One of the products of rural Japan is the wrestler. Sumo, which is going on in every school and college of the country, exhibits its perfect flower twice a year in the January and May ten-days-long tournaments in the capital. The immense rotunda of the wrestlers' association suggests a rather rickety Albert Hall and holds 13,000 people.[[216] ] On the day I went in I paid 2 yen and had only standing room. Everybody knows the more than Herculean proportions of the wrestlers in comparison with the rest of their countrymen. The rigorous training, Gargantuan feeding and somewhat severe discipline of the wrestlers enable them to grow beyond the average stature and to a girth, protected by enormously developed abdominal muscles, which reinforces strength with great weight. [[217]]
I had often the opportunity at a railway station or in a train to witness the easy carriage and magnificent pride of these massive, good-tempered men. There is not in the world, probably, a more remarkable illustration than they afford of what superior physical training and superior feeding can do. At first sight, indeed, these gigantic creatures seem to belong to a different race. It is no wonder that they should be so commonly proteges of the rich and distinguished. When an eminent wrestler retired in the year in which I first saw a good wrestling bout the ceremony of cutting his hair—for, like Samson, the wrestler wears his hair long—was performed by a personage who combined the dignities of an admiral and a peer. There is nothing of the bruiser in the looks of the smooth-faced wrestlers. Many, however, are the bruises to their bodies and to their self-esteem which they receive in their disciplinary progress from the contests of their native villages through all the grades of their profession to the highest rank. Their sexual morality is commonly of the lowest.
In my own hamlet at home in England I have seen the shoemaker, tailor and carpenter successively pass away; the only craftsman left is the smith. In Japan the hereditary craftsman survives for a while. I watched in my house one day the labours of such a worker. He was not arrayed in a Sunday suit fallen to the greasy bagginess of everyday wear, topped by a soiled collar. He appeared in a blue cotton jacket-length kimono and tight-fitting trousers of the same stuff, and both garments, which were washed at least once a week, were admirably fitted to their wearer's work. Almost the same rig was worn by our own medieval and pre-medieval workmen. The carpenter had on the back of his coat the name of his master or guild in decorative Chinese characters in white. There are nowadays in the cities many inferior workers, but all the men who came to my house worked with rapidity and concentration, hardly ever lifting their eyes from their jobs. The dexterity of the Japanese workman is seldom exaggerated. To his dexterity he adds the considerable advantage of having more than two hands, for he uses his feet together or singly. His supple big toes are a great possession. We have lost the use of ours, but the Japanese artisan, accustomed from his youth to tabi with a special division for the big toe, and to geta, which can be well managed only when the big toe is lissom, uses his toes as naturally as a monkey, with his paws and mouth full of nuts, gives a few to his feet to hold. The first sight of a foot holding a tool is uncanny.
The pitiful thing is that a modest, polite, cheerful, industrious, skilful, and in the best sense of the word artistic hereditary craftsmanship is proving only too easy a prey to the new industrial system. It is a sad reflection that the country which, owing to her long period of seclusion, had the opportunity of applying to all the things of common life so remarkable a skill and artistry, should be so little conscious of the pace at which her industrial rake's progress is proceeding, so insensible to the degree to which she is prodigally sacrificing that which, when it is lost to her, can never be recovered. It is no doubt true that when our own handicrafts were dying we also were insensitive. But because the Middle Ages in England encountered the industrial system gradually we suffered our loss more slowly than Japan is doing. Because, too, we never had in our bustling history the long periods of immunity from home and foreign strife by which Japanese craftsmanship profited so wonderfully, we may not have had such large stores of precious skill and taste to squander as New Japan, the spendthrift of Old Japan's riches, is unthinkingly casting away.
It is at Christmas at home that we have in the Christmas tree our reminder of the country. It is on New Year's Day that in Japan a pine tree is set up on either side of the front gate, but there are three bamboos with it, and the four trunks are all beautifully bound together with rope. If the ground be too hard for the trees to be stuck in the ground, they are kept upright by having a dozen heavy pieces of wood, not unlike fire logs, neatly bound round them. The pines may be about 10 ft. high, the bamboo about 15 ft. To the trees are affixed the white paper gohei. Over the doorway itself is an arrangement of straw, an orange, a lobster, dried cuttlefish and more gohei. A less expensive display consists of a sprig of pine and bamboo. Poor people have to be content with a yard-high pine branch with a French nail through it at either side of their doorway. I have been ruralist enough to harbour thoughts of the extent to which the woods are raided for all this New Year forestry. Some prefectures, in the sincerity of their devotion to afforestation, forbid the New Year destruction of pine trees.
I remember the gay and elaborate dressing of the horses during the New Year holidays. I saw one driver of a wagon who was not content with tying streamers on every part of his horse where streamers could be tied: he had also decorated himself, even to the extent of having had his head cropped to a special pattern, tracts of hair and bare scalp alternating.
It was pleasant to learn that a fine chrysanthemum show arranged in an open space in Tokyo was free to the public. Some plants, by means of grafting, bore flowers of half a dozen different varieties. Several plants had been wondrously trained into the form of kuruma, etc. Not a few of the varieties exhibited were, according to our ideas, atrocious in colouring, but many were beautiful and all were marvels of cultivation. Even greater manipulative and horticultural skill was represented in the chrysanthemums I saw at the Imperial garden party. A chief of a department of the Ministry of Agriculture told me that from a chrysanthemum growing in the ground it was possible to have a thousand blooms.
In a Japanese room the timber upright alongside the tokonoma is always a tree trunk in the rough. If it be cherry it has its bark on. The contrast with the finely finished wood of the rest of the room is arresting. It is said that the use of the unplaned upright is not more than three or four hundred years old and that it had its origin in Cha-no-yu affectations of simplicity.
I was visited one evening by an agricultural official who had returned from a visit to Great Britain. He spoke of the "lonelyism" of our best hotels. In a Japanese hotel of the same class one's room is so simple and the view of the garden is so refreshing that, with the beautiful flower arrangement indoors, the frequent change of kakemono, the serving of one's meals in a different set of lacquer and porcelain each day and the willing and smiling service always within the call of a hand clap, there comes a sense of restfulness and peace. The drawback which the Western man experiences is the lack of any means of resting his back but by lying down and the inability to read for long while resting an elbow on an arm rest which is too low for him. [[218]] A Japanese often reads kneeling before a table.
Here I am reminded to say that the development of the desire for books and newspapers in the rural districts is a noticeable thing, if only because it is new. It is not so long ago that reading was considered to be an occupation for old men and women and for children. The samurai had few books and the farmers fewer still. But the idea of combining cultivation and culture was not unknown. I have heard a rural student humbly quote the old saying, SE-kō U-doku (literally, "Fine weather—farming—Rainy weather—reading").