Chapter XVIII

We had left Tokyo before the latest catastrophe overwhelmed her and the surrounding section of Japan, and threw into greater relief some of her most striking national traits. Among the stories of the great earthquake and fire which have been confirmed, perhaps the most astounding to us was the refusal of the captains of Japanese war-ships and transpacific liners to rescue the refugees who appealed to them for succor, while foreign ships near-by were making every effort to save them. But—they were waiting for orders! The Japanese mind, particularly of the official class, is not trained to function on its own initiative. Their superiors seem to partake of some of the divinity of the superior of them all, the being so sacred that he can only be referred to indirectly and by inference as “mikado,” the “honorable gate”—behind which he reigns. Besides, the Japanese are Orientals, and nowhere does the Oriental soul seem to quiver with anything like the profundity of our own at the sight of suffering and violent death. The longer one has lived in the East, provided it has been in actual living contact with its strange peoples, the less impossible it will be to visualize those stern Japanese captains in Yokohama Harbor unflinchingly dooming to death under their very eyes scores of their own race because they considered it their solemn duty not to take them on board until they had received official instructions to do so.

That extreme Japanese reticence on questions concerning their own country, less often adroitly sidestepped than deliberately refused as a subject of conversation even by those readiest to talk, and inquire, freely on any other, is exemplified in the secrecy that still prevails over their losses. We shall never know how many perished in that great earthquake and fire of 1923 even if the Japanese themselves ever work it out exactly; we shall particularly remain in all the ignorance in which they are capable of keeping us as to the amount of damage done to their navy and their great naval base at Yokosuka. We also might have attempted—though probably it would not have struck us as worth the trouble—to keep the results of such a disaster in our own land from the rest of the world, but we certainly should not have succeeded. We have no such training in national reticence.

Underneath their protestations of thankfulness for our national and individual help during their hour of trial, say those who were in close contact with the Japanese at the time of the catastrophe and immediately afterward, there was no real gratitude at all; they accepted our help as something naturally due them, as if we were merely instruments of the Kami or national gods that watch over them. I am in no position to confirm or deny this statement, but it is wide-spread enough to be worth reporting. After all, how genuine is gratitude, East or West? I certainly can name several races, in both hemispheres, that do not have a visible trace of it. But it was surely adding insult to injury not only not genuinely to thank us but to suspect us of the worst motives in aiding them. Perhaps that is still more typical of the race. Knowing them even imperfectly it is not hard to imagine them asking themselves what these foreigners were up to, why they were coming into their harbors, not only the open commercial ports but into those officially closed to outside nations, merely on the pretext of wishing to help their suffering people. Surely there must be some real reason behind this apparently gratuitous altruism,—a chance in a lifetime to get secret information about their precious country, possibly even to photograph those inviolate “strategic zones”, that had turned gray so many officers assigned to protect them from kodaking tourists—something up their sleeves, certainly. It needs no comment to show what such a people would evidently have done under similar circumstances; we suspect others particularly of what we do or would like to do ourselves.

It is quite as typical of Japan to find that Tokyo is being rebuilt with astonishing rapidity, and its complex business of life resuming. But no less so is the order in which it is being reconstructed. No part of the destroyed capital has been so artistically, so thoroughly, and so quickly resurrected as its _yoshiwara_, the official segregated district out beyond the temple of Kwannon, goddess of mercy and most popular of all with the Japanese masses. One of the great holocausts of that horrific first day of September took place there. Hundreds of the women of the _yoshiwara_ who escaped from the crashing houses and devouring flames took refuge in a shallow artificial pond, perhaps fifty by thirty feet in size, within the inclosure, one of the decorative features of the high-walled precinct about which the courtezans used to place their tutelary gods and goddesses. There was soon hardly standing-room in it, and the flames rose ever higher. The water of the pool became tepid, then hot, then took to boiling. When squads of soldiers and workmen could get near the place on the following day there was little left but an enormous caldron of cooked bodies. A granite stone roughly carved with Chinese characters recalls the tragedy to those who can read them, but it seems already almost forgotten, though from the stone rises intermittently the smoke of incense, a tribute perhaps from their successors to those who so miserably perished there.

But there seems to be no particular difficulty in securing women for this degrading “necessity” in Japan, any more than in getting right of way for the rebuilding of the district. The houses in which the new oiran are housed are among the finest in phenix-like Tokyo, much finer than the dwellings erected for mere citizens, while the barracks put up for the homeless are pigsties in comparison. Trees and flowers have been planted to give the place an air of quiet dignity and respectability; the streets are straight, broad, and clean, which is more than can be said of the commercial and industrial part of Tokyo; the houses are artistically constructed on Japanese-Chinese lines; inside of each of them is a miniature landscape garden with little altars where each inmate burns a candle or a lantern to her particular god. Street peddlers again sing their multifarious wares gaily from brothel to brothel, flattering the women on their appearance, and showing them how to improve it with trinkets from their stocks; out in the wide portico beside the inviting photographs two men sit like spiders, warming their hands over a _hibachi_ as the night chill advances, and scanning each passer-by with a furtive eye to business. Those who can get them to talk on the point will be assured that “business is as flourishing as ever, perhaps more so, for the women are nearly all new, and all the houses have agreed upon a flat rate of a yen and a half an hour, so that many a fine sturdy young fellow has regretfully to leave for lack of accommodations.”

It was an appalling disaster, that latest of Japan’s misfortunes, in the front rank of those that have befallen mankind; yet it was not the first of its kind, not only in Japan but in Tokyo itself, and a people so familiar with its own long unbroken historical records should have been at least subconsciously prepared for it. Besides, no small part of Tokyo ought to have been destroyed, anyway; those noisome old shacks along dirty narrow streets down near the muddy bank of its alleged river, for instance, were unworthy of the capital of an enlightened people. Though it already boasted some quite modern skyscrapers, a considerable portion of the city was so built that once a fire started it must sweep an enormous area. For a year an American expert in city planning had been laying out on paper a new Tokyo, which the disaster will make it so much more simple to carry out—though I believe no one has been cynical enough to assert that the earthquake was made to order. Yokohama is gone; whether or not it is rebuilt, it was only an insignificant little fishing village when it was first opened to foreign trade in 1859, an ephemeral thing indeed in the long history of Japan.

A dreadful calamity, there is no question. But I like to dwell on the comedy rather than the tragedy of life, and the picture that recurs most often to my mind is not of little children pinned under fallen timbers and awaiting the licking flames, not that giant cooking-pot of the _yoshiwara_, but of that haughty English lady living on the bluff at Yokohama, who was just taking a bath before sitting down to luncheon, on what must have been a hot and dusty day, when the crash came—and who promptly tobogganed in her tub down the long slope of the bluff to the sea-shore, as easily and as unhurt as Minerva riding the waves. I cannot find absolute court-room proof of the story—ma, si non è vero è ben’ trovato.