Jinrikisha days in Japan

by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

The flimsiness of our little house, no less than the absurd walls and gates of the moated demesne, seemed to invite robbery, but in that Arcadia there were no robbers. The habitation was left alone for hours with every screen wide open, and countless things in view that might have tempted curious handling at least, but nothing was disturbed nor lost. There was no provision for locking the screens of any room, nor for making the amados proof against any amateur burglar, the need of such a protection never having been felt—a sufficient commentary on the people.

Nesans, coolies, and small boys were all so individual, so characteristically Japanese, so untouched by and unused to foreign influences, that they were an unceasing delight; and so unintentionally theatrical and picturesque that for day after day we felt ourselves to be living in a theatre, and Nara’s hill-side to be one vast revolving stage. We had easily fallen into the serene and peaceful routine of Nara life, and become so interested in those surrounding us, that there was a real sadness on our own part when easel, camera, and koris were packed, and those simple, affectionate people bade us their tearful sayonaras.

It was a rainy morning, and the green rice plain looked greener under the gray sky as we rode away from Nara. Men and women were working in the fields, wading knee-deep in the mud and water, stirring the muck around the young shoots, and tearing up the water-weeds with iron hooks. No other grain requires as much care as rice, and from the first transplanting from the seed-bed until the ears of grain are formed, there is continuous grubbing in the mire of the paddy fields. The legions of frogs that live in them share their abode with horrible slugs, snails, blood-suckers, and stingers of many kinds, against whose assaults the poor farmers wrap their legs knee-high with many thicknesses of cotton cloth. Following the level plain and skirting instead of surmounting the bold mountain-spur, all the twenty-six miles from Nara to Osaka ran through rice fields. Every little square of dyked paddy-field had its workers. In some the first ploughing was being done; in others the water was being worked into the soil; and, farther on, men and women, standing ankle-deep in the muck, were setting out the tiny green shoots. Here and there laborers were treading water-wheels to pump water from the lower to the higher levels, or with long sweeps dipping it slowly up from wells.

There are seven great Buddhist monasteries around Nara, all more or less in decay, but all possessing relics of great historic interest and value. Several of them show their white walls, like fortresses, high on the mountain-side, and in them linger the remnants of a once rich and numerous priesthood—their sacred retreats being so remote and inaccessible that not half a dozen foreigners have ever visited them.

Horiuji, half-way to Osaka, is the largest of these Nara monasteries, and its pagoda and Hondo are the oldest wooden buildings in Japan. Both were completed in the year 607, and both are intact, solid, and firm enough to endure for twelve centuries more. To students of Buddhism, Horiuji is a Mecca, on account of its wealth of scriptures, statues, pictures, and relics, dating from the time when that faith had just been introduced from China. To art connoisseurs its interest is unique because of its old Hondo, containing frescos executed by a Korean artist at the time of its erection, which, with one exception, are the only frescos proper in Japan, and among the few paintings executed on a surface erect before the artist. All other paintings in Japan—kakemono, panels of screens, and sections of ceilings or wall space—are done with the wood, paper, or silk lying on the floor before the seated artist. These Horiuji frescos are dim and faded, and only pale wraiths and suggestions of haloed saints, here a head and there a bit of drapery, can be made out. In recent years attention has been called to these works. By imperial command an artist came down from Tokio to copy them; and when the Imperial Art Commission came from their Nara work to inspect and catalogue the Horiuji treasures, Ogawa, their photographer, spent two days at work making flash-light exposures in the dark interior of the Hondo.

Among the sacred relics of Horiuji is the veritable eyeball of Buddha, the legacy of the holy Shotoku Taisho, the Emperor who founded Horiuji, and left to it statues of himself, carved by his own hand at different ages. Shotoku Taisho talked when he was four months old, and a little later conversed in eight languages all at once. It is therefore easy to believe that when this prodigy of legend was a year old, and, turning to the East, with clasped hands repeated the invocation of his sect—“Namu Amida Butsu!” (Hail, or Hear us, Great Buddha!)—he found this precious relic of Buddha’s body, the eyeball, in his hands. That he knew it to be an eyeball is not the least part of the miracle, as it looks most like the tiny, discolored pearl of a common oyster. The eyeball of Buddha is shown every day at high noon, a special mass being chanted by the priest while the relic is displayed. For a consideration, and for the welfare of the temple treasury, the mass may be repeated at any hour. The celebrant, a very old priest, when called from the monastery, came in splendid apparel of brocade and gauze, and entering the little temple, knelt, touched a silver-voiced gong, and prayed before a gilded shrine with closed doors and a wealth of golden lotus ornaments. Then he slowly drew forth from an altar recess a large bundle, covered with rich red and gold brocade and tied with heavy silk cords, laid it reverently on a low table before the altar, and, with a muttered chant of prayer, untied and laid back bag after bag of old brocade, each lined with silk of some contrasting color and tied with thick cords. After the ninth bag was opened, an upright case, covered with more brocade, appeared, lifting which, the priest produced a little rock-crystal reliquary, and set it upon a golden lotus as a pedestal. The reliquary was in the shape of the conventional Buddhist tomb—a cube, a sphere, and a pyramid, placed one above the other—and the bits of flawless crystal were held together by silver wires. In the hollow sphere lay the dingy relic, that rattled like a pebble when it was turned for one to see it. The holy man never once paused in his muttered chant from the time he lifted the precious bundle from the altar until he had replaced the ten silken wrappings and set the sacred relic back in its niche.

