Chapter V

My impression that Japan is only a little country after all somewhat evaporated during a visit to its slightly known northern island. This was no doubt partly due to the almost Oriental leisureliness of Japanese trains, and it is perhaps as much the long day’s ride from Tokyo to the northern end of the main island as the uninviting aspect of the steamers which set one across to Hokkaido that causes the overwhelming majority of visitors to confine themselves to the well-beaten track from Nikko to Nagasaki and miss a region amply worth while.

Beyond beautiful Volcano Bay with its smoking cones lies quite another Japan, inconspicuous on the world map yet of a surprising vastness. Hakodate, the chief landing-place, burdened with that silly Japanese rule forbidding photography within modern cannon-shot of fortifications which the most slow-witted of spies could easily find some other means of picturing, calls for nothing more than the unavoidable halt of an hour or two. But on the long day’s journey northward from there to Sapporo one’s coming is already rewarded. Though May will soon be half gone, it is cold enough for an overcoat, and the Imperial Government Railways are still heating their trains. Low huts, with heavily thatched or rusty-tin roofs, held down by scores of stones that testify to the occasional violence of storms, hug the ground closely, in a way unknown in the main island. Instead of rice-fields, the rich black soil is given over mainly to corn and potatoes, corn shocked as it is in the United States, as weatherbeaten cones of it that have stood through the long, arduous winter still testify. Now and again the train rumbles for an hour or more along the very edge of this or that magnificent bay, through collections of miserable huts, with thatched fishing-boats and millions of herring split in two and hung on lines to dry in the sun, and millions more in heaps and bales ready for shipment. There is a genuine Japanese atmosphere, not to say scent, about these clusters of toilsome poverty, though certainly there is little of that cleanliness which the mind habitually associates with the Japanese.

But these familiar touches, like the rare glimpse of an aged wife with unsightly blackened teeth, are merely the reminders of the old well-known Japan which give contrast to the real Hokkaido. New England landscapes of hills, then low mountains dabbled with snow, finally big white patches beside and below the track, succeed one another as the train struggles inland. At length come rugged, snowcovered peaks rising into the clouds; before long all the mountains in view, more than can be counted on the fingers of both hands, are blanketed with snow, great fields of which lie in the hollows far below us. Yet, as I have already said, May was well along. It required a distinct mental effort to keep in mind that this was still Japan.

Lower down again there was a profusion of wild flowers, though the buds did not seem so far advanced as they are along our northern border on the same date. There came whole hours of primeval forest, with at most a rare patch of clearing, then broad vistas of charred stumps and the primitive conditions that go with them, finally some square-cut cultivated fields, but these only in the dead-flat lands, as if there were far too much room available to trouble with hilly ground. On the whole, the fields, though still small to the American eye, were ten times the size of those of Japan’s main island. Also there was much plowing with shaggy horses, instead of mud-wading men and women with hoes, goodly herds of cattle grazing here and there—in short, a landscape in which a rural American from our Northern States would have felt almost at home.

Yezo, as the island which the Japanese, for some political reason, have renamed Hokkaido is still best known to the outside world, has never kept pace with the rest of Japan. Though the primitive Ainus were reduced to serfdom at least a dozen centuries ago, the north island was an almost unknown wilderness even when the Japanese resumed their intercourse with the outside world in the middle of the last century. A plan to make it an independent fief of the crumbling Tokugawa shogunate at the time of the imperial restoration having been bloodily upset a year later, various schemes of government under an executive appointed from Tokyo finally crystallized in 1886 in an independent administration, with Sapporo as the capital. To the already American aspect of the landscape were added, through the initiative of the first governor, charged with the task of colonizing the island, a group of American agricultural experts, who brought with them machinery, seeds, trees, and other aids of a similar nature. To-day Hokkaido produces, for instance, an ample supply of American apples for all Japan—and incoming travelers must hand over to courteous but stern custom officials the last remnants of this fruit in their possession, though a case of oranges or a month’s supply of raisins pass duty-free.

