CHAPTER XXXV

THE HUSBANDMAN, THE WRESTLER AND THE CARPENTER

(SAITAMA, GUMMA AND TOKYO)

We are here to search the wounds of the realm, not to skim them over.—Bacon

One day in the third week of October when the roads were sprinkled with fallen leaves I made an excursion into the Kwanto plain and passed from the prefecture of Tokyo into that of Saitama.[[211]] The weather now made it necessary for Japanese to wear double kimonos. During the middle of the day, however, I was glad to walk with my jacket over my arm, and many little boys and girls were running about naked. The region visited had a naturally well-drained dark soil, composed of river silt, of volcanic dust and of humus from buried vegetation, and it went down to a depth beyond the need of the longest daikon (giant radish). Sweet potatoes and taro were still on the ground, and large areas, worked to a perfect tilth, had been sown or were in course of preparation for winter wheat and barley; but the most conspicuous crop was daikon. There were miles and miles of it at all sorts of stages from newly transplanted rows to roots ready for pulling. There is daikon production up to the value of about a million yen. In addition to the roots sent into Tokyo, there is a large export trade in daikon salted in casks.

I came into a district where there was a system of alternate grain and wood crops. The rotation was barley and wheat for three or four years, then fuel wood for about fifteen. The tendency was to lengthen the corn period in the rotation.

The women even as near Tokyo as this wore blue cotton trousers like the men. One farm-house I entered was a century old but it had not been more than forty years on its present site. It had been transported three miles. I was once more impressed by the low standard of living. If by this time I had not been getting to know something of the ways of the farmers I should have found it difficult to credit the fact that a household I visited was worth ten thousand yen.

Sweet potatoes are here much the most important crop. They were bringing the farmer in Tokyo a little over a yen the 82 lbs. bale. The consumer was paying double that. Not a few of the farmers were cultivating as much as 5 chō or even 8 chō, for there was little paddy. Even then, I was told, "it's a very hard life for a third of the farmers." The reason was that there was no remunerative winter employment.

Before the Buddhist temple, where there was preaching twice a year, were rows of little stone figures, many of which had lost their heads. The heads were in much demand among gamblers who value them as mascots. Among some mulberry plots belonging to different owners I saw a little wooden shrine, evidently for the general good. It was there, it was explained, "not because of belief but of custom." The evening was drawing in and Fuji showed itself blue and mystical above the dark greenery of the country. As I gazed a sweet-sounding gong was struck thrice in the temple. Three times a day there is heard this summons to other thoughts than those of the common task.

INSIDE THE "SHOJI."

AUTOMATIC RICE POLISHER.

THE AUTHOR (AND THE KODAK HOLDER) IN THE CRATER OF A VOLCANO.

My companion entered into conversation with a decent middle-aged pedestrian, neatly but poorly dressed, and found that he was a man who had formerly pulled his kuruma in Tokyo. The man had found the work of a kurumaya too much for him and had withdrawn to his village to open a tiny shop. But he had been taken ill and had been removed to hospital. When he came out he found that his wife was in poverty and that his eldest son had been summoned to serve in the army. Now his wife had become ill and he was on his way to a distant relative to ask him to take charge of a small child and to help him with a little money to start some petty business. My companion gave him a yen and deplored the fact that poor people should fail to take advantage of the law releasing from service a son required for the support of a parent. They failed occasionally to find friends to represent their case to the authorities.

A WAYSIDE MONUMENT.

THE GIANT RADISH OR "DAIKON," WHICH IS USED AS A PICKLE.

While waiting at the station we talked with another old man. He had come to see his daughter whose husband had been called up for two years' service. She was living of course with her parents-in-law. He said that his daughter would have no difficulty in keeping the farm going during the young man's absence, but his being away was "a great loss."

The old man, who squatted at our feet as he spoke, went on to tell us about a young man of his village who had served his term in the navy but thought of remaining for another term. "Gran'fer" thought it a good opening for him; he would not only get his living and clothes but—and this is characteristic—"see the world and send back interesting letters." The ancient was specially interested in the sailor, he said, because his wife had "given milk" to the adventurer when an infant.

It is difficult to enter a village which has not its pillar or its slab to the memory of a youth or youths who perished in the Russian or Chinese wars.[ [212]] But in the severe struggle with Russia the villages did more than give their sons and build memorials to them when they were killed. They tried, in the words of an official circular of that time, "to preserve the spirit of independence in the hearts of the relieved and to avoid the abuses of giving out ready money." There was the secret ploughing society of the young men of a village in Gumma prefecture. "Either at night or when nobody knew these young men went out and ploughed for those who were at the front." In one prefecture the school children helped in working soldiers' farms. In villages in Osaka and Hyogo prefectures there was given to soldiers' families the monopoly of selling tofu, matches and other articles. Some of the societies which laboured in war time were the Women's One Heart Society, the Women's Chivalrous Society, the National Backing Society and the Nursing Place of Young Children of those Serving at the Front.