In one of the buildings are queer oven-shaped humps in the floor, covering secret chambers, where for twelve centuries offerings of gold have been dropped for the rebuilding of the temples in case of fire. These hoards cannot be touched except on the occurrence of the calamity feared, and the priests even resisted the wish of the Imperial Art Commission to break open the vaults to examine the coins believed to be there. A Boston art connoisseur, who visited Horiuji a few years ago, and found its priests poor and its art treasures in need of care and restoration, started a fund for that purpose, and himself took in charge the rehabilitation of one precious old screen. Many valuable paintings, tattered, mouldered, and mildewed almost to extinction, were thereby rescued. Four other contributors have since subscribed generous amounts to this fund, all of whom, by strange coincidence, were from Boston.

On a hill back of the main sanctuaries is a most curious octagonal temple, filled with the votive offerings of those who have been restored to health, or received other answers to prayer. The outside walls are half-hidden by the hundreds of six-inch-square boards, upon which are painted the suffering pilgrims who have been cured, and a ledge is heaped high with awls, the conventional offering of the deaf whose hearing has been restored. Locks of hair, short swords, daggers, steel mirrors, and devices in coins are hung on the doors. The circular altar within the stone-floored temple, containing many old statues and sacred images, has its base completely plated with overlapping sword-guards, short swords, and little steel mirrors. Helmets and bits of armor are everywhere, and the long shell hair-pins of Japanese women have been offered in such numbers that, woven together with silk cords into curtains or screens, they hang like banners before and beside the altars. All around the walls and over the rafters, as far up into the darkness as one can see, hang short swords, ranged closely side by side, overlapping mirrors, guards, bows, arrows, curious weapons and pieces of armor, coins, and hair-pins. Near this extraordinary place is a nunnery, where a family of holy women have the shaved heads and disfiguring garments of priests, their altars and images, their daily service, and the same routine of life in every way.

Rounding the last spur of hills and crossing a broad river, the road reaches the great Osaka plain, lying in a broad semicircle between the mountains and the shores of the Inland Sea. On these vast alluvial flats rice is still the main crop, and the saké made from it is considered the best in the empire. All over this emerald plain the farmers could be seen at work, their wide hats showing like so many big mushrooms when the wearers, sunk deep in the muck of the paddy fields, bent over their work. On the prairie-like level of the plain the irrigating system is simple and ingenious. Everywhere the farmers were plastering up the little dikes that keep the water within its limit and pattern the plain with a gigantic check-work of narrow black lines and serve as footwalks from field to field. No fences or high barriers break the even level, and those strange contrivances, the primitive Persian water-wheels, may be seen every few rods. This Persian wheel, with its row of hanging boxes, is put in motion by a man who climbs it in treadmill fashion, the boxes scooping up the water from the lower level and discharging their burden into a trough at the top, whence the stream flows from field to field by almost imperceptible changes of level. The wheelman wears only the loin-cloth prescribed by law and a wisp of blue towel knotted about his head. Occasionally he fastens a big paper umbrella to a long bamboo pole, and plants it where it will cast a small shadow on him, but usually he tramps his uncomplaining round in the blaze of the tropical sun, a solitary and pathetic, but highly picturesque figure, isolated thus on the vast green plain. More Oriental, even, are the groups at the wells, shaded by straw mats or umbrellas on long poles, while they work the same long well-sweeps as the shadoofs of the Nile.

Far off, like an island in this sea of green, rise the castle towers and the pagoda-tops of Osaka, and for hours we hardly seemed to gain upon the vision, but the runners, saving themselves for a last effort and taking a sip of tea in the suburbs, raced down through the streets and over the bridges at a gait never before equalled.