Jinrikisha Days in Japan/Chapter 21
CHAPTER XXI
NAGOYA
In this day of French uniforms, Gatling-guns, and foreign tactics, it is only in Nagoya that the garrison occupies the old castle; the fortress, with its gates and moats, remains unchanged, and the bugle-calls echo daily around the quaintly-gabled citadel. In the great parade-grounds outside the deep inner moat rise foreign-looking barracks and offices, and dumpy little soldiers in white-duck coats and trousers and visored caps stand as sentries on the fixed bridges, and in the portals of the huge, heavy-roofed, iron-clamped gate-ways. Of course these guards should be men in old armor, with spears and bows, and the alarms should be given on hoarse-toned gongs or conch-shell bugles, as in feudal days. Instead, the commandant of Nagoya has on his staff young nobles of old feudal families, who speak French, German, or English, as they have been taught in foreign military schools. A dapper little lieutenant, in spotless gloves and an elaborately-frogged white uniform, conducted us along the deep moat, over the bridge, and under the great gate of the citadel, whose stones, timbers, and iron clampings would defy a dozen mediæval armies. Gay chatter about la belle Paris, which the little lieutenant had learned to adore in his student-days, echoed under the yet more ponderous inner gate, and the ghosts of the old warriors must have groaned at the degeneracy of their sons.
Below the frowning citadel is an old palace, wherein the son of Iyeyasu, the first Prince of Owari, lived in state and entertained the Shogun’s messengers. The empty rooms are musty and gloomy from long neglect, but the beautifully-carved and colored ceilings, and the screens and recess walls, decorated by famous artists with paintings on a ground of thinnest gold-leaf, remain the sole relics of his splendor.
The great donjon tower of the citadel, rising in five gabled stories, is surmounted by two golden dolphins, the pride of Nagoya. Made over two hundred years ago, each solid goldfish is valued at eighty thousand dollars, and many legends are attached to them. A covetous citizen once made an enormous kite wherewith to fly up and steal the city's treasures, but he was caught and put to death in boiling oil. The golden pets were never disturbed until one of them was taken down and sent with the Government exhibits to the Vienna Exposition in 1873. On the return voyage it sank to the bottom of the sea with the wrecked steamer Nil. Like the old lacquers and porcelain, the golden dolphin suffered no sea change, and, after a few months’ immersion, was brought up and returned to its high perch on the tower, while all Nagoya rejoiced to see it flashing in the sun once more.
The donjon tower is a fine example of the old architecture, and the massive joists of keyaki would build barracks for twenty regiments. Inside the tower is an inexhaustible well, called the “Golden Water,” which, in time of siege, would enable a rice-provisioned garrison to hold out for years. Up a stair- way of massive timbers one climbs, half in darkness to the top, to look down upon the broad Nagoya plain, the blue bay, and the busy port of Yokkaichi opposite, in the sacred province of Ise.
Commercially, Nagoya is best known as the centre of a great pottery and porcelain district, Seto in Owari being as famous as Staffordshire in England. In the Seto suburb porcelain clay is found, and silica exists in large quantities a few miles away. From the castle tower one sees the smoke of continuous lines of kilns surrounding the valley, and all the ware is sent in from these villages to Nagoya for distribution. Here the finest egg-shell porcelain, rivalling the French ware, is made, much of it going to Yokohama to be decorated for the foreign market. Seto itself has given its name to all porcelain, and especially to the pale, gray-green ware so commonly used in Japanese households. Old green Seto ware is highly esteemed, both for its soft tinting and its peculiar glaze, suggesting jade or lacquer to the touch more than hard, kiln-burnt porcelain. The bulk of the commoner heavy porcelain is decorated here for the foreign market—men, women, and small boys mechanically repeating the monstrous designs in hideous colors, which they ignorantly suppose to represent western taste, and which the western world accepts as “so Japanese.” Modern Owari is least desirable and least Japanese of all the wares of Japan, but as thousands of dollars pour annually into Nagoya for these travesties of national art, their manufacture and export will still go on. Recently the Seto potteries have been turning out large tea-caddies, with double or pierced covers, by tens of thousands, daubing them with the discordant colors of cheap foreign mineral paints. Across the ocean they are called Japanese rose-jars, although the rose was unknown in Japan until the entrance of foreigners, and the rose-jar and the pot-pourri it contains would greatly astonish a Japanese. But as Nagoya and Seto are made rich and happy by badly decorated porcelain tea-caddies, industry gains if art loses.
Thirty thousand Nagoyans are engaged in the manufacture of a cheap cloisonné enamel, ship-loads of plaques and vases with one unvarying hard, pale-blue ground being exported annually. The powdered porcelain from Seto’s imperfect pieces forms the base of the enamel used, and the two industries work together economically.
