The foundations of Japan

by J. W. Robertson Scott

CHAPTER XV

THE NUN'S CELL

(NAGANO)

It is one more incitement to a man to do well.—Boswell

Eighty per cent. of Nagano is slope. Hence its dependence on sericulture. The low stone-strewn roofs of the houses, the railway snow shelters and the zig-zag track which the train takes, hint at the climatic conditions in winter time. Despite the snow—ski-ing has been practised for some years—the summer climate of Nagano has been compared with that of Champagne and there is one vineyard of 60,000 vines.

I was invited to join a circle of administrators who were discussing rural morality and religion. One man said that there was not 20 per cent. of the villages in which the priests were "active for social development." Another speaker of experience declared that "the four pillars of an agricultural village" were "the sonchō (headman), the schoolmaster, the policeman and the most influential villager." He went on: "In Europe religion does many things for the support and development of morality, but we look to education, for it aims not at only developing intelligence and giving knowledge, but at teaching virtue and honesty. But there is something beyond that. Thousands of our soldiers died willingly in the Russian war. There must have been something at the bottom of their hearts. That something is a certain sentiment which penetrates deeply the characters of our countrymen. Our morality and customs have it in their foundations. This spirit is Yamato damashii (Japanese spirit). It appeared among our warriors as bushido (the way of the soldier), but it is not the monopoly of soldiers. Every Japanese has some of this spirit. It is the moral backbone of Japan."

"I should like to say," another speaker declared, "that I read many European and American books, but I remain Japanese. Mr. Uchimura sees the darkest side of Buddhism and Mr. Lafcadio Hearn expected too much from it. 'So mysterious,' Hearn said, but it is not so mysterious to us. We must be grateful to him for seeing something of the essence of our life. Sometimes, however, we may be ashamed of his beautifying sentences. I am a modern man, but I am not ashamed when my wife is with child to pray that it may be healthy and wise. It is possible for us Japanese to worship some god somewhere without knowing why. The poet says, 'I do not know the reason of it, but tears fall down from my eyes in reverence and gratitude.' I suppose this is natural theology. The proverb says, 'Even the head of a sardine is something if believed in.' I attach more importance to a man's attitude to something higher than himself than to the thing which is revered by him. Whether a man goes to Nara and Kyoto or to a Roman Catholic or a Methodist church he can come home very purified in heart."

"Some foreigners have thought well to call us 'half civilised,'" the speaker went on. "Can it be that uncivilised is something distasteful to or not understood by Europeans and Americans? We have the ambition to erect some system of Eastern civilisation. It is possible that we may have it in our minds to call some things in Europe 'half civilised.' Surely the barbarians are usually the people other than ourselves. When the townsman goes to the country he says the people are savages. But the countryman finds his fellow-savages quite decent people."

"Some time ago," broke in a professor, "I read a novel by René Bazin and I could not but think how much alike were our peasants and the peasants of the West."

The previous speaker resumed: "The other day a foreigner laughed in my presence at our old art of incense burning and actually said that we were deficient in the sense of smell. I told him that fifty years ago our samurai class, in excusing their anti-foreign manifestations, said they could not endure the smell of foreigners, and that to this day our peasants may be heard to say of Western people, 'They smell; they smell of butter and fat.'"

In the city of Nagano early in the morning I went to a large Buddhist temple where the authorities had kindly given me special facilities to see the treasures—alas! all in a wooden structure. A strange thing was the preservation untouched of the room in which the Emperor Meiji rested thirty years ago. May oblivion be one day granted to that awful chenille table cover and those appalling chairs which outrage the beautiful woodwork and the golden tatami of a great building! At the entrance of the temple priests in a kind of open office were reading the newspaper, playing gō or smoking. More pleasing was the sight of matting spread right round the temple below its eaves, in order that weary pilgrims might sleep there, and the spectacle of travel-stained women tranquilly sleeping or suckling their infants before the shrine itself. There is a pitch dark underground passage below the floor round the foundations of the great Buddha, and if the circuit be made and the lock communicating with the entrance door to the sacred figure be fortunately touched on the way, paradise, peasants believe, is assured. I made the circuit a few moments after an old woman and found the lock, and on returning to the temple with the rustic dame knelt with her before the shrine as the curtain which veils the big Buddha was withdrawn. The face of one wooden figure in the temple had been worn, like that of many another in Japan, with the stroking that it had received from the ailing faithful.

IN A BUDDHIST NUNNERY.

GRASS-CUTTING TOOLS COMPARED WITH A WESTERN SCYTHE.

