by Pat Barr
This attitude greatly dismayed Isabella, as it did many of her contemporaries. For them the very existence of the so-called enlightened western institutions was indissolubly linked to Christianity, and to take the first without the second was like having a shell with no yolk, a carriage with no horse. Japan, Isabella wrote, angered by this incident, was ‘an Empire with a splendid despotism for its apex and naked coolies for its base, a bald materialism its highest creed and material good its greatest goal, reforming, destroying, constructing, appropriating the fruits of Christian civilisation but rejecting the tree from which they sprung’.
Ito, her interpreter, was a case in point. He was a sharp-witted, vain, bandy-legged youth with a passion for sweetmeats and tea-house girls, but ‘no moral sense according to our notions’. He was rampantly chauvinistic and secretly despised westerners, declaring that when Japan had learned all she could from them, ‘she will outstrip them in the race, because she takes all that is worth having and rejects the incubus of Christianity’. Fortunately he was also reasonably honest, industrious and ambitiously bent upon learning ‘proper’ English. When Isabella patiently explained that the phrase ‘a devilish fine day,’ that he had picked up in Yokohama was ‘common,’ he instantly erased it from his vocabulary. ‘What a beautiful day this is,’ he used to exclaim politely thereafter, as they rode together along some empty shore where sea and sky were blue.
When, at last, another blue day arrived, they left Kubota and continued north towards Aomori, whence steamers crossed to the island of Hokkaido. It was a long journey of about a hundred miles, took them a fortnight, and started off with a bang when on the first day they came upon a matsuri, a summer fair, in progress. The town streets were strung with joggling lanterns and people, ‘monkey theatres and dog theatres, two mangy sheep and a lean pig attracted wondering crowds, for neither of these animals is known in this region of Japan; a booth in which a woman was having her head cut off every half-hour for two sen a spectator; cars with roofs like temples, on which, with forty men at the ropes, dancing children of the highest class were being borne in procession; a theatre with an open front, on the boards of which two men in antique dresses, with sleeves touching the ground, were performing with tedious slowness a classic dance of tedious posturings, which consisted mainly in dexterous movements of the aforesaid sleeves, and occasional emphatic stampings and utterances of the word No in a hoarse howl. It is needless to say that a foreign lady was not the least of the attractions of the fair.’
They left the town, which was called Minato, along a lovely ‘avenue of deep sand and ancient pines much contorted and gnarled. Down the pine avenue hundreds of people on horseback and on foot were trooping to Minato from all the farming villages, glad in the glorious sunshine which succeeded four days of rain. There were hundreds of horses, wonderful-looking animals in bravery of scarlet cloth and lacquer and fringed nets of leather, and many straw wisps and ropes, with Gothic roofs for saddles, and dependent panniers on each side, carrying two grave and stately-looking children in each, and sometimes a father or a fifth child on the top of the pack-saddle.’
But the fair respite was brief, the foul weather returned. For days Isabella shivered in wet clothes, slept on a soaking bed; trees and bridges were uprooted around them, hillsides and banks slithered into torrents; straw rain-cloaks hung dripping under every cottage eave, wet flanks of horses steamed; the last of the bouillon cubes mildewed and water even infiltrated the tins of condensed milk. Under these conditions, every village inn was swamped with stormbound travellers, men mostly, whom the local geisha entertained with pluckety samisens and reedy songs that shrilled eerily towards the grey heavens. Long into the night the music continued, threaded among the slurps of noodles and saké, the shouts of ribaldry, the creak of a windlass, the sloshing about in bath-tubs and, finally, the snoring. Nor were the sounds always outside Isabella’s room. ‘I had not been long in bed on Saturday night,’ she relates, ‘when I was awoke by Ito bringing in an old hen which he said he could stew till it was tender, and I fell asleep with its dying squeak in my ears, to be awoke a second time by two policemen wanting for some occult reason to see my passport, and a third time by two men with lanterns scrambling and fumbling about the room, for the strings of a mosquito net which they wanted for another traveller.’
That particular interlude occurred in Odate; it was repeated, with local variations on the stringiness of hens, the persistence of policemen, the intrusiveness of other travellers, in one village after another; for there was, she noted, a remarkable homogeneity about the land and its inhabitants. ‘Everywhere the temples and houses are constructed on identically the same plan, and though some may be large and some small, and wooden walls and mud walls, thatched roofs and roofs of bark or shingles, may alternate, the interior of the dwelling-house has always similar recognisable features. Crops vary with the soil and climate, but there is no change in the manner of cultivation; the manuring and other agricultural processes are always the same. And far beyond all this the etiquette which governs society in all its grades is practically the same. The Akita coolie, boor as he may be, is just as courteously ceremonious in his intercourse with others as the Tokyo coolie; the Shirasawa maidens are as self-possessed, dignified and courteous as those of Nikko; the children play at the same games with the same toys, and take the same formal steps in life at the same ages. All are bound alike by the same rigid fetters of social order, a traditional code which, if it works some evil, also works so much good that I should grieve to see it displaced by any perverted imitation of Western manners and customs.’
On each similar landscape, similar figures reappeared. Thus, each village had its headman to oversee the collection of taxes after each harvest, to report on the conditions of ferries and bridges, and to keep the civil register up to date. To facilitate this, each house was legally bound to keep a tally hanging on the doorpost outside with the names, number and sex of its inhabitants inscribed thereon (in one village Ito counted 307 people in twenty-four houses!). Each village also had its priest, to guard the chill grey shrine, to bear the saké cup at weddings and the lotus blossom at funerals, and each had its blind masseur with a shaven pate who shuffled down the street at dusk blowing a bamboo whistle and offering to knead care away from the weary.
The same people seemed always to be trotting from one village to the next along the same sort of miry bridle-path: the mago or female groom, ‘with her toil-hardened thoroughly good-natured face rendered hideous by black teeth’, in trousers, sandals, a towel round her head, trudging with a firm steady stride through streams, swamps and tangles of undergrowth; swarms of ‘gentle, naked, old-fashioned’ children, carrying bundles, chasing dragon-flies, herding cattle; and, on every pass, baggage-coolies, gasping violently with exhaustion. It was sickening to see their distress, Isabella said, describing five she saw one evening: ‘Their eyes were starting out; all their muscles, rendered painfully visible by their leanness, were quivering; rills of blood from the bite of insects which they cannot drive away were literally running all over their naked bodies, washed away here and there by copious perspiration. Truly “in the sweat of their brows” they were eating bread and earning an honest living for their families!’
This sense of continuity, order, familiarity and stability was somewhat modified once they crossed the Tsugaru Straits to the northernmost island of Hokkaido. Here was a life that was free, wild and random compared with that on the main island, with few headmen to count heads or policemen to check passports and blessedly bereft, she told a friend, ‘of the fatiguing and clattering society of the English’. It was a land rich in minerals, virgin soil, bountiful fish-grounds, it was half-tamed and half-explored, with plenty of elbow-room for man and beast. Isabella spent about three weeks there, galloping at last, over plains speckled with damask roses and plumed grasses, rambling along desolate shores scattered with tatty fishing-nets, the bleached ribs of captured whale and ship-wrecked junk. And while there she made the acquaintance
of the Ainu, the original inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago.
The Ainu were sturdy, hairy people of a mild and indolent disposition who lived in dirty lonely settlements along the shores and among the forests. Though primitive and generally held in contempt by the Japanese to whom they bore little physical resemblance, they were courteous and hospitable to strangers, and Isabella was made welcome in their lowly thatched huts, and accepted almost without question as quite ‘one of the family’. Of her first night among them she writes, ‘At this moment a savage is taking a cup of saké by the fire in the centre of the floor. He salutes me by extending his hands and waving them towards his face, and then dips a rod in the saké, and makes six libations to the god – an upright piece of wood with a fringe of shavings planted in the floor of the room. Then he waves his cup several times towards himself, makes other libations to the fire and drinks. Ten other men and women are sitting along each side of the firehole, the chief’s wife is cooking, the men are apathetically contemplating the preparation of their food; and the other women, who are never idle, are splitting the bark of which they make their clothes. I occupy the guest seat – a raised platform at one end of the fire, with the skin of a black bear thrown over it.’
The hunting of the bear, which provided covers for their guest-seats, hide for their boots, meat for their stews and fat for their lamps, was the thrill and focus of the Ainu male’s rather dreary existence. Hunting began in early spring when the village men, armed with knives, spears, bows and arrows tipped with a dark red poisonous paste made from monkshood-root, trooped off into the forest. Keen-eyed, with endless time and knowing where to look, they were sure, eventually, to find a little discoloured patch in the snow under which snuggled a hibernating bear. Often, though harassed by dogs, spears and sticks, the bear refused to leave his cosy hole, and when that happened a brave Ainu, taking comfort from the belief that bears did not attack while inside their own dens, went in after the poor beast. Apparently, the bear’s most common reaction to this intrusion was to seize the man and simply thrust him behind his back, whereupon the man, very cool, pricked the animal’s behind with his knife and thus sent him lumbering forth at last. Upon emerging into the unwelcome light, the bear was shot with poisoned arrows, bitten by dogs, punctured with spears, knifed through the heart, its head and viscera given to its killer, its immense carcass dragged back in triumph to the village. Isabella did not see an actual hunt, but numerous fleshless bear-skulls stuck on poles round the chief’s house were trophies and evidence enough of the hunters’ past victories.
Isabella visited several Ainu settlements, carefully noted all she saw and, in the evenings, sat round the fire with the village elders and, through Ito, plied them with questions. She admired their vigorous, thick-set, strong bodies, their lithe, graceful movements, their luxuriant black hair and beards. Compared to the puny Japanese, they are ‘the most ferocious-looking savages, with a physique vigorous enough for carrying out the most ferocious intentions, but as soon as they speak the countenance brightens into a smile as gentle as that of a woman, something which can never be forgotten’. And so they answered all her questions with a courteous, if puzzled, patience and she learned that the gods they worshipped dwelt in every tree, rock, river and mountain, that they had no written history or law, that they hated the Japanese, but with a resigned and apathetic hatred, for they had no ambition to become part of the infinitely strange New Japan.
All the Ainu wanted of the Japanese was saké, for which they had a pathetic and ruinous addiction. ‘They spend all their gains upon it and drink it in enormous quantities,’ Isabella said. ‘It represents to them all the good of which they know, or can conceive. Beastly intoxication is the highest happiness to which these poor savages aspire, and the condition is sanctified to them under the fiction of “drinking to the gods”.’ They drank the liquor from shallow bowls and used slender pieces of carved wood to hold aside their facial hair so that it did not get wet. These ceremonial ‘moustache-lifters’ were among their few prized possessions and were vaguely holy, as was the saké itself.
Apart from this craving, the Ainu were more or less self-sufficient. They made their own clothes of split bark-cloth and animal furs; they ate dried fish, pumpkin, seaweed, venison, bear and beans; they built their own houses of straw and wood, with convenient ante-chambers for the storing of looms, bows and arrows, nets, mortars and pestles, cooking-pots and tubs. When Isabella asked them if they wanted education for their children or greater opportunities for themselves, they simply smiled with a sad and yet sweet sort of resignation, as if to imply that they were as happy now as they could expect to be.
Isabella would have liked to stay longer among the Ainu, for she found their placid simplicity restful after the pushy noisy curiosity of the Japanese. But she had discovered that Ito had a contract with another foreigner who lived in Hokkaido, and so she insisted that he remain there to honour it, while she determined to ‘buy her own experience’ alone in South Japan. She regretted the necessity, for he had been faithful, honest and diligent in his fashion. ‘Are you sorry it is the last morning? I am’ was his question on the day before she left the island. And she smiled at his arrogant, wistful, intelligent face and agreed that she was indeed sorry their travels together were over.
When she reached the south a few weeks later, there was an autumn snap in the air. The fishing boats on the Inland Sea were trailing iron cages over their sides to catch the squid that would be dried for winter; people were burrowing in the leafy earth of the forests for the succulent mushrooms that came with the first frosts; in the country inns, guests sat swaddled in padded robes on the verandahs, sipped warm saké and looked out upon the hills where maples fired crimson, bamboos danced feathery-yellow and the conifers, as always, paraded in files of purple-green and black.
