Osman Edwards

“ Every year pilgrims pass through the bronze gateway of the Zo-o-do Temple and climb the mountain side to rest beneath the canopy of tender, billowy blossom, which broods like an ever-renascent cloud of beauty above the Yamato plain, endeared by thirteen centuries of history and romance. Many pleasure-seekers mix with the white-robed pilgrims, who belong for the most part to distant villages and look on religion as an excellent excuse for change of interest and change of scene. ”

“ It might be supposed that the names of Iyeyasu and Hideyoshi have no more virtue as a rallying-cry for their descendants than the watchwords of Roundhead and Cavalier have for us. But such is not the case. Subtly reincarnate in the cities which they glorified in life, their spirits still give battle after death in the bloodless field of civic rivalry. Tōkyō is still Yedo, the Petersburg of the empire, created by a despot’s will and the centre of law, of authority, of administration; but it is to Kyōto, as to Moscow, the holy city, that lovers of art and of religion are inevitably attracted. ”

“ The designs were rapidly and lightly touched in a hawk pouncing on a goose; a carp swimming against the stream; a frog climbing up a reed; and a terrified child, with shaven pate, running away from a temple-dancer, masked by a lion's head. Next a batch of fans was distributed to the competitors, who speedily adorned them with fanciful arabesques, in which curled clouds played hide-and-seek with Fuji, or moonlit pines peeped out from drifted snow. We drew lots for these souvenirs of playful skill, and to me fell the picture of the child flying from the lion-mask. ”

“ There was never great hostility in Japan between the goddess of love and more ascetic deities. In more than one locality you will find a row of temples fronted by a row of pleasure-houses, that the pilgrims may impartially indulge body and soul.
When the Ashikaga Shōguns made Kyōto a centre of nobler art and more delicate refinement, the Scarlet Lady lost ground. The curse of Confucius, stigmatising her sex, had crossed the Yellow Sea. Painters preferred the beauty of snow and tree and bird to her fatal beauty ; poets, imbued with Buddhism, wrote passion-plays on other passions than hers. ”

“ The umeboshi, a plum pickled in salt and shiso and afterwards dried, is as happily descriptive of the wizened monkey face of a Japanese crone as the peach of an Anglo-Saxon lassie’s complexion. It will be seen that serio-comic touches of self-depreciation, like the old lady’s frank comparison of faded bloom to dried fruit, do not jar on the Japanese. Sincerity—genuine feeling and just appreciation—is at the root of their poetic impulse. Why should a disappointed girl shrink from whispering her secret to the reeds of anonymous minstrelsy? ”

“ Hidden from the eyes of Moscow merchants and revealed to the patient artisans of Kyōto is that spirit of beauty, which, out of cotton and paper and Bengal lights can fashion a poem, so lovely that its simple schemes of form and colour haunt the memory like music, so profound that the deepest instincts of the beholder may be stirred by communion with the faith in which his fathers laboured and died. ”

“ But his victory is short-lived, for a terrible phantom, the Devil of Jealousy, wearing the famous Hanja mask, replaces Rokujo. Inch by inch the priest falls back, as the grinning demon with gilt horns and pointed ears slowly unveiled from a shroudlike hood glides forward to smite him with menacing crutch. To and fro the battle rages beside the prostrate Aoi no Uye; neither holy man nor devil will give way; the screaming and shrill fifing of the musicians rise to frenzied pitch; adjuration succeeds adjuration, until the evil spirit is finally driven away. ”

“ The winding valleys and soaring rocks converge at an elevation of more than a thousand feet on a little shrine, in which has been burning a sacred fire for more than a thousand years. From the opposite shore, as one traces the salient features of this evergreen island, all the details—streamlet and temple-roof, cliff and maple and pine—merge in a majestic harmony of serried line and luxuriant colour. ”

“ All she has to offer is momentary pasture for the teeth of desire, since love and confidence, the lanterns of happy wedlock, shed no light on her outcast bed. Society damns, but cannot destroy, her. Shame and solitude are the wages which corrode her soul even more rapidly than her body, though that has become in Christian eyes, as the poet so finely says, “a blasphemy, brandished like a torch before God”; but man, denying her the status of any but an unconvicted criminal, forces her to drop lower and lower through remorse and infamy to the hospital-pallet or the assassin’s knife. ”

“ Imagine the wildest of kiōgen incidents invading a Nō! How shocked a Japanese audience would have been! If the Nō seem occasionally naïf and puerile, the gross enfantillage of European miracle-plays none but readers of them can believe. And, when we reach the tedious "Moralities," which coincided in this country with the advent of the Protestant Tudors, and were therefore written a century later than the best of the Nō, the palm of sacred drama for beauty, interest, and pathos must still be awarded to the disciples of Buddha. ”

“ The outcast pariahs—the eta—no longer exist in law or name; but they exist in fact. The operatives of the Ōsaka mills, the wretched human shambles of the prostitute quarters, the sick and suffering poor—are these not social pariahs and even worse? We miss the sternly martial virtue of the days of yore; the unbending dignity of the true, the real Yamato-damashii (the spirit of Japanese chivalry) .... Never were bribery and corruption more rife: the whole machinery of the State is suffering from this dry-rot; and even those who are called upon to set the country an example have their price. ”

