Two pictures only I carried away of the many I hoped to see—the Hawaiian swimmers, bronzed and perfect as statues, who floated out to meet us and dive for coins, and a crowd of little yellow fellows, each on the swaying branch of the monkey-pod tree, black hair shaking in the wind, white teeth flashing, faces merry, and mouths stretched wide with song.
Thence eleven long, long days to that sunset entrance into the Land of the Rising Sun—where Perry came to throw open to the world the long-shut sea portals of Japan.
The Japanese way of revealing heart-beats is not the way of the Occidental world, and seeing no signs of war, this correspondent, at least, straightway forgot the mission on which he had come, and straightway was turned into an eager student of a people and a land which since childhood he had yearned to see.
On a certain bluff sits a certain tea-house—you can see it from the deck of the ship. It is the tea-house of One Hundred and One Steps, and the mistress of it is O-kin-san, daughter of the man who was mayor when Perry opened the sea portals at the mouth of the cannon, whose guest Perry was, and whose friend.
O-kin-san's people lost their money once, and she opened the tea-house, as the American girl under similar circumstances would have taken to the typewriter and the stenographer's pen. The house has a year of life for almost every one of the steps that mount to it, which is ancient life for Japan, where fires make an infant life of three years for the average Japanese home. The tea-girls are O-kin-san's own kin. Everything under her roof is blameless, and the women of any home in any land can be taken there fearlessly.
An American enthusiast—a voluntary exile, whom I met later—told me that O-kin-san's Japanese was as good as could be found in the empire; that her husband was one of the best-educated men he had ever known, and had been a great help and inspiration to Lafcadio Hearn. There were all the pretty courtesies, the pretty ceremonies, and the gentle kindness of which the world has read.
After tea and sake and little Japanese cakes and peanuts, thence straightway to Tokio, whence the soldiers went to the front and the unknown correspondent was going, at that time, to an unknown destination in an unknown time. It is an hour between little patches of half-drowned rice bulbs, cottages thatched with rice straw, with green things growing on the roof, and little gardens laid out with an art minute and exquisite, blossoming trees of wild cherry, that beloved symbol of Japanese bravery because it dares to spread its petals under falling snow, dashed here and there with the red camellia that is unlucky because it drops its blossom whole and suggests the time when the Japanese head might fall for a slight offence; between little hills overspread with pine trees, and little leafless saplings that help so much to give the delicate, airy quality that characterizes the landscape of Japan. At every station was a hurrying throng of men, women, and children who clicked the stone pavements on xylophones with a music that some writer with the tympanum of a blacksmith characterized as a clatter. These getas are often selected, I am told, to suit the individual ear.
At Tokio outward evidences of war were as meagre as ever. But to that lack, the answer is, "It is not the Japanese custom." I am told that the night war was declared the Japanese went to bed, but about every bulletin board there is now always an eager crowd of watchers. The shout of "Nippon banzai!" from the foreigner, which means "Good luck to Japan," always gets a grateful response from the child in the street, the coolie with his ricksha, policeman on his beat, or the Japanese gentleman in his carriage.
And then the stories I heard of the devotion and sacrifice of the people who are left at home! The women let their hair go undressed once a month that they may contribute each month the price of the dressing—five sen. A gentleman discovered that every servant in his household, from butler down, was contributing a certain amount of his wages each month, and in consequence offered to raise wages just the amount each servant was giving away. The answer was:
"Sir, we cannot allow that; it is an honor for us to give, and it would be you who would be doing our duty for us to Japan."