The foundations of Japan

by J. W. Robertson Scott

CHAPTER XXIX

FRIENDS OF LAFCADIO HEARN

(SHIMANE, TOTTORI AND HYOGO)

Those who suffer learn, those who love know.— Mrs. Havelock Ellis

At Matsue, with which the name of Lafcadio Hearn will always be associated, I chanced to arrive on the anniversary of his death. His local admirers were holding a memorial meeting. As a foreigner I was honoured with a request to attend. First, however, I had the chance of visiting Hearn's house. Matsue was the first place at which Hearn lived. He always remembered it and at last came back there to marry. Except that a pond has been filled up—no doubt to reduce the number of mosquitoes—the garden of his house is little changed.

The most interesting feature of the meeting was old pupils' grateful recollections of Hearn, the middle-school teacher. The gathering was held in a room belonging to the town library in the prefectural grounds, but neither the Governor nor the mayor was present. A sympathetic speech was made by a chance visitor to the town, the secretary-general to the House of Peers. He recalled the antagonism which the young men at Tokyo University, himself among them, felt towards the odd figure of Hearn—he had a terribly strained eye and wore a monocle—when he became a professor, and how very soon he gained the confidence and regard of the class.

I had often wondered that there was no Japanese memorial to Hearn, and when I rose to speak I said so. I added that it was rare to meet a Japanese who had any understanding of how much Hearn had done in forming the conception of Japan possessed by thousands of Europeans and Americans. The fault in so many books about Japan, I went on, was not that their "facts" were wrong. What was wrong was their authors' attitude of mind. I had heard Japanese say that Hearn was "too poetical" and that some of his inferences were "inaccurate." That was as might be. What mattered was that the mental attitude of Hearn was so largely right. He did not approach Japan as a mere "fact" collector or as a superior person. What he brought to the country was the humble, studious, imaginative, sympathetic attitude; and it was only by men and women of his rare type that peoples were interpreted one to the other.

In that free-and-easy way in which meetings are conducted in Japan it was permissible for us to leave after another speech had been made. The proceedings were interrupted while the promoters of the gathering showed us a collection of books and memorials of Hearn, arranged under a large portrait, and accompanied us to the door of the hall. I do not recall during the time I was in Japan any other public gathering in honour of Hearn, and I met several prominent men who had either never heard his name or knew nothing of the far-reaching influence of his books. But some months after this Matsue meeting there was included among the Coronation honours a posthumous distinction for Hearn—"fourth rank of the junior grade."[^[192]]

During this journey I attended a dinner of officials and leading agriculturists and had the odd sensation of making a short after-dinner speech on my knees. At such a dinner the guests kneel on cushions ranged round the four walls of the room, and each man has a low lacquer table to himself, and a geisha to wait on him. When the geisha is not bringing in new dishes or replenishing the saké bottle, she kneels before the table and chatters entertainingly. The governors of the feast visit the guests of honour and drink with them. In the same way a guest drinks with his neighbour and with his attendant geisha. I have a vivid memory of a grave and elderly dignitary who at the merry stage of such a function capered the whole length of the room with his kneeling-cushion balanced on the top of his head. There is a growing temperance movement in Japan but a teetotaller is still something of an oddity. My abstinence from saké was frequently supposed to be the result of a vow.

Although the average geisha may be inane in her patter and have little more than conventional grace and charm, I have been waited on by girls who added real mental celerity, wit and a power of skilful mimicry to that elusive and seductive quality that accounts for the impregnable position of their class. At one dinner impersonations in both the comic and the tragic vein were given by a girl of unmistakable genius. Frequently a plain, elderly geisha will display unsuspected mimetic ability. Alas, behind the merry laugh and sprightliness of the girls who adorn a feast lurks a skeleton. One is haunted by thoughts of the future of a large proportion of these butterflies. No doubt most foreigners generalise too freely in identifying the professions of geisha and joro. In the present organisation of society some geisha play a legitimate rôle. They gain in the career for which they have laboriously trained an outlet for the expression of artistic and social gifts which would have been denied them in domestic life. At the same time the degrading character of the life led by many geisha cannot be doubted. Apart from every other consideration the temptation to drink is great. The opening of new avenues to feminine ability, the enlarged opportunities of education and self-respect and the increasing opening for women on the stage—from which women have been excluded hitherto—must have their effect in turning the minds of girls of wit and originality to other means of earning a living than the morally and physically hazardous profession of the geisha.