The lecture yesterday was a success, going off rather better than the others. It was in a school hall and they are always beautiful rooms. I was entertained during its two hours of duration by watching a splendid pink azalea and a pine on either side of the desk. They are each about five feet high and of the most lovely shape, and there were about a thousand blossoms on this azalea. We know but very little about dwarfed trees and shrubs in our country as the specimens we see are very small ones and inferior in shape and interest to those we see here. They are everywhere, each little shop has in the midst of its mess of second hand or cheap new things a charming little peach or plum, pine, azalea, or redberry. In a hot house we saw a tree that had two plums on it, and we frequently see tiny orange trees covered with fruit. The white peach is one of the loveliest things in the world, double blossoms like roses, and is entirely artificially produced.
The smoke has lifted and we are seeing the hills of the shore very well. On the other side of the ship we see the Island of Awaji, so we are now between the two islands and it is much like the Thousand Islands in the St. Lawrence River. I suppose this is the entrance to the Inland Sea. It is partly clear and the land is so close it is easy to see. There are many Japanese ladies on board with their husbands and they seem to enjoy it. With their faces white with rice powder and their purple color in their haoris they are pretty, and especially here where they do not feel the necessity of covering the obi with haori so they look less humpbacked than in fashionable Tokyo. Their footwear I love, only, of course, it holds them still more to the conventional position as it leaves the legs bare above the ankle, and they must walk so as not to show that as well as not to disturb the lap of the kimona down the front. But the tabi feel like bare feet on account of the division of the big toe from the other toes, and as soon as you put them on you feel as if the toes were really made to use, and the foot clings as you walk. I am taking a set of cotton kimonas to China so as to have them to wear in my room with the tabi on hot days. Without the obi the dress becomes quite cool if made of thin material. The thin silk, which is practically transparent, is one of the most beautiful things in Japanese weaving, as it is still firm enough to keep its shape and wear for years.
The dress of the geisha is very like the ceremonial dress of the lady, especially when black with decorations at the bottom. The little girls are very touching, many of them are not over eight or nine, and they wear the elaborate dress and coiffure which is theirs for the part. In cherry season it is bright peacock blue. In Osaka the decorations were butterflies in colors and gold. The samisen players are older and they dress more plainly in black or plain blue, the drum players are young and gay colored. The teeth of the little girls are so bad that I asked if they blackened them. The dances are lovely poetical things with themes of the most delicate subjects. There is never anything coarse either in the thought or the execution. They say the geisha is the most unselfish person in the world. Perhaps that might be said for all the women. They do their hard work and keep themselves out of sight to a degree that shows the pain there must be in it. When I was asked what I thought of them I answered that I thought Japanese women were not appreciated for what they did. They said, “No, that is not so, we do not show it but we appreciate them in our hearts.”
Shanghai, May 1.
We have slept one night in China, but we haven’t any first impressions, because China hasn’t revealed itself to our eyes as yet. We compared Shanghai to Detroit, Michigan, and except that there is less coal smoke, the description hits it off. This is said to be literally an international city, but I haven’t learned yet just what the technique is; every country seems to have its own post office though, and its own front-door yard, and when we were given a little auto ride yesterday, we found that the car couldn’t go into Chinatown because it had no license for that district.
I shall be interested to find out whether in this really old country they talk about “ages eternal” as freely as they do in Japan; the authentic history of the latter begins about 500 A.D., their mythical history 500 B.C., but still it is a country which has endured during myriads of ages. In spite of the fact that they kept the emperors shut up for a thousand years, and killed them off and changed them about with great ease and complacency, the children are all taught, and they repeat in books for foreigners, that the rule of Japan has been absolutely unbroken. Of course, they get to believing these things themselves, not exactly intellectually but emotionally and practically, and it would be worth any teacher’s position for him to question any of their patriotic legends in print. However, they say that in their oral lectures, the professors of history of the universities criticise these legends. In the higher elementary school we visited in Osaka, we saw five classes in history and ethics, in each of which the Emperor was under discussion—sometimes the Emperor and what he had done for the country, and sometimes an Emperor in particular. Apparently this religion has been somewhat of a necessity, as the country was so divided and split up, they had practically nothing else to unite on—the Emperor became a kind of symbol of united and modern Japan. But this worship is going to be an Old Man of the Sea on their backs. They say the elementary school teachers are about the most fanatical patriots of the country. More than one has been burned or allowed the children to be burned while he rescued the portrait of the Emperor when there was a fire. They must take it out in patriotism in lieu of salary; they don’t get a living wage, now that the cost of living has gone up.
