Letters from China and Japan

by John Dewey; Harriet Alice Chipman Dewey

You would be surprised to see how free from all affectations this country has remained, at least so far as we see it. There is a social democracy here that we do not know. All Japan is talking democracy now, which is to be taken in the sense of representative government rather than in the sense of tearing down the present form of government. The representation in elections here now does not seem to extend much further, if any, than to include those large taxpayers who would under any system be a force in forming policy. The extension of the suffrage is the great question under discussion at present. That and the expansion of special education for men are the turning points for the coming legislators. Japan has acquired many new millionaires during the war and those men are already founding new schools for vocational purposes for men. Four hundred and forty students are to be sent abroad with a very generous allowance for living in the different foreign countries, none of them women, and no women are mentioned in any of the new appropriation bills. Not even a mention of the needs for women.

Yesterday, to begin, was spent thus: It was the famous festival of dolls. In the morning I made a dress for a poor sort of foreign doll I had hunted out for a little girl. It was all American. Another ridiculous imitation of American baby, looking half caste Japanese, has still to be dressed when I can find the material for long clothes, but I presented it as is. They invited me in to see their exhibition. Some of their dolls are two hundred years old from their mothers’ family. I shall try to find some literature on this festival as it is too long to write about. But it is true that one begins immediately to get the passion for dolls; they are not dead things like ours, but works of art symbolic of all the different phases of national life. The little girls were delighted with their possessions. If I had only known about this I should have known what to bring to Japan for gifts, instead of feeling as helpless as I did. If you come, bring dolls.

In the afternoon I was invited to go to the best or one of the best collections in the country and that was a great experience. It began very painfully for me because I got lost and was three-quarters of an hour late at the Imperial Hotel from which we started. The family that owns this famous collection is very old and the wife is the daughter of a Daimyo, hence the dolls are very old. And they are wonderful, and more wonderful still their housekeeping equipment of old lacquer and porcelain and glass. The doll refreshments are served in tiny dishes on tiny tables while the guests sit on the floor, the hostess and her family doing all the serving. We had the thick white wine made from rice poured out of wonderful little decanters into tiny glasses. We drank to the health of the family and the stuff is delicious, with an aroma such as no honey can excel. After these refreshments we were shown the room for the tea ceremony and then taken back into the foreign part of the house for real refreshments, which consisted of many and wonderful varieties of cakes. The tea was served in cups with saucers decorated with plum blossoms, this being the time of plum blossoms. Then tea cups taken away and cups of rich chocolate placed on the tables. These tables were high enough for the ordinary chairs. All the foreign houses are very ugly in style but very comfortable and mid-Victorian. The Baroness urged us to eat special cakes and we left stuffed. One kind is in the form of a beautiful pink leaf wrapped in a cherry leaf which has been preserved from last year. The leaf gives the cake a delicious flavor and also a cover to protect the fingers from its stickiness. Then three little round brown cakes looking some like chocolate—on a skewer. You bite off the first one whole, then slip the other two as you eat them. Those alone are enough for a meal and very nourishing. All cakes are made from bean paste or like our richest pastries. When that second meal was finished, we said good-bye. The Baroness and her three pretty daughters and her sister all followed us to the outer door and when our auto drove off the last thing we saw were the bows of the butlers and these pretty ladies, all saying one more harmonious good-bye. The young girls dress in kimonos of wool muslin of the brightest colors and designs which are conceivable even to the Japanese imagination. They look like a very profusely blooming garden of old fashioned perennials.

The garden is indescribable. I had some fancy of what a Japanese garden would look like, but find it is nothing at all beside the reality. This place is big and the grass is now brown. Most of the grass is covered with a thick carpet of pine needles and at the edge of the pine needle carpet a rope of twisted straw outlines graceful curves. The use of the big stones is the most surprising part of the whole. They are very old and weather-stained, of many shades of gray and blue-gray, with the short shrubs for a background, and the severity and simplicity of the result has a classic beauty which we may attain in centuries, and only after we have consumed our abundance of things material.

Then we went to dinner at the house of Professor M——. There are six children in his family, the oldest a man of about twenty-five, a graduate of the Imperial University, now a factory inspector for the government; he speaks eight languages. One of these is Esperanto, which is his hobby. The French Professors were there also, two of them, a clever and amusing pair, who did their duty in talking, and the young man spoke better than any of us and with an excellent pronunciation. He has never been out of Japan. Two little girls and a young boy appeared after dinner and made their pretty bows to the floor, and then went to a low table and squatted and played Go the rest of the evening. Go is the famous shell game. Go means five and it is a game of fives, but ask me no more, except that the men are 364 in number and you play it on an expanded checker board. There was an endless succession of food and drinks and we did not leave till nearly eleven. Japanese families have many nice drinks which we do not. Theirs are perhaps no better than our best ones, but they add to the pleasant variety of non-alcoholic drinks. Besides those we had two wines.

