COUNTRY-HOUSE LIFE
The sense of a common humanity is a real political force.—J.R. Green
The stranger in Japan sees so little of the intimacies of country life that I shall say something of further visits to what we should call county families. My hosts, who seemed to be active to a greater or less degree in promoting the welfare of their tenants, lived in purely Japanese style. Yet now and then in a beautiful house there was a showy gilt timepiece or some other thing of a deplorable Western fashion. At all the houses without exception we were waited upon by the host and his son, son-in-law or brother, and for some time after our arrival our host and the members of his family would kneel, not in the apartment in which our zabuton (kneeling cushions) were arranged, but in the adjoining apartment with its screens pushed back. Even when the time of sweets and tea had passed and a regular meal was served, all the little tables of food were brought in not by servants but by the master of the house and such male relatives as were at home.
When the duration of a Japanese meal is borne in mind, some idea may be gained of the fatigue endured by the head of a house in serving many guests. The host sometimes honours his guests still further by eating apart from them or by partaking of a portion only of the meal. The name of a feast in Japanese is significant, "a running about." The ladies of the house are usually seen for only a few minutes, when they come with the children to welcome the guests on their arrival; but on the second day of the visit the ladies may bring in food or tea or play the koto.
The foreigner, though on his knees, feels a little at a loss to know how to acknowledge politely the repeated bows of so many kneeling men and women. He watches with appreciation the perfect response of his Japanese travelling companions. It is difficult to convey a sense of the charm and dignity of old courtesies exchanged with sincerity between well-bred people in a fine old house. Although all the shoji[30] are open, the trees of the beautiful garden cast a pensive shade. The ancient ceremonial of welcome and introduction would seem ludicrous in the full light of a Western drawing-room, but in the perfectly subdued light of these romantically beautiful apartments, charged with some strange and melancholy emotion, the visitor from the West feels himself entering upon the rare experience of a new world.
Everyone knows how few are the treasures that a Japanese displays in his house. His heirlooms and works of art are stored in a fireproof annexe. For the feasting of the eye of every guest or party of visitors the appropriate choice of kakemono,[[31]] carving or pottery is made. I had the delight of seeing during my country-house visiting many ancient pictures of country life and of animals and birds. It was also a precious opportunity to inspect armour and wonderful swords and stands of arrows in the houses in which the men who had worn the armour and used the weapons had lived. The way of stringing the seven-feet-high bow was shown to me by a kimono-clad samurai, as has been recorded in the previous chapter. When he threw himself into a warlike attitude and with an ancient cry whirled a gleaming two-handed sword in the dim light thrown by lanterns which had lighted the house in the time of the Shoguns, the figures on old-time Japanese prints had a new vividness.
What also helped in illuminating for me the old prints of warlike scenes was a display of a remarkable kind of fencing with naked weapons which one of my hosts kindly provided in his garden one evening. The tournament was conducted by the village young men's association. The exercises, which, as I saw them, are peculiar to the district, are called ki-ai, which means literally "spirit meeting." They call not only for long training but for courage and ardour. The combats took place on a small patch of grass which was fenced by four bamboo branches. These were connected by a rope of paper streamers such as are used to distinguish a consecrated place. Before the first bout the bamboos and rope were taken away and a handful of salt was thrown on the grass. Salt was similarly thrown on the grass before every contest. The idea is that salt is a purifier. It signifies, like the handshake of our boxers, that the feelings of the combatants are cleansed from malice.
Most of the events were single combats, but there were two meetings in which a man confronted a couple of assailants. The contests I recall were spear v. spear, spear v. sword, sword v. long billhook, spear v. the short Japanese sickle and a chain, spear v. paper umbrella and sword, pole v. wooden sword, pole v. pole, and long billhook v. fan and sword. The weapons were sharp enough to inflict serious wounds if a false move should be made or there should be a momentary lack of self-control. The flashing steel gave an impression of imminent danger. There was also the feeling aroused in the spectators by the way in which the combatants sought to gain advantage over one another by fierce snarls, stamping on the ground and appalling gestures. The neck veins of the fighters swelled and their faces flamed with mock defiance. Their agility in escaping descending blades was amazing. But the ki-ai player's dexterity is famous. It is his boast that with his sword he could cut a straw on a friend's head. I noticed that no women were present at the "spirit meeting."
