"Bother the Shogun! I've seen something like the Babu class, and something like the farmer class. What I want to see is the Rajput class—the man who used to wear the thousands and thousands of swords in the curio-shops. Those swords were as much made for use as a Rajputana sabre. Where are the men who used 'em? Show me a Samurai."
The Professor answered not a word, but scrutinised heads on the wayside platforms. "I take it that the high-arched forehead, club nose, and eyes close together—the Spanish type—are from Rajput stock, while the German-faced Jap is the Khattri—the lower class."
Thus we talked of the natures and dispositions of men we knew nothing about till we had decided (1) that the painful politeness of the Japanese nation rose from the habit, dropped only twenty years ago, of extended and emphatic sword-wearing, even as the Rajput is the pink of courtesy because his friend goes armed; (2) that this politeness will disappear in another generation, or will at least be seriously impaired; (3) that the cultured Japanese of the English pattern will corrupt and defile the tastes of his neighbours till (4) Japan altogether ceases to exist as a separate nation and becomes a button-hook manufacturing appanage of America; (5) that these things being so, and sure to happen in two or three hundred years, the Professor and I were lucky to reach Japan betimes; and (6) that it was foolish to form theories about the country until we had seen a little of it.
So we came to the city of Kioto in regal sunshine, tempered by a breeze that drove the cherry blossoms in drifts about the streets. One Japanese town, in the southern provinces at least, is very like another to look at—a grey-black sea of house roofs, speckled with the white walls of the fire-proof godowns where merchants and rich men keep their chief treasures. The general level is broken by the temple roofs, which are turned up at the edges, and remotely resemble so many terai-hats. Kioto fills a plain almost entirely surrounded by wooded hills, very familiar in their aspect to those who have seen the Siwaliks. Once upon a time it was the capital of Japan, and to-day numbers two hundred and fifty thousand people. It is laid out like an American town. All the streets run at right angles to each other. That, by the way, is exactly what the Professor and I are doing. We are elaborating the theory of the Japanese people, and we can't agree.
No. XV
KIOTO AND HOW I FELL IN LOVE WITH THE CHIEF BELLE THERE AFTER I HAD CONFERRED WITH CERTAIN CHINA MERCHANTS WHO TRAFFICKED IN TEA. SHOWS FURTHER HOW, IN A GREAT TEMPLE, I BROKE THE TENTH COMMANDMENT IN FIFTY-THREE PLACES AND BOWED DOWN BEFORE KANO AND A CARPENTER. TAKES ME TO ARASHIMA.
"Could I but write the things I see,
My world would haste to gaze with me.
But since the traitor Pen hath failed
To paint earth's loveliness unveiled,
I can but pray my folk who read:—
'For lavish Will take starveling Deed.'"
We are consorting with sixty of the Sahib-log in the quaintest hotel that ever you saw. It stands on the hillside overlooking the whole town of Kioto, and its garden is veritable Japanese. Fantastically trimmed tea trees, junipers, dwarfed pine, and cherry, are mixed up with ponds of goldfish, stone lanterns, quaint rock-work, and velvety turf all at an angle of thirty-five degrees. Behind us the pines, red and black, cover the hill and run down in a long spur to the town. But an auctioneer's catalogue cannot describe the charms of the place or deal justly with the tea-garden full of cherry trees that lies a hundred yards below the hotel. We were solemnly assured that hardly any one came to Kioto. That is why we meet every soul in the ship that had brought us to Nagasaki; and that is why our ears are constantly assailed with the clamour of people who are discussing places which must be "done." An Englishman is a very horrible person when he is on the war-path; so is an American, a Frenchman, or a German.
I had been watching the afternoon sunlight upon the trees and the town, the shift and play of colour in the crowded street of the cherry, and crooning to myself because the sky was blue and I was alive beneath it with a pair of eyes in my head.