Samurai Trails: A Chronicle of Wanderings on the Japanese High Road

by Lucian Swift Kirtland

They lead isolated, unhappy lives.

They always have a beautiful daughter (one only) to fall heir to the riches.

This daughter dreams of noble lovers, but no Japanese, whatever his rank, be it noble, humble, or decayed (or, for that matter, no matter how much in debt he may be to her father), would ever throw away his pride to wed a pawnbroker’s daughter. Thus she is left to grieve out her heart in the midst of her father’s luxury.

A Japanese believes certain things patriotically. I know that Hori does not believe these same things intellectually, for I was once rude enough to continue an argument until he capitulated intellectually—but for the love of country and the required loyalty to what should be, he also keeps to the beliefs which he should have as a Japanese. After all, juxtapositioned to such faith, mere intellectual judgment does seem lacking in vital fluid.

The hiatus in Hori’s Japanese life—the foreign period and influence—began when he was of the high school age and went to America. Thus, at the time when the mind is supposed to be most receptive, he was separated from the traditions and ethical customs of his homeland, and he made no return home until he had left his American university. A peculiar duality may come from such a training. It would be impossible otherwise, for instance, that one individual should really appreciate both a symphony orchestra and a samisen, not so much from the angle of technical divergence in the use of notes, tones, and scales as in aesthetic comparison. To any human being with emotional sensitiveness and response, not possessing a dual personality, acknowledgment of the rights of the symphony would seem to preclude those of the samisen.

I had lost my Japanese pipe. Those little iron bowls continue to be a most admirable luxury through all of the days that one is in the land of their invention. When the traveller leaves the shores of Japan he takes away with him packages of silken tobacco and his pipe, only to find that he never lights it again. The charm is broken when the circle is broken, and the circle, I suppose, is a unity when one is lying on the cushions of a balcony overlooking a garden, and a maid brings the charcoal hibachi and a pot of tea. You touch the bowl of the pipe to the fire and then—three puffs and a half. You knock the ash into a bamboo cup. Perhaps the maid refills the pipe, touches it to the charcoal, and hands it to you again.

Ordinarily these pipes are sold everywhere, but at Narii we could not find them. When we were walking into Shiogiri I asked Hori to help me keep an eye on the shops as we passed. After a time he said: “Here we are. Here’s a one-price store.”

We had not come upon just such a shop before. While the stock and the arrangement was purely native, the atmosphere of the place was distinctly un-Japanese. A little of everything was for sale, but instead of the selling being a social ceremony, the shopkeeper and his wife and his sons and his daughters were expeditious clerks and not hosts. The entering customer asked for what he wished to see, and a price tag told him the cost. That was the beginning and the end of any bargaining.

In the conventional shop the buyer sits down leisurely, after removing his geta, and perhaps has a cup of tea. If an ordinary utility is wished, the negotiating is necessarily devoid of much opportunity for extended approach, consideration, and conclusion, but it is always to be remembered that our idea of what is a waste of time may be the Japanese idea of a valuably used moment. The little shops have no opening and closing hours. Literally, there is all the time there is. The clerk does not sell eight, nine, or ten hours of his day to his employer. He sells all of it. As it is impossible to keep at high pressure for maybe twenty hours of the twenty-four (and twenty hours is not an exaggeration in some instances) nature’s insistence for rest has to come out of the working day. The fact that the workers are not awaiting the striking of a clock for their liberty, but are more or less taking it as it comes, accounts for what is often a mystery to travellers, the easy gaiety of a busy Japanese street. Workmen put down their tools and stop for a visit; the shopkeeper chats indefinitely with a customer; the maids at the inns have plenty of time to light pipes for the guests and pour tea. Our idea is that the individual’s liberty begins at the sharp demarcation of the hour which ceases to belong to the employer. After the wanderer has lived for a time in the midst of the Oriental system, the impression comes that time is a continuous flow and that it is not a succession of intervals as it is with us. The people of the East have even found a counteracting thrust to oppose the tyranny of the railroad schedule. By arriving at the station indefinitely early they can show their contempt for definite departures.