More than once I found that my landlord host was accustomed to make a circuit of his village once or twice a week in order to see how things were going with his tenants. Public-spirited landlords were working for their people by means of co-operation, lectures and prizes, the distribution of leaflets and the giving of from 2½ to 7½ per cent. discount in rent when good rice was produced. The rural philanthropist in Japan sees himself as the father of his village.[[32]] The Japanese word for landlord is "land master" and for tenant "son tiller." The old idea was patronage on the one side and respect on the other. This idea is disappearing. "We wish," said one landlord to me, "to pass through the transition stage gradually. We do not feel the same responsibility to our people, perhaps, now that they do not show the same reverence for us, but we do not say to them that they may go to the factory and we will invest our money for our children. We check ourselves. We know well, however, that things will change in our grandsons' time. We therefore try to mix our grandfathers' ideas and modern ideas. We are believers in co-operation and we try to be counsellors and to work behind the curtain."
From time to time there are such things as tenants' strikes. Mr. Yamasaki assured me that the problem of the rural districts can be solved only by appealing to the feelings of the people in the right way. He said that "the Japanese are largely moved by feelings, not by convictions." In some coastwise counties, someone told me, a hurricane destroyed the crops to such an extent that the tenants could not pay rent, and the landlords who depended on their rents were impoverished. Things reached such a pass that a hundred thousand peasants signed a paper swearing fidelity to an anti-landlord propaganda. Officials and lawyers achieved nothing. Then Mr. Yamasaki went, and, sitting in the local temple, talked things over with both sides for days. He got the landlords to say that they were sorry for their tenants and the tenants to say that they were sorry for the landlords, and eventually he was allowed to burn the oath-attested document in the temple.[[33]]
Many landlords are "endeavouring to cultivate a moral relation" between themselves and their tenants. They have often the advantage that their ancestors were the landlords of the same peasant families for many generations. But there are still plenty of absentee landlords and landlords who are usurers. There are also the landlords who have let their lands to middlemen. The cultivator therefore pays out of all proportion to what the landlord receives. Of landlords generally, an ex-daimyo's son said to me: "Many landlords treat their tenants cruelly. The rent enforced is too high. In place of the intimate relations of former days the relations are now that of cat and dog. The ignorance of the landlords is the cause of this state of things. It is very important that the landlord's son shall go to the agricultural school, where there is plenty of practical work which will bring the perspiration from him." The object of most good landlords is to increase the income of their tenants. It is felt that unless the farmers have more money in their hands, progress is impossible. There is one direction in which the landlords are not tried. The franchise is so narrow that farmers cannot vote against their landlords.
In the house of one old landowning family in which I was a guest I saw a gaku inscribed, "Happiness comes to the house whose ancestors were virtuous." I was admitted to the family shrine. Round the walls of the small apartment in which the shrine stood were the autographs or portraits of distinguished members of the house going back four or five hundred years. It was easy to see that the inspiring force of this family was its untarnished name. It was a crime against the ancestors to reduce the prestige or merit of the family. No stronger influence could be exerted upon an erring member of such a family than to be brought by his father or elder brother before the family shrine and there reprimanded in the presence of the ancestral spirits. The head of this house is at present a schoolboy of twelve and the government of the family is in the hands of a "regent," the lad's uncle. I saw the boy and his younger sister trot off in the morning with their satchels on their backs to the village school in democratic Japanese fashion. Japan is a much more democratic country than the tourist imagines. Distinctions of class are accompanied by easy relations in many important matters.
I went for a second time to the restful city of Nagoya. It is out of the sphere of influence of Tokyo and is conservative of old ideas. People live with less display than in the capital and perhaps pride themselves on doing so. But if the houses of even the well-to-do are small and inconspicuous, the interiors are of satisfying quality in materials and workmanship, and the family godowns bring forth surprises. Here as elsewhere the guest is served in treasured lacquer and porcelain. (While we are not accustomed in the West to look at the marks on our host's table silver, it is perfect Japanese manners to admire a food bowl by examining the potter's marks.) My host hung a rural kakemono in my room, one day a fine old study of poultry, another an equally beautiful painting of hollyhocks.
