Cotton goods are largely manufactured in Kioto, and at all seasons the upper reaches of the Kamogawa’s broad, stony bed are white with bleaching cloth. The Kamogawa’s water, which is better for tea-making, for rice-boiling, and for mixing dyes than the water of any other stream in Japan, is also sovereign for bleaching, and its banks are lined for a long distance with dyeing establishments. The river-bed, paved with stones under each of its great bridges, is dreary, wind-swept, and colorless in winter-time, as compared to its summer brilliancy; but in January it is the place of the kite-flyers, and Hideyoshi’s bronze-railed Shijo bridge—the southern end of the Tokaido, the centre from which all distances are measured—commands a view of an unexampled aerial carnival. Thousands of giant kites float upward, and the air is filled with a humming, as they soar, sweep, and circle over the city like huge birds. Kite combats take place in mid-air, and strings covered with pounded glass cut other strings, and let the half-animate paper birds and demons loose. Jinrikisha coolies on bridges and streets must dodge the hanging strings, and boys run over and into each other while watching their ventures; but the traditional kite-flying grandfathers whom one reads about in Western prints are conspicuous by their absence.
There is a game of battledore and shuttlecock much played at the same season by the girls, the battledore a flat wooden paddle ornamented with gaudy pictures of Japanese women. The game is a pretty one, and the girls are wonderfully graceful in playing it, the long sleeves and the flying obi-ends taking on expressive action when these charming maidens race and leap through its changes.
Kioto is not without its theatres and places of amusement, ever ready to beguile one from the sight-seeing and shopping rounds. Its great actor is Nakamura, and it maintains an academy for the training of maiko and geisha, where every spring there is a long-drawn-out festival of dances to help on the rejoicings of the cherry-blossom season. But its great place of amusement, its Vanity Fair, is the narrow theatre or show street running from Sanjio to Shijo Street, just beyond the bridges. This thoroughfare is lined all the way with rows of shops, labyrinthine bazaars, stalls, and booths, theatres, side-shows, peep-shows, puppet-shows, wax-works, jugglers, acrobats, wrestlers, trained animals, story-tellers, fortune-tellers, all exploited by the voice and drum of their loquacious agents at the door-way. No jinrikishas are allowed to run on this highway, and day and night, morning and midnight, it is filled with strolling people and playing children. In winter it is a cheering refuge from the wider, wind-swept streets, and in summer days it is cool and shady, the pavement constantly sprinkled, and the light and heat kept out by mat awnings stretched across the narrow road-way from roof to roof, in Chinese fashion. At night it is the busiest place in Kioto, even with the rival attraction of the river-bed; crowded with revellers, torches flaring, drums and gongs sounding, the high-pitched, nasal voices, of the showmen sing-songing their stories and programmes; and peddlers, pilgrims, priests, men, women, and children, and the strangers within their gates, making up the throng. Once when a giantess was on exhibition in a tent the spectators, instead of being awed by her heroic eight feet of height, were convulsed with laughter at sight of her. Every movement of the colossus sent them into fresh spasms. It was like a personification of some netsuke group to see this huge creature, with hair-pins like clubs, and clogs as large as a door-step, standing with folded arms, while pigmy visitors climbed up to perch like insects on her shoulders.
In this ever-open market one may buy the tailless cats of the country; forlorn, spiritless creatures, staying at home and in-doors at night, and never going on midnight prowls. Or, if he prefer, there are the wonderful long-tailed Tosa chickens, fowls kept in tall, bamboo cages, that their tail-feathers, measuring ten and twelve feet in length, may make a graceful display. When they are let out to scratch and wander about like other chickens, their precious feathers are rolled up in papers and protected from any chance of harm. Japanese spaniels, or Kioto chins, those little black-and-white, silky-eared pets, with big, tearful, goggle eyes, and heads as round and high as Fukurokojin’s, are fashionably dear, ranging from five to forty dollars each, even in their native town.
From the lower end of Theatre Street a covered way leads to the fish-market of the city, a dark, cool, stone-floored place, where more peculiar things may be bought, and more picturesque groups may be studied, in the strange Rembrandtesque light, than anywhere else in Kioto. The foreign artists, who carry away scores of sketches of Japanese life, seem never to find this fish-market, nor in general to seize the best and least hackneyed subjects. Most of their pictures have been long anticipated by the native photographers, and the foreign artist repeats, with less fidelity, the familiar scenes and subjects, with that painstaking western method that, to the Japanese eye, leaves as little to the imagination as the photograph itself.
