A Curious Life for a Lady

by Pat Barr

  The beauty of the shrines so made her prisoner that Isabella stayed on for a time in Nikko, where she acquired her very first taste of oriental village life, of which she was to have so much harsh, uncomfortable, fascinating experience during the next twenty years. It was a deceptively idyllic introduction to what lay ahead. Each village day was a rhythmical, placid imitation of the one before. At seven a.m. a drum-beat summoned the children to school where, with earnest docility, they studied their own tongue, Chinese, arithmetic, history and geography in a classroom which, with its blackboard, maps, desks, Isabella thought ‘too Europeanised’. During the morning the cobbles were a clatter of wooden clogs as housewives hurried to buy cubes of jellied beancurd, strands of seaweed, pickled roots for lunch. Below Isabella’s room, Kanaya (her host) pottered about among his azaleas, his floppy hat straw-gold in the sun, and the birds swooped for gnats over his dainty pond. Later, released, the children gathered along the streams which tumbled in stone channels down the middle of every street. Their ingenious toys – water-wheels, red windmills, cockleshell boats – bounced and spun in the current and when there was a disaster, a shipwreck or a broken wheel, the children at last forgot their staid sobriety and roared with glee or dismay. At sunset, the younger ones, warm-pink from the evening’s hot bath, rode their father’s shoulders about the streets or watched while he had his regular shave and haircut on the raised open front of the barber’s shop. This operation, said Isabella, was one of Nikko’s most entertaining sights: ‘Soap is not used and the process is a painful one. The victims let their garments fall to their waists and each holds in his left hand a lacquered tray to receive the croppings. The ugly Japanese face at this time wears a most grotesque expression of stolid resignation as it is held and pulled about by the operator, who turns it in all directions that he may judge of the effect he is producing. The shaving of the face till it is smooth and shiny, and the waxing and tying of the queue with twine made of paper’ completed the performance. This formal method of hairdressing was already old-fashioned; urban, modernised Japanese men, including the Emperor Meiji himself, had gone in for western hair-styles, cropped, tousled and chopped to various lengths above the collar. But the provinces were slow to respond to this, as to many of the drastic directives and fashions that emanated from the capital, and most of the Nikko men preferred to keep their hair long, waxed and bunched in a neat tail across the crown.

  After the evening visit to the barber, as the light faded and street-channels ran darkly, the family gathered indoors and the andon was lit. This ‘wretched apparatus’ was a lamp with panes of white paper and inside them a dish of oil on which a pith of lighted rush floated. By its unpredictable flare, Kanaya’s older children recited their morrow’s lessons in a high monotonous twang that plucked at Isabella’s nerves, adults played go, told stories, strummed an eerie samisen and passed the warmed saké cup. Saké, she noted, ‘mounts readily to the head’, and soon the singing began, a moaning two-note chant, that whined ‘like the very essence of heathenness’, while a half-witted manservant was excited into ‘some very foolish performances’ at which everyone cackled immoderately, except Isabella who felt ill at ease. At about ten, the andon being left to burn rancidly through the night, the wooden shutters were bolted tight, wadded quilts and wooden head-rests were produced, trays of sweetmeats were placed about in case anyone wanted a midnight snack, and then the family rolled themselves into their respective multi-coloured cocoons and slept.

  Upstairs, alone, Isabella looked round her moonlit room, the one spray of azalea in a slender white vase, the filigree tracery of a cabinet, the hint of a misty landscape sketched on an ochre-gold screen – a room so exquisite that she went in constant dread of ‘spilling the ink, indenting the mats, or tearing the paper windows’. And, remembering the vulgarity of the manservant’s antics, the weird chill of the chant, she was uneasily aware that beneath the restrained and ordered beauty of her surroundings, and the placid village routines, shuddered an element that was bizarre, raw, totally alien to her understanding. And this sense of the essential outlandishness of the country and its people grew upon her as she journeyed northward into regions that were a world away both from the conventional globe-trotters’ pictures of willow-pattern-pretty Japan, and from new Japan with its telegraph offices and station-masters in white kid gloves. The Japan she saw and, in a way, loved, was late-medieval: uncouth, ungilded, often unclean – also original, homespun, untrammelled.

  The differences were apparent as soon as she and Ito, on two sorry mares, left Nikko and plunged north into forests through which, everyone said, no proper routes existed. And certainly the ‘roads’ soon dwindled to bridle-trails that slithered over log-bridges zigzagged among boulders and heaps of landslipped rubble, dabbled into quagmires. Villages degenerated into haphazard clusters of tattered single-room thatch huts with a much-decayed, much-trodden manure heap for a front garden, and one fouled stream where people washed themselves and their clothes. The people too degenerated – in so far as they became increasingly covered with dirt and sores instead of clothes. ‘The men may be said to wear nothing. Few of the women wear anything but a short petticoat wound tightly round them or blue cotton trousers very tight in the legs and baggy at the top’. The petticoat, Isabella thought, was ‘barbarous-looking’ and when a woman thus clad, with a nude, diseased baby on her back stood and stared vacantly at the foreigner, Isabella could hardly believe herself to be in ‘civilised’ Japan.

  Nor did the typical rural inn offer much to support her belief. Its rooms were draughty, smoky, humming with fleas and mosquitoes, reeking of sour sewage, their rafters crusted with dank soot, their walls a rickety clutter of dilapidated paper screens. These latter were her greatest trial, for, once the news of her arrival spread, crowds gathered in rooms adjoining hers and numerous holes began to appear in the screen-paper, to each of which was applied one Japanese eye, anxious to see what a female foreigner really looked like. It was unnerving and embarrassing to prepare for a night’s rest under this silent, dark, eager gaze and on one occasion, when she felt particularly ill, Isabella prevailed upon the landlord to gum over every hole with strips of tough binding! In addition to the wondrous spectacle of Miss Bird herself, the crowds were immensely inquisitive about her possessions – the india-rubber bath, air pillow and her white mosquito net. Ito assured her he could have made a yen a day exhibiting these items to the public view, and policemen, who often called ostensibly to copy the details of her passport, actually came just to look at her and her marvellous accoutrements.

  Occasionally, among all this dreary squalor, beauty graced their journeying: a line of trees woven together by a web of fragrant honeysuckle, a steep-thatched farmhouse roof glowing warm russet in a shaft of evening light, a row of stubby stone Buddhas, noseless but erect, showing the way to a neglected temple. But for much of the time, things were trying. The vicious Japanese horses stumbled, kicked and rocked like camels and always had to be led by a groom, so there was no hope of galloping off into the wild blue yonder as she had in Hawaii or Colorado. There was, in any case, little blue to gallop into, for unfortunately, the region was experiencing its wettest summer for thirty years. Rain plunged down day after grey day. Village streams and ponds overflowed, carrying ancient deposits of slime and refuse into damp dwellings; mildew flourished everywhere – in the rice she was offered for lunch, on bedclothes and towels, between the pages of the Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society that she carried with her. She lived in a state of perpetual wet chill, subsisted on a diet of rice-mush, old eggs, slushy sago and cucumbers and was afflicted with spinal pain and bites from numberless insects that multiplied amazingly in the moist air. At one point, her foot was so hugely swollen with horse-ant bites and her hand by stings of both hornet and gadfly that, in desperation, she summoned a native doctor to her inn.

  Ito, ‘who looks twice as big as usual when he has to do any “grand” interpreting, and always puts on a silk hakama [jacket] in honour of it,’
ushered into her presence a middle-aged man who bowed three times, sat on his heels and looked first at her ‘honourable hand’ and then at her ‘honourable foot’. Then he sucked in his breath many times, gazed at her eyes through a magnifying glass, took her pulse and told her the bites were much inflamed, which was not news to her. Then he clapped his hands and a coolie appeared carrying a black lacquer chest on his back, inside which another gilt chest contained various medicines. The doctor concocted a lotion, bandaged her arm and told her to pour the lotion over it, then he made her a medicine and suggested she refrain from saké-drinking for a few days! There was something diffident and warm about him and they got on well. He showed her a box of ‘unicorn’s horn’ which, he said, was worth its weight in gold, and told her that he relied mainly on it, acupuncture, rhinoceros horn and vegetable brews for his cures. He asked about western surgical methods and if chloroform was used in childbirth mainly to keep the population down. He stayed to dinner and gulped and belched with such gentility that Isabella nearly laughed aloud. After the meal, he asked her to join him in a smoke and assumed her refusal was on account of some strange religious vow. Tobacco had been introduced into Japan by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century and almost all men and women smoked pipes. Doctors, Isabella noted, usually recommended the practice and she reproduces an amusing translation of a treatise on the attributes of tobacco – the ‘Fools’ Herb ’or ‘Poverty Weed’ as smug non-smokers called it. Smokers, contrariwise, swore that it ‘dispels the vapours and increases the energies … affords an excuse for resting now and then from work, as if in order to take breath … and is a storehouse of reflection, giving time for the fumes of wrath to disperse’.

  Perhaps Isabella should have taken up smoking to relax the nerves, for the records of her journey through North Japan have a nagging undertone of sour peevishness, only sometimes relieved with a jab of wry, self-mocking humour: ‘Again I write that Shinjo is a wretched place. It is a daimyo’s town and every daimyo’s town that I have seen has an air of decay, partly owing to the fact that the castle is either pulled down or has been allowed to fall into decay. Shinjo has a large trade in rice, silk and hemp, and ought not to be as poor as it looks. The mosquitoes were in thousands, and I had to go to bed, so as to be out of their reach, before I had finished my wretched meal of sago and condensed milk. There was a hot rain all night, my wretched room was dirty and stifling, and rats gnawed my boots and ran away with my cucumbers.’ To keep down the rats, incidentally, most houses kept a ‘rat-snake’ who lived unmolested in the rafters and who, if over-gorged with his favourite fare, occasionally tumbled off them on to bed or table below.

  Root cause of Isabella’s depression was that her frail physique had not dramatically strengthened with the stimulus of travel as it had done on her previous journeys to the Sandwich Isles and the Rockies. Exhaustion added to her woes, for she seldom seemed to get a good night’s rest. At one inn five tobacco merchants thrumming on ‘that instrument of dismay, a samisen’ kept her awake till dawn; at another, the darkness throbbed to the clatter of drums and gongs keeping summer festival; at another the locals quietly removed the screens that made her room, and she woke to find herself completely surrounded by puzzled, staring faces. In her state of weariness she even allowed herself to be wheeled along in a jinrikisha, if one was available. These little ‘two-wheeled prams’, though a picturesque and intrinsic part of the traditional Japanese image, had only been invented about eight years previously, and were not widely used in these remote regions. In urban areas they were everywhere, crazy, rapid little vehicles that looked irresistibly funny at first to the foreigner’s eye, including Isabella’s: ‘The shafts rest on the ground at a steep incline as you get in – it must require much practice to enable one to mount with ease or dignity – the runner lifts them up, gets into them, gives the body a good tilt and goes off at a smart trot. They are drawn by one, two or three men, according to the speed desired by the occupants. When rain comes on, the man puts up the hood, and ties you and it closely up in a covering of oiled paper in which you are invisible. At night, whether running or standing still, they carry prettily painted circular paper lanterns 18inches long. It is most comical to see stout, florid, solid-looking merchants, missionaries (male and female), fashionably dressed ladies, armed with card cases, Chinese compradores, and Japanese peasant men and women flying along Main Street … racing, chasing, crossing each other, their lean, polite pleasant runners in their great hats shaped like inverted bowls, their incomprehensible blue tights, and their short blue overshirts with badges or characters in white upon them, tearing along, their yellow faces streaming with perspiration, laughing, shouting and avoiding collisions by a mere shave.’

