Japanese Girls and Women / Revised and Enlarged Edition

by Alice Mabel Bacon

Not only hotels, but little tea-houses all through Japan, form openings for the business abilities of women, both in country and city. Wherever you go, no matter how remote the district or how rough the road, at every halting point you find a tea-house. Sometimes it is quite an extensive restaurant, with several rooms for the entertainment of guests, and a regular kitchen where fairly elaborate cooking can be done; sometimes it is only a rough shelter, at one end of which water is kept boiling over a charcoal brazier, while at the other end a couple of seats, covered with mats or a scarlet blanket or two, serve as resting-places for the patrons of the establishment. But whatever the place is, there will be one woman or more in attendance; and if you sit down upon the mats, you will be served at once with tea, and later, should you require more, with whatever the establishment can afford,—it may be only a slice of watermelon, or a hard pear; it may be eels on rice, vermicelli, egg soup, or a regular dinner, should the tea-house be one of the larger and more elaborately appointed ones. When the feast is over, the refreshments you have especially ordered are paid for in the regular way; but for the tea and sweetmeats offered, for which no especial charge is made, you are expected to leave a small sum as a present. In the less aristocratic resting-places, a few cents for each person is sufficient to leave on the waiter with the empty cups of tea, for which loud and grateful thanks will be shouted out to the retiring party.

In the regular inn, the chadai[41] amounts to several dollars, for a party remaining any time, and it is supposed to pay for all the extra services and attention bestowed on guests by the polite host and hostess and the servants in attendance. The chadai, done up neatly in paper, with the words On chadai written on it, is given with as much formality as any present in Japan. The guest claps his hands to summon the maid. When it is heard, for the thin paper walls of a Japanese house let through every noise, voices from all sides will shout out Hē´-hē´, or Hai, which means that you have been heard, and understood. Presently a maid will softly open your door, and with head low down will ask what you wish. You tell her to summon the landlord. In a few moments he appears, and you push the chadai to him, making some conventional self-depreciating speech, as, "You have done a great deal for our comfort, and we wish to give you this chadai, though it is only a trifle." The landlord, with every expression of surprise, will bow down to the ground with thanks, raising the small package to his head in token of acceptance and gratitude, and will murmur in low tones how little he has done for the comfort of his guests; and then, the self-depreciation and formal words of thanks on his side being ended, he will finally go down stairs to see how much he has gotten. But, whether more or less than he had expected, nothing but extreme gratitude and politeness appears on his face as he presents a fan, confectionery, or some trifle, as a return for the chadai, and speeds the parting guests with his lowest bow and kindliest smile, after having seen to every want that could be attended to.

Once, at Nikkō, I started with a friend for a morning walk to a place described in the guide-book. The day was hot and the guide-book hazy, and we lost the road to the place for which we had set out, but found ourselves at last in a beautiful garden, with a pretty lake in its centre, a little red-lacquered shrine reflected in the lake, and a tea-house hospitably open at one side. The teakettle was boiling over the little charcoal fire; melons, eggs, and various unknown comestibles were on the little counter; but no voice bade us welcome as we approached, and when we sat down on the edge of the piazza, we could see no one within the house. We waited, however, for the day was hot, and time is not worth much in rural Japan. Pretty soon a small, wizened figure made its appearance in the distance, hurrying and talking excitedly as it came near enough to see two foreign ladies seated upon the piazza. Many bows and profuse apologies were made by the little old woman, who seemed to be the solitary occupant of the pretty garden, and who had for the moment deserted her post to do the day's marketing in the neighboring village. The apologies having been smilingly received, the old lady set herself to the task of making her guests comfortable. First she brought two tumblers of water, cold as ice, from the spring that gushed out of a great rock in the middle of the little lake. Then she retired behind a screen and changed her dress, returning speedily to bring us tea. Then she retreated to her diminutive kitchen, and presently came back smiling, bearing eight large raw potatoes on a tray. These she presented to us with a deep bow, apparently satisfied that she had at last brought us something we would be sure to like. We left the potatoes behind us when we went away, and undoubtedly the old lady is wondering still over the mysterious ways of the foreigners, as we are over those of the Japanese tea-house keepers.

One summer, when I was spending a week at a Japanese hotel at quite a fashionable seaside resort, I became interested in a little old woman who visited the hotel daily, carrying, suspended by a yoke from her shoulders, two baskets of fruit, which she sold to the guests of the hotel. As I was on the ground floor, and my room was, in the daytime, absolutely without walls on two sides, she was my frequent visitor, and, for the sake of her pleasant ways and cheerful smiles, I bought enough hard pears of her to have given the colic to an elephant. One day, after her visit to me, as I was sitting upon the matted and roofed square that served me for a room, my eye wandered idly toward the bathing beach, and, under the slight shelter where the bathers were in the habit of depositing their sandals and towels, I spied the well-known yoke and fruit baskets, as well as a small heap of blue cotton garments that I knew to be the clothing of the little fruit-vender. She had evidently taken a moment when trade was slack to enjoy a dip in the soft, blue, summer sea. Hardly had I made up my mind as to the meaning of the fruit baskets and the clothing, when our little friend herself emerged from the sea and, sitting down on a bench, proceeded to rub herself off with the small but artistically decorated blue towel that every peasant in Japan has always with him, however lacking he may be in all other appurtenances of the toilet. As she sat there, placidly rubbing away, a friend of the opposite sex made his appearance on the scene. I watched to see what she would do, for the Japanese code of etiquette is quite different from ours in such a predicament. She continued her employment until he was quite close, showing no unseemly haste, but continuing her polishing off in the same leisurely manner in which she had begun it; then at the proper moment she rose from her seat, bowed profoundly, and smilingly exchanged the greetings proper for the occasion, both parties apparently unconscious of any lack in the toilet of the lady. The male friend then passed on about his business; the little woman completed her toilet without further interruptions, shouldered her yoke, and jogged cheerfully on to her home in the little village, a couple of miles away.

As one travels through rural Japan in summer and sees the half-naked men, women, and children that pour out from every village on one's route and surround the kuruma at every stopping place, one sometimes wonders whether there is in the country any real civilization, whether these half-naked people are not more savage than civilized; but when one finds everywhere good hotels, scrupulous cleanliness in all the appointments of toilet and table, polite and careful service, honest and willing performance of labor bargained for, together with the gentlest and pleasantest of manners, even on the part of the gaping crowd that shut out light and air from the traveling foreigner who rests for a moment at the village inn, one is forced to reconsider a judgment formed only upon one peculiarity of the national life, and to conclude that there is certainly a high type of civilization in Japan, though differing in many important particulars from our own. A careful study of the Japanese ideas of decency, and frequent conversation with refined and intelligent Japanese ladies upon this subject, has led me to the following conclusion. According to the Japanese standard, any exposure of the person that is merely incidental to health, cleanliness, or convenience in doing necessary work, is perfectly modest and allowable; but an exposure, no matter how slight, that is simply for show, is in the highest degree indelicate. In illustration of the first part of this conclusion, I would refer to the open bath-houses, the naked laborers, the exposure of the lower limbs in wet weather by the turning up of the kimono, the entirely nude condition of the country children in summer, and the very slight clothing that even adults regard as necessary about the house or in the country during the hot season. In illustration of the last part, I would mention the horror with which many Japanese ladies regard that style of foreign dress which, while covering the figure completely, reveals every detail of the form above the waist, and, as we say, shows off to advantage a pretty figure. To the Japanese mind it is immodest to want to show off a pretty figure. As for the ball-room costumes, where neck and arms are freely exposed to the gaze of multitudes, the Japanese woman, who would with entire composure take her bath in the presence of others, would be in an agony of shame at the thought of appearing in public in a costume so indecent as that worn by many respectable American and European women. Our judgment would indeed be a hasty one, should we conclude that the sense of decency is wanting in the Japanese as a race, or that the women are at all lacking in the womanly instinct of modesty. When the point of view from which they regard these matters is once obtained, the apparent inconsistencies and incongruities are fully explained, and we can do justice to our Japanese sister in a matter in regard to which she is too often cruelly misjudged.

There seems no doubt at all that among the peasantry of Japan one finds the women who have the most freedom and independence. Among this class, all through the country, the women, though hard-worked and possessing few comforts, lead lives of intelligent, independent labor, and have in the family positions as respected and honored as those held by women in America. Their lives are fuller and happier than those of the women of the higher classes, for they are themselves bread-winners, contributing an important part of the family revenue, and they are obeyed and respected accordingly. The Japanese lady, at her marriage, lays aside her independent existence to become the subordinate and servant of her husband and parents-in-law, and her face, as the years go by, shows how much she has given up, how completely she has sacrificed herself to those about her. The Japanese peasant woman, when she marries, works side by side with her husband, finds life full of interest outside of the simple household work, and, as the years go by, her face shows more individuality, more pleasure in life, less suffering and disappointment, than that of her wealthier and less hard-working sister.

Footnotes:

[39] The laws against the éta and hinin, making of them a distinct, unclean class, and forbidding their intermarriage with any of the higher classes, have recently been abolished. There is now no rank distinction of any practical value, except that between noble and common people. Héimin and samurai are now indiscriminately mingled.

[40] Toyotomi Hidéyoshi, a peasant boy, rose from the position of a groom to be the actual ruler of Japan during the Middle Ages. He it was who in 1587 issued a decree of banishment against the Christian missionaries in Japan. He is called Faxiba in the writings of these missionaries, and in Japan he is frequently spoken of as Taiko Sama, a title, not a name; but a title that, used alone, refers always to him. For further account of his life, see Griffis, Mikado's Empire, book i., chap. xxiv.

[41] Chadai is, literally, "money for tea," and is equivalent to our tips to the waiters and porters at hotels. The chadai varies with the wealth and rank of the guests, the duration of the stay, and the attention which has been bestowed. On is the honorific placed before the word in writing.