Part 17

The little round platform of stamped earth sprinkled with sand, set in the midst of a huge amphitheatre of faces, shows small as a raft on the sea, and slight despite its purple trapping. The crowd, a Tokyo crowd in _kimono_ and foreign head-gear, cap, bowler, and felt hat, sit from morning until night, day in day out, for the three long weeks of the wrestling matches.

The wrestlers stand, knees bent, body horizontal, their out stretched hands almost touching the ground, and grip. And the bout is long because the grip must be accepted by both of them, and because between each false grip the two retire slowly to their respective sides and wash out their mouths with tea. This may be repeated a dozen, twenty times, but when the real grip comes, then the action can be swift as lightning; the opponent forced beyond the straw rope which lies upon the sanded earth of the ring, before one realises that the wrestle has begun, or pushed down over it with the slow resistless force of flowing water, or the two may sway about interminably before one is beaten.

Bulk is not the one ideal of the wrestler, the young and strong rely on their activity; it is only when a man is getting older that he weights himself with fat, that his bulk and heaviness may prove too great for his opponent easily to push over. The wrestlers all wear waistbands and stiff fringes of blue silk, and the rippling of the muscles beneath their golden brown skin is such a joy as the Greek nation knew at the time of the Olympiads.

A man with a fan, an average-sized Japanese who hardly comes above the elbows of some of the wrestlers acts as starter, as umpire, and as referee, and the sharp s-s-sh of his shutting fan can be heard distinctly in the silence of the amphitheatre. The judges, four old tried wrestlers, sit under purple hangings and decide disputed points, while half the front tier is reserved for the _Smō_ themselves.

But to the non-Japanese it is not the wrestlers but the spectators who are the centre of interest. Here gathered together within the amphitheatre, concentrated on one thought, absorbed, therefore natural, sit samples of all Tokyo. For the _Smō_, like our prize fight of last century, is beloved by the populace and patronised by the aristocracy. Every one takes some sort of interest in it, and results are as widely known as the Derby or a test match. The crowd, a crowd of men and boys,--for the fathers bring their little sons with them,--knows, as well as the umpire himself, the forty-eight falls, the twelve lifts, the twelve throws, the twelve twists, the twelve throws over the back, alone allowed the Japanese wrestler. The excitement at disputed points is intense, the whole amphitheatre arguing with its neighbour. The enthusiasm at a brilliant, a quick, or a well-contested throw is intoxicating. Spectators will rise in their seats and throw down presents, tobacco-pouches, purses, hats, or other property, which the owner redeems next morning in money.

The _Smō_ are the idols of the street boys, and tall, huge, unintelligent, in gaudy _kimono_ and well-oiled top-knots, they stride through the Tokyo streets haughty, and sometimes overbearing.

We think of the Japanese as unalterably small, yet here is a class, bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh, who are huge, strong, large-framed men, taller than the tall races of the north. They are another and a living contradiction of the imaginary minisculism of the nation. If the Japanese desire to produce big things, in war, in statues, or in men, they take thought, they take care; much thought, infinite care, and somehow it is done.

* * * * *

So Tokyo wrestles, works and plays, and this left bank of the river toils and lives hard. Across the water Tsukiji, secluded in its “foreign” residences, dwells genteel, and gossips. The Ginza shops. The suburbs far within the circle of the streets grow hedged-in gardens and long avenues of trees, where the houses lie unseen. The schools, the training colleges, and the university, a cityful of students study, and boys in cotton _hakama_ and dark-peaked soldiers’ caps walk through the streets--boys who are passing from the indulged childhood of Japan to the iron self-control of manhood.

There is apparent in their ways and manners a touch of self-assertiveness, a touch of almost self-conceit, which at no other time in their own lives, and at no time at all in any other member of the community, will ever be observable. It is but a touch, and would pass unseen in any other land, in any other setting; here it stands out palpable. A little hard these boys look and very earnest. They will strike work if they think a teacher is not competent to teach, so bent are they on learning. They seem to have accepted school as the modern training of the _samurai_, and to study in that spirit.

The scholarship boys at Government Colleges work harder still and on the narrowest of means. They can afford so little for their board that one whole college gave up playing base-ball in its recreation hour because “it made them too hungry.”

And at the University, where the students matriculate at twenty and stay till twenty-four and five, for beside their own learning, beside the ten thousand Chinese symbols and all the philosophy of the East, they must to-day add the learning of the West, the languages of Europe, the laws, the sciences, and the arts of another civilisation and of an alien race, at the University the students live lives of hardest brainwork and rigidest economy. Many spend their evenings in earning the money that buys their day. Some deliver newspapers and sleep in the porches of “foreign” houses. Many die of consumption, brought on by over-work and under-feeding. Across the river the hammers ring, the wheels whir round, the hum of a people’s toil sounds in all ears. Here within the girdle of the streets, between the factories and the palace is a work doing, silent, less perceptible but harder, higher and undertaken for that end.

* * * * *

Between the hard work of hand and brain Ginza and Nihon-bashi shop, and at night the wire-drawn twang of the _samisen_ comes from the lighted restaurants. Restaurants where each diner or each party occupies a separate room, and _geisha_ girls are sent for to entertain the guests, with puns and games, with polite conversations and endless repartee. They sit on the kneeling cushions throughout the meal pouring _saké_--and amuse. Then they dance. Posturing and swaying to an accompaniment of _samisen_ and song they glide over the matting always graceful, always reserved. The quality of their dancing rings passionless, dainty, graceful, not cold but controlled. An air of serenity surrounds them. They are not trained to the duties of womanhood, but to its heaviest burden--pleasing. The licensed playthings of the nation, toys to amuse, they reach up to their limited, low-scaled destiny, through the perpetual sacrifice of self; and the national self-control encases them, so much their very own that few perceive it. With very different fates and from very different motives there is about them, as they dance, something of the charm and of the aloofness of Andersen’s mermaiden; and if their steps too are as steps upon a sword, they, too, will smile untroubled.

* * * * *

So the city strives and pleasures, so the city learns and toils. Full and full of life the streets, quiet and very still the heart. The nine tall hills from Shiba to Ueno make a crescent round the moat, the brown streets lie without, the Mikado dwells within. Born as a camp Yedo made its ruler’s seat its centre, its nobles’ _yashiki_ an enclosing wall; and then beyond, out of sight and sound, the necessary, unimportant commonfolk had leave to work and sell. Tokyo to-day is still as Yedo was. _Yashiki_ are pulled down, their ground is sold, but parliaments and embassies, nobles’ houses and their gardens, still make a circle round the palace, a space of suburb and of peace between the city and its centre.

Over the streets and the roadways, through parks and gardens, the black-winged crows sail past cynical, unbelieving. The web of brown canals beneath their high-arched bridges, the broad uncertain river sometimes slowly, sometimes fiercely, all flow towards the sea. The land-locked ocean, and the pale green rice-fields ripple round the streets. From sixty miles across the plain great Fuji looks towards the capital.

And here in Tokyo’s heart, in _Dai Nippon’s_ heart of hearts, not the usurping _shōgun_ or general in his camp, but _Tenshisama_, Son of Heaven, bestower of a western constitution, augustly dwells.

II

EAST AND WEST

EAST

The large red building covered all over with Chinese characters--a white sign on each cardboard square of red--overlooks the canal. It seems too gaudy and unsubstantial a building for sober work, and yet all day long multitudes of dark-blue coolies, like Florentine noblemen run to seed, go in and out. Fantastic key patterns in white are traced upon the skirts of their blue tunics, while on each back is a large red circle covered with the hieroglyph of the building. They may earn some 6_d._ a day for twelve long working hours.

From among the pale straw-coloured bales emerge two workmen. There are patches in their dark-blue hose, and the brown toes stick out through the blue of their divided socks. Even the blue designs on the white towels around their heads have faded away with much washing.

Catching sight of one another they bow low. A step nearer, and the jaunty ends of white towel tied in a knot on the forehead of one man, touch his knee.

The other, whose towel is tied like a night-cap round his head and under his chin, bends lower still.

Another step, and the indrawn whistles of politeness grow loud and shrill.

Another, and the white towels disappear entirely between the blue legs.

Then the night-capped one straightens himself and speaks:

“_Shitsurei de gozaimas ga, chotto hi o kashte kudasai_” (“Although this is great rudeness on my part,” he says, “would you condescend to lend me a match.”)

WEST

Between two rows of slovenly houses a long grey street stretches away, wet and grimy. There is just one break in the grey monotony where the gin palace stands in all its gilt and plate-glass splendour.

Coming up the street are two workmen. The billycock hats on their heads have lost their brim, and show more dirty stain than original black. As they catch sight of one another across the street they pause.

Suddenly one removes the clay pipe from his lips and spits profusely. The other eyes him, his hands in his pockets; then he too takes the short pipe from between his lips, and jerking his head in the direction of the public house, slowly puts out his tongue.

The first billycock replaces his pipe with care, crosses the road, and with a sanguinary word they both disappear within the doors of the gin palace.

III

YONÉ’S BABY

It lay on the matted floor, a little brown thing that cried, and Yoné sat on her heels and looked at it.

Huddled over the brazier in the corner, her skinny hands stretched out to clutch the warmth from the sticks of glowing charcoal, the old grandmother dozed and grumbled.

And Yoné did not move. The _Ijin San_ for whom she worked had told her she ought to take care of her dead daughter’s child and bring it up; but Yoné’s conscience, the conscience of her race, the inherited upbringing of her dead fathers, made her instinctively turn towards the _O Bā San_ in the corner. She could not feed two mouths. Life was hard for Yoné; and the _O Bā San_ had a good appetite though she was so old.

So Yoné sat on her heels and sullenly listened to the quavering wail without moving.

“If the gods wanted the child to live, why had they let its mother die? Why had its father divorced the little wife ‘for temper’ before the baby was born? It was Fate. And after all the baby was very small and ugly, a little, cross sickly thing that cried. No, it had much better die, much better.”

And Yoné got up, and went to get ready the evening rice for the _O Bā San_. As she did so the shadow of the _Ijin San_ herself fell across the floor, and her voice, in very English Japanese, asked after the baby. Yoné was down on her knees in a moment, drawing in her breath through her teeth in long whistles of politeness.

“The baby was not well, as the _Ijin San_ could see. It did nothing but cry; and after all what was the use? It had much better die.”

The _Ijin San_ sat down on the little platform, the _shōji_ pushed back between her and the room, in consternation. After all she had said the day before, all she had urged, Yoné still clung to that awful idea. The _Ijin San_ had a shrewd suspicion that the old lady in the corner had something to do with Yoné’s idea “it was better baby die.” It would be quite easy for “baby to die” too, and that without much active doing on Yoné’s part. So she sat there perplexed, the baby cuddled up in her arms. Moral persuasions she had tried, and appeals to Yoné’s conscience, her love for her dead daughter, her duty--all in vain. And she looked down at the queer little atom in its bright red _kimono_, with the wide flapping sleeves, wondering whether it would look quite so odd dressed like other babies, her own for instance, and she smiled. It was a last chance any way.

“Yoné,” she said, holding up the baby. “How would you like to see him dressed like the _Bot’chan_.”

“Hē,” cried Yoné, turning round, her vanity awake in a moment.

“Well, if you’ll take care of him, I’ll dress him in foreign clothes, and he’ll look just like the _Bot’chan_.”

