Part 9

--'None whatever,' I replied, 'and we certainly find them very difficult to acquire. The difference between the various European languages might perhaps be compared to the difference between a horse and a mule, while the difference between Japanese and the European languages would certainly not be closer in comparison than a horse to an ox. That is to say, the former differs only in species, and the latter in kind. Hence you can easily see how much more difficult it is for an Oriental to learn any European language, than a European to learn a second European language. Even amongst the European languages, there are, as you know, many idioms differing one from the other, and consequently difficult to understand. Only the other day I was not a little amused at a French translation of the English sentence "hold good" in the sense that "one thing had an advantage over another." You can imagine how much more difficult it is for a Japanese to know the value of every word, not to say an idiom, of a European language. Once in Japan, I was watching some European and Japanese children playing Hide-and-Seek together. The European children were making use of the Japanese words meaning "Hot and Cold" in place of "Far and Near." I could only make out what they meant after I had carefully watched the game. I am sure we commit similar errors every day when speaking in a foreign language. More than thirty years ago a party of Japanese ambassadors, including the present Marquis Ito, whom you know, and their suites, made a round trip through America and Europe: perhaps the duke remembers it. The mayor of a large manufacturing town in England, which a portion of the party were visiting, invited the visitors to the play. The party was divided into two and occupied two boxes opposite each other. The mayor and his wife were in a box and their daughter in the other. An Englishman who was in the mayor's box remarked to a Japanese guest, of an eminent fellow-guest seated beside the young lady opposite, "Monsieur K. must be very happy," meaning, no doubt, to pay a compliment indirectly to the mayor and his wife; but the Japanese to whom the remark was addressed understood but little English and replied: "K. must be quite ashamed."

--'It spoilt everything. In our language the word meaning "shame" and "bashfulness" are identical and the sense is only modified by a slight difference in construction. A somewhat similar example is the great difference in the meaning between the phrases _fâché contre_ and _fâché de_. The results of the misconstruction, as may be imagined, were rather serious. It was only made good by another Japanese who made a timely explanation. I heard this incident direct from that gentleman who made the explanation. That incident clearly demonstrates how difficult and delicate it is to express oneself in a tongue other than one's own.'

--'Exactly,' interposed the young nobleman. 'It is always necessary to make much allowance for a foreigner, and to make a guess at his meaning.'

--'The jiujitsu is being exhibited once more in France,' said the duchess. 'I have seen several advertisements in to-day's papers, one of which states that a physician asked the exhibitor to demonstrate on him, and afterwards declared it quite scientific. People in France know very little of that art.'

--'No wonder,' I answered; 'even in England, where jiujitsu is so much spoken of, it was very little known until quite recently. Not many years ago a lecture on the subject, accompanied by some practical demonstrations, was delivered at a literary society, by a Japanese gentleman, assisted by another Japanese. On that occasion a weekly paper of high reputation commented upon the art, saying that there was nothing in it. The writer added that jiujitsu was exactly the same as the English wrestling, with a few different tricks.'

--'Is there much difference between the two?'

--'Yes, there is a great difference. Of course the combatants in both exercises strive to get the upper hand of each other, but the great difference is that the wrestling relies chiefly on strength, whilst jiujitsu depends on all sorts of tricks, based upon a careful study of physical organism, and therefore physical strength may be said to be of little value, nay, in truth, it uses the strength of the opponent against himself. We, in Japan, have also a method of competition resembling the wrestling of the West, and we apply to that the Western name "wrestling." We do not like our jiujitsu to be confounded with it, though Western people sometimes call it by that name. When our jiujitsu is called "wrestling," it hurts our feelings a little.'

--'Why, how is that?' demanded the duchess.

--'Well, nothing very serious, but the reason is this: jiujitsu has always been regarded in Japan as an art chiefly practised by men of the higher classes. It has never been a profession, still less a public show, and the reason why now and then the art is made an object of exhibition in a public hall of the Western towns, is only an outcome of the altered conditions of the time. On the other hand, the wrestling which we call Sumoo has always been a profession and for public entertainment for many centuries.'

--'I see.'

--'It must, however, be understood that even wrestling is not considered a low profession, and though it is exhibited to the public, is very different from other kinds of shows--those, for instance, given at a fête. Wrestling in Japan has a very remote origin. In its earlier stage it was not a profession, it was one of the military sports, but as time went on it became a regular profession. Tokio is the centre of the Wrestling Association, and therefore it has the best wrestlers. Osaka comes next. The wrestlers are brought up and trained from boyhood: promising youths are picked up from all parts of the country by the principal wrestlers and taken into their private halls. There are two principal exhibitions of ten days, one early in the year and the other early in the summer, held in Tokio, when the rank and order of every member of the association is determined by competition. In the intervals they subdivide themselves into several parties and go about the country exhibiting their art. Men are very fond of seeing the wrestling, though very few women care to see it; in fact, it is only of recent date that one observes any women at all at such exhibitions, and those only of indifferent standing. It is not considered good taste. The last point excepted, wrestling in Japan resembles somewhat a bull-fight in Spain. I do not mean the sport itself, but in the sense of its being a national institution. From this fact you may see that we have more and better wrestlers than you in the West. Sometimes Western wrestlers come to Japan and challenge our wrestlers, but they are no match for ours. It is not worth boasting about, I merely state the fact. Of course, there is also much wrestling in country parts, and young people often perform, but they are, after all, only amateurs. As to jiujitsu, the art has been studied by the Samurai in a similar manner to fencing, with no professional performance or public show. Hence a great difference in the social position of jiujitsu experts and wrestlers. Nevertheless, the wrestlers maintain some trace of their ancient standing, for their position even now is regarded as superior to actors or the geisha, though good actors are rapidly gaining a social position.'

--'Is jiujitsu as old as wrestling?'

--'No, it is not. Jiujitsu is not quite three hundred years old, since it has been systematised into an art. There are many schools, I mean styles, of jiujitsu, and naturally some are older than others. They differ somewhat from one another, the difference having arisen chiefly from the endeavour of the founders to make improvements.'

--'But what is the real purport of jiujitsu?'

--'The masters call it an art of self-defence. You see, our Samurai do not like to be arrogant or offensive to other people, and therefore they profess to use jiujitsu only when attacked, hence the name of self-defence, and this point is one of their ideals; but as a matter of fact, it is an art that can be used for attack equally well, and therefore may be called an art both offensive and defensive. The advantage of knowing this art is that we can throw an opponent without hurting or killing him, because it requires no weapons, not even a stick. It is done by catching hold of various parts of the opponent by the hands. Of course, there are many tricks, and therefore, if both parties be equally efficient in the art, the combat becomes very complicated. The term jiujitsu literally means "soft art," or an art accomplished by "sleight of body," as some people put it, so much so that one school is called "The Willow Mind Style." We have a saying, "A willow knows not a breaking by snow," meaning that a slender branch of a willow is stronger than a branch of a robust tree like the pine, an analogy showing that flexibility is often stronger than stubbornness.

'From all this it may well be imagined that a slender and small man, without any perceptible physical strength, can often become a great master of the art. Once at Shanghai, a Japanese who understood jiujitsu well was attacked by a group of Chinese roughs in the middle of a bridge, but he threw them all, one after the other, since when no Chinaman attempts to attack a Japanese, concluding wisely that we may all be masters of the art. Once in England--I believe it was in Newcastle--a number of roughs attacked a Japanese; he threw them all, one after the other, and went off. The roughs were taken into custody by constables, when they confessed that they would not have attacked the man had they known he was a Japanese, and they believed that all Japanese knew the "devilish trick of wrestling," as they called it. You now see the nature of our jiujitsu, I suppose.'

--'And suppose your best wrestler and a jiujitsu man encountered?' asked one of the young ladies.

--'A wrestler is no match for a jiujitsu man. A wrestler who can lift up a big stone, or catch hold of a bull by its horns, would be easily beaten by a youth of fourteen scarcely able to lift a small cannon ball, provided the boy were well trained in jiujitsu. In wrestling, therefore, all jiujitsu tricks are forbidden. This will explain why no Occidental, even a champion wrestler, has ever succeeded in defeating a Japanese jiujitsu man. Perhaps you remember one of our jiujitsu men, who is in England, won the Gold Championship Cup last year, and yet in Japan he is not considered a first-class man in the art. I do not, however, wish to boast of the matter. Even amongst the most undeveloped tribes one sometimes sees the greatest possible skill shown in such matters, especially in the use of the bow and arrow. I hear American Indians shoot fishes in the rivers with arrows, and that too not by aiming direct, but by sending arrows up in the air and letting them fall in the water. They do not shoot direct, because, as you know, the curve of sight in water is very different from that in plain air.'

--'I understand that,' said the duchess, 'but your jiujitsu seems to be very different from mere skill. It is the result of a long and deliberate study of physical organism, systematised upon a scientific basis, as the physician in the paper says.'

--'Maybe,' I answered.

--'But what is that book which you have brought with you?' asked the duchess.

--'It is the book I promised you the other day. It is the _Kokkwa_, a monthly on art. It contains, as you see, very good photogravures and chromographs of our old _objets d'art_.'

So saying, I handed the book to the duchess, and continued:

--'You told me the other day, _apropos_ of the conversation of the Marchioness Vivastine and myself, that you were also an admirer of our art, and that you appreciated Utamaro and Hokusai. No doubt they were great artists, and I am delighted, of course, with your appreciation, but we should be sorry if they stood to you for the best that we can do in art. This monthly will give you a good idea why I say so.'

All present were interested in the book, and its pages were gently turned over one by one. Presently the duchess remarked:

--'Do you mean to say that the originals of these illustrations date back thirteen centuries?'

--'Indeed, I do,' I replied.

--'And that these prints were really made in Japan?' said another.

--'Yes, surely.'

--'What a softness and feeling here! Look!' the duchess went on; 'and how this part resembles classic Italian.'

--'The art of printing,' I said, 'is well developed in Japan. The other day I showed a copy of the _Financial and Economical Annual_ of Japan to a Frenchman, and he thought the printing was very neat and clear, and could scarcely believe that the book had been printed in my country.'

--'I can quite realise the scepticism of that person; but can you give me a rough idea of your ideal of pictures?'

--'That's a rather difficult question. In your sacred book you have a picture where Christ talks about "lilies." He stands in a field, utters His words, pointing to some pure white lilies blooming, but not in abundance, in the field. There is a perfect picture, the symbolic meaning of the pure white flowers standing out vividly before your eyes. In another place you see Christ entering a boat on a lake. There is another picture. A lake calm and serene, surrounded by undulating hills, perhaps with the shadow of the hills and trees reflected on the surface of the water. There one or two fishermen handle oars in a fantastic boat. A sage calls them from the shore to come to Him. A perfect landscape! An immense expanse and an eternal stillness of the universe almost unconsciously arises before the mind's eye of the onlooker. Such is, then, a type of the ideals of our pictorial worlds.'

--'I can well imagine it,' said the young nobleman. 'Your chromographs of even small objects, such as picture postcards, are very fine and artistic and, at the same time, so simple. Look at ours: they have neither feeling nor taste, and usually are showy and gorgeous, and, indeed, often vulgar.'

--'I must say I agree with you to some extent. I am rather sorry that such monthly publications as _Kokkwa_ do not pay well in Japan. The present publisher of the journal is the proprietor of a large newspaper, and not a regular book publisher. He is himself a great collector of our _objets d'art_, of which he is very fond, and this is the sole reason why he took up the publication after it had been nearly discontinued by its former publisher. He is now trying to see if an English edition of it will pay, although the end he has in view is to make Japan known to the West, rather than any pecuniary personal gain. Indeed, it is for that reason he has sent me this copy, asking me to show it to those who have a taste for such things. I really think that, for the general good, the publication is worth continuing.'

--'Certainly,' said the duchess. 'Let me see, it is only two yen per number, that is five francs per month; cheap enough. I will subscribe at once.'

The young nobleman now left our party, for he had another engagement. He has a talent for music, and when a private concert was given only a few weeks ago in the garden of an aristocratic family which I know, he was the conductor, although only an amateur. This the young ladies told me, and the circumstance led me to ask if they also were not musical. One of them, she told me, played the piano, and the other the violin, and I said I hoped that one day they would let me have the pleasure of hearing them. I further said that the piano was only known in Japan to a slight degree, and that only recently; but that we had always had an instrument much resembling the violin.

The duke held in his hand an English literary weekly of the highest repute. Turning to me he said:

--'Look! here is a review of two new books, one on the Bushido by a Japanese writer, and the other on Japan in general by an American, I suppose. It is a subject that interests me, as, indeed, it does many people nowadays. I have read it through and noticed that the reviewer speaks of Bushido very sarcastically. He says, among other things, that the discovery of Bushido is of quite recent date, and continues; but listen, I will read it:

'Neither Sir E. Satow nor Dr. Aston even mentions the word Bushido; Prof. Chamberlain in his _Things Japanese_ (1898) does not refer to it; the word is not contained in the admirable dictionary prepared by Captain Brinkley, the able but intensely Japanicised correspondent of the _Times_; nor is it to be found in the principal native dictionary, the _Kotoba no Izumi_ ("Source of Language").'

--'What nonsense,' I interrupted; 'by the same analogy one might say, because there is no compound noun Christian-morality in an English dictionary, there is no such thing as Christian morality.'

