In the mean time, in spite of many drawbacks, trade was making headway in other directions besides the exportation of gold, and quaint indeed were the beginnings of it. The staple products happened to be the same in Japan as in China, tea and silk, and they soon began to be regularly brought down to Yokohama for sale. But business was at first on such a lilliputian scale, and was introduced in so dainty a manner, that to merchants accustomed to the large transactions of China the whole affair wore something of the air of comic opera, or as if children were playing at being merchants. This impression was strengthened by the aspect of the fragile wooden structures with their sliding doors and windows, but without sitting accommodation, wherein business was transacted, which to those habituated to the massive, if inelegant, buildings of Hongkong and Shanghai irresistibly suggested the idea of a doll's house. The Chinese methods also were inverted. Instead of sending samples of substantial quantities, such as a thousand chests of tea or fifty bales of silk, and the owner or his broker coming to chaffer in the silk-room or the tea-room of the foreign merchant, the latter had to go the round of the Japanese shops to find out what they had got. Early every morning the leading merchants might be seen booted to the thighs—for the rain was frequent and the roads unmade—trudging up and down the Japanese bazaar to see what novelties had come to hand. The more zealous would sometimes make a second round in the afternoon, in case there might be some late as well as early worms to be picked up. The bodily fatigue and consumption of time involved in this process would have rendered a large business impossible. There were as yet no Japanese merchants properly so called, and their endless parley resembled more the tenacious higgling of peasants than the negotiations of men of business. Moreover, the native dealers seemed scarcely conscious of any law which should hold them to a bargain in the event of a more acceptable offer turning up.
Conclusions unfavourable to Japanese commercial morality have been drawn from some of those early—and later—experiences; but commercial like other kinds of specialised morality has necessarily something of a professional character. The akindo, or merchant, was a sort of pariah in Japan, his social status being inferior to those of the peasant and the handicraftsman. His sense of honour was not, therefore, sustained by tradition or stimulated by esprit de corps. There being no mercantile body in Japan, there was no mercantile code, at least none applicable to international trade, and those unwritten laws without which large commerce is impossible had not yet been called into being. Contrasts between the two neighbouring nations have just been mentioned very much to the advantage of the Japanese; but in matters of commerce, it must be conceded, the advantage lay entirely with the Chinese, a nation of traders from their birth.
In the sale of lacquer ware and objects of art the Japanese were much more at home than in dealing in raw products of foreign manufactures, and the treasures which were in the early days exposed in the shops of Yokohama would make a modern dealer sigh for opportunities which are no more. Speaking roundly, it would have been safe to buy the stock indiscriminately at the sellers' own prices, when fortune would have awaited the investor as surely as if he had bought up the gold coinage at the ratio of 5 to 1. The same remark would apply to such of the raw produce of Japan as had been in large demand in China; and conversely the rule applied also to selected articles of foreign manufacture, which the Japanese were satisfied to buy at a price mid-way between the high level of the Dutch monopoly and the low level of what would remunerate the free importer. Therefore the sudden inroad of open trade on a market artificially confined resulted in profitable trading while a new equilibrium was being found; but such prosperity was in its nature evanescent.
Irrespective of the material aims which attracted foreign residents to Japan, the life itself presented several novel and interesting features. Nothing could have been pleasanter than the social relations which sprang up between the foreign communities and the unofficial natives. The strangers were received everywhere with open arms, and the residence among a smiling people (excluding altogether the meretricious allurements of the country, which have also not been without their influence) and amid enchanting scenery was found to add a new pleasure to existence. Here again we must resort for illustration to a comparison with China, where strangers at the best were sullenly tolerated, where one might live a lifetime without entering a house, or seeing a respectable woman, or making a friend save on a business footing. The Japanese of Yokohama and Kanagawa, as well as in the surrounding villages and temples, never failed in courtesy and hospitality to passers-by, and were eager for conversation with foreigners. A useful smattering of the language was soon acquired under the stimulus of a quick-witted and sympathetic people alert to jump at the meaning and patient to help the novice to find his words. The women of the household were always charming, and if their domestic conversation sometimes startled the stranger by its freedom, there was neither malice nor any such impropriety as leaves an evil odour in its trail. Friendships were formed, not deep perhaps, but genuine as far as they went, and certainly not the less sincere on the Japanese than on the foreign side.
The intelligence also of the common people enhanced both the pleasure and the value of friendly intercourse with them: apt as they were to receive, they were no less ready to impart, information. Their appreciation of their country—its beauties, history, traditions, and folk-lore—was conscious and unrestrained, indeed it amounted to a passion. This afforded endless subject for talk. Everything save the politics of the day might be freely discussed, and though the first-arrived foreigners came poorly prepared to assimilate so much that was novel, they could not help carrying away a good deal from their frequent confabulations. The native guide-books formed a reservoir of suggestive topics: surprisingly minute they were, noting every gem of scenery or point of interest, with the legends of history, romance, or mythology attaching to them. So accurate were these itineraries that with their contents well studied foreigners might make excursions inland lasting several days without the aid of guide or the necessity of inquiring the way.
It need not, of course, be said that the mutual intelligence of Japanese and foreigners did not penetrate below the surface of every-day phenomena. Of their festivals, their pilgrimages, their votive offerings to temples and shrines, their ancestral worship, and their whole relation to the Unseen—call it religion, superstition, or idolatry—the strangers had no comprehension. Although its outward symbols were passing constantly under their eyes, esoteric Japan was to them a sealed book, as the mental processes of the Oriental always are to the Occidental, whose imagination is cramped by the syllogism, and whose faith languishes for demonstration. There was, however, ample outside the region of mysticism, outside the concerns of trade, and equally apart from political questions, to nourish the best relations between Japanese and foreigners.
The impressions of the British Minister on his journeys of relaxation are by no means the least interesting portion of his important work, 'The Capital of the Tycoon.' Having shaken off the official incubus, and breathing the free air of the country, the intercourse with the common people in which he was able to indulge was fruitful of reflections of a brighter hue than any that were prompted by his strenuous life in the capital. He observes:—
They are really a kindly people when not perverted by their rulers and prompted to hostility.... I had begun to forget I was in Japan, so much goodwill was shown.... There may be a good deal of tyranny and oppression, but the people show no marks of it.... The feudal lord is everything and the lower and labouring classes nothing. Yet what do we see? Peace, plenty, apparent content, and a country more perfectly and carefully cultivated and kept, with more ornamental timber everywhere, than can be matched even in England.... The material prosperity of a population estimated at thirty millions, which has made a garden of Eden of this volcanic soil, and had grown in numbers and in wealth by unaided native industry.
Such were the observations made during a few days' rest at the mineral springs of Atami, and they coincided exactly with the opinions formed by those whose daily intercourse lay with these same common people, in which term, of course, were included such town populations as foreigners had acquaintance with. A contemporary writer, Nagasaki, 1859, remarked: "The Government of Japan is the most absolute despotism in the world, and perfectly successful.... For the present it is consistent with great prosperity and contentment on the part of the people, but it seems to me it is only their exclusive policy that has kept it so."
The great, industrious, prosperous masses of Japan, enjoying the gifts of the gods with thankful hearts, and drinking the cup of life as presented to them without any acidulating scruples, seemed to be happiest of all in this, that they were not burdened with the dignity of wearing swords. The storms that convulsed the upper regions passed over their humble heads without interrupting the cast of a fishing-net or hindering by a day the gathering of their harvest. How different the life of the nobles and their following! their humanity dominated by an elaborate and intolerable ceremonial, settling their quarrels at the sword's point, and ever on the alert for bloody intrigue.[4]