Chapter XII

The undoubtedly many attractions of the island empire for the mere traveler are, unfortunately, greatly offset by the high cost of living there. The rapidity with which letters of credit are depleted turns almost to naught the well nigh frantic efforts of such publicity agencies as the diligent Japan Tourist Bureau to attract visitors. Two or three years ago those who cater to and depend upon the passing foreigner comforted themselves with the thought that his scarcity was merely a temporary aftermath of the World War. Now that he still fails to come in appreciable numbers, there is dismay in such quarters, though it is characteristic of the Japanese temperament to assert that “the increase is gratifying.” Word has drifted to the ear of many a prospective tourist that life is unreasonably expensive in Japan, or he hears proof of that fact in crossing the Pacific and goes on to China without landing, or cuts to a fraction the time he planned to spend in the mikado’s realm. If even Americans feel that way about it, one can easily imagine the sensations of those from war-impoverished lands with a feeble currency.

Some of this raising of prices is justifiable; much of it is not. The Japanese working-man has recently won a wage commensurate with a citizen instead of a serf, and the consumer must take care of it. But the war engendered the profiteer there as elsewhere; it left behind newly rich to set bad examples and crowd the heels of their more honest brethren; a great increase in taxes has popularized the pastime of seeing how much of them can be passed on to the next man. Then there is what a Tokyo editor calls “expensive face-saving.” In olden days the Japanese “saved face” in other ways; it is no doubt in keeping with the general westernization of their standards that the modern method of doing so should be by ostentatious extravagance. The ordinary Japanese business man who would keep up with the procession and not give his colleagues and his clients the impression that he is hovering on the verge of insolvency must waste much money on mere show. Completely separate wardrobes for the four seasons, often European as well as native style, are indispensable. When he entertains his friends or customers he can scarcely invite them to his home, not so much because of domestic seclusion as because it is the fashion to have such gatherings in a tea-house, where geisha-girls may be summoned to serve or dance. Not only do the more famous of these expect an opera-singer’s fee, but the _chaya_ itself has boosted its prices to the new-rich level. Then there is the very serious matter of tipping. In the United States this vicious importation from Europe has swollen almost beyond recognition of its origin, but the extra fees exacted there are mere flea-bites compared with the _chadai_, or “tea-money,” of Japan. On the amount of it depends the reputation for importance of the giver, and it is a common failing to wish to impress the world with one’s importance. The Japanese of any standing who puts up in a native hotel, for example, and is handed a bill for twenty yen at the end of a three-day stay, is expected to send at least half that amount as a tip to the proprietor, to give another five yen to the maid who brought his food and kept his room in order, and generously to remember the bath-boy and the shoe-man. “Is there any other country,” asks the irate editor, “where such a ridiculous custom as tipping to eighty per cent of the bill prevails?”

All this, of course, is reflected in general prices. But what has particularly aroused the wrath of travelers is the almost universal Japanese custom of expecting the foreigner, particularly the Caucasian visitor, to pay higher prices for the same things than the native. Perhaps this is merely an extension, almost flattering, of the notion that one pays according to one’s importance. The fact remains that the American and the European are sometimes frankly and naturally, more often surreptitiously, made to pay more than the Japanese, a custom which ignorance of the language, among other things, makes it next to impossible to combat. In some cases this, too, is justifiable. An American staying in a native inn is likely to require more attention, to call for stranger foods, to be more careless with the floor-matting than the Japanese guest—and he is almost certain to be ignorant of, or to scorn, the native custom of exorbitant tips. But the overcharging is not confined to justifiable cases; among those who habitually come into contact with foreign travelers it has become a fixed habit, and has spread to a considerable extent to the rank and file. I have already mentioned the high cost of _kuruma_-riding. In the slang of the rickshaw-man and his class, a foreigner is a _kane-mochi_, a “possessor of money,” in other words, a rich man, and whenever it is possible he is treated accordingly. Wherever he moves, except by the government railways or the strictly public means of conveyance, the tourist has the feeling that his money is being taken away from him with unjust rapidity; whenever he stops he is likely to be quickly impressed with the nation that it is better for his financial constitution to move on again.

