In Japan we spent our entire days in sight-seeing. If we were not going over interesting buildings (and I over Yoshiwaras), temples, castles, baths or tea-houses in marvellous gardens—we were wandering about the streets or the country in our rikishas, dismounting when there was anything to photograph or examine or purchase. The rikisha is a most convenient way of getting about for a person who is making notes, because he can write as he goes along, and pull up as often as he likes when there is anything which needs his attention. Also, your Jinrikisha boy, if you choose carefully, speaks enough English to act as an interpreter, and, from having taken foreigners to the sights so often, is usually a tolerably efficient guide. Besides which, it is a novel, pleasant and exciting method of locomotion.
We hired the best two rikisha men we could hear of by the week, and never regretted the extravagance. They were always there when we wanted them, and in a very few days grasped exactly what we wished to do and see. One was called Sada and the other Taro.
It was in this way that I acquired my knowledge of the Japan which can be seen on the surface, and which is all that the average foreigner wishes to see, and gave myself one of the three or four subjects with which my name is identified.
We spent the first month in Yokohama, a much-maligned place, for it had in those days an unspoiled native town at the back of the settlement, and its environs were charming, whether one went towards Negishi or towards Ikegami: I found enough to keep me hard at work for a month.
On the last day of the year we went to Tokyo. We had a reason for that; we wished to see the great fair in the Ginza, which is one of the most typical sights of Japan. Savage Landor, who had been in Tokyo for some time, wrote that we must on no account miss it, and he took rooms for us in the Tokyo hotel—which the Japanese called Yadoya, “the hotel.”
The Tokyo hotel was an experience: it had originally been the Yashiki or town-house of a feudal prince, in the days when the Shogun reigned at Tokyo. It had a moat (into which Miss Lorimer, who accompanied us on all our travels, fell on the first night we were there, but which fortunately contained more mud than water), and stood in an angle of the outer works of the castle.
Just below it, small craft made a port of the outer moat of the castle: in its courtyard carpenters were using up the large amount of waste space which there is in a Yashiki by nailing fresh rooms on to the Daimio’s house, to make the hotel larger. It could not be called anything but nailing on, because it was made of wood and paper, and was not properly dovetailed into the existing building, but simply tacked on. We learnt many upside-down notions by watching the builders and carpenters, who did most things inside-out or upside-down, according to our notions. Also the Japanese manager, the Abè San who was murdered a few months ago, borrowed my clothes to have them copied by a Japanese tailor, and the waiters wore their European clothes over their native dress, and wriggled out of them behind a screen as soon as a meal was over. If you called them at such a moment, whatever your sex, they might come forward with their trousers half on and half off. The Japanese have their own ideas of conventions between the sexes.
Wandering through that fair at the Ginza took one into the very heart of Japan: it is held to enable people to settle their debts before New Year’s Day.
Apart from the obituary parks of Shiba and Ueno, Tokyo is not reckoned rich in temples, though it has a few very famous temples in the suburbs, and more than a few within a short excursionary distance. But Shiba and Ueno—and especially the former—present an epitome of Japanese life, art, scenery and history.
It is difficult to imagine anything more beautiful than Shiba, though the Japanese have a proverb that you must not call anything beautiful till you have seen Nikko. The fir woods in which it stands are on a low ridge commanding an exquisitive view of the Gulf of Tokyo, and in this wood are embosomed the mausolea of most of the earlier Shoguns of the Tokugawa House, which came to an end this winter with the death of the abdicated Shogun. Each mausoleum has a beautiful temple beside the tomb. The presence of so many temples has led the Japanese to exhaust their landscape art on Shiba with lake and cherry-grove and cryptomeria. Such natives as do not go there for religion are attracted by the pleasure city, with its famous tea-houses, like the Maple Club, its shows, and, above all, by its dancing. Here you may see the No-dance, the Kagura-dance, and some of the best Geishas.