Jinrikisha days in Japan

by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

CHAPTER I
THE NORTH PACIFIC AND YOKOHAMA

All the Orient is a surprise to the Occidental. Everything is strange, with a certain unreality that makes one doubt half his sensations. To appreciate Japan one should come to it from the mainland of Asia. From Suez to Nagasaki the Asiatic sits dumb and contented in his dirt, rags, ignorance, and wretchedness. After the muddy rivers, dreary flats, and brown hills of China, after the desolate shores of Korea, with their unlovely and unwashed peoples, Japan is a dream of Paradise, beautiful from the first green island off the coast to the last picturesque hill-top. The houses seem toys, their inhabitants dolls, whose manner of life is clean, pretty, artistic, and distinctive.

There is a greater difference between the people of these idyllic islands and of the two countries to westward, than between the physical characteristics of the three kingdoms; and one recognizes the Japanese as the fine flower of the Orient, the most polite, refined, and æsthetic of races, happy, light-hearted, friendly, and attractive.

The bold and irregular coast is rich in color, the perennial green of the hill-side is deep and soft, and the perfect cone of Fujiyama against the sky completes the landscape, grown so familiar on fan, lantern, box, and plate. Every-day life looks too theatrical, too full of artistic and decorative effects, to be actual and serious, and streets and shops seem set with deliberately studied scenes and carefully posed groups. Half consciously the spectator waits for the bell to ring and the curtain to drop.

The voyage across the North Pacific is lonely and monotonous. Between San Francisco and Yokohama hardly a passing sail is seen. When the Pacific Mail Steamship Company established the China line their steamers sailed on prescribed routes, and outward and homeward-bound ships met regularly in mid-ocean. Now, when not obliged to touch at Honolulu, the captains choose their route for each voyage, either sailing straight across from San Francisco, in 37° 47′, to Yokohama, in 35° 26′ N., or, following one of the great circles farther north, thus lessen time and distance. On these northern meridians the weather is often cold, threatening, or stormy, and the sea rough; but the steadiness of the winds favors this course, and persuades the ship’s officers to shorten the long course and more certainly reach Japan on schedule time. Dwellers in hot climates dislike the sudden transition to cooler waters, and some voyagers enjoy it. Fortunately, icebergs cannot float down the shallow reaches of Bering Strait, but fierce winds blow through the gaps and passes in the Aleutian Islands.

Canadian Pacific steamers, starting on the 49th parallel, often pass near the shores of Attu, the last little fragment of earth swinging at the end of the great Aleutian chain. The shelter which those capable navigators, Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine, had the luck to find in their memorable journey, mariners declare to be Midway Island, a circular dot of land in the great waste, with a long, narrow, outlying sand-bar, where schooners have been wrecked, and castaways rescued after months of imprisonment. The steamer’s course from San Francisco to Yokohama varies from 4500 to 5500 miles, and the journey takes from twelve to eighteen days. From Vancouver to Yokohama it is but eleven days.

When the ship’s course turns perceptibly southward the mild weather of the Japan Stream is felt. In winter the first sign of land is a distant silver dot on the horizon, which in summer turns to blue or violet, and gradually enlarges into the tapering cone of Fuji, sloping upward in faultless lines from the water’s edge. One may approach land many times and never see Fuji, and during my first six months in Japan the matchless mountain refused to show herself from any point of view. Cape King, terminating the long peninsula that shelters Yeddo Bay, shows first a line of purple cliffs, and then a front of terraced hills, green with rice and wheat, or golden with grain or stubble. Fleets of square-sailed fishing-boats drift by, their crews, in the loose, flapping gowns and universal blue cotton head-towels of the Japanese coolies, easily working the broad oar at the stern. At night Cape King’s welcome beacon is succeeded by Kanonsaki’s lantern across the Bay, Sagami’s bright light, then the myriad flashes of the Yokosuka navy-yard, and last the red ball of the light-ship, marking the edge of the shoal a mile outside the Bund, or sea-wall, of Yokohama. When this craft runs up its signal-flag a United States man-of-war, if there be one in port, fires two guns, as a signal that the American mail has arrived.

Daylight reveals a succession of terraced hills, cleft by narrow green valleys and narrower ravines; little villages, their clusters of thatched roofs shaded by pine, palm, or bamboo; fishing-boats always in the foreground, and sometimes Fuji clear-cut against the sky, its base lost now and then behind the overlapping hills. In summer Fuji’s purple cone shows only ribbon stripes of white near its apex. For the rest of the year it is a silvery, shining vision, rivalled only by Mount Rainier, which, pale with eternal snows, rises from the dense forests of Puget Sound to glass itself in those green waters.

Yokohama disappoints the traveller, after the splendid panorama of the Bay. The Bund, or sea-road, with its club-houses, hotels, and residences fronting the water, is not Oriental enough to be very picturesque. It is too European to be Japanese, and too Japanese to be European. The water front, which suffers by comparison with the massive stone buildings of Chinese ports, is, however, a creditable contrast to our untidy American docks and quays, notwithstanding the low-tiled roofs, blank fences, and hedges. The water life is vivid and spectacular. The fleet of black merchant steamers and white men-of-war, the ugly pink and red canal-steamers, and the crowding brigs and barks, are far outnumbered by the fleet of sampans that instantly surround the arriving mail. Steam-launches, serving as mail-wagon and hotel omnibus, snort, puff, and whistle at the gang-ways before the buoy is reached; and voluble boatmen keep up a steady bzz, bzz, whizz, whizz, to the strokes of their crooked, wobbling oars as they scull in and out. Four or five thousand people live on the shipping in the harbor, and in ferrying this population to and fro and purveying to it the boatmen make their livelihood. Strict police regulations keep them safe and peaceable, and the harbor impositions of other countries are unknown. On many of these sampans the whole family abides, the women cooking over a handful of charcoal in a small box or bowl, the children playing in corners not occupied by passengers or freight. On gala days, when the shipping is decorated, the harbor is a beautiful sight; or when the salutes of the foreign fleets assembled at Yokohama are returned by the guns of the fort on Kanagawa Heights, and the air tingles with excitement. Since the annexation of the Philippines the American Asiatic fleet has been fully occupied in that archipelago, and the vessels seldom visit Yokohama, or remain for any time. The acquisition of Wei-hai-Wei gave the British fleet a northern station, and that, with the perpetual break-up and crisis in China, keeps those ships and the fleets of all nations closely to that coast. Nagasaki’s coal-mines make it the great port of naval call and supply in Japan.