buildings were burned, and as they are made entirely of wood a great many have simply fallen away in decay. But there are still dozens of quaint old structures tucked away in all sorts of queer places among the mountains. The region has become the holy land of Korean Buddhists.

Needle-pointed peaks of the Diamond Mountains. Photographs give but a poor idea of how wonderful these mountains are.

I wish I could describe the steep trails of Kongo-san, its raging mountain torrents, the narrow log bridges over great chasms, so that you could get some idea of how hard it was to visit all its most important places in four days. But I should be still more pleased if I could picture to you the beautiful forests piled into the sky all about those trails, the great stone cliffs rising high on either side of the rushing streams. Some of those cliffs are carved with gigantic figures that have been there more than a thousand years. The little finger of one such Buddha was longer than my coolie was tall.

One of the many beautiful old temples or monasteries scattered through the Diamond Mountains (Kongo-san). They are made entirely of wood, but are richly painted and decorated.

233In the ancient temples, with their upturned roof corners and their gaudy wooden gods, live monks who take care of visitors, even foreigners. Perhaps they are really glad to see outsiders, for though they have tried to get away as far as possible from the rush and troubles of the world, they must sometimes long for a bit of news from it. Especially in winter, when snow makes it impossible to enter or leave the mountains, the monks can imagine themselves on quite another planet. I saw great piles of firewood ready for the next winter, and other supplies were hidden away in the storerooms and in the queer denlike kitchens.

This kitchen of a Buddhist monastery in Kongo-san (the Diamond Mountains) is made of stones and mud, like all Korean kitchens, yet it seems to be satisfactory for cooking the food of the monks, of whom there are thousands scattered through these beautiful mountains. The monks eat no meat.

234But now it was summer; pilgrims came every day, and sometimes a foreign traveler. We had to eat just the same food as the monks. Although they are not allowed by their religion ever to eat meat, you would be surprised to see how many appetizing dishes their cooks can prepare entirely from vegetables. The Korean style of bed, however, which is nothing but the floor, without even the thinnest mattress on it, you would probably not find so pleasant. I certainly did not. Often, too, I was awakened by the ringing of gongs and the pounding of drums, for the monks have services every few hours during the night as well as during the day. I think they actually sleep more in the daytime than at night.

The young monks of a monastery in the Diamond Mountains are fond of tennis.

These huge figures were carved in solid rock in the Diamond Mountains of Korea many centuries ago. They are connected with the Buddhist religion, of which Kongo-san is a sanctuary.

I have seen many mountains, in many parts of the world, but I do not remember any that have such hundreds of marvelous peaks as Kongo-san. Most of them are of granite so clear that it looks like white marble. Some are piled up in dozens of sharply pointed steeples; some have the form of strange animals; some look like the skyscrapers of New York in 236ruins. Wonderful as they are, the highest is only three or four thousand feet above the level of the sea, which is not very high as mountains go. But climbing them was almost like going up the side of a hundred-story building, with each brick and window ledge sharpened to a needle point. When I got down to earth again hardly enough of my clothing was left to be worth throwing away.

Going through the Diamond Mountains the author carries his coolie’s load for awhile, in order to see how the Korean jicky feels on the back.

Small Japanese steamers run from Gensan on up the coast, touching at several little ports, and sometimes going on to Vladivostok in Russian Siberia. From one 237of those ports a little railway line goes almost to the northern frontier. Along this, between the Japanese Empire and Russia, stretches a great range, which the Koreans call the Ever White Mountains. Even during the hot Korean summers their tops are always covered with snow. In the heavy forests on their sides there are many wild animals, such as great hunters like to track. Antelope and foxes you expect to find in such a place, and also bears, perhaps even leopards. But it seems strange that in so cold a region there should also be fierce man-eating tigers.

A fencing match in Seoul, at a Japanese school.

Looking across Song-do or Kaijo, once a capital of Korea, now a typical medium-sized town, having many more roofs smoothly thatched of rice-straw than tile roofs which cost so much more.

If we had time to stop, we should find many interesting things in the cities and towns and villages on the long railway journey northward from Seoul into China. There is Song-do, for instance, formerly the capital, with the foundations of ancient palaces scattered for miles about it. Comparatively speaking, Seoul is very young; it has been the capital only since a hundred years before Columbus crossed the Atlantic. Song-do, or Kaijo, is also famous for its gin-seng. This is a plant the root of which the Chinese and Koreans consider very valuable as medicine. As it takes seven years to grow, and must be protected from 239the direct rays of the sun during most of that time, the people have built endless rows of tiny gin-seng sheds. The train passes mile after mile of these on either side of the ancient capital.

A tennis game with wooden rackets in the back streets of Song-do, one of the several former capitals of Korea.

At some stations there are great bales of silk cocoons. The people of the surrounding villages, especially the women and children, will throw these into boiling hot water, unwind the fine threads which the worm inside spent so much time in weaving into a nest for itself, and finally will eat the worm itself. Of all the cities north of the capital the most important is Pingyang. That also was once the capital, but now it has more factory chimneys than loafing ex-officials. There are more clipped heads and fewer topknots than 240in Seoul, and there do not seem to be so many “plug” hats. Among the many long streets of shops in Heijo, as the Japanese call Pingyang, I saw a great many knitting machines, making stockings and similar things. The workers still wind their thread on queer little bamboo wheels such as were used hundreds of years ago; but it was a very up-to-date sound that came from those knitting machines, clashing away in hut after hut. It made one feel that perhaps Korea will soon be one of the modern manufacturing nations of the world, as Japan proper has become. In some ways this will be fortunate and in some unfortunate.

Winding thread in a machine-fitted stocking factory of Pingyang, second largest city of Korea and formerly a capital of the “Land of Morning Calm.” Though the stockings are now made by machinery, and the town sounds very busy as you make your way through the streets, the thread is still wound in the old-fashioned way, by hand.

241Farther north there are fields of corn and of millet, then fields of kaoliang, much like the sorghum of our own South. Two or three large towns slip past, but they are so much like the other towns of Korea that we do not lose much by not stopping. Then suddenly we come to the great Yalu River. Here the Russians and Japanese had one of their bloodiest battles during the war of 1904–05. Huge rafts of logs from the forests on the slopes of the Ever White Mountains come floating down the Yalu on their way to China. But the most interesting thing about this big stream, wider than the Connecticut River, is that it is the boundary line between Japan and China. Manchuria on the other side of it is as Chinese as Chosen is Japanese. The traveler is startled at the suddenness of the change from one people to another. The white garments and “plug” hats disappear as quickly as if a fog were to sweep them from view, and dirty Chinese streets, along which hobble women in bound feet, spring up to give us a hint of the sights to be seen in the ancient land of China.

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The Central Circle of Dairen, surrounded by handsome buildings, reminds one of a European city. This view shows the Yamato Hotel.

CHAPTER XX JAPAN’S RENTED TERRITORY — A Railroad on the American Model

Although the Japanese Empire of to-day really ends in the middle of the Yalu River between Korea and Manchuria, Japan has a lease on another piece of territory on the continent. In order to understand the position of Japan in Manchuria, which the Chinese call their “Three Eastern Provinces,” we must look a little into recent history.

In 1904, as I have mentioned before, Japan had a war with Russia. Before that, Russia was very powerful in northeastern Asia. It had forced China to let a Russian railroad be built the whole length of Manchuria, from a Siberian junction to the southern end of Manchuria. The Russians already had a Far Eastern port at Vladivostok, but as that freezes up completely for about half the winter they desired a Pacific port that could be used all the year round. This the railway down through Chinese territory was intended to provide. At the southern point of Manchuria, on what is known as the Liaotung Peninsula, the Russians had built a commercial city and ocean port, which they called Dalny, and not far from it a fortress city named Port Arthur. Other European powers did similar things on Chinese territory, so Russia was not so bold in this matter as you might think.

244Russia was beaten by Japan in the war between them. The treaty ending that war (which, by the way, was made at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with the assistance of our President Roosevelt) turned over to Japan all the rights and properties of Russia in the southern half of Manchuria. In theory the Liaotung Peninsula had only been rented to Russia by China, and the lease went to the Japanese.

Dairen is called the gateway to Manchuria. It has one of the finest harbors in the Far East and ranks next to Shanghai as a trading port. About 6,000,000 tons of merchandise are handled annually on its wharves.

The Japanese have given the two former Russian cities new names. Port Arthur they officially call Riojun, though it is very generally spoken of still as Port Arthur. Dalny they renamed Dairen. Both the cities have been greatly improved by the Japanese. Dairen, especially, is now one of the best-built cities of the Far East. From its central circle, with radiating cement 245walks, trees and shrubbery, and the statue of a famous Japanese, the streets extend in every direction, like those of Washington. Some of the government buildings, banks, hotels, and business structures look as if they had been brought from a handsome European city. The smaller buildings, stores, and homes are much better than those in most of China, or indeed in the average city of Japan proper. The well-paved streets are kept clean, and the police maintain as nearly perfect order as in any large city elsewhere.

Several steamship lines run from Dairen to other ports, one of the longest lines being to Shanghai across the Yellow Sea. It is no hardship to wait for a boat in such a pleasant room as this at the Dairen wharves.

But it is especially down along the wharves that we see how important Dairen is to the Japanese. There are long rows of docks just as up to date as any in the United States or Europe. All the products of Manchuria may be seen there, being loaded into Japanese 246steamers by huge cranes under the most modern methods. Our attention is likely to be attracted first by great soya bean cakes that look like grindstones. Chinese coolies carry these, one at each end of their supple shoulder poles, from the warehouses to the dock-side, and whole steamers are loaded with them. The cakes, which consist of the pulp or residue of soya beans from which the oil or edible part has been squeezed in huge presses, are used for fertilizer, especially in the southern half of China. Sometimes the beans themselves are sent to Dairen in bags like those in which we ship wheat. Whole acres may be covered with such bags, stacked higher than a man’s head.

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Soya beans, which form one of the great staple food products of Korea and Manchuria, are stored in mat-rush bins that look somewhat like our silos.

