Part 9

For many months I passed regularly every day through a street of warehouses where sacks of all kinds, and containing all sorts of produce, were lying on the ground, were being carried into the _godown_ or were loading or unloading. It was some time before it really struck me that the sacks were decorated, that their blank yellow sides were made beautiful with a design; but when I had once realised it, I used to look carefully to see if I could find sacks without. They were extremely rare. The designs varied considerably. A flower, conventional or natural, a maple leaf, a broken branch of plum-or cherry-blossom, the delicate outline of the bamboo in a thousand different shapes, were the most common, but there were others, birds, geometrical patterns, rice-ears, Fujiyama. These designs were with true decorative feeling in one corner, rarely in the exact centre, and admirably proportioned to the size of the sack. They were mostly drawn in, in soft blues--the commonest colour in the Far East--sometimes in a pale but very beautiful green; colours which, on the unbleached cotton or pale yellow matting of the sack, made complete harmonies.

But a sack, whatever its business in life, is at least an article of considerable duration, it is not made to be used and thrown away the next moment like the paper wrapping of a parcel. Yet it is very few parcels in very few shops which are not wrapped up in paper whose monotonous surface is broken by just one tiny design. The papers in which piece-silks are wrapped, the equivalent to those whitey-brown covers which drapers seem perpetually doing up on our counters, are often really beautiful in both colour and design. I do not think a Japanese can see a blank surface without wanting to design something on it, something little, something beautiful, just to redeem it for art.

These designs are to be found, if one looks for them, in the most unexpected places, on the axle-heads of your _kuruma_ for instance. A casual and rather dilapidated _kuruma_ in an out-of-the-way town in Japan had such exquisite flying storks beaten on to the bronze metal of its axle-head that I had to get out and look at them. The _kurumaya_ was amused at my enthusiasm, and entered into a detailed comparison of these axle-heads with all the other axle-heads of all the other _kuruma_ of his acquaintance, explaining their respective merits and defects. If there is no actual design the metal is usually beaten in such a way as to form an irregular pattern.

When a Japanese cannot mould the shape of an object, when he cannot redeem it by a design, when in fact he has no control over its creation at all, but it is placed in his hands as it is, finished, he will still contrive to add beauty to it merely by arrangement. I first noticed this on board the steamer going out, where the Japanese “boy” arranged the extra blanket on the berth in a new design each day. He folded it into lotus leaves and chrysanthemums, into half-opened fans and half-shut buds. He had one wonderful arrangement which, being patriotic, was more often repeated than the rest. The blankets of the steamship company had, instead of the usual stripes at top and bottom, just two thick wavy lines of deep red--the steamer’s flag was two wavy red lines on a white ground; by some wonderful twist of his fingers the “boy” would fold that blanket into the rising sun, with the four red lines coming out of it like blood-red rays. It sounds difficult, but he did it so perfectly that I recognised the flag of Japan the moment I saw it. Nor was he exceptional; the other “boys” on board were just as artistic, all the other cabins, for in the course of the voyage I entered most of them, were equally decorated, though in most cases the art had been quite lost on the occupants.

A Japanese servant, any servant, even one in a hotel, will set out your hair brushes, clothes brushes, nail scissors, collar box, tooth-powder tin on the ordinary average hotel dressing-table and make a design of them. The toilette table will somehow be a picture, an artistic whole. It was an application of art I tried hard to learn, and failed dismally. After awhile I could manage something with the brushes; but the nail scissors, and more especially the tooth-powder tin, remained, in my hands, the unbeautiful necessary articles which they intrinsically are.

We make in Europe various attempts at beautifying our food. We put parsley on white dishes round cold mutton, and paper frills on ham bones where the pins are dangerous. On special occasions, such as a Lord Mayor’s banquet or a cookery exhibition, we serve pastries as Tower Bridges, or jellies as broken lutes, but we do not consistently arrange our food so that each dish is a colour scheme and an art design of its own.

I lunched once with a professor in Tokyo; it was a modest meal in the house of a man badly off, according to our ideas, but when the red-lacquered trays came in, each lunch on its own tray, and all the courses served together, I could not restrain a cry of delight. The whole set out in its red-lacquered tray was a picture, each dish in itself was another. The golden bream lay on a pale blue dish; an oval slab of pounded fish, pure white in colour, rested against a mound of lime-green chestnuts; in front and lying in a crescent curve were purple roots, brown ginger, and tiny slices of red radish. It was simply a triumph. I have eaten pinky brown soup in which the curved peel of an orange floated like a golden dolphin; pale yellow custards, served in delicate blue bowls, whose surfaces were ruffled with silver fishes; white rice-moulds wrapped in the delicate tendrils of a vine-green seaweed; thin slices of pink raw fish, the colour of an uncooked salmon, laid out on green dishes and garnished with little heaps of olive seaweed shaven fine and eaten with a burnt-sienna sauce. The very hawkers in the streets serve their one-_rin_ (10 to a ¼_d._) sweetmeats or their snow-white _tōfu_ daintily, on plates of appropriate colour, artistically set out. The rice-paste biscuits are veritable works of art in shape and colour. You can eat almost every variety of chrysanthemum, as well as see it, and the colouring, all vegetable, is almost as beautiful.

