Chapter IX

Were facetiousness toward so solemn a people permitted, one might say that the Japanese are imitators at top rather than at bottom. The nation has apparently almost no notions of its own in the matter of head-dress; but certainly no one can accuse it of copying its footwear from extraneous sources. Fortunately the “derbies” and “bowlers” which topped off kimonos and European garb alike a decade or two ago seem to have passed into the limbo befitting such eyesores; but the foreign adaptations that have taken their place are little less incongruous. A group of Japanese males in their native costume, to which three out of four of them still cling more or less unalterably, and wisely, look as if they had been suddenly beset by a whirlwind in a foreign land, and had borrowed for the return journey whatever head coverings their hosts could spare them. Fedoras, caps, slouchy felts, particularly, now that summer was spreading northward across the empire, stiff straw hats, loomed forth on every hand—or head. Is it because the Restoration caught them with nothing between the fantastic hair-dress of _shoguns_ and _samurai_, still retained in a modified form by their hog-fat wrestlers, and the parasol-like sun- and rain-shades of the peasants, that most of the nation copies with such poor success our Western styles of head-dress? Personally I much prefer the bareheaded tooth-brush pompadour or closely clipped pates of most boys and of no small number of men of old-fashioned or indifferent attitude. The distinctly national feminine coiffure, too, never covered with anything but a parasol or an umbrella, helps to save the situation.

The two-toed human biped, reminiscent of the primitive horse, the cloven-hoofed mortal who shuffles his way in many millions through the islands of Japan is, however, unknown in all the rest of the round world. No other race has had the genius—to use a polite word—to evolve that cross between a stocking-foot and a foot-mitten, the great toe separated from the rest, which rounds off Japanese bare legs, irrespective of sex. Beneath this may be seen every manner of makeshift, always gripped by the independent great toe,—wooden clogs of many shapes and sizes, _getas_ ranging from flat boards to veritable stilts that raise the wearer a foot above the ground in the rainiest muddy weather, matted-topped sandals of wood, slippers—if a mere sole with a V-shaped cord as upper may be so called—for house wear, of a score of different forms and materials, slippers for the hallways, others for certain unmentioned chambers, special rubber slippers for the bath-room, crude straw _waraji_ for pilgrims and peasants, worn-out examples of which lie strewn along any traveled road, varied and special footwear for every time, place, and occasion.

In the old days when this was all, when man, woman, or child stepped instinctively in or out of his multifarious sole-protectors with unhesitating ease, it was a mere question of knowing the intricate etiquette of footwear. But now, with Western shoes wide-spread among the men and making headway among school-girls, there is often physical labor involved in the Japanese persistence in his peculiar footwear habits. At the “semi-European” hostelry where we sojourned for a week in Kyushu, southernmost island of Japan proper, the sub-manager laced or unlaced his shoes thirteen times in showing us our Japanese quarters. No wonder the island empire is the favorite dumping-ground for congress gaiters!

The Nipponese take extraordinary care to keep their feet off the ground. Even the peasants, market-women, boys and girls whose weather-toughened supports have never been subjected to the effeminate niceties of the toed-sock-foot, almost invariably wear at least straw _waraji_ out of doors. Pleasing custom, and a wise one, too, in a land where nothing that may enrich the land is wasted. But I believe I am giving no proof of extraordinary perspicacity in asserting that to her footwear is largely due the poor roads and the abominable streets of Japan. Her people are not great believers in pavements; they can easily hobble and scrape through life on their clumsy stilts without them. If it rains—and there are weeks on end when it does, indeed—until the shoe-clad foreigner cannot stir out of doors without covering himself to the ankles with paste-like mud, the native merely steps into higher and higher _getas_ and stumps serenely on. In the classic speech of recent years, “he should worry.” Before it fell in a crash one Saturday noon there was scarcely a square yard of street even in Tokyo that was not deep in dust or deep in mud, according to the weather. The municipal fathers had recently threatened to spend forty million yen toward giving the capital a modern pavement. If the threat is made good, now that the opportunity for general improvement is so excellent, Tokyo will no longer seem Japan, for dust and mud are as national as _getas_ and kimonos. When a stretch of Japanese street becomes really impassable, a few loads of sea-shore stones are spilled into it—to the still greater discomfiture of the shoe-shod foreigner.

At least one class of Japanese profits by this atrocity of streets and roads. Scores of what would be pleasant strolls, were there anything fit to stroll on, must be abandoned, to the advantage of the rickshaw-man. If he had no such allies, it is doubtful whether this human horse of the Orient would not already have passed from the stage in Japan, for there his constantly increasing demands have made him almost a luxury. To be jogged about Tokyo for a short day of sight-seeing or shopping costs even the initiated ten or twelve yen, which is almost half as bad as if it were American dollars. No extraordinary reward in these times, perhaps, for a hard day’s toil. Let us not, however, in our fairness to the physical toiler, lose sight of the fact that it is what he accomplishes, not how greatly he exerts himself, which counts; and your rickshaw-man moves you from place to place but little faster than you could walk, and not much more comfortably.

Personally, I found riding in a _kuruma_—which is a politer, more ladylike Japanese word for rickshaw—an unpleasant, almost a humiliating experience, as if I were being impressed with the notion that the man trotting in the shafts before me was more sturdy than I—which in Japan at least he usually wasn’t. Or my mind harked back to the origin of this unseemly means of conveyance, to the American—we admit we are an inventive nation—missionary who, half a century ago, converted—in addition, we trust, to many parishioners—a baby-carriage into a means of giving his invalid wife an occasional outing. Even the glistening wire wheels and the plump pneumatic tires to which the contrivance has since advanced cannot blot out that unmanly derivation.

Perhaps it is true also that no rickshaw-runner survives his tenth year in the profession, but as some of those I have ridden behind were plainly over fifty, and the speed of the majority in Japan by no means killing, I found this no great contributing cause of my displeasure in rickshaw riding. But often the choice is narrow,—a mud bath, a coating of dust and perspiration, a small and ancient type of tram-car with a floor as muddy or dusty as the street outside and inevitably packed beyond any American conception, possibly a limping, asthmatic, purse-flattening exile from our most popular automobile factory, or—the spider-mannered _kuruma-ya_, sitting on his own dashboard, awaiting a victim. The miniature member of our family became instantly fond of “widin’ man,” fortunately, for his walking was still limited; the unofficial head thereof recognizes the rickshaw’s domestic convenience, in spite of her constant dread that the runner’s reputedly brief span of life will end between the shafts sustaining her; but I, the minority, prefer stretching my legs to cramping them.