We left the hotel amid many "Sayonaras" (farewells), reached the station by the drooping avenue of willows, and, with five hours in the train, arrived at Kioto, and settled ourselves into its excellent new Hotel, with palatially proportioned rooms.
CHAPTER VII.
THE WESTERN CAPITAL AND INLAND SEA
Kioto is the western metropolis of Japan, and was the only capital from 793 until twenty years ago, when the present Mikado re-established his supremacy over the Shoguns, and selected Tokio as the metropolis of the Empire.
We began the next day by doing our duty by the sights of Kioto, and commenced with His Majesty's palace, of Gosho, for which a special permission had been sent us. This is now the third Imperial palace that we have visited. I think we were foolish to come, because by this time we might have known that there is really nothing worthy of interest to see.
The palace is enclosed by high walls and covers an area of twenty-six acres. At the gate of "the August Kitchen," we went through an elaborate ceremony of inscribing our names in the lacquer and gold tasselled visiting book of the Mikado, whilst two exceedingly unkempt officials, in rusty black kimonos, superintended our movements. Of course this palace, like the others, is bare of furniture, carpets or hangings. The fusumas, or screens are decorated with splashes of blue paint and green mountains, or with funny little pictures of Japanese life, drawn with a total neglect of perspective. A lot of old women in wicker hats were raking, with bamboo claws, His Imperial Majesty's courtyards. The garden is scarcely so good as the one at the Hotel, with its pond on which floated an unpainted wooden gondola. The whole produces an impression of discomfort.
We pass first into the Seiryoden, or "Pure and Cool Hall," where the square of cement in the corner was every morning strewn with earth, so that the Mikado could worship his ancestors on the earth without leaving the palace. Then into the Audience hall, in the centre of which is the Imperial throne, hung with white silken curtains and a pattern meant to represent the bark of a pine tree. The stools on either side of the throne were for the Imperial insignia, the sword and the jewel. On the eighteen steps stood the eighteen grades into which the Mikado's officials were divided. Then we see the Imperial study, where His Majesty's tutors delivered lectures. The suite of rooms called the "August Three Rooms," where Nō performances, a kind of lyric drama, were performed, and lastly a suite of eleven rooms, where the Mikados, when Kioto was the capital, lived and died. We see the Imperial sitting-room with the bed-room behind, completely surrounded by other apartments, so that no one should approach His Majesty without the knowledge of his attendants. This sounds perhaps interesting enough, and having read Murray's elaborate description we were eager to see Gosho, but the reality is a succession of ordinary Japanese rooms, dark and bare, without the redeeming feature of well painted fusumas.
The obnoxious janitors, notwithstanding our credentials, obstinately refused to show us the only thing of interest, namely the present Imperial living rooms, on the plea that they are being now prepared for the reception of the Heir Apparent who arrives in a few days, and we see bales of furniture covered with green and blue cloths, bearing the royal insignia of the chrysanthemum, being dragged across the inner courts.
The Nijo Palace is surrounded by a moat and pagoda-guarded wall of Cyclopean masonry. It is undergoing repair, and we can therefore only see the handsome outer gateway formed of lacquer and beaten gold, and the beautifully worked gilt fastenings to the gates, but inside the descriptions read like a dream of beauty, which we should be most anxious to see, were it not for the experience we have just gone through at the other palace of Gosho.
Kioto has its Diabutsu, its big bronze bell, its pagodas, palaces, gardens and monasteries, but above all it has its temples—temples large and small, decorated and plain, dull and uninteresting. You might easily spend a week at Kioto seeing nothing save these, but of temples I confess we are by this time thoroughly sick and tired. The sight of a torii makes us turn wearily away, and from a sāmmon (or gateway) we hastily flee. Everyone who visits Japan ends by experiencing this satiety of temples, a feeling induced by their monotonous identity and entire want of originality. Still we feel that we must visit some of the sights, so somewhat half-heartedly we go forth towards the Show Temple of Nishi Hongwanji, the headquarters of the western branch of the Hongwanji Buddhist sect, a dark massive structure. In the courtyard is the large tree which, "by discharging showers of water," protects the temple from fire in the vicinity. We wander through the state rooms, the minor shrines, and the big temple; and in truth the decorations are marvellously beautiful, but I will not weary you with the detailed descriptions of lacquer-ribbed ceilings, golden pillars, of kakemonos (hanging scrolls) over 200 years old, of cornices wrought in coloured arabesques, and shrines painted and carved in floral designs. Again there are those most exquisitely painted scenes on the sliding screens, of peacocks and peahens seated on a peach tree with white blossoms; of wild geese on a dead-gold ground, of scroll patterns carved in the design of the peony or chrysanthemum leaf and flower, nor of the angels in full relief that gaze down upon us from the ceiling. But I must make especial mention of the gilt trellised folding-doors, opening back to disclose a wintry scene of life-sized bamboo and plum trees, and of pine with dark-spreading branches covered with snow.
