Jinrikisha days in Japan

by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

Everywhere the rearing of the worms goes on. The silk districts and villages are always thriving, prosperous, and tidily kept, forming peaceful and contented communities. Each house becomes both a nursery for the worms and a home factory, where every member of the family engages in the work. Wages in silk districts range from eight to twenty cents, in United States gold, for a day’s work of eighteen hours, the higher price being paid to the most expert and experienced only. The houses are all spacious, kept most exquisitely clean, ventilated, and held to an even temperature. Sheets of paper coated with eggs, and looking like so much sand-paper, will in a few days fill the waiting trays with tiny white worms. The mulberry-leaves have to be chopped as fine as dust for these new-comers, which are daily lifted to fresh trays by means of chopsticks, the fingers being too rough and strong for such delicate handlings. For a week at a time the tiny gluttons crawl and eat, then take a day and night of sleep, maintaining this routine for five weeks, when, having grown large enough, they begin to wind themselves up in cocoons. Then the cauldron of boiling water and the whirling reel change the yellow balls into great skeins of shining silk, ready to be twisted, tied, and woven either at home or across the seas. Compressed into bales of a picul’s weight, or 133½ pounds, the raw silk finds its way to market, or, woven in hand looms in the usual thirteen-inch Japanese widths, or in wider measures for the foreign trade, it is again sold by weight, the momé being the unit. One hundred and twenty momé are equal to one pound. Twenty-five yards of fine white handkerchief-silk weigh from 150 to 200 momé, and 100 momé of such silk varies in price from six to seven dollars, gold.

Steam-looms are fast supplanting the old hand-machines in Nishijin and Josho. The Government sent men to study the methods in use at Lyons and bring back machinery, and now there are filatures and factories in all the silk districts. Private corporations are following the Government example. At the Kwangioba no Shokoba the first exhibition of foreign machines, with instruction in their use, was given. To-day the lively clatter of the Jacquard loom is heard above the slow, droning noise of the hand-loom behind Nishijin’s miles of blank walls. Slowly the weavers are abandoning the rude loom, which was probably in use, like gunpowder, at an age when Europeans clothed themselves in skins and lived in caves; and the singing draw-boy is descending from his high perch, where he has so long been lifting the alternating handful of threads that make the pattern.

In a tour of the Nishijin factories, one scorching August day, we saw many of these primitive hand-looms, with half-clad weavers tossing the shuttles of silk and gold thread, their skin shining with the heat like polished bronze, and marked all over with the scars of moxa cones. Everywhere were gathered books upon books filled with samples of superb brocades, many of them more than a century old. Everywhere we were regaled with sweets and thimble-cups of lukewarm amber tea, that seemed harmless as water, but murdered sleep. Everywhere we found a new garden more enchanting than the last, and everywhere the way in which work-room and kitchen, living-room and sales-room were combined; women, children, family, workmen, and servants were ruled over by the master of the home and factory, offered a curious study in political economy and patriarchal government.

Until the Emperor, and finally the Empress and court ladies abandoned the national dress, the court-weaver of brocade remained a considerable personage, for he and his ancestors had been both tailors and dress-makers to those august personages. We visited the beautiful garden and lantern-hung verandas of this artistic dictator, and sipped tea, fanned the while by attentive maids, while the stout, dignified, and prosperous head of the ancient house and our Japanese official escort conversed. Afterwards we were shown the books of brocade and silks manufactured for the imperial family and court. The gorgeousness of some of these, especially the blazing red brocade, stiff with pure gold thread and covered with huge designs of the imperial chrysanthemum, or the Paulownia crest of the Emperor’s family, fairly dazzled us. We saw the pattern of the old Emperors’ ceremonial robes, and patterns designed by past Empresses for their regal attire. Several of these were of a pure golden yellow, woven with many gold threads; one design half covered with fine, skeleton bamboos on the shimmering, sunshiny ground. The splendid fabrics that bear the imperial crest may be woven only for the reigning family, and their furniture coverings, draperies, and carriage-linings are as carefully made and guarded as bank-note paper. Squares of thickest red silk, wrought with a single gold chrysanthemum, are woven for the Foreign Office, as cases for state papers and envoys’ credentials. Rolls of the finest white silk were ready to be made into undergarments for the Emperor, who, never wearing such articles twice, obliges his tailor to keep a large supply ready; and these garments that have once touched the sacred person are highly treasured by loyal subjects.

