Jinrikisha days in Japan

by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

At Shimonoseki, the Inland Sea ends, and ships pass out by the narrowest of its channels—a channel that boils with tide-rips and across which a chain once held all craft at bay. New forts replace the old ones bombarded by the combined English, Dutch, French, and American fleets in September, 1868. The “Shimonoseki Affair” is conspicuous in the annals of the scandalous diplomacy and international bullying that has constituted the policy of Christian nations in their relations with Japan. The United States did, indeed, make a late and lame apology for its disgraceful share in the plundering of a weaker people, by restoring its portion of the indemnity, thus tardily acknowledging the injustice of its conduct.

As travel increases, the harbor of Nagasaki will be everywhere known as one of the most picturesque in the world. Green mountains, terraced and wooded to their very summits, have parted far enough to let an arm of the sea cleave its way inland, and chains of islands with precipitous shores guard the entrance of the tortuous reach. The town seems to have run down from the ravines and spread itself out at the end of the inlet, and temples, tea-houses, and the villas of foreign residents cling to the hill-side and dot the groves on the heights.

Nagasaki lost commercial importance for some years after the opening of the port of Kobé, since that took the tea trade to the upper end of the Inland Sea, around which lie the great tea districts of Japan. Its coal mines and its million-dollar dry-dock make it a harbor that no ships pass by, more vessels entering annually than at Yokohama. The American occupation of the Philippines, the events occurring in China in 1900, the progress and completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and the development of Vladivostock and Dalny have all greatly increased the business of Nagasaki, which now looks upon the busiest and most crowded harbor of Japan. It is coal and supply station for all fleets, the American soldier scatters money wildly when transports anchor, and a large Russian colony comes down from the frozen North each winter. The picturesqueness of Nagasaki has appealed to the novelist and short-story writer, and certain villas and tea-houses have romantic interests.

Its people are conservative and cling to old customs tenaciously. The old festivals are kept up with as much spirit as ever, and boat-loads of farmers praying for rain often make Nagasaki’s harbor ring with their shouts and drum-beating. Twenty of these rustics, sitting by the gunwales in one long boat, and paddling like so many Indians in a war-canoe, go up and down the narrow fiord waving banners and tasselled emblems.

While the inhabitants kept it, Nagasaki’s observance of the Bon, the festival of the dead, was even more picturesque than the Daimonji of Kioto. On the night when Nagasaki’s spirits were doomed to return to the place of the departed, lights twinkled in all the graveyards, and the mourners carried down to the water’s edge tiny straw boats set with food offerings. These they lighted and started off; and the tide, bearing the frail flotilla here and there, finally swept it out to sea—a fleet of fire, a maze of floating constellations. Many junks and bridges were burned on these festival nights, and the authorities have forbidden the observance.

While Nagasaki was the first port opened to foreigners, it now has fewer foreign residents than any other. There are large mission establishments, but, outside of their community, the society open to the consuls and merchants is very limited when the harbor is empty of men-of-war. Their villas on the heights are most luxurious, and the views these command down the narrow fiord and out to the ocean entrancing. Life and movement fill the harbor below. Ships, junks, and sampans come and go; bells strike in chorus around the anchorage-ground; whistles echo, bands play, saluting and signalling flags slip up and down the masts, and the bang and long-rolling echo of the ships’ guns make mimic war. At night the harbor lights are dazzling, and the shores twinkle to the very hill-tops. The crowded masts of native junks are as trees hanging full of golden, glowing spheres, and electric flash-lights from the men-of-war illuminate sections of hill and town and harbor niches.

The Nagasaki winter is delightful—clear, bright, sunny days continually succeeding each other; but in summer-time the climate leaves much to be desired. The air is heavy with moisture, and when the thermometer registers 90° there is a steamy, greenhouse temperature that encourages the growth of the hundred varieties of ferns that amateur botanists collect on these hills. This damp heat is exhausting and wearing, trying to temper and patience, and annihilating to starch and artificial crimps. Man’s energy fails with his collar, and although all the sights of the empire were just over the hill, the tourist would miss them rather than go to see them. Everything mildews then; boots taken off at night are covered with green mould in the morning, gloves spot and solidify, and fungi gather on any clothing packed away. Every morning, on balconies and clothes-lines, is aired and sunned the clothing that nevertheless mildews. Only a strong sense of reverence for a hero’s memory can then lead one up the terraces of the public gardens near the O Suwo temple to see the tree that General Grant set out. When he came to Nagasaki, both the General and Mrs. Grant planted trees to commemorate the visit, and his autograph certificate recording the event was cut in fac-simile on the face of the large, irregular stone between the two saplings. Though the trees have been most carefully tended, one died and had to be replaced, but both now promise to spread into a generous shade. At the tea-house where the great Japanese dinner was given by the local governor, with maiko and geisha and jugglers performing between the courses, they still preserve the floor-cushion on which their illustrious guest was seated, and bring it out to show to favored Americans. To the Japanese, General Grant and Commodore Perry mean America; nor could we have sent them better types than the great sailor who peaceably opened Japan to the world, and the greater soldier who made use of war only to insure enduring peace.

The Portuguese and Dutch have left records of their occupancy here in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Francis Xavier and the Jesuit fathers who succeeded him converted thousands of Japanese to Christianity, and though it had been supposed that the persecutions and tortures under Iyeyasu had destroyed the Christians, the opening of the country after the Restoration discovered whole communities of them near Nagasaki, who retained their belief, wore the peculiar dress prescribed for them by the Jesuits, knew the prayers and forms, and made the sign of the cross. Nothing in the Book of Martyrs exceeds the tortures and suffering of these Christians, who would not deny their religion, nor tread upon the paper picture of Christ, as they were bidden to do. The tradition goes that at Pappenberg, the precipitous little island at the mouth of the harbor, thousands of converts were forced by spear-points into the sea, but the best scholars and authorities now discredit this wholesale horror, of which no trustworthy record exists.

From 1641 the Dutch lived as prisoners on the little island of Deshima, where the porcelain bazaar now stands, suffering incredible restrictions and humiliations for the sake of monopolizing the trade of the country. Nagasaki’s children and beggars still follow strangers with the shout, “Hollander san! Hollander san!” as a remembrance of those first foreign residents, and in curio-shops queer clocks and ornaments show the adaptation and imitation of many Dutch articles by the Japanese.