But then the ritual of these Japanese adorers was so beautiful that it could hardly fail to be magically compelling. Their arms, prolonged by the enormous white drumsticks, were held out before them almost at full stretch. And when they beat, they beat from the shoulder, lifting and letting fall the whole arm. But “letting fall” is not the right expression; it connotes a loose and undeliberate movement, and the drummers did nothing undeliberately. On the contrary, each stroke was applied with a perfectly controlled precision. Tap, tap, tap-a-tap, tap; they touched the drum face as though they were fitting into position, one by one, the tesserae, now large, now small, of an elaborate mosaic.
Perhaps these dancers, these exquisitely disciplined musicians, were the “real” Japan. Perhaps, too, it existed in the country which we saw on our way to Yokohama. The sun had come out at last. The sky was palely blue and alive with clouds that trailed great indigo shadows across the earth beneath them. It was an almost Italian country of abrupt hills and lakes and mountain-encircled plains. A paler variety of our mustard was blooming in the fields. Great expanses of primrose yellow covered the plains to the edge of the blue lakes, to the feet of the dim blue mountains. The mustard seemed to me far more impressively beautiful than the cherry blossom.
The near hills were brown, steep, almost bare, their crests fringed with a growth, not of the Tuscan umbrella pine, but of the trees which figure so largely in the native woodcuts, the ragged, yet strangely elegant, pine trees, whose silhouette against the sky is like a Chinese ideograph. To one familiar with the Celestial symbols, the whole landscape, I liked to fancy, would be an open book. Wisdom and poetry would sprout for him on every hill. Or perhaps, who knows? the trees might just be saying, “Foreign Devil, Foreign Devil,” and repeating it monotonously, mile after mile. The second, I am afraid, is the more probable hypothesis.
We rolled on, through miles of innumerable little rice fields laboriously embanked to hold the water with which they were being flooded; among sloping plantations of tea shrubs, round and shinily green, like bushes of clipped box; through luminous plains of mustard and young green corn; past villages of thatched houses beautifully set among the trees. And every twenty miles or so, we would catch glimpses of a thing which seemed, at first, only a white cloud among the clouds of the horizon, a pale small ghost, but a ghost which, at every glimpse, became more definite, clearer, larger, until—hours after we had had our earliest sight of it—it stood shining high above us, a huge white cone, girdled with clouds, a miracle of regular and geometrical form among the chaotic hills which it overtopped, the sacred mountain of Japan, Fujiyama. We saw it first at noon, a tiny cloud melting into the clouds; and at sunset we were looking back on it, an enormous mass rising clear of all vapours, naked and perfect, into the coloured sky. Was this the “real” Japan? I suppose so.
But a little later, at Yokohama, we were plunged again, head over ears, into the unreal. If Kyoto looks like a mining camp, Yokohama after the earthquake looks like a mining camp that has not yet been finished. There are dust heaps among the shanties, there are holes in the roadways, there are unbuilt bridges. But in a little while, when the mass is all cleared up and the damage repaired, it will be just like Kyoto—miles of dreary ill-kept roads, hundreds of thousands of ugly little wooden shanties, and every shanty a shop and every shop a Woolworth. But there are differences of quality, there is a higher and a lower, even among Woolworths. At Kyoto the shops had looked like three-penny bazaars. At Yokohama they were only penny ones.
We boarded our ship with thankfulness. “Real” Japan had been delightful. But there had been more of the unreal than of the real, and the unreal, moreover, was obviously so much the more significant and important that it had quite eclipsed the real. In every country the places, the people, the institutions which are said by lovers of that country to constitute its “real” self are the least characteristic and significant. Cornwall and county families and the Anglican Church may be the esoterically “real” England. But the England that matters, that makes history, that impresses itself on the world and casts its shadow into the future, is represented by Lancashire, Trade Unions and Big Business Men.
It is the same, I suppose, with Japan. Fuji and village life, traditional dances and cultured gentlemen of leisure, are what the lovers of Japan would have us believe to be the “real” thing. But it is the unreal Japan, the wholesale producer of shoddy, which is at present projecting itself on history. Not the dancers, not the cultured and religious gentlemen, but the manufacturers of shoddy direct the country’s policy. And in the enormous mining-camp cities more and more of the Japanese are being transformed, for good or for evil, from peasants and craftsmen into proletarian factory hands, the brothers of all the other proletarian workers of the world.
The future of Japan, as of every other country, depends on its “unreal” self. Some day, in the Utopian future, when things are very different from what they are now, English and Japanese patriots, desirous of exalting their respective countries, will point, not to Cornwall or Fuji, not to the county families or the descendants of the Tea Masters, but to Manchester and Osaka, to the cotton spinners and the weavers of silk. “Here,” they will say, “here is the real England, the real Japan.” Progress may be defined in this connection as the gradual transformation of what we now call “unreal” into something sufficiently noble and decent to be styled “real.” Meanwhile we have the misfortune to live in a world in which all that is historically significant is so repulsive that we are compelled, if we have any pride in our country or our human species, to practise a wholesale Christian Science on it and deny it reality.
JAPAN
Accustomed to deploring and at the same time taking advantage of the low standards of living current elsewhere in the East, the traveller who enters Japan is rudely surprised when he finds himself asked to pay his rickshaw coolie a wage which would not be despised in Europe. To travel otherwise than by tram through the streets of a Japanese city is a luxury. I was glad, for the sake of the rickshaw coolies, that it should be so; for my own, I must confess, I was sorry. To the slave-owners, slavery seems a most delightful institution.
ON THE PACIFIC
Each evening before dinner as we zig-zag down the long corridor towards our cabin, now labouring uphill as the liner dips to port in the slow swell, now racing downwards as it rights itself and dips again to starboard, we hear behind our neighbours’ closed doors a curious dry clicking sound. It is a sound which, in a convent, one would attribute to the rapid and multitudinous telling of beads. But a liner is not a convent, and trans-Pacific passengers are no more pious than ordinary folk. Those clickings are not the record of muttered Paternosters and high-speed Aves. They are the sound of ice being rattled in cocktail shakers. We are on an American ship, and when we want to drink we must do so in our cabins and from our own private cellars. And how ardently one does want to drink when one is not allowed to.
A childish desire to do what is prohibited is stronger than taste and habit. I, who abhor whisky, have a large bottle of it in my trunk. And every evening we gravely sit down in our cabin to drink some of the champagne with which certain kind American friends, with a thoughtful foresight born of their knowledge of Prohibition, presented us before we left Japan.
AT SEA
Familiarity blunts astonishment. Fishes do not marvel at water; they are too busy swimming in it. It is the same with us. We take our Western civilisation for granted and find nothing intrinsically odd or incongruous in it. Before we can realise the strangeness of our surroundings, we must deliberately stop and think.
But moments come when that strangeness is fairly forced upon our notice, moments when an anomaly, a contradiction, an immense incongruity is suddenly illumined by a light so glaring that we cannot fail to see it. Such a moment came to me as I was crossing the Pacific. It was the first morning out of Yokohama. Coming out of my cabin, I was handed the day’s bulletin of wireless news. I unfolded the typewritten sheet and
