An Artist's Letters from Japan

by John La Farge

As we get into what is really the country, passing from broad road to narrow tracks, our runners sometimes lifted us over soft, wet places, or bumped us over narrow ditches, or guided us, at full tilt, on the edges of the stones that are bridges. Sometimes more patiently we halted to allow the files of black bulls to meander past us, dragging loads on wheels or carrying bales.

Rarely we met peasants, and then usually women, sometimes with horses of a larger breed than that we saw last month in the east. Once, among rice fields in the basin of a circle of low hills, I saw the grove which covers the tomb of some divine emperor of early times. As we circled around the slope, far away from this solitary oasis of trees, we could see the grove on every side, finished and complete and rounded by time, as if sculptured in nature from some of those sketches that Japanese artists make for carving when they give all four sides, and the bottom, and the top, on a single page. Nothing else, but perhaps some uninscribed stone, marks the tomb of emperors, dotted about the plains of this oldest province of Japan. Strange enough, even in this strange country, is this evidence of the extreme of simplicity in death, as in life, of the oldest line of Oriental despots, absolute lords and masters, ever-present patterns of the deity, who make this one solitary exception of simplicity in history. It is as if Japan itself was their tomb, as if they passed back into the nature of which their divine ancestors were gods—the gods of the sun and of the earth.

PEASANT WOMAN—THRESHER.

Blue hills and pagodas, and temples in the distance, and we came into Nara, which is but a breath, a ruin, a remnant of what it was. I had been told so often of the place, as a ruin among rice fields, that I was unprepared for the beautiful lay-out of what remains—for the well-planned roads and avenues, such as may well have belonged to some great capital, such as would have been heard of by travelers who, returning in days of Charlemagne from other Eastern cities to Byzantium, might have talked of Zipango.

Nothing remains but a few buildings, belonging to temples, but their approaches are splendid, even though there be often nothing more than the general grading and disposition. I should have written to you from our inn, where I looked, in the evening and morning, toward the slopes of distant hills, and heard, out of the darkness, the sound of the great bell which rang first some eleven centuries ago, and the singing of the frogs in the fields which were once a city. It is now too late to begin to describe anything of what I saw; anything of temple buildings, from one of which to another we wandered, or of the old statues and relics, or of the religious dances of young girls which we looked at, standing or sitting near the balustrade of the dancing-shed, while inside, in the greater shade, they moved to the music and hymns of the priests—red and white figures, with long tresses of black hair and chaplets of flowers; with faces all painted white, and brilliant, indifferent eyes that saw me sketching clearly, however, and hands that waved, in a cadence of routine, fans and bunches of little bells with long streamers of violet, blue, green, red, and white. Or of the great park-like avenue, that made me think of England, through which still wander tame deer, as did those that, long ago, served as models for Okio the painter. I fear that what I have seen will remain only as an embroidery upon the stuff that my memory tries to unroll.

It was late on a sweltering afternoon when we managed to leave Nara, and we reached Horiuji for too short a visit; for we were due in Osaka the next day. We wandered in the late afternoon and evening through its courts, kindly received by the priests, for whom we had the recommendation of a friendly name.

At least I had time to see the Golden Hall, one of the earliest buildings, now more than twelve centuries and a half old, and the noble paintings on its walls attributed to some famous sculptor of that day. Their placid elegance, the refinement of their lines, their breath of religious peace, explained those claims to a solemn and glorious past for Japan, which look like a conventional exaggeration in a to-day that is delicate and small and dry.

The recall of Greek perfection was not forced, and while still vaguely unwilling to confuse one excellence by referring to another, I could not help again thinking of the Greek and of Tanagra images, when I saw, by the light of the torches, in the great pagoda, as old as the great hall, groups modeled in clay by the same old sculptor, whose name is given to the paintings—Amida, and Kuwan-on, and Monju, and the scenes of the death of Buddha. An admirable antiquity was to be the continuous impression of the evening, carried out into our last looks at the Treasure House. Its very air of an old New England barn or crib raised upon posts, its rough red painting, the high wooden steps of entrance, the gigantic wooden latch-key with which the guardian priest fumbled at its door, gave the note of extreme early simplicity—the feeling of a persisting indifference to the adornments and changes of centuries of fashions.

It has been useless all along to detail anything, but the impressions of the last things seen remain with me as types of all. For there hung on the old walls of the Treasure House a framed banner, once carried in ancient battles, its brocaded pattern exactly like that which we know in Babylonian art: the circles with the lilies between, and in each circle the Assyrian monarch struggling with lions—imitation or original of coeval Sassanian Persia, I suppose, but housed here all these thousand years, and in its persistence of pattern connecting with that heavy and oppressive antiquity of Nineveh which knows nothing older than itself for our story, except oldest Egypt.