CHAPTER IV
I GO TO JAPAN
The Admiral’s prognostications were correct. We met such heavy seas passing Cape Flattery that the ship seemed to be trying to turn turtle. We were unable to sit on deck from that day until the day that we sighted Japan, and once we had to heave-to for eighteen hours. The worst of the weather being so terrible was that the Captain was unable to execute the Company’s instructions to take us to see the Aleutian Islands, which only whalers know, and drop some stores there for shipwrecked mariners.
But on that December morning, when we found ourselves in smooth water and soft, summery temperature off the flat-topped hills of Japan, surrounded by the billowing sails of countless junks, the very first vessels we had seen since Cape Flattery faded out of sight, we felt rewarded.
The East, the Far East, which I had heard “a-calling” all my life, was right within my grasp. In a few hours’ time I should be standing on the shores of fanciful and mysterious Japan, able to remain there as long as I chose, for we had no fixed plans. We were just drifting on—drifting through our lives—drifting across the world. My heart beat high; I might have written nothing but a few books of verse which hardly anybody read, but, at any rate, I had gone half round the world, and if I wished to stay and dream for the rest of my life in the East, who was to say me nay?
Whatever the causes, the effect was to give me the subject for which I had been waiting to make my position as an author. From the day that I published The Japs at Home, I shed my label of the “Australian Poet,” and became known as the author who has been to Japan.
I even enriched the English language with a word—Japs. It had long been in use in America, but no one had ventured to put it into a book in England. Some thought it was undignified; some thought that it would incense the Japanese. I not only put it into a book, but on the cover of a book, which has sold a hundred and fifty thousand copies. Only to-day I discovered that Japan’s great poet, Yone Noguchi, and the Japanese publicist, T. G. Komai, use it in their books, which are written in English.
I had, in Montreal, bought a No. 1 Kodak—a novelty in those days—and with it I took several hundred photographs in Japan—it was from these that Fenn, the artist, of McClure’s Syndicate, afterwards drew his illustrations for my articles, which were reproduced in the earlier editions of the book. The “Kodaks” not only served as the basis of the illustrations, they made a most admirable journal for me to write from.
I commenced Kodaking and taking notes from the hour that we entered the harbour of Yokohama, and kept it up without flagging till the day that we left Yokohama for San Francisco. It was to those snapshots with camera and pencil that my books on Japan owed the lively touches which gave them their popularity.
We were a winter and a spring and a summer in Japan—for all except six weeks which we spent in China. I paid most of my hotel bills in Japan by writing my Handbook to Japan for the Club Hotel Company.