CHAPTER XXVIII
IN A JAPANESE INN
If we received a slight shock when we saw the woman in the shop adding up by the help of beads, what about the booking-clerk at the station? He seems unable to give the simplest change without this sort of reckoning. Comic, isn't it? Picture the clerks at Euston fumbling away at their beads while an impatient throng elbowed one another before the pigeon-hole!
The station is quite small, merely a shed with a wooden roof set on posts. We are going second-class and taking Yosoji with us, so that we shall see some of the native life.
The trains are corridor, with the seats lengthwise and across the ends. Many of the Japs are sitting sideways on them with their feet tucked under them,—they are not used to have them hanging down,—but one grand gentleman, directly opposite to us, is quite European in his top hat and long coat, and his feet are on the floor as to the manner born.
We have not been long started before he begins to fidget and shuffle, and presently he hauls up a wicker basket beside him, undoes it, and fishes out a very nice dark purple kimono. His top hat goes into the rack. His collar, tie, and stud disappear. His coat comes off and is carefully folded on the seat. We watch the gradual unpeeling with an absorbed interest, wondering how far it will go. Luckily there are no ladies present! We can stare as much as we like without being rude, because everyone else in the carriage has their eyes fixed with a straight unwinking stare upon us. It is difficult to realise that we are more entertaining to them than the gentleman who is disrobing himself with ineffable dignity in public, is to us.
He has now slipped on the kimono over his remaining garments, there is a little twist, and a slight, a very slight struggle, and in some miraculous way the rest of his European outfit glides off underneath the kimono, neatly folded. It is like a conjuring trick! Last of all come off the boots also, and with his stockinged feet tucked up under him he sits transformed into the Complete Jap. Judging from the lack of interest taken in the performance by his fellow-countrymen, it must be quite a usual thing to undress in trains.
Having finished his task the gentleman on the seat turns to us and asks innumerable questions. Where have we come from? Where are we going to? How do we like Japan? Is it not a very poor, mean country compared with the glorious and august land we belong to? All this is interpreted by Yosoji, who no doubt puts our answers into the flowery language Japanese courtesy demands; for instance, when I say that I like Japan very much, I am sure, from the breathless sentence that follows, that he is saying that the strangers think the honourable country of Japan far more beautiful and wonderful than their own poor land. The man opposite does not for a moment think really that England is to be compared with Japan, but in Japan people are taught to talk like that, and must often think us very rude and abrupt.
It is not a long journey, and after an hour or so of passing through pretty, hilly country, with many bushy pine trees dotted about, we stop at a station which Yosoji says is our destination. It is a good thing we have Yosoji with us, for certainly we could never have discovered the name of the station for ourselves. We see a long scroll covered with Chinese characters, and other smaller scrolls ornamented in the same way, these are, of course, the name of the station and the inscriptions on various waiting-rooms, but they leave us none the wiser. I ask Yosoji how any European travelling alone could discover where he had got to, and he smilingly points out a board at the extreme end of the station with some of our own lettering on it. No one could possibly see it from the incoming train.
We still feel absurdly big as we get out of the little train on its little narrow gauge line and wait while Yosoji captures our luggage from the van. It is packed in great baskets which fit into each other like two lids; we see them in England often, but there they are rather looked down upon, here they are quite the correct thing. Indeed, among all the luggage in the van there is no trunk or wooden or tin box at all, only a great pile of such baskets of all sizes, mingled with a few bundles simply tied up. When our belongings are rescued and identified they are stowed away in a rickshaw by themselves, while we three mount in three others and set off for far the most interesting part of the journey. At first the road is quite good, and the men trot away contentedly, the big hats bobbing up and down before us. What do these hats remind you of? To me they are exactly like the lids of those galvanised dustbins you see put out in streets for the dustmen at home.