Jukichi Inouye

“ The theatre is open in Japan for the better part of a day and is, moreover, an expensive amusement. The great mass of the people who live by daily toil cannot naturally afford to visit a play-house except at rare intervals, and it is to these, the busy and slender-pursed, that the story-tellers’ hall appeals. Artisans and small-tradesmen, with their families, and students seek at the hall a relaxation from the hard day’s work; and as they are after all no unimportant sections of the city population, the influence of these halls on Tokyo life cannot be overlooked. ”

“ And it must be admitted that the samisen can never charm and enthrall us like the deep-sounding cathedral organ; and its want of volume deprives it of any power to make a cumulative impression upon us. In short, our samisen-music is mainly a matter of dexterity, with a modicum of taste and judgment. We do not look to it to sway our passions—to move us to tears or laughter, to stir up in us anger, awe, pity, or wonder, or to fire us into bursts of patriotic enthusiasm. ”

“ Her object, her raison d’être, is to beguile the time that is irksome to her guests. Sometimes she fails to conjure up merriment, or she is too indifferent and makes no efforts in that direction. The silence or dull talk becomes oppressive; and in such cases she fortifies herself against ennui by blowing and squeezing between her lower lip and teeth the berry of the winter-cherry, from which the pulp has been deftly extracted at the stem. The noise is most irritating to others, though many geisha and tea-house waitresses appear to take delight therein. ”

“ Her absolute concentration upon her own home, though it is a serious obstacle to her social development, brings its compensation when her wedded life is crowned with maternity, and in the smiles of infancy she finds ample consolation for the monotony of her home. This intense love of children is one of the brightest traits of Japanese home life, and with the reverence for old age, gives it a tone of quiet, undemonstrative happiness. ”

“ The fire-engines, useful as they are for the extinction of fires, are for that reason in disfavour with the true native of Tokyo, who admires the “flowers of Yedo” as much as the flowers of nature, for it is not worth while to turn out of bed on the first alarm of fire, as was his Wont, at midnight in winter at the risk of catching cold, and then run at full speed for half a dozen miles, only to find it extinguished, as would now be the case. Tokyo cannot now boast of what in the old days used to be one of its finest sights. ”

“ Newspapers are, it is true, now leavening the whole society; but it is still from the halls that the artisan to-day gets all his knowledge, meagre as it is, and to the same source may be traced his familiarity with the notable events and heroes in the history of his country. In its educating influence, then, the story-teller’s profession is an important one, and though it must be owned that few of his tales are edifying, his confrères in the front rank of their profession deserve better of their countrymen than has hitherto been their lot. ”

“ Labouring as she is under many disadvantages, the Japanese wife does not get credit for her good qualities, because she always keeps in the background. Neither she nor her husband ever sings the other’s praises in public; on the contrary, mutual depreciation is the custom. And yet all her efforts are directed to her husband’s cutting a creditable figure among his acquaintances. A good, sensible, tactful wife is a jewel with us no less than with the wise man of yore; and her adroitness covers a multitude of defects in her husband. ”

“ When called to a teahouse, the geisha always plays a piece of serious music, unless her guests expressly dispense with what they do not understand. After this duty is discharged, she may play whatever she or her guests please; and she generally takes to popular songs as they are the easiest to render. With Government officials and others who do not pretend to be musical connoisseurs, the geisha finds it all plain sailing as they appear satisfied with whatever she may thrum on her samisen; but at a party of amateur singers or musicians, her knowledge and skill are taxed to the utmost. ”

“ In the West it is through romance that people enter into matrimony, and that is apt to melt before the hard facts of life; whereas in Japan we regard it in a more prosaic light, and the Japanese bride takes up the burden of married life at the threshold to lay it down only at the grave. Again, in the West a man may in a vague way think it time for him to marry and then look for a suitable partner; but more often it is the sight of the woman with whom he would willingly share the pleasures and pains of this world that awakens in him the desire to marry and prompts him to propose to her. ”

“ She would also have to put up sometimes with the reproaches of her husband or his parents for this failure of issue and consent to the adoption of a child to whom she must concede the love which she had hoped to reserve for her own flesh and blood. But happily for the wife, we are on the whole a prolific nation untroubled by the phantom of race suicide, and every woman is prepared to bring up a family, which is in her eyes as much the wife’s destiny as in girlhood she looked upon marriage as her inevitable fate. ”

“ The fortune-teller’s influence is almost as unbounded over the superstitious. He is consulted by them on every occasion, be it their future lot, their present happiness, their chances of drawing a prize at a lottery, the fluctuations of the exchange, the consequences of a marriage, the direction luckiest for a removal, the proficiency of their family doctor, the whereabouts of a missing article, the keeping of an appointment, or the efficacy of a prayer, in short, every mortal thing in which there is the least shadow of uncertainty. ”

“ Neither of these amusements can serve to while away a few hours of idleness or relaxation; to those who wish to spend an evening pleasantly and at little expense, the story-tellers’ hall is always open. It stands conspicuously in a street; for over a wide entrance, the walls of which are studded with numerous pegs for suspending the clogs and sandals of its patrons, hangs a large square lantern announcing on its face the names of the principal performers, while the name of the hall is inscribed at a side-end. The hall itself is a great matted room with a platform at the furthest end. ”

