Tokyo

“ Over the dusty Tokyo parade-ground, where little men, in ill-fitting khaki uniforms, were going through various evolutions on horses about the size of Welsh ponies—along by rice swamps, through narrow lanes, bordered by evil-smelling, sluggish streams of water (the Japanese may be clean inside their houses; outside, the streets of Tokyo are insanitary to an unspeakable extent) , we prosecuted our journey, while a cold wind whistled round us, and inky-black clouds heaped themselves on the horizon. When at last we reached the cemetery it seemed to have but little charm to recommend it. ”

“ But to know the full charm of the great city, one must wake with it at some rebirth of dawn. This hour gives to the imaginative in every land a thrill, a yearning, and a pang of visual regeneration. In no place is this wonder more deeply touched with mystery than in modern Tokyo.
Far off to the east the Sumida River lies in sleep. Beyond it, temple roofs—black keels of sunken vessels—cut a sky still powdered thick with stars. Nothing moves, and yet a something changes! The darkness shivers as to a cold touch. A pallid haze breathes wanly on the surface of the impassive sky. ”

“ In their swift flight the city appeared a living sea of undulations, of immense green wastes alternating with humming sections of trade, of abrupt, cliff-like hills, of small parks that were masses of cherry-bloom and landscapes of weird Japanese beauty. Patricia quoted one of Haru's quaint sayings: "So-o-o many small village got such a lonesomeness an' come more closer together. Tha's the way Tokyo born." ”

“ Why should we, who have more wealth than many of those in Tokyo who live in palaces, be caged up here, like birds with clipped wings? What is the use of having that wealth if we may not use it? Oh, there are so many joyful happenings in the capital every day and every night. I read about it in those papers which father brings home sometimes from Tokyo. The city is so gay and brilliant, mother, and there are so many peculiar foreigners to see. ”

“ This Tokyo was at the first the town of samurai of two swords, of mind more bent on learning how to die than how to live, proper to say, founded by Iyeyasu Tokugawa, the mighty prince of the Tokugawa feudalism, four hundred year ago, whose want of artistic education made it quite natural for him not to see the poetical side of city-building; he allowed every whim and imagination of the people to take their own free course. ”

“ The stranger, then, who visits the streets of Tokyo will find much to arouse his curiosity in the open, windowless shops, the jinrikisha, the native dresses of men and women, the throngs of hawkers, and the ceaseless din of traffic ”

“ 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. ”

“ Tokyo is considered cold in winter. It has a chill wind, but not so bad as the east wind in Boston. The climate might, perhaps, compare with Washington, but as the houses are so lightly built, and the people live upon the floor with little heat, the Japanese suffer a great deal from the cold. It had always been thought too severe in Tokyo for the Emperor, who as Crown Prince used to go to the seashore during the winter months, but this year, having become Emperor on the death of his father, he was obliged to stay in town. ”

“ Just as Tokyo is the seat of government nowadays, so Kyoto was in olden times. The Emperor—the Son of Heaven, as he was called—dwelt there in a magnificent palace, and all the great daimios lived near him in state, surrounded by their retainers. The streets of the Imperial City were beautifully built and spotlessly clean, and the houses were far grander than Taro had ever dreamed of—with great sloping roofs and picturesque gates and park-like gardens enclosing them. Very different indeed was the capital from the province of Shinano, from which Taro had come. ”

“ Asako rang up Reggie; and on the next afternoon the young diplomat called for the Barringtons in a motor-car, where Miss Yaé Smith was already installed. They drove through Tokyo. It was like crossing London for the space of distance covered; an immense city—yet is it a city, or merely a village preposterously overgrown?
There is no dignity in the Japanese capital, nothing secular or permanent, except that mysterious forest-land in the midst of the moats and the grey walls, where dwell the Emperor and the Spirit of the Race. ”

“ Tokyo, with its immense population and its air of business and activity, is yet not so favored by foreigners, nor by the better class Japanese, as a place of residence as is Kyoto. Indeed, a great many of them carry on a business in Tokyo and also keep a house in Kyoto. Most of the merchants of Tokyo, however, prefer to live in one of the charming little villages a few hours' ride by train from Tokyo, on the shores of the Hayama, where there is a good view of Fuji-Yama, the peerless mountain. ”

“ Tokyo, with a population of 3,000,000, has been the capital of the Empire since the resignation of the late Shogun, in 1868. While Japan has made great strides in maritime, naval and military affairs, and her schools, still the home of the Japanese is not as good as the hut of the Samoan.
Ninety miles above Tokyo is located Nikko, held in the same degree of reverence by Japanese as the Hindus do Benares and Mohammedans Mecca. Temples, mausoleums, mountains, lakes, streams, and trees tend to make this an attractive place. ”

“ There is no blood relationship to ease the strain; nor is there always in Tokyo the calm, phlegmatic, self-interested statesmanship of London. Tokyo is sometimes temperamental.
If we continue to bungle we shall ultimately gain the lasting ill-will of Japan, and if we do that we shall almost certainly find ourselves looking out of our back window not merely at a frowning Nippon, but at a coalition between Japan, Russia, and Germany—a coalition into which we ourselves, by our attitude, shall have driven Japan. ”