In the train we talked of the hardiness induced by not being the slave of clothing. When it rains kuruma men and workmen habitually roll up their kimonos round their loins, or if they are wearing trousers, take them off.[ [213]] Of course no Japanese believes in catching cold through getting his feet wet. This is a condition which is continually experienced, for the cotton tabi are wet through at every shower. Some years back it was not uncommon in walking along the sea-beach at night to find fishermen sleeping out on the sand. An old man told me that it used to be the custom in his sea-shore hamlet for all members of a family to sleep on the beach except fathers, mothers and infants.

On my return from the country I found myself in a company of earnest rural reformers who were discussing a plan of State colonisation for the inhabitants of some villages where everything had been lost in a volcanic eruption. Families had been given a tract of forest land, 15 yen for a cottage, 45 yen for tools and implements and the cost of food for ten months (reckoned at 8 sen per adult and 7 sen per child per day). During the evening I was shown the figure of a goddess of farming venerated by the afflicted folk. The deity was represented standing on bales of rice, with a bowl of rice in her left hand and a big serving spoon in her right.

The gathering discussed the question of rural morality. As to the relations of the young men and women of the villages, to which there has necessarily been frequent references in these pages, the reader must always bear in mind the way in which the sexes are normally kept apart under the influence of tradition. In nothing does this Japanese countryside differ more noticeably from our own than in the fact that joyous young couples are never seen arming each other along the road of an evening. Thousands of allusions in our rural songs and poetry, innumerable scenes in our genre pictures, speak of blissful hours of which Japan gives no sign. There is no courting; there are in the public view no "random fits of Daffi'." An unmarried young man and young woman do not walk and talk together. A young man and woman who were together of an evening would be suspected of immorality. Even when married they would not think of linking arms on the road. I was a beholder of a family reunion at a railway station in which a young wife met her young husband returned from abroad. There were merely repeated bows and many smiles. The view taken of kissing in Japan is shown by the fact that an issue of a Tokyo periodical was prohibited by the police because it contained an allusion to it. We are helped to understand the Japanese standpoint a little if we remember how repugnant to English and American ideas is the Continental custom of men kissing one another. Kissing is understood by the Japanese to be a sexual act, as is shown by their word for it.

Early in November in the neighbourhood of Tokyo, where three crops are taken in the year and sometimes four or five, I found between the rows of growing winter barley two lines of green stuff which would be cleared off as the barley rose. The barley was sown in clumps of two dozen or even thirty plants, each clump being about a foot apart, and liberally treated with liquid manure. In Saitama 100 bushels per acre has been produced by a good farmer. The clump method of sowing is believed to afford greater protection against the weather. (Outside the volcanic-soil area ordinary sowing in rows is common.) The volcanic soil, as one sees in spots where excavations have been made, is originally light yellow. The humus introduced by the liberal applications of manure has made it black.

I came upon a hollow in some low hills, studded with trees and overlooking Tokyo Bay, which had been secured for the building of an elaborate series of temples at a cost of three million yen. Acres of grounds were being laid out with genius. The buildings were of that beautiful simplicity which marks the edifices of the Zen sect. The construction was in the hands of some of the cleverest master craftsmen in Japan. The work was to be spread over four years. A great hoarding displayed thousands of wooden tablets bearing the names and the amounts of the subscriptions of the faithful. In one of the completed temples a kindly priest was preaching. He added to the force of his gestures by the use of a fan. He was being attentively listened to by an intelligent-looking congregation. I caught the injunction that in the attainment of goodness aspiration was little worth without will.

The method of announcing subscriptions on hoardings was also adopted outside the new primary school near by. The subscriptions were from a hundred yen to one yen. The charge to scholars at this school, I found, was 10 sen per month during the first compulsory six years and 30 sen during the next two years.

Just after Christmas I walked again into the country. There were miles of dreary brown paddies with the stubble in puddles. On the non-paddy land there was the refreshing green of young corn which seemed greatly to enjoy being treated as a garden plant in a deep exquisitely worked soil with never a weed in an acre. But children were kept from school because their parents could not get along without their help. Many of the school teachers seemed as poor as the farmers. As I passed the farm-houses in the evening they seemed bleak and uninviting. In the fire hole[ [214]] of every house, however, there was a generous blaze and the bath tub out-of-doors was steaming for the customary evening hot dip in the opening.

In my host's house I noticed an old painting of a forked daikon. Such malformed roots used to be presented to shrines by women desirous of having children.

