Hokkaido

“ It is possible that when Hokkaido shall have worked out her destiny she may not be without her influence on the development of Old Japan. Those of the settlers who are reasonably well equipped in character, wits and health are not only making the living which they failed to obtain at home; they are testing some national canons of agriculture. Face to face with strangers and with new conditions, these immigrants are also examining some ideals of social life and conduct which, old though they are, may not be perfectly adapted to the new age into which Japan has forced herself. ”

“ The number of emigrants in 1913 was no larger than the number in 1906. A usual view in Hokkaido is that the island can hold twice as many people as it now contains. "When 3,625,000 acres are brought into cultivation," says an official publication, "Hokkaido will be able easily to maintain 5,000,000 inhabitants on her own products." ”

“ On weekends in Japan such an enormous exodus of people would come out to do their shopping; whereas for her, having had no firmly set schedule that enslaved her and not needing to release an enslaved being in the unbound weekend freedoms of malls, she had found a more internal brooding in the Hokkaido cold. ”

“ But no cause has been more potent than a lack of money in the public treasury. I was told that for five years in succession Tokyo had cut down the Hokkaido budget. Necessary public work and schemes for development have been repeatedly stopped. At a time when the interests of Hokkaido demand more farmers and there is a general complaint of lack of labour, at a time when there are Page 360 persistent pleas for oversea expansion, there are in Japan twice or thrice as many people applying for land in the island as are granted entry. ”

“ There are two training farms of 185 and 260 acres respectively, beautifully kept botanic gardens, a tract of 15,000 acres on which there are already more than a thousand tenants, and 300,000 acres of forests in Hokkaido, Saghalien and Korea. Four or five times as many students as can be admitted offer themselves at Sapporo.
There is in Hokkaido an agricultural and rural life conceived for a country where stock may be kept and a farmer does not need to practise the superintensive farming of Old Japan. ”

“ Ito is in an excellent humour on this tour. Like me, he likes the freedom of the Hokkaido. He is much more polite and agreeable also, and very proud of the Governor's shomon, with which he swaggers into hotels and Transport Offices. I never get on so well as when he arranges for me. Saturday was grey and lifeless, and the ride of seven miles here along a sandy road through monotonous forest and swamp, with the volcano on one side and low wooded hills on the other, was wearisome and fatiguing. ”

“ The sea fisheries of Hokkaido are valuable but agriculture and forestry are greater money makers. Even without forestry agriculture is well ahead of factory industry, which is also eclipsed by mining. Industry is aided by the presence of coal. Among manufactures, brewing stands out even more conspicuously than wood-pulp making or canning. One of the three best-known beers in Japan comes from Hokkaido. [242] In contrast with the situation in Old Japan, where the land is half paddy and half upland, there is in Hokkaido only a ninth of the cultivated land under rice. ”

“ Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido (Yezo) has a great amount of good agricultural land as yet almost unoccupied, some of [Pg 45] her other island possessions offer minor outlets, while Korea and Manchuria afford extensive colonizing possibilities albeit Chinese and Korean competition preclude a Japanese colonization on the scale which the size and natural wealth of these regions would at first sight seem to indicate. ”

“ Bad roads are a serious problem for the Hokkaido farmer. In one district, only fifteen miles from the capital, they are so bad that rice is at half the price it makes in Sapporo. It is unfortunate that the roads are at their worst in autumn and spring when the farmer wants to transport his produce. ”

“ An undoubted hindrance to the colonisation of Hokkaido has been land scandals and land grabbing. Many of what the late Lord Salisbury called the "best bits" are in the hands of big proprietors or proprietaries. Some large landowners no doubt show public spirit. But their class has contrived to keep farmers from getting access to a great deal of land which, because of its quality and nearness to practicable roads and the railway, might have been worked to the best advantage. In various parts of Japan I heard complaints. ”

