When We Were Strolling Players in the East

by Louise Jordan Miln

In Japan it is chiefly the middle class that has become Europeanised. The upper nobility and the poorer peasantry are the classes most tenacious of the old national customs. The upper middle class is the travelled class. The masses are too poor, the nobles are too tied by grave responsibilities, to go far from Japan. It is the son of some petty nobleman or well-to-do gentleman who goes to Oxford or Harvard for his education, and returns home a very Westernised Oriental indeed. Then, too, class prejudice is always stronger in the very high and in the very lowly than in the intermediate classes.

I went to a Japanese funeral in Tokio. But I do not for a moment pretend that it was a typical funeral. Even those who attempt to write exhaustively about Japan find little or nothing to say about the burial customs of the Japanese. There are a number of reasons why it is very difficult to say anything definite. First, all Japan, like Gaul of old, is divided into three parts: into Japan the old, the conservative, into Japan the new and iconoclastic, and into Japan the compromising. In this third Japan, nothing is anything, anything is everything. European habits and Japanese customs are jumbled together in the most unhappy way. Then, as for the second reason, if we confine our inquiries to the old conservative Japanese—the only Japanese picturesquely interesting—we find them so divided into sects and so subdivided into families that what you say, truthfully enough, about Yamamato, would be entirely false about Nozeyama. Japanese religion is a very puzzling thing to any one who comes of a race accustomed to take religion seriously. Religion in Japan is a subject by itself—a big subject. I will try to be intelligible briefly. A large proportion of the Japanese are Buddhists, free-and-easy Buddhists, lightly-worshipping Buddhists, but still Buddhists. But these Buddhists are divided into fifteen sects. The funeral customs of each sect differ from those of the other fourteen. There are also many of the funeral observances determined by the rank of the dead, still others decided by the family to which he belonged, and, again, some dependent upon his financial placement.

I went to a Japanese funeral. It was, I repeat, typical of some Japanese funerals only.

The day before the interment I went to the house in which the death had occurred. The dead man had been prominent in the upper mercantile circles. Hundreds of Japanese men and women were passing noiselessly in and out of the house. They had come to say good-bye to a man they had known well and liked well; they were all dressed quietly. It is an insult to enter a Japanese house of death clad in anything but the plainest, simplest garments. We passed in with the others. I was with a Japanese gentleman and his wife. An old man-servant showed us into a large, handsome room. Another servant took charge of us. Both these men were dressed in the plainest dark-blue livery; both had red eyes. The room was furnished in strict Japanese style; it was full of sorrowful-looking people. Several of them hastened to extemporise a seat for me out of cushions and the broad window-seat. There were no chairs in the room, of course, only mats. Japanese courtesy never fails, never flags; it is the real, the universal religion of Japan, and from it there are no dissenters. A Japanese allows nothing to lessen the full measure of graceful politeness which he pays you, because he owes it to himself to do so. Absolutely nothing!

The condemned man about to perform hara-kiri, bows with extreme civility to his witnesses and assistants. No sorrow, no trouble, no illness, not death, not marriage, not even birth itself, in the least way frees a Japanese from the grave obligation of being very polite. I went one night in Kobe to the hut of a poor Japanese woman who had been suddenly taken very ill. When I went in, I saw that the joy of motherhood would be hers in a very few moments. But I was allowed to do nothing for her until she had spoken all the prescribed words of Japanese greeting and given me a cup of tea. No wonder that the Japanese women are more charming than those of almost any other race, when the poorest and lowliest of them are so heroic in their practice of a woman’s greatest charm—courtesy!

The room in which they had so kindly contrived me a delightful seat was the ante-chamber of the room in which the dead man lay. Maid-servants were passing round trays of sweetmeats, which every one refused, pointing to the inner door and shaking their heads. Then a white-haired old man, who was evidently not a servant, brought us an exquisitely carved ivory tray. On it were thimble-sized silver cups holding saki. There are two things in this world I cannot drink—whisky and saki. They are very much alike. Saki is the Japanese whisky, and is even nastier to my thinking than Occidental whisky. The friend I was with knew my repugnance to saki, and hastened over to me as swiftly as she might, for Japanese etiquette forbids one to move except very slowly in a house of mourning. “You must drink it,” she whispered, “it is a health to the dead. And his brother, who is offering it to you, will be deeply offended if you don’t.” I took the cup and rose, meaning to bow to the ground as every one else was doing. But the old cup-bearer motioned me gently back on to my cushions. “Try not yourself with our strange customs. My sister feels it very kind that you are here.” I had known the dead man’s wife rather well, years before, in Washington.

Every few moments a servant pushed back from the inside the door of the next room. When he did so, a few people passed in to the dead. Our turn came and we went in. A large white cloth was spread upon the floor. In the centre lay a low bier, on it, clad in his best robes, lay the dead man. Upon his bosom, half inside the opening of his kimono, lay a rose. The room was sweet with flowers. The servants stood silently near the doors, and the whole room spoke of sad, loving care. My two friends bent and kissed the dead face, and we passed out by a door opposite to that through which we had entered.

We were leaving the house when word was brought me that the widow would like to see me. I went upstairs, and was shown into a room just over the one we had left. It was a typical Japanese bedroom. The bereaved woman half sat, half lay upon her sleeping mat, one elbow resting upon her peculiar little Japanese pillow. She was dressed in coarse hempen cloth, which is the prescribed Japanese mourning. It would be wrong, I think, for me to write about the five minutes I spent with her. We were friends, and the wide racial difference between us would afford me a poor excuse if I utilised her grief for a paragraph.

The next day I went to the funeral service in the temple. The body was no longer visible. It had been encased, in a sitting posture, in a square wooden box. Then the box had been filled with carmine to preserve the body from decay. This is expensive. When it cannot be afforded, carmine is put in the ears, nose, and mouth of the corpse as a partial preventative of decomposition.

In a room of the temple had been placed the white stone tablet, upon which was inscribed the new name by which the dead would enter paradise. After death, every conservative Japanese, who was a Buddhist, receives a new name; it is called okurina, or accompanying name. Into this room passed the incense burners. Each was provided with a paper packet of incense, which he burned before the tablet. Behind the tablet sat the priests of the temple. The temple itself was a gay, joyous looking place, which seemed strangely out of keeping with the grave, subdued manner of the company. Demeanour is everything at a Japanese funeral; but were it not so, it would be impossible for a people of such exquisite good taste to behave lightly on such an occasion.