The Japanese ideal of landscape gardening is to have a different view from every point, and to this end they make a miniature park. These knolls, mounted by wooden steps on one side and descended on the other, represent hills; the pond crossed by a stone bridge made out of two stones, is a lake; the island in its midst is formed of a rock and one tree; the timber is represented by some dwarfed and distorted fir trees, for the smaller and more spreading, the more valuable they become. The Japanese take great pains with these deformed trees, pruning them back, and picking out the fir needles one by one. They give large sums of money for an old tree, and we were shown a tiny fir in a pot over eighty years old. And yet these Japanese gardens, twisted and deformed as they are, with no open green lawns or bright flower-beds, are very quaint and attractive in their own way. Then we drove on to the Euryo-kwan, another Imperial Palace, where the Emperor and Empress hold their annual cherry blossom party in April, and when the arched avenue we are standing under, is a mass of pink and white bloom. The chrysanthemum garden party at the Palace is in November, and very beautiful, from all accounts it must be, the plants trained into every shape and device, of ships, pagodas, and umbrellas.
AN IMPERIAL GARDEN, TOKIO.
Mr. Nagasaki told us a great deal of the bitterness of the struggle of old Japan against the sudden inroad of European custom, a struggle that is apparent everywhere, but more especially in the capital at Tokio. The next generation will be altogether European. The Court is modelled on the etiquette of our English Court, and the Emperor has the same court officials as the Queen, whilst the Empress holds Drawing Rooms, and has her ladies in waiting, everyone wearing European and low evening dresses. We found that all gentlemen wear European clothes, whilst their wives yet cling to the far more comfortable and graceful kimono. English is taught in all the upper-class, schools, and spoken very generally in shops, where the names are also written up in English, though there are only 3000 Europeans altogether resident in Japan. The Mikado has a son of twelve, and two little girls, and the former is soon to have an English tutor.
We drove to Ueno Park, to a luncheon given in our honour by the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Viscount Enomotto. This restaurant is the "Berkeley" of Tokio, and it was a most elaborate repast, though we could have wished that it had been in a Japanese house. However, Viscount Enomotto, Viscount Okabé, Mr. Nagasaki, and M. Haryashi Tadasu, had brought their wives, Viscountess Okabé being a charming bride who spoke English. These ladies wore kimonos in pale blue, fawn and grey, and their costly embroidered obis were clasped round with a single jewel. They had diamond rings and brooches, and their glossy hair arranged in wonderfully glossy coques with tortoiseshell combs; and such sweet gracious ladies as they were, shyly putting out their hands, and bowing so low and gracefully, and speaking in such soft, caressing tones. Even here, though, European influences were at work, for I saw a pair of high-heeled French shoes, and even a pair of carpet slippers peeping out from under the kimonos.
The room had such beautiful vases of flowers, arranged as only Japanese can, not put together, but as if growing in natural sprays. After much drinking of healths and ceremonious compliments, we adjourned to the neighbouring Technical School of Art, where we saw specimens of lacquer work, and some of the thirty-five processes through which it passes before completion. The natural taste for art in the nation comes out in the work of these 190 students, who pay ten yen a year for their instruction, for their wood carvings and drawings from life are of extraordinary excellence, and executed too with the roughest tools.
The same evening we visited the Maple Leaf Club, to see a performance of "geisha" or dancing girls.
This fashionable club was founded by the Nobles, for the preservation of Japanese customs, and as a protest against the general use of European ones. Thirty dancing girls are maintained, educated and kept in strict discipline from the age of fourteen, in the premises of the club. We are ushered through numerous dimly-lighted corridors, on our stockinged feet, into a large matted room, bare of furniture, where we squat on cushions on the floor. A Japanese dinner is served, course after course being brought in lacquer bowls. A row of maidens, with their almond eyes dancing with laughter, squat before us and smile gleefully as we vainly struggle with our chopsticks, and try with frantic efforts to swallow the recherché dinner, for as Murray truly says: "Europeans cannot eat Japanese food." And this was the ménu. Sweet cakes of rice and sugar, served on plates with the monogram of a maple leaf; soup, a brown liquid with floating lumps of fish; an omelette (of ancient eggs) with fish sauce; a hot trout with upturned tail, with grated cheese coloured pink, a stewed fig, and a finger-like radish that tasted like ginger; more fish with a nasty sauce and stewed seaweed. As will be seen, fish formed a large item of the dinner, for the Japanese eat all that comes out of the sea. Saké is served from the long-necked blue and white bottles into tiny cups. Despair was gaining upon us at the ceaseless arrival of more lacquer bowls, when the work of the evening commenced.
Three demure damsels, in quiet kimonos, with their samisens or guitars, enter, and begin to play and sing. From behind a screen, their faces hidden by their fans, steal in three geishas, dressed in the loveliest grey and pink kimonos, embroidered with the crimson leaf of the maple. Slowly they girate, their clinging garments trailing around their turned-in toes. Deliberate and graceful are their slow motions, and the three figures act as one piece, and not only do their arms move in unison, but their faces do so too, and they elevate the eyebrows and close the eyes with the rise and fall of the body. In pretty imagery they tell the pathetic little story of the maple leaf: its birth and growth, its mature glory, and its death, the dance ending by the fans being thrown upon the floor, even as it falls to the ground and dies. A second performance is a clever mimicry, by the aid of masks, of an old man, his wife and daughter; and the last dance, with the floating gauze streamers that wave rhythmically with the music, is most elegant. These geishas are the favourite form of amusement, and in all villages you pass houses with mysterious gratings, enclosing a floor, where nightly the gentle wail of the samisen is heard and the graceful performance of the geishas is seen.
October 1st.—We have had a terrible experience of a typhoon. It began with a thunder-storm last night, accompanied by violent showers of tropical rain, the drops being as large as small marbles, whilst the thunder claps crackled and boomed overhead, and the dazzling lightning was blinding. The air was full of electricity, and a feeling of restless foreboding took possession of all. This morning the air was so damp and close that you felt scarcely able to breathe. Violent gusts of wind, increasing in succession, alternate with strange pauses of breathless stillness. There is no twitter of bird or hum of beautiful dragon fly, for they are forewarned by these signals of danger, and have crept into safety. The force of the wind increases, and it is blowing a hurricane, as in our ignorance of these dreadful phenomena of typhoons (a word formed from the Japanese meaning "great wind,") we leave the Imperial Hotel at Tokio, on our return journey to Yokohama, just as it reaches its height.