We have, I believe, in England, a profession called “window-dressing,” and in a few cases this does truly attain to art. But with us it always ends at the windows. Enter the shop and, unless it is a showroom, you stand in the midst of undigested cargoes of goods; and whose eye has not been pained by heaped rolls of stuff where a post-office red will lie, as often as not, on the top of a crimson and underneath a magenta? That is a thing which could not happen in Japan; the eye of the young man behind the counter would forbid it.

I once watched a whole consignment of silks being put away on shelves in a shop in Tokyo. It was the European side of the establishment, so that the shop was fitted with counters, chairs, and the usual drapers’ shelves, the silks, too, told the same tale in their width and pattern. It was only a boy who was putting them away, sixteen at the outside, yet he did it with a conscious choice, and when he had finished, the silks, which ran through the whole gamut of colour, harmonised delightfully. But the real Japanese shops are more beautiful still. To go over the Mitsui is to walk through a gallery of pictures in still life. Here are no heaps of undigested goods, no mere piles of articles, but a definite and deliberate setting forth of certain things which left the impression that the clerks of the Mitsui posed their silken goods as an artist his model. The Mitsui is one of the best shops in Tokyo; to be perfectly fair compare it with one of our “art salesmen.” But the best of our shops tie up their parcels in whitey-brown paper with tow-coloured string, thinner or thicker according to the weight of the parcel. In the Mitsui the string is all pure white or scarlet-red, and each parcel is tied with a strand of both laid side by side, the heavier the parcel the greater the number of scarlet and white strings, always laid side by side, until sometimes they make a wide white line above a wide red one, kept evenly together by a skilful knot. The ends, too, are not snapped off anyhow after tying an ugly knot, but are cut slantwise, to form a V or a point, and even the knot is beautiful because it is a coherent whole, and not a conglomeration of successive ties.

So far, all these things, rice-fields, sacks, and food, with the sole exception of the blankets and hair brushes, have been exclusively Japanese, the nation has evolved them in itself, and by itself, and consequently in comparing them with things European it has only been possible to take similar and not identical objects. But since their first contact with Europe, and more especially during the last thirty years, the Japanese have borrowed a certain number of articles directly from the West. They have borrowed beer-glasses, windows, and wall-papers. And from the Dutch, three-hundred years ago, they took pipes and tobacco pouches. A light kind of _lager_ beer is rapidly becoming a universal drink in Japan. There are several native breweries, and those places where beer has not penetrated are considered hopelessly “old-fashioned.” After the beer came the beer-glasses, and though the art of the nation has not been long at work upon them, they are already very different from their European models. It must be remembered, too, that glass was unknown to the Japanese until it was introduced from the West. The first thing which the nation did when it set to work upon beer-glasses was to reduce the size, otherwise they would have been out of all proportion to the rest of the dinner service, and so the beer-glasses of Japan are small as dolls’ tumblers in which, if you are lucky, you will find three sips of beer under the egg-white froth.

If this example illustrates the love of the little, generally supposed to be the chief characteristic of the Japanese, the case of the windows will show their dislike to unredeemed blank space, and at the same time their knowledge of the artistic value of space in design. So long as windows only existed in houses built in the style called “foreign,” they remained severely Western, just another European object like the railway or the telegraph set up in the land, but when they began to be introduced into Japanese houses, then the art of the nation set to work upon them. They are still rare, but in a few private houses and in some of the best native hotels windows exist. They do not open. They were not introduced to supply ventilation, an unnecessary consideration in a Japanese house, which is all draughts, nor really for light, the paper panes of the _shōji_ admitting light readily; but just in order that the person inside might have another picture before his eyes--the picture of what lies without. The window then is not a glass fitting to an oblong hole knocked into a wall, but a broad band of glass running round the whole length of the _shōji_ at just that distance from the ground which will allow anyone sitting on his heels on the floor to see through comfortably. A pattern on this glass window would have interfered with the view, and the window was there expressly for the view. So the glass is empty and clear, but not blank. Then it would have been merely useful, and the Japanese never stop at utility; it had to be made beautiful, and so the pure perfect curves of Fuji were traced upon the glass. The design was quite small and only occupied one end, but the area of the glass was no longer blank space, but the demanded setting to a picture.

There is no place in a Japanese house for wall-papers, but the number of foreign-built hotels and houses has created a certain demand for them. Also the Japanese are beginning to export wall-papers abroad. As the patterns are mostly supplied to them direct from European firms, or copied from models sent them on order, they have to please their market, and yet I have seen a wall-paper in a hotel bedroom where two golden dragons drawn back to back studded a white ground. It was a perfectly conventional pattern, and at first there seemed nothing remarkable about it. The tiny dragons, looking something like a _fleur de lys_, occurred at six-inch intervals. Then it dawned gradually, the intervals were not regular, they differed both lengthways and width-ways. It took indeed ten feet of wall before the pattern absolutely repeated itself.

But windows, wall-papers and beer-glasses are new growths, only just engrafted on to the life of the people. They are still thought of as something foreign, whereas pipes and pouches, although coming originally from the West, have in the course of three hundred years become thoroughly absorbed and transformed by the genius of the nation. To judge from the old pictures the first pipes were three or four feet long, with a bowl to correspond, in size and capacity suggestive of those long wooden pipes with china bowls smoked by the traditional Dutchman. At the same time we in the West have also been evolving our pipes and pouches, as the art and the convenience of Europe demanded, and to-day the British navvy has arrived at his clay and the city clerk at his briarwood, and both at the gutta-percha pouch. When bent on “something tasty,” they may indulge in skeleton-head pipes with carbuncle eyes, or magenta plush pouches embroidered in apple-green silk. In Japan the navvy (or his wife, for smoking is equally common to both sexes) uses a doll’s pipe made of a slender bamboo reed, whose bowl and mouthpiece are of metal, beautifully finished, and holding just three whiffs of their fine-cut red-brown tobacco. The pouch is made of leather, fastening like a purse, and the metal snap is always fashioned into a design, however simple--two birds flying, a fish, a grasshopper. There is also a leather case to keep the pipe in, like an open spectacle-case, and the two are fastened together by means of a twisted silken cord. The pipe-case is stuck into the _obi_, and the pouch hangs over. It was to allow of the free hang of the pouch, and also as a finish to the silken cord, that the _netsuké_ was invented, and some of the most beautiful of museum art objects produced. But _netsuké_ are not for the navvy or the people, or if they do occur in the cheap pouches of the poorer classes they are nothing more than a rounded bead only valuable artistically as a spot of colour. The pouches, the pipes and the pipe-cases are genuinely beautiful in shape, make and proportion. They also have the merit, rare in gutta-percha, of endurance. A pouch bought four years ago by a careless European, and in use ever since, shows to-day no sign of wear. It is not cracking at the seams, and the snap is as firm as ever. A smoker, I believe, has no particular hankering after the Japanese pipe with its metal bowl and mouthpiece, but anybody with a sense of form must enjoy the delicate refinement of even the commonest native pipe with the gentle yellow of its bamboo stem, the finish of the metal mouthpiece, and the perfect shape of its acorn bowl.

These are, after all, only a few examples, sufficient perhaps for the purpose, but any one who has lived in Japan and looked at the common objects of daily life used, owned and produced by the people would be able to multiply them almost indefinitely.

In thinking them over perhaps the thing which occurs most frequently to the mind is the simplicity of the means used. The whole artistic effect of the rice-fields consists in the variation of their shape, in the curve of the mud wall; in the shops and in the food simply in the right choice of given articles. But through all Japanese art, even the most elaborate, this same simplicity of means is noticeable. I have seen the most elaborate imperial brocade which produced an effect of running water, and it was done by simply throwing over the original blue brocade a rough mesh network of brown silk. Every garden in Japan is an illustration of this point, for a Japanese in a dull back yard as big as a bath-towel will, by the judicious planting of two small palm-trees, the setting up of a stone lantern, and the careful making of a puddle, convey to the mind of those who look the greenness and the coolness of a dense forest, the freshness of clear water, and the delight of hills and dales. I have seen it often in wayside inns, in shops, in big towns, in factories, everywhere.

Exactly the same thing is true of their flower arrangement. Putting aside all other points of beauty and charm, a Japanese with three chrysanthemums, with one branch of fir, will produce a whole which we should only think of attempting with a shilling’s-worth of flowers and two penny bunches of “green.”

