Following the Sun-Flag: A Vain Pursuit Through Manchuria

by Jr. John Fox

The Japanese gave no open hint of unwillingness to have us go—no hint that we were not to go very soon. We were urged to get passes for ourselves, interpreters and servants at once. Most of the men obeyed at once, bought horses, outfits, provisions and wrote farewell letters—wrote them many times. This was the middle of March. Ever since we have stayed at the Imperial Tomb in Tokio—the Imperial Hotel is the name it calls itself—under heavy expense to ourselves here and to the dear ones at home who sent us here; unable to go away; told every ten days that in the next ten days we would most likely go, and told on no day that within the next ten we should not go. Now it was soon—"very soon"—in English, and then it was "tadaima"—in Japanese.

Tadaima! That, too, meant "soon," when I first put stumbling feet on the tortuous path of Japanese thought and speech. The unwary stranger will be told to-day that it does mean "soon," and as such in dictionaries he shall find it. But I have tracked "tadaima" to its lair and dragged it, naked and ashamed, into the white light of truth. And I know "tadaima" at any time refers only to the season next to come. Early in March, for instance, it means literally—"next summer about two o'clock."

All this was something of a strain in the way of expectation, disappointment, worry, wasted energy—idleness. And so with a worried conscience over the expense to the above-mentioned dear ones at home, and the hope that some return might yet be made to them; through a good deal of weakness and a good deal of reluctance to go home and get "guyed," we stayed on and on. In May came the battle of Nanshan and the advance on Port Arthur. In June followed Tehlitzu. Both battles any man would have gladly risked his life to see, and I really think it would have been well for the Japanese, granting their accounts of the two battles as accurate—Russian atrocities in one, undoubted Japanese gallantry in both—if impartial observers had been there to confirm. As it stands, the Japanese say "you did"—the Russians say "we didn't"—and there the matter will end.

But we swung out of Yokohama Harbor at last—the Tokio slate for the time wiped clean and all forgiven. We were going to the front and that was balm to any wound. O-kin-san of the Tea House of the Hundred Steps—bless her!—had me turn my back while she struck sparks with flint and steel behind me and made prayers for my safety, and from her kind hand I carried away a little ideographed block of wood in a wicker case which would preserve me from all bodily harm. Whither we were bound we knew not for sure, since by the same token you know nothing in this land for sure. But there were three men among us who had been guaranteed, they said, by the word of a Major-General's mouth, that they should see the fall of Port Arthur. So sure were they that they had made less important representatives of their papers stay behind in Tokio to await the going of the third column. Two others had got the same assurance indirectly, but from high authority, and the rest of us knew that where they went, there went we.

That day and that night and next day we had quiet seas and sunlight. The second night we were dining in Kobbe at a hotel to which Kipling once sang a just pæan of praise—Kobbe, which he knew at once, he said, was Portland, Maine, though his feet had not then touched American soil. He was quite right. Kobbe might be any town anywhere. The next daybreak was of shattered silver, and it found us sailing through a still sea of silver from which volcanic islands leaped everywhere toward a silver sky. We were in the Inland Sea. To the eye, it was an opal dream—that Inland Sea—and the memory of it now is the memory of a dream—a dream of magic waters, silvery light and forlorn islands—bleak and many-peaked above, and slashed with gloomy ravines that race each other down to goblin-haunted water-caves, where the voice of the sea is never still. This sea narrowed by and by into the Shimonoseki Straits, which turn and twist through rocks, islands, and high green hills. Through them we went into the open ocean once more. In the middle of the next afternoon we passed for a while through other mountain-bordered straits, and by and by there sat before the uplifted eye Nagasaki, with its sleepy green terraces, rising from water-level to low mountain-top—where the Madame Chrysanthème of Loti's fiction is a living fact to-day. Who was it that said, after reading that book, he or she would like to read Pierre Loti by Madame Chrysanthème? It must have been a woman—and justly a woman—sure. There is an English colony at Nagasaki and an American or two who cling together and talk about going home some day—all exiles, all most hospitable to the stranger, and all unconsciously touched with the pathos of the exile wherever on earth you find him.