Yoné’s strangled “h’s” of admiration grew deeper and deeper. Her admiration for the _Ijin San’s Bot’chan_ knew no bounds; and then the pride of having a foreign-dressed baby of her own! Why, not one of her acquaintances, not even the rich _saké_ merchant at the corner, dressed their children “foreign fashion.” It was a height beyond their ambition, a dizzy pinnacle only reached by the _samurai_ and the Court! And Yoné’s strangled “h’s” of admiration and her indrawn whistles of politeness knew no bounds. Even the _O Bā San_ in the corner turned her head round and showed some signs of interest. And the baby stopped its feeble cry and lay back on the _Ijin San’s_ lap--and smiled.

With a sudden swoop Yoné caught it up. “I take care, I take care,” she said, “let the _Ijin San_ bring the clothes.”

And from that day she went about her work with the quaintest little brown morsel in a foreign pelisse and a white bonnet nodding over her shoulder. And neither the _O Bā San_ nor the baby ever went hungry whatever Yoné might do.

IV

THE GRAVES OF THE RŌNIN

The white wing of a blossoming plum-tree casts a pale shadow across the pebbled steps of the causeway, and the spring sunshine is warm. Behind, under the great gate of the temple, is a stall with souvenir tea-bowls of the _Forty-Seven Rōnin_ and the red blankets of a tiny _chaya_. In front, at the end of the causeway, stands a Japanese father with his little son, buying bundles of incense sticks from the Buddhist sexton. Coming up the path are two peasants with bare, brown legs, one wearing the old-fashioned gunhammer top-knot. And the plum-tree, its scent warm and fragrant, lies a white wing above the path.

The Japanese father, _samurai_ from his face, and modern by his clothes, and his son have passed into the graveyard before us. But we all stand together in the little square garden on the side of the hill, with its thickly clustered tombstones, shaped like Moses’ Tables of the Law in the Child’s Bible, set in the flat brown earth.

Below, a sharply falling line of dark green shrubs; above, the overhanging trees of the hillside; and the garden is quiet and still, with a little chill of damp and death that sobers and subdues.

Before each stone tablet on the earthen path are bamboo vases filled with freshly cut branches of evergreens, and the burning incense sticks trail a thin scarf of smoke along the ground.

The two old peasants are busy sticking their thin, brown incense tapers into the little heaps of grey ash--to become grey ashes in their turn. The little son has already lit his before the tomb of Oishi Kuranosuké; and the father, gravely feeling in the pocket of his “foreign” coat, takes out a visiting-card, and lays it reverently among the pile of others on the grave.

Then they go away slowly. And I catch the names of Asano Takumi no Kami and Kira Kōtsuké no Suké, and I know that the little son is listening to the story of the _Forty-Seven Rōnin_.

For two hundred years now they have come up the pebbled pathway into the graveyard, country peasant and Tokyo gentlemen coming with incense sticks and flowering branches, to keep green the memory of the loyal retainers who died to revenge their lord: coming in _kimono_ and top-knot: still coming in foreign clothes and _shappo_, for the old spirit lives though the outer form is changing. The fierce unswerving loyalty, the utter self-sacrifice, the tenacity and strength of the _Forty-Seven Rōnin_ still stir the soul of the modern Japanese under their foreign envelope as it stirred the heart of those fierce old _samurai_, with their hands ever on the hilt of their long two-handed swords.

“Thou shalt not live under the same heaven nor tread the same earth as the enemy of thy father or thy master,” says the Scripture. And the Forty-Seven died, and more than died, to fulfil the commandment.

In the temple below their wooden effigies stand to this day. Among them are old men and young boys--one with the grey locks of seventy-seven, one with the boyish cheeks of seventeen--but neither the old man nor the young boy faltered, through all the long months of waiting, in the dangerous moment of the struggle or after. They plotted and endured; they fought and slew; they brought the bloody head of Kira Kōtsuké no Suké, washed in the well beyond the plum-tree, here to the grave of their dead lord; they gave themselves up to Justice; they carried out the sentence of death on their own bodies with their own hands--all with the same quiet self-control which only the sense of a supreme, absorbing duty can produce.

