Kakemono

Kyoto is a city of immense distances where the brown earth streets, set in between their rows of low brown houses, run on interminably. Even under the weltering summer sky the streets are full; for Kyoto, the once-time capital, is still the second city of the Empire, and the art centre of Japan. My kurumaya scatters men and children as he runs; and the sounds of busy bargaining, the inevitable takai (too much), following the ikura des ka (how much?) pursue me as I ride.

At each corner two more streets stretch out, as straight as interminable, as full of life. And still my kurumaya runs.

I am going to see the Emperor’s Palace. Through many hundred years, through most that is history in Japan, the Son of Heaven dwelt in the heart of this city, and these long interminable streets so full of life stretched all around him. The Tenshisama lived in the midst of his people, and neither saw nor heard.

We have left the streets at last; on either hand stand railed-in squares of growing trees; the road is wide and smooth, the busy thousands in the streets drop out of sight and sound. My kurumaya runs more swiftly.

Here is neither shop nor house, nor passer-by, the restless hum of life itself has ceased. It is quieter than a forest, for in these artificial squares of railed-in trees nothing stirs. Men’s gardens are always three parts dead.

The broad road widens still; white as fuller’s earth and hard, it stretches like an avenue between high walls of smooth white brick, laid flat and thin as Roman tiles, on thick layers of pale white mortar. Two carefully paved-in streams of fresh grey water run between wall and road. And streams and road and walls go on and on. It is the Palace of the Heir Apparent.

The walls are twelve feet high, the stream is three feet wide; and still my kurumaya runs. The pale white walls stretch down the road like parallels in Euclid. It is the Palace of the Princes of the Blood.

And still he runs. The pale white walls, thin tiles set in their thick layers of mortar, run as he runs.

I have lost sense of the city now, lost memory of the gardens, lost belief in life itself. The world is a dead white road between white walls. This is the Palace of the Son of Heaven, one speck of brown breaks the interminable line of white, the carved gateway whence the great Tenshisama issued once a year to visit the temple. One other speck, the gate by which he returned. And then the pale white walls, thin tiles set in thick layers of mortar, stretch out of sight.

Inside these miles of walls, in his artificial solitude, year in, year out, the Son of Heaven dwelt. The life of the city, surging through its streets, surged up in vain; he could not see it, hear it, nor conceive it. Lord of a world he did not know, the Son of Heaven lived, while all around the sons of earth fought and toiled, were born and died, and not a murmur of their being passed his Palace walls. Shut up in his rose-garden world, fictitious, quite unreal, the Son of Heaven augustly ruled. And while the thousands in the city and the millions in the land held him divine, so that whoso looked upon his face did surely die, the men who looked usurped his power, crowned or deposed him; ruled in his name, but reigned supreme, and fought to reign. The history of Japan lies there. War and worship, divine unquestioned right and civil strife, never rebellion, each army fighting in the name of the ever-sacred Son of Heaven, to use victory for its own ends.

And the living son of these dead Emperors, brought up as they, Son of Heaven still, though without the walls, a modern monarch holding levees and cabinet councils, does that fictitious rose-garden world lie about him yet shutting out the real?

“And always in Japan,” says my kurumaya, “the Son of Heaven augustly rules.”

And he sings: