Part 7
Nearly three hundred years ago, Captain John Saris, visiting Japan in the service of the "Eight Honourable Companye, ye. marchants of London trading into ye. East Indyes," wrote concerning the great city of Ōsaka (as the name is now transliterated): "We found Osaca to be a very great towne, as great as London within the walls, with many faire timber bridges of a great height, seruing to passe over a riuer there as wide as the Thames at London. Some faire houses we found there, but not many. It is one of the chiefe sea-ports of all Iapan; hauing a castle in it, maruellous large and strong" ... What Captain Saris said of the Osaka of the seventeenth century is almost equally true of the Ōsaka of to-day. It is still a very great city and one of the chief seaports of all Japan; it contains, according to the Occidental idea, "some faire houses;" it has many "faire timber bridges" (as well as bridges of steel and stone)--"seruing to passe ouer a river as wide as the Thames at London,"--the Yodogawa; and the castle "marvellous large and strong," built by Hideyoshi after the plan of a Chinese fortress of the Han dynasty, still remains something for military engineers to wonder at, in spite of the disappearance of the many-storied towers, and the destruction (in 1868) of the magnificent palace.
Ōsaka is more than two thousand five hundred years old, and therefore one of the most ancient cities of Japan,--though its present name, a contraction of _Oye no Saka,_ meaning the High Land of the Great River, is believed to date back only to the fifteenth century, before which time it was called Naniwa. Centuries before Europe knew of the existence of Japan, Osaka was the great financial and commercial centre of the empire; and it is that still. Through all the feudal era, the merchants of Osaka were the bankers and creditors of the Japanese princes: they exchanged the revenues of rice for silver and gold;--they kept in their miles of fireproof warehouses the national stores of cereals, of cotton, and of silk;--and they furnished to great captains the sinews of war. Hideyoshi made Osaka his military capital;--Iyeyasu, jealous and keen, feared the great city, and deemed it necessary to impoverish its capitalists because of their financial power.
The Ōsaka of 1896, covering a vast area has a population of about 670,000. As to extent and population, it is now only the second city of the empire; but it remains, as Count Okuma remarked in a recent speech, financially, industrially, and commercially superior to Tōkyō. Sakai, and Hyōgo, and Kobé are really but its outer ports; and the last-named is visibly outgrowing Yokohama. It is confidently predicted, both by foreigners and by Japanese, that Kobé will become the chief port of foreign trade, because Osaka is able to attract to herself the best business talent of the country. At present the foreign import and export trade of Ōsaka represents about $120,000,000 a year; and its inland and coasting trade are immense. Almost everything which everybody wants is made in Ōsaka; and there are few comfortable Japanese homes in any part of the empire to the furnishing of which Ōsaka industry has not contributed something. This was probably the case long before Tokyo existed. There survives an ancient song of which the burden runs,--"_Every day to Ōsaka come a thousand ships."_ Junks only, in the time when the song was written; steamers also to-day, and deep-sea travelers of all rigs. Along the wharves you can ride for miles by a seemingly endless array of masts and funnels,--though the great Trans-Pacific liners and European mail-steamers draw too much water to enter the harbor, and receive their Ōsaka freight at Kobé. But the energetic city, which has its own steamship companies, now proposes to improve its port, at a cost of 116,000,000. An Ōsaka with a population of two millions, and a foreign trade of at least $300,000,000 a year, is not a dream impossible to realize in the next half century. I need scarcely say that Ōsaka is the centre of the great trade-guilds,[1] and the headquarters of those cotton-spinning companies whose mills, kept running with a single shift twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four, turn out double the quantity of yarn per spindle that English mills turn out, and from thirty to forty per cent, more than the mills of Bombay.
Every great city in the world is believed to give a special character to its inhabitants; and in Japan the man of Ōsaka is said to be recognizable almost at sight. I think it can be said that the character of the man of the capital is less marked than that of the man of Ōsaka,--as in America the man of Chicago is more quickly recognized than the New Yorker or Bostonian. He has a certain quickness of perception, ready energy, and general air of being "well up to date," or even a little in advance of it, which represent the result of industrial and commercial intercompetition. At all events, the Ōsaka merchant or manufacturer has a much longer inheritance of business experience than his rival of the political capital. Perhaps this may
## partly account for the acknowledged superiority of Ōsaka commercial
travelers; a modernized class, offering some remarkable types. While journeying by rail or steamer you may happen to make the casual acquaintance of a gentleman whose nationality you cannot safely decide even after some conversation. He is dressed with the most correct taste in the latest and best mode; he can talk to you equally well in French, German, or English; he is perfectly courteous, but able to adapt himself to the most diverse characters; he knows Europe; and he can give you extraordinary information about parts of the Far East which you have visited, and also about other parts of which you do not even know the names. As for Japan, he is familiar with the special products of every district, their comparative merits, their history. His face is pleasing,--nose straight or slightly aquiline,--mouth veiled by a heavy black moustache: the eye-lids alone give you some right to suppose that you are conversing with an Oriental. Such is one type of the Ōsaka commercial traveler of 1896,--a being as far superior to the average Japanese petty official as a prince to a lackey. Should you meet the same man in his own city, you would probably find him in Japanese costume,--dressed as only a man of fine taste can learn how to dress, and looking rather like a Spaniard or Italian in disguise than a Japanese.
[Footnote 1: There are upwards of four hundred commercial companies in Osaka.]
II
From the reputation of Ōsaka as a centre of production and distribution, one would imagine it the most modernized, the least characteristically Japanese, of all Japanese cities. But Ōsaka is the reverse. Fewer Western costumes are to be seen in Ōsaka than in any other large city of Japan. No crowds are more attractively robed, and no streets more picturesque, than those of the great mart.
Ōsaka is supposed to set many fashions; and the present ones show an agreeable tendency to variety, of tint. When I first came to Japan the dominant colors of male costume were dark,--especially dark blue; any crowd of men usually presenting a mass of this shade. To-day the tones are lighter; and greys--warm greys, steel greys, bluish greys, purplish greys--seem to predominate. But there are also many pleasing variations,--bronze-colors, gold-browns, "tea-colors," for example. Women's costumes are of course more varied; but the character of the fashions for adults of either sex indicates no tendency to abandon the rules of severe good taste;--gay colors appearing only in the attire of children and of dancing-girls,--to whom are granted the privileges of perpetual youth. I may observe that the latest fashion in the silk upper-dress, or _haori,_ of geisha, is a burning sky--blue,--a tropical color that makes the profession of the wearer distinguishable miles away. The higher-class geisha, however, affect sobriety in dress. I must also speak of the long overcoats or overcloaks worn out-of-doors in cold weather by both sexes. That of the men looks like an adaptation and modification of our "ulster," and has a little cape attached to it: the material is wool, and the color usually light brown or grey. That of the ladies, which has no cape, is usually of black broadcloth, with much silk binding, and a collar cut low in front. It is buttoned from throat to feet, and looks decidedly genteel, though left very wide and loose at the back to accommodate the bow of the great heavy silk girdle beneath.
*
Architecturally not less than fashionably, Ōsaka remains almost as Japanese as anybody could wish. Although some wide thoroughfares exist, most of the streets are very narrow,--even more narrow than those of Kyōto. There are streets of three-story houses and streets of two-story houses; but there are square miles of houses one story high. The great mass of the city is an agglomeration of low wooden buildings with tiled roofs. Nevertheless the streets are more interesting, brighter, quainter in their signs and sign-painting, than the streets of Tōkyō; and the city as a whole is more picturesque than Tōkyō because of its waterways. It has not inaptly been termed the Venice of Japan; for it is traversed in all directions by canals, besides being separated into several large portions by the branchings of the Yodogawa. The streets facing the river are, however, much less interesting than the narrow canals.
Anything more curious in the shape of a street vista than the view looking down one of these waterways can scarcely be found in Japan. Still as a mirror surface, the canal flows between high stone embankments supporting the houses,--houses of two or three stories, all sparred out from the stonework so that their façades bodily overhang the water. They are huddled together in a way suggesting pressure from behind; and this appearance of squeezing and crowding is strengthened by the absence of regularity in design,--no house being exactly like another, but all having an indefinable Far-Eastern queerness,--a sort of racial character,--that gives the sensation of the very-far-away in place and time. They push out funny little galleries with balustrades; barred, projecting, glassless windows with elfish balconies under them, and rootlets over them like eyebrows; tiers of tiled and tilted awnings; and great eaves which, in certain hours, throw shadows down to the foundation. As most of the timber-work is dark,--either with age or staining,--the shadows look deeper than they really are. Within them you catch glimpses of balcony pillars, bamboo ladders from gallery to gallery, polished angles of joinery,--all kinds of jutting things. At intervals you can see mattings hanging out, and curtains of split bamboo, and cotton hangings with big white ideographs upon them; and all this is faithfully repeated upside down in the water. The colors ought to delight an artist,--umbers and chocolates and chestnut-browns of old polished timber; warm yellows of mattings and bamboo screens; creamy tones of stuccoed surfaces; cool greys of tiling.... The last such vista I saw was bewitched by a spring haze. It was early morning. Two hundred yards from the bridge on which I stood, the house fronts began to turn blue; farther on, they were transparently vapory; and yet farther, they seemed to melt away suddenly into the light,--a procession of dreams. I watched the progress of a boat propelled by a peasant in straw hat and straw coat,--like the peasants of the old picture-books. Boat and man turned bright blue and then grey, and then, before my eyes,----glided into Nirvana. The notion of immateriality so created by that luminous haze was supported by the absence of sound; for these canal-streets are as silent as the streets of shops are noisy.
*
No other city in Japan has so many bridges as Ōsaka: wards are named after them, and distances marked by them,--reckoning always from Koraibashi, the Bridge of the Koreans, as a centre. Ōsaka people find their way to any place most readily by remembering the name of the bridge nearest to it. But as there are one hundred and eighty-nine principal bridges, this method of reckoning can be of little service to a stranger. If a business man, he can find whatever he wants without learning the names of the bridges. Ōsaka is the best-ordered city, commercially, in the empire, and one of the best-ordered in the world. It has always been a city of guilds; and the various trades and industries are congregated still, according to ancient custom, in special districts or particular streets. Thus all the money-changers are in Kitahama,--the Lombard Street of Japan; the dry-goods trade monopolizes Honmachi; the timber merchants are all in Nagabori and Nishi-Yokobori; the toy-makers are in Minami Kiuhojimachi and Kita Midōmae; the dealers in metal wares have Andojibashidōri to themselves; the druggists are in Doshiōmachi, and the cabinet-makers in Hachimansuji. So with many other trades; and so with the places of amusement. The theatres are in the Dōtombori; the jugglers, singers, dancers, acrobats, and fortune-tellers in the Sennichimae, close by.
The central part of Ōsaka contains many very large buildings,--including theatres, refreshment-houses, and hotels having a reputation throughout the country. The number of edifices in Western style is nevertheless remarkably small. There are indeed between eight and nine hundred factory chimneys; but the factories, with few exceptions, are not constructed on Western plans. The really "foreign" buildings include a hotel, a prefectual hall with a mansard roof, a city hall with a classical porch of granite pillars, a good modern post-office, a mint, an arsenal, and sundry mills and breweries. But these are so scattered and situated that they really make no
## particular impression at variance with the Far-Eastern character
of the city. However, there is one purely foreign corner,--the old Concession, dating back to a time before Kobé existed. Its streets were well laid out, and its buildings solidly constructed; but for various reasons it has been abandoned to the missionaries,--only one of the old firms, with perhaps an agency or two, remaining open. This deserted settlement is an oasis of silence in the great commercial wilderness.[1] No at-tempts have been made by the native merchants to imitate its styles of building: indeed, no Japanese city shows less favor than Ōsaka to Occidental architecture. This is not through want of appreciation, but because of economical experience. Ōsaka will build in Western style--with stone, brick, and iron--only when and where the advantage of so doing is indubitable. There will be no speculation in such constructions, as there has been at Tōkyō: Ōsaka "goes slow" and invests upon certainties. When there is a certainty, her merchants can make remarkable offers,--like that to the government two years ago of $56,000,000 for the purchase and reconstruction of a railway. Of all the houses in Osaka, the office of the "Asahi Shimbun" most surprised me. The "Asahi Shimbun" is the greatest of Japanese newspapers,--perhaps the greatest journal published in any Oriental language. It is an illustrated daily, conducted very much like a Paris newspaper,--publishing a _feuilleton,_ translations from foreign fiction, and columns of light, witty chatter about current events. It pays big sums to popular writers, and spends largely for correspondence and telegraphic news. Its illustrations--now made by a woman--offer as full a reflection of all phases of Japanese life, old or new, as Punch gives of English life. It uses perfecting presses, charters special trains, and has a circulation reaching into most parts of the empire. So I certainly expected to find the "Asahi Shimbun" office one of the handsomest buildings in Ōsaka. But it proved to be an old-time Samurai-yashiki,--about the most quiet and modest-looking place in the whole district where it was situated.
I must confess that all this sober and sensible conservatism delighted me. The competitive power of Japan must long depend upon her power to maintain the old simplicity of life.
[Footnote 1: The foreign legations left Ōsaka to take shelter at Kobé in 1868, during the civil war; for they could not be very well protected by their men-of-war in Ōsaka. Kobé once settled, the advantages offered by its deep harbor settled the fate of the Ōsaka Concession.]
