Jinrikisha days in Japan

by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

There are no such holiday-makers as the Japanese. The whole twelvemonth is fête-time, and the old year held three hundred and sixty-five festivals and anniversaries. All the great days of the Chinese calendar are observed, and the death-day of past sovereigns, instead of the birthday; while each religion, each sect, each temple, and each neighborhood has its own fête or matsuri, religious in its origin. Every night different temple grounds and different streets glow with lanterns and torches, an out-door fair is in full progress, and happy, laughing, chattering men, women, and children enjoy it all. The evening flower-fairs are as characteristic and picturesque as anything in Japan. The smoke of blazing flambeaux, the smell of the women’s camellia seed hair-oil, and the mingled odors from booths and portable restaurants, are not enticing on a hot night, but at least they offend in an “artless Japanese way.”

The booths along the whole length of the Ginza offer innumerable odd notions, queer toys, pretty hair-pins, curios, and indescribable trifles, every night in the year. The Japanese hair-pin, by-the-bye, is a dangerous vanity, the babies often twisting themselves into the range of its point, and the mothers impaling them on it in shaking them up higher on their backs and tightening the bands that hold them. The comic and ingenious toys, embodying the simplest principles of mechanics, and by the aid of a little running water, or the heat of a candle, performing wonderful feats, are such trifles of bamboo, thin pine, paper, or straw, as American children would destroy at a touch. Yet the more truly civilized Japanese little people play with them for weeks; and they toddle home with minute wicker cages of semi, or cicada, on one finger, content to hang them up and listen peaceably to the strident captives’ chirping mi-mi-mi all day long.

THE SEMI’S CAGE

The first week of March is gala time for the small girls of Japan, when their Hina Matsuri, or Feast of Dolls, is celebrated. Then do toy shops and doll shops double in number and take on dazzling features, while children in gay holiday clothes animate the streets. Little girls with hair elaborately dressed, tied with gold cords and bright crape, and gowns and girdles of the brightest colors, look like walking dolls themselves. The tiniest toddler is a quaint and comical figure in the same long gown and long sleeves as its mother, the gay-patterned kimono, the bright inner garments showing their edges here and there, and obis shot with gold threads, making them irresistible. Nothing could be gentler or sweeter than these Japanese children, and no place a more charming play-ground for them. In the houses of the rich the Dolls’ Festival is second only to the New Year in its importance. The family don their richest clothing, and keep open house for the week. The choicest pictures and art treasures are displayed, and with these the hina or images that have been preserved from grandmothers’ and great-grandmothers’ time, handed down and added to with the arrival of each baby daughter. These dolls, representing the Emperor, Empress, nobles, and ladies of the old Kioto court, are sometimes numbered by dozens, and are dressed in correct and expensive clothing. During the holiday the dolls are ranged in a row on a shelf like an altar or dais, and food and gifts are placed before them. The tiny lacquer tables, with their rice-bowls, teapots, cups, plates, and trays, are miniature and exquisite likenesses of the family furnishings. Each doll has at least its own table and dishes, and often a full set of tableware, with which to entertain other dolls, and amazing prices have been paid for sets of gold and carved red lacquer dishes, or these Lilliputian sets in wonderful metal-work. After the festival is over, the host of dolls and their belongings are put away until the next March; and when the beautiful images emerge from the storehouses after their long hiding they are as enchanting as if new. Nothing better illustrates inherent Japanese ideas of life and enjoyment, and gentleness of manners, than this bringing out of all the dolls for one long fête week in the year, and the handing them down from generation to generation.

On the fifth day of the fifth month comes the boys’ holiday. The outward sign is a tall pole surmounted with a ball of open basket-work, from which hang the most natural-looking fish made of cloth or paper. Such a pole is set before every house in which a boy has been born during the year, or where there are young boys, and some patriarchal households display a group of poles and a school of carp flying in the air. These nobori, as the paper carp are called, are of course symbolic, the carp being one of the strongest fish, stemming currents, mounting water-falls, and attaining a great age. Many of these nobori are four or five feet in length, and a hoop holding the mouth open lets them fill and float with as life-like a motion as if they were flapping their fins in their own element. In-doors, images and toys are set out in state array—miniature warriors and wrestlers, spears, banners, and pennants, and all the decorative paraphernalia that once enriched a warrior’s train. In all classes children’s parties and picnics prevail The schools are given up to out-door exercises, and every sunny morning processions of youngsters file by, with banners and colored caps to distinguish them, and go to some park or parade-ground for exercises, drills, and athletic games.

Besides the public schools maintained by Government, there are scores of private schools and mission schools. With its higher institutions reaching up to the Imperial University, with its special schools of law, medicine, engineering, science, and the arts, Tokio offers the best education to the youth of Japan. The public-school system is the equal of that of the United States, and the Government employs foreign teachers in even the remotest provincial schools. At a kindergarten the aristocratic pupils, with a repose of manner inherited from generations of courtly and dignified ancestors, trot in, in their little long-sleeved kimonos, like a Mikado opera company seen through the wrong end of an opera-glass, sit down demurely around low tables, and fold their hands like so many old men and women of the kingdom of Lilliput. There is no tittering, no embarrassment, nor self-consciousness; and these grave and serious mites will take the blocks from the teachers with a reverent bow and present them to other children with another formal salute, quite as their grandfathers might have done at court. In some of the girls’ schools the old Japanese methods are followed, and they are taught the traditional etiquette and the cha no yu, to embroider, to write poems, to arrange flowers, and to play the samisen. The koto, once almost obsolete, is restored to favor, and girls delight to touch this sweet-toned, horizontal harp.

The great summer festival is the opening of the river. This is the beginning of the nightly water fêtes on the Sumidagawa, and in the innumerable tea-houses that line its banks. This fête, appointed for the last week of June, is often postponed to the more settled season of July. Flat-bottomed house-boats, with open sides, awnings hung round with lanterns, and sturdy boatmen at either end of the craft, go up the river by hundreds and thousands at sunset, gliding out from the creeks and canals that everywhere intersect the city. The glittering fleet gathers in the broad stretch of stream lying between the Asakusa bashi and the Ryogoku bashi, and these two bridges are black with spectators. The rows of tea-houses lining both shores spread red blankets over the balcony railings, and hang row upon row of lanterns along balustrades and eaves. With their rooms thrown wide open to the water, they themselves look like great lanterns. Every room of every house has its dinner party, the tea-house of the Thousand Mats being engaged months before hand, and every maiko and geisha bespoken. Boats command double prices, and nearly every boat has its family group; little children in holiday dress, their elders in fresh silk, crape, gauze, or cotton kimonos, sitting on the red floor-cloth, each with a tray of dolls’ dishes, filled with the morsels of dainty things that make up a Japanese feast, and saké bottles circulating freely. The lines of lanterns shed a rose-colored light over all; and at one end a pretty maiko goes through her graceful poses, the company keeping time with her in rhythmical hand-clappings. Peddlers of fruit, candies, fireworks, and saké; performing jugglers, acrobats, and story-tellers; floating restaurants, theatres, side-shows, and boat-loads of musicians row in and out among the rest. Talk, laughter, and the wailing notes of samisens fill the air with a hum that swells to cheers and roars as the swift rockets fill the air with balls, fountains, sheaves, sprays, jets, and trails of light; or fiery dragons, wriggling monsters, rainbows, and water-falls shine out on the dark night sky. Although saké flows everywhere, there is no drunkenness or disorder to degrade these gentle, cheerful merrymakers.

Fires are among the thrilling but picturesque experiences of city life, confined chiefly to the winter months. The annual losses of Japan through conflagrations are very great, and Tokio has been destroyed many times. The flimsy little straw-matted, wooden houses are always ready to blaze; and if a lamp explodes, a brazier upsets, or a spark flies, the whole place is in flames, which leap from roof to roof until the quarter is kindled. Each time a burned district is rebuilt the streets are widened, a measure which preserves property but ruins picturesqueness, for the broad thoroughfares, lined with low, unpainted buildings, make the modern Japanese city monotonous and uninteresting.

The diminutive Japanese dwellings, of toy-like construction, rest on corner posts set on large rocks, and made stable by their heavy roofs of mud and tiles. Fires are stemmed only by tearing down all buildings in the path of the flames, which is done as easily as a house of cards is overturned. A rope, fastened to one of the upright corner posts, brings the structure down with a crash, while the heavy roof covers it like an extinguisher. The ordinary city house or shop may have twelve feet of frontage, and even a second story seldom raises the roof more than fifteen feet from the ground. To hear of a thousand houses being burned in a night is appalling, but a thousand of these Lilliputian dwellings and their microscopic landscape gardens would not cover more area than two or three blocks of a foreign city.