I
Théophile Gautier, describing his travels in Russia, declares that, whereas Moscow and St. Petersburg fell short of the romantic dream-pictures which he had conceived of them by reason of their fame, the reverse was the case with Nijni-Novgorod, of which the name alone allured his ear with chiming syllables. Having reached the town with no other premonitory bias than the spell exercised by its magical appellation, he was ravished by the picturesque admixture of races from every corner of the empire. This paradoxical conflict between history and geography makes many victims. I too had been haunted by the prestige of a great name in Japanese annals—the name of Ashikaga. As I studied period after period of the turbulent evolution from feudal rivalry to military usurpation, from military usurpation to constitutional monarchy, it seemed more and more evident that the Ashikaga Shōguns, during two-and-a-half centuries of power, had been greater friends of art and learning than any rulers before or since. At Kyōto I had seen the golden pavilion of Yoshemitsu (whom Professor Fenollosa compares with Cosmo de Medici) adorned with mural paintings and screens by the artists whom he had imbued with the spirit of dreamy seclusion of the Hangkow idyllists. Under his patronage Chinese learning took root in Ashikaga University; the religious plays, or Nō, acquired in the hands of Kiyotsugu their claims to rank as aristocratic opera; the war of chrysanthemums, between rival dynasties in Yamato and Kyōto, was composed by an astute compromise. In short, culture was not purchased at the cost of firm government. Nearly a century later came Yoshimasa, whose silver pavilion, where he held æsthetic revels with his favourites, the Abbots Soāmi and Shuko, was as pale a copy of his great predecessor’s taste as his capacity to govern was inferior. Effeminacy followed in the train of refinement. The Ashikaga régime left a legacy of civil war and ruined peasantry for stronger rulers to replace by hardier methods, but it also bequeathed the memory of a new learning and a new art. To Ashikaga, then, urged by misleading memories and the promise I had given to visit Ikao comrades, I gladly repaired when September rains depressed the face of Tōkyō.
Yamada San, rightly thinking that living friends were of more interest than dead lions, took me straight from the station to his father’s house, and postponed all sightseeing until the morrow. Here I first realised the patriarchal atmosphere of an old-fashioned home. Father and mother were gravely courteous, and took pains to show me polite attention, but the son scarcely spoke in their presence; and pretty O Mitsu, who looked extremely pale, became mute as ivory. The entry of two cousins, who spoke a little English, introduced some animation; and after the consumption of tea and oranges O Mitsu was asked to sing me an old song, playful, if possible, because the foreigner would find it more easy to understand. Crouching over a long-stringed koto, she sang (the weather was very hot) this popular mosquito song:
“All you wives, lying
Outside the curtain,
Many mosquitoes
Often have stung,
Till the Bell Seven
Clanged from the temple:
Such things a good wife
Heeds not at all.”
It was explained that a wife would be showing disrespect to her husband by taking rest under the mosquito-net in his absence. If, therefore, he happened to stop out all night, she must still wait for him, outside the net, until the bell for matins sounded the retreat of her winged persecutors. “The Bell Seven” is named in accordance with old reckoning: the time represented is really four in the morning, when the Japanese day begins. That was the last I saw of O Mitsu, for etiquette forbade her taking supper at my hotel in company with her husband and father-in-law.
We spent the evening with the Tanaka family. There, too, I observed the reticence imposed on women in their own homes. Tanaka Okusama, who at Ikao had discoursed so brightly on every possible subject from ethics to Epaminondas, crept quietly from one to another of her guests, offering tea and cakes, but never joining in the conversation. Her husband, who had a most genial, refined face, made an excellent host: the four boys sat silently in a corner. Many questions were put about European houses and habits, for the Ashikaga of to-day, being a great centre of the trade in cotton goods made from foreign yarn, is accustomed to the sight of foreign commercial travellers.
The antiquities of the place were disappointing. The Academy of Chinese Learning, founded, if tradition may be believed, in 852, after attaining its zenith of prosperity under Yoshemitsu, has since gradually declined. The great library of Chinese works is broken up; only a few books remain. Of Confucian relics there rests only an impressive bronze tablet, with full-length figure of the sage, from which “rubbings” are sold to the pious. A sinister black impression of the gaunt, long-nailed philosopher, whose teaching still broods like a shadow over the majority of Japanese households, recalls to me, in the shape of a colossal kakemono, that dusty, dilapidated school, whose students are deserting it for Western lore. The vast temple, however, standing in a grove of cryptomeria, is still thronged by worshippers, and forms a worthy link with the historic glories of Ashikaga. In a side-chapel stand wooden effigies of all the Shōguns, wearing the tall black court-cap and the moustache with small pointed beard, fashionable from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. It is related that three similar figures, preserved in the Tōjiin Temple at Kyōto, were subjected to the indignity of decapitation in 1863, when the Restoration party wished to insult the memory of the Shōgunate, but did not dare to outrage the still powerful Tokugawa. The heads were pilloried in the dry bed of the Kamogawa, where it was customary to expose the heads of criminals. But Kyōto was at once the scene of their rise and their decline. In Ashikaga itself their memory lives as changeless and as free from insult as the tutelary mountain rampart of Akagisan.
There being no hotel near Yamada’s dwelling, he secured me a room in a geisha-house, with the result that late revelry made sleep impossible. But a bathe next morning in the rushing Tonegawa, with the exciting diversion of shooting some rapids in a crazy punt, invigorated me and amused a crowd of urchins, who shouted from the bank, “We want to see the naked foreigner!” By the end of the second day I felt at home with the older generation of both families, and was shown over warehouse, mill, and granary. Having not omitted to present miage on arrival, I departed in a shower of good wishes and small souvenirs. Yamada senior, who had never before (so his son declared) been willing to make the acquaintance of a foreigner, insisted on my accepting a roll of habutai (white silk, resembling taffeta), while Tanaka Okusama met me at the station with a parting gift of pickles and poetry. She had made the one, her husband the other. In fact, he had added this haikai to his published works:
“You, like a bird, pass,
Joyous, untrammelled;
Sad our farewell, when
Kiri-trees fall.”