Chapter III: Part 3

There is many another towering mountain with its set of pilgrims, but none can vie with Fujiyama for majestic grace. More beautiful than sublime, more serene than imposing, it has been from time immemorial a silent influence on the Japanese character. Who would deny that it has reflected in its serenity and grace as seen on a bright day all the ideals of the Japanese mind?

Another favourite emblem of our spirit is the cherry blossom. The cherry tree, which we cultivate, not for its fruit, but for the annual tribute of a branchful of its flowers, has done much, especially in the development of the gay side of our character. Its blossoms are void of that sweet depth of scent your rose possesses, or the calm repose that characterizes China's emblematic peony. A sunny gaiety and a readiness to scatter their heart-shaped petals with a Samurai's indifference to death are what make them so dear to our simple and determined view of life. There is an ode known to every Japanese by the great Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801 A.D.) which runs as follows:--

_Shikishima no_
_Yamata-gokoro wo_
_Hito toha ba,_
_Asahi ni nihofu_
_Jamazakura-bana._

(Should any one ask me what the spirit of Japan is like, I would point to the blossoms of the wild cherry tree bathing in the beams of the morning sun.)

These words, laconic as they are, represent, in my opinion, the fundamental truth about the Japanese mentality--its weak places as well as its strength. They give an incomparable key to the proper understanding of the whole people, whose ideal it has ever been to live and to die like the cherry blossoms, beneath which they have these tens of centuries spent their happiest hours every spring.

The mention of a Japanese poem gives me an opportunity to say something about Japanese poetry. Like other early people, our forefathers in archaic time liked to express their thoughts in a measured form of language. The whole structure of the tongue being naturally melodious, on account of its consisting of open syllables with clear and sonorous vowels and little of the harsh consonantal elements in them, the number of syllables in a line has been almost the only feature that distinguished our poetry from ordinary prose composition. The taste for a lengthened form of poems had lost ground early, and already at the end of the ninth century after Christ the epigrammatic form exemplified above, consisting of thirty-one syllables, established itself as the ordinary type of the Japanese odes.

This form subdivides itself into two parts, viz., the upper half containing three lines of five, seven, and again five syllables, and the lower half consisting of two lines of seven syllables each. This simplicity has made it impossible to express in it anything more than a pithy appeal to our lyrical nature; epic poetry in the strict sense of the word has never been developed by us.

But it must be noticed that it is this simplicity of form of our poetical expression that has put it within the reach of almost everybody. To all of us without distinction of class and sex has been accorded the sacred pleasure of satisfying and thus developing our poetical nature, so long as we had a subject to sing and could count syllables up to thirty-one. The language resorted to in such a composition was at first the same as that in use in everyday life. But afterwards as succeeding forms of the vernacular gradually deviated from the classical type, a special grammar along with a special vocabulary had to be studied by the would-be poet. This was avoided, however, by the development in the sixteenth century of a popular and still shorter form of ode called _Hokku_, with much less strict regulations about syntax and phraseology. This ultra-short variety of Japanese poetry, consisting only of seventeen syllables, is in form the upper half of the regular poem. Here is an example:--

_Asagaho ni_
_Tsurube torarete_
_Morai-midzu._

Sketchy as it is, this tells us that the composer Chiyo, 'having gone to her well one morning to draw water, found that some tendrils of the convolvulus had twined themselves around the rope. As a poetess and a woman of taste, she could not bring herself to disturb the dainty blossoms. So, leaving her own well to the convolvuli, she went and begged water of a neighbor'--a pretty little vignette, surely, and expressed in five words.

This new movement, which owes its real development to a remarkable man called Bashô (1644-1649), a mystic of the Zen sect to the tip of his fingers, had an aim that was strictly practical. 'He wished to turn men's lives and thoughts in a better and a higher direction, and he employed one branch of art, namely poetry, as the vehicle for the ethical influence to whose exercise he devoted his life. The very word poetry (or _haikai_) came in his mouth to stand for morality. Did any of his followers transgress the code of poverty, simplicity, humility, long-suffering, he would rebuke the offender with a "This is not poetry," meaning "This is not right." His knowledge of nature and his sympathy with nature were at least as intimate as Wordsworth's, and his sympathy with all sorts and conditions of men was far more intimate; for he never isolated himself from his kind, but lived cheerfully in the world.'[17]

Now, this form of popular literature by virtue of its accessibility even to the poorest amateurs from the lowest ranks of the people, was markedly instrumental, as the now classical form of poetry had been during the Middle Ages, in the cultivation of taste and good manners among all classes of the Japanese nation. Even among the ricksha men of to-day you find many such humble poets, taking snapshots as they run along the stony path of their miserable life. I wonder if your hansom drivers are equally aspiring in this respect.

