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

by Lucian Swift Kirtland

VIII
MANY QUERIES

In abrupt change as we neared Shiogiri the people grew more prosperous and more smiling. One housewife along the way was busy with a gigantic baking in the sun. I have forgotten just what she said the small cakes were which she was patting out so expeditiously by the hundred. Her hands coquettishly fell into error in her routine when we wished her good-day. She had an adventurous spirit behind the work-a-day masque of her face. Inordinate questioners as we could generally prove ourselves, it was she who took and kept the lead in every kind of interrogation. She wanted to know all about the great world over the ridge of mountains which stopped her sight. She followed this questioning with an exposition of facts which she already knew about foreigners. She could be quite sure, she said, that the information which she had previously collected through gossip had in no way been adulterated by exaggeration. The proof was that we looked exactly as she had hitherto imagined foreigners. This comment was more interesting than flattering. Her anecdotes about foreigners were fluently parallel to the tales about pagans which I used to hear as a child from the cook when she returned from her missionary circle.

I asked our hostess if she would let me take her picture. My hesitation in asking was an unnecessary contribution to the proceedings. She was much pleased. She patted down her hair, rubbed her cheeks with a pale blue towel until they were rosy red, and then dusted her hands and arms with rice powder. After that she ran into the house to reappear without her trousers. Hori told her quickly that foreigners are greatly shocked to see women in skirts. We appropriately pretended to be unseeing long enough for the hasty redonning of the discarded trousers and then the camera clicked.

Foreigners, particularly missionaries, are by no means unknown in the quarter of Shiogiri built around the railway station. The town is a rather important junction. At the new inn the servants who met us at the door told us that they knew just what the foreigner likes. We in our obstinacy refused to like what the foreigners who had come before us had said that they liked. It was one of the least happy of all our rests.

The service in the shiny new inn had lost the spontaneity, the not-to-be-imitated bloom of the yado-ya which makes each guest believe that he is the most honoured. It had resolved into the inevitable mortification which comes from trying to please two masters. When they asked whether we wished native dishes or foreign dishes for dinner, we kept insisting that we wished Japanese fare, but the inn could not shake itself free from compromises and we had a native dinner cooked after some imagined foreign style; just as we would have had a semblance of a foreign dinner cooked in the native pots if we had consented to act our proper parts as seiyo-jins. The trouble with such in-between places is not so much that they are jerry-built or that the ignorance of why is naturally followed by an ignorance of how, but that something essentially vital has been abstracted; the fire has gone, and the result is a listless lassitude.

Across the street was the entrance to another inn, with an electric sign at the gate and with two rows of paper lanterns hanging over the path. While we were taking a walk and looking in at the shops Hori picked up the information from someone that the rival establishment to ours was half inn, half geisha house, that the maids, in fact, were country geishas. Every geisha must have a geisha’s ticket from the government to follow her vocation of innocent amusing. All geishas are not innocent, but says the government, if they are not they must possess another license. Through its varieties and grade of licenses the government relies largely upon maintaining order; thus, much of the work of the police is devoted to social regulation to prevent disorder rather than to the otherwise necessity of curbing it after it breaks forth. In any social system, whether the general scheme reaches out for the ideal or not, if the cogs fit in smoothly enough to work at all, the logical conclusion reads that the better the machine runs the more nearly have the everyday, actual wishes of the people been satisfied. In Japan the social regulations and the demands of the popular moral standard appear to mesh without much friction. This does not mean that the social problem has been solved, but it does mean that the compromise has measurably been made with eyes open and thus some evils have been successfully eliminated.

The geisha tea-houses have their special licenses, and inns have special licenses. While many combinations of licenses are possible, it is contrary to custom to issue a permit to a geisha house to have all the privileges of an inn. Hori thought that there might be licenses of that sort issued in the smaller provincial towns such as Shiogiri. Whatever the facts were, such a combination license would seem to be contrary to the usual intent of the regulations. The government proceeds about its business of regulation without much sentiment, but it does seek by its very system of labelling to secure to the innocent the assurance of travelling through the kingdom without unwittingly having to come into contact with vice. The traveller is supposed to be able to go to an inn without having to inquire whether it is also a questionable tea-house.

It might seem that the easiest way to have found out what was the exact status of the inn across the street would have been to have walked there and asked. Hori, however, was lukewarm for any such investigation. I discovered in this mood of Hori’s cosmos a trait more interesting than the entire subject of licenses. The intuition came suddenly in a wholeness. This trait might have been called patriotic, a patriotism so very broad that in the first inkling it seemed narrow. He had a deep desire that we should understand Japanese ideals, and his process of thought was that while he believed that to understand Japan we must see everything, nevertheless at all times there should be a certain normality in the seeing. As he explained, many Japanese customs and modes of thought, puzzling at first, are quite comprehensible when the entire fabric is examined. He did not wish to have certain squares of the embroidery held up to be criticized without the offset of properly contrasting squares. Naturally his own impetus often carried him a little beyond that normal into looking for the bright and golden patches and ignoring the dull ones. I think he was theoretically right, but most of us have a childish overconfidence in our maturity and we do not wish to have it doubted that we are capable observers even of the abnormal. Experience has not trained us to follow, even if we wished, an idealized instruction. Thus I am afraid that O-Owre-san and I remained recalcitrant observers most of the time and in our own way used our philosophical microscopes in grandiose attempt to disintegrate the atom and conclude the infinite.

It is true that the most balanced mind can be poisoned by an impression. We are sensitized to light and shade. The traveller who goes to one of the great capitals of the world and endures as his first impression a visit to the dregs of the underworld forever finds the darkness of that shadow over his concept of aught else. This comparison is indeed putting a superlative exaggeration upon Hori’s not wishing to go to the inn-tea-house across the street. Just because I happened to glean something of his attitude about our excursion as a whole from that particular incident did not mean that he was attaching particular importance to it. The subject was dropped and as we were all tired, we went to bed, and allowed the double row of paper lanterns to swing on in the breeze without our three figures casting shadows on the path beneath, and the question that interested me about what sort of a license had been issued there was never settled.