Kakemono

The bulletins grew longer, and all the world waited and watched.

The Japanese papers were full of minute descriptions and hopeful prognostications. The cherry-trees were doing well; they were expected to bloom next week.

Then came a cold wind and rain; “for flowers,” as the proverb says, “bring showers.” And the bulletins became paragraphs.

But the sky grew blue again, and even the foreign papers broke through their Western disdain, and announced that “Marquis Itō had gone to Kyoto to see the cherry-trees.” Imagine the Times gravely recording amongst its official intelligence that “Mr. Balfour had gone to Devonshire (not a third of the journey) to see the apple-blossoms”! But the Japanese are, of course, uncivilised!

On Easter Monday the trees were out, and all the world with them. The two long miles of river-bank at Mukojima were crowded. The river itself was thick with sampan. And still all Tokyo pours itself out over the bridges, across the canals, out under the long double line of cherry-trees.

The chrysanthemum may well be the Imperial crest; the cherry-tree is the national emblem, and its flowering a national fête—a Japanese Bank Holiday, with Mukojima for its Hampstead Heath.

The two long miles of raised bank is a sea of heads, a second black river set between pale pink banks; and it washes slowly, undisturbedly onwards. Nobody pushes, nobody shouts, nobody calls rude remarks. And the blue-tuniced coolies, like Florentine noblemen out at elbows, with the work-a-day blue towel round their heads replaced by a pink one, the very shade of the cherry-blossoms above, say polite “Go men nasai” (“I beg your honourable pardon”) if in looking upwards they stumble against each other.

The kurumaya has drawn his wife and children to Mukojima, and they wander slowly under the trees, the little ones in their gay-coloured kimono, covered with the largest of large flowers. Even the little tonsured babies blink up at the pink wonder overhead from the warm pouch on their mother’s backs. And the old grandmothers, with their cropped grey heads and shaven eyebrows, tell how the cherry-trees were much finer when they were young. The little girls, with their hair oiled into lengths of black ribbons and tied in loops on the top of their heads; the young wife, with the wonderful whorls of the married woman’s coiffure; the bare-legged, blue-knickerbockered ’ricksha man; the schoolboys, with their striped cotton hakama; the fathers, in their grey kimono—all the working world, all the people are here.

Below the level of the bank, raised high here, for the Sumidagawa, like all the rivers of Japan, is fierce in its floods, and set thick together, are the chaya. These range from the humblest little roofed shed, with its broad, low tables, like a series of large trays on dwarf legs, covered with coarse red blankets, to the superb tea-houses with their snow-white matted rooms, their painted shōji. And they are all full. The kurumaya drinks his bowl of pale green tea, sitting on his heels on the red blanket. The little wife tries the immensely popular drink of ramuné (lemonade) out of a doll’s tumbler. The coolie, with his festive pink towel, pours warm saké from slim china vases into tiny china bowls, and the smile on his broad, bullet-headed face grows broader. For the saké drinker, unlike Western drunkards, only becomes politer and politer, until the Japanese smile of courtesy broadens into a large, fixed, unending, amiable grin, and the saké drunkard goes politely, though stumblingly, home to sleep. But of even saké drunkenness there is little, for the most part o cha (honourable tea) and o kashi (honourable cakes) content these uncivilised Bank Holiday-makers, who have come out to see—just the pink cherry-blossoms against the blue sky. And will go home again—content.

On the river the red towels are perhaps more numerous, for all the fishermen, all the dock labourers, the whole riverside population of Tokyo have come in their sampan to Mukojima. And they float past now, little and big, crowded with blue tunics or grey kimono. Some with an awning of paper lanterns, and all gay with flags and banners. And full as the river is with boats, and jammed together as they are under the bank, nobody shouts, nobody quarrels, nobody swears. A garden party at Windsor Castle might be better dressed, it could hardly be better behaved. Nor in the whole length of those two miles of crowded bank, with the line of sampan on one side and the line of public-houses on the other—sampan, avenue, inns, all full to overflowing—are there three policemen. More, the trees, with their exquisite cloud of pink flowers, are within easy reach of a man’s arm, and nobody breaks them. The municipality of Tokyo has not even considered it necessary to affix a notice regarding the penalty for damaging trees. I should doubt if it had even thought to invent one.

And yet the blossoms are beautiful enough to make a man’s heart long to possess them.

“A little pink cloud of the sunset has caught in the bare branches of the cherry-tree.” And not all Western imagery can surpass the simile, for the pink is the pink of a cloud at sunset, and soft as the softest mist. When the wind stirs the trees, the blue sky seems scattering pink snowflakes to the ground.

“What is the soul of Japan?” asked the poet. “It is the mountain cherry-tree in the morning sun.”

But a soul so simple, the civilised nations, of course, disdain!