Chapter X

It is nearly a score of years now since the many private “iron roads” of the island empire were combined under a cabinet minister, yet when all is said and done the Imperial Government Railways of Japan are a refutation of an almost universal experience elsewhere, that trains will not run properly under government ownership. Perhaps it is the combination of religion and patriotism of which Shintoism seems to be concocted, the semi-deification of the mikado and all his belongings; perhaps it is due to mere habit, or racial temperament; the fact remains that government ownership and employment do not mean carelessness and neglect, indolence and waste, in Japan. One has, to be sure, the impression, at sight of the swarms of men and boys in the dull-blue railway uniform, that the system is over-staffed; but nothing, one recalls, is more plentiful in Japan than human beings. If improvement and extension languish a bit, there are reminders that the railways, like schools and many another ward of the mikado’s Government, must often be content with modest rations, that its favorite sons, the army and navy, may lose none of their sturdy corpulence.

A narrow gauge is not conducive to reckless speed; the Japanese express-train that covers a mile in two minutes congratulates itself on a feat, while the locals that fulfil most of the promises, nearly always to the minute, of a bulky national time-table consume an incredible amount of time both at stations and between them. But few sports in Japan are far beyond the reach of rail, and the risk to life and limb is negligible. The adolescent squeal of the European-copied locomotives may be annoying to Americans, who will probably regret that the two car-length cushions on either side in first- and second-class are better suited to squatting on one’s heels or stretching out at full shoeless length than to ease in viewing the passing landscape; one may question the Japanese conception of certain indispensable conveniences, but such as he conceives them they are always in order. Diligent scrub-women at the terminals are no more so than the train-boy, in no way related to the commerce-minded nuisance of the same name in our own land, who come hourly to sweep out the carriages with but slight disturbance to its occupants, and several times a day to mop them. All cars are smoking-cars; there is no division by sex even of wash-rooms. But in what other land does the guard, whom we would call conductor, uncover with a regal bow as he enters to announce the regretful necessity of troubling the honorable passengers to display their respectable tickets, or pause to rearrange a rug over a sleeping traveler and to set aright the shoes, clogs, sandals, _getas_, and slippers scattered along his way through the train?

The experienced traveler rarely brings his lunch with him on a Japanese railway journey; he knows that he will find frequent and fresher supplies along the way, and at prices no higher than in his own street. Prices can sprout wings in Japan quite as easily as elsewhere, but it may be due to a frowning government that the wide-spread custom of considering travelers by train temporary prisoners, to be mulcted during the confinement of as great a portion of their financial solvency as possible, has not yet taken root there. In the very likely event of there being no dining-car, with tolerable European meals of four or five courses at a scant seventy cents each, there is a system of station venders more frequent and more dependable perhaps than anywhere else in the world. Never does a train halt at a place of any importance that the singsong cry of “O-bento!” does not call attention to green-capped youths marching up and down the platform offering for sale all that a reasonable traveler can demand in the way of food and drink.

It is conceivable that the foreigner may not at once take kindly to the “honorable _bento_,” the staff of life of Japanese travelers; but with persistence he will come to endure and even to relish it. Two fresh wooden boxes tied together with a paper ribbon contain the collation, which is uniform in cost,—forty _sen_, the half-cents of Japan, everywhere now, since the war,—and almost so in contents and quality. On top clings a paper napkin and a paper-sealed pair of chop-sticks, the virginity of the latter assured by their being but half split in two, with—such is the Japanese genius for unexpected little details!—the inevitable toothpick tucked between them. The larger box contains hot boiled rice, all a native cares to eat at one sitting and more than the normal American can. The several little compartments of the other hold a piece of fish—fortunately not usually raw, as the Japanese like it—perhaps a bit of meat, some slices of cold potato, a cut of sweet omelet that is most likely of all Japanese viands to appeal to the average Western taste, two or three unknown vegetables, some boiled, the others pickled, perhaps some brown beans to give one chop-stick practice, and a shaving of red ginger to lend the rest seasoning. Variations on this menu, according to the locality and the things each place is famed for, are pickled lily- or lotus-root, black mushrooms, bean-curd, shrimps, steamed eel, edible seaweed, sliced octopus, and even stranger sea-foods.