We wander through the peaceful stillness of the monastery garden, where the jostle and noise of the thick crowding streets around comes over the wall in a dull hum, feed the gold fishes in a pond from the cool cloister, and climb up to a little tower—or pavilion of the flying clouds—where, on kneeling on the ground, we can trace a few pencil lines on a gold ground, supposed to be the work of the great artist, Kana Molonobii.
Then, passing the Hijashi Hongwangi, which, when finished, will be the largest Buddhist temple of Japan, we go on through a narrow street, under an archway, and pass into an enclosure, where booths of gay trifles line the road running to the Sanjūsangendo, or the temple of 33,333 images of Kwannon, the Goddess of Mercy, where a thousand gilt images of five feet rise in tiers above each other, the number being completed by the smaller effigies engraved on the face and hands of the larger ones. Near by the great Buddha, twin to the Kamakura one, is dwarfed into a building where his head touches the ceiling, and you can only gaze up from underneath at his colossal sleepy features. To the right, hung under a belfry, is one of the two largest bronze bells in the Island, and immediately under it is a little open temple, where five Buddhist priests, squatted in a semicircle, monotone the evensong. We return home with that comfortable feeling that comes of duty performed, and proceed to enjoy ourselves by a drive in the dusk through the fairy lighted streets.
Kioto is a fascinating place, but, as I have said, it is not the sights that make it so. The attraction partly lies, as it always does in Japan, in those wonderful little brown streets, with their wide eaved and diminutive two-storied dolls' houses, hung with original sign posts of fans, monster paper lanterns and gay flags, that stand out in sharp relief down a long vista, from the purple mountains. Kioto is on the plain surrounded by a circle of mountains, and at the end of all the streets, face which way you will, there is always this effective background to the toy town. If you mount a little way up them, you can look back and have a panoramic view over thousands of brown-roofed huts, presenting a perfectly level surface, except when a temple roof, square and dark, overshadows the others.
We had thought Tokio the most fascinating imaginable place, but, except for its grass-grown moats, reflecting waters, and cawing rooks, Kioto is even more enticing. The streets are narrower and more untouched by that dreaded European taint, showing itself at Tokio in small drapers' shops, and cheap lamp and umbrella stores. Life is more primitive, the people are more unsophisticated, as we know by the little crowd, polite and interested, that attends us in our shoppings, and that makes the dusk in the shops darker, by the blackness of their gathering round. The gay china shops, the chemists, blacksmiths, booksellers, the fish and fruit stores cease not to interest us; the walking picture, coming to meet us of a Japanese lady with shapely, tightly-girt figure, with the baby on her inclined back, sheltered under a paper umbrella, charms us as much as ever. The wee children in their blue and white kimonos or wadded jackets, their heads shaved, with a bald circle on the crown, just like the Japanese doll of a toy shop; the little ten-year-old nurses with their brown babies asleep, and heads waddling from side to side as they shuffle along; the ladies, in handsome dress, taking an afternoon airing with their husbands in a double jinrikisha; the sellers crying their goods and attracting attention by the help of a bell, gong, drum, or whistle: all these things, though we seem to have been in their midst for so long, almost at times to have lived all our lives with them, are a never-ending source of interest. But a new charm has been added to these, one that exceeds them all, one that is all-absorbing. We throw temples, palaces, gardens, sight-seeing to the winds, and resolve to devote the few remaining hours of our stay in Japan, to shopping and the curio shops.
We drive through many winding streets and draw up in one not different to the others, and, lifting up the black draperies, enter. There may, perhaps, be a few bronze or lacquer articles spread about, but nothing to indicate the priceless art-treasures that we are presently going to see. With hands on knees, sliding down with bows of reverence, and the gasping produced by sucking in of breath between the teeth, stands the proprietor, surrounded by a background of assistants. With deferential encouragement he leads you to the backmost recesses of the shop, through winding passages, across paved squares, until you come to the prettiest little picture of a garden made out of a courtyard of a few square feet, and here in rooms opening out of this, surrounded by fire-proof godowns, far away from the eyes of an inquisitive crowd of passers-by, he shows forth his precious treasures. This courtyard is so artfully arranged as to deserve description. There will be, perhaps, a clump of bamboos in one corner, a stone lantern on one side, a piece of water with gold fish in it in the centre, and an azalea on bamboo supports trained round it; a bronze urn with drinking water and a wooden scoop by it, and a green metal stork. First of all tea is brought, and the smoking boxes, which contain the hot ashes in a bronze or china urn, and the bamboo trough for the used ashes; then the real work commences. An art museum, the labour of hundreds of years ago, when a man devoted his life-time to the production of one or two works of art, are laid on the matting before you.
From behind cabinets, from underneath tables, boxes are silently produced, and from out of folds of soft crêpe or flannel, and many paper wrappers come lovely objects, lovingly, caressingly fingered and stroked by their owner. There are vases of rock crystal, jade, plaques, and trays of the most exquisite cloisonné, when a magnifying glass is gently pushed into your hands that you may enter into the minutest details of the minute work. Bronzes, and satsuma china, inro or lacquer medicine boxes, with their succession of trays for powders, and those lovely Netsuke or carved ivories where each wrinkle and hair, each line and feature are so faithfully graven in the quaint heads and groups. The prices asked are fabulous, but I often scarcely thought that the dealer wanted to part with his curios, he seemed so proudly fond of them.
I confess that our taste inclined often to the baser kind of shops, where the goods were of doubtful origin, but Japan has, in the last few years, been so overrun with curio buyers and Americans, that the few really antique things left are scarce, and hard to find. The Japanese, like the Chinese, always reserve their best things to the last, and then somewhat reluctantly produce them. We haunted the old shops where great golden Buddhas sat enthroned amidst a most miscellaneous collection—men in armour, memorial cabinets, huge bronze vases, inlaid swords with quaint tsuba, or sword guards, mingling with lovely china vases, which, if modern, are nevertheless a joy for ever to possess—to feast your eyes on their delicate shiny surfaces of ruby sang-de-bœuf, imperial yellow, lilac, blue, apple-green, or rose pink, strewn with a spray of snowy blossom or a spiky shaft of bamboo, where little birds fly across the pale sea of colour, or solemn storks perch beside some waving reeds.
Again and again we are made to wonder how these small shops, so meagre and unpretentious outside, find the capital and become possessed of such wondrous treasures. Hours you can spend there, and hours they will be pleased to show you these, for in Japan no one is ever in a hurry. Life is very leisurely.
The "curio fever" is upon us. To anyone who has visited Japan the description of a Canadian authoress is but "too intensely true."
"You don't 'shop' in this country. Shopping implies premeditation, and premeditation is in vain in Japan. If you know what you want, your knowledge is set aside in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, and your purchases gratify anticipations that you never had, to be paradoxical. And you never fully know the joy of buying until you buy in Japan. Life condenses itself into one long desire, keener and more intense than any want you ever had before—the desire of paying and possessing. The loftiest aims are swallowed up in this; the sternest scientist, or political economist, or social theorist that was ever set ashore at Yokohama straightway loses life's chief end among the curios, and it is at least six weeks before he finds it again. And as to the ordinary individual, without the guidance of superior aims, time is no more for him, nor things temporal; he is lost in contemplation of the ancient and the beautiful in the art of Nippon, and though he sell his boots and pawn his grandfather's watch, he will carry it off with him to the extent of his uttermost farthing...."
And so we felt.
But of course it is the crêpe and silk shops that woman-like fascinate me most. Those lovely, soft, crisp, textiles, in rose-pink, coral, lilac, blue, and silver-grey, in sea-green, mignonette, and chrysanthemum-yellow, shades that you can find in no other country, because the secret of these heavenly dyes is known only to the Japanese. Oh! they are things to make your coveteousness strong, your heart ache, unless your purse is full and deep. Then there are the common washing crêpes, with their graceful running designs so artistically disposed, their harmony of colouring, and of which I order kimonos for dressing-gowns for all the children of the family. There is a lovely crêpe with rainbow stripes, not as you who have seen the brilliant orange-green and purple rays of the original would imagine, for it is a white filmy texture, with only a suspicion of pale melting zephyr stripes, slanting across it.
Then there are the silks and crêpes embroidered with blood-red autumn sprays, with butterflies, pink dolphins and sea-shells, or panels of satin of such exquisite workmanship, with ever recurring views of Fuji, and hanging kakemonos and screens and coverlets, all so beautiful, and of such faithful artistic merit. We are shown specimens of a newly-revived industry, handed down from ancient dyers, where pictures rich and soft are raised in velvet, against a pale silk or satin ground. By an ingenious process of wires, running parallel with the hard thread of the woof, bearing the outline of the picture in velvet, which are, after the dyeing and steaming cut out, these quaint pictures, which at first you think painted, are produced. Everything you see in Japan is art. It is brought into the manufacture of the commonest things of daily life, and seen to perfection in these cut velvets and rich embroideries. It is in the air they breathe. For even as we pass out from this rich inner sanctum, into the open street shop, where the crowd of customers, each seated on cushions on the counter step, with a salesman squatted before him, swiftly running the counters of his abaca up and down, multiplying and dividing like lightning by this ingenious machine, we see piles of coloured goods, of quite common quality only one degree less delightful in colour and design, than those we have chosen from. I must not forget to mention in our shoppings the photographs, which are extraordinarily good and very cheap. It might also be of use to someone to know that we found at Kioto, Daimaruicha and Co., and Takashimaya Ilda and Co., the best shops for crêpes, silk, embroideries, and kimonos, made to order, and Nishimura for the cut velvets, these shops having but one price, and with the goods marked in plain figures.
We get up early the next morning, for now that we are so soon leaving Japan, we feel that every hour is wasted that we are not out and about, drinking in last scenes from these bewitching streets. We direct our jinrikishas into a distant quarter of far-reaching Kioto, into the meanest and dirtiest of streets, where most of the shops are full of old iron, and hung round with second-hand goods like a pawnbroker's, but where we are told that the real old-fashioned curio-shops, not got up collections of curio for the circumnavigator, still exist. I must say that they seemed full of impossible rubbish.
In the afternoon, somewhat satiated with buying, we drove out to Shugaku—one of the Mikado's summer villas. It was an intensely hot afternoon, but the first disagreeably warm day that we have had, as our weather has been perfect, with no rain and sunny skies day after day. October and November are always delicious months in Japan.
The villa consisted of an absolutely bare, undecorated, matted, tea-house, of modest, you might in the case of this, its royal owner, say mean dimensions, but the garden is a gem. From it there is a near view of purple hills, all in little crinkled edges, running in lines one below the other, made nearer to us by the warm still atmosphere, whilst behind the garden rises a formal hill; truly Japanese in its conical structure, covered with pine trees, whose pink and purple stems gleam out from the dark fir needles. There is the usual figurative mile upon mile of winding paths, the steep hills to descend and climb up by stone steps, the familiar bridges, one with pagoda-covered roof, and the other of bamboo and turfed, crossing the neatly devised harbours and bays of the artificial lake, whose banks are covered with palms, but it is the hedges that are worth coming to see. They are of azalea and camellia, and honeysuckle, cut low, so that they spread out to an enormous thickness, to a breadth of twenty feet, and it is over these green open ramparts, that you look out on the lovely view.
