While we were buying my new twelve-sen pipe in the Shiogiri one-price store, Hori commented with obvious emphasis several times that he was pleased that the prices were so carefully marked on the tags. As smoking may at any time become a ceremony, I spent many minutes in my selection, and through these minutes Hori kept dropping his pointed comments, but I stored away the impression of his satisfaction over the price tags to be asked about later. An appropriate time did not come for several days. An hour came when we were lounging on an inn balcony in the soft night air.
It seemed that our method of shopping was the disturbing pressure against Hori’s peace of mind. We two foreigners undoubtedly had many flaws which came to light under the wear of intimate association, but it was this one which at last drove Hori to the verge where he had to unburden his feelings. In the curio shops, or wherever we were making purchases, when we came upon something that interested us, we immediately asked: “How much?” It had been natural, when Hori was with us, to rely upon him to interpret rather than to employ our own cumbrous methods of transmitting ideas. As soon as we received an intimation of the bargain price we proceeded to the bargaining and continued until we arrived at what was presumably the lowest compromise of the shopkeeper. Hori had also noticed that we sometimes put off deciding whether we really wished to purchase until we discovered the eventual price. We quite reversed the ceremonial purchase making enacted by a Japanese gentleman. As Hori witnessed it, the difference was meaningful. The Japanese collector looks first of all at an object to see whether it merits his attention. If it does, there follows an extended conversation about its intrinsic excellence. Every question as to artistic value, authenticity, age, workmanship, uniqueness—these are all settled before a word about the price arises. If the object does not equal his demands of it, the collector departs without inquiry about the money value—for why should he be interested in the cost of an article if not in the article itself?
Hori shook his head sadly. “You always ask right away: ‘How much?’” he said. “That sounds very mercenary to us. It looks as if you were more interested in cheapness than quality.”
We had not suspected that Hori was writhing when, under the pressure of our Occidental impetus, he had been asking for us the questions of price. As a matter of fact, be it to his credit and our discredit, despite the simplification of his quick interpreting against our imperfect use of the few words that we did know, when it came to the detail of price our efforts often seemed to be able to effect a more extraordinary drop from the original quotation than when such arguing was put off until all other details were settled. It is true that the merchants who have really fine things will not show nor sell their best to customers whose appreciation they doubt, but it may also be true that as far as we did have appreciation, we made up our minds more quickly than does the Japanese collector, and thus the stages of consideration which Hori missed were not so much lacking as they were abbreviated.
The standards of the samurai when he goes forth to make purchases should not be confused as being an index to the methods of modern Japan in attacking the world’s markets. In such trading there is no nation which is more intent upon giving the customer what the customer thinks he wants, and price and profit are sufficiently an affair of cold business to be safely refrigerated against any germs of sentimentalism. Hori was speaking as the son of the civilization which flowered in the feudal days. Whatever that civilization was, it was not commercial. In that old régime the shopkeeper was only a shopkeeper, and a discussion of ethics in trade occupied little space in the code of honour of the nation. When Hori’s fathers stopped to buy a fan or a bronze or a roll of brocade or sandals for their feet, or whatever it might be that they wished, bargaining stopped as soon as they reached the end of their patience—and they were most impatient warriors. They might arrogantly pay what was asked, or, if their patience was too far gone, they might lop off the head of the obdurate merchant. The last probability had a tendency to keep prices fairly near to an equitable level when the two-sworded men were purchasers.
It is not an appreciated trait in the modern world to have contempt for money. Japan’s nobility, when the Shogun ruled, had sincere contempt for money. There is something dramatic, even noble, in having such a contempt, but it must be said that it is a much easier possession to maintain if back of it the possessors have the inalienable ownership of their landed estates. The descendants of the ancient orders in Japan do not own the land to-day and, examining their position in the cold light of fact, their contempt for any consideration of things commercial is the sign-board finger pointing to their eventual elimination. It was the miracle of all time when those noble families responded to the necessity of the new order, forced upon Japan by the outside world, and gave up their feudal right to the land to the Emperor for a more democratic distribution. They not only surrendered their land in response to the Emperor’s edict, but they metamorphosed their sons into statesmen to help carry through the ideal. Their children went to foreign lands and laboured at menial tasks to learn the ways of the seiyo-jin. Returning home they recognized that the standards both of commerce and ordinary trade had to be raised. Their encouragement to their country to proceed along new lines was practical and effective; nevertheless few were the sons of the nobility who themselves entered the world of commerce. Rather was it that they encouraged a middle class to rise. Even with no longer a perpetuation of power through landed estates, the old aristocracy has so far continued to exert the preponderating influence in national leadership. Can they continue to cherish a contempt of money and at the same time withstand the power of the new commercial class which is becoming richer every year while they are becoming poorer? Can they prove that, even in this age, honour and loyalty need not have to go hand in hand with money, and that poverty, second only to death, is not the great leveller?
Curiously, indeed, the abandon which comes from contempt for wealth by this class in Japan has had a bullish effect in one small department of world trade. Westerners first thought of Japan as a nation so given over to aestheticism that it used its hours in creating beautiful works of art and then admiring them. In those early days examples of their highest achievement in art were to be found at incredibly low prices. For a decade or two after its ports were forced open by the foreigner, the country was absorbed in adjusting itself to meet conditions unique to its traditions. It was a revolution which had to endure the strain of the uncompromising lavishness of war without the excitement of war. In such a period “priceless” art objects had their price. Those objects of art had been so intimately associated with the calm of the old order in its social and religious system that when that order gave ground the Japanese disregarded such possessions. It was then that gold lacquer boxes were either sold for a sum equal to the mere salvage of the gold or else melted in the furnace.
Those first years of readjustment presented the glorious days for the foreign collector. Then came reaction. To their own bewilderment the Japanese awoke to find that their love for the beautiful had not been merely an appendage of the feudal system. They began to compete for their own treasures. Prices began to advance to the mystification of the foreign buyers. The Japanese aristocrats were entering into collecting with that abandon which can exist only through sincere contempt for money. Thus it is that very few fine things now come out of Japan. Japan is poor, desperately poor, and it would seem that our millionaires should easily outbid them, but to a mind commercially trained, eventually there enters a consideration of price. To the son of the old Japanese nobility there is no such consideration except the limit of his purse. I heard the story of a young nobleman who desired a certain Korean antique. His wealth was about six hundred thousand yen. Like the Roman youth who shook dice, hazarding himself to become the slave of his opponent should he lose, this young Japanese entered the bidding until it was his last yen which bought the antiquity. The dilettante does not bid successfully against that spirit.