Kakemono

Tokyo is a city of one million five hundred thousand souls, and in its heart of hearts stands the Palace of the Son of Heaven.

The city through its girdle of brown streets works hard, its wharfs and factories, its shops and warehouses are dense with human life and resonant with human labour. The low brown streets so thick with flimsy paper houses stretch for ten miles along the plain. In them the children play, the kuruma pass quickly, the heavy laden hand-carts of the coolies push and jostle, but the heart of this great capital lies still.

From circumference to centre as you come, through street on street of houses, wharves and shops, the magic of the city grows. First the streets space out and out, then the houses dwindle as the trees and gardens grow, greener, wilder, stiller, till the heart of Tokyo’s city is a moated park of peace.

Up nine steep hills the city spreads, and sea and river, and the wide green rice-fields lap it round, while far away across the land, above the level blue of sky great Fuji rises peerless in the midmost heaven.

Engirdled by the thronged and busy streets the nine tall hills peaceful with well-kept houses and secluded gardens, make a crescent round the moated park. For in this strange city whose centre is a palace and a peaceful walled-in pleasaunce the “suburbs” lie within and not without the town.

And through the town and over street and roadway, in the gardens and the courtyards the gaunt beaked crows flap coal-black wings as they sail past, and their cynical “Haw, haw” is sarcastic with an utter disbelief. With stately swoop, black wings outspread, they drift past the ear of the newcomer confident with a three weeks’ visit that he understands the East, and in the midst of his cocksureness they drop their cold, sarcastic “Haw.”

Brown and so crowded are the streets, bewildering with their jostle of blue-clad men and women, their open stalls, their unmade roads of earth stretching flat between the houses on each side, where man-drawn carts, and kuruma, passengers, and children get in each other’s way. The white uniformed policeman, sword on thigh, stands, a bronze statue, at each busy corner, and to him even the criminal is polite. And down the streets and through and through the town, cut straight or winding, the brown canals, valleys of black mud, or slow streams of dark water, run to the river and the sea. And thousands upon thousands, too, seem the bridges, some flat and narrow as gangways, most arched in a crescent curve, and the brown canals run from the sea and from the river far within the town.

On one of them, at high tide, a steamer like the ark of Noah plies. It seems to go indifferently stern or bow foremost, and is no larger than a big-sized rowing boat. The one landing-stage to which I traced it was like a pasteboard on two rolling-pins, and stood as the threshold to the back door of a house. A European picture hung above the entrance, bright with greens and blues and reds and yellows, where this resplendent steamer floating amid green waves, showed at alternate windows a head, male, Japanese, dressed “foreign”; a head, female, Japanese, dressed Japanese. A policeman and a soldier both in uniform balanced on the deck at either end. The ark’s ports of call, as its starting-place and destination, remained a mystery. At low tide the canal was an inch of water between two banks of mud, and only at high tide could this toy ark float at all.

One long, straight street, broken into sections at the bridges, and then reset at different angles, runs from end to end of Tokyo, runs from Shimbashi to Ueno, from the “Mercantile Marine Store,” which sells dried fishes, to the Parcels Office of that delicious “Internal Railway,” otherwise unknown to fame. This is the main street of the town, here is the Ginza, with its red brick sidewalks, its shop-boys who speak English, even its plate glass windows. Here, too, is the goldsmith who advertises:

And the residence of that mysterious baker who keeps:

And down it from end to end runs Tokyo’s main tramway. With the river on the east, the moated park upon the west, north and south the broad street runs, and the park of Shiba lies at one end and the park of Ueno at the other. Shiba, where the tombstones of the dead shōgun lie in their sumptuous lacquered temples; Ueno, where the lacquered temples stand bullet-pierced, for the soldiers of the shōgun and the soldiers of the emperor fought their last fight here before the great Tenshisama came back to his own again. Once the closed gardens of Buddhistic monasteries, both parks now are open to the town, bicycles ride through them, nursemaids, their babies on their backs, loiter in them, little girls play classic games of bones, boys catch grasshoppers, while beneath the trees the low red blanketed tables of the chaya offer ¼d. teas.

The Park of Shiba is green and quiet, smaller than Ueno, for its temples hold so large a space. It is a forest growing in the heart of a town. Ueno is lighter, brighter, fuller of flowers and festivals, with long avenues of cherry-trees, and a lake where the lotus flowers grow thickly.

And over the lake and the temples, over the cherry-trees and the tea-stalls, over the city below and the playing children within, the big bronze bell of Ueno sends forth its great booming note—that note which is outside our music, deeper, more liquid, which comes with its low, booming sway, just when daylight turns to darkness. Cast of bronze and silver, rung by a wooden beam that strikes a boss outside, the note of the great bell comes swaying as though the air were water. And slowly over the city the bell booms, trembling, and he who hears it sits still and thinks; sits lost and dreams of the song of the seven spheres.

When Ueno’s avenues of cherry-trees are pink with flowers, when the stalls beneath the trees are full of flower hairpins, then Tokyo through its gardens and its roadways blushes too, for the whole city is planted thick with cherry-trees. Not only on the river bank, where the long two-mile avenue of Mukojima is a perpetual fête, but everywhere, in private gardens and in public streets, the delicate, pale pink blossoms on their brown leafless branches catch the sunshine and the showers, and fall as little rosy clouds from heaven on to the ground beneath. For Tokyo is a city holding the country in its lap. Not an artificial bedded-out country, stiff as a Versailles park, but the real wayward country, though tended with a loving, understanding care.

And Tokyo is a city brimful of flowers. Between the cherry-trees of April and the chrysanthemums of November most of the flowers can be seen within the city in temple courts or nursery gardens or public parks. The lake of the lotus at Ueno is famous through Japan, and in the temple of Kameido grow the age-old wistarias.

Trained on horizontal trellis work, their long pale tassels hang down towards the water, stirring with each breeze. The trailing clusters of the flowers grow four feet long sometimes, and droop towards the surface of the lake in thick swaying pendants of pure colour. Behind these living curtains, in a twilight of pale mauve or soft white light, on the edge of the pond whose shape spells “heart,” sometimes afloat on the pond itself, the tables of the chaya stand, and those who make holiday because the flowers are blooming, all Tokyo, sit and look, drinking wee bowls of pale green tea, or writing poems to the flowers.

On the waters of this lake of the letter “heart” float the pale mauve petals and the petals of pure white, which fall and drift and sink, and fall and drift and sink, until the waters are hidden with flower flakes and the wistaria is over and gone.

Kameido lies on the far bank of the Sumidagawa, in a network of poor streets, for the left bank of the river, like the big island at its mouth, is denser with yards and factories than is the right. The streets are narrower, fuller of children and the noise of hammers and of wheels. Yet in this poor wage-working quarter the festivals of the plum-blossoms, the wistaria, and the peony are held.

In all Japan there is no other flower fête which in the least resembles a horticultural show except that of Botan, the tree-peony. For when the peony blooms, the little trees, large as dwarf rose-bushes, are placed on tiers inside a matted tent. There the resemblance ends. These plants are set each in a framework of space, and the colours are grouped and blended with the thought and the instinct of an artist.

The flowers of the peony are as large as the largest chrysanthemum, larger than ours, but their petals are rich, made of satin where ours are of cotton, delicate, fragile, and sheeny. The colouring is soft and subdued, and the faint sweet scent which comes from them is like the dream of a rose. The colours are simple, white warming to cream, paling to snow, and all the tints of pale reds, deep reds, and crimsons.