Between four and five o'clock these exiles take launches for a beach five miles away, since the Japanese regulations now forbid bathing at any nearer point. They carry out cakes and tea and other things to drink and I took one trip with them through one beautifully radiant late afternoon, but even in that way there was no evading the Japanese. Two of them, whether fishermen, sailors, officers, or what not, calmly fixed their boat-hooks to the launch and there they hung. The fact that the ladies of the launch were undressing and dressing in one end did not seem to disturb them at all, and to this day I am wondering what possible harm a man or a woman in a bathing-dress among waves can do in time of war in a place that is impregnable and five hundred miles from the firing-line. I found the Japanese as different in Nagasaki as is their speech. There they say "Nagasaki" with a hard g. In Tokio, where the classics are supreme, they pronounce it "Nangasaki," almost—just as the rickshaw men in the one place lose something of the samurai haughtiness that characterizes them in the other. It is the difference between the flat and the broad "a" in our own land, and between the people who use the one and the people who use the other. Everybody left next morning, but I clung to Nagasaki as long as I could, and in consequence took an all-night ride on a wooden seat. Early next morning I was crossing the Shimonoseki Straits from Moji in a sampan. It was before sunrise. The mist on the sea was still asleep, but on the mountains it was starting its upward flight. Through it fishing-boats were slipping like ghosts, and here and there the dim shape of a transport or a little torpedo-boat was visible. The flush in the East was hardly as deep as a pale rose before I was noiselessly oared to the stone quay of the little village whence we were to take transport at last for the front. The foreign hotel was full. Richard Harding Davis had gone to a Japanese hotel and had left word for me to follow. So in a rickety rickshaw I rattled after him through the empty street. I found him in a Japanese room as big as the dining-room of an American hotel, covered with eighty mats, full of magic woodwork, and looking out where there were no walls (the walls in a Japanese house are taken out by day) for full fifty feet on mountain and sea and passing transports and sampans. Davis was unpacking. Hanging over the balcony was a yellow moth of a girl some fourteen years old, who smiled me welcome. On another balcony at the other end of the hotel, three other sister moths were lighted, and among them I saw a correspondent beating a typewriter vigorously—they watching him with amazement and brushing him with their wing-like sleeves as they hovered about. Others still were fluttering fairy-like anywhere, everywhere. The latest occupant of our room had been the Marquis Ito—we found it quite big enough for two of us. Li Hung Chang had the same room when he came over to make peace terms after the Japanese-Chinese War. We could see the corner of the street near by where a Japanese tried then to assassinate that eminent Chinaman, and in that very room the great Shimonoseki treaty was signed. We had it two nights and a day, and we learned, when we went away, that we were not told the history of that room for nothing. First, our interpreters hinted that great men like Ito and Li Hung Chang and Our Honorable Selves were always expected to make a present to the hotel. It was the custom. We followed the custom to the extent of ten yen each, and an old lady came in and prostrated herself before each of us in turn. Now, when you are clothed only in pajamas, are seated in a chair, and have your bare feet on a balcony in order to miss no vagrant wind, it is somewhat embarrassing to have a woman steal in without warning, smite her forehead to the mat several times, and make many signs and much speech of gratitude. You won't smite yours in turn; you can't bow as you sit, and if you rise, it looks as though you were going to put foot on the neck of a slave. We looked very red and felt very foolish, but we did not exchange confidences. If there was any slumbering supposition in our minds that this was a polite Oriental method of dealing with guests who have doubtful luggage, or a slumbering hope that the "present" might have a dwindling effect on our bill, there needn't have been. We had to pay in addition for that room and those eighty mats and that Fuji landscape of delicate woodwork; we had to pay for all the brilliant moths that fluttered incessantly about, for the chamber-maids and the smiling bronze scullery-girl who looked in on us from the hallway; for the bath-boy and the cook or cooks. Every junk and sampan that passed had apparently sent a toll for collection to that hotel. The gold of the one sunset and the silver of the one dawn were included in the turkey-tracked, serpent-long bill that was unrolled before our wondering eyes. In fact, if Marquis Ito's breakfast and the biggest dinner that Li Hung Chang had there nine years before were not put down therein, it was a strange oversight on the part of the all-seeing eye that had swept the horizon of all creation during the itemization of that bill. That was business—that bill. The present had been custom. I cheerfully recommend the method to highway robbers that captain other palaces of extortion in other parts of the world. Get the present first—it's a pretty custom—and the rest is just as easy as it would have been anyway.

Next day we went back again to Moji, where a polite and dapper little officer examined us and our passes and asked us many questions. Why he did I know not, since he seemed to know about us in advance, and every now and then he would look up from a pass and say: "Oh, you are so-and-so"—whereat "so-and-so" would look a bit uneasy. At two o'clock that day we set sail—correspondents, interpreters, servants, horses, a few soldiers, and much ammunition—on the transport Heijo Maru. Every ship has that "Maru" after its name, and I have never been able to find out just what it means—except that literally it is "round in shape." We steamed slowly past a long, bleak, hump-backed little island that had been the funeral pyre for the Japanese dead in the war with China. For ordinarily the Japanese, after taking a lock of hair, a finger-nail, or the inkobo (a bone in the throat), which they send back to relatives, burn their dead. But this funeral pyre was for those who died in the hospital, and the wounded and sick therein could see by the flames at night where next day their own ashes might lie. Thence we turned northward toward the goal of five months' hope on the part of those hitherto unhappy but now most cheerful eighteen men.

Fuji was on board. Fuji is my horse, and he had come down by rail. He is Japanese and a stallion—as most Japanese horses are. He has a bushy, wayward mane, by the strands of which you can box the compass with great accuracy, and a bushy forelock that is just as wayward. His head, physiognomy, and general traits will come in better when later they get an opportunity for display. All I knew then of Fuji was that he had nearly pulled the arms out of the sockets of several men, and had broken one man's leg back in Tokio. I was soon to learn that this was very little to know about Fuji.

Takeuchi also was aboard. Takeuchi is my interpreter and servant. He is tall and slender, and has a narrow, intelligent face and general proportions that an American girl characterized as Greek. I call him the ever-faithful or the ever-faithless—just as his mood for the day happens to be. He keeps me guessing all the time. When I make up my mind that I am going to say harsh things next day, I find Takeuchi tucking a blanket around me at three o'clock in the morning. He knows they are coming, and when I do say them Takeuchi answers, "I beg you my pardon," in a way that leads me to doubt which of us is the real offender after all. Sometimes my watch and money disappear, but Takeuchi turns up with them the next morning, shaking his head and with one wave of his hand toward the table.

"Not safe," he says, smiting his waistband, where both were concealed. "I keep him." He has both now all the time. His first account overran, to be sure, the exact amount of his salary for one month and for that amount I had him sign a receipt. Two hours later he said, in perplexity: