Twenty Years of My Life

by Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen

For seven centuries prior to the revolution in our own day, Kyoto was the capital of the Mikados. Here they lived like gods behind a veil, only penetrated by the hierarchy: they never left the palace gates except in a closed palanquin: they added little but tombs to the city, and their tombs were never shown. But the Shoguns, who ruled in their name, and others great in the land, adorned Kyoto with some of the greatest and most interesting temples in Japan, such as the temples of the Gold and Silver Pavilions, the two Hongwanji temples, the temple of the Thirty-Three Thousand Images, and the chief temple of Inari the Goddess of Rice. And it being the ancient capital, we found the city full of old prints and curios, and the old-fashioned pleasure resorts of Japan.

Kyoto was a city of the pleasure-seeker of old time, as capitals are wont to be. It has wonderful tea-houses in the city; its temple grounds are like permanent fairs; and within a rikisha drive is Lake Biwa, one of the most exquisite lakes in the world, whose shores exhibit the chefs d’œuvres of the Japanese landscape-creator. Nothing could be more exquisite than the temple grounds on the shores of Lake Biwa.

Of the many old-time festivals of Kyoto, the most famous survival is the Miyako-odori, or cherry-blossom festival, held every year, when visitors flock to Kyoto to see the cherry-groves in full blossom. The feature of the festival is a wonderful ballet, for which the best dancers in Japan gather in Kyoto. Even the Duke and Duchess of Connaught came to Kyoto for it, when they were in Japan. We stayed for a long time at Yaami’s when they were there, and when the Duke learned from Colonel Cavaye, his private secretary, that I was a journalist, he gave me permission to accompany his party to any function or expedition which I wished to describe. The most interesting of them was the shooting of the rapids of the Katsuragawa, some miles from Kyoto, where thirteen miles of cataracts are negotiated in huge punts, built of springy boards. As we were buffeting down the rapids, the Duke told me that our present King, then Prince George of Wales, had said that shooting those rapids, and the baths of Miyanoshita, where you have natural hot water in wooden boxes sunk in the floor, were the two best things in the world.

In Kyoto, an antique city on a broad plain, embosomed in hills, capped by temples, one has the very essence of old Japan. We stayed there a long time, absorbing an atmosphere which may soon pass away, never to return.

Within a day’s rikisha drive of Kyoto is Nara, with its thousand-year-old treasury of the most notable possessions of the Mikados, and its glorious temples, and its sacred deer-park, and its acres of scarlet azalea thickets.

We visited all; we visited the two great cities of Osaka and Nagoya, with their magnificent castles, and Kamakura, with its gigantic Buddha and its ancient monasteries. We visited all the most famous cities and points of scenery in Japan; and the pleasure of our visit was heightened by our going away to China for six weeks in the middle of it, because when we came back our eyes were far keener to observe and to appreciate, while we had the knowledge acquired in our former visit to guide us.

We were truly sorry to leave Japan. I should be quite content to be living there still; but if we had remained there, Japan would not have taken its part in my development as a writer, for though I should doubtless have compiled a book or books about Japan, they would have been sent home as the productions of an amateur, and very likely have had such difficulty in finding a publisher that they would have been brought out in some hole-and-corner way, instead of my selling The Japs at Home in the open market, and thereby laying the foundation of my career as a travel-book writer.

Japan supplied me with the material for several books, not counting the handbook which I wrote for the Club Hotel—A Japanese Marriage, next in point of sales to The Japs at Home; Queer Things About Japan, which sold best of all my books in guinea form; More Queer Things About Japan, which I wrote with Norma Lorimer; When We Were Lovers in Japan, a novel which was originally published under the title of Playing the Game; and Pictures of Japan; while I have written countless articles and short stories about the country.

I had almost forgotten that I had a book—my Lester the Loyalist—published in Japan. Though it only contained about twenty pages, it took two months to print. How the result gratified me, I wrote in The Japs at Home.

“I forgot all the delays when I saw the printed pages, they were so beautiful, and really, considering that Mr. Mayeda was the only man in the establishment who could read a word of English, the printing was exceedingly correct. The blocks had turned out a complete success, though, of course, the proofs of the covers did not look as well as they would when mounted and crêped.