As may be seen from the table on page 246, the soya bean has a great variety of uses. It is one of the most important products of Manchuria.

Since 1905, the Japanese have established excellent industrial schools in Dairen, an experimental laboratory, a big glass factory, and many other features of modern civilization that are found in few parts of China. Most of the common labor in this great port city is done by the Chinese, while the skilled workmen are mainly Japanese.

Over at Port Arthur life moves a little more slowly, at least in times of peace. Perhaps when Japan is at war that is as busy and bustling a place as Dairen, for 248it is a fortified city, as well as the center of government of the leased territory. During the war with Russia great battles took place all about it, and some of the old fortresses and underground galleries that were broken down by Japanese shells are still kept as they were at the end of the war. Tourists go there not only to see the ruins but to bathe at the fine beaches near by. We found the ocean water very comfortably warm as early as May. Japan has scattered monuments to her war heroes far and wide over the hills about Port Arthur. As in the case of other Japanese fortified places no photography is allowed anywhere in or near the city.

Near Dairen, at Shakako, are the great car and locomotive shops of the South Manchuria Railway. In this engine erecting shop, great traveling cranes pick up locomotives as if they were toys.

249The Japanese have not rebuilt the houses and streets of Port Arthur as much as they have those of Dairen. In Port Arthur we may still stop in hotels built by the Russians, and see many a home that is just as the former occupants left it. Instead of electric street cars there are rickshaws. But there are automobiles too. Under the rather stern Japanese government, the rickshaw runners are much more orderly than those in Chinese territory usually are.

An embroidery class in a girls’ school at Mukden, maintained by the South Manchuria Railway. It is plain that bobbed hair has not yet become popular in Manchuria.

In traveling northward from the end of Liaotung Peninsula, we shall find other Japanese towns, even though, in a sense, we are then in China.

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Terraced open-cut coal mines at Fushun, showing tracks on different levels. Elsewhere in this region are mines deep in the ground. There are estimated deposits of 1,200,000,000 tons of bituminous coal.

The South Manchuria Railway, which extends as far as Changchun, has a branch from the Korean border, and one from Port Arthur. These join at Mukden, and also connect there with the Peking-Mukden line. This road is more like our American railroads than almost any other line in Asia. It has the same width track as ours; the engines come from locomotive factories like ours, and the trains are very American, even to sleeping and dining cars.

The Japanese run the railroad without outside help, except for Chinese laborers. They have big shops, at Mukden and other places along the line, where they not only repair engines and cars but build new ones on the American model. The Japanese who come to Manchuria must find railroad travel there much stranger than Americans do. The equipment is certainly in great contrast to the little trains, with screeching engines and lengthwise seats, that are found in Japan proper.

A strip of land along the South Manchuria Railway is held by Japan to protect it. Wherever there is a station of any size, a Japanese town has grown up close to the railroad, with perhaps an old walled Chinese city back of the modern development. At Mukden, the capital of Manchuria, for instance, we must cross nearly three miles of Japanese city, built in the European style, before we come to the walls of the old Chinese city in which the Manchu emperors ruled before they conquered China. Many Japanese soldiers, 252with their red cap-bands and very modern rifles, may be seen along the whole length of the railroad.

A branch line from Mukden runs out to the coal mines of Fushun, which are also Japanese. These are queer looking mines, for instead of going down into the earth in deep shafts, the miners dig the coal out of great quarries open to the sky. Some of these coal quarries, their terraced sides reminding one of a huge stadium, are so large that long coal trains run back and forth in them. Some of the coal is used as fuel by the trains of the South Manchuria Railway and by the Japanese factories and institutions along the line; and some of it is sent to Japan on ships calling at Dairen. The miners who do the actual digging are Chinese, but Japanese hold all the higher positions.

In many Japanese towns along the railway there are Shinto temples, tea houses, and most of the other things found in Japan itself. Now and then Japanese actors come to give plays in the theaters, and groups of fat Japanese wrestlers match their weight and skill in temporary buildings made of boards and mats.

The signs at the railway stations are in English as well as in Japanese, just as they are in Japan proper. English, indeed, is the most important language, next to that of the country itself, throughout most of the Far East. It makes us rather proud to find that our language is really a kind of world language, much more useful the world over than any other tongue. But when we come to Changchun, where the Japanese part of the railway ends and the Russian part begins, our 253English is much less useful. From there on, the station signs are in Russian and Chinese, and it is about as easy for us to read one as the other. So when we reach Changchun, in traveling through the Japanese Empire, we rather naturally turn back to Mukden and take the Chinese railway westward toward the Great Wall of China and on to Peking. For if the empire of modern Japan is full of interest to the traveler and important to the world at large, the great land of China is no less so.

The big station at Mukden where the traveler takes the Chinese railway westward toward Peking, and bids good-by to the Japanese Empire.

PRONUNCIATION LIST

A series of Geographical Readers for Intermediate Grades, written by Harry A. Franck and published by F. A. Owen Publishing Company:

Books by Mr. Franck published by The Century Company: