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

by Lucian Swift Kirtland

We slept until we awoke to find the sun shining. Our hostess, with immobile, gentle face, was still fanning us. We were abjectly, guiltily remorseful. We sat up and she brought fresh tea. We appealed in a roundabout way for forgiveness by praising the teacups and the teapot. They were very fine. She explained that they had been the gift of some daimyo, she thought. Whoever he was, he had made many rich gifts to the temple. She pushed back panels and brought out bowls and vases, and told us romantic legends. The legends were colourful rather than of plot. I knew then that I could never remember more than their impression. The old woman’s own personality had drifted into limbo and she had absorbed in its place a reflection of those dark, mysterious temple rooms. She held out robes and porcelains before us and then carried them away quickly. She led us through the shadows, stopping to light incense at the feet of the Buddhas with the reverence that such acts were her life and not her task.

We said good-bye and walked away, following along the crest of the hill. The temple roof disappeared behind the treetops and we were again in the modern world, for at that instant across the valley we saw a huge, nondescript, barracks-like building. It had been erected in the worship of efficiency, and was more completely mere walls of windows with a roof above than even an American factory. As we stood watching, a man paced out of the gate and behind him stepped a girl, and then another girl, and another, until it was a long procession. The line pursued a twisting way, sometimes in measured steps, sometimes in undulating running. At last the line formed a serpentine coil in an open space.

The building was the high school for girls and the man leading the line was the physical instructor. The pupils wore the distinguishing universal reddish-purple skirt of the high schools which are bound over the kimonos. These skirts look heavy and uncomfortable. They must have been designed by some minister of education in those days of translation when the demand for modern ideas included always that they must be served raw. It was believed with loyalty and devotion that the principle at the base of the secret of foreign success was the axiom that nothing useful can be ornamental.

The physical instructor was inhumanly military and dignified—and so overwhelmingly efficient in his instruction that it was annoying to see such perfection. Secretly perhaps, but always, the male animal instinctively protests and resists that women should unite into solidarity to do things. To his roots he begs that if they do so do, they shall not achieve success in the essay. Man has always run in packs, but woman has been the eternal individual. Our wrath was against the traitor in sleeveless gymnasium shirt and tight foreign trousers who was teaching so systematically and effectively to that line of girls the secret of team work. By the sorrow of his eyes it could be seen he acknowledged to himself his infamy to his sex, but his loyalty to his Emperor was that he must conduct that exercise drill and conduct it professionally.

Hori suggested that we visit the school, insisting that such a visit would be considered a great compliment. It seemed to us more like an impertinence of vagrants, but Hori continued firm that it was our duty as itinerant foreigners to interrupt the machinery. He took a couple of our visiting cards, mere innocent slips of pasteboard, and proceeded with his fountain pen to make them pretentiously formidable. He raked up all the detritus of our past lives. We did have sufficiency of conventional shame to cough apologetically when Hori read aloud the outrageous qualifications of our scholarship and degrees which he had added after our names. We learned that it is a mistake to believe that there can be no utilitarian value in a college degree: letters after one’s name are seeds ready to burst into useful bloom under an exotic sun, and the flowering may be a pass into a provincial high school for Japanese maidens.

A servant took those remarkable cards from Hori’s hand and walked off down the long corridor. The result was that a smiling diplomat came to us empowered to minister to our entertainment and instruction. We were honoured as the first courtesy by not being allowed to remove our heavy walking shoes. Every step that I took on those shining, spotless floors made me feel as if I were perpetrating a clownish indecency. The remorse that follows one’s own wilfulness can never be so keen as the agony when sheer fate ordains unavoidable vulgarity. Still, in leaving heel marks in the polished wood, there was the saving humour of the idea that our hosts thought they were honouring us by encouraging our foreign barbarity.

There were unending rooms of maids in purple skirts. They were studying every sort of subject from the abstract to the practical, and from the aesthetic to the ethical. There were girls with the refinement of profile which one seeks and finds in the ideal drawings by the great Japanese artists; and there were those other faces, the round, good-natured O-Martha-sans. We looked over their shoulders at their paintings of flowers, at their embroidery, at their arithmetic sums, their maps, and their English composition. The Japanese say, “Perhaps rich nations can afford to economize in education and to exploit ignorance, but we, being very poor, must be practical. We cannot take such risk of ignorance.”

A modicum of truth lies in the statement that the Japanese have taken up education as a new religion. (And some of the bumptious youthful devotees in Tokyo impress one that it was a mistaken bargain to have allowed them to exchange pocket shrines for text-books.) Theories of education have many splits everywhere in the world and the Japanese fervour has not escaped having to face the necessity of certain decisions. One difference of opinion, which might almost be called theological, rests in the question whether the youth should be educated to think according to conviction or to think according to conformity; to think or to be taught what to think. A Japanese told us that the government must risk its last penny to-day to guarantee the future, that the people are being educated to understand national policies in the faith that understanding will breed willing cooperation and willing self-sacrifice. When I asked him which he meant, whether students were being taught to understand the policies of the state or whether they were being taught to believe in them, I rather thought that he considered my question argumentative and perhaps unfriendly. However, without his having answered the question, it is obvious that Japan is trusting its fate to the system of educating toward solidarity, the impulse to think alike.

After our noisy boots had been in and out of many rooms we were taken to meet the head of the school. He was not in his administration room, but he entered in a few minutes. After the formal introduction he clapped his hands for tea. His appearance and his dignity were of ancient Japan. His thin divided moustache fell in long pencil-like strands from the corners of his lip, as do those of the sages in the ancient Chinese paintings. His kimono was silk. We smoked and drank tea and talked abstractedly about education. It was a girls’ school but he talked of boys. We strayed from Montessori methods to industrial training. After he had used some such phrases as “a sound education,” O-Owre-san asked how many years of a boy’s life he considered should be given over to his schooling. His eyes had been of passive light. They now gleamed like those of a warrior.

“Until he has been taught loyalty to his Emperor!”