Chapter II: Part 2

A granite sign-post where the little temple path turns off from a track through the rice-fields tells all who can read it that the temple is dedicated to the five hundred Rakkan (disciples of Buddha), and their gilded and lacquered effigies sit in long tiers round one large building within the court-yard; beyond this is the Hondo, where the principal altars are, and where the services are performed at daybreak by the old priest who has sole charge of the establishment. My room was a little annex of the Hondo, quite apart from the living-rooms of the family, and open on two sides to the air. The angle of my veranda projected over the fish-pond, and on the right and the left stepping-stones led down from it into the garden, a small patch of level ground, with a pine-clad hill-side rising sharply beyond it. Just at the foot of this hill there was a rocky projection, covered with an undergrowth of azaleas, and spotted with statues of Buddha and his sixteen principal followers. These were rudely carved of the natural stone; with their growth of lichens and mosses they looked as old as the rocks themselves, and were hardly to be distinguished from them at a little distance. Several stony zigzagging footpaths, mere tracks through the bushes and pine-trees, led to the top of the ridge, from which one looked down on fertile valleys enclosed by more pine-clad ridges, and to the westward on the great shining plain of Lake Biwa, its lagoons, islands, and distant mountains. Many times I walked to the top of this hill, sometimes in the clear brilliant moonlight, when the delicate pinks and reds of the azaleas were hardly visible, and only their honeysuckle scent made me conscious of their presence, and when all the world would have been silent but for the incessant chorus of myriads of frogs which came up from the rice-fields below.

In the daytime the whole of the wood was lively with cicadæ, who kept up a constant and irritating clatter, but then there was the delight of finding new flowers, or making the acquaintance of old garden friends in their own homes. A little damp gully just behind the bamboo grove was full of deutzia bushes in blossom, and under them grew a clump of pale pink lilies (_Lilium krameri_), which seemed to me the loveliest flowers I had ever seen. The priest at Tennenji was so anxious to have some of my work that I made a drawing of these for him; it hangs among the temple treasures, and may be a surprise to some wandering foreigner, who will little expect to find any European traces in such an out-of-the-way spot. The family, consisting of Sokin the father, O Shige San the mother, and Takaki, a son employed in the office of police at Hikone, soon

adopted me as a friend, and did all they could to make me comfortable. Takaki had received a modern education (they teach English in the Hikone schools, as you find out from the small boys, who shout A B C after you in the streets); but he had not got beyond the word “Yes,” beginning every sentence with it and then lapsing into Japanese. We made many excursions together, he, Matsuba, and I, strolling down to the town after dinner and looking in at the theatres and shops.[A] O Shige San was great at cooking, and took delight in providing me with new and strange forms of food every evening; for breakfast and lunch I ate what European food Matsuba could provide, and as flour and whiskey could be bought, and a cow was slaughtered in Hikone every Saturday, I did not do badly; you can get the necessary sustenance in a shorter time on foreign “chow,” but when work was over and I had taken my hot bath and exchanged my suit of flannels for a cotton kimono, it was amusing to sit on the floor and speculate on the composition of the dishes which she brought me, trying with the aid of a dictionary to find out what they really were, and to acquire a taste for “daikon.”[B] Among her successes were eels cooked in soy, broiled fish, and bean curd “à la brochette”; young bamboo shoots, chrysanthemum leaves fried in batter, and lily bulbs boiled in sugar were eatable; but a sausage made of rice and herbs, and some of the quaint vegetables, were simply nauseous. In one of my water-colors there was a large group of leaves, round ones with a dark hole where the stem goes in, commonly known as the “foreground plant,” and I noticed one afternoon to my disgust that these had been cut; the boiled stalks were given to me at dinner that evening, and I never tasted anything more unpleasant. When the various dishes had all been brought in and arranged round me by the priest or Takaki, O Shige San would appear and kneel in front of me, keeping my sake cup and rice bowl filled, and watching with intense anxiety my expression as I tasted each compound, and at the end of my dinner would remark that I had eaten nothing, and that Japan was a dirty, ugly country, to which I always replied that I had feasted, that England was dirty and ugly, but that Japan was a beautiful country. Such is Oriental politeness. Then Sokin came in with his pipe and pouch and little fire-box, and, after taking a cup of sake with me, sat and smoked and conversed, or brought out the tea things of his lamented patron, Ii Kamon no Kami, and made me a bowl of powder tea with all the correct ceremonies. The Cha-no-yu is not to be confounded with ordinary tea-drinking. It is an elaborate form of entertainment which cannot be appreciated by an uneducated foreigner; every movement is regulated by laws known to the initiated, and the conversation is confined to some object of art, or poem produced by the host. The kettle, water-bowl, and other utensils should all have some historic or artistic interest, and the cup from which the mixture is drunk is usually an example of archaic pottery. The rules of the game have not been altered for about two centuries, though there are various schools which differ as

to minor details--whether the whisk with which the drink is stirred should afterwards be laid on the seventh or thirteenth seam of the matting, and things of that sort, which seem of infinitely small importance to the ignorant, but make a vast difference to the connoisseur. Our love of tobacco was a great bond of sympathy, although after trying each other’s pipes we both preferred our own. The old man, who knew that I did not like to be watched while painting, would sit in his little room and gaze at me as I worked in the garden or among the stone gods on the hill-side, and when he saw that my pipe was out, would fill another for me and bring it out with a box of matches, making this an excuse to look over my shoulder for a few minutes, and to have a little conversation.