“ It is not in my power to reassure him, so I welcome with relief the reappearance of the dancers, who, bearing flowers in one hand and a fan in the other, step gaily out of the garden and, posing, perching, pirouetting, flutter with deliberate grace through a maze of correlated motions. I do not dare to ask if their gestures point a moral: it is wiser to assume with Keats that "beauty is truth, truth beauty," and to follow with undistracted eye the solemn prettiness of these human dragon-flies. ”

“ Of Confucian relics there rests only an impressive bronze tablet, with full-length figure of the sage, from which "rubbings" are sold to the pious. A sinister black impression of the gaunt, long-nailed philosopher, whose teaching still broods like a shadow over the majority of Japanese households, recalls to me, in the shape of a colossal kakemono, that dusty, dilapidated school, whose students are deserting it for Western lore. The vast temple, however, standing in a grove of cryptomeria, is still thronged by worshippers, and forms a worthy link with the historic glories of Ashikaga. ”

“ However, one evening I met by chance the secretary of a famous lawyer-politician, who was taking a country cousin to see the sights of the capital; and, as he obligingly invited me to join the party, we made our way together through the maze of variety-shows and toy-shops which surround the Temple of Kwannon at Asakusa, until we reached the high embankment of Nihon-tsutsumi.
As we stood on the great dyke in a whirr of hurrying rickshaws, the country on the outer side stretched away into darkness, like the waste tracks which border the northern exterior boulevards of Paris. ”

“ We remained for seven days at Ishinomaki, charmed with the busy life of the place, which owes its prosperity to slate-quarries and salmon-fisheries, with the boats for ever passing up and down the Kitakami, with Kinkwa-zan, "the golden-flower mountain," that sacred island on which in ancient times no women might set foot, though the deer roam freely round the pilgrim's circuit or ascend to the shrine of Watazumi-no-Mikoto, the Shintō god of the sea. ”

“ Good taste and simplicity conceal all traces of the wealth which is his. Opposite the reception-room is a small lake, decorated with trees and huge ornamental stones such as the Japanese aesthete loves, since they recall, as far as may be, the freaks which Nature loves to play with forest and mountain. The rooms are of white wood, beautifully planed, and the only objects which suggest the theatre are fuda, or long laths, hung with wreaths and bands of silk, on which are inscribed tributes of admiration from tea-houses, geisha-houses, and guilds of various kinds. ”

“ If we put aside for the moment Western feeling on this subject, it is clear that no romance could be more deeply pathetic than that of a duteous heart fluttering behind the gilded bars of self-imposed shame and responding to the generous affection of a liberating lover. The entourage of spies and gaolers made escape no easy thing: thus plenty of dangerous adventure would diversify the plot. The nimble-witted theatre-goer loves intrigue, and follows hero and heroine through an imbroglio of ruses and disguises and machinations which it would be tedious to describe. ”

“ Hard by was the pine-room, whose faintly pictured canopy of serpentine boughs was the work of Kōrin. And, when the servants entered to lay the preliminary meal, they wore the same red aprons and red sleeve-cords as in the days when Iyeyasu was borne in his litter to the gardens of Shoji Jinyemon.
It would seem that the routine of ambrosial nights does not greatly vary in the land of perpetual etiquette. Having sipped rather than supped, the dishes being light and fluid, we summoned the usual geisha, but among them, as the artist had forewarned me, was one of unusual distinction. ”

“ To begin with, his audience loved a spectacle, and what spectacular setting could dazzle them more than the spacious Kuruwa with its balconied palaces, divided by cherry-trees and hung with showy lanterns? What other section of society could provide such a feast of colour for beauty-loving eyes as these priestesses of pleasure, when they moved in procession through thronging suitors in their gorgeous sweeping robes, or sat superbly immobile, like painted idols, their high coiffures haloed with radiating pins of pearl and silver and tortoise-shell? ”

“ Love, of course, inspires innumerable quatrains, which fly from mouth to mouth, from geisha to gejo, like butterflies from one blossom to another. Sometimes it is the man who speaks, as in the following:
Snow Song.
Careless of snow-drifts,
Nightly I seek thee;
Deeper the love lies,
⁠Heaped in my heart.
More often the woman, who does not allow her sense of humour to be atrophied by passion. But perhaps the humour is quite unconscious in this description of
Lovers Meeting. ”

“ Yet they play a large part in the emotional life of the people. Patrons of travellers, women, and children, they bear the semblance of a shaven priest with benevolent countenance, whose neck is generally encircled with a child's bib of coloured wool, while his hand holds an emblematic jewel, a lotus, a pilgrim's staff, an incense-box, a rosary, or sometimes an infant. In most villages and near many schools will you find the six Jizō, for the country people, loving their children, cherish the children's patron-saint with particular attachment. ”