Right gladly then we struck the backward trail of the Saxon. The Happy Exile went aboard with me, and so did Takeuchi, who brought his pretty young wife along to say, "How d'ye do?" and "Good-by." Takeuchi brought a present, too—a little gold mask of a fox, which he thought most humorously fitting—a scarf-pin for Inari-sama, which is the honorific deistical form of my honorable name in Japanese. Later, in this country, I got Takeuchi's photograph and this card: "I wish you please send me your recommondation which is necessary to have in my business." He shall have it.
All my life Japan had been one of the two countries on earth I most wanted to see. No more enthusiastic pro-Japanese ever put foot on the shore of that little island than I was when I swung into Yokohama Harbor nearly seven months before. I had lost much—but I was carrying away in heart and mind the nameless charm of the land and of the people—for the charm of neither has much succumbed to the horrors imported from us; Fujiyama, whose gray head lies close under the Hand of Benediction; among the foot-hills below the Maid of Miyanoshita—may Fuji keep her ever safe from harm; O-kin-san the kind, who helps the poor and welcomes the stranger—her little home at the head of the House of the Hundred Steps I could see from the deck of the ship; the great Daibutsu at Kamakura, whose majestic calm stills all the world while you look upon his face and—the babies, in streets and doorways—the babies that rule the land as kings. I did have, too, for a memory, Shin—my rickshaw man—but Shin failed me at the last minute on the dock. Yes, even at that last minute on the dock, Shin tried to fool me. But I forgive him.
Of this war in detail I knew no more than I should have known had I stayed at home—and it had taken me seven months to learn that it was meant that I should not know more. There can be no quarrel with what was done—only with the way it was done—which was not pretty. Somehow, as Japan sank closer to the horizon, I found myself wondering whether the Goddess of Truth couldn't travel the breadth of that land incog.—even if she played the leading part in a melodrama with a star in her forehead and her own name emblazoned in Japanese ideographs around her breast. I think so. I wondered, too, if in shedding the wrinkled skin of Orientalism, Japan might not have found it even better than winning a battle—to shed with it polite duplicity and bring in the blunt telling of the truth; for if the arch on which a civilization rests be character, the key-stone of that arch, I suppose, must be honesty—simple honesty.
Right gladly we struck the backward Trail of the Saxon.
Transcriber Notes:
Throughout the dialogues, there were words used to mimic accents of the speakers. Those words were retained as-is.
Errors in punctuations and inconsistent hyphenation were not corrected unless otherwise noted.
On page ix, "Liaoyang" was replaced with "Liao-Yang".