Jinrikisha days in Japan

by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

The fact of Nagasaki’s being only a port of call makes its curio market fluctuate in proportion to the number of merchantmen and men-of-war in port. When the harbor is full, no resident visits the curio-shops, whose prices always soar at such times. Tortoise-shell carving is a great industry of the place, but porcelain is still the specialty of this southern province, where the art was first introduced. Those wares of South Japan known anciently as Nabeshima and Hirado are the finest of Japanese porcelains, their blue and white beauty being simply perfect. The potters who brought the art from Korea and China settled in Satsuma and Hizen, and the kilns of Arita and Kagoshima are still firing. The Dutch carried the Arita ware to Europe under the name of Hizen. This porcelain is now more commonly termed Imari, while Deshima is another general name for the modern product, and Nabeshima and Hirado are the words used by connoisseurs in vaunting precious wares. This confusion of names misleads the traveller, who cannot at once discern that Hizen is the name of the province; Arita of the town where the potters live and the kilns are at work; Imari of the port from which it is shipped; Nabeshima the family name of that daimio of Hizen who brought the potters from Korea; and Hirado of the daimio, whose factory at Mikawaji, near Arita, produced the exquisite pieces coveted by all of his fellow-daimios. Modern Imari ware is much too fascinating and tempting to the slender purse, but when one acquires a fondness for the exquisite porcelains the old Nabeshima made for themselves, learns the comb-like lines and the geometrical and floral marks on the underside that characterize them, and is aroused to the perception of the incomparable “seven boy” Hirado, his peace of mind is gone. Genuine old Hirado vases or plates, with the seven boys at play, or even five boys or three boys, are hardly to be bought to-day, and the countless commercial imitations of the old designs do not deceive even the amateur connoisseur. Old Satsuma is even rarer, and a purchaser needs to be more suspicious of it in Japan than in London. It is true that the air is full of tales of impoverished noblemen finally selling their treasures; of forgotten godowns being rediscovered; and of rich uncles leaving stores of Hirado and Satsuma to poor relations, whose very rice-box is empty. But the wise heed not the voice of the charmer. The credulity of the stranger and the tourist is not greater than the ignorance of residents who have been in the country for years without learning to beware of almost everything on which the Emperor’s chrysanthemum crest, the Tokugawa trefoil, or the Satsuma square and circle stand conspicuous.

The fine modern Satsuma, all small pieces decorated in microscopically fine work, is painted chiefly by a few artists in Kioto and Osaka, and their work and signatures are easily recognized. The commoner Satsuma—large urns, koros, vases, and plates—is made in the province of Satsuma and in the Awata district of Kioto, but it is decorated anywhere—Kobé, Kioto, Yokohama, and Tokio all coating it with the blaze of cheap gilding that catches and delights the foreign eye. Once upon a time ship-loads of porcelains, bronzes, and lacquer were sold for a song; fine bells going for ship ballast, and ships’ cooks using veritable old Satsuma jars to put their drippings in. But that time is not now. A collection of old Satsuma lately gathered up in Europe by a Japanese buyer brought five times its cost when disposed of in Japan. Some notion of the wealth of art works, and of the great stores the country contained in the old days, may be conveyed by the drain of these twenty years, since Japanese art began to revolutionize the art world. The Restoration, the Satsuma rebellion, the adoption of foreign dress for the army and the court, each sent a flood of rare things into the curio market, and hard times still bring forth treasures. The great collectors and connoisseurs are now so generally known that sacrifices of choice curios are made directly to them by private sale, and not in the open market. Government has begun to realize the irrecoverable loss of the country, and the necessity of retaining what still remains, and lists and photographs are being made of all art treasures stored in the Government and temple godowns throughout the empire. Much has been destroyed by fire, of course, and it is said that the priests themselves have put the torch to their temples at the approach of the official commission that would have discovered what priceless temple treasures they had sold in times of need. All the Buddhist establishments suffered loss of revenues after the Restoration, and only by secretly disposing of the sacred objects in the godowns were many priests kept from starvation.

While the Dutch were there, Nagasaki had a large trade with China, and still does a great business with that country in the exportation of dried fish. It smells to heaven all along the Bund, and in the court-yards of the large warehouses men and women turn in the sun and pack into bags oblong brown things that might be either the billets of wood used in cricket, or old boot-soles. These hard blocks are the dried bonito which, shaved on a plane, stewed, and eaten with rice, are a staple of food in both countries, and not unpalatable, as we found while storm-bound on Fuji.

Almost all the coal used in China and Japan, and by the Asiatic fleets of the different nations, comes from the mines on the island of Takashima, at the entrance of Nagasaki’s fiord-like harbor. Cargoes of it have been sent even to San Francisco with profit, although this soft and very dirty fuel is much inferior to the Australian coal. The Takashima mines and the dry-dock at Nagasaki are owned by the Mitsu Bishi company, which retained those properties when it sold its steamship line to the Government, and the coal-mine brings in two million yen a year to its owners. Its deepest shaft is only one hundred and fifty feet down, and barges carry the coal from the mouth of the shafts to the waiting ships in harbor.

In 1885, the year of the great cholera epidemic, the village of mining employés was almost depopulated. The harbor was nearly deserted, the American and English mission stations were closed, and the missionaries and their families fled to Mount Hiyeizan. Only the Catholic fathers and the nuns remained, much to the concern of the governor and officials, who begged them to go. On our way to China we touched at Nagasaki while the epidemic was at its height, but no passenger was allowed to go ashore, and all day we kept to the decks that were saturated with carbolic acid. It took six hours to coal the ship, and from noon to sundown we beheld a water carnival. As the first coal-barge drew near, a man in the airy summer costume of the harbor country—which consisted of a rope around his waist—jumped over the side and swam to the stern of our steamer. He was like a big, brown frog kicking about in the water, and when he came dripping up the gang-way the faithful steerage steward gave him a carbolic spraying with his bucket and brush. The barge was hauled up alongside and made fast, and our consignment of coal was passed on board in half-bushel baskets from hand to hand along a line of chanting men and women. Nothing more primitive could be imagined, for, with block, tackle, windlass, steam, and a donkey engine on board, it took a hundred pairs of hands to do their work. At the end of each hour there was a breathing spell. Many of the women were young and pretty, and some of them had brought their children, who, throwing back the empty baskets and helping to pass them along the line, thus began their lives of toil and earned a few pennies. The passengers threw to the grimy children all the small Japanese coins they possessed, and when the ship swung loose and started away their cheerful little sayonaras long rang after us.

CHAPTER XXXVII
IN THE END

And after a foreigner has spent months or years in the midst of these charming people, what has he discovered them to be? What does the future hold for them? To what end did Commodore Perry precipitate upon them the struggle and ferment of the nineteenth century? The present generation ceasing to be what their forefathers were, what do they expect of their descendants? Is our world thoroughly to occidentalize them, or will they slowly orientalize us? Which civilization is to hold, and which is the better? These are the unsolvable problems that continually confront the thoughtful observer.

The Japanese are the enigma of this century; the most inscrutable, the most paradoxical of races. They and their outward surroundings are so picturesque, theatrical, and artistic that at moments they appear a nation of poseurs—all their world a stage, and all their men and women merely players; a trifling, superficial, fantastic people, bent on nothing but pleasing effects. Again, the Occidental is as a babe before the deep mysteries, the innate wisdom, the philosophies, the art, the thought, the subtle refinements of this finest branch of the yellow race. To generalize, to epitomize is impossible; for they are so opposite and contradictory, so unlike all other Asiatic peoples, that analogy fails. They are at once the most sensitive, artistic, and mercurial of human beings, and the most impassible, conventional, and stolid; at once the most logical, profound, and conscientious, and the most irrational, superficial, and indifferent; at once the most stately, solemn, and taciturn, and the most playful, whimsical, and loquacious. While history declares them aggressive, cruel, and revengeful, experience proves them yielding, merciful, and gentle. The same centuries in which was devised the elaborate refinement of cha no yu saw tortures, persecutions, and battle-field butcheries unparalleled. The same men who spent half their lives in lofty meditation, in indicting poems, and fostering art, devoted the other half to gross pleasures, to hacking their enemies in pieces, and watching a hara kiri with delight. Dreaming, procrastinating, and referring all things to that mythical mionichi (to-morrow), they can yet amaze one with a wizard-like rapidity of action and accomplishment. The same spirit which built the Shinagawa forts during the three months of Commodore Perry’s absence at times animates the most dilatory tradesmen and coolies.

There is no end to the surprises of Japanese character, and the longer the foreigner lives among them the less does he understand the people, and the less do his facts contribute to any explanation. Their very origin is mysterious, their Ainos the rock on which ethnologists founder. Their physical types present so many widely differing peculiarities that one cannot believe in any common source, or in the preservation of the race from outside influences for so many centuries. Some coolie possesses the finely-cut features, perfectly-modelled surfaces, and proudly-set head of a Roman emperor. Some peer exhibits the features, the stolidity, and the slow, guttural articulation of a Sioux Indian, and it is common to see coolies identical in figure and countenance with the native races of the north-west coast of America. One group of children might come from an Alaskan village, and in another group frolic the counterparts of Richter’s fisher boys of Italy. At times the soft, musical speech flows like Italian; at other times it is rough and harsh, and rumbles with consonants.