CHAPTER EIGHT
From the square, gray platform of Shimbashi station, terraced by stone steps, hung with tiled eaves, and surrounded by a swarming school of black jinrikishas, each with a chattering, gesticulating, blue-clad human horse before it, one dives at will into the iridescent life of modern Yedo. Regarded as a city, it is little more than a collection of villages carelessly swept together; little communities where the same streets catch up altered names; districts with opposing trades, antagonistic feast-days, and rival deities.
Tanners preëmpt an unsavory ward. Shoemakers claim for themselves a network of small streets. The dry-goods merchants command an avenue. Pipe-sellers, wine-merchants, tobacconists, book-sellers, marketmen, carpenters,—each guild tends to make a centre for itself. Perhaps, as one consequence of this segregation, Tokio becomes the stronghold of street peddlers. It matters little to the housewife that the nearest market is four miles away, when sections of that market, strapped to boyish shoulders, go crying past her gate with the punctuality of planets. Tokio is a place where circulating libraries literally circulate; where perambulating oil-shops fill lamps on the patron's kitchen step or in the glass frame at his gate, and then stop to light them; where the tailor finishes a quilt or an overcoat on the bedroom floor, and the hair-dresser needs no local habitation.
In a great semicircle crowded near the Red Gate of the Imperial University, live and study and brawl and bluster the students,—the future Nogis, Togos, Kurokis, Saigos, Itos, and Oyamas of their race,—now no more than restless young spirits in a recognized democracy of their own. Some of them cook their own meals and patch their own faded hakama,—a species of heroism to make death on a battlefield grow tame. Others "board" in one of the long, barn-like dormitories, or in a convenient cheap lodging-house, often three and four in a room, at the enormous rate of fifty cents a week. Poverty seems to them admirable, nothing whatever to be ashamed of. The Japanese youth of the samurai class is bred to a distaste of bodily luxury. Should one of their number show a leaning toward soft cushions and rich food, the others ridicule him, call him "O Sharè Sama," the Tokio equivalent of "Dandy," and say that his soul grows fat.
Yuki sped through all, breathless with the wonder of home-returning. The three jinrikishas, Tetsujo, of course, in the lead, went one after the other in a straight line, as though on an invisible track. Whether in a lane four feet wide, or in an avenue two hundred, this goose-like manner of procedure never changed. Old familiar street-corners, familiar pines, changed shop fronts, appealed to the girl with a sense of reality. Her eyes filled and her heart beat faster as she caught her first glimpse, after four years, of towering moated walls where crawled the "Dragon Pines" of Iyemitsu, and of the high dark roof now sheltering her beloved ruler.
Beyond the palace and its moats came foreignized Yedo. Sidewalks were here, though pedestrians still preferred the middle of the street, turning aside good-naturedly at the warning "Hek! hek!" of approaching vehicles. The streets, conspicuously broad, were paved with concrete or with stone. On every side rose buildings just completed, of brick and stone, or great steel frames for other edifices. It might have been Connecticut. The sidewalk trees, set rigidly in hollowed concrete basins, refused to grow in Japanese fashion, and had the poise of elms. Down centres of these streets horse-cars jangled. Work was already started on the superseding electric line. Yuki observed it all with conscious pride, yet her eyes brightened with new eagerness as another quick turn plunged them once more into the heart of feudal Yedo.
The streets narrowed now to lanes, bordered on each side with shops,—mere open booths,—flung wide to the dim rear plaster wall. Shelves holding various wares came down sheer to the matted floor. In the middle of the space generally sat the master, while skirmishing about, sometimes in a gloomy slit of a passage to the rear, sometimes up or down stepladder-like stairs to a crouching upper story, could be seen the small apprentices, or kozo. The life of the Japanese kozo forms a literature to itself; but this is not the place to begin it. These were the narrow streets Yuki had longed for. Here were the shop signs swinging wonderful tones of blue, dark crimson, and white, here the great gold Chinese ideograph, sprawling across long banners.
In a sort of pause between districts came a hint of suburbs, and, winding through it, Little Pebble River. A river is never more mysterious than when carrying its deep secrets through a busy town. This one, the Koishikawa, dominated the section through which it passed, giving its own name, and establishing certain small industries of dyeing, grinding, fishing, and boating possible nowhere else in Yedo, until the great central artery of the Sumida is reached. Cherry-trees joined finger-tips above the Koishikawa,—real grass crept down its banks to trail finger in the hurrying tide.
It was all beautiful, all real, all familiar. From afar the clanging of beaten metal smote the ears. Yuki remembered that the main bridge led almost to the great gate of the Arsenal. A moment later it came into view. Tall chimneys pulsed black worlds of smoke, and corrugated roofs scowled above spiked, enclosing walls. At every gate stood a sentry-box and a soldier in blue uniform.
"A mighty noise, young lady!" volunteered Yuki's jinrikisha man, in a hoarse shout. He nodded his head toward the clamor, and then looked backward to bestow on her a confidential grin. In the river, just in front of the arsenal, great muddy barges were poled in and beached,—with loads of coal and copper, iron and wood.