In Nagoya town are shops filled with the charming Banko ware, made across the bay at Yokkaichi, which still retains all its old merits, unaltered by the demands of foreign markets. Banko teapots worked out of sheets of thin clay, pressed, folded, cut, and patterned in white mosaic or glazed designs in low relief, resemble nothing so much as bits of soft painted crapes stretched over hidden frames, and these fragile, unglazed pieces are all the more pleasing in the midst of Nagoya’s keramic nightmares.
Nagoya being a little off the line of tourist travel, its curio shops are not entirely stripped of their best things. As Owari’s princes exchanged porcelains liberally with the daimios of Hizen and Kaga, some rare pieces of old Imari and Kutani are often chanced upon, as the impoverishment of great families, and the rage for foreign dress and fashions, tempts the better class to part with heirlooms. Whole afternoons wore on as we made our way into the graces of certain curio dealers, that they might disclose their jealously-guarded treasures. These old men of Nagoya have a real affection for the beautiful things of the past, made before any foreign demands had corrupted and debased the native art. Once convinced of the intelligent interest of their customer, the owners proudly open the go-down, and the swords, the lacquer, and the porcelains appear, and, lifted from their boxes, stripped of cotton and silk wrappings, are set forth. These old dealers are men wholly of the past, who meditate and smoke long over an offer, and if they agree to the price solemnly and slowly clap their hands as a ratification of the terms. Four times we passed by the largest curio shop in Nagoya, led by the tea-jars and boxes in the front to suppose that it was only the abode of a tea-merchant. When we had accidentally bought some choice tea there, we were invited back to a court, where two godowns were crowded with old porcelains and lacquer. Near by was another shop where arms, armor, Buddhas, altar-pieces, saints, images, carvings, candlesticks, koros, robes, trappings, and all the paraphernalia of priests, temples, warriors, and yashikis were heaped up on the floor and hung overhead.
The coolies had been anxious about our rate of progress on the last Tokaido days, fearing to miss the great matsuri of the Nagoya year, which, celebrating the deeds of the founder and patron saints of the city, has been maintained with great pomp and splendor for centuries. The procession was to take four hours in passing, and our landlord engaged places for us in the house of a shoe-dealer in the main street. The dealer in geta and dzori dealt only in those national foot coverings, but, yielding to foreign fashions, had set up a sign of
“Shoes the Shop.”
The sliding screens of the front wall of the room over the shop were removed, and bright red blankets thrown over the ledge and spread out on the eaves of the lower story. All the houses were open and decorated in this same way, and lanterns hung in rows from the eaves and from upright posts at the door-way.
The worthy shoe-dealer’s blankets and lanterns were just like his neighbors’, but when three foreigners appeared at the low balcony, then the multitude stopped and stared open-mouthed at that unusual spectacle, and we divided popular interest with the procession as long as we remained there. Policemen were perplexed between their duty of making the crowds move on and their own pleasure of having a look at the strangers. Soldiers from the garrison stared by hundreds, and the policemen requested them to depart, as well as the rustics and townspeople. Policemen rank much higher, in a way, than the soldiers, the guardians of the peace being nearly all descendants of the old samurai, the two-sworded, privileged retainers of feudal days, while the common soldier is enlisted from the farm laborers; and one quickly sees how much more regard the lower classes have for the gunsa than for the soldier.
The procession began with high ornamental wooden cars, or dasha, set on wheels hewn from single blocks of wood, and drawn by ropes, to which every pious person was supposed to lend a hand. Regular coolies were engaged for the steady wheel-horse work, and sang a wild chorus as men with stout sticks pried the clumsy wheels up for the first turn. The corner posts and upper railings of the dasha are lacquered in black or red, and finished with plates of open-work brass, or elaborately-gilded carvings. The sides are hung with curtains of rich old brocade or painted cloth, and the railed top is a stage, on which puppet-shows and tableaux represent scenes from mythology and legend. On one car Raiden, the red Thunder God, mounted on a rearing charger, shook his circle of drums, and Suzume, the priestess, repeated her sacred dance before the cave. Comic scenes took best with the audience, however, and the jolly old shojo, men who come up from the bottom of the sea for a revel on shore, wearing mats of bright red hair and gowns of gorgeous brocade, were received with greatest favor. They ladled out saké from a deep jar, and finally stood on their heads on the rim of the jar and drank from the depths. There were only twelve dasha in line, but they stopped every fifty feet while the puppets were put through their performances.
