Japan: A Record in Colour

by Dorothy Menpes

SUGAR-WATER STALL

Once I drifted into a country village in search of subjects for pictures, and I found to my astonishment that every living soul there was flying a kite, from old men down to babies. It was evidently a fête day, dedicated to kites; all business seemed abandoned, and every one either stood or ran about, gazing up in the air at the respective toys. There were kites of every variety—red kites, yellow kites, kites in the shape of fish, teams of fighting kites, and sometimes whole battalions of them at war with kites of a different colour, attempting to chafe each other’s strings. It rather surprised me at first to see staid old men keenly interested in so childish an amusement; but in a very short time I too found myself running about with the rest, grasping a string and watching with the greatest joy imaginable the career of a floating thing gorgeously painted, softly rising higher and higher in the air, until it mingled among the canopy of other kites above my head, becoming entangled for a moment, then leaving them and soaring up above the common herd, and side by side with a monstrous butterfly kite; then came the chase, the fight, and the downfall of one or the other. They were all children there, every one of them, from the old men downwards; all care and worry was for the time forgotten in the simple joy of flying kites; and I too, in sympathy with the gaiety about me, felt bubbling over with pure joy. To see these lovely flower-like child faces mingling with the yellow wrinkled visages of very old men, all equally happy in a game in which age played no part, was an experience never to be forgotten. None was too old or too young, and you would see mites strapped to the backs of their mothers, holding a bit of soiled knotted string in their baby fingers, and gazing with their black slit eyes at some tiny bit of a crumpled kite floating only a few inches away.

ADVANCE JAPAN

Another game in which both the youth and the age of Japan play equal parts is the game of painting sand-pictures on the roadside. These sand-pictures are often executed by very clever artists; but I have seen little children drawing exquisite pictures in coloured sands. Japanese children seem to have an instinctive knowledge of drawing and a facility in the handling of a paint-brush that is simply extraordinary. They will begin quite as babies to practise the art of painting and drawing, and more especially the art of painting sand-pictures. You will see groups of little children sitting in the playground of some ancient temple, each child with three bags of coloured sand and one of white, competing with one another as to who shall draw the quaintest and most rapid picture. The white sand they will first proceed to spread upon the ground in the form of a square, cleaning the edges until it resembles a sheet of white paper. Then, with a handful of black sand held in the chubby fingers, they will draw with the utmost rapidity the outline of some grotesque figure of a man or an animal, formed out of their own baby imaginations. Then come the coloured sands, filling in the spaces with red, yellow, or blue, according to the taste and fancy of the particular child artist. But the most extraordinary and most fascinating thing of all is to watch the performance of a master in sand-pictures. So dexterous and masterly is he that he will dip his hand first into a bag of blue sand, and then into one of yellow, allowing the separate streams to trickle out unmixed; and then with a slight tremble of the hand these streams will be quickly converted into one thin stream of bright green, relapsing again into the streams of blue and yellow at a moment’s notice. A Japanese mother will take infinite pains to cultivate the artistic propensities of her child, and almost the first lesson she teaches it is to appreciate the beauties of nature. She will never miss the opportunity of teaching the infant to enjoy the cherry-blossom on a sunny day in Uyeno Park. Hundreds of such little parties are to be seen under the trees enjoying the blossom, while the mother, seated in the middle of the group, points out the many beauties of the scene. She will tell them dainty fairy stories—to the boys, brave deeds of valour, to strengthen their courage; to the girls, tales of unselfish and honourable wives and mothers. Every story has a moral attached to it, and is intended to educate and improve the children in one direction or another. There is one fairy story which is a universal favourite with both mothers and children, and that is the story of Momotaro. When seeing a mother talking earnestly to her children, I have always discovered that it was the same old story, old yet ever fresh. It is a curiously simple tale about an old woman who goes every day to the river to wash clothes, and an old man who goes to the mountain to fetch wood. The old woman is always unhappy because she has no children, and one day, when she is washing clothes in the river, a large peach comes floating down towards her. On carrying it home, she hears the cry of a child, which appears to come from the inside of the peach. She rapidly cuts it in two, and finds to her amazement a fine baby sitting in the middle of it, which, since it was born in a peach, she afterwards called Momotaro. The story then goes on to tell how the baby grows up to be a fine healthy lad, who, on reaching the age of seventeen, plans an expedition to subjugate an island of the devil. A minute description is given of the food he takes with him—of the corn and rice wrapped in a bamboo leaf—and how on his journey he meets with a wasp, a crab, a chestnut, and a millstone, who all promise to help him if he will give them half of his food. The lad complies, and a beautiful description is given of their journey to the island of the devil, on which journey a very skilful plan is thought out by which to kill him. On arriving at the island, they find that the chief of the devils is not in his own room. They soon take advantage of his absence. The chestnut hops into the ash; the millstone mounts on to the roof; the crab hides in the washing-pan; the wasp settles in a corner; and the lad waits outside. The poor devil comes back, and has a terrible time between them all. He goes to the fireplace to warm his hands; the chestnut cracks in the fire and burns them; he rushes to the water-pan to cool himself, and the crab bites his hand; he flies to a safe place, and is tormented by the wasp; in an agony of pain he tries to leave the room, but the remorseless millstone descends with a crash upon his head, and mortally wounds him. This story is told to the Japanese children over and over again, but is always received with wide-eyed delight and excitement.

CHUMS

I have never seen a child in Japan cry; nor have I ever seen one smacked, for what mother can have the heart to touch so dainty a blossom as the child flower of this land of flowers? A group of Japanese children is perhaps the prettiest sight on earth, and they themselves are works of art, the beauty of which can scarcely be imagined. Each head and each piquant face is but a field where the ever-present artist can exercise his ingenuity and his skill in colour and design. Deliberately the child’s head and face are treated as subjects fit for the most decorative of design, and the result, though quaint and formal to the last degree, is invariably as pleasing as it is undoubtedly startling and original. And the children themselves are no less full of interest than their heads and faces are full of paint. I once saw a pyramid of children gazing in at a sweet-stuff shop. They looked like three children; but on closer inspection I discovered that one was a doll looking about the age of a child of two, with its great head lolling on the back of its mother, aged three. The three-year-old was a boy, strapped to the back of his sister aged five. The doll and the sister looked very sleepy and tired as they gazed vacantly at the rows of tempting pink sugar-water bottles in the sweet-stuff shop; but what arrested my attention was the alert and intelligent expression of the three-year-old child in the middle, who, just as I took out my notebook to sketch the group, put a lighted cigarette between his lips, holding it between two chubby fingers, eyeing me with the peculiar introspective look of the old hand as he both tests the excellence of the tobacco and gives himself up to its enjoyment. As I sketched him he looked composedly at me out of his big eyes, and posed twice without a particle of artificiality—once with the cigarette in his mouth, and again as if he had just taken it from his lips for a moment while he paid attention to me.

A SUNNY STROLL