In the tea-firing godowns the dried leaves are stacked in heaps as high as a haystack, when it makes a solid, cohesive mass, that can be cut off like hay with a patent hay-knife. In nearly every case the firing is superintended by a Chinese compradore, and his assistants are Japanese.
The tea-firers bring their cooked rice and their own teapots with them, and snatch refreshment whenever there is a lull in the work. They are searched at night when they leave, and with the sweet simplicity of children they keep on trying to secrete the leaves, always being caught at it. Their work consists in standing over round iron pots sunk in a brick framework for the thirteen hours of a day’s work, and stirring and tossing tea-leaves. There are charcoal fires under the iron pans, and all day they must lean over the hot iron and brick. The tea is given this extra firing to dry it thoroughly before its long sea-trip, and at the same time it is “polished,” or coated with indigo, Prussian blue, gypsum, and other things which give it the gray lustre that no dried tea-leaf ever naturally wore, but that American tea-drinkers insist on having. Before the tea-leaves are put in the pans for the second firing men, whose arms are dyed with indigo to the elbows, go down the lines and dust a little of the powder into each pan. Then the tossing and stirring of the leaves follows, and the dye is worked thoroughly into them, the work being regulated by overseers, who determine when each lot has been fired enough. It requires a certain training to keep the tea-leaves in constant motion, and it is steady, energetic work.
This skilled labor is paid for at rates to make the Knights of Labor groan, the wage list showing, however, a rise in the scale of prices since the fall in the price of silver and the increased cost of living throughout Japan. During the four busy months of the tea season the firers are paid the equivalent of fourteen and sixteen cents, United States gold, for a day’s work of thirteen hours. Less expert hands, who give the second firing, or polishing, receive twelve cents a day. Those who sort and finally pack the tea, and who work as rapidly and automatically as machines, get the immense sum of twenty cents a day. Whole families engage in tea-firing during the season, earning enough then to support them for the rest of the year; or, rather, pinching for the rest of the year on what they earn during this brief season. In autumn little tea is fired, but the whole force of workmen can be had at the shortest notice, though the godown may have been closed for weeks. One compradore, notified at eleven o’clock at night that tea must be fired the next day to fill a cable order, had four hundred coolies on hand at daybreak, many of them summoned after midnight from their villages, distant over seven miles from the godowns. This mysterious underground telegraphy in the servants’ quarters is one of the astonishing things of the East.
Tea-firing begins at six o’clock in the morning, the coolies clattering into the settlements on their wooden clogs at dawn, and going home at dusk. They wait patiently outside the compounds until the lordly Chinaman comes to summon as many workers as he wants for the day, whether two hundred, three hundred, or four hundred. All these guilds in the Orient have their established rules of precedence among themselves; each one knows his rights and his place, and desperate as may be their need of the small pittance, there is no pushing or fighting. Foreigners who live near godowns complain of the babble of the coolies before daylight, and a tea-firing godown always declares its nearness by the confused hum of the several hundred cheerful voices all day long. The Japanese lower classes are the most talkative people under the sun, and rows of jinrikisha coolies never sit quietly in waiting, like the red-nosed Parisian cabmen, dozing or reading feuilletons, but are always jabbering, laughing, playing games and tricks on one another. The long, hot day’s work does not check the tea-firers’ loquacity in the least, and at dusk they are as sociable as at dawn. One frenzied resident, whose door-steps, window-sills, and shady curb-stones were favorite resting-places for the tea-firing coolies, determined to know the subjects discussed with such earnestness and sonorous phrases. His interpreter reported on three consecutive mornings that, for three mortal hours, one group of ten coolies, sitting on patient heels, cheerfully discussed the coming rice crop.
Philanthropists see fit to drop a tear over the lives of the workers in the tea-godowns, although these victims seem as cheerful and well satisfied with their lot as human beings can be. The women and young girls are rather picturesque with their blue cotton towels folded over their heads, and as the Japanese have remarkably pretty hands, the play of their fingers in the moving streams of tea-leaves is pleasant to watch. How they endure the slow, killing heat of the charcoal fires in torrid weather, on their diet of tea, rice, and shreds of cold fish, is a marvel to indolent, meat-eating foreigners. The pathetic sights are the women with young babies on their backs trudging home from the godowns at sunset, the babies having been danced around on the backs of older children in the godown-yard all day, or laid down in some safe corner near the mother’s charcoal-pan. I asked a most humane woman once why charity did not take the form of a crèche, or day nursery. The answer was that it would be impossible to support such an institution in so small a community of foreigners. Each godown would need a large crèche of its own; the poor women could not afford to spare a half-penny of their earnings, and the problem must solve itself.