In the office of one village I visited I was permitted to examine the dossiers of some of the inhabitants. Among a host of other particulars about a certain person's origin and condition I read that he was a minor when his father died, that such and such a person acted as his guardian, that the guardianship ended on such and such a date, and that his widowed mother had a child nine years after her husband's death.

In not a few places I found that the tiny shrines of hamlets (aza) had been taken away and grouped together at a communal shrine with the notion of promoting local solidarity. At one such combination of shrines I saw notice boards intimating that "tramps, pedlars, wandering priests and other carriers of subscription lists and proselytisers" were not received in the village. It was explained that a community was sometimes all of one faith: "therefore it does not want to be disturbed by tactless preachers of other beliefs."

At an inn there was a middle-aged widow who served there as waitress in the summer but in the winter returned to Tokyo, where she employed a number of girls in making haori tassels. (She gave them board and lodging and clothes for two years, and, after that period, wages.[[215] ]) Remembering what I had written down about courting, I asked for her mature judgment on our rural custom of "walking out." She was amused, but, in that way the Japanese have of trying to look at a Western custom on its merits, she said, after consideration, that there was much to be said for the plan. "In Japan," she declared, "you cannot know a husband's character until you are married. On the whole, I wish I had been a man." In order to catch our train we had to leave this inn the moment our meal was finished, although the widow quoted to us the adage, "Rest after a meal even if your parents are dead."

On a morning in May I went into the country to visit a friend who was taking a holiday in a ramshackle inn 4,000 ft. up Mount Akagi. I continually heard the note of the kakkō (cuckoo). On the higher parts of the mountain there were azaleas at every yard, some quite small but others 12 or even 15 ft. high. Many had been grazed by cattle. Big cryptomeria were plentiful part of the way up, but at the top there were no trees but diminutive oaks, birches and pines, stunted and lichen covered, the topmost branches broken off by the terrific blasts which from time to time sweep along the top of the extinct volcano.

One of the products of rural Japan is the wrestler. Sumo, which is going on in every school and college of the country, exhibits its perfect flower twice a year in the January and May ten-days-long tournaments in the capital. The immense rotunda of the wrestlers' association suggests a rather rickety Albert Hall and holds 13,000 people.[[216] ] On the day I went in I paid 2 yen and had only standing room. Everybody knows the more than Herculean proportions of the wrestlers in comparison with the rest of their countrymen. The rigorous training, Gargantuan feeding and somewhat severe discipline of the wrestlers enable them to grow beyond the average stature and to a girth, protected by enormously developed abdominal muscles, which reinforces strength with great weight. [[217]]

I had often the opportunity at a railway station or in a train to witness the easy carriage and magnificent pride of these massive, good-tempered men. There is not in the world, probably, a more remarkable illustration than they afford of what superior physical training and superior feeding can do. At first sight, indeed, these gigantic creatures seem to belong to a different race. It is no wonder that they should be so commonly proteges of the rich and distinguished. When an eminent wrestler retired in the year in which I first saw a good wrestling bout the ceremony of cutting his hair—for, like Samson, the wrestler wears his hair long—was performed by a personage who combined the dignities of an admiral and a peer. There is nothing of the bruiser in the looks of the smooth-faced wrestlers. Many, however, are the bruises to their bodies and to their self-esteem which they receive in their disciplinary progress from the contests of their native villages through all the grades of their profession to the highest rank. Their sexual morality is commonly of the lowest.

In my own hamlet at home in England I have seen the shoemaker, tailor and carpenter successively pass away; the only craftsman left is the smith. In Japan the hereditary craftsman survives for a while. I watched in my house one day the labours of such a worker. He was not arrayed in a Sunday suit fallen to the greasy bagginess of everyday wear, topped by a soiled collar. He appeared in a blue cotton jacket-length kimono and tight-fitting trousers of the same stuff, and both garments, which were washed at least once a week, were admirably fitted to their wearer's work. Almost the same rig was worn by our own medieval and pre-medieval workmen. The carpenter had on the back of his coat the name of his master or guild in decorative Chinese characters in white. There are nowadays in the cities many inferior workers, but all the men who came to my house worked with rapidity and concentration, hardly ever lifting their eyes from their jobs. The dexterity of the Japanese workman is seldom exaggerated. To his dexterity he adds the considerable advantage of having more than two hands, for he uses his feet together or singly. His supple big toes are a great possession. We have lost the use of ours, but the Japanese artisan, accustomed from his youth to tabi with a special division for the big toe, and to geta, which can be well managed only when the big toe is lissom, uses his toes as naturally as a monkey, with his paws and mouth full of nuts, gives a few to his feet to hold. The first sight of a foot holding a tool is uncanny.