Shanghai, May 2.
We have been taken in hand by a reception committee of several Chinese gentlemen, mostly returned American students. The “returned student” is a definite category here, and if and when China gets on its feet, the American university will have a fair share of the glory to its credit. They took us to see a Chinese cotton spinning and weaving factory. There is not even the pretense at labor laws here that there is in Japan. Children six years of age are employed, not many though, and the wages of the operatives in the spinning department, mainly women, is thirty cents a day, at the highest thirty-two cents Mex. In the weaving department they have piece work and get up to forty cents.
I will tell you something of what we had to eat in one small afternoon. First, lunch of all courses here at the hotel. Then we went to the newspaper where we had tea and cake at about four. From there to the house of the daughter of a leading statesman of the Manchus, she being a lady of small feet and ten children, who has offered a prize for the best essay on the ways to stop concubinage, which they call the whole system of plural marriage. They say it is quite unchanged among the rich. There we were given a tea of a rare sort, unknown in our experience. Two kinds of meat pies which are made in the form of little cakes and quite peculiar in taste, delicious; also cake. Then after we went to the restaurant where we were to have dinner. First we got into the wrong hotel and there, while we were waiting, they gave us tea. We were struck by the fact that they asked for nothing when we left, and thanked us for coming to the wrong place. Then we went to the right hotel across the street from the first. They called it the corner of Broadway and 42nd Street, and it is that. There is a big roof garden besides the hotels, and they are both run by the Department stores which have their places underneath. It may be a sad commentary on the human character that one can eat more than one can remember, but that is what we did last night. First of all we went into the room which was all Chinese furniture; very small round table in the middle and the rows of stools along one side for the singing girls, who do not dance here. Those stools were not used, as all the young Chinese are ashamed of that institution and want to get rid of it. On a side table were almonds shelled, nice little ones, different from ours and very sweet. Beside them were dried watermelon seeds which were hard to crack and so I did not taste them. All the Chinese nibbled them with relish. Two ladies came, both of them had been in New York to study. All these people speak and understand English in earnest. On the table were little pieces of sliced ham, the famous preserved eggs which taste like hard-boiled eggs and look like dark-colored jelly, and little dishes of sweets, shrimps, etc. To these we helped ourselves with the chop sticks, though they insisted on giving us little plates on which they spooned out some of each. Then followed such a feast as we had never experienced, the boys taking off one dish after another and replacing them with others in the center of the table, to which we helped ourselves. There was no special attempt at display of fine dishes such as you might have expected with such cooking and such expense, and such as would have happened in Japan. We had chicken and duck and pigeon and veal and pigeon eggs and soup and fish and little oysters that grow in the ground (very delicious and delicate) and nice little vegetables and bamboo sprouts mixed in with the others, and we had shrimps cooked, and shark’s fin and bird’s nest (this has no taste at all and is a sort of very delicate soup, but costs a fortune and that is its real reason for being). It is gelatine which almost all dissolves in the cooking. We had many more things than these, and the boy in a dirty white coat and an old cap on his head passing round the hot perfumed wet towels every few courses, and for dessert we had little cakes made of bean paste filled up with almond paste and other sweets, all very elaborately made, and works of art to look at, but with too little taste to appeal much to us; then we had fruits, bananas and apples and pears, cut up in pieces, each with a toothpick in it so it can be eaten easily. Then we had a soup made of fish’s stomach, or air sac. Then we had a pudding of the most delicious sort imaginable, made of a mold of rice filled in with eight different symbolic things that I don’t know anything about, but they don’t cut much part in the taste. In serving this dish we were first given a little bowl half full of a sauce thickened and looking like a milk sauce. It was really made of powdered almonds. Into this you put the pudding, and it is so good that I regretted all that had gone before, and I am going to learn how to make it.