Jinrikisha Days in Japan/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII
TOKIO—CONTINUED
There are no such holiday-makers as the Japanese. The whole twelvemonth is fête-time, and the old year held three hundred and sixty-five festivals and anniversaries. All the great days of the Chinese calendar are observed, and the death-day of past sovereigns, instead of the birthday; while each religion, each sect, each temple, and each neighborhood has its own fête or matsuri, religious in its origin. Every night different temple grounds and different streets glow with lanterns and torches, an out-door fair is in full progress, and happy, laughing, chattering men, women, and children enjoy it all. The evening flower-fairs are as characteristic and picturesque as anything in Japan. The smoke of blazing flambeaux, the smell of the women’s camellia seed hair-oil, and the mingled odors from booths and portable restaurants, are not enticing on a hot night, but at least they offend in an “artless Japanese way.”
The booths along the whole length of the Ginza offer innumerable odd notions, queer toys, pretty hair-pins, curios, and indescribable trifles, every night in the year. The Japanese hair-pin, by-the-bye, is a dangerous vanity, the babies often twisting themselves into the range of its point, and the mothers impaling them on it in shaking them up higher on their backs and tightening the bands that hold them. The comic and ingenious toys, embodying the simplest principles of mechanics, and by the aid of a little running water, or the heat of a candle, performing wonderful feats, are such trifles of bamboo, thin pine, paper, or straw, as American children would destroy at a touch. Yet the more truly civilized Japanese little people play with them for weeks; and they toddle home with minute wicker cages of semi, or cicada, on one finger, content to hang them up and listen peaceably to the strident captives’ chirping mi-mi-mi all day long.
The first week of March is gala time for the small girls of Japan, when their Hina Matsuri, or Feast of Dolls, is celebrated. Then do toy shops and doll shops double in number and take on dazzling features, while children in gay holiday clothes animate the streets. Little girls with hair elaborately dressed, tied with gold cords and bright crape, and gowns and girdles of the brightest colors, look like walking dolls themselves. The tiniest toddler is a quaint and comical figure in the same long gown and long sleeves as its mother, the gay-patterned kimono, the bright inner garments showing their edges here and there, and obis shot with gold threads, making them irresistible. Nothing could be gentler or sweeter than these Japanese children, and no place a more charming play-ground for them. In the houses of the rich the Dolls’ Festival is second only to the New Year in its importance. The family don their richest clothing, and keep open house for the week. The choicest pictures and art treasures are displayed, and with these the hina or images that have been preserved from 
THE SEMI'S CAGE
grandmothers’ and great-grandmothers’ time, handed down and added to with the arrival of each baby daughter. These dolls, representing the Emperor, Empress, nobles, and ladies of the old Kioto court, are sometimes numbered by dozens, and are dressed in correct and expensive clothing. During the holiday the dolls are ranged in a row on a shelf like an altar or dais, and food and gifts are placed before them. The tiny lacquer tables, with their rice-bowls, teapots, cups, plates, and trays, are miniature and exquisite likenesses of the family furnishings. Each doll has at least its own table and dishes, and often a full set of tableware, with which to entertain other dolls, and amazing prices have been paid for sets of gold and carved red lacquer dishes, or these Lilliputian sets in wonderful metal-work. After the festival is over, the host of dolls and their belongings are put away until the next March , and when the beautiful images emerge from the storehouses after their long hiding they are as enchanting as if new. Nothing better illustrates inherent Japanese ideas of life and enjoyment, and gentleness of manners, than this bringing out of all the dolls for one long fete week in the year, and the handing them down from generation to generation.
On the fifth day of the fifth month comes the boys’ holiday. The outward sign is a tall pole surmounted with a ball of open basket-work, from which hang the most natural-looking fish made of cloth or paper. Such a pole is set before every house in which a boy has been born during the year, or where there are young boys, and some patriarchal households display a group of poles and a school of carp flying in the air. These nobori, as the paper carp are called, are of course symbolic, the carp being one of the strongest fish, stemming currents, mounting water-falls, and attaining a great age. Many of these nobori are four or five feet in length, and a hoop holding the mouth open lets them fill and float with as life-like a motion as if they were flapping their fins in their own element. In-doors, images and toys are set out in state array—miniature warriors and wrestlers, spears, banners, and pennants, and all the decorative paraphernalia that once enriched a warrior’s train. In all classes children's parties and picnics prevail. The schools are given up to out-door exercises, and every sunny morning processions of youngsters file by, with banners and colored caps to distinguish them, and go to some park or parade-ground for exercises, drills, and athletic games.
Besides the public schools maintained by Government, there are scores of private schools and mission schools. With its higher institutions reaching up to the Imperial University, with its special schools of law, medicine, engineering, science, and the arts, Tokio offers the best education to the youth of Japan. The public-school system is the equal of that of the United States, and the Government employs foreign teachers in even the remotest provincial schools. At a kindergarten the aristocratic pupils, with a repose of manner inherited from generations of courtly and dignified ancestors, trot in, in their little long-sleeved kimonos, like a Mikado opera company seen through the wrong end of an opera-glass, sit down demurely around low tables, and fold their hands like so many old men and women of the kingdom of Lilliput. There is no tittering, no embarrassment, nor self-consciousness; and these grave and serious mites will take the blocks from the teachers with a reverent bow and present them to other children with another formal salute, quite as their grandfathers might have done at court. In some of the girls’ schools the old Japanese methods are followed, and they are taught the traditional etiquette and the cha no yu, to embroider, to write poems, to arrange flowers, and to play the samisen. The koto, once almost obsolete, is restored to favor, and girls delight to touch this sweet-toned, horizontal harp.
The great summer festival is the opening of the river. This is the beginning of the nightly water fêtes on the Sumidagawa, and in the innumerable tea-houses that line its banks. This fête, appointed for the last week of June, is often postponed to the more settled season of July. Flat-bottomed house-boats, with open sides, awnings hung round with lanterns, and sturdy boatmen at either end of the craft, go up the river by hundreds and thousands at sunset, gliding out from the creeks and canals that everywhere intersect the city. The glittering fleet gathers in the broad stretch of stream lying between the Asakusa bashi and the Ryogoku bashi, and these two bridges are black with spectators. The rows of tea-houses lining both shores spread red blankets over the balcony railings, and hang row upon row of lanterns along balustrades and eaves. With their rooms thrown wide open to the water, they themselves look like great lanterns. Every room of every house has its dinner party, the tea-house of the Thousand Mats being engaged months before hand, and every maiko and geisha bespoken. Boats command double prices, and nearly every boat has its family group; little children in holiday dress, their elders in fresh silk, crape, gauze, or cotton kimonos, sitting on the red floor-cloth, each with a tray of dolls’ dishes, filled with the morsels of dainty things that make up a Japanese feast, and saké bottles circulating freely. The lines of lanterns shed a rose-colored light over all; and at one end a pretty maiko goes through her graceful poses, the company keeping time with her in rhythmical hand-clappings. Peddlers of fruit, candies, fireworks, and saké; performing jugglers, acrobats, and story-tellers; floating restaurants, theatres, side-shows, and boatloads of musicians row in and out among the rest. Talk, laughter, and the wailing notes of samisens fill the air with a hum that swells to cheers and roars as the swift rockets fill the air with balls, fountains, sheaves, sprays, jets, and trails of light; or fiery dragons, wriggling monsters, rainbows, and waterfalls shine out on the dark night sky. Although sake flows everywhere, there is no drunkenness or disorder to degrade these gentle, cheerful merry-makers.
Fires are among the thrilling but picturesque experiences of city life, confined chiefly to the winter months. The annual losses of Japan through conflagrations are very great, and Tokio has been destroyed many times. The flimsy little straw-matted, wooden houses are always ready to blaze; and if a lamp explodes, a brazier upsets, or a spark flies, the whole place is in flames, which leap from roof to roof until the quarter is kindled. Each time a burned district is rebuilt the streets are widened, a measure which preserves property but ruins picturesqueness, for the broad thoroughfares, lined with low, unpainted buildings, make the modern Japanese city monotonous and uninteresting.
The diminutive Japanese dwellings, of toy-like construction, rest on corner posts set on large rocks, and made stable by their heavy roofs of mud and tiles. Fires are stemmed only by tearing down all buildings in the path of the flames, which is done as easily as a house of cards is overturned. A rope, fastened to one of the upright corner posts, brings the structure down with a crash, while the heavy roof covers it like an extinguisher. The ordinary city house or shop may have twelve feet of frontage, and even a second story seldom raises the roof more than fifteen feet from the ground. To hear of a thousand houses being burned in a night is appalling, but a thousand of these Lilliputian dwellings and their microscopic landscape gardens would not cover more area than two or three blocks of a foreign city.