The matting which covers them is of pale yellow, but somehow the light, as it comes through it, touched perhaps by the flowers, is the light of a dream—as sunlight without heat, as moonlight warmed and living, a light that shimmers, holding colour fast within, yet fast asleep. To-day the light in that peony tent at Kameido remains to me as definite as the flowers, as distinct as the scent, as real and, in truth, more beautiful. It was as though one saw the radiance of an unknown, unmade jewel, light but not yet substance.

All this left bank of the river from Fukagawa to Eko-in is full of workmen and workshops, of small trades and smaller traders, and here in the month of May in the grounds of the temple raised to the memory of the hundred thousand citizens killed in the great fire of 1657, the yearly wrestling contests are held. The Smō, tall, broad, powerful men, many six feet high or more, who dress in large checked kimono and wear their hair in the old-fashioned top-knot, are adored by the populace who come in thousands to see them.

The little round platform of stamped earth sprinkled with sand, set in the midst of a huge amphitheatre of faces, shows small as a raft on the sea, and slight despite its purple trapping. The crowd, a Tokyo crowd in kimono and foreign head-gear, cap, bowler, and felt hat, sit from morning until night, day in day out, for the three long weeks of the wrestling matches.

The wrestlers stand, knees bent, body horizontal, their out stretched hands almost touching the ground, and grip. And the bout is long because the grip must be accepted by both of them, and because between each false grip the two retire slowly to their respective sides and wash out their mouths with tea. This may be repeated a dozen, twenty times, but when the real grip comes, then the action can be swift as lightning; the opponent forced beyond the straw rope which lies upon the sanded earth of the ring, before one realises that the wrestle has begun, or pushed down over it with the slow resistless force of flowing water, or the two may sway about interminably before one is beaten.

Bulk is not the one ideal of the wrestler, the young and strong rely on their activity; it is only when a man is getting older that he weights himself with fat, that his bulk and heaviness may prove too great for his opponent easily to push over. The wrestlers all wear waistbands and stiff fringes of blue silk, and the rippling of the muscles beneath their golden brown skin is such a joy as the Greek nation knew at the time of the Olympiads.

A man with a fan, an average-sized Japanese who hardly comes above the elbows of some of the wrestlers acts as starter, as umpire, and as referee, and the sharp s-s-sh of his shutting fan can be heard distinctly in the silence of the amphitheatre. The judges, four old tried wrestlers, sit under purple hangings and decide disputed points, while half the front tier is reserved for the Smō themselves.

But to the non-Japanese it is not the wrestlers but the spectators who are the centre of interest. Here gathered together within the amphitheatre, concentrated on one thought, absorbed, therefore natural, sit samples of all Tokyo. For the Smō, like our prize fight of last century, is beloved by the populace and patronised by the aristocracy. Every one takes some sort of interest in it, and results are as widely known as the Derby or a test match. The crowd, a crowd of men and boys,—for the fathers bring their little sons with them,—knows, as well as the umpire himself, the forty-eight falls, the twelve lifts, the twelve throws, the twelve twists, the twelve throws over the back, alone allowed the Japanese wrestler. The excitement at disputed points is intense, the whole amphitheatre arguing with its neighbour. The enthusiasm at a brilliant, a quick, or a well-contested throw is intoxicating. Spectators will rise in their seats and throw down presents, tobacco-pouches, purses, hats, or other property, which the owner redeems next morning in money.

The Smō are the idols of the street boys, and tall, huge, unintelligent, in gaudy kimono and well-oiled top-knots, they stride through the Tokyo streets haughty, and sometimes overbearing.

We think of the Japanese as unalterably small, yet here is a class, bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh, who are huge, strong, large-framed men, taller than the tall races of the north. They are another and a living contradiction of the imaginary minisculism of the nation. If the Japanese desire to produce big things, in war, in statues, or in men, they take thought, they take care; much thought, infinite care, and somehow it is done.