As we left the town my attention was attracted by a commemorative stone overlooking rice fields. The inscription proclaimed the fact that at that spot the late Emperor Meiji, [[34]] as a lad of fifteen, on his historic first journey to Tokyo, "beheld the farmers reaping."
The matron of a farmhouse two centuries old showed me a tub containing tiny carp which she had hatched for her carp pond, the inmates of which, as is common, came to be fed when she clapped her hands. In the garden there was an old clay butt still used for archery. In the farmhouse I was taken into a room in which in the old days the daimyo overlord had rested, into another room which had a secret door and into a third room where—an electric fan was buzzing.
At a school I had to face the usual ordeal of having to "write" as best I could a motto for use as a wall picture. Our lettering, when done with a brush, falls pitifully behind Chinese characters in decorative value, and our mottoes will not readily translate into Japanese. I was often grateful to Henley for "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul," because with the substitution of "commander" for captain, the lines translate literally.
We left the village through arches which had been erected by the young men's association. At an old country house four interesting things were shown to me. There was, first, a phial of rice seed 230 years old. The agricultural professor who was my fellow-guest told me that he had germinated some of the grains, but they did not produce rice plants. The second thing was a fine family shrine before which a religious ceremony had been performed twice a day by succeeding generations of the same family for 350 years. The third object of interest was a little, narrow, flat steel dagger about eight inches long, sheathed in the scabbard of a sword. The dagger was used for "fastening an enemy's head on." After the owner of the sword had beheaded his foe, he drew the smaller weapon, and, thrusting one end into the headless trunk and the other end into the base of the head, politely united head and body once more, thus making it possible "to show due respect and sympathy towards the dead." Finally, I had the privilege of handling a wonderful suit of armour which was fitted slowly together for me out of many pieces. Although it had been made several centuries ago, this rich suit of lacquered leather had been a Japanese general's wear on the field of battle within living memory.
One of the landowners I met was a poet who had been successful in the Imperial poem competition which is held every New Year. A subject is set by His Majesty and the thousands of pieces sent in are submitted to a committee. The dozen best productions are read before the sovereign himself, and this is the honour sought by the competitors. The subject for competition in the year in which the landowner had been successful was, "The cryptomeria in a temple court." His poem was as follows:
In transplanting
The young cryptomeria trees
Within the sacred fence
There is a symbol
Of the beginning of the reign.
The New Year poems come from every class of the community and there is seldom a year in which landowners or farmers are not among the fortunate twelve.
As we rode along a companion spoke of the force of public opinion in keeping things straight in the countryside, also of the far-reaching control exercised by fathers and elder brothers. But the good behaviour of some people was due, he said, to a dread of being ridiculed in the newspapers, which allow themselves extraordinary freedom in dealing with reputations.
I met a man who had had a monument erected to him. He was a member of a little company which received me in a farmer's house. He was formerly the richest man in the village, that is to say, he owned 20 chō and was worth about 100,000 yen. Moved by the poverty of his neighbours, he devoted his substance to improving their condition. Now many of them are well off, the village has been "praised and rewarded" by the prefecture for its "good farming and good morals," and the philanthropist is worth only 50,000 yen. Impressed by his unselfishness, the village has raised a great slab of stone in his honour.
I made enquiries continually about the influence exerted by priests. I was told of many "careless" priests, but also of others who delivered sermons of a practical sort. A few of the younger priests were described as "philosophical" and some preached "the kingdom of God is within you." Many people laid stress on the necessity for a better education of the priesthood and for combating superstition among the peasantry, though the schools had already had a powerful influence in shaking the faith of thousands of the common people in charms and suchlike. Many folk put up charms because it was the custom or to please their old parents or because it could do no harm.
I was told that the Government does not encourage the erection of new temples. Its notion is that it is better to maintain the existing temples adequately. When I went to see a gorgeous new temple, I found that official permission for its erection had been obtained because the figures, vessels and some of the fittings of an old and dilapidated temple were to be used in the new edifice. This temple was on a large tract of land which had recently been recovered from the sea. The building had cost between 80,000 and 90,000 yen. It stood on piles on rising ground and had a secondary purpose in that it offered a place of refuge to the settlers on the new land if the sea dike should break.