III
Ōsaka is the great commercial school of the empire. From all parts of Japan lads are sent there to learn particular branches of industry or trade. There are hosts of applications for any vacancy; and the business men are said to be very cautious in choosing their _detchi,_ or apprentice-clerks. Careful inquiries are made as to the personal character and family history of applicants. No money is paid by the parents or relatives of the apprentices. The term of service varies according to the nature of the trade or industry; but it is generally quite as long as the term of apprenticeship in Europe; and in some branches of business it may be from twelve to fourteen years. Such, I am told, is the time of service usually exacted in the dry goods business; and the detchi in a dry goods house may have to work fifteen hours a day, with not more than one holiday a month. During the whole of his apprenticeship he receives no wages whatever,--nothing but his board, lodging, and absolutely necessary clothing. His master is supposed to furnish him with two robes a year, and to keep him in sandals, or geta. Perhaps on some great holiday he may be presented with a small gift of pocket money;--but this is not in the bond. When his term of service ends, however, his master either gives him capital enough to begin trade for himself on a small scale, or finds some other way of assisting him substantially,--by credit, for instance. Many detchi marry their employers' daughters, in which event the young couple are almost sure of getting a good start in life.
The discipline of these long apprenticeships may be considered a severe test of character. Though a detchi is never addressed harshly, he has to bear what no European clerk would bear. He has no leisure,--no time of his own except the time necessary for sleep; he must work quietly but steadily from dawn till late in the evening; he must content himself with the simplest diet, must keep himself neat, and must never show ill-temper. Wild oats he is not supposed to have, and no chance is given him to sow them. Some detchi never even leave their shop, night or day, for months at a time,--sleeping on the same mats where they sit in business hours. The trained salesmen in the great silk stores are especially confined within doors,--and their unhealthy pallor is proverbial. Year after year they squat in the same place, for twelve or fifteen hours every day; and you wonder why their legs do not fall off, like those of Daruma.[1]
Occasionally there are moral break-downs. Perhaps a detchi misappropriates some of the shop money, and spends the same in riotous living. Perhaps he does even worse. But, whatever the matter may be, he seldom thinks of running away. If he takes a spree, he hides himself after it for a day or two;--then returns of his own accord to confess, and ask pardon. He will be forgiven for two, three, perhaps even four escapades,--provided that he shows no signs of a really evil heart, -and be lectured about his weakness in its relation to his prospects, to the feelings of his family, to the honor of his ancestors, and to business requirements in general. The difficulties of his position are kindly considered, and he is never discharged for a small misdemeanor. A dismissal would probably ruin him for life; and every care is taken to open his eyes to certain dangers. Ōsaka is really the most unsafe place in Japan to play the fool in;--its dangerous and vicious classes are more to be feared than those of the capital; and the daily news of the great city furnishes the apprentice with terrible examples of men reduced to poverty or driven to self-destruction through neglect of those very rules of conduct which it is part of his duty to learn.
In cases where detchi are taken into service at a very early age, and brought up in the shop almost like adopted sons, a very strong bond of affection between master and apprentice is sometimes established. Instances of extraordinary devotion to masters, or members of masters' households, are often reported. Sometimes the bankrupt merchant is reëstablished in business by his former clerk. Sometimes, again, the affection of a detchi may exhibit itself in strange extremes. Last year there was a curious case. The only son of a merchant--a lad of twelve--died of cholera during the epidemic. A detchi of fourteen, who had been much attached to the dead boy, committed suicide shortly after the funeral by throwing himself down in front of a train. He left a letter, of which the following is a tolerably close translation,--the selfish pronouns being absent in the original:
_"Very long time in, august help received;--honorable mercy even, not in words to be declared. Now going to die, unfaithful in excess;--yet another state in, making rebirth, honorable mercy will repay. Spirit anxious only in the matter of little sister O-Noto;--with humble salutation, that she be honorably seen to, supplicate._
_"To the August Lord Master,_
_"From_
_"MANO YOSHIMATSU."_
[Footnote 1: In Japanese popular legend, Daruma (Bodhidharma), the great Buddhist patriarch and missionary, is said to have lost his legs during a meditation which lasted uninterruptedly for nine years. A common child's toy is a comical figure of Daruma, without legs, and so weighted within that, no matter how thrown down, it will always assume an upright position.]
IV
It is not true that Old Japan is rapidly disappearing. It cannot disappear within at least another hundred years; perhaps it will never entirely disappear. Many curious and beautiful things have vanished; but Old Japan survives in art, in faith, in customs and habits, in the hearts and the homes of the people: it may be found everywhere by those who know how to look for it,--and nowhere more easily than in this great city of ship-building, watch-making, beer-brewing, and cotton-spinning. I confess that I went to Ōsaka chiefly to see the temples, especially the famous Tennōji.