Each section or ward has a high tower or ladder, with a long bell, and from this lookout the watchman gives the alarm or the near policeman sounds the fire-bell. Pandemonium follows, for a more excitable being than the Japanese does not exist, and the fire-bell’s clang is suggestive of many sad and terrible experiences. Besides the municipal fire brigade with their ladders and hand-pumps, each ward maintains private watchmen and firemen. These watchmen roam their beats from dusk to daylight, jingling the loose iron rings on the tops of their long staffs. Throughout the night the watchman’s clinking rings are heard at half-hour intervals or oftener. The policemen, on the contrary, go about quietly, lurking in shadow to pounce upon malefactors; and foreigners, mistaking the fire-guardian for the constable, have pointed many jokes at his noisy progress.
When the alarm-bell clangs, friends rush to help friends in saving their effects, and thieves make the most of the opportunity. Blocks away from the fire agitated people gather up mats, screens, bedding, clothing, and cooking utensils, and hurry from the neighborhood. Then does the simplicity of Japanese life justify itself. No cumbrous furniture is rolled out, to be broken in the transit; no tables, chairs, or clumsy beds are ruined in the saving. One small hand-cart holds the roll of wadded comforters and gowns that compose the bedding of the family, their clothing, and their few other effects. The sliding paper-screens are slipped from their grooves, the thick straw-mats are taken from the floor, and the household departs, leaving but the roof, corner posts, and rough floor behind them. Processions of these refugees stream away from the burning quarter, and the heart of the spectator goes out to the poor people, who, with so little, live so cheerfully and suffer so bravely.
The emblems or rallying banners always carried by native fire-companies astonish foreign eyes. Glorified drum -majors’ sticks, gigantic clubs, spades, hearts, diamonds, balls, crescents, stars, or puzzles, are borne aloft by the color-bearer of the detachment, who stands in the midst of smoke, sparks, and the thickest of the hurly-burly, to show where his company is at work. Thrilling tales are told of these Casabiancas remaining on roofs or among flames until engulfed in the blazing ruins.
Sometimes carpenters begin to build new habitations on the still smoking ground, stepping gingerly among hot stones and tiles. The amazing quickness with which Japanese houses rise from their ashes defies comparison. In twelve hours after a conflagration the little shopkeepers will resume business at the old stand. Fire insurance is not suited to this country of wood and straw dwellings; but thatched roofs are giving way to tiles in the cities, and brick is more and more used for walls. Stone is too expensive, and, in this earthquake country, open to greater objections than brick. The stone walls sometimes seen are a sham, the stones being thin slabs nailed on the wooden framework of a house, like tiles or shingles, to rattle down in a harmless shower when the earth heaves and rocks. Steam fire-engines are unknown, and hand-grenades are inevitably forgotten in the excitement of a conflagration.
Earthquakes, though frequent, are fortunately not severe, and no alarming catastrophe has been suffered since the convulsions of 1854 and 1855, which the malcontents attributed to the wrath of the gods at the spectacle of foreign barbarians entering the country. The old myth, that the earth—meaning the islands of Japan—rests upon the back of a huge fish, whose writhings cause these disturbances, places the head of the leviathan beneath Vezo, its tail under the southern island, and its vital and active body below Yokohama and Tokio. Now the Government has a seismologist on its university staff, and each tremor or palpitation is accurately recorded, the average number reaching four hundred annually. Kobé and Kioto seldom experience even the slightest motion, but in the vicinity of the capital one becomes fairly accustomed to the unpleasant visitation. A slight disturbance sets lamps and chandeliers vibrating; with a heavier rock all bric-à-brac not wired fast to cabinets, mantels, or tables, slides to the floor; and a harder shock loosens tiles, wrenches timbers, and sends brick chimneys, not boxed in wood or sheet-iron, crashing through the roofs. A small house rattles as if the earthquake fish had come out of the sea and seized it as a terrier does a rat. Pebbles grate in garden paths, tall evergreens snap their tops like switches, bells ring, clocks stop, and people rush frantically to open spaces or streets.
The Japanese seldom drink water, although they splash, dabble, or soak in it half the time; yet men who are working in moats or lotus-ponds, grubbing out the old roots or stalks, and dripping wet to their waists and shoulders, will quit work on rainy days. In Yokohama harbor, coolies who load and unload lighters, and are in and out of water continually, often refuse to work when a shower begins; but a wet day brings a new aspect to the streets, and fair weather has no monopoly of picturesqueness. The unoccupied women with babies tied on their backs, an apparently large leisure class, are always gadding about the town with the aimless unconcern of hens, taking no account of the weather, and enjoying the open air regardless of the barometer. Children are equally indifferent, and jinrikisha coolies, although they draw the hoods and tie their passengers in snug and dry with oil-paper or rubber aprons, trot along cheerfully, with their too scanty cotton garments more abbreviated than ever. They substitute for an umbrella a huge flat straw plate of a hat, and instead of putting on galoches, they take off even their straw sandals and run barefooted, tying up the big tee with a bit of rag or wisp of straw, apparently by way of decoration. Those pedestrians who wish to be stately and dry-shod thrust their bare feet into a half-slipper arrangement of wood and oil-paper, perched on two wooden rests three inches high, adding this cubit to their stature.
