Chapter I: Westward to the Far East

For five days we had been rolling across the United States in a Pullman car, on our way to the opposite side of the globe. We might have set out from New York across the Atlantic, changing steamships in some European port and going the whole distance by water. But we had decided to see our own country first, and after our long journey across the continent, here we were at last rumbling into the city of Seattle.

The Pacific Ocean was spread before us. Perhaps more people sail from San Francisco than from Seattle in crossing this largest body of water on the globe, but the farther north one crosses, the shorter is the trip. If you will look at your school globe you will see why ships can reach Japan more quickly from Puget Sound than from the Golden Gate. Mother Earth’s waistline, the Equator, is the greatest distance around the world (east and west), and the nearer to it one is, the longer the distance. So you will understand how we saved a few days on our journey to Asia by sailing from Seattle; but it hardly paid, for we had winter weather in April, all the way across.

How limitless the sea about us seemed morning after morning! It was not hard to realize that this body of water, which often does not live up to its name (Pacific means “peaceful”), is greater in area than all the land on the globe. And we were on our way to the largest piece of land on the earth, the continent of Asia. Years ago, I went eastward to the Far East. In returning to America, I crossed the Pacific as a sailor on a sailing vessel and we were more than a month without a glimpse of anything but the sea and sky. My journey home seemed long indeed.

On this trip westward we did not see another ship for more than a week, to say nothing of sighting land. Then one morning we saw north of us to starboard (the right-hand side of the ship as one faces the bow) what looked like a great motionless iceberg. The Japanese “boy” who tended our cabin and waited on us at table called it “American country,” and he was right. For it was one of the Aleutian Islands, a great string of which stretch southwestward from Alaska and, like it, belong to the United States. Yet it was a whole week since we had sailed from Seattle, thinking we had left our native land behind. If we had gone from San Francisco we should have seen other islands belonging to us, the Hawaiian group. There we should have stopped for a day, and enjoyed a delightful run ashore in a garden spot of the tropics. But only seals, and now and then a few fishermen in the summer time, or navy men flying across the Pacific, think it worth while to land on the Aleutian Islands, so closely does each resemble a glacier or a mountaintop emerging from the sea.

My Son Loses a Birthday

The rest of the trip was the same, day after day, except for one curious incident. My son, who was born on a British steamer in the Caribbean Sea, lost his second birthday! When a ship westbound crosses what is called the international date line, it must move its clocks forward twenty-four hours, so to speak. Otherwise its calendar will not agree with the calendar of Asia. It happened that we crossed the international date line on Tuesday evening, April 24, and when my son woke up next morning it was Thursday, the 26th! His birthday, the 25th, had disappeared without a trace, a cake, or a candle, and if he lives to be a hundred he will have had only ninety-nine birthdays. Had we been traveling eastward instead of westward, he might have had two birthdays—two April 25’s—for in that case the ship, on reaching the international date line, would have added a day to fit the calendar of the western hemisphere.

Japanese artists delight to paint the sacred mountain Fujiyama.
]

Another week and we sighted Japan, the eastern edge of the great continent of Asia which contains almost one-third the land and fully one-half the people of the earth, a continent larger than both the Americas plus all other land in the western hemisphere. It was not really the continent of Asia, of course, that we saw growing ever larger on the horizon ahead. It was merely one of the islands off its eastern coast—just as Bermuda, the Bahamas, and the West Indies lie off the coast of the United States. These islands stretching along the coast of Asia, however, are not like most of the West Indies politically, for instead of being colonies of other nations, they form an independent empire.

Japan has often been called a great string of pearls flung down along the western side of the Pacific. The Japanese have a legend that their islands were formed of water dropped from the spear of Izanagi, one of their gods. Scientists explain the islands in a way much easier to believe, saying that they are the tops of ancient volcanoes. According to them Japan is a great mountain chain rising from very deep water. These mountain tops that are islands stretch all the way from the climate of Greenland in Sakhalin to that of Cuba in Formosa, a sort of stepping stone to our Philippines. Some of the “pearls” are large, some of the others are very small, mere rocks on which no one lives. The Kuriles hang like a necklace from the peninsula of Kamchatka, and the Riu Kiu or Ladrones connect the southern end of old Japan with Formosa, which also belongs to the Empire now. If we could count them all we should find nearly three thousand islands!

Yet all of them together do not give room enough for the sixty million people who live on them. Besides, being the tops of mountains, only a small part of the islands of Japan can be cultivated. But for the same reason they have many forests, nearly all minerals, countless mountain streams to furnish water power, and beautiful scenery almost everywhere.

The most important of all the islands that make up Japan is Honshu, on which at least half the Japanese live. North of it, where the winters are cold and snow often caps the mountains, is the second largest island, called Hokkaido, Yezo, or Hokushu. South of Honshu come two middle-sized islands, Kyushu and Shikoku, and after that the islands dwindle down through all sizes to those mere uninhabited rocks in the sea which make Japan the most broken-up country in the world.

How Japan got its present name is interesting. Once the country was called Yamato, but centuries ago a Chinese emperor sent a man there to look for medicine or the elixir of life or something of the sort. As the emperor did not know what name to give it, he had to say Jrr-pen, which would be translated as “native of the sun” or “place the sun comes from.” Gradually the Japanese themselves adopted this new name for their country, and to-day they write those characters for it which in their language are pronounced Nippon. So it is natural that Japan should be called the “land of the rising sun,” and that its national flag should be a white banner bearing a red sun, either round or with rays.