Читать книгу Twenty Years of My Life - Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen - Страница 8

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The Admiral’s prognostications were correct. We met such heavy seas passing Cape Flattery that the ship seemed to be trying to turn turtle. We were unable to sit on deck from that day until the day that we sighted Japan, and once we had to heave-to for eighteen hours. The worst of the weather being so terrible was that the Captain was unable to execute the Company’s instructions to take us to see the Aleutian Islands, which only whalers know, and drop some stores there for shipwrecked mariners.

But on that December morning, when we found ourselves in smooth water and soft, summery temperature off the flat-topped hills of Japan, surrounded by the billowing sails of countless junks, the very first vessels we had seen since Cape Flattery faded out of sight, we felt rewarded.

The East, the Far East, which I had heard “a-calling” all my life, was right within my grasp. In a few hours’ time I should be standing on the shores of fanciful and mysterious Japan, able to remain there as long as I chose, for we had no fixed plans. We were just drifting on—drifting through our lives—drifting across the world. My heart beat high; I might have written nothing but a few books of verse which hardly anybody read, but, at any rate, I had gone half round the world, and if I wished to stay and dream for the rest of my life in the East, who was to say me nay?

Whatever the causes, the effect was to give me the subject for which I had been waiting to make my position as an author. From the day that I published The Japs at Home, I shed my label of the “Australian Poet,” and became known as the author who has been to Japan.

I even enriched the English language with a word—Japs. It had long been in use in America, but no one had ventured to put it into a book in England. Some thought it was undignified; some thought that it would incense the Japanese. I not only put it into a book, but on the cover of a book, which has sold a hundred and fifty thousand copies. Only to-day I discovered that Japan’s great poet, Yone Noguchi, and the Japanese publicist, T. G. Komai, use it in their books, which are written in English.

I had, in Montreal, bought a No. 1 Kodak—a novelty in those days—and with it I took several hundred photographs in Japan—it was from these that Fenn, the artist, of McClure’s Syndicate, afterwards drew his illustrations for my articles, which were reproduced in the earlier editions of the book. The “Kodaks” not only served as the basis of the illustrations, they made a most admirable journal for me to write from.

I commenced Kodaking and taking notes from the hour that we entered the harbour of Yokohama, and kept it up without flagging till the day that we left Yokohama for San Francisco. It was to those snapshots with camera and pencil that my books on Japan owed the lively touches which gave them their popularity.

We were a winter and a spring and a summer in Japan—for all except six weeks which we spent in China. I paid most of my hotel bills in Japan by writing my Handbook to Japan for the Club Hotel Company.

In Japan we spent our entire days in sight-seeing. If we were not going over interesting buildings (and I over Yoshiwaras), temples, castles, baths or tea-houses in marvellous gardens—we were wandering about the streets or the country in our rikishas, dismounting when there was anything to photograph or examine or purchase. The rikisha is a most convenient way of getting about for a person who is making notes, because he can write as he goes along, and pull up as often as he likes when there is anything which needs his attention. Also, your Jinrikisha boy, if you choose carefully, speaks enough English to act as an interpreter, and, from having taken foreigners to the sights so often, is usually a tolerably efficient guide. Besides which, it is a novel, pleasant and exciting method of locomotion.

We hired the best two rikisha men we could hear of by the week, and never regretted the extravagance. They were always there when we wanted them, and in a very few days grasped exactly what we wished to do and see. One was called Sada and the other Taro.

It was in this way that I acquired my knowledge of the Japan which can be seen on the surface, and which is all that the average foreigner wishes to see, and gave myself one of the three or four subjects with which my name is identified.

We spent the first month in Yokohama, a much-maligned place, for it had in those days an unspoiled native town at the back of the settlement, and its environs were charming, whether one went towards Negishi or towards Ikegami: I found enough to keep me hard at work for a month.

On the last day of the year we went to Tokyo. We had a reason for that; we wished to see the great fair in the Ginza, which is one of the most typical sights of Japan. Savage Landor, who had been in Tokyo for some time, wrote that we must on no account miss it, and he took rooms for us in the Tokyo hotel—which the Japanese called Yadoya, “the hotel.”

The Tokyo hotel was an experience: it had originally been the Yashiki or town-house of a feudal prince, in the days when the Shogun reigned at Tokyo. It had a moat (into which Miss Lorimer, who accompanied us on all our travels, fell on the first night we were there, but which fortunately contained more mud than water), and stood in an angle of the outer works of the castle.