Back on the conventional globe-trotters’ route, she went to Kyoto, the old capital, that was gay with tea-houses, sombre with shrines, rich in artistic treasures. And while there, Isabella made a genuine and conscientious effort, for the only time in her life, to comprehend Buddhism, a faith about which she had increasingly harsh things to say in later years. When journeying in rural Japan, she had spent much time considering the puzzle of Christian salvation – those diligent, innocent-seeming, merry grooms who led her horses, for instance; surely the immortality of their humble souls could not entirely depend upon the insufficient and tardy efforts of the ‘niggard and selfish’ Christian Church? Surely God numbered ‘the heathen among his inheritance’? Perhaps the portals of Heaven were immeasurably wider than she had been taught in her childhood?
And so, beset by ‘these solemn queries’, she arranged a meeting with one Akamatz, the head of the Monto sect, a man of intellect, culture and energy, with a good command of English and a bright, keen, humourous eye. He and Isabella had one thing in common: they both deplored the increase of ‘godless materialism’ in the land and feared that the indiscriminate and popularised teaching of western scientific philosophy would undermine the people’s faith in all deities, Buddhist or Christian. For the rest their ways diverged, and Isabella was soon tangled in a metaphysical web, ‘lost in a chaos where nothing had form, and birth and death succeeded each other through endless eternities’. It was not her sort of ground; she had no aptitude for esoteric spiritual speculation. If she was to attain salvation, she felt it must be through a life of good works and moral endeavour rather than through mystic communion with the godhead. And so when the priest told her that ‘the end of righteousness is rest,’ and added, ‘To attain Nirvana is to be delivered from the merciless necessity of being born again, to reach a state “in which there are neither ideas, nor a consciousness of the absence of ideas,”’ it filled her only with a profound melancholy.
Akamatz, a courteous host, showed her temples and enchanted gardens where he and his followers dwelt, and conducted her into the former Shogun’s residence where ‘tea and bonbons were served on a gold lacquer tray in antique Kaga cups by nois
eless attendants, in the large room of the summer palace, with its dark posts and ceiling and dull gleams of dead gold, the little light there was falling on the figure of the priest in his vestments, as he still discoursed on his faith. The solemnity was nearly oppressive, and the deserted palace, the representative of a dead faith (for dead it surely is), the deepening gloom, the sighing of a doleful wind among the upper branches, the rattling of the shoji [screens], the low boom of a temple drum in the distance, and the occasional sound of litanies wafted on the wailing breeze, wrought on me so like a spell, that I felt as if I were far from the haunts of living men.’
Depressed by this encounter, only confirmed in her view that Buddhism was a shell of a faith, beautiful, but empty of meaning and purpose, Isabella was relieved to return to the haunts of the living. There, in the streets near the temples, silk-robed salesmen, squatting on the matted floors of their open shops, gently offered tea and suggested she might like to look at their wares – those exquisite wares produced over centuries by this essentially materialistic ‘nation of artists’. Brocades of stiff silver and gold that might soon emblazon the back of a shuffling old priest were unleashed before her, and mossy silks shadowed with a suggestion of bamboo; next door they offered creamy crackle-glaze vases, bulbous weedy-green teapots and angular bronze cranes with haughty glares. ‘I long to buy things for all my friends,’ she exclaimed, ‘but either they would despise them or huddle them together with other things on some vile piece of upholstery!’ It needed, she knew, a visit to Japan before most westerners of her acquaintance could begin to understand the meaning of artistic space, the harmonious wisdom of asymmetry. Nevertheless, she bore away the requisite globe-trotter’s burdens of silks, screens and bronzes – and a mysterious object she called a daimyo’s bath – when she left Japan that winter. ‘I am not fascinated with Japan,’ she concluded, when writing to her publisher about the journey. ‘It is deeply interesting and tempts one to make it a serious study,’ but it had not taken her by storm. She retained that interest and revisited Japan – and her old friends there – several times during her second period of eastern travel in the 1890s; she grew more fond of it – as an orderly and delightful haven of rest from the wear and tear of dirtier, cruder lands.