On the characteristics of Japanese art European writers have varied greatly, but in considering only the art of the people there are perhaps fewer difficulties or differences, and we come, I think, to four--value of space, desire for line, sobriety of taste, and thoroughness of workmanship. I do not include the dislike of symmetry, because a want can hardly be called a characteristic. Symmetry is more properly a characteristic of our art. The Japanese dislike it, they make nothing in pairs, and if certain things, such as candlesticks, are required in twos, each one, though resembling the other in the main idea, always differs from it in detail.

The sense of the artistic value of space shows itself everywhere, in every form of decoration and design, as well as in every object of art. In Japan there is no such thing as overcrowding. It is one small leaf which decorates the sheet of paper wrapping. It is the scarcity of articles in the Mitsui which accounts for nine-tenths of the artistic effect of that draper’s interior. If ever a nation has thoroughly and æsthetically realised the psychological fact on which much of our theory of backgrounds is based, that we only really see an object by its outlines, it is the Japanese. They have worked out this fact to its last artistic value. In a Japanese room there hangs one picture; on the raised and polished platform of the _tokonoma_, the artistic altar of the room, there is set one bronze or porcelain vase of flowers, one ornament. These are changed as often as the fortune or the taste of their owner permits. When a Japanese comes to Europe he complains that our drawing-rooms, with their dozens of pictures and their scores of ornaments, are “like warehouses”; and after this first disturbing feeling of crowd, when he has lived in that drawing-room for several months and finds that the ornaments are never changed, only perhaps added to, he complains then of the monotony. For he knows and has realised another psychological fact, that it is in the freshness of observation that the eye sees clearest and the brain works best.

With the sense of the supreme value of space comes an intense feeling for line. Whether this has something to do with the climate, which is clear, and the landscape, which is mountainous, I do not know; but compare the purity of outline in the Italian painters, more especially in the Tuscan and the Umbrian, Botticelli and Perugino, with the Netherlands School, Rembrandt and Rubens, where light and shadow, and colour as colour, play so great a part. But whether it is due to the landscape or not, personally I should be inclined to attach a great deal of importance to the artistic value of Fujiyama, a mountain whose exquisite outlines, visible from thirteen provinces, have simply permeated Japanese art; but landscape or no, the desire for line is a fact. The Japanese draw with everything; with the mud embankments of their rice-fields, with the granite stones of their walls, with the trees in their gardens, with the flowers in their vases. The whole essence of flower arrangement is not colour mass, but line drawing. It is the same with their trees, the dwarf trees in their pots, or the grown trees in their gardens. Both are trained and educated to produce a beautiful outline, and they succeed. It is perhaps interesting in this connection to notice the number of illustrations in Japanese books where the trees are simply silhouettes washed in in Indian ink on a blank background. We should have, I think, a great disinclination to treat our trees in this way.

The feeling for line is very strong, and it is perhaps perpetuated by the daily use of those dead pictures, the Chinese ideographs. Several hundred years ago the Japanese invented the phonetic syllabaries called _kana_. It is interesting from an artistic point of view to compare them with our alphabet. A very short contemplation of the alphabet as used in our books and handwriting will show that it is mainly composed of straight lines, often parallel, with a certain admixture of circles. Now, although a straight line is the nearest way between two points, it is rarely or never the most beautiful; did not some one once say, “The line of beauty is a curve”? I do not think any one’s artistic soul has received much nourishment from a contemplation of the letter “m,” three parallel lines, or “t.” Compare them with the corresponding _kana_, and the difference will be felt at once. Indeed, we are all unconsciously well aware of the artistic failing of our ordinary alphabet, for directly we carve or write an inscription, or introduce it in any way into something which claims to be an object of art, then we discard it altogether, and either fall back on the Gothic letters, or adopt some kind of fancy alphabet. As the average Japanese child is taught writing four hours a week for the first three years, and three hours for the next two, and as their writing is really painting, their feeling for line has at least a chance of development.

Of the thoroughness of Japanese workmanship I do not think anybody would disagree; when the wing of the stork on your rice-bowl is finished inside, when the chrysanthemum petals on your wooden tray curl over the edge, when the bottom of your flower vase has a design as well as the outside, you are convinced that the Japanese knew Ruskin’s dictum long before he said it. I have seen the feet of a bronze statuette, the feet which were entirely hidden under the folds of the _kimono_ from in front, carefully finished off underneath. The statuette in question cost 50 _sen_ (1_s._), and was sold by a street hawker. Nobody really sees the designs on the _kuruma_ axle-heads, not unless they look for them, except perhaps the _kurumaya_ himself, when he squats on the ground waiting for a fare; but they give a thoroughness of finish to the _’ricksha_ which it would miss without.