“ TOKYO Psychologically speaking, the city of Tokyo, like the Japanese civilization, which is often unmoral, if not immoral, is a wanton growth, not a true development from the inner force of impulse; its immensity in size, and perhaps in humanity too, is not the consciousness of sure development, but more or less in the nature of an accidental phenomenon. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is a wooden tray with a tea-pot filled with hot water, and glasses for the tea, which the Japanese are always drinking. When we stop at the stations there is such a cheerful chorus of clicking high-heeled clogs, as the men and the little ladies, with their smiling brown babies on their bent backs, tippet and shuffle along.
The short run between Tokio and Yokohama is [113] perfectly flat, with nothing but rice fields, or if there is a little eminence it is crowned by the dwarf forestry, which is the peculiar feature of Japanese scenery.
Tokio or Tokyo, is the official capital of Japan. ”

“ Tokyo has more open space than other native cities, and street cars, rickshas and crowds of people about the railway station gave ample evidence of having reached a large center. One of the main streets of the capital city is wide, with sidewalks, and good business buildings rise at frequent sections along the thoroughfare. Goods were displayed in the windows, and clerks were on their feet; whereas in other cities Japanese merchants, like the Indians, were seen sitting down on an elevation or low counter, with feet partly under and the sandals or clogs on the floor. ”

“ The pullulating population of Tokyo seemed to have emptied itself, like a rabbit warren, into the streets. The ladies were in their best kimonos, their hair elaborately dressed, set round with pins, and the men, some of them bareheaded, Japanese fashion, in Japanese garb, others wearing bowler hats, others again dressed in ill-fitting American clothes, carrying American umbrellas. These umbrellas, I think, are one of the features that you resent most in the occidentalising of the Japanese man and woman. ”

“ It is customary in Tokyo, we were told afterwards, to warehouse in a depository or "go-down" (a name derived from the Malay godong given to the fire-proof storehouses in the open ports of the Far East) all valuable and artistic [Pg 325] objects; the idyllic innocence of Tokyo is a thing of the past; thieving is rife; it is well also to protect them from fire, earthquakes and floods.
Above the bookcases all was thoroughly Japanese in character; the ceiling mostly composed of unpainted wood laths, traversing a delicate grey ground. ”

“ The streets themselves are worth notice. If the foreigner who comes to Japan expects to see in such a great capital the asphalt carriageway and paved sidewalk of his native country, he will be sadly disappointed, for Tokyo, with all its multitudinous thoroughfares, cannot boast even the boulevards and avenues of a European provincial town. In spite of the efforts of the Tokyo municipality, the streets are still narrow. Their total length is about six hundred miles, with a width ranging from one yard to fifty, the average being nine yards. ”

“ Without great factories such as Osaka boasts of, without the political importance of Tokyo, and without shipping advantages such as have made Kobe and Yokahoma famous, Kyoto is noted rather for conserving the life of old Japan. Here are the family industries, the handicrafts, and a hundred little arts in which the Land of the Rising Sun excels.
Little themselves in stature, the people of Japan are best in dealing with little things requiring daintiness, finish, and artistic taste. ”

“ The most beautiful and perfect of the gardens of Japan, in the old-fashioned Chino-Japanese style, which I have ever seen, are the Kōrakuen in Tokyo, and the Katsura-no-Rikyū in Kyoto. The former was originally the garden of the Prince of Mito, the site of whose mansion is now occupied by the Koishikawa Arsenal. Thus the quiet beauty of the art of the “Old Japan” is brought into contrast with the preparations for displaying its strength of the “New Japan.” ”

“ It is almost too free to be called democratic; it has no discrimination. (My friend critic, that unique N. Y., scorns Tokyo as the human beehive of mobbishness.) Many millions of Japanese, dark in skin, short in stature, live here looking as if the increasing summer clouds had fallen on the ground, now parting and anon gathering again with a sort of mystery of Oriental fatalism; the first and last impression is a weariness not altogether unpleasant, ghostly at the beginning and tantalisingly human afterward. ”

“ In Tokyo they are at present absolutely indispensable and their abolition would not only throw thousands of men out of employment in the city, but would even paralyze its activity. In such vogue are they that the people of Tokyo have ceased to be the good pedestrians that their fathers were and their country cousins still are, and its young men cannot keep pace with the sexagenarians who in their prime thought nothing of covering forty miles in a single day. The jinrikisha has, in fact, become a necessity and a luxury. ”

“ It would be a great mistake, however, to suppose that the enjoyment of the Japanese garden in a social way is confined to the wealthy and the nobles with their large estates. All over the country the multitude of the people love nature and have it abundantly at their command to enjoy in quiet ways. In Tokyo thousands of artisans and common labourers and coolies, with wives and children, will trudge for miles to view the plum or cherry blossoms, or to see the morning-glories open at four o’clock of a Summer morning. ”

“ In short, though Tokyo, as the capital, will probably remain the largest city in the Empire, it cannot be denied that it is not now so far in advance of the rest as it was a few years ago. This rise of great provincial cities is a necessary result of the growth of manufacturing industries which are bound, if the country is to prosper, to take the place of agriculture, which is too limited in its scope in a country of such a moderate extent as Japan. ”