Succeeding the cars came a daimio’s train, preceded by heralds in quaint, mediæval costume, and presenting every phase of the old-time parade. Chinese sages and instructors, Korean prisoners, falconers and priests walked in line after the daimios, who were mounted on horses half hidden in clumsy but beautiful old trappings. The men in white silk gowns and lacquer hats, who took the daimios’ places at the head of the line, are descendants of those great families of the province, whose members have ridden in Nagoya’s matsuri parades for centuries. After them came an endless line of men in armor, the suits of mail being either heirlooms of the wearers or provided from the rich stores of such things owned by the temple. The armor surpassed the treasures of curio shops, and the dents and cuts in the cuirasses and helmets attested their antiquity. Having sat from eleven o’clock until three in the upper room with the family of 
THE SHOJO
the shoeman, we parted with elaborate expressions of esteem on both sides, and with such bows and prostrations from them that we wondered how our guide would contrive to slip a gift into their hands.
Nagoya maiko and geisha are celebrated throughout Japan for their beauty, grace, and taste in dress, and a geisha dinner is as much a property of Nagoya as the golden dolphins of the old castle. At ours we engaged two geisha to sing and play, and four maikos to dance in their richest costumes. As the guests were Japanese the feast was made a foreign dinner of as many courses as our guide and magician, Miyashta, could conjure from Nagoya’s markets and the Shiurokindo’s kitchen. Our three friends rustled in early, clad in ceremonial silk gowns, each with his family crest marked in tiny white circles on the backs and sleeves of his haori, or coat. At every praise of Nagoya, which the interpreter repeated to them on our behalf, they rose from their high chairs and bowed profoundly. At table the play of the knife and fork was as difficult to them as the chopsticks had once been for us, but they carried themselves through the ordeal with dignity and grace, and heroically ate of all the dishes passed them.
Towards the end of the dinner a gorgeous paroquet of a child appeared on our open balcony. Her kimono was pale blue crape, painted and embroidered with a wealth of chrysanthemums of different colors. Her obi, of the heaviest crinkled red crape, had flights of gray and white storks all over its drooping loops, and the neck-fold was red crape woven with a shimmer of gold thread. Her face was white with rice powder, and her hair, dressed in fantastic loops and puffs, was tied with bits of red crape and gold cord, and set with a whole diadem of silver chrysanthemums. She came forward smiling with the most charming mixture of childlike shyness and maidenly self-possession, becoming as much interested in our curious foreign dresses as we in her splendid attire.
Presently, against the background of the night, appeared another dazzling figure—Oikoto, the most bewitching and popular maiko of the day in Nagoya. She, too, was radiant in gorgeously-painted crape, a red and gold striped obi, and a crown of silver flowers. Oikoto had the long, narrow eyes, the deeply-fringed lids, the nose and contour of face of Egyptian women. Her hand and arm were exquisite, but it was her soft voice, her dreamy smile, and slowly lifted eyelids that led us captive. Oikoto san and the tiny maiko fluttered about the table, filling glasses, nibbling sweetmeats, answering questions, and accepting our frank admiration with grace incomparable. Two more brilliantly-dressed beauties entered, and with them the two geisha and their instruments. One of the geisha, O Suwo san, was still a beauty, who entered with a quiet, languid grace and dignity, and whose marvellous black eyes had magic in them.
The geisha struck the samisens with the ivory sticks, the wailing chorus began, and there succeeded a fan-dance, a cherry blossom- dance, and an autumn-dance, the four brilliant figures posing, gliding, moving, turning, rising, and sinking slowly before our enchanted eyes. One dance demanded quicker time, and the dancers sang with the chorus, clapping their hands softly and tossing their lovely arms and swinging sleeves. The three gentlemen of Nagoya joined in that pæan to the cherry blossoms and the blue sky, accenting the verse with their measured chanting; and one of them, taking part in a musical dialogue, danced a few measures in line with the maiko very well and gracefully.
The closing dance—a veritable jig, with whirls and jumps, rapid hand-clapping, and chanting by the maiko—ended in the dancers suddenly throwing themselves forward on their hands and standing on their heads, their feet against the screens.
“That is what we call the foreign dance: it is in foreign style, you know. You like it?” asked the interpreter on behalf of our guests; and our danna san had the temerity to answer that it was very well done, but that it was now going out of fashion in America.
After the seven dances the maiko stood in a picturesque row against the balcony rail and fanned themselves until supper was brought in for them and set on low tables, whereon were placed many cups and bowls and tiny plates, with the absurd bits and dolls’ portions that constitute a Japanese feast.
The incongruous and commercial part of the geisha and maiko performance came in the shape of a yard-long bill, on which were traced charges of seventy-five cents an hour for each maiko, which included the two accompanists, and the jinrikisha fares to and from the entertainment. Unwritten custom required of us the supper for the performers, and a little gratuity or souvenir to each one.
When we begged the lovely Oikoto for her photograph, she proudly brought us one which showed that exquisite creature transformed into a dowdy horror by a foreign gown and bonnet, which the Nagoya photographer keeps on hand for the use of his customers.