And the Forty-Seven were buried here, in the quiet cold graveyard, beside the body of their lord. And when they had been laid to rest there came a fierce two-sworded _samurai_ to the little garden, and, kneeling down in front of the tomb of Oishi Kuranosuké, he took his dirk from his belt and stabbed himself above the grave. For he had insulted Oishi Kuranosuké, in the long months of the waiting, thinking he had forgotten his lord.

So they buried him among the Forty-Seven, and before his tomb are flowering branches and burning incense tapers.

* * * * *

The two old peasants are gone, but the sound of coming steps is on the pebbled pathway.

It is the feet of the nation. They come to keep their age long watch above the graves of the Loyal _Rōnin_.

V

THE DOLLS’ FESTIVAL

Enshrined in their white wooden boxes the dolls look down; and the gently drifting crowd stare their fill.

It is the eve of the Dolls’ Festival, and for a hundred yards along the wide _Odōri_, the street is wreathed across and across with swaying lines of paper lanterns.

On each matted floor, raised knee-high from the ground, a shopman sits on his heels, his hands eternally stretched out over the charcoal fire of the _hibachi_.

The background of dolls on three sides of him seem as interested in their sale as he. The crowd drifts, talks, points, looks, but he sits still, absorbed in his occupation. Occasionally he will turn a languid head over one shoulder in the direction of an inquiring voice, and tranquilly name a price four times bigger than he expects to get; but unless the customer pursues the bargain with vigour he does not stir. Even then, all the talking is done without moving more than a head. And when the culminating point arrives at which the would-be buyer shakes the dust off his feet and makes vigorously for the next shop, he murmurs an impassive “_Yoroshī_” (“All right”), and warms another finger, while a boy in the background, who for ever dusts the stock-in-trade, does up the parcel and takes the money.

I wonder--would anything stir this _blasé_ image of indifference?

Perhaps if a fool or a foreigner, interchangeable terms in the East, paid the price he asked he might----. No, “_Yoroshī, yoroshī_,” he murmurs, and does not interrupt the warming of his hands by a finger’s-breadth.

For ten long days now the dolls, all in the quaint robes of old, have looked down on the gently drifting crowd, emperor and empress, lords and ladies, and court musicians. The red silk trousers and the flowing hair, the cut-glass chandelier-like head-dress and the wide, wide sleeved _kimono_; the court lady leading her lap-dog; the musicians with their instruments; and along the lower shelves, the long procession of lacquered bowls, and tables and furniture, the old, old shapes of Old Japan, the realities buried for ever in museums, and only these, their midget substitutes, enjoying a brief life once a year.

They are so neat and pretty, of such exquisite workmanship and finish, that I stay to look and look. Behind me the crowd closes in thicker and thicker, looking too--but at me; so thickly that they obstruct the rails of Tokyo’s main tramway, and cause it much embarrassment.

To-morrow is the Dolls’ Festival, and all the world is buying; I, too, would like to buy. So I sit still on the edge of the matted floor and watch. I shall learn what I ought to give and how to conduct the intricate matter of a purchase. But though they were here before me, and though they stay long after me, and though I wait with what I consider quite Oriental patience, they do not buy, not one of them, they only talk. So I am compelled to conduct my own purchase without the aid of native example, and to the certain advantage of the impassive shopman.

Does any one ever buy anything in Tokyo?

In all my many wanderings I have never seen them, patiently as I have stalked them. They are always just going--just going--just going----

Perhaps that is why the impassive shopmen are so impassive.

VI

WITH DEATH BESIDE HER

“_Go-han wa skoshi mo arimasen_” (“Not another grain of rice, not a grain”). And O Matsu sat back on her heels, the lid of the wooden rice saucepan clutched in her hand.

“_Skoshi mo arimasen._” And the grey head, with its cropped hair gathered into a slide behind, bent despairingly over the saucepan.