Just below it, small craft made a port of the outer moat of the castle: in its courtyard carpenters were using up the large amount of waste space which there is in a Yashiki by nailing fresh rooms on to the Daimio’s house, to make the hotel larger. It could not be called anything but nailing on, because it was made of wood and paper, and was not properly dovetailed into the existing building, but simply tacked on. We learnt many upside-down notions by watching the builders and carpenters, who did most things inside-out or upside-down, according to our notions. Also the Japanese manager, the Abè San who was murdered a few months ago, borrowed my clothes to have them copied by a Japanese tailor, and the waiters wore their European clothes over their native dress, and wriggled out of them behind a screen as soon as a meal was over. If you called them at such a moment, whatever your sex, they might come forward with their trousers half on and half off. The Japanese have their own ideas of conventions between the sexes.

Wandering through that fair at the Ginza took one into the very heart of Japan: it is held to enable people to settle their debts before New Year’s Day.

Apart from the obituary parks of Shiba and Ueno, Tokyo is not reckoned rich in temples, though it has a few very famous temples in the suburbs, and more than a few within a short excursionary distance. But Shiba and Ueno—and especially the former—present an epitome of Japanese life, art, scenery and history.

It is difficult to imagine anything more beautiful than Shiba, though the Japanese have a proverb that you must not call anything beautiful till you have seen Nikko. The fir woods in which it stands are on a low ridge commanding an exquisitive view of the Gulf of Tokyo, and in this wood are embosomed the mausolea of most of the earlier Shoguns of the Tokugawa House, which came to an end this winter with the death of the abdicated Shogun. Each mausoleum has a beautiful temple beside the tomb. The presence of so many temples has led the Japanese to exhaust their landscape art on Shiba with lake and cherry-grove and cryptomeria. Such natives as do not go there for religion are attracted by the pleasure city, with its famous tea-houses, like the Maple Club, its shows, and, above all, by its dancing. Here you may see the No-dance, the Kagura-dance, and some of the best Geishas.

But the chief charm of Shiba to me was its absolute Orientalness compared to the rest of Tokyo.

No sooner are you inside the great red gateway of the temples than you are in the world of fairy-tales. For temple after temple opens up before you, low fantastic structures, on which Oriental imagination has run riot in colour and form. You are bewildered by the innumerable courtyards of stone lanterns, the paraphernalia of drum-tower and bell-tower, fountain and dancing-stage, which surround them. You are sobered by the dark groves between the temples, which contain the tombs.

Temple and tomb are thronged by streams of dignified natives, some come to worship and some to see the sights. Here you will find a service going on, with white-robed priests kneeling on the mirrored floor of black lacquer, for which you have to remove your boots. Outside the actual temples the shows are in full blast, and picnicking proceeds everywhere. All the Japanese are in their native dress. Gay little musumes and gorgeous geishas flutter before you. The grand tea-houses offer fresh visions of the Orient with their Geisha dances and their fantastic gardens.

Ueno has the added charm of a large lake, covered with lotus-blossoms in summer.

At no great distance from Shiba is the Shinagawa Yoshiwara, which, for fantastic beauty, surpasses anything in Japan. With these and the water life of the Nihombashi, and the life of the poor going on all day in the streets—for the poor Japanese takes the front off his house all through the day to air it—I should have found good occupation for my notebook and camera for years.

If we had not been urged by other foreigners, I do not know when we should have left Tokyo. And we saw little enough of them except at meal-times, or when we went to the Frasers (Hugh Fraser was British Minister of Tokyo, and husband of the well-known author, Mrs. Hugh Fraser, Marion Crawford’s sister), or the Napiers. The Master of Napier, the Lord Napier and Ettrick, just dead, was his First Secretary. But at meal-times they talked so much of Easter at Miyanoshita, and the cherry-blossom festival at Kyoto, and the annual festival at Nikko, and the Great Buddha at Kamakura, and the sacred shrines of Ise, that we fortunately felt obliged to visit them.

Miyanoshita, the favourite holiday-resort of the Europeans in Japan, is high up in the mountains. The valley on the right of the long ridge which leads up to it in spring is ablaze with azaleas and flowering trees. It, itself, is perched on a mountain-side, above a densely-wooded valley. Exquisite walks can be taken from it, such as the trip to Hakone, the beautiful village which stands on the blue lake at the foot of Fujiyama, in which the immortal grace of the great mountain is reflected whenever the sun or moon is above the horizon. Miyanoshita is equally famous for its mountain air and its mountain baths. The boiling water, highly impregnated with sulphur, is brought down in bamboo pipes from the bosom of the mountain to deep wooden baths sunk in the floor of the hotel bathing-house. Life here is one long picnic: the energetic take walks, the lazy are carried in chairs over the hills: people fly here for week-ends in spring, and from the heat and damp of the summer.

Its great rival is Nikko, another mountain village, embosomed in shady groves, with woods full of wild hydrangeas. In June Nikko is crowded for the festival of Toshogu, the deified founder of the dynasty of Shoguns, which was ended by the revolution of 1868—the principal festival of Japan, inaugurated with the grandest procession to be seen nowadays, in which all who take part in it wear the ceremonial dresses of three hundred years ago.

Nikko has the two most beautiful temples in the magic land—those of Iyeyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa dynasty, and his grandson, Iyemitsu. Here you see the most perfect lacquer and carving in all Japan. And their courtyards are exquisitely terraced on the mountain-side. Here, too, besides these and other glorious temples, there are the added charms of scenery, a foaming sky-blue river, running beneath the sacred scarlet bridge, and between the avenue of Buddhas, commons of scarlet azalea, and thickets of wild wistaria.

Having seen Nikko, the sacred city of the Shoguns, one must needs see Kyoto, the city of the Mikados, and Nara.

For seven centuries prior to the revolution in our own day, Kyoto was the capital of the Mikados. Here they lived like gods behind a veil, only penetrated by the hierarchy: they never left the palace gates except in a closed palanquin: they added little but tombs to the city, and their tombs were never shown. But the Shoguns, who ruled in their name, and others great in the land, adorned Kyoto with some of the greatest and most interesting temples in Japan, such as the temples of the Gold and Silver Pavilions, the two Hongwanji temples, the temple of the Thirty-Three Thousand Images, and the chief temple of Inari the Goddess of Rice. And it being the ancient capital, we found the city full of old prints and curios, and the old-fashioned pleasure resorts of Japan.

Kyoto was a city of the pleasure-seeker of old time, as capitals are wont to be. It has wonderful tea-houses in the city; its temple grounds are like permanent fairs; and within a rikisha drive is Lake Biwa, one of the most exquisite lakes in the world, whose shores exhibit the chefs d’œuvres of the Japanese landscape-creator. Nothing could be more exquisite than the temple grounds on the shores of Lake Biwa.

Of the many old-time festivals of Kyoto, the most famous survival is the Miyako-odori, or cherry-blossom festival, held every year, when visitors flock to Kyoto to see the cherry-groves in full blossom. The feature of the festival is a wonderful ballet, for which the best dancers in Japan gather in Kyoto. Even the Duke and Duchess of Connaught came to Kyoto for it, when they were in Japan. We stayed for a long time at Yaami’s when they were there, and when the Duke learned from Colonel Cavaye, his private secretary, that I was a journalist, he gave me permission to accompany his party to any function or expedition which I wished to describe. The most interesting of them was the shooting of the rapids of the Katsuragawa, some miles from Kyoto, where thirteen miles of cataracts are negotiated in huge punts, built of springy boards. As we were buffeting down the rapids, the Duke told me that our present King, then Prince George of Wales, had said that shooting those rapids, and the baths of Miyanoshita, where you have natural hot water in wooden boxes sunk in the floor, were the two best things in the world.

In Kyoto, an antique city on a broad plain, embosomed in hills, capped by temples, one has the very essence of old Japan. We stayed there a long time, absorbing an atmosphere which may soon pass away, never to return.

Within a day’s rikisha drive of Kyoto is Nara, with its thousand-year-old treasury of the most notable possessions of the Mikados, and its glorious temples, and its sacred deer-park, and its acres of scarlet azalea thickets.

We visited all; we visited the two great cities of Osaka and Nagoya, with their magnificent castles, and Kamakura, with its gigantic Buddha and its ancient monasteries. We visited all the most famous cities and points of scenery in Japan; and the pleasure of our visit was heightened by our going away to China for six weeks in the middle of it, because when we came back our eyes were far keener to observe and to appreciate, while we had the knowledge acquired in our former visit to guide us.

We were truly sorry to leave Japan. I should be quite content to be living there still; but if we had remained there, Japan would not have taken its part in my development as a writer, for though I should doubtless have compiled a book or books about Japan, they would have been sent home as the productions of an amateur, and very likely have had such difficulty in finding a publisher that they would have been brought out in some hole-and-corner way, instead of my selling The Japs at Home in the open market, and thereby laying the foundation of my career as a travel-book writer.

Japan supplied me with the material for several books, not counting the handbook which I wrote for the Club Hotel—A Japanese Marriage, next in point of sales to The Japs at Home; Queer Things About Japan, which sold best of all my books in guinea form; More Queer Things About Japan, which I wrote with Norma Lorimer; When We Were Lovers in Japan, a novel which was originally published under the title of Playing the Game; and Pictures of Japan; while I have written countless articles and short stories about the country.

I had almost forgotten that I had a book—my Lester the Loyalist—published in Japan. Though it only contained about twenty pages, it took two months to print. How the result gratified me, I wrote in The Japs at Home.

“I forgot all the delays when I saw the printed pages, they were so beautiful, and really, considering that Mr. Mayeda was the only man in the establishment who could read a word of English, the printing was exceedingly correct. The blocks had turned out a complete success, though, of course, the proofs of the covers did not look as well as they would when mounted and crêped.

“The Japanese have a process by which they can make paper crêpe book-covers as stiff as buckram.

“‘Well, Mr. Mayeda, how did your little boy like the stamp-book you mended up for him so beautifully?’ I asked one day.

“‘Ah! it is very sad; he has gone to hell. But the little boy, he has loved the stamp-book so that he has taken it to hell with him. It is on his grave, do you call it?’

“Mr. Mayeda was thinking of what the missionaries had told him when he was learning English.

“A few weeks more passed. Mr. Mayeda brought us the perfect book. He was so flushed and tearful that I poured him a couple of bumpers of vermouth, which he drank off with the excitement of an unemployed workman in England when he makes a trifle by chance, and spends it right off on his beloved gin.

“‘Is anything the matter, Mr. Mayeda?’ I asked.

“‘It is so sad. My other little boy has gone to hell, too. And I am so poor, and I have to keep my wife’s uncle, and my father is very silly, and so I get drunk every night.’

“The books he had brought were exquisite. The printing was really very correct, and the effect of the long hexameter lines, in the handsome small pica type, on the oblong Japanese double leaf of silky ivory-tinted paper, every page flowered with maple-leaves in delicate pearl-grey under the type, was as lovely as it was unique.

“The block printings on every single leaf were done by hand—the leaf being laid over the block, and rubbed into it by a queer palm-leaf-pad burnisher.

“The covers were marvels of beauty, made of steel-grey paper crêpe, ornamented, the back one with three little sere and curled-up maple leaves drifting before the wind, and the front one with a spray of maple leaves in all their autumn glory and variety of tints, reproduced to the life.

“Across the right-hand end of the sprig was pasted a long white silk label in the Japanese style. The good taste, the elegance, the colours of this cover, fairly amazed me.”

Our visit to China was taken at the instigation of friends in Japan, who made an annual trip to the Hong Kong races. I cannot say that it interested me as much as Japan; but we only had time to visit Hong Kong, Shanghai, Canton and Macao, and of these, Canton alone was absolutely Chinese. Canton is as typical a Chinese city as one could desire—supreme in commerce, a hot-bed of Chinese aspirations. But it is very poorly off for fine old buildings; it is more interesting for its huge water population, living in long streets of boats, and for the wonderful gardens of some of its merchants.

Macao is chiefly interesting as a very ancient outpost of Europe in the East, old enough for Camoens to have lived and written his immortal Lusiad there in the sixteenth century. It has little to call for the attention of the stranger, except nice old gardens with huge banyan-trees, and gambling hells, where you learn to play Fan-tan. It only flourishes as an Alsatia for rogues outside of British and Chinese jurisdiction.

Shanghai is a fine European town, with luxuries and conveniences, for which Hong-Kongers sigh, and a most picturesque walled native town, which contains one of the most beautiful tea-houses in the East.

Hong Kong is a gay city, because it is so full of British naval and military officers. It is also rather a beautiful place, having a mountain right over the town, which is the sanatorium and summer-resort. I met many old schoolfellows there, who took care that invitations should be sent to us for all the Service festivities, which are so thick at Race-time. And they also told me what to see in Hong Kong and Canton and Macao.

But, knowing that I was only to be in China for a month and a half, I made no effort to ground myself in knowledge of everyday China, but gave myself up to enjoying the gaieties and tropical luxuries.

China thus had no effect on my literary development. Our stay there was a mere holiday, at which I had a fresh and exhaustive round of military and naval festivities.

The island of Hong Kong is not a good place for studying the Chinaman, except as an employé of the Englishman.

On our return from China to Japan we were fascinated by the almost tropical beauty of the Japanese summer. There was also a good deal of British gaiety, for the Fleet had moved just before us from China to Japan.