It is not the Japanese alone who are to blame for this baiting of the visiting traveler. The score of more or less foreign hotels throughout the country which cater especially to such clients have been joined together in a price-fixing association, mainly by the efforts of the typically American manager of the most pretentious of them, situated in a busy “treaty-port.” In the best few of these the virtually uniform charges are not entirely out of reason; but to come upon a run-down or poorly constructed and badly provided member of the association, far from the beaten track, only to be confronted by the same inflated rates, is likely to turn one’s attention once more to the train schedule. It would perhaps be unfair to suspect that the typical American hotel man above mentioned resorted to a manœuver time-honored in his native land in order to remove an incentive for travelers to desert his own ostentatious and necessarily high-priced establishment for more modest ones in out-of-the-way places; but the Japanese, for all his reputation for cleverness and foresight, is often dense.

There are many Americans, to be sure, who would not consider the foreign hotels of Japan high-priced, though they might express dissatisfaction at what they get for their money. But I am one of the firm believers in travel for persons of modest means, and not merely for the wealthy or those shielded from financial worries by an expense account. There are many who can, and should, and do go to see foreign lands, who still cannot, will not, and should not continually pay at least six dollars a day for a place to sleep and three heavy meals which they often do not wish to eat—plus constant increases for bottled water, for many services that should not be regarded as extras, for clever manipulations of the stated daily rate, and the high tips expected at their departure by a long line of more or less useless servants. Yet there is often no choice but to patronize the sometimes flea-bitten members of the hotel association or stay at home. One may not have the courage, or even the ability, to live in Japanese inns, and even these have in many cases caught the hint and greet the foreigner with “special rates,” on the pretense that they are furnishing him with silk- instead of cotton-covered _futons_, and “European food,” though they are as ignorant even of the appearance of the latter as a Tennessee mountaineer is of Japanese viands. Their own overreaching is depriving those who long to do business with him of the patronage of the modest traveler, and the immodest are too scarce to bring them a livelihood.

All that has saved some of these ill-advised exotic hostelries from disaster is an increasing Japanese patronage. Men who have been abroad sometimes prefer to live in foreign style, or at least to show their families a sample of it; some find it cheaper to pay the high rates and low tips of these establishments than the low rates but high tips expected of “persons of importance” in native hotels; the war-rich make them new forms of ostentation and overrun some of them with their geisha parties. Hence it is a rare dining-room that does not contain a few men faultlessly European from the neck down, audibly enjoying their soup, tea, or toothpick in Japanese fashion or striving to conceal their chagrin at the unadaptability of wives still distinctly native in garb and manners. For if the Japanese smile at our clumsiness with the chop-sticks, we recover the amusement with interest among the native sojourners in these so-called European hotels. Daintily kimonoed ladies clutching forks upside down in the wrong hand, grasping the body of a tea-cup for fear the handle to which they are unaccustomed will prove too frail, paring their fruit backward with what is to them a clumsy knife, unconsciously trying to draw their feet up on their chairs—and often succeeding—the while avoiding the eye of inwardly wrathful though outwardly imperturbed husbands, enliven many a meal. That their mishaps are not confined to the detested public place of eating is suggested by the unfailing anecdote of those traveled Japanese who are given to admitting personal discomfiture of how they fell out of their first bed.

It is as much as anything the commonplace atmosphere and stereotyped menus of these exorbitant imitations of Occidental hotels that make one inclined to hurry through Yokohama, Nagoya, Kobe, even temple-rich Kyoto, and spend such time as one can afford in smaller and less sophisticated places. There—almost anywhere off the one well-beaten track, in fact—one must endure the unconscious bad manners of a race which, for some unexplainable reason, always quickly gathers about a foreigner, though a hundred others have passed within a fortnight, and giggles childishly at him if he speaks, though the study of his language is compulsory in every higher school and, except that his eyes do not squint, his appearance is scarcely a whit different from many of the gigglers themselves. But there are compensations, in glimpses of unsophisticated corners, unadvertised bits of picturesqueness, semi-survivals of customs that carry one back to the days, not yet nearly a century distant, when to wander in a land now as safe as any on the globe would have been to lose one’s head forthwith by order of some wrathful _daimyo_. Nor does one ever tire of seeing the velvety Japanese landscape, its rugged misshapen pines, its terraced hillsides, and its crazy-quilt rice-fields cut up into absurd little patches so carefully tended that there is hardly a weed in the whole country, or of the laborious, uncomplaining, mud-wading men and women who spend their lives in them. Fields pink with Chinese clover that is to be plowed under to enrich the soil change to white stretches of daisies doomed to the same undignified end as one rambles southwestward; otherwise, there is a picturesque sameness which nevertheless does not grow wearisome.