As the summer came on and the weather got hotter the insects became more and more numerous; there were splendid butterflies and dragon-flies in the daytime, swarms of fire-flies over the rice-fields at night, and unfortunately many others which bit at all hours, flying things, and things which mosquito-curtains could not keep out. The Japanese house has no separate rooms for living and sleeping; when bedtime comes quilts are brought in and laid on the floor, and, if necessary, a mosquito-netting of thick green gauze is slung over them from the four corners of the apartment. The natives use a small wooden pillow, with a depression for the neck to rest in; I never could manage this, but after a time I succeeded in sleeping well with coats or another quilt rolled up for a bolster.

Certain paragraphs about me in the local papers brought a good many visitors to the temple to see what I was doing, among them a gentleman who was introduced to me as the best singer in Hikone, and a little conversation and whiskey induced him to give me some specimens of his art--songs of the Buddhist and Shinto priests, and others

which might be described as popular airs. To foreign ears they were quite devoid of melody, and his elaborate vocalization only produced sounds which were disagreeable and harsh, or else ludicrously inadequate to the efforts they cost him. My friend, who appeared to be an all-round æsthete, spent a good part of the afternoon in arranging a big bronze jar of azalea boughs and a hanging vase of irises, curling the leaves and snipping off any stray shoots which did not conform to the fish-scale arrangement (sakana no uroko no kata) which he was trying to make.

The family were very busy all through this month with their crop of silk-worms, which required incessant care and feeding. I was taken to see them first in an outbuilding when they were just little black specks; as they got older the air of this shed did not suit them, and they were moved into the Hondo, where they flourished and grew with astonishing rapidity under the eye of the Buddha, and devoured the baskets of chopped mulberry leaves as fast as they could be prepared. The caterpillars were huddled together on mats hung one above another in a framework; a netting of string was spread over each mat so that the whole mass could be lifted and the débris cleared away with very little trouble. When they had ceased to grow, and began to stand on end, waving their heads in the air after the idiotic fashion of silk-worms who want to spin, they were picked off and put in little nests of straw or bundles of brush-wood, which soon became a mass of soft yellow cocoons. It was an anxious time for O Shige San, for a considerable part of her income depended on the crop of silk; the cocoons are worth about thirty yen a koku, a measure rather less than five bushels.

The pond under my veranda was full of carp and baby tortoises, which hurried up to be fed as soon as they saw me leaning over the rail; the old tortoises were more shy, and I only saw them on very hot days, sunning themselves on the stones, and they slipped into the water with a flop if I attempted to get near them. I caught one on a patch of sandy ground, after watching its struggles to cover up the hole in which it had just laid some leathery-looking white eggs. These days brought out the snakes too, some of them very big, and all unpleasant to look at, but quite harmless. There is only one venomous snake in the country, a small brown beast called “Mamushi”; the other sorts are not ill-treated, indeed, they are considered lucky, but this is always killed and skinned, and a medicine is prepared from its dried body.

It would have been easy to dream away months here, but the wise regulations of the Japanese government, foreseeing that the traveller might be tempted to neglect his duties and become a mere loafer, forced me to return to Kōbe and get a new passport, so I had to say good-bye to my friends, and the Rakkan with the lichen-covered azaleas, still gay with crimson flowers which trailed round their feet, and the terrace where every evening I had watched the sun setting over Biwa, and to descend once more to the railway and the commonplace.

The rain came down in torrents as I left the temple, and continued to do so all the day, but there was plenty that was amusing to be seen from the carriage window. The people were busy putting out their young rice plants, and the fields were full of men and women working in mud and water half-way up to their knees, and wearing their “kasa” and straw coats, oiled paper, rush mats, or other contrivances to keep off the rain. It is surely the dirtiest and most laborious form of agriculture; the work is almost entirely done by manual labor with a spade and a heavy four-pronged rake, though I occasionally saw a cow

or a pony, with a little thatched roof on its back to shoot off the rain, dragging a sort of harrow through the mud. As soon as the spring crop of barley or rape-seed is garnered and hung up to dry, the ground is trenched with the spade, and water is turned over it until it has become a soft slush, which is worked level with the rake. The young rice plants, grown thick together in nursery patches, are pulled up when the fields are ready for planting, their roots are washed, and they are tied in bundles, which are thrown into the mud and water; then the men and women wade in, untie a bundle, and set the seedlings in lines by just pressing them with their fingers into the mud. They do this wonderfully quickly, and can plant eight or nine in a row without moving from their places; when the field is all planted it looks like a pond with a delicate green haze over it. The dividing banks are planted with beans or other vegetables, so that not a yard of ground is wasted. This was the 18th of June, the beginning of the “dew month,” a period full of discomforts for the traveller, and especially for the landscape-painter.

THE TIME OF THE LOTUS

THE TIME OF THE LOTUS

The damp heat of the Japanese summer, which is so trying to human beings, encourages all vegetation to grow with surprising luxuriance and rapidity; the buds of yesterday are flowers to-day, and to-morrow nothing is left but the ruin of a past beauty, making the painter’s struggle most arduous just when he has least energy to contend with nature. The young bamboo shoots come up like giant asparagus, growing so fast that one can almost see them move; some of them are cut and eaten while young and tender, and those which are allowed to grow to large poles are used for every imaginable purpose. They are made into water-pipes and flower-vases, barrel-hoops and umbrellas, baskets and hats, scaffolding-poles and pipe-stems, fans and delicate whisks for stirring the powdered tea--more things, in fact, than I could enumerate in a page. The bamboo is surely the cause of much of the clever constructive work of the Japanese; for though it will do most things with proper treatment, it will not stand being handled like ordinary timber; its peculiar qualities have to be considered, and every way in which they use it is artistic and good. This is the large species which grows to twenty or thirty feet high; there are many dwarf kinds, which clothe the hills with green, and are used only for making fences and such like.

The general aspect of Japan during the summer months is a harmony in greens, the dark pines and cryptomerias striking the lowest note of a scale which culminates in the

brilliancy of the rice-fields--the most vivid green I know. There is more variety of color in those districts which are not irrigated, such as that round Kamakura, where the light sandy soil grows a great many kinds of vegetables, sweet-potatoes, melons, tomatoes, beans, and big patches of auratum and longiflorum lilies, the bulbs of which are exported. The lily is not one of the flowers which the Japanese themselves particularly admire, nor do they often use it for decoration. In this, as in most other matters, there are recognized rules of taste, and the man is considered

1. Susuki 2. Kikyo 3. Asago 4. Shion 5. Omnia-Meshi 6. Kiku 7. Hagi

Drawing by Teshoto Hario]

an ignoramus who does not know the right thing to like. I was walking one day at Yoshida with a Japanese artist, a remarkable man who was engaged in making a series of steel-engravings, half landscape and half map, of the country round Fuji, and called his attention to a splendid clump of pink belladonna lilies growing near an old gray tomb; but he would not have them at all, said they were foolish flowers, and the only reason he gave me for not liking them was because they came up without any leaves. When we got back to our tea-house he took my pen and paper, and showed me what were the seven beautiful flowers of late summer--the convolvulus, the name of which in Japanese is “asago,” meaning the same as our “morning-glory;” wild chrysanthemum; yellow valerian; the lespedeza, a kind of bush clover; _Platycodon grandiflorum_, a purple-blue campanula; _Eulalia japonica_, the tall grass which covers so many of the hills; and shion, a rather insignificant-flowered aster. I noticed that some versions of the seven flowers differed from his; a large-flowered mallow is often substituted for the last he named. There are doubtless different schools which hold strong views on the subject, but on the morning-glory and some others they are evidently agreed. The auratum lily is a common wild flower in the hilly districts, and boiled lily bulbs are a favorite vegetable, but I could not find out which was considered the best variety for the table. O Shige San told me that it was a red lily; I looked in vain for any of that color in their gardens.

The cottages in the country round Kamakura are thickly thatched, and on the top of the thatch is laid a mass of earth held together by iris plants, which form a roof-crest of spiky green; near them in July there often were large hydrangea bushes covered with balls of blossom, the young flowers a pale yellow-green, changing as they grew older through bright blue to purple.

On the 9th of July the heat drove me from Europeanized Yokohama to the hills. I left the train at Utso-no-miya, a little town which has been financially ruined by the railway--for every one formerly stayed a night there instead of travelling straight through--and was delighted to find myself once more in thoroughly Japanese quarters. It was a wonderful moonlight night, and I wandered round the town in kimono and clogs, watched the people, and was stared at by them, climbed the steps to the big Shinto temple, and

gazed over the plains flooded with pale light, and thoroughly enjoyed myself.

There is a railway now to Nikko, and most people rush up there without seeing the glorious avenue of cryptomerias--described so well in Loti’s _Japoneries d’Automne_--which line the old road for miles and miles. I sent my boy and my baggage by rail, and went myself in a kuruma with two good runners. The road is sadly out of repair in some places, but the splendid old trees remain, and young ones have been planted where winds and age have thinned their ranks. It is not like an ordinary avenue with the trees planted some yards apart; these are so close together that the trunks have often joined at the base, and I noticed one lot of seven big trees all grown together at the bottom into a mass that must have been eight or ten yards long. The road is sunk between the high banks on which the trees grow, and it must be gloomy enough on such a night as Loti experienced. Here and there it opens out into a village street, with abundance of refreshment booths for the pilgrims who still make the journey on foot.

Nikko itself is a long, steep street, leading up to a rushing mountain torrent in a rocky ravine, which is crossed by two bridges side by side. One is an ordinary wooden structure, used by all the world; the other, which is of red lacquer, with black supports and brass ornaments, is only opened for the Emperor and his family to pass over. Beyond them the hills rise, covered with cryptomerias, among which are concealed the great mortuary temples of Ieyasu and Iemitsu, founders of the great Tokugawa Shogunate that lasted for two centuries. Marvellous as these mausolea are, they make no effect in the distance; it is only when you get close to them, wander about in their successive court-yards, and examine the lovely details of wood-carving, lacquer, and gilding, that the wonder of them strikes you. The tombs themselves are plain bronze pillars, and are reached by long flights of granite steps, green and gray with mosses and lichens, which lead up under the dark masses of foliage behind the temples. After passing through all the glories of color and elaborate workmanship in the preliminary temples their final peacefulness and simplicity are very striking.

Nikko in the summer is full of foreign ladies and children; the Emperor, too, has a country-house there, where some of his large family spend the hot months. I saw the arrival of two little princesses, with a crowd of nurses, tutors, and officials. They were funny little things, about three or four years old, not as pretty as most Japanese children, but dressed in the most gorgeous colors. The red lacquer bridge was opened for them, decorated with “gohei”--the strips

of white paper which are used so largely in the Shinto religion--and in the middle of the bridge there was a little table with offerings of food on it, where the children stopped and made their obeisances to the manes of their ancestors as they passed over. All the priests of Nikko turned out in gauze vestments of many colors, Buddhist and Shinto equally anxious to do honor to the descendants of the gods.

The hills are alive with little tinkling streams of clear water, and the favorite walks mostly lead to waterfalls. I spent a soaking day making a sketch of one of them--Kirifuri; the path to it crossed a wide, stony river, and went over grassy hills where there were abundant wild flowers, purple iris, white and mauve funkias, yellow orchids, clusters of white roses, pink spiræas, hydrangeas, St.-John’s-wort, meadow-rue, and bocconia appearing here and there, half hidden among the rank herbage. The big buds of auratum lilies showed how fine they would be in a few days’ time. Just in front of the waterfall a little tea-house gave me shelter enough to work in; but the path, up which I had walked dry-shod, by the time I got back had been turned to a raging torrent, and I only just crossed the stony river in time, for the light bamboo bridge was washed down during the night.

Chūzenji is a little hamlet, some hours’ walk from Nikko up a mountain road, consisting of a group of tea-houses which overlook a charming lake, a very sacred temple with a large bronze torii, and long rows of sheds to accommodate the pilgrims who come in early August to make the

ascent of Nantai-zan, the mountain which rises close behind the village. During five long days of incessant rain I painted everything that was visible from my room in one of the tea-houses, the water of the lake rising each day so much higher that on the last two I was able to take a morning header from my balcony, and I hardly got a chance to explore the country round. At last a bright morning tempted me to

walk on to Yumoto, and see the sulphur springs and the wide moorland, Senjō-ga-hara, which lies surrounded by mountain-peaks at a height of nearly five thousand feet above the sea. On the moor the grasses do not grow high enough to conceal the flowers, and I found it gay with purple iris and white meadow-rue. The baths in Yumoto are open to the public; they are large wooden tanks under sheds by the road-side, and as you walk along the street you see the patients, men, women, and children, all sitting together, in a state of nature, up to their necks in the steaming malodorous soup. The clouds were gathering round the mountain-tops as I started to walk back to Chūzenji, and before I had finished a rapid sketch on the moor the rain began again in torrents; the road was a series of small ponds, and my coolie insisted on carrying me, as well as my sketching materials, through them; but he unfortunately stumbled under my weight, and dropped me in the deepest of them, and what with the wet above and below I was well soaked by the time I reached my tea-house. The hibachi seems a very inadequate means of warmth on such occasions; a hot bath and whiskey and dry clothes are more effective, and after dinner a bottle of tamago-sake, a hot compound of whipped egg and sake, soon produces a pleasing drowsiness. Since leaving Chūzenji I have recognized the place in many drawings on screens and fans; the artist always gives its main features--the lake, the cryptomerias, the huge bronze torii, and the steep wooded slope of Nantai-zan--but he combines them in one view as you never can see them in reality. The rain had played havoc with the road back to Nikko; several bridges were down, but temporary ones built of fagots made it possible to cross the streams. All the higher woods near the lake are hung with gray moss, and the flowering shrubs which grow among them are endless--azaleas, climbing and bushy hydrangeas, weigelia, seringa, and wild vine; on the ground I found orange Turk’s-cap lilies, columbines, the big _Lilium cordifolium_, and ferns of many kinds.

Notwithstanding the advantage of cooler nights, I was glad to leave the green mountains, with their constant rain and mists, and the shut-in valleys, where it was impossible to see more than a few hundred yards away, and get down

again to the broader horizons and bigger skies of the plains. On the journey to Tōkyō I saw my first lotus flowers in a lake near the railway, and I hurried off at once to the pond which surrounds the little temple of Benten at Shiba, where I found them in full glory.

The lotus is one of the most difficult plants which it has ever been my lot to try and paint; the flowers are at their best only in the early morning, and each blossom after it has opened closes again before noon the first day, and on the second day its petals drop. The leaves are so large and so full of modelling that it is impossible to generalize them as a mass; each one has to be carefully studied, and every breath of wind disturbs their delicate balance, and completely alters their forms. Besides this their glaucous surface, like that of a cabbage leaf, reflects every passing phase of the sky, and is constantly changing in color as clouds pass over.

Japanese drawings of flowers--and they usually draw them beautifully--are often influenced in some way by a tradition. The man who invented the method was a true impressionist; he seized what appeared to him characteristic of the plant, and insisted on that to the exclusion of other truths, thus founding a mannerism which all following artists imitated. In time, what he saw as characteristic became exaggerated by his disciples, who looked at nature only through his eyes and not with their own, and I have observed that the flowers which are most frequently drawn are not depicted so naturally as those less popular ones, in books of botany and such like, for drawing which there is no recognized method, and where the draughtsman had to rely entirely on his own observation for his facts. Take, for example, the spots on the lotus stems; if you look very closely you can see that there are spots, but certainly they could not strike every artist as a marked feature of the plant, for they are not visible three yards away. But some master noticed them many years ago and spotted his stems, and now they all spot them, and the spots get bigger and bigger; and so it will be until some original genius arises who will not be content with other people’s eyes, but will dare to look for himself, and he may perhaps, without abandoning Japanese methods, get nearer to nature, and start a renaissance in Japanese art.

The Japanese treatment of landscape is not more conventional than that of Claude or David Cox, or than the shorthand of our pencil-sketches, but it records its facts in a different way. The everlasting question in art is the imitation of nature; it has never been carried further in certain directions than by Millais and his pre-Raphaelite brethren, or in others than by Manet, Monet, and the modern French, but no one can put in everything; look at a simple bunch of leaves in sunlight against a wall, and think how long it would take to really imitate all their complexities of form, color, and light and shade; some facts can only be given by ignoring others, and the question what is the important thing which must be insisted on is the personal affair of each individual artist in every country where art is unfettered and alive. But in Japanese, as in Byzantine and other Eastern arts, this question is still decided by the practice of past generations, and it will take all the vitality of a strong man to infuse new life into it without destroying its many exquisite qualities. Perhaps when Japanese artists absorb its spirit instead of merely trying to imitate its methods, Western art may help in the direction of freedom; at present I fear that its influence has done more harm than good.

The people are so quick to recognize the meaning of a few lines, and to understand the poetic idea which they suggest, that it is a wonder the artists ever learned to draw at all; they might have been content with symbols, for a few lines like those below are enough to convey all the poetry that is associated in their minds with any of the well-known art motives.

The little island of Benten is a frequented spot, and my easel was surrounded from morning till night with a crowd of spectators; they dispersed at the command of the policeman on his hourly round, but after he had gazed his fill and left me, a new lot instantly assembled. They were mostly children; and a crowd of Japanese children is twice as many as any other crowd of its size, for every child has another smaller one tied to its back. I suppose they are not born in pairs this way, but they contract the habit of carrying a little one at a very early age, and often tie on a doll when a sufficiently small human being cannot be found. The spectators are almost always polite, and take care not to put themselves between you and your subject; but they squeeze up very close to your elbow, and trample on your nerves, if not on your materials. They usually remarked that my work was a photograph; some more educated ones said that it was an oil-painting, that being the medium which is associated with foreign art; and one man said that it was enamel, which I took as a compliment to the brilliancy of my color. The keeper of a little tea-shed hard by, where I took my lunch, noticed that I was worried by the people standing so close to me, and when I arrived next morning I found that he had put up a fence round the place where I worked; it was only a few slender bamboo sticks, with a thin string twisted from one to another, but not a soul attempted to come inside it. They are such an

obedient and docile race that a little string stretched across a road is quite enough to close the thoroughfare. It is difficult to reconcile the character of this peaceable and pleasure-loving race which the modern traveller sees with that which is ascribed to their forefathers--those heroes of the desperate wars and bloody revolutions which fill the pages of the early history of Japan. It may be that two centuries of Tokugawa rule, fatherly but autocratic, developed qualities of unreasoning obedience, and perhaps all the struggles of the past were merely dynastic, or affairs between the warriors of different clans; perhaps the people themselves have always been as gentle as they are now, cultivating their land and pursuing their ingenious trades, little affected by these turmoils, except that, like the producers of all times and countries, they were called on to supply the sinews of war.