CHAPTER XXIX
GOLDEN DAYS
Nammikawa, the first cloisonné artist of the world, has his home, his workshop, and his little garden in a quiet corner of the Awata district. Most visitors never pass beyond his ante-room, as Nammikawa holds his privacy dear, and that small alcove with the black table gives little hint of what lies beyond. The more fortunate visitor follows the master through a dark recess to a large room with two sides open to the garden, and a tiny balcony overhanging a lakelet. He claps his hands, and big golden carp rise to the surface and gobble the mochi thrown them. In that little paradise, barely sixty feet square, are hills, groves, thickets, islands, promontories, and bays, a bamboo-shaded well, and a shrine, while above the farthest screen of foliage rise the green slopes of Maruyama.
A Japanese friend, who described Nammikawa as “the most Japanese and most interesting man in Kioto,” took us to drink tea with him in this charming garden, and, on the hottest afternoon of a hot Kioto summer, we noted neither time nor temperature until the creeping shadows warned us to depart. Old Japan seemed to re-live in the atmosphere of that garden, and a cha no yu was no more finished than the simple tea-ceremony the master performed there. By the old etiquette a Japanese gentleman never intrusted to any servant the making of tea for a guest, nor allowed the fine art of that simple, every-day process to be exercised unseen. The tea-tray, brought and set before the master, bore a tiny jewel-like teapot of old Awata, and the tiny cloisonné cups with plain enamelled linings were as richly colored as the circle of a tulip’s petals, and smaller far. With them was a small pear-shaped dish, not unlike our gravy-boats, a beautiful bronze midzu tsugi, or hot-water pot, and a lacquer box holding a metal tea-caddy filled with the finest leaves from Uji tea-gardens. Taking a scoop of yellowed ivory, carved in the shape of a giant tea-leaf, our host filled the little teapot with loosely-heaped leaves, and having decanted the hot water into the little pear-shaped pitcher to cool a little, poured it upon the tea-leaves. Immediately he drew off the palest amber fluid, half filling each cup, and presented them to us, resting on leaf-shaped stands or saucers of damascened metal. The tea was only lukewarm when we received it, but as delicate and exquisitely flavored as if distilled of violets, as rich and smooth as a syrup, the three sips of it constituting a most powerful stimulant. In the discussion of tea-making that followed, our Japanese mentor explained to us that to the epicurean tea-drinkers of his country, boiling water was an abomination, as it scorched the leaves, drove out the fine fragrance in the first cloud of steam, and extracted the bitterness instead of the sweetness of the young leaves. “It may be well enough to pour boiling water on the coarse black tea of China’s wild shrub,” said this delightful Japanese, “but the delicate leaf of our cultivated tea-plant does not need it.”
With the tea our host offered us large flat wafers of rice and fancy confections in the shape of most elaborate asters and chrysanthemums, too artistic to be eaten without compunction. The cups were refilled with the second and stronger decoction, which set every nerve tingling, and then only were we permitted to see the treasures of Nammikawa’s creation. From box and silken bag within bag were produced vases, whose lines, color, lustre, and brilliant intricacy of design made them beautiful beyond praise. They were wrought over with finest traceries of gold, silver, and copper wires, on grounds of dull Naples yellow, soft yellowish-green, a darker green, or a rich deep-red, wonderful to behold, the polished surface as even and flawless as that of a fine onyx.
One by one some smaller pieces were brought in, in little boxes of smooth white pine, beautifully made and joined. Nammikawa opened first the cotton wadding, then the inevitable wrapping of yellow cloth, and lastly the silken covers, and handled with a tender reverence these exquisite creations of his genius, every one of which, when placed on its low teak-wood stand, showed faultless. For two years his whole force was at work on the two sixteen-inch vases which went to the Paris Exposition, and four years were given to the Emperor’s order for a pair for his new palace. These bore the imperial emblems, and dragons writhed between chrysanthemums and through conventional flower-circles and arabesques, and the groundwork displayed the splendid red, green, russet, mottled gold, and glistening avanturine enamels, whose secret Nammikawa holds. For it is not only in his fine designs, but in the perfect composition and fusing of his enamels and the gem-like polish that this great artist excels all rivals.