So Tokyo wrestles, works and plays, and this left bank of the river toils and lives hard. Across the water Tsukiji, secluded in its “foreign” residences, dwells genteel, and gossips. The Ginza shops. The suburbs far within the circle of the streets grow hedged-in gardens and long avenues of trees, where the houses lie unseen. The schools, the training colleges, and the university, a cityful of students study, and boys in cotton hakama and dark-peaked soldiers’ caps walk through the streets—boys who are passing from the indulged childhood of Japan to the iron self-control of manhood.

There is apparent in their ways and manners a touch of self-assertiveness, a touch of almost self-conceit, which at no other time in their own lives, and at no time at all in any other member of the community, will ever be observable. It is but a touch, and would pass unseen in any other land, in any other setting; here it stands out palpable. A little hard these boys look and very earnest. They will strike work if they think a teacher is not competent to teach, so bent are they on learning. They seem to have accepted school as the modern training of the samurai, and to study in that spirit.

The scholarship boys at Government Colleges work harder still and on the narrowest of means. They can afford so little for their board that one whole college gave up playing base-ball in its recreation hour because “it made them too hungry.”

And at the University, where the students matriculate at twenty and stay till twenty-four and five, for beside their own learning, beside the ten thousand Chinese symbols and all the philosophy of the East, they must to-day add the learning of the West, the languages of Europe, the laws, the sciences, and the arts of another civilisation and of an alien race, at the University the students live lives of hardest brainwork and rigidest economy. Many spend their evenings in earning the money that buys their day. Some deliver newspapers and sleep in the porches of “foreign” houses. Many die of consumption, brought on by over-work and under-feeding. Across the river the hammers ring, the wheels whir round, the hum of a people’s toil sounds in all ears. Here within the girdle of the streets, between the factories and the palace is a work doing, silent, less perceptible but harder, higher and undertaken for that end.

Between the hard work of hand and brain Ginza and Nihon-bashi shop, and at night the wire-drawn twang of the samisen comes from the lighted restaurants. Restaurants where each diner or each party occupies a separate room, and geisha girls are sent for to entertain the guests, with puns and games, with polite conversations and endless repartee. They sit on the kneeling cushions throughout the meal pouring saké—and amuse. Then they dance. Posturing and swaying to an accompaniment of samisen and song they glide over the matting always graceful, always reserved. The quality of their dancing rings passionless, dainty, graceful, not cold but controlled. An air of serenity surrounds them. They are not trained to the duties of womanhood, but to its heaviest burden—pleasing. The licensed playthings of the nation, toys to amuse, they reach up to their limited, low-scaled destiny, through the perpetual sacrifice of self; and the national self-control encases them, so much their very own that few perceive it. With very different fates and from very different motives there is about them, as they dance, something of the charm and of the aloofness of Andersen’s mermaiden; and if their steps too are as steps upon a sword, they, too, will smile untroubled.

So the city strives and pleasures, so the city learns and toils. Full and full of life the streets, quiet and very still the heart. The nine tall hills from Shiba to Ueno make a crescent round the moat, the brown streets lie without, the Mikado dwells within. Born as a camp Yedo made its ruler’s seat its centre, its nobles’ yashiki an enclosing wall; and then beyond, out of sight and sound, the necessary, unimportant commonfolk had leave to work and sell. Tokyo to-day is still as Yedo was. Yashiki are pulled down, their ground is sold, but parliaments and embassies, nobles’ houses and their gardens, still make a circle round the palace, a space of suburb and of peace between the city and its centre.

Over the streets and the roadways, through parks and gardens, the black-winged crows sail past cynical, unbelieving. The web of brown canals beneath their high-arched bridges, the broad uncertain river sometimes slowly, sometimes fiercely, all flow towards the sea. The land-locked ocean, and the pale green rice-fields ripple round the streets. From sixty miles across the plain great Fuji looks towards the capital.

And here in Tokyo’s heart, in Dai Nippon’s heart of hearts, not the usurping shōgun or general in his camp, but Tenshisama, Son of Heaven, bestower of a western constitution, augustly dwells.