The lotus is intimately connected with Buddhism; most personifications of the Buddha are represented as seated or standing on its flower, or holding an unexpanded bud in their hands; it is largely used in temple decorations, and vases with imitations in metal of the flowers, leaves, buds, and seed-pods, often very exquisite in workmanship, stand on all the altars. It is typical to the Buddhist mind of the qualities of the ideal man: as it grows in the mud, yet produces a lovely flower, it is a symbol of purity in a naughty world; as its odor sweetens the air around, so his good deeds influence those about him; it opens in the morning sunshine, and his mind is expanded by the light of knowledge; its branchless stalks, rising without a break to the leaf or flower, are a type of his single-mindedness and directness of purpose; and its edible root shows that the basis of his life must be usefulness to others. To this I may add that, like the very good, the flower always dies young. It is lovely enough in itself without all this halo of virtue. Hardy says of Tess, “Beauty to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized”; this is unavoidable with most of us, and the suggestion of feelings and memories of our own does not necessarily obscure our visual sense; but a fixed and recognized suggestion is the result of mental laziness, and may lead to the ignoring of intrinsic beauty; as our lovely primrose is to some eyes a political badge, admired only because of its association with a name and a faction, or rejected for the same cause. To quote Mr. Punch,

“A primrose by the river’s brim
A party emblem was to him,
And it was nothing more.”

But the lotus has not sunk so low as this; though it has been adopted by the Buddhists, it excites no animosity in Shinto breasts; and where temples under the present _régime_ have been handed over from the one religion to the other, though the pagoda and other distinctively Buddhist

structures are pulled down, the lotus-ponds are left in their beauty. The largest I saw were those connected with the great Hachiman temple at Kamakura, which has been turned over to the state religion; they cover several acres, and the flowers in them are of three colors--either white, bright rose, or a delicate shell-like pink. All three varieties seem to grow equally freely, and one is as lovely as the other. The white one has been specially adopted by

the followers of Nichiren, a noisy sect which beats a drum during the long hours of prayer, and it is this variety, too, which is usually grown in patches here and there among the rice-fields for the sake of its roots. They have not much flavor, except that of the sugar with which they are boiled, but they are crisp in texture and pleasant to munch. The children are very fond of the nutlike seeds which are embedded in the fleshy seed-pod; it looks very like the rose of a watering-pot. In the tea-booths round the temple of Benten they use a dried slice of this pod for a mat on which to stand the cup or bowl.

Kamakura was for a long time the capital of Japan; in the twelfth century it was selected for his headquarters by Yoritomo, the great warrior whose victories enabled him to take the reins into his own hands, and to establish that system of military government which only ended with the deposition of the last Shogun in 1868. But when a rival family defeated his successors they removed the seat of government, and Kamakura rapidly declined from a great city of more than a million inhabitants to the insignificant fishing-village which it now is, with nothing to show of its former greatness but this temple of Hachiman, and the Daibutsu, an enormous bronze Buddha, not only remarkable for its size, but also for being the finest and most dignified production which the art of Japan can show. The temple buildings which once sheltered it were destroyed ages ago, and the image is now in the open air, in one of the little valleys which branch out from the plain and run back among the pine-clad hills. Centuries of exposure to rain and sun have given varied colors to the great bronze god. He is seated cross-legged on a lotus-flower, his hands folded in his lap; the head is bent slightly forward, and his face gazes down with an expression of calm superiority which can only come from perfected wisdom and subjugated passions. A new shrine to Yoritomo’s memory, all of black and gold, stands near one of the lotus-ponds; in front of it are some splendid old willow-trees, which he is said to have planted, and under which he sat and composed poetry when he was not engaged more actively in fighting. It is hardly possible that these willows can have lived to such a great age; they are probably descendants of the original trees. Behind the shrine is a large modern barrack, and I saw bands of white-clad recruits, with side-arms and repeating rifles, trousers,

tunics, and forage-caps, quite European in everything but face and stature, constantly passing to and fro over the ground where the old warrior must have seen his quaint soldiers in lacquered armor and bronze helmets carrying their long-bows and queer-shaped halberds. One day when I was painting the willows my boy Matsuba, who had plenty of spare time for investigating the neighborhood while waiting to carry home my umbrella and things, came and told me that there was a wrestling-match at a small temple about a mile away. I packed up at once and we walked over there, for I was very anxious to see what kind of a sport it was. This was a tournament, and all the professional wrestlers of the neighborhood, and many youths anxious to distinguish themselves, had collected to take part in it. They were divided into three classes. The masters of the art were all past their first youth; not enormously stout, as they are often represented in drawings and carvings, but fine, athletic men, taller than the average of Japanese. They wore their hair in the ancient style, shaved away from the centre of the head, and the locks from the back and side made into a queue, turned up and knotted with a string on the top of the poll; they had no clothes except a loin-cloth and an embroidered apron. In the second class were men who had won but few prizes; they were not all in the professional get-up, and some of them were evidently laboring-men with a taste for sport. The third class was composed of youths, none of them more than nineteen or twenty years old. The contests took place in the temple court-yard on a circular bed of sand, under a roof supported by wooden pillars, but not enclosed at the sides; round the edge of this raised circle there was laid a straw rope, and the man won who could either fairly throw his opponent or force him across the rope without being dragged over himself. The proceedings were conducted by a Shinto priest in full dress, wide trousers, and a coat sticking out from the shoulders like that of a modern young lady, who with a peculiar-shaped fan gave the signal to begin and to stop. For the highest class this umpire was a venerable old gentleman; for the others the place was taken by young priests who needed to learn this part of their business. The wrestlers came on in pairs as their names were called, and after a great deal of marching round, stamping, rubbing their limbs, making gestures of defiance, and so on, they squatted opposite each other. When the

signal was given to begin they rested their fingers on the ground between their knees, and leaned towards each other till their foreheads touched, sometimes waiting several minutes before attempting to make any grip. If the grip seemed unfair or unsatisfactory to one of the opponents, he immediately put down his hands, the priest stopped the bout, and all the preliminary business had to be gone through again; but if it seemed all right the struggle began, and sometimes lasted for five minutes, each man straining every muscle in a splendid way, and using all the science and cunning he knew. If it lasted too long without either man gaining any advantage, the priest signalled to them to stop, and they had to wait till their turn came round again. The preceding rough sketch, made while jammed in the crowd of spectators, will give some idea of the attitude of the men waiting for the fan to be lowered. Everything was conducted in the most ceremonious and orderly manner, and there was no drunkenness or rowdyism, although the multitudes who had assembled were entirely of the poorest class. The most fashionable wrestling-matches are held in Tōkyō in spring and autumn, and the champion is as much a popular favorite as a famous torero in Spain, or a well-known prize-fighter in England and America.

Those who read these notes will have gathered that the heat and the rain make summer life in Japan not wholly enjoyable; let me also say some words of warning to the thin-skinned against the mosquitoes, and even more against a horrible little insect which lives in the grass or sand and bites your legs and feet. It is so small that I never succeeded in finding it, but its bite brings up a blister which breaks and leaves troublesome sores. There were few nights from June till October when I was not obliged to get up once or twice and bathe them in cold water to allay the intolerable itching. The sea, too, has its terrors. I went down to the shore near Kamakura one hot night, hoping that a swim would soothe my troubled skin, but no sooner had I plunged into the approaching wave than my neck and arms were embraced by jelly-fish, and I scrambled out feeling and looking as if I had taken my bath in a bed of nettles. The Japanese, although they grumble and fan themselves a good deal, do not really mind the heat; their draughty houses are admirably adapted for fine summer weather, and their clothing is sensible and scanty. But the foreigners suffer, and as September comes, and the lotus flowers fade, they hail with relief the approach of the cooler and dryer weather of autumn.

FUJISAN

FUJISAN

The great mountain of Japan is well known to us all; its form appears on countless screens and fans, and its foreign name, Fusiyama, is as familiar as Mont Blanc or Pike’s Peak. By the Japanese it is called Fuji, or Fujisan, or sometimes Fuji-noyama when speaking poetically: it is difficult to understand how an _s_ came to be substituted for the _j_ by foreigners, but under any name there is a peculiar fascination about the mountain, and the first sight of it, from the hundred steps in Yokohama, from Ueno in Tōkyō through a haze of telephone wires, or across the waves of Suruga Bay from the deck of a steamer, is an event which will be fixed in the traveller’s memory.

I can never see a high place without wishing to be on the top of it, and Fuji looks obtrusively high. The long sweep with which it heaves its twelve thousand feet above the shore, the absence of any competitive mountains, and the exaggerated perspective of its broad base and narrow summit, all add to this impression, and the ambitious soul longs to be on such a superior eminence. And there is no better way of taking a holiday than to climb a mountain. To go down a river leads to laziness; things glide by which look as if they ought to be sketched, but to do so would involve stopping the boat, and interfering with the forces of nature which are gently furthering the traveller’s ends, and thus the mind is tossed to and fro between the delight of seeing things and the unpleasant feeling that it is a duty to work. Thinking is the one thing to be especially avoided on a holiday, and there is too much time for thinking on an ordinary river. The same objection holds against walking on easy roads; in fact, the farther you walk the more you think; but in climbing a really big hill all thought is killed for hours by the simple physical exertion, and you become a mere machine, with a laboriously pumping heart and very heavy legs. And what a sense of superiority comes when the highest point is at last reached, when the world is all below you, half cloud and half solid earth, lovely, mysterious, and absolutely unpaintable. Even this sense fades from me in a few minutes, and I become a nonentity, with only a vague feeling of the hugeness of the universe and the infinitesimal smallness of the individual, and the opening verse of Adam’s morning hymn always comes into my mind, as it did years ago on the top of a Somersetshire hill overlooking the Glastonbury flats, just after my first reading of “Paradise Lost.”

An artist often hears the remark, “You must find painting a great resource,” as if it were an amusement like golf or trout-fishing; and no doubt to many people a landscape-painter’s life seems like one long holiday; but the struggle with ever-changing skies and fast-fading flowers has its fatigues, and the mind gets wearied of constantly thinking how this and that ought to be painted, so when a friend in Yokohama suggested that we should go up Fuji together, I accepted his proposal with alacrity, and we chose the first week in August for our excursion, that being the time when there is the best chance of good weather, and when most pilgrims are to be seen on the mountain. One of the most boring things in life is to walk through new and interesting country with a man who has no eyes for anything but his watch, and who insists on telling you how many minutes the last mile has taken; but my friend’s figure was a sufficient guarantee against any attempt at “record-cutting,”

and I felt sure that his pace would give me plenty of time for looking about.

The weather for our start was not promising--that damp summer heat of which there is so much in Japan, heavy and depressing, shrouding the mountains from morning till night in dense masses of cloud, which seem to slowly drag themselves up from the valley, and never succeed in getting clear of the hill-tops. From Miya-no-shita to the Hakone Lake we were from time to time enveloped in these clouds, and a thin drizzling rain prevented us from enjoying what in fine weather would be a very lovely walk. The moor at the northern end of the lake, Sengoku-hara, is dotted with herds of cattle, and is perhaps the only place in Japan where this familiar sight can be seen. You may wander for miles over the green hills and moorlands which cover so large a portion of its surface without ever seeing a four-footed animal; perhaps because the tall, coarse grasses and the leaves of the dwarf bamboos are unsuitable for fodder; perhaps because the Japanese are not a meat-eating nation, and do not need herds and flocks.

Our intention was to cross this moor, and join the road which leads from Miya-no-shita by way of the Maiden’s Pass, Otome-no-toge, to Gotemba, a village at the foot of Fuji, but our coolie assured us that he knew a shorter road by the Nagao-toge, so we struggled up the hill-side on our left, reached a post which marked the top of the pass, and then stopped in the mist to consider which track we should follow. Suddenly appeared to us an aged man, whose venerable face inspired us with confidence, and by him we were led astray. He took us by the semblance of a path along the hill-top, and for about half an hour we plunged through wet grass up to our necks, the thick white mist hiding everything more than ten yards distant; then he confessed that he had lost his way, that he had heard of that road, but had never taken it before, and that it was all grown over--an obvious fact; so there was nothing to be done but find our way back to the post, and try the wider track from which he had beguiled us. He was a cheerful old soul, seventy-four years of age, who had just walked to some hot springs about twenty miles from his home to take the baths for a couple of days because he suffered from rheumatism. Either it was a very mild case or the baths were marvellously efficacious, for he led us down the hill at a rattling pace, and went five or six miles out of his way to atone for his error, and to put us in the right road for Gotemba.

The mists reached far down the hill, and when we were at last free from them we looked eagerly for Fuji. There was the sea below us, with the great curve of sand, Tago-no-ura, bordering Suruga Bay, and the green slopes rising from it showed where our mountain must be, but at the height of about two thousand feet a straight bank of white cloud ruled off the landscape, and of the summit we could see no sign. The path led us along the hill-side, where men were cutting the rough grass, and loading it on pack-horses; it wandered in and out of the dry gulleys, and over the intervening ridges, and at last, descending to the northward, brought us through cultivated fields to a tea-house near the railway station, where our baggage and provisions were waiting for us. Gotemba is on the Tōkaidō Railway, and is therefore a much-frequented place during the six weeks or so when Fuji is considered to be “open.” It has been ascended at all seasons, the laborious walking through soft snow being the only difficulty, and the chance of bad weather the only danger; but except from the latter part of July to the beginning of September the numerous rest-houses are unoccupied, and the climber is obliged to carry all provisions with him.

There were plenty of pilgrims about, waiting to start on the morrow or just returned from the mountain, some washing their weary feet, others tying their big hats and long walking-sticks in bundles for the luggage-van, and all chattering incessantly. After dinner a travelling company entertained us in front of our tea-house with songs and dances. The band consisted of two samisen, a bell tapped with a stick, and bamboo castanets. The dancers were all little girls, from ten to fifteen years old, dressed in the ordinary long-sleeved kimono, and the movements of their bodies and slim little hands and limbs were full of grace and variety. Each performance was a mixture of song, dance, and dialogue, with instrumental accompaniment; the music was queer, tuneless, and often harsh to the European ear, but with the blood-stirring quality of all genuine national music.

Before daybreak next morning the whole house was stirring, and it was useless to hope for more sleep. Most of the pilgrims start early in order to get to the top by sunset, sleep there, and descend the following day, but we had decided to sleep two nights on the mountain, and were in no hurry. Our heavier baggage was sent by pack-horse to Yoshida, on the north side of the mountain, and three coolies went with us as guides and porters, carrying some extra clothing and the solid food which seems necessary for European stomachs. In the village street our strolling players were already wandering round, trying with some preliminary chords on the samisen to attract an audience. Daylight did not suit them, they looked draggled and discouraged, and it was difficult to believe that those dirty little figures shuffling along in the mud could ever have had any charm or grace of movement.

The path from Gotemba to the summit is one steady ascent over beds of old ashes. At first it is a very gentle rise; the lanes wind through the fields with various crops,