“ Emma, Judge of Hades, pulls out every liar’s tongue; insanity befalls him that throws nail-parings or a hair into the fire; poverty is sure to overtake a whistler; he that lies down immediately after a meal will turn into an ox; if we walk round another, we shall be transformed into snakes; one that wastes rice will have bad eyes ”

“ The highest, which is twenty points, is assigned to the pine-tree with a crane in the middle and a red sun above, the cherry-tree in bloom with a curtain underneath for a picnic party, the eularia under the full harvest moon, the willow under which a great scholar is learning perseverance from a frog which succeeds after many hours’ vain attempts in reaching a branch, and the paulownia with the phœnix flying over it. ”

“ If caught in a rain in a dream, there will before long be an invitation to a dinner; if the sun and moon fall, the dreamer’s parents will die; and if a black cloud comes spinning down, there will be an illness in his house. ”

“ But these inæsthetic innovations he must put up with, for they are typical of the present stage of Japanese civilisation, and nowhere else are they more marked than in Tokyo. The herculean task Japan has set herself leaves her little leisure to consider its artistic effects; she is too much in earnest to waste a thought on the awkward cut of the habiliments she is donning; and only when she has so adapted herself as to fit them exactly, will she turn her attention to their frills and trimmings. ”

“ Japanese women are as a class gentle, pliant, and docile; and these qualities stand them in good stead at home. Whether it be that they manage with all their demureness to twist their lords round their little fingers or that the latter are afraid that any change in home life would develop a new revolting woman who would refuse to be as submissive as they are at present, the fact remains that with the mass of the nation there has been little change in the conditions of domestic life. ”

“ Tokyo is therefore a great city; but the stranger who visits its streets for the first time usually gets an impression of an even greater populousness. For the streets are always in the evening teeming with young children; they are not gutter-snipes, but children of respectable parents, small tradesmen or private persons of slender means, who let them run about on the public road rather than romp in their narrow dwellings. ”

“ Making use only of the knowledge acquired during his term of apprenticeship or service as journeyman, the master carpenter has little occasion to display his inventiveness or originality, for he need only follow the time-honoured conventions which hold sway in his craft as in all other arts and crafts of the country. Hence, monotony is a distinctive mark of Japanese domestic architecture; there is a sameness of style in all our dwelling-houses. The chief and perhaps the only point upon which the carpenter has to bring his ingenuity to bear is the arrangement of the rooms. ”

“ A French writer has charged Japanese lovers with a lack of tenderness as they neither kiss nor shake hands. But what can the poor lovers do to kiss each other? They cannot fall into each other’s arms while they remain squatting, for squatting is not like sitting together on a sofa. When we sit up straight with our feet under us, the equilibrium of such a posture is as unstable as if we were perched on a high stool. It is very rude to remain standing and even to speak before squatting, so that kissing while we are on our legs is not to be thought of. ”

“ But in winter we feel the inadequacy of wooden houses; it is next to impossible to keep out the cold effectually; a room never gets thoroughly warmed. The wind blows in through the crevices of the sliding-doors, for the edges on which these doors meet are flat and never dovetailed. The paper of the doors is porous, and through its pores the air gets in; there is certainly this to be said for it that in a Japanese room one need never fear asphyxiation, however much charcoal may be burning in the braziers. ”

“ Thus, a child that begins to suck its fingers before the thumb which represents the parents in Japanese palmistry, will not be an encumbrance upon its father when it grows up; if it pushes itself out in sleep beyond the head of its bed, it will rise in the world, while a downward course is in store for the one that slips in under its bed-clothes. ”

“ As the oldest servant with the authority she exercises over her younger fellow-domestics, she is held in hardly less reverence than her mistress, and every opportunity is seized to please her; for to cross her would be worse than to offend their mistress, and she is certainly more touchy than the other. She knows her power, too, and enjoys it to the full. She lets them serve her even more assiduously than her lady; and they help her to dress, and when she is tired, offer to shampoo her. She plays, in short, the retired lady more completely than her mistress’s honoured mother-in-law. ”

“ When the patient is in the last article of death, his wife and children put their mouths close to his ear and call him by name; recalled by the dear voices, life flickers for a moment and then goes out. ”

“ And as a Japanese girl usually marries at eighteen or nineteen, she has not much time to spare before she has to think seriously of matrimony. Two or three years of home life are all that is left her before she will have to take charge of a household of her own. And further, as she is supposed to pass the flower of her youth at four and twenty, a college course would bring her dangerously close to the lower limit of spinsterhood, and so, as things stand in Japan, female universities would, even were they plentiful, not be so popular as they should deserve. ”

“ Even the flowers for which Tokyo is noted they go to look at in the country; and the festivals of the tutelary deities have lost their former splendour, and their most prominent feature, the procession-cars, cannot now be built on the grand scale of the old days, for unless they can be bent low, they cannot parade the streets without snapping the innumerable electric wires which disfigure the thoroughfares of the metropolis. ”

“ We mature early and decline at the same rate. Indeed, man, says a Japanese proverb, lives but for fifty years and rarely does his span extend to seventy years. Our expectation of life is, then, two decades less than the Psalmist’s. Impressed by its brevity, the Japanese woman knows that she ceases to please after two score and unmurmuringly gives up hope. She does not allow herself to be deceived when silver locks begin to appear among the raven; and by her dress and coiffure she frankly confesses the stage she has reached in the journey of life. ”