Chapter I

All the way across the Pacific we mused on the probability of getting a glimpse of Japanese family life—not of mere inns or wide-open lower-order hovels, but of the unexpurgated interior of a real Nipponese home. The chance came quickly and unexpectedly, on our first day in the country. One of those fires which rival earthquakes in strewing with disasters the history of this flimsily wood-built land had just erased one of the three or four hotels of Tokyo that welcome foreigners—at least foreigners of the table and chair habit. Luckily for us; for, had the mishap been postponed a fortnight, the likelihood of seeing all our worldly goods, lugged thither with much mental and financial effort, ascend in smoke, would have been excellent. It was lucky, too, that the refugees from the chaotic ruin had filled its former rivals to overflowing; for thereby not only did we escape the legal banditry which they have the reputation of practising upon those who fall into their hands as clients, but we realized our pent-up desire.

One of my few letters of introduction to the island empire did the trick. The addressee himself lived far from his office, but one of his subordinates requested—or consented, at a flicker of the superior’s eyebrow—to be permitted to offer us temporary asylum in his mean and dishonorable abode. Not that the solution was reached at once, just like that, in an easy, offhand American manner. The Japanese mind does not work that way. To begin with, there was an interminable session with the telephone, actually manipulated by a boyish underling, under the dictation of the seated man of standing. Yet, though fully half the audible end of the conversation consisted of the endless repetition of “Moshy-moshy”—which seems to be an abbreviation of something corresponding to “Pardon your dishonorable servant for presuming to exist, but have the honorable kindness to deign to listen to the miserable noises which I shall now convey to your august ear through this most disreputable and unethical mechanical contraption”—and though the instrument was of as antiquated form, and the telephone system of Japan is as deeply imbedded in the postal and telegraph department of the Government, as in France, it was noticeable that it performed its ends with what would there be considered vertiginous and incredible efficiency.

Just where the hour or two went between this confirming of my information regarding the plenary condition of Tokyo’s surviving hotels and the actual offer of temporary refuge no one with mere American experience could fathom, nor one without generations of schooling in the intricacies of Japanese etiquette explain. As to the similar length of time which elapsed between that epochal decision and its physical accomplishment—do not housewives, even of our own often too swift-moving land, require time to prepare themselves and their dwellings for the fitting deception of unexpected but “highly distinguished” guests?

The mean and dishonorable abode proved to be a most delightful and thoroughly Japanese dwelling set in its own spacious garden, at half an hour’s dodging by “motor-car” from the modernized heart of Tokyo. So far so good. But other difficulties quickly beset our path. Should, for instance, “highly honorable” guests commit the uncleanly Western barbarism of shaking hands in response to the welcoming antics of the entire galaxy of hosts,—women, children, servants, as well as the now lordly master himself,—who were wiping with their brows the matted threshold a high step above us? Should the removal of one’s dishonorable footwear and the performance of whatever might be the proper gesticulations of greeting be simultaneous—ambidextrous, so to speak—or consecutive, and, if the latter, in what order? What, if any, should be the reputable means of concealing the sudden discovery that, presuming upon its customary invisibility in one’s own scheme of life, one had been so careless as to permit a humble nether garment to reach a state incompatible with the publicity to which it is frequently subjected in Japan? Certainly one must, at least, flinging aside all etiquette, Oriental or Western, dash after that two-year-old member of the family, who, still dishonorably shod, set off on a sudden scamper through the frail house, in imminent possibility of racing unchecked through one of its paper walls, the while clamoring for his overdue bath, board, and bed in a manner not customarily used toward a chance host in any land.

Things move with a certain Oriental leisureliness even in Japan; but the time came when, after a supper that night that might have been less deliberately an attempt to be European, and baths which were not particularly noted for their privacy, piles of quilts were at last spread upon the spotless straw matting of our large second-story chamber and cylindrical bean-bags lay ready to receive our weary heads. Beyond a miniature gorge the darkness was sprinkled with hundreds of the lights of Tokyo; to our ears came across the intervening gardens the mild night noises of Ushigome-ku, one of the most populous wards of the densely populated Japanese capital, the subdued scraping of wooden _getas_ most conspicuous among them; surely we could not complain of delay or lack of thoroughness in the granting of our wish for a glimpse of home life in Japan.