Once I took refuge in a wrestling-match. I found a great pagoda-like, circus-like tent made of bamboo with matting for a roof. Outside long streamers of various colors floated from the tops of long poles. High above and on a little platform supported by four bamboos a man was beating a drum. He had started beating that drum at daybreak. About the entrance and around the big, fragile structure was the same crowd of men and boys that you would find at an American circus. To get in I paid two yen. Had my skin been yellow and my eyes slant I would have dropped but one. The arena inside was amphitheatrical in shape with three broad tiers of benches on which squatted the spectators. In the centre and under a bamboo roof was a hummock of dirt about two feet high. Four pillars swathed with red and blue supported this roof, and from each pillar was stretched a streamer from which dangled little banners covered with Chinese ideographs. A ring some twelve feet in diameter was dug into the dirt hummock and in the centre of this ring were two huge fat men, stark naked except for a breech-clout. As I came in, they rose and took hold. To the Saxon it looked at first glance like two fat ladies simply trying to push each other out of the ring, and I came near laughing aloud. Before I had approached ten steps one of the two fat men touched one foot outside of the ring. He had lost and the bout was over. Now two more came walking in with great dignity. They mounted the arena and turned their backs upon each other. Then each stretched out his right leg with his right hand on the knee, raised it high in the air and brought it down on the earth with a mighty stamp. The same performance with the left leg, and then they strained downward until their buttocks almost touched the earth. Turning, they squatted on their heels opposite each other at the edge of the ring, and each man slapped his hands together gently, stretched them out at full length and turned the palms over. This was a salute—the Japanese equivalent of the Saxon pugilist's handshake. Each walked then to one of the posts from which hung a little box of salt, and his second handed him there water in a sake cup. He rinsed his mouth, spurted the water out, took a pinch of salt and threw it into the ring. One of them stooped and plucked a few blades of grass from the sod and threw them also into the ring. Both these acts were meant to drive the spirits of evil away, and it was all so serious that I was aroused at once. Four times they squatted like two huge game-cocks, and four times they got up slowly, strolled leisurely to the salt-box and the sake cup. At last they got together, and there was a mighty tussle, and to my astonishment, one of those giants threw the other over his head and landed him some eight feet outside the ring. Apparently there was more in it than was evident to the casual eye, and it was very serious business indeed. The fact is, wrestling is an ancient and honorable calling in Japan, and goes back to the sun goddess. She had a brother once who used to annoy her by killing wild animals and tossing them into her backyard. One day she got angry and ran away to a cave, leaving the earth in total darkness. Her retainers, and the brother and his retainers tried to get her out, but she refused to come out—having blocked the cave with a great stone. So they performed antics and made strange cries until, tempted by curiosity, she pushed the stone slightly away and looked out, and thereupon one Taji Karac, stamping the earth, rushed forward and tore the bowlder away, and that is why the wrestlers stamp the earth to-day. This is myth—what follows is historical.
"Once upon a time," said an American correspondent, as he leaned over the bar that night at the Imperial Hotel, "a chesty noble got gay, and remarked that he was about the best on earth. The emperor heard of this, and sent a challenge broadcast. A big chap took it up, kicked in the chesty noble's ribs, and brake his bones so that he died. This was twenty-four years before celestial peace was proclaimed on earth. About nine hundred years later, two brothers claimed the throne and they agreed to wrassle for it. They did it by proxy, though, and one Korishito got the throne through his champion. In the same century there was a wrestling-match at the autumn festival of the Five Grains. The harvest was good that year, and the emperor argued thereupon that the coincident wrestling must be good, and so wrestling became a permanent national custom. When the champion Kiobashi became referee the emperor gave him a fan which proclaimed that he was the Prince of Lions. The wrestlers were divided into east and west, and that's why they come into the arena from the east and west to-day. Hollyhock is the flower of the east, the gourd-flower is symbol of the west, and the path to the stage is called the flower-path to-day. The pillars indicate the points of the compass. The next champion the emperor called the Driving Wind, and the family of the Driving Wind alone can hold the symbol of the referee to-day."
These wrestlers are exempt from military service, and they constitute, I understand, a very close corporation. When an unusually large child is born in Japan, the father and mother say: "He shall be a wrestler."
The wrestlers are enormous men, and average over six feet in height. Some of them are magnificent in shape, but as weight counts in the science, they encourage fat. The present champion weighs over three hundred pounds. Certainly, as a class, the wrestlers show what Japan can do in the way of producing big men. Constantly I have been surprised not only at the thick-set sturdiness, but at the average height of the Japanese soldier as I see him in Tokio on his way to the front. Moreover, I am told that the height of Japanese school-children has increased three inches within the last ten years in the schools where the students sit in chairs instead of squatting on the floor. And, among the new types one sees in Tokio to-day, the dapper men in European clothes about the clubs and hotels, the statesmen in high hats and frock-suits, the half-modernized class, who wear derby hats and mackintoshes with fur collars and show their legs naked to the knee when they step from a rickshaw—the most interesting and significant is the Tokio University student you see lilting on his getas through the public gardens. He has an intelligent face, looks you straight in the eye, is agile as a panther, and as tall, I believe, as the average college student. I suppose the emperor issued an edict that his people should grow taller and if he did—they will. But these students—one can't help wondering what, when they grow up, they will do for Japan and to the rest of the East.
With bird-like cries the rickshaw men turn under an arched gateway into a little court-yard paved with stones. The wheels rattle as in a hollow vault and come to a sudden halt. Straightway there is an answering bustle and the shuffling of many little feet along the polished floors to the entrance of the tea-house, and many little brown maidens kneel there and smile and gurgle a welcome. There the shoes of the visitor come off, and if any man has forgotten the first instruction Kipling gave, that the visitor to Japan should take with him at least one beautiful pair of socks, there is considerable embarrassment for him. You are led up a narrow stairway, each step of polished wood, and into a big chamber covered with mats—the wall toward the interior made of beautiful screens, the other wall opening on the outer air to a balcony. At the other end of the room from the entrance a single beautiful vase stands on a little platform, and in that vase is one single beautiful flower. In front of that vase is the seat of honor, and the guests are arranged in front of it seated on thin cushions on the floor. Straightway little nesan—serving-girls—carry in little trays, a box filled with ashes in which glow tiny bars of charcoal, a little ash-receiver of bamboo, a bottle of sake, and dainty little bowls without handles for drinking-cups. Now one by one the brilliant little stars of the drama appear. A geisha girl glides in at the entrance, another and another, and in a row sink to their knees and bow their foreheads to the mat. Rising, they approach ten steps and kneel again. Once more they approach shuffling along the floor in their socks of spotless white (the big toe in a separate pocket) walking modestly pigeon-toed that the flaps of their brilliant kimonos may part not at all, and then they are bowing in front of the little trays where they sit smiling and ready to serve you with food and drink.
There for the first time we saw Kamura—Kamura-san you must say, if you would be polite. She was pretty, and dainty, and graceful, and her years were only fourteen, which by our computation, would be thirteen only, since the Japanese child is supposed to be a year old when born. She spoke English very well, for she had lived in Shanghai once where she had played with American children. She was an Eurasian—that is a half-caste—but that was a secret which she told a few in confidence, for you could not tell it from her face, and the fact would be no little obstacle to the success of her career as a geisha girl. Straightway little Kamura-san was the favorite of the dinner party, with the women as well as with the men, and she acted as interpreter and said many quaint, shrewd, unexpected things. The women petted and caressed her, and the men doubtless would have liked to do the same, but that is not a Japanese custom. She turned to one man of the party, and she spoke slowly and with no shading of intonation whatever:
"Who was the very young gentleman with red cheeks who was here with you the other night?"
The man told her.
"Why?" he asked.