If all this does not suffice, one may summon other wearers of the green cap. There is the tea boy, the hot milk boy, fruit sellers, venders of rice-cakes, of the dough-ball sweetmeats of Japan, of wood-wrapped native jams, of California raisins, a trifle cheaper than at home, a hawker of cigarettes, periodicals, beer, and more doubtful thirst-quenchers, perhaps even an incongruous purveyor of near-bread and sandwiches. Hot boiled milk in bottles holding a scant glassful is expensive; tea, on the other hand, is almost given away. For eight _sen_, a bare four cents, the boy furnishes an earthenware tea-pot with cover and handle, crudely glazed, like the tea-cup that goes with it, and fills it with hot water from his traveling buffet—furnishes everything, in fact, except tea, in lieu of which the purchaser finds merely a sack-inclosed handful of leaves that do the water no harm if one prefers to throw them out and add real tea of one’s own, some bouillon cubes, or whatever individual taste suggests. Most traveling Japanese deceive themselves into believing that this tasteless hot water is really their indispensable beverage. The stranger cannot but wonder how all this can be supplied at so slight a price, and why the pot and cup cannot be retrieved at some other station. They never are, however, but, like the _bento_ boxes and all the rest of the waste which Japanese travelers cast under the seats, and never out of the window, they are periodically swept up by the train-boy and dumped as the train passes over some river or arm of the sea. Where these are shallow, one may see thousands of broken tea-pots and cups heaped up at the bottom. Thus, for a yen at most, a rugged appetite can be tamed into submission for several hours. To be sure, the Imperial Government Tobacco Monopoly cigar, which may sometimes be had to top off with, sadly belies even its misspelled Spanish label; but one may be so fortunate as still to have left a few of the fifty genuine smokes which the Japanese customs generously allow the traveler to bring into the country with him—and what boots it to worry about to-morrow?

To-night, however, is a more serious matter. All the horrors of the American so-called “sleeping-car” are as nothing compared with the bitter tragedy in many acts of a night spent in one of the poor imitations thereof that ramble up and down Japan. The natives, I believe, find little fault with them, and there is no reason that they should be remodeled to fit the few foreigners who might use them. For it is mainly a question of fit, so far at least as the Anglo-Saxon is concerned. By day second class differs from first only in the color of the upholstery, and perhaps a bit more companionship. But not only is the normal second-class berth built to Japanese specifications; the so-called “large size” ones are merely wider, which is very slight advantage to the full-length man. Granted, however, that he has succeeded in stowing himself away, there are other inconveniences. The Imperial Railways being narrow-gauge, it is inevitable that some portion of the average Western anatomy shall more or less continually protrude into the aisle. The flimsy curtains that satisfy the atrophied sense of privacy of the Japanese are always half open for one cause or another; there is no real dressing-room; if one is so daring, dexterous, and determined as to disrobe inside a berth, where the retention of a tooth-brush means overcrowding, one must resort to the customary Japanese custom of hanging one’s clothes on the floor—and the only floor available is that of the aisle. Worst of all, perhaps, the sleeping-car of Japan is never really that but a day-coach with furnishings which runs at night. The lights blaze unabated; short-distance passengers stalk in or out of the car at every station and chatter and smoke incessantly between them; trainmen are constantly marching through, and never fail to slam the four or five noisily sliding doors; at every halt brazen-voiced youth walk back and forth along the platform outside insistently repeating the name of the station—in short, there is even less likelihood of a bit of sound sleep than in a Japanese inn.

First class ought to be better, but it is not unlikely to be worse. Yokels along the way, or in third class, are curious to see the rare personage who travels thus, and the magnificence about him; the scarcity of occupants makes it the favorite rendezvous of the train-crew as work-, play-, or catnapping-room; the other half of the same coach is not infrequently the dining-car and all-night café; and the train-boy will die at his post rather than permit a window to stay open for an instant on the hottest night. Old travelers who know the ropes often make their night trips in first class without taking a berth. Their sleeping-place is the same that it would be with a berth-ticket, in some ways all the better for not being made up—and there is a saving of seven yen.

It is perhaps natural that “boys” in hotels and on trains have no realization of the advisability of quieting down toward midnight in a land where the most courteous seem to have no respect for the sleeper, where even husbands habitually wake their wives or children at any hour of the night on the flimsiest provocation. A nation accustomed since time immemorial to paper walls, overcrowding, and uncomfortable substitutes for beds probably is not conscious of the value of long, sound slumber. The passing foreigner who sees ill-slept faces all about him and notes the tendency to nap by day whenever a chance offers realizes that a wise people should be as insistent on restful sleep as in avoiding dyspeptic food and unhealthful eating habits. Our impression is that the Japanese are careless in both these respects.