The weaver exhibited flaming silks covered with huge peonies, or fine maple-leaves, or circles of writhing dragons, which the outside million may buy if they choose, but not a sixteen-petalled chrysanthemum are they privileged to obtain from him in any way. In discussing the changeableness of the American taste, Kobayashi and his staff wondered that the mass of our people did not care for silks that would wear forever, rather than for the cheap fancies of the moment. The Japanese cling to the really good things that have stood the test of a century’s taste, and Japanese ladies had a pride in wearing the brocade that had been theirs for a lifetime and their mothers’ before them. In noble families inherited ceremonial dresses are as highly treasured as the plate and jewels of European families, though they are now seldom worn. Rolls of such silks and brocades were often presented by Emperor and Shogun to their courtiers, and the common saying, “He wears rags, but his heart is brocade,” attests the esteem in which these nishikis (brocades) were held in olden times, and those yesso nishikis, with their reverse a loose rainbow of woof threads, are far removed from the thin, flat, papery, characterless stuffs known as Japanese brocades in the cheap foreign trade.

A heavy silk tapestry, peculiar to Japan, although suggested by Chinese models, is best woven now at the Dotemachi Gakko, an industrial school for girls, maintained by the Government. The art had nearly died out when the aged tapestry-weaver was brought to the school and given a class of the most promising pupils. The fabric is woven on hand-frames, the design being sketched on the white warp threads, wrought in with shuttles or bobbins, and the threads pressed down with a comb. Each piece of the design is made by itself, and connected by occasional cross threads, or brides, as in lace. The fabric is not dear, considering its superior beauty and durability, as compared to the moth-inviting tapestries of the Gobelins and Beauvais, and conventional and classic designs are still followed, the old dyes used, and gold thread lavishly interwoven.

The gold thread employed in weaving brocades and tapestries is either a fine thread wound with gold foil, a strip of tough paper coated with gold-dust, or threads wound with common gold-paper. The fineness and quality of the gold affect the cost of any material into which it enters, and in ordering a fabric or a piece of embroidery one stipulates closely as to the gold-thread employed. The fine gold-wires of Russian brocades are very rarely used, because of their greater cost. The manufacture of gold thread is an open secret, and women are often seen at work in the streets, stretching and twisting the fine golden filaments in lengths of twenty and thirty feet.

The old dyers were as much masters of their craft as the old weavers; and in trying to match the colors in a piece of yesso nishiki, I once went the round of Paris shops and dress-makers’ establishments in vain. Nothing they afforded would harmonize with the soft tones of the old dyes. A distinguished American connoisseur, wishing to duplicate a cord and tassel from one of his old lacquer boxes, took it to a Parisian cord-maker. The whole staff looked at it, and the proprietor asked permission to unravel a bit, to decipher the twist and obtain some long threads for the dyer. But with months of time allowed him, he could not reproduce the colors nor braid a cord like the original, nor even retwist the Japanese cord he had unravelled.

Velvet-weaving is one of the old arts, but it was accomplished by the most primitive and laborious means, and the fabrics, dull and inferior to foreign factory velvets, do not rank among the more characteristic productions of Japanese looms. Kioto’s painted velvets are unique, however, and charming effects are obtained by painting softly-toned designs on the velvet as it comes from the loom, with all the fine wires still held in the looped threads. The painted parts are afterwards cut, and stand in softly-shaded relief upon the uncut groundwork.