We refused in coming home, though we had time to spare, to visit any more temples, and we spent the last evening in going to a fair, given in honour of the God of Water. As at Tokio, where we saw a similar festival for the God of Writing, it was held in a special quarter. The dark, narrow streets are outlined in coloured lamps, with arches, the light glowing through the paper, and the varieties of colour—red, green, blue, and pink, forming a soft and effective illumination, not surpassed by many more elaborate Jubilee ones. Many of the houses are decorated with wonderful marine representations of blue waves, with fishes and dolphins, and fir trees placed at intervals, with more lanterns and red paper devices. The locality is en fête, and the entire population is thronging the streets, which we wander delightedly through. There are performances of monkeys and dogs proceeding, and a crowd outside trying to look over the partitions; geishas, with the accompanying twang of the Samisens, are going through their slow performances behind the open bars. Children are flattening their noses against the glass cases of the confectioners', with their sweetmeats and temptingly sugared cakes, or group round the vendors of paper toys stuck on pieces of wood, whilst the women gaze as longingly at the cheap combs, tawdry hair-pins, and gaudy flowers, laid out under the hawkers' glaring oil lamps. There are booths for the sale of cheap soap, cutlery, sandals, glass, jewellery, and candles. The tea-houses are doing an enormous trade, and the naturally contented people look supremely happy.
We left Kioto to pay a flying visit to Osaka on our way to Kobe. Each town seems prettier than the last, and Osaka is no exception. Our chief object in going there was to visit the Arsenal, and according to the special instructions of the Minister of War, we were most courteously received by the chief, Colonel Ota, and given tea at his official residence before being conducted over the arsenal.
We are much struck that instead of having to teach Japan, there is something that we can learn from her. Her civilization, coming, as it has, so late in the decade, breaking in suddenly upon centuries of dark ages, she has benefited by the experience of other nations, and constructed her civilization on the best systems of other countries. Here in this arsenal we see the newest improvements of science in machines of every nation. Some are from England, some from Italy, France, or Germany. The Arsenal is in beautiful order and keeps employed a large number of workmen. They manufacture their own cannon, and we passed through the large workshops, the smelting furnaces, and saw mouldings and castings, the making and filling of cartridges. The arsenal is inside the outer moat or glacis of the castle, and, with canals and rivers, has through water communication to the sea and to the forts on the coast.
It is this rapid civilization, of which the arsenal is only an example, that fills the traveller with admiration. Japan was only opened to foreigners in 1868, and with the fall of the last Shogun and the beginning of the present Mikado's reign European customs rapidly spread. Some say that Japan has gone too fast, and has absorbed and not digested sufficiently the forms of civilized life. The Japanese went to Prussia for a constitution, and call their Parliament the Diet; to England for their railway system, which was built, organized, and worked at first by English engineers and firemen. They went to France and Germany for an army organization, borrowing their blue and scarlet infantry uniforms with white leggings from the French, and their artillery uniform of blue and yellow from Germany. To France again for their culinary art; for which these Japanese have a latent talent, making excellent cooks. To England again for her model of Court etiquette and nobles' titles, and then again to Germany for medicine. The great reaction that followed naturally in the course of this rapid innovation is not yet dead. The struggle is still going on, as one can easily see, but a few years hence the revolution will be complete, and Japan will cease to be so intensely fascinating to foreigners. It presents, perhaps, the most wonderful page in the history of the world: this deposition of the Shogun, the reinstatement of the old dynasty, a great revolution in a remarkable intelligent country, perfectly bloodless, of short duration, and changing the whole face and destinies of the land.
But these Japanese civilize so fast, that now there is scarcely a European employed in their State departments. They are very proud of this, and gradually European agents for their steamships, companies, the managers of banks and commercial houses are being dismissed, or superseded by Japanese, who take the management into their own hands.
But to return to Osaka. If the castle at Nagoya is so well worth seeing, this one of Osaka is equally so, for it is the exact counterpart of the other, only minus the keep and the dolphins. There are the same outer and inner moats, the same white plaster walls edged with crenellated bronze tiles, resting on stone walls, guarded at the four corners with those square towers, loopholed in several storeys; but I think that the perfectly gigantic stones of the walls are even more colossal than at Nagoya, for there are several opposite the entrance by the gateway and the guard-room, that measure at least twelve feet square. It will always remain one of the wonders of Japan, how these stones, with the primitive appliances of the earlier Shoguns, were ever placed in position. The open square of the inner moat is now a garden, and the palace has been used to accommodate the General and his staff. It is worth climbing up to the top of the walls for the splendid view over the plain, always bordered by those chains of mountains, that run as a prickly backbone from north to south of Japan.