The founder of the temple was the man who had drained the land and established the colony. He had given an endowment of 500 yen a year, three-quarters of which was for the priest. This functionary had also an income of 150 yen from a chō of land attached to the temple. Further he received gifts of rice and vegetables. I noticed that the gifts of rice—acknowledged on a list hung up in his house—varied in quantity from four pecks to half a cupful. Probably the priest bought very little of anything. If he needed matting for his house, which was attached to the temple, or if he had to make a journey, the villagers saw that his requirements were met. And he was always getting presents of one kind or another. "A man says to the priest," I was told, "'This is too good for me; please accept it.'" The villagers on their side sat and smoked in one of the temple rooms and drank his reverence's tea for hours before and after service. [[35]]
The building of the temple was not only an act of piety but a work of commercial necessity. The colonists on the reclaimed land would never have settled there if there had not been a temple to hold them to the place and to provide burial rites for their old parents. Not all the people were of the same sect of Buddhism, but "they gradually came together." A third of what a tenant produced went for rent and another third for fertilisers, the remaining third being his own. The population was 1,800 in 300 families. The average area per family was 2 chō and colonists were expected to start with about 200 yen of capital. Some unpromising tenants had been sent away and "some had left secretly." Half of the people were in debt to the landlord—the total indebtedness was about 15,000 yen—for the erection of houses and the purchase of implements and stock. The rate was 8 per cent. In the district 10 per cent. was quite usual and 12 per cent. by no means rare. The co-operative society lent at the daily rate of 2½ sen per 100 yen.
The landlord told me that the sea dikes took two years to build and that most of the earth was carried by women, 5,000 of them. Their labour was cheap and the small quantities of earth which each woman brought at a time permitted of a better consolidation of an embankment that was 240 feet wide at the base. More than a million yen were laid out on the work. The reclaimed land was free of State taxes for half a century, but the landlord made a voluntary gift to the village of 2,000 yen a year. The yearly rent coming in was already nearly 56,000 yen. The cost of the management of the drained land and of repairs to the embankment, 20,000 yen a year, was just met by the profits of a fishpond. A valuable edible seaweed industry was carried on outside the sea dikes. The landlord mentioned that he had had great difficulty in overcoming the objections of his grandfather to the investment, but that eventually the old man got so much interested that at ninety-three he used to march about giving orders.
One day in the course of my journeying I was near a railway station where country people had assembled to watch the passing of a train by which the Emperor was travelling. No one was permitted along the line except at specified points which were carefully watched. A young constable who wore a Russian war medal was opposite the spot where I stood. He politely asked me to keep one shaku (foot) or so away from the paling. When someone's child pushed itself half-way through the paling the police instruction was, "Please keep back the little one for, if it should pass through, other children will no doubt wish to follow." A later request by the constable was to take off our hats and keep silence when he raised his hand on the approach of the Imperial train. We were further asked not to point at the Emperor and on no account to cry Banzai. (The Japanese shout Banzai for the Emperor in his absence and cry Banzai to victorious generals and admirals, but perfect silence is considered the most respectful way of greeting the Emperor himself.) The Imperial train, which was preceded by a pilot engine drawing a van full of rather anxious-looking police, slowed down on approaching the station so that everyone had a chance of seeing the Emperor, who was facing us. All the school children of the district had been marshalled where they could get a good view. The Japanese bow of greatest respect—it has been introduced since the Restoration, I was told—is an inclination of the head so slight that it does not prevent the person who bows seeing his superior. This bow when made by rows of people is impressive. Undoubtedly the crowd was moved by the sight of its sovereign. Not a few people held their hands together in front of them in an attitude of devotion. The day before I had happened to see first a priest and then a professor examining a magazine which had a portrait of the Emperor as frontispiece. Both bowed slightly to the print. Coloured portraits of the Emperor and Empress are on sale in the shops, but in many cases there is a little square of tissue paper over the Imperial countenances.