I had the privilege of visiting the adjoining nunnery. As I was specially favoured by a general admission, I asked to be permitted to see some nuns' cells. They showed a Buddhist advance on Western ideas. The word "cells" was a misnomer for beautiful little flower-adorned rooms of a cheerful Japanese house. The fragile, wistful nun who was so kind as to speak with me had a consecrated expression. Her dress was white, and over it was brocade in a perfect combination of green and cream. Her head was shaven; her hands, which continually told her beads, were hidden. Religious services are conducted and sermons are delivered here and in other nunneries by the nuns themselves. I could not but be sorry for some girl children who had become nuns on their relatives' or guardians' decision. Adult newcomers are given a month in which, if they wish, they may repent them of their vows; but what of the children? The head of this nunnery was a member of the Imperial family. The institution, like the temple from which I had just come, stores thousands of wooden tablets to the memory of the dead. There are many little receptacles in which the hair, the teeth or the photographs of believers are preserved. I found that both at the nunnery and the temple a practical interest was being shown in the reformation of ex-criminals.

THE CHILD-COLLECTORS OF VILLAGERS' SAVINGS.

NUNS PHOTOGRAPHED IN A "CELL" BY THE AUTHOR.

STUDENTS' STUDY AT AN AGRICULTURAL SCHOOL.

While in the highlands of Nagano I spent a night at Karuizawa, a hill resort at which tired missionaries and their families, not only from all parts of Japan but from China, gather in the summer months beyond the reach of the mosquito.[ ^[133]] I stayed in the summer cottage of my travelling companion's brother-in-law. The family consisted of a reserved, cultivated man with a pretty wife of what I have heard a foreigner call "the maternal, domestic type." In their owlishness newcomers to the country are inclined to commiserate all Japanese housewives as the "slaves of their husbands." They would have been sadly wrong in such thoughts about this happy wife and mother. The eldest boy, a wholesome-looking lad, had just passed through the middle school on his way to the university, and spoke to me in simple English with that air of responsibility which the eldest son so soon acquires in Japan. His brothers and sisters enjoyed a happy relation with him and with each other. The whole family was merry, unselfish and, in the best sense of the word, educated. As we knelt on our zabuton we refreshed ourselves with tea and the fine view of the active volcano, Asama, and chatted on schools, holidays, books, the country and religion. After a while, a little to my surprise, the mother in her sweet voice gravely said that if I would not mind at all she would like very much to ask me two questions. The first was, "Are the people who go to the Christian church here all Christians?" and the second, "Are Christians as affectionate as Japanese?"

Karuizawa, which is full of ill-nourished, scabby-headed, "bubbly-nosed"[ ^[134]] Japanese children, is an impoverished place on one of the ancient highways. We took ourselves along the road until we reached at a slightly higher altitude the decayed village of Oiwaké. When the railway came near it finished the work of desolation which the cessation of the daimyos' progresses to Yedo (now Tokyo) had begun half a century ago. In the days of the Shogun three-quarters of the 300 houses were inns. Now two-thirds of the houses have become uninhabitable, or have been sold, taken down and rebuilt elsewhere. The Shinto shrines are neglected and some are unroofed, the Zen temple is impoverished, the school is comfortless and a thousand tombstones in the ancient burying ground among the trees are half hidden in moss and undergrowth.

The farm rents now charged in Oiwaké had not been changed for thirty, forty or fifty years. In the old inn there was a Shinto shrine, about 12 ft. long by nearly 2 ft. deep, with latticed sliding doors. It contained a dusty collection of charms and memorials dating back for generations. Outside in the garden at the spring I found an irregular row of half a dozen rather dejected-looking little stone hokora about a foot high. Some had faded gohei thrust into them, but from the others the clipped paper strips had blown away. At the foot of the garden I discovered a somewhat elaborate wooden shrine in a dilapidated state. "Few country people," someone said to me, "know who is enshrined at such a place." It is generally thought that these shrines are dedicated to the fox. But the foxes are merely the messengers of the shrine, as is shown by the figures of crouching or squatting foxes at either side. A well-known professor lately arrived at the conviction that the god worshipped at such shrines is the god of agriculture. He went so far as to recommend the faculty of agriculture at Tokyo university to have a shrine erected within its walls to this divinity, but the suggestion was not adopted.

In the course of another chat with the old host of the inn he referred to the time, close on half a century ago, when 3,000 hungry peasants marched through the district demanding rice. They did no harm. "They were satisfied when they were given food; the peasants at that time were heavily oppressed." To-day the people round about look as if they were oppressed by the ghosts of old-time tyrants. But there is "something that doth linger" of self-respect. When we left on our way to Tokyo I gave the man who brought our bags a mile in a barrow to the station 40 sen. He returned 10 sen, saying that 30 sen was enough.