If man cannot live by bread alone, many foreign residents live by tea alone, and live luxuriously. Great fortunes are made quickly in the tea trade no longer, as in earlier days. Romance departed with the clipper ships, and the cable and freight steamers reduced the tea trade to prosaic lines. Only the best and most experienced men now succeed in this trade, but the tea-merchant toils in his counting-room and godown only from April to October. Then he closes and locks it all behind him, and usually goes over to the United States to look after his interests and orders there. Tea has its fluctuations, like corn or cotton, although it is a crop that never fails, with the added disadvantages of the great distance from the final markets and the expensive cable communications to make it uncertain and full of speculation. As it takes fifty days for the fast tea steamers to reach New York by way of the Suez Canal, the tea-picking season is over when the exporter learns of the arrival and sale of his invoices. On account of the heavier freight charges that way, only a fraction of the crop crosses the Pacific to be shipped by rail across the continent from San Francisco, the New York steamers by way of the Suez Canal requiring but a little longer time, saving half the cost to the shipper, and adding the convenience of a single handling of the cargo.
The first of the season’s crop is fired and hurried off as quickly as possible; tea steamers racing through Suez to New York, and the overland railroads rushing cargoes across the United States in special trains, as if they were perishable. With the exception of the Pacific Mail steamers running to San Francisco, English and Japanese ships carry all this tea to America. The tea steamers discharging cargo at New York usually load there for Liverpool, and arrive in Japan in time for the next season, or sometimes make two trips to New York in one season. While the tea is moving freights are high, but in the autumn they decline. Sailing vessels no longer carry tea, and the glory of the American fast clipper ships is but a tradition, a romance of the Eastern trade. The greatest market for Japan teas in America is now centering at Chicago instead of New York, and prophetic tea-merchants expect to have San Francisco become the headquarters and great distributing-point.
CHAPTER XXXVI
THE INLAND SEA AND NAGASAKI
In making six trips through the Inland Sea I have seen its beautiful shores by daylight and moonlight and in all seasons—clothed in the filmy green of spring, golden with ripened grain or stubble, blurred with the haze of midsummer heat, and clear in the keen, midwinter winds that, sweeping from the encircling mountains, sting with an arctic touch.
My first sail on its enchanted waters was a September holiday, the dim horizon and purple lights prophesying of the autumn. From sunrise to dark, shadowy vistas opened, peaceful shores slipped by, and heights and islands rearranged themselves. The coast of southeastern Alaska is often compared to the Inland Sea, but the narrow channels, wild cañons, and mountain-walls of the Alaska passage have no counterpart in this Arcadian region. The landlocked Japanese water is a broad lake over two hundred miles long, filled with islands, and sheltered by uneven shores. Its jagged mountains of intensest green nowhere become wild enough to disturb the dream-like calm. Its verdant islands lie in groups, the channel is always broad and plain, and signs of human life and achievement are always in sight. Along the shores stretch chains of villages, with stone sea-walls, castles, and temples soaring above the clustered roofs or peeping from wooded slopes, and the terraced fields of rice and grains ridging every hill to its summit and covering every lower level. Stone lanterns and torii mark the way to temple groves, and cemeteries with ancient Buddhas of granite and bronze attest that these little communities are centuries old. Junks and sampans lie anchored in fleets, or creep idly across the water, and small coasting steamers thread their way in and out among the islands. The railway follows the west shore of the sea, touching many old castle towns, most important of which is Hiroshima, whose great citadel is army headquarters, and was occupied by the Emperor during the war of 1894-95. The chief naval station of the empire is at Kure, a few miles away, and the naval college is on the island of Etajima. The sacred island of Miajima, facing Hiroshima, is one of the Sankei, or three most beautiful sights of Japan. Miajima is more enchanting and idyllic than Nara, and offers more of landscape beauty, of picturesque architecture, of historic and legendary interest than the others of the Sankei—either “the thousand pine-clad islands of Matsushima,” in the bay of Sendai, or “the Bridge of Heaven,” the fairy peninsula of Ama-no-Hashidate, in the bay of Miyazu. No one has been born, no one has been allowed to die, on Miajima, and formerly no woman could set foot there, although the great temple and its galleries, built on piles in the water and approached by boats through a giant torii in the water, is dedicated to the Shinto goddess, Itsukushima, and her two sisters. Hundreds of votive lanterns line the shores and are frequently lighted; sacred deer roam everywhere, and the place is so idyllic and peaceful that one cannot realize that every wooded point and height conceals a battery, and that sketching and photographing within this fortified area are as rigorously prohibited as in France and Germany.