Osaka is a charming town. It is called the Venice of Japan, and with its flowing rivers and canals intersecting the streets, its high, arched bridges thrown across on a single sweep, its grassy banks and avenues of weeping willows, it is fitly likened to that Queen City of the sea. The houses are built on piles projecting over the water, and narrow passages in between, lead down to the stone steps, where there are multitudes of boats.
To stand on one of the bridges and watch the ceaseless ebb and flow of the changing stream of life, is a dream of delight, only to be compared to standing on the Bridge of Galata at Constantinople. Blue-coated coolies, with their bare brown legs, roped to heavy carts, with their encouraging grunts; itinerant sellers slung with bamboo trays of vegetables; jinrikishas by the hundred, pedestrians jostled from side to side, closed sedan chairs, from behind the curtains of which peer out priests whose way is cleared by running attendants, for it is a day of ceremony, with much coming and going from the temples—all this kaleidoscopic stream, accompanied by the warning cries, and the dull thud of the echoing wood pavement, is what we see. And then look up and down the river, with a vista of bridges, and see the irregular mass of brown houses, winding round the bend of the stream, with poles on the roof, hung with waving blue cottons, placed there to dry, and the overhanging balconies, from which men are fishing. And then the scenes of river life—the brown shiny figures bathing and plunging in a cool bath, the hundreds of sampans moored by the banks, where reside a large aquatic population, and the high-peaked prows of others, which, propelled along by six oarsmen, again remind one of the gondolas of Venice. There are other sampans, which, with one square brown sail set, come skimming down the canals before the afternoon breeze. Yes, Osaka is a charming place, and these river scenes passed in crossing the bridges, add to the never-ending joys of the dark, narrow streets, compressed on to the restricted peninsulas of land.
Having done our duty by the arsenal, and to our good constituents at Sheffield, we sit out and have tea on the balcony of the hotel, and then go for a prowl in the dusk round the streets.
Then succeeded one of those lovely evenings. I shall never forget those sunsets and twilight evenings, with their pale, washed skies, that we had in Japan. They only last for a short half hour, but they are entrancing. If you watch carefully, you may see the shadows lengthening, but after the brightest and hottest afternoon, suddenly the colour of the sun seems to go out of everything, and in its place steal up soft shadows, the vista of streets grow dim, and darkness falls into the little open shop fronts, whilst the sky is suffused with the palest wash of lilac or saffron. The jinrikisha bulbous lights come out, one by one, like glow-worms, and the single lamp lights a dark interior. And then as we pass across some street, which lies to the west, we see a blaze of orange, lying low on the horizon, where the sun has just dipped. It becomes cold and chilly for an hour, and then begin the fairy scenes of night, in a Japanese town.
It is an hour in the train from Osaka to Kobe, where we arrived at eight o'clock.
Kobe is a pretty seaport, girt round, close at hand, by great mountains, up into which the streets run. It is too cosmopolitan and European to be very interesting. But from the handsome Oriental houses, with their pale buff and grey tints, the deep balconies with green blinds of the foreign consulates on the Bund—from the curio shops, Europeanized like Yokohama, you can pass into the quaintest and brightest native bazaar, where from feeling yourself in Europe (especially if you are staying at the French Oriental Hotel), you can suddenly plunge back again into native Japan. We find the steamer of the Nippon Company in quarantine, by reason of a cholera death on board and coming from Shanghai, an infected port; so we have to wait for two days.
On one afternoon we went up to the waterfall in one of the green mountains, crowned with straggling pine trees, to see sunset over the harbour. After having hovered round and inspected half the gold Buddhas for sale in Japan, now that we have reached the last place of departure, we have at length bought one. Of course, directly we had done so, we immediately saw a much better one in an adjacent shop. I cannot help feeling that it is a matter for thankfulness that we are leaving this seductive country, not ruined, it is true, but greatly impoverished!