The pitiful thing is that a modest, polite, cheerful, industrious, skilful, and in the best sense of the word artistic hereditary craftsmanship is proving only too easy a prey to the new industrial system. It is a sad reflection that the country which, owing to her long period of seclusion, had the opportunity of applying to all the things of common life so remarkable a skill and artistry, should be so little conscious of the pace at which her industrial rake's progress is proceeding, so insensible to the degree to which she is prodigally sacrificing that which, when it is lost to her, can never be recovered. It is no doubt true that when our own handicrafts were dying we also were insensitive. But because the Middle Ages in England encountered the industrial system gradually we suffered our loss more slowly than Japan is doing. Because, too, we never had in our bustling history the long periods of immunity from home and foreign strife by which Japanese craftsmanship profited so wonderfully, we may not have had such large stores of precious skill and taste to squander as New Japan, the spendthrift of Old Japan's riches, is unthinkingly casting away.

It is at Christmas at home that we have in the Christmas tree our reminder of the country. It is on New Year's Day that in Japan a pine tree is set up on either side of the front gate, but there are three bamboos with it, and the four trunks are all beautifully bound together with rope. If the ground be too hard for the trees to be stuck in the ground, they are kept upright by having a dozen heavy pieces of wood, not unlike fire logs, neatly bound round them. The pines may be about 10 ft. high, the bamboo about 15 ft. To the trees are affixed the white paper gohei. Over the doorway itself is an arrangement of straw, an orange, a lobster, dried cuttlefish and more gohei. A less expensive display consists of a sprig of pine and bamboo. Poor people have to be content with a yard-high pine branch with a French nail through it at either side of their doorway. I have been ruralist enough to harbour thoughts of the extent to which the woods are raided for all this New Year forestry. Some prefectures, in the sincerity of their devotion to afforestation, forbid the New Year destruction of pine trees.

I remember the gay and elaborate dressing of the horses during the New Year holidays. I saw one driver of a wagon who was not content with tying streamers on every part of his horse where streamers could be tied: he had also decorated himself, even to the extent of having had his head cropped to a special pattern, tracts of hair and bare scalp alternating.

It was pleasant to learn that a fine chrysanthemum show arranged in an open space in Tokyo was free to the public. Some plants, by means of grafting, bore flowers of half a dozen different varieties. Several plants had been wondrously trained into the form of kuruma, etc. Not a few of the varieties exhibited were, according to our ideas, atrocious in colouring, but many were beautiful and all were marvels of cultivation. Even greater manipulative and horticultural skill was represented in the chrysanthemums I saw at the Imperial garden party. A chief of a department of the Ministry of Agriculture told me that from a chrysanthemum growing in the ground it was possible to have a thousand blooms.

In a Japanese room the timber upright alongside the tokonoma is always a tree trunk in the rough. If it be cherry it has its bark on. The contrast with the finely finished wood of the rest of the room is arresting. It is said that the use of the unplaned upright is not more than three or four hundred years old and that it had its origin in Cha-no-yu affectations of simplicity.

I was visited one evening by an agricultural official who had returned from a visit to Great Britain. He spoke of the "lonelyism" of our best hotels. In a Japanese hotel of the same class one's room is so simple and the view of the garden is so refreshing that, with the beautiful flower arrangement indoors, the frequent change of kakemono, the serving of one's meals in a different set of lacquer and porcelain each day and the willing and smiling service always within the call of a hand clap, there comes a sense of restfulness and peace. The drawback which the Western man experiences is the lack of any means of resting his back but by lying down and the inability to read for long while resting an elbow on an arm rest which is too low for him. [[218]] A Japanese often reads kneeling before a table.

Here I am reminded to say that the development of the desire for books and newspapers in the rural districts is a noticeable thing, if only because it is new. It is not so long ago that reading was considered to be an occupation for old men and women and for children. The samurai had few books and the farmers fewer still. But the idea of combining cultivation and culture was not unknown. I have heard a rural student humbly quote the old saying, SE-kō U-doku (literally, "Fine weather—farming—Rainy weather—reading").

I have a rural note of one of my visits to the Nō. [[219]] One farce brought on an inferior priest of a sect which is now extinct but surely deserves to be remembered for its encouragement of mountain climbing. This "mountain climber," as he was called, was hungry and climbed a farmer's tree in order to steal persimmons. (The actor got on a stool, obligingly steadied by a supposedly invisible attendant, and pretended to clamber up a corner post of the stage.) While he was eating the persimmons he was discovered by their owner. The farmer was a man of humour and said that he thought that "that must be a crow in the tree." So the poor priest tried to caw. "No," said the farmer, "it is surely a monkey." So the priest began to scratch after the manner of monkeys. "But perhaps," the farmer went on, "it is really a kite." The priest flapped his arms—and fell. The farmer thought that he had the priest at his mercy. But the priest, rubbing his beads together, put a spell on him and escaped. The word Nō is written with an ideograph which means ability, but Nō also stands for agriculture.[[220]]