Chapter XIX

Until familiarity dulls the attention, one misses the sight of animals and of pastureland in Japan except in Hokkaido to the north. Perhaps there are a few more horses to the square _ri_ in half-tropical Kyushu than on the long main island, but even there mankind furnishes the great majority of beasts of burden—and of milch animals, too, one might be so frank as to add, for Japanese children are habitually, and unsecretively, suckled long after they can walk and talk. Japan, like South America, outside the narrow llama-zone, was not supplied by nature with four-footed assistants. The first horses are said to have reached the islands from Korea late in the third century of the Christian era, and they are still far from numerous. With a people doomed to do nearly all its own hauling and carrying, it is not so strange that the horse is a kind of sacred animal of Shintoism.

Without horses there was no great reason for roads, and to this day the Japanese do not fully realize the importance of good highways and solid bridges, so that the automobile has not been much of a relief to their horseless condition. Besides, the Government seems to regard this new contraption from the West as a luxury to be kept out of the hands of the people, and to be saddled with a staggering proportion of the tax-returns. In addition to a heavy import duty and all that goes with it, the yearly licence-fee for an automobile in Tokyo is three hundred dollars. One might easily suspect a policy of keeping the government railways free from competition, and be thankful that at least these only serious means of transportation by land in the empire are being steadily extended.

The line down the east coast of Kyushu is complete now, except for twenty miles of the most execrable road extant, linked up by the ubiquitous, omnivorous, all-suffering Ford. The railway is mainly tunnels, so frequent in Japan, with wonderfully terraced hills or vistas of blue tropical waters between them, seas so mirror-clear that it seems a sacrilege to scratch the surface of them with an occasional steamer. Along it, too, lies Beppu, landing-place of three shipwrecked Portuguese sailors in a rowboat half a century after the discovery of America, where multitudes of Japanese come now to bake or boil, sporting the naïve garb of Adam and Eve, in the overflow from smoking Aso-san behind. The peasants of Kyushu were already harvesting their grain in May, though frogs still croaked in choruses in the flooded rice-fields. Fancy our farmers working under umbrellas, and tilling their soil at sunset on Sunday. Above each scattered village along the way still floated in the wind the huge fish of gaily colored cloth that are put up on boys’ festival day early in May over every house in the empire in which a boy has been born within the past few years. Its open mouth fastened to a bamboo pole, and filled with wind, each seemed to be swimming in the air high above the lowly abodes it honored. They are emblematic of the carp, it seems, which to the Japanese personifies perseverance, a fighter to the end, and hence a fitting example or spiritual guardian for the rising male generation.

Kagoshima, in the far south, was dusty and uninteresting as a city, and so hot that its people were more indecent in exposure than Hindus. But the famous island volcano in its harbor gave it a suggestion of Naples, and the place teems with history. Here, legend has it, the divine pair which founded Japan landed; or, if you will have none of mythology, there is the reality of that probably Malay race with paper houses and no chairs making this the first stepping-stone to a modern empire. Kagoshima was the first to greet and the last to accept the Occident. Father Xavier, the Jesuit, set foot here seven years after his wind-blown fellow-countrymen drifted upon the empire at Beppu; here, not yet half a century ago, the Satsuma lords made the last stand against the influx of Western ways that had followed the restoration—a final rebellion of the old loose-jointed order opposed to strong centralized government, which ended for the defeated leaders in _seppuku_, a politer term for _harakiri_. There are statues of these forgiven rebels now in the hillside park above the town still in their curious shogunal dress. Only those of retentive memories can recall how many times Kagoshima town and castle have been destroyed. Usually it was by their own fellow-countrymen, but England did likewise in 1863, because of the killing of an Englishman near Yokohama by a vassal of the Satsuma lord. It was by such outspoken methods that the Western world brought Japan to her modern knowledge of the rights of foreigners within her borders. And through it all Kagoshima continued to make its famous Satsuma ware, looking to the uninitiated like the checked and cast-off crockery of a ten-cent store, until Kyoto wrested the art from her.

We are apt to forget that Japan did not hermetically seal herself up for more than two centuries from mere hermit temperament, but because she had tried the faith and the ways of the West and found them wanting. The Jesuits were welcomed, and had everything their own way for a long time. Then came the Franciscans and the Dominicans, aggressive Spanish priests who refused to recognize the pope’s award of this region of “heathen gentiles” to their Portuguese rivals; and the bewildered Nipponese sought in vain to reconcile the practice of deadly quarreling with the preaching of brotherly love of these strange beings from an outside world. Finally, in 1600, the Protestant Dutch came, led by the Englishman, Will Adams, and mutual slander became the order of the day. Ever more puzzled, the rulers of Japan sent a man to Europe to investigate these strange things at their source, and after seven years he came back to report what Japan was already concluding, that Christianity was vicious and the ways of the West to be avoided. Rumors of rough doings in the unfortunate New World seem to have drifted in, too, and brought the astonished realization that this handful of Spanish and Portuguese friars and traders dreamed of conquering this ancient empire and of forcing upon it their own corrupt faith, as upon other “barbarians.” There followed increasing orders for them to retire, and justifiable, even if too bloodthirsty, punishments for disobedience, culminating in beheadings and crucifixions which supplied the church with a long list of martyrs and saints. All foreigners were at length forbidden to move about in Japan, “for fear that Portuguese would travel with Dutch passports.” Then finally, in his wrath, the ruling _shogun_ commanded that so long as Japan should be Japan any Christian who had the temerity to set foot upon it should forthwith lose his head; and for long afterward his threat was approximately made good. Even books from the Western world were forbidden, and when, more than a century later, they were again permitted, it was on condition that they contain nothing concerning Christianity.

It must have been a dreary life to the handful of Dutch traders who were allowed to remain, imprisoned on the little flat island of Deshima in what is now the heart of Nagasaki. Perhaps, being Dutch, they smoked their pipes contentedly in their sea-level patch of earth, indifferent to the lure of winding trails climbing away out of the hill-girdled harbor. About them Nagasaki grew from a mere fishing-village to a center of commerce with the outside world, though even that did not mean much by modern standards. The forbidden faith, too, seems to have dug in and remained, awaiting a more propitious occasion to reassert itself; for of the seventy-seven thousand Roman Catholics now credited to Japan fifty-seven thousand are in and about Nagasaki, as against only ten thousand even in Tokyo. The count is stretched, of course, after the Catholic-mission custom of crediting the church with a family of five members whenever one of them is baptized, even though the other four be non-existent or totally ignorant of the existence of churches; but, assuming that the fraud is evenly practised, the proportions are suggestive. No doubt it was by the same intensive methods of census that the martyrs of the sixteenth century won the reputation of having made more than a million converts in sixty years. To-day, though there are about thirteen hundred Christian missionaries of all sects on the field in Japan, and the Protestants claim almost twice as many converts as the older branch of the faith, and the Greek orthodox Church nearly half as many, there is barely one confessed Christian among one hundred and fifty-eight persons throughout the island empire.

The Nagasaki we saw was dull and considerably down at heel, dusty and hot and dirty, by no means the busy city even of my first visit early in the century. Women, repulsive in their rags and soot as beings from the infernal regions, still load passing ships with coal by handing endless baskets of it over their heads along steep gangways; and establishments of the “Madame Butterfly” type may still be found here and there in the hilly, sometimes flower-scented suburbs. Next year, they say, the inauguration of a daily twenty-four-hour steamer service to Shanghai will give the place new life, but in the meanwhile changes in world routes have left it sad and discouraged. Even the rickshaw-men stop our American quartermaster in the street to ask, as does the governor, whether there is not some way of getting American transports to come there again for coal, instead of putting in through Hyasaki Strait to a port nearer the mines. The Washington Conference was almost the last straw, forcing Nagasaki’s great shipyard to give up a mammoth warship-building contract. Speaking of the conference, there lay in Nagasaki Harbor at the time of our visit a newly launched forty-million-yen battle-ship, still in her first red coat of paint, which was actually and visibly being dismantled—unless, as a cynical foreigner long resident in Japan put it, they tow the hulk up some creek and throw their convenient pall of military secrecy about her until she has been rebuilt. But cynicism, after all, is not the trait most needed in the world just now. Besides, June had come, the golden-yellow _biwas_ were ripe, and the long rainy season was upon us; it was high time we pushed on to throttled Korea and topsyturvy China.