“ The establishment in 1871 of a new Board, or minor department, for the development of the then northernmost island of Yezo, thenceforth to be known as the Hokkaidō, or Northern Sea Circuit—one of the many geographical areas distinguished by this name into which Japan is divided—calls for notice chiefly from the fact that it was one of the few instances of reforms which were unsuccessful. For the enterprise in question the services of American experts were engaged. ”

“ Page 347 The possibilities of outdoor stock keeping in Hokkaido are limited by the fact that snow lies from November to the middle of February and in the north of the island to the end of March. A high agricultural authority did not think that the number of cattle in all Japan could be raised to more than two million within twenty years. ”

“ Koro Halcho, in the province of Kii, is very beautiful, especially in the spring when the gorge with its deep cliffs is made lovelier still with wild flowers. A motorcyclist would find inviting trips in Hokkaido, where the roads are not bad, though it is rather difficult getting there. Over on the other coast, from Nazano [pg 321] to Navetta, and around Kamisana, there are good roads.
Our trip through the Inland Sea, from Kobe to Nagasaki, was one of the most delightful experiences that we had in Japan. We chartered a boat at Kobe, after an extravagant comedy of errors. ”

“ The longest river in Japan, 260 miles long, is in Hokkaido. There was obviously a vast moorland area in need of draining. Peat—there are 300,000 chō of it—may be a standby when the waste of timber that is going on brings about a shortage of fuel other than coal. From poor peat soil, which was growing oats, buckwheat and millet, we passed to land capable of producing rice, and saw ploughing with horses. One region had been opened for only twenty years, but already the farmers had cultivated the hillsides in the assiduous fashion of Old Japan. ”

“ The rainfall is heavy in summer and light in winter. It is greatest along the coasts washed by the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Japan, and least in the central portions of the country along the two coasts of the Inland Sea, as well as in the northern end of the main island. Hokkaidō has an average fall.
Rich soil, a genial climate, and a sufficient rainfall produce luxuriant vegetation. Cultivated fields and gardens succeed each other for wide areas. ”

“ ON approaching an Ainu village one is deceived as to the number of houses, and apt to underestimate them. I fancy this is because of their being scattered about most irregularly, and because there are no streets to guide the eye. Along the coast the villages are, as a rule, built just inside of the first row of sand-dunes, which afford considerable protection from the heavy gales. Since the Japanese Government has undertaken the management and development of the Hokkaido, a good road leads through each village ”

“ The tall tsuzuki reed, with its clusters of feathery fruits standing out against the sky at evening, and the stars twinkling through the beautiful bamboo and the trees of sweet chestnuts, all seemed far too fresh and unsullied to be so near a city. The Japanese can certainly populate a place without defacing it. The absence of all railings and notice boards is also very soothing.
September 30.—A cut-up day at the Institute. Dr. Y——, one of the geologists from the Survey, visited me and we spent some time discussing the [38] beds of Hokkaido. ”

“ At the first approach of winter it will in one night become all blanched from foot to crest; and then its snowy pyramid so much resembles that Sacred Mountain, often compared by poets to a white inverted fan, half opened, hanging in the sky, that it is called Izumo-Fuji, 'the Fuji of Izumo.' But it is really in Hoki, not in Izumo, though it cannot be seen from any part of Hoki to such advantage as from here. It is the one sublime spectacle of this charming land; but it is visible only when the air is very pure. ”

“ After that, he was so poor that he peddled in the streets of Tokyo.
Later, Hokusai collaborated with the successful novelist Bakin for many years. The famous set of prints of a hundred views of Fuji, the series of the waterfalls of Japan, the noted bridges, the scenes in the Loochoo Islands, as well as the views of the Tokaido, were all done in the latter part of his life. Hokusai used strong colours, and produced fine work. He was most unfortunate in having all his original studies destroyed by fire, and as he was careless about money matters he died in poverty. ”