  That, of course, was a treaty port scene where there were lots of tourists about and all the runners were ‘decently clad’ in their blue tights in accordance with a law imposed by a government anxious not to offend western susceptibilities by any indecent display of coolie nakedness. In the hinterlands, as Isabella discovered, observance of the law was not so punctilious. Bowling along in a jinrikisha on a narrow country road, she and her runner ‘met a man leading a prisoner by a rope, followed by a policeman. As soon as my runner saw the latter, he fell down on his face so suddenly in the shafts as nearly to throw me out, at the same time trying to wriggle into a garment which he had carried on the crossbar, while the young men who were drawing the two jinrikisha behind, crouching behind my vehicle, tried to scuttle into their clothes. I never saw such a picture of abjectness as my man presented. He trembled from head to foot, and illustrated that queer phrase often heard in Scotch Presbyterian prayers, “lay our hands on our mouths and our mouths in the dust.” He literally grovelled in the dust, and with every sentence that the policeman spoke, raised his head a little, to bow it yet more deeply than before. It was all because he had no clothes on. I interceded for him as the day was very hot, and the policeman said he could not arrest him, as he would otherwise have done, because of the inconvenience that it would cause to a foreigner. He was quite an elderly man and never recovered his spirits, but as soon as a turn of the road took us out of the policeman’s sight, the two younger men threw their clothes into the air, and gambolled in the shafts, shrieking with laughter!’

  This incident nicely illustrates the provincial attitude to the waves of brand-new edicts that flooded the country during the decade: those in authority enforced them sternly and without questioning their relevance to a particular circumstance; the people, for the most part, accepted them with docility and made a great show of absolute obedience – nevertheless, when officialdom’s back was turned, many reverted happily to their own well-tried ways, keeping the new ones handy, as it were, to put on quickly when authority reappeared.

  II

  Near the end of July, after bouncing like a baby in a jinrikisha, balancing atop the high-peaked saddles of various ill-tempered pack-horses, ploughing on foot over steep mountain tracks, even, on one occasion, straddling the blessedly firm back of ‘a comely pack-cow’, Isabella reached Kubota (now called Akita), capital of the north-western Akita province. She liked the town immediately, because it was entirely and typically Japanese, self-contained, unpretentious and thriving after its traditional fashion. She drifted into it on a flat scow up a narrow green river lined with derelict boat-yards; a grand mulberry-coloured mountain dominated its grey-green roof-line; a clean fresh breeze whipped in from the nearby Sea of Japan; she actually had a good beefsteak with mustard for dinner that night and began to feel better.

  In olden times, Kubota, like dejected Shinjo, had been a daimyo’s town, and his castle, ringed by three moats, still looked imposingly feudal from afar, but was actually in ramshackle ruïns. Nowadays, manufacturers and merchants propsered there instead, making and selling the subtly-toned blue-and-black silk much favoured by ladies, a white silk crêpe with raised woof much prized by sophisticates in distant Tokyo and clogs and screens for everybody. Along the main streets, women pattered among the
usual conglomeration of native shops: switches of lustrous black hair and ruby-red hairpins shone in the local ‘beauty salon’; demon-faced kites, paper carp and butterflies were anchored to the ridge-poles of the toy-store; ranks of watery-blue jars and musty gilt boxes of dried herbs lined the druggist’s shelves; coopers and weavers displayed a lovely umber-and-tawny jumble of straw and wooden things – wash-tubs beautifully turned with copper ribs, cages of meshed bamboo, looking fine and large enough to cloister an eagle but actually used to hold stones in place as breakwaters, and tiny reed grasshoppers that looked real enough to hop straight out of your hand.

  Western influence had penetrated to Kubota nevertheless, and its principal manifestations were a new hospital and the Normal School, both of which Isabella visited. The hospital’s chief physician had been trained in western medicine and it was cheering to compare his methods with those of the dear old country doctor with his box of ‘unicorn’s horn’. In the Kubota hospital, local resistance to chloroform was being overcome and there were sufficient sprays of carbolic acid ‘to satisfy Mr Lister himself’. The school too had changed from the old days when classical Chinese, native literature and the martial arts were its main subjects; now chemistry, Ganot’s physics and the economic theories of J. S. Mill were added to the syllabus, and Isabella, as a representative of exciting western ideas, was positively lionised. As she was leaving, she asked one of the lecturers about religious instruction and he laughed, ‘with undisguised contempt. “We have no religion,” he added, “and all your learned men know that religion is false.”’