'Bushido, in literal Chinese,' continued the duke, reading, 'is the way of the executioner, and those who were eye-witnesses of the tyranny of the Samurai, in the last three years of the Bakufu [Shogunate], will not regard the name as altogether inappropriate. The Bushi (a Japano-Chinese, but not Chineseform), or Samurai, were neither knights nor knightly; they were "followers" merely; many, if not most of them, petty officials, few of them for two hundred and fifty years possessed any military experience whatever.'

--'How ridiculous,' I interrupted; 'but I cannot make out what the reviewer could have got into his head to make him translate the term Bushi as "executioner." It is an insult to Bushi, of whom we have the oft-quoted saying, "Hana wa sakura ni hitowa bushi": "As the cherry blossoms are the prime of the flowers, so the Bushi is the flower of man." We have a popular drama in which there is a scene where a female prisoner is brought out under the superintendence of a common Bushi; and there the phrase "Keigo-no-Bushi" occurs, meaning, the Bushi who guards. Perhaps the reviewer remembered it, and concluded that Bushi meant an executioner, because he had charge of a prisoner. If this is so, by the same analogy we might say the "Knight of the Garter" is a domestic servant who looks after his mistress's garter. Ah! there is another thing which occurs to me. In China, where military men are little thought of, they are often used for such duties as those of an executioner; some foreigners, who had seen the fact whereby those men were called Bushi, perhaps thought that the term meant "executioners" without knowing its primary meaning. By that analogy one might say that gentlemen belonging to the honourable guild known as "The Worshipful Company of Grocers of the City of London" were common dealers in tea and sugar, because they are called grocers, without knowing the origin of the term. The passages in that review accidentally caught my sight too, and out of curiosity I looked the matter up in a few books which I happened to have by me. It is a little technical, but if you do not mind, I will explain it to you in detail.'

--'Please do,' said the duke.

--'The word Bushi is a noun composed of two Chinese characters, _bu_ and _shi_, both having a distinct meaning. _Bu_ means military or martial when used as an adjective, but it is also very commonly used as a concrete noun; and in that case it may be translated as martialism. When used as a noun it is used in contradistinction to _bun_. The last word may be translated as "civil," but I am unable to find out an exact equivalent in the Western terms, because the Western term "civil," still less the term "civism," does not convey the true idea of the word. It may, however, be taken to signify things or affairs on civil lines, as contrasting with those on military lines. _Shi_ means a man of position or a gentleman, which came by evolution to mean a military man rather than a civilian. These two words, _bu_ and _shi_, were put together and made a compound noun, signifying professional military people. The term has been most commonly used in Japan for over ten centuries. There are two other terms, Bundo and Budo, the former means principle, or doctrine, or teaching, or ways of affairs on civil lines, and the latter means the same on martial lines. They are very antique terms, contradistinguishing each other. The term Bushido is not so ancient as those two, but still it is by no means modern. The term Budo is used when one wishes to refer the matter more to the system or the principle as a unit; and the term Bushido is used when one wishes to designate more the individuals. In China the term Bushi had existed, as is natural from the antiquity of her history, many centuries before it did in Japan; I have seen it used in the history of the Hung dynasty. The term of course signifies military men; nevertheless, it has not acquired so much prominence as it has done in Japan, because in China military men have never attained the same importance and organisation as in Japan, and naturally enough there exists in China no such term as Bushido in its concrete sense, Bushido being peculiarly unique to the Japanese. Bushido consists of three Chinese characters, as the reviewer says. In the colloquial Japanese it is read as Bushi-no-michi, _do_ being the Chinese way of pronunciation, and _michi_ being the colloquial Japanese pronunciation of the one and the same character; and therefore _do_ and _michi_ are both the same thing. In _Hogen Monogatari_, an historical record of the events which took place in the middle of the twelfth century A.D., and written not longer after that period, a great hero, Tametomo, is represented to have said, in the course of a speech, as follows:

'For a Bushi, an act of killing is inevitable. Nevertheless Bushi-no-michi [_i.e._ Bushido] forbids to kill an unfit object, and therefore, though I have fought more than twenty battles, and put an end to countless lives, I have always fought legitimate foes, and not illegitimate foes [in modern phraseology combatants and non-combatants]. And more! I have neither killed a deer nor fished a fish.

'In the fourteenth century A.D., a book called _Chiku-ba-sho_ (the reminiscence of the bamboo-horse), which is ethical teaching for Bushi, was written by Shiwa Yoshimasa, a Japanese general, born 1349, died 1410 A.D.