“ In the inimitable sketch-book of Hokusai, the bourgeois artist who threw all classical rules to the winds, we see the sort of people who really "had a good time," while their betters bored themselves to extinction, namely, the Japanese shopkeepers and artisans. We see their homely jokes, their drunken sprees, their occasional sly hits at superiors, as when, for example, a group of street Arabs is depicted making fun of some Confucian sage behind his back, or as when the stately Daimyō's procession becomes a procession of grass hoppers bearing a mantis in a basket. ”

“ In both countries we find the spirit hankering after old human haunts. In Egypt the soul returned through the medium of its preserved body, and in Japan the Festival of the Dead, described elsewhere, afforded a joyous exit from the world of Emma-Ō, a three days' visit in the middle of July to Japan, a land more beautiful, more dear, it would seem, than any Japanese conception of a future world. But Hokusai appears to suggest that his visits would not be made merely in the [Pg 118] summer season—rather a frequent coming and going at all times of the year. ”

“ The Hokkai are most jealously attached to their own ritual, and to other observances peculiar to themselves; and, inheriting the disposition attributed to their founder, exhibit a narrowness and intolerance rarely met with in Japan. Their characteristic may be said to consist in an emotional fanaticism; and a visitor to one of their temples will generally find a number of devotees,—who thus remain engaged for hours at a time,—chanting the invocation of the sect, “Adoration to the Lotus of the Law,” to a deafening accompaniment of drums. ”

“ The lien-chü was never taken seriously by the Chinese, and is barely mentioned in histories of their literature, but linked-verse developed steadily in Japan into an extraordinarily complicated form of poetry, governed by elaborate codes. Of the opening verse (the hokku) it was said, “The hokku should not be at variance with the topography of the place, whether the mountains or the sea dominate, with the flying flowers or falling leaves of the grasses and trees of the season, with the wind, clouds, mist, fog, rain, dew, frost, snow, heat, cold or quarter of the moon. ”

“ The right moment had now come for Shunsho with his numerous school, for Kiyonaga and for Utamaro, who in the closing third of the eighteenth century brought Japanese wood-engraving to its full development. Hokusai, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was the last of the great artists of this line. Out of the multitude of the artists who follow, still for the most part admirably trained but lacking in dignity and precision, Hiroshige, with his subtly subjective landscapes, alone stands out conspicuously. ”

“ From the standpoint of Buddhism, Hokusai was the crowning glory, the supreme efflorescence of countless previous incarnations. In his career he epitomized the theory of evolution, the embryonic stages being exemplified by his progress through the schools. Trained in the atelier of Shunsho, the most skillful exponent of Ukiyo-ye art, he rapidly absorbed the methods of his master; but even the Popular School was trammelled by convention, and Hokusai’s genius, rejecting academic fetters, winged its flight through all the realms of oriental art. ”

“ After a thorough training in youth, Hokusai had risen, about the year 1800, to the first rank of artists; by his subsequent activity, which always exhibited great ability and imagination, and an effort to expand the sphere of representation, he retarded the inevitable decline of Japanese art for decades, but as he was lacking in culture and sterling personality, and remained fast-bound among externals, he was neither able to lead art back to its former height nor to create a new and great style. ”

“ At Hakone village, a single street of thatched houses bordering the shore of Hakone lake, the narrow foot-path over the hills joins the true Tokaido, a stone-paved highway shaded by double rows of ancient trees, a forest aisle recalling, for a brief journey, the avenue to Nikko. The chrysanthemum-crested gates of the Emperor’s island palace were fast shut, and Fuji’s cone peeped over the shoulders of encircling mountains, and reflected its image in the almost bottomless lake—an ancient crater, whose fires are forever extinguished. ”

“ At present we come as friends to give you timely warning of what may befall you, if you do not refrain from all further dealings with the foreigners in Yokohama. You must be aware that since these foreigners have come into the country the price of every commodity has risen greatly, that in consequence all classes are suffering, and that the country is on the verge of ruin. The Shōgun has no power to protect you, since we hold orders direct from our Sovereign, the Mikado. We are a very different stamp of men from those who behaved so badly in Kiōto some weeks ago. ”