This was the dinner as near as I can remember. A menu card was at each plate and I fancy they were intended as souvenirs for the foreign guests, but I forgot to take mine, if that was their purpose. We had soup, bread of two kinds, and butter. Then fish patties, then little birds, boned, on toast with a vegetable, then ramekins of Japanese macaroni, which is not like ours. Next roast beef, very tender fillet, with potato balls, peas, gravy, another vegetable forgot, and salad, white and red wine, coming after the orange cider. Then a delicious pudding, then cake and strawberries. Those berries are raised out of doors. They are planted between rows of stones which are heated artificially, I did not quite understand how, the vines being kept from touching the stones by low bamboo trellises. Whipped cream served with the berries. Then delicious coffee in foreign style.

After dinner we leave the reception room in foreign style and go upstairs to the big Japanese room, sit by the hibashi or the grate, and here the children come. At once tea is served. Then just as we were starting for home we were urged to stay for a drink, which was more orange cider, very sweet, and bottled waters, which are so good and come from the many natural springs. One of the amusements of the Japanese is seeing the foreign visitors try to sit, and you can’t wonder they are amused. I can manage it, in awkward fashion, but your father can’t even bend for the pose. On Sunday we sat for two hours in the presence of the greatest Buddhist priest in Japan, and you can guess whether we wriggled and if my feet were asleep if you try the pose for a few minutes yourself, even on a nice soft cushion as we were. Getting up properly is the hardest part of it.

Tokyo, Tuesday, March 4.

Our friends took us to Kamakura; it isn’t interesting reading these things in advance in guide books, so I don’t think a description will be interesting, but something over seven hundred years ago, the first Shogun rulers settled there and made it their capital, of which nothing is now left save the Buddhist temples. We met on the train going down the professor of Japanese literature in the University, who was going there because it was the seventh hundred anniversary of a Shogun who wrote poetry, and the professor was going over to lecture on his poems. Also we ran across several hundred school children, boys and girls with their teachers, who were spending Sunday seeing the historic sights. One of the big temples to the god of war was a kind of museum, with old swords and masks and things in it. They took us to call on the Reverend Shaku, who is the head of the Zen sect of Buddhists in Japan, and who talked—including the interpreter—about two hours, in answer to questions about Buddhism, especially his variety. It was very interesting. We were ushered into a Japanese room, beautiful proportions, a lovely kakemono in the alcove—it’s a scroll, not a kimono—and a five-legged little table made of metal with mother-of-pearl inlay. Otherwise nothing but the room with gorgeous blue and gold chrysanthemums alternating on the paneled ceiling and five silk cushions scattered around for us to sit on, and a single one at the end of the room for him. In about five minutes another screen door opened and he appeared in a gorgeous but simple flowing robe, copper colored. Then tea and sponge cake—meantime the talk fest had begun. Incidentally I should remark that the bowing and kneeling of the servants looks much more natural and less servile when you see people seated on the floor, and the servants have to kneel to hand them anything. His personality is that of a scholarly type, rather ascetic, not over refined, but not in the least sleek like some of our Hindu swamis, and very charming. When we left he thanked us for coming and expressed his great satisfaction that he had made some friends. His talk was largely moral but with a high metaphysical flavor, somewhat elusive, and reminding one of Royce. Well it was an experience worth having, as he is reputed the most learned and representative Buddhist in Japan, and as I have remarked before, seeing is quite different from reading. He was more modern than Royce in one respect; he said God is the moral ideal in man and as man develops the divine principle does also. We saw the big fifty-foot bronze statue of Buddha, in some respects the most celebrated single thing in Japan and again one you have to see. It is as impressive as a cathedral.

We have been to a dinner party since I began this. Our host seems to be a universal genius—a member of the house of peers, an authority on education, an orchid fancier, a painter and I don’t know what. There were over twenty at table, and our health was drunk in champagne with a little speech, and two members of the cabinet were there. The Countess is the mother of eight children, and looks about thirty and very pretty for thirty. Three or four of the little girls were about before and after dinner, and, like several of the little girls of the new generation, are as spontaneous and natural as you would wish. Acquired characteristics are certainly hereditary in Japan, for even the most lively and spontaneous children are civilized. Whatever else you think about the Japanese they are about the most highly civilized people on earth, perhaps overcultivated. I asked Mamma when these girls would undergo the clammifying process and have all their life taken out of them, and she said never for these girls.