When the rain-drops patter the shops are a delight, and the great silk bazaars of Echigoya and Dai Maru, the Louvre and Bon Marché of Tokio, are as entertaining as a theatre. Both occupy corners on great thoroughfares, and have waving curtains of black cloth, with crest and name in white, as the only wall or screen from the street. The one vast open room of the first story is revealed at a glance. The floor proper of this great apartment, raised a foot and a half from the stone walk surrounding it, is covered with the usual straw-mats, the uniform glistening surface extending more than sixty feet either way. Here and there salesmen and accountants, the book-keepers being also cashiers, sit at low desks, where they keep their sorobans, money, and curious ledgers. There are no shelves nor counters, and in groups on the mats sit women with beautifully-dressed hair, and men in sober silk garments, inspecting the heaps of rainbow fabrics strewn about them. Small boys bring out arm loads and baskets of silks from the godowns, for no stock is ever in sight until the purchaser asks for it. It is etiquette for these small boys to hail and cheer the arriving and departing customer, and they drone out some nasal chorus. We once lifted the street curtain at Dai Maru’s on a rainy day to find the whole matted area deserted of customers. Immediately the battalion of small boys sprang to their feet, and, deafening us with a chanted canticle, hurried to the corner where a steaming bronze urn, various tea-caddies, and a shelved box full of tea-sets provide patrons with cups of amber-tinted nectar. For an hour these myrmidons ran to and fro, baskets were carried back and forth, and gold brocades supplied sunlight and rainbows for a gloomy day. All these precious brocades come in lengths of four and a half yards for the broad obis or sashes that are one secret of her looks in the toilet of a Japanese woman. Those woven of silk alone are as thick as leather and soft as crape, and the massed gold threads, while glistening like plates of chased metal, give stiffness but not hardness to the fabrics. When the woof threads are left in thick, shaggy loops on the under side, not cut away in any economical fashion, these are yesso nishikis, the choicest of all Japanese stuffs, and valued from sixty to one hundred and twenty dollars for the single obi length.
The Nakadori is a half-mile-long street of curio and second-hand shops, which just before the New Year contain their best bargains, and no one can hold to the safety of his jinrikisha through that straight and narrow path, beset by every temptation of old porcelains, lacquer, and embroideries. Peddlers will gather from these shops and carry packs twice their own size, to spread their contents out in the room of a customer. Their wares are so tempting and cheap that the beholder cannot resist them, after a reformation of prices, and that peddler who comes twice has marked his victim for his own. On certain days of the week a rag fair is held on the Yanagiwara. Vendors in rows half a mile long sit under the willow-trees on the canal bank, with neat piles of old clothing, scraps of cloth, and ornaments for sale. Between Shiba and the railway station is a rag alley, a Petticoat Lane of old clothing, but most of it is foreign and unpicturesque, even in the flying glimpses to be caught from a jinrikisha.
In curio-hunting the experienced buyer invariably replies takai, “too much,” to whatever price the dealer names. If intent on the bargain he may add takusan takai, “altogether too much.” Osoroshi takai, or tokomoni takai, “inexpressibly, unspeakably dear,” sometimes serves to abate the price by reason of the dealer’s amazement at hearing those classic and grandiloquent words brought down to common usage.
Once I visited the most charming of old-clothes shops, one where theatrical wardrobes were kept; but Sanjiro could not, or would not remember it, and I never returned. The shopmen were sober and serious automata, whose countenances were stolid and imperturbable, and one might as well have bargained with the high-priest for the veil of the temple, as have offered them less than they asked. They sat, smoked, and cast indifferent glances at us while baskets of gorgeous raiment were borne in, and affected to look up the prices in a book of records. After baiting me long enough, and bringing me to raise my offer, the trio of partners would suddenly clap their hands, say something in concert, and deliver me the article. It was all as precisely ordered and acted as a set scene on the stage, and I longed in vain to assist at other acts in the unique drama.