[17] B.H. Chamberlain's _Bashô and the Japanese Epigram, T.A.S.J._, vol. xxx. pt. ii.

In all these phases of the development of our poetry, we notice, as one of its peculiarities, a strong inclination to the exercise of the witty side of our nature. Even if we leave out of consideration the so-called 'pillow word' (_makura-kotoba_), so profusely resorted to in our ancient poems, part of which were nothing but a naïve sort of _jeu de mots_, and the abundant use of other plays on words of later development, known as _kakekotoba_, _jo_, _shûku_, etc. (_haikai-no-uta_), it is noteworthy that poems of a comic nature found a special place in the earliest imperial collection of Japanese odes named Kokinshifu,' which was compiled in the year A.D. 908. This species has flourished ever since under the name of Kyôka, and also gave rise to a shortened form in seventeen syllables, called _haikai-no-hokku_. When in the hand of Bashô this latter form developed itself into something higher and more serious, the witty and satirical Senryû, also in seventeen syllables, came to take its place.

One thing to be specially noted in this connection is the introduction from China of the idea of poetic tournaments, the beauty of which consisted in the offhand and quick composition of one long series of odes by several persons sitting together, each supplying in turn either the upper half or the lower half as the case might be, the two in combination giving a poetical sense. This usage of capping verses known as _renga_ came to be very popular, from the Court downward, as early as the thirteenth century. After a while the same practice was applied to comic poetry, thus producing the so-called _haikai-no-renga_, or comic linked verses. This coupling of verses gave plenty of occasion for sharpening one's wit as well as one's skill in extemporising. It is to a later attempt to express all these subtleties in the upper half of the poem composed by one person that the present _kokku_ owed its origin. You can easily imagine the effect such an exercise produced on the popular mind. Besides the moral good which this literary pursuit has brought to the populace, it has given a fresh opportunity for the cultivation of our habit of attaching sense to apparently meaningless groups of phenomena, and our fondness of laconic utterance and symbolic representation, not to say anything about our love of nature and simplicity.

All this tends in my view to show that we Japanese have a strong liking for wit in the wider sense of the word. We try to solve a question, not by that slower but surer way of calm deliberation and untiring labour like the cool-headed Germans, but by an incandescent flash of inspiration like the hot-blooded Frenchmen. This fact is singularly preserved in the earlier sense of the now sacred word _Yamato-damashî_, which had not its present meaning, viz., 'the spirit of Japan' in the most elevated sense of that term, but signified 'the wit of the Japanese' as contrasted with the 'learning of the Chinese' (_wakon_ as opposed to _kansai_). The word _tamashî_, which now expresses the idea of 'spirit,' corresponds in the compound in question to the French _esprit_ in such combinations as _homme d'esprit_ or _jeu d'esprit_.

Turning now to the consideration of other sets of phenomena, as an illustration of the Japanese character, let me tell you something about the tea-ceremony and kindred rites.

To begin with the _Cha-no-e_ (or _Cha-no-yu_), or tea-meeting, this much-spoken-of art originated among the Buddhist priests, who learned to appreciate the beverage from the Chinese. Indeed, the tea-plant itself was first introduced into Japan along with the name _Cha_ (Chinese _Ch'a_) from the Celestial Empire, in the tenth century after Christ. During the following centuries its cultivation and the preparation of the drink was monopolised by the priesthood, if we except the cases of a few well-to-do men of letters. This fact is gathered from the frequent mention of tea-cups offered to the emperor on the occasion of an imperial visit to a Buddhist monastery. During all this time a sense of something precious and aristocratic was attached to this aromatic beverage, which had been regarded as a kind of rare drug of strange virtue in raising depressed spirits, and even of curing certain diseases.

This high appreciation of the drink, as well as the need of ceremony in offering it to exalted personages, gradually developed in the hands of monks with plenty of leisure and a good knowledge of the high praise accorded to its virtues by the Chinese savants, into a very complicated rite as to the way of serving, and of being served with, a cup of tea. A print representing a man clad as a Buddhist priest in the act of selling the beverage in the street at a penny a cup is preserved from a date as early as the fourteenth century, showing that the drink had then come to find customers even among the common people. But the ceremony of Cha-no-e, as such, never made its way among them until many centuries after. It was at first fostered and elaborated only among the aristocracy. Already in the fifteenth century, when the luxury and extravagance of the Ashikaga Shogunate reached its zenith in the person of Yoshimasa (1435-1490), the tea-ceremony was one of the favourite pastimes of the highest classes. Yoshimasa himself was a great patron and connoisseur of the complicated rite, as well as of other branches of art, such as landscape gardening and the arrangement of flowers.

There are two different phases of the tea-ceremony, the regular course and the simplified course, known among us as the 'Great Tea' and the 'Small Tea.' In either case, it might be defined in its present form as a system of cultivating good manners as applied to daily life, with the serving and drinking of a cup of tea at its centre. The main stress is laid on ensuring outwardly a graceful carriage, and inwardly presence of mind. As with the national form of wrestling known as _ju-jitsu_, with its careful analysis of every push and pull down to the minutest details, so with the Cha-no-e, every move of body and limb in walking and sitting during the whole ceremony has been fully studied and worked out so as to give it the most graceful form conceivable. At the same time the calm and self-control shown by the partaker in the rite is regarded as an essential element in the performance, without which ultimate success in it will be quite impossible. So it is more a physical and moral training than a mere amusement or a simple quenching of thirst. But this original sense has not always been kept in view even by the so-called masters of the tea-ceremony, who, like your dancing-masters, are generally considered to be the men to teach us social etiquette. Thus, diverted from its original idea, the Cha-no-e is generally found to degenerate into a body of conventional and meaningless formalities, which, even in its most abbreviated form as the 'Small Tea,' is something very tiresome, if not worse. To sit _à la japonaise_ (not _à la turque_, which is not considered polite) for an hour, if not for hours together, on the matted floor to see the celebration of the monotonous rite, daring to talk only little, and even then not above a whisper, in the smallest imaginable tea-room, is not what even a born Japanese of the present day can much appreciate, much less so Europeans, who would prefer being put in the stocks, unless they be themselves Cha-jin or tea-ceremonialists, that is to say, eccentrics. How to open the sliding-door; how to shut it each time; how to bring and arrange the several utensils, with their several prescribed ways of being handled, into the tea-room; how to sit down noiselessly in front of the boiling kettle which hangs over a brasier; how to open the lid of the kettle; how to put tea-powder in the cup; how to pour hot water over it; how to stir the now green water with a bamboo brush; how to give the mixture a head of foam; how and where to place the cup ready for the expecting drinker--this on the part of the person playing the host or hostess; and now on the part of the guest--how to take a sweet from the dish before him in preparation for the coming aromatic drink; how to take up the cup now given him; how to hold it with both hands; how to give it a gentle stir; how to drink it up in three sips and a half; how to wipe off the trace of the sipping left on the edge of the cup; how to turn the cup horizontally round; how to put it down within the reach of his host or hostess, etc., etc., _ad infinitum_--these are some of the essential items to be learned and practised. And for every one of them there is a prescribed form even to the slightest move and curve in which a finger should be bent or stretched, always in strict accordance with the attitude of other bodies in direct connection with it. The whole ceremony in its degenerated form is an aggregate of an immense number of _comme il faut_'s, with practically no margin for personal taste. But even behind its present frigidity we cannot fail to discern the true idea and the good it has worked in past centuries. It has done a great deal of good, especially in those rough days at the end of the sixteenth century, when great warriors returning blood-stained from the field of battle learned how to bow their haughty necks in admiration of the curves of beauty, and how to listen to the silvery note of a boiling tea-kettle. They could not help their stern faces melting into a naïve smile in the serene simplicity of the tea-room, whose arrangement, true to the Zen taste to the very last detail of its structure, showed a studied avoidance of ostentation in form and colour. To this day it is always this Zen taste that rules supreme in the decoration of a Japanese house.

Visit a Japanese gentleman whose taste is not yet badly influenced by the Western love of show and symmetry in his dwelling: you will find the room and the whole arrangement free from anything of an ostentatious nature. The colour of the walls and sliding-doors will be very subdued, but not on that account gloomy. In the niche you will see one or a single set of _kakemono_, or pictures, at the foot of which, just in the middle of the slightly raised floor of the niche, we put some object of decoration--a sculpture, a vase with flowers, etc. These are both carefully changed in accordance with the season, or else in harmony with the ruling idea of the day, when the room is decorated in celebration of some event or guest. This rule applies to the other objects connected with the room--utensils, cushions, screens, etc.