It was these same American experts who laid out the capital, Sapporo, thereby wholly depriving it of the picturesqueness of genuine Japanese towns and giving it the spaciousness, convenience, and solidity of an American city. Its wide, squarely intersecting streets—a hundred and sixty feet from wall to wall, if you must have statistics—have not merely sidewalks but rows of trees to delimit them from the roadway that is the common battle-ground of pedestrians and vehicles in the rest of Japan. Lawns and lawn-mowers, men shingling the roofs of clapboard houses, even government barracks built in similar fashion, elms and maples in lieu of the rugged and distinctive Japanese pine-tree, the big campus of an agricultural college copied after that of Massachusetts, with a snow-capped mountain background to its broad baseball, track, and tennis field, are but a few of the reminders of Sapporo’s origin. Even the women have almost abandoned the elaborate and costly coiffure of their southern sisters, and dress their hair in American fashion. Paper walls are all but unknown; baby-carriages—but what gain are these in a land where children come so thick and fast that every perambulator seems to hold twins, to be indeed evidently designed for them, while a still later arrival dozes on the propeller’s back? With its big fruit-stores, its self-sufficient, well-supplied people, an extent seeming to belie its mere half-century of age, Sapporo looks almost a transplanted bit of our own land, for all the rickshaws racing noiselessly through its wide streets and notwithstanding some of the unfortunately still Japanese personal habits of many of its inhabitants—and by the same token it does not, of course, offer the mere traveler a tithe of the interest of almost any village of the real Japan.

Beyond Sapporo lies nearly the whole island, wonderful plains of black loam soil almost as flat as our prairies, now stretching from the distant sea on one hand to faintly delimned ranges of snow-capped mountains on the other, now filling some vast basin between whitened rival ramparts which merge in either direction into the horizon. The great valleys now and again pinched out between brown hills littered with charred stumps, growing gradually into heavily wooded mountains, with many a snow-capped peak more massive and well nigh as symmetrical as Fujiyama itself, yet thus far doomed to fameless isolation. Big rivers brought down thousands of fresh-cut logs, whole acres of which gathered in placid back-waters. But the fertile plains always soon came again, now with wigwam-like stacks of hop-poles recalling Bavaria in spring,—Sapporo beer is famous throughout Japan,—now mile after mile of fields completely flooded, though plainly not destined for rice, with plowing horses and their drivers wading thigh-deep in the cold mud and water. It was a land like the richest sections of Illinois or Kansas; yet gangs of women were piling up great logs, a score of them supplied the motive-power of a primitive, singsong pile-driver, and half-starved fisher-folk still battle for existence along the coast. It seemed as if the few inhabitants, accustomed for countless generations to the crowded struggle for existence farther south, were mentally incapable of taking advantage of the wide and fertile opportunities all about them, of casting out the centuries-old sense of inequality they brought with them and enjoying the fulsome prosperity of ample elbow-room.

There are signs everywhere that the Japanese Government is doing its best to turn Hokkaido into a cleared and settled land. A hundred telegraph or telephone wires, on half a dozen rows of posts, parallel the track, not to mention an important power line; pine, or at least evergreen, nurseries cover a sloping hillside here and there; much forest has recently been denuded and burned, with somewhat less wasteful methods than those in vogue before the spreading sugar-fields of Cuba. But of all the obstacles its people set against the laborious efforts of the Government more nearly to equalize the density of population of this great north island with the rest of the empire, the dread of battling with the rigorous climate stands first. The man of Japan is not on the whole adaptable. He hesitates at the limits of heat and cold to which his frail type of architecture and his thin, flowing garb are unfitted; he is, by temperament, no pioneer, but resembles those militant birds that prefer to settle down in the warm, well-feathered nest built by some other species. If he goes to a new and undeveloped land, it is, by choice, as an economic hanger-on, as shopkeeper or official, rather than to do his share in the rude labor of reducing the primitive to the cultivated. No one, I believe, has ever accused the Japanese of laziness; it seems to be rather his inherent dread of the primeval, of great unpeopled spaces, that leaves Hokkaido, large and fertile enough to support in unaccustomed style a third of the people of all Japan, with a scattered population barely one fifth that of the city of Tokyo.