The European way of arranging a room is, generally speaking, rather revolting to our taste. We take care not to show anything but what is absolutely necessary to make a room look agreeable, keeping all other things behind the scenes. Thus we secure to every object of art that we allow in our presence a fair opportunity of being appreciated. This is not usually the case in a European dwelling. I have very often felt less crowded in a museum or in a bazaar than in your drawing-rooms. 'You know so well how to expose to view what you have,' I have frequently had occasion to say to myself, 'but you have still much to learn from us how to hide, for exposition is, after all, a very poor means of showing.'

To return to the main point, we owe to the Cha-no-e much of the present standard of our taste, which is, in its turn, nothing more than the Zen ways of looking at things as applied to everyday life. This is no wonder, when we remember that it was in the tasteful hands of the Zen priests that the whole ceremony reached its perfection. Indeed, the word _cha_ is a term which conveys to this day the main features of the Contemplative sect to our mind.

In connection with the tea-ceremony, there are some sister arts which have been equally effective in the proper cultivation of our taste. Landscape gardening, in which our object is to make an idealised copy of some natural scene, is an art that has been loved and practised among us for more than a thousand years, although it was not indigenous like most things Japanese. This practice of painting with tree and stone soon gave rise to another art, the miniature reproduction of a favourite natural scene on a piece of board, and this is the forerunner of the later _bonkei_, or the tray-landscape, and its sister _bonsai_, or the art of symbolising an abstract idea, such as courage, majesty, etc., by means of the growth of a dwarf tree.

The same love that we feel for a symbolic representation is also to be traced in the arrangement of flowers. The practice of preserving cut branches, generally of flowering trees, in a vase filled with water is often mentioned in our classical literature. But it was first in the sixteenth century that it assumed its present aspect, when, in conjunction with the Cha-no-e, it found a great patron in that most influential dilettante Shogun Yoshimasa. Already in his time there were a great many principles to be learned concerning the way to give the longest life and the most graceful form to the branches put in a vase, besides investing the whole composition with a symbolic meaning. Up to this day we look upon this art as very helpful for the cultivation of taste among the fair sex, who receive long courses of instruction by the generally aged masters of floral arrangement, who, along with their teaching in the treatment of plants, know how to instil ethics in their young pupils, taking the finished vase of flowers as the subject of conversation. The masters of the tea-ceremony are also well versed in arranging flowers in that simple manner which is yet full of meaning called _cha-bana_, or the 'Zen type of floral art.'

You see how much all these arts have contributed to the production of our taste, whose ideals are the dislike of loudness and love of symbolic representation, with a delicate feeling for the beauty of line as seen in things moving or at rest. This last quality must have been immensely augmented by the linear character of our drawing, and also by the great importance we are accustomed to attach to the shape and the strokes of the characters when we are learning to write.

All these qualities you will see exemplified in any Japanese work of art--from a large picture down to a tiny wooden carving. Take up a girl's silk dress and examine it carefully, and note how the lining is dyed and embroidered with as great, if not greater care, in order to make it harmonise in colour and design with the visible surface and add some exquisite meaning. Do not forget to look at the back when you come across a lacquered box, for it is not only the surface that receives our careful attention. And above all, you must always keep in mind that our artists think it a duty to be suggestive rather than explicit, and to leave something of their meaning to be divined by those who contemplate their works.

* * * * *

The time is now come to conclude my essay at an exposition of the Japanese spirit. I think I have given you occasion to see something of both the strong and the weak sides of my countrymen; for it is just where our favourable qualities lie that you will also find the corresponding weaknesses. The usual charges brought against us, that we are precocious, unpractical, frivolous, fickle, etc., are not worthy of serious attention, because they are all of them easily explained as but the attendant phenomena of the transitory age from which we are just emerging. Even the more sound accusation of our want of originality must be reconsidered in face of so many facts to the contrary, facts which show us to be at least in small things very original, almost in the French sense of that word. That we have always been ready to borrow hints from other countries is in a great measure to be explained by the consideration that we had from the very beginning the disadvantage and the advantage of having as neighbours nations with a great start in the race-course of civilisation. The cause of our being small in great things, while great in small things, can be partly found in the financial conditions of the country and in the non-individual nature of the culture we have received. These delicate questions will have to be raised again some centuries hence, when a healthy admixture of the European civilisation has been tried--a civilisation the effect of which has been, on the whole, so beneficial to our development, that we feel it a most agreeable duty gratefully to acknowledge our immense obligation to the nations of the West.

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