by M. M. Kaye
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I had been wondering how to describe Japan, when memory came up with a phrase that had become something of a catchword in my family. It dated from the days when audiences queued to see the latest light opera by Gilbert and Sullivan at London’s Savoy Theatre, and Tacklow, a dedicated Gilbert and Sullivan fan, had been taken to the opening night of Ruddigore by an elderly friend who was the music critic of one of London’s newspapers. The old gentleman had not been favourably impressed by the opening acts and had said so in a series of audible asides. At last the score came up with the ditty that begins: ‘There grew a little flower…’ and this so caught his fancy that he kept on repeating, throughout: ‘Sweetly pretty! – Sweetly pretty!’
Well, that is how Japan struck me. It wasn’t beautiful in the way that the Taj Mahal and the Dāl Lake at sunrise and sunset are beautiful, or that fishing fleet caught by the light of a rising moon. But it was sweetly pretty … Adorably so, at times. Yet I find that my memory of it is extraordinarily sketchy, and there are blanks I can’t account for. Perhaps this was because none of us seem to have taken many photographs while we were there. Bets and Mother were both great ones for taking photographs and keeping albums, and though I was not (until the war years), our combined albums have taken the place of the diaries that none of us kept in those days, and I have found them invaluable.
There are endless snapshots taken in India and China, but the few taken in Japan are nearly all of groups. The only one we were allowed to take on the Kaizan Maru was a group of our party standing together in the bows, with a very small and far-away smudge on the sea behind us which I take to be one of the ‘thousand islands’. I know that the ship stopped briefly at Nagasaki in order to discharge cargo and several passengers (and possibly take on more of both), because we had specially chosen a ship that took us via that port, instead of one that made straight for Yokohama. The reason for this was that the hero of The Crimson Azaleas had a Japanese house, ‘The House of the Clouds’, on a hilltop above Nagasaki. Yet I am quite sure that we didn’t go ashore there; and what’s more, I haven’t the faintest recollection of laying eyes on the place.
Did we perhaps put in by night and leave again at daybreak? Or could the absence of any snapshots taken of Nagasaki have had something to do with the presence of our official guide? Were we again requested not to take any? If so I don’t remember it. The only ban on our taking photographs or sketching was the one placed on us by the Captain of the Kaizan Maru, and the chances are that he was merely playing safe.
I remember a lot of train journeys. But not where we went or, specifically, what the country we passed through looked like – except that after China it looked very small and neat. A miniature country. One thing I do remember about it was that it lived up to all my expectations, which is quite something to be able to say of any land, even in those days.
We must have spent at least one night in a hotel at Kobe, because Tacklow wanted to see Nara. But though I remember Nara quite clearly, I have no recollection at all of where we stayed; or for how long. I think we went there by train. Looking at the map, it is quite a short journey. And we must have taken a boat for the last part of it, because I remember approaching it from the sea and admiring the huge red-lacquered torii (the graceful free-standing ceremonial gate that all over Japan marks the approach to a temple) which stands above its own reflection in the shallows off the coast of Nara Park. Perhaps I should say of this one that it ‘used to stand’. For the park lies at no great distance from Kobe, and the epicentre of the latest earthquake to rack Japan was in a small island not so far from Kobe – which having been hit first by the quake was then destroyed by the resulting fireball caused by fractured gas and oil pipes. Judging from the appalling destruction that was caused in Kobe, it would be a near miracle if the charming park of Nara, with its tall cryptomeria trees, its lovely pagoda that stands near a lake screened by weeping willows, its avenues of stone lanterns, its toriis and temples and its herds of deer that are so tame – and so greedy – that they nudge you with their soft noses or (less pleasantly, if they are stags) with their horns, urging you to feed them with the biscuits that can be bought from stalls set up by vendors among the forest of tree-trunks, could possibly have survived.
We indulged the deer by buying little paper sacks full of biscuits, which was a mistake, for they immediately became more and more importunate and eventually had to be chased away. But biscuits were not the only thing for sale on the stalls. There were the usual cheap souvenirs, most of which appeared to be made in Birmingham, but among the junk were a few little painted Japanese figures, most beautifully and very simply carved out of wood; men and women and mikados, only a few inches high. Bets and I bought two each – they were not cheap! – and we have them still. They are our luck-pieces, and have travelled everywhere with us.
We all went shopping in every place we visited, and if we’d had the money to spend, we’d have spent every cent of it and returned from Japan stony broke. So it’s just as well we hadn’t got too much available, for the Japanese shops were irresistible. Most of my savings had vanished in Bead Street and Flower Street in Peking’s Chinese City. What was left went on two magnificent Japanese obis, one of pale green satin with a woven design of yellow and white chrysanthemums, each petal, and the darker green leaves, edged with bright gold, and the other a day-time obi of dull orange silk, also patterned with chrysanthemums in several shades of orange, with a single flower picked out in gold thread.
I had hoped to buy myself a kimono or an obi patterned with sprays of fruit blossom, but here I came up against a Japanese custom which still fascinates me, and which I imagine is unique. In all the shops we visited in Kobe, Osaka and Tokyo, Nikko and Yokohama, and a couple of other towns whose names I can’t remember, not a shop had anything patterned with blossom. Why? Because it was autumn, of course! Blossom is for the spring, and no one would be so out-of-date as to wear it in the autumn. What’s more, they didn’t. Only after I had discovered this fascinating Japanese quirk did I notice that not a kimono or an obi did I see with a blossom-pattern – either worn or on a shelf – during our entire visit. ‘Come back in the spring,’ they urged, ‘and you will find hundreds of them – thousands. But at this time of year they have all been put away in store until then.’
The prettiest things in Nara – or indeed in all Japan – were the children, and next to them the women. For, thank heavens, the vast majority still wore their national dress. I can’t remember seeing a single child togged up in European clothes, while the sight of a woman in them was so rare that you turned round to stare. Their men, alas, were beginning to imitate the West; still not to any great extent, though, as in China, far too many of them had taken to ruining the effect of their traditional dress by topping it with a felt Homburg or a straw boater. Or even an occasional bowler hat.
No one could have visited Japan in the days before the Second World War without being impressed by the charm and the sheer numbers of the children. One got the impression that they outnumbered the adults by roughly fifty to one, and every one of them was a miniature version of its elders in the matter of dress: the boys in dark-coloured kimonos and the girls in paler and brighter ones, complete with obis that tied at the back in a large bow into which the younger ones frequently tucked a doll in emulation of their mothers, who carry their babies in this manner. Even the older girls learnt early to carry a younger sister or brother on their backs, and one often saw a child who could not have been much more than six years old carrying a tiny baby on her back, tucked into her obi.
Since no one in Japan wore shoes when indoors, the almost universal footwear consisted of tabis – thick white socks with a single toe on which, outside the house, they wore gaetas, flat wooden clogs held on by a string that passed between the big toe, and lifted the wearer free of mud or puddles. The clatter of these clogs was the most familiar of all the sounds in Japan. It provided a backdrop to every day, and a Japanese woman or child, setting out to go s
hopping, visiting or to school, was a delightful sight: swathed in a wide-sleeved kimono with an obi that tied in an enormous bow at her back, her hair pulled up smoothly and held in place with several huge pins, perched up on her black-lacquered gaetas and carrying, either against the sun or the rain, a bright coloured oiled paper umbrella. They were in themselves sufficiently decorative to make the dullest street a treat to the eye.
Looking back over the last seventy years or so, the only countries to have escaped the craze for dressing up as Americans or Europeans are the Asian ones. Their women have continued to wear their own dress: saris, shalwar-kameez and the shador, which doesn’t seem to have inhibited them in the matter of work, or made them look any less charming. I presume, though, that Japanese women will soon have altered in shape to suit modern clothes. After all, Western ones have done it often enough. After the opulent curves of the early Georgians, we turned ourselves into string-beans when the Directoire fashions came in, went back with Victoria to waists and crinolines, developed busts and bottoms when bustles became the fashion, and with the advent of the First World War abandoned tight lacing, let ourselves spread, and were once again string-beans with, this time, cropped hair and skirts above the knee in the Roaring Twenties. If we can do it, so can Japan. But it’s a pity, and I’m glad I saw them while they were still different – and enchanting to look at.
Chapter 13
One of the things that we had to see while in Japan was their sacred mountain, Fujiyama. And we saw it from a train in ‘the early, pearly morning’, rising above a belt of mist into a sky of duck-egg green, and looking as if it had just been painted on a huge canvas by a master artist and lit by an expert in theatrical lighting. I am told that ‘Fuji-san’ stands only 14,000 feet above sea level, which compared with peaks in the Himalayas makes it of little account. But like Kashmir’s Nanga Parbat, there is no other high peak anywhere near it, which gives it an illusion of being a great deal higher than it actually is.
Standing alone against a cloudless sky, Fujiyama lives up to everything you have ever read or been told about it. But it is so exactly like the thousands of postcards, paintings and photographs that you will find in every souvenir shop throughout the land, that when you first see it you cannot believe that what you are looking at is the real thing and not an enormous poster. I thought for years that there could be nothing like it anywhere else in the world; until almost half a century later I saw, from a room on the thirtieth floor or so of a hotel in Washington State an almost exact replica of it in the evening sky, far away beyond the intervening city. And for a ridiculous moment I tried to visualize how near we were on the atlas to Japan.
That replica, I learned, was Mt St Helens. But Fuji-san is still unequalled, for not long afterwards Mt St Helens erupted, levelling miles of forest in every direction and blowing a large part of its top off, so that it no longer bears any resemblance to the larger and world-famous volcano on the far side of the Pacific.
The only thing I remember about Osaka is the castle, which like the one in Lays of Ancient Rome looked as though it had been ‘piled by the hands of giants/For godlike kings of old’, and was probably capable of withstanding any number of earthquakes. There were any number of temples, all with charming gardens and cloisters for the monks, and dozens of tea houses, where you were waited on by pretty girls in delightful kimonos and enormous obis patterned with autumn leaves, chrysanthemums and night-birds, who served you on their knees (the girls, not the birds), each folded double until their noses touched the matting. The only trouble was that you too were expected to sit on the floor and keep your feet out of the way; which is an art that I suspect has to be learnt young. We were none of us very good at it, except Bets, who had always been able to cross her feet behind her head – and could probably still do so if she hadn’t, in her old age and a careless moment, fallen off the Aga and broken her hip. But that, as Kipling was fond of saying, is another story.
Leaving the coast behind us, we moved inland to Tokyo and spent a few nights at the Imperial, which must, at that time, have been one of the most famous hotels in the world. And, I would have said, one of the ugliest. But then it had not been built to look pretty. It had been specifically designed by America’s most innovative architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, to stand up to a major earthquake. And it had done so.
Lloyd Wright used the idea of a raft on which the building would float, and where it would ride the tremors of a quake as a laden raft would ride a rough sea. He also built it with many different materials, all of which would give to the movement instead of standing rigid and cracking with the strain. And it worked. It looked as if it had been built of bits and bobs of anything that came to hand, including lots of what was probably pumice stone since it is porous and excessively hard and so light that it floats. The general effect was like the Witch’s House in Hansel and Gretel. It all looked madly edible. It also looked like a trap, and was.
Nothing in that hotel looked like it was supposed to look. Handles of drawers or doors were flat-faced squares, oblongs, triangles or other geometrical shapes. Lamps and basins were hidden in the walls, and only sprang out provided you pressed down the right oblong, or pushed up that black and orange thingamebob on the left. (‘No, that’s not right, try sliding sideways … Oops! – sorry! Well, how was I to know that it would bring a mosquito net down on your head? You’re lucky it wasn’t the shower! Does anyone know where the electric light switch is? Or what it looks like? Or where the room service bells are – or the telephone? Help! I’m locked in! Help!’)
Well, I suppose that is somewhat exaggerated. But not much, I assure you. What you needed to do – provided anyone had warned you, which of course no one had – was to pinpoint the door you had just been ushered in by, and then make sure of its position in relation to the window and the balcony, and the doors into the dressing-room and the bathroom. For if you didn’t (and Bets and I didn’t), the minute the bellhop vanished, you were lost. Because nothing looked in the least like a door, and if you weren’t careful you’d push or pull something, or shove it to the left when you should have shoved it to the right, and suddenly find that you had blacked out the windows and/or turned on the fire alarm.
The rest of that unique building was on the same lines. It had come through an earthquake tremor as a boat rides out rough weather, and should have been kept as a monument, if nothing else. But it was pulled down or perhaps fell victim to some bombing raid in the Second World War. I felt sad when I heard that the gallant old Gingerbread Palace had died the death.
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Bets and I had been used from our earliest years to travelling on train journeys that necessitated spending a night or two in a railway carriage. But though we were familiar (via films) with American-style ‘sleeping-cars’, we had never seen one until we visited Japan, and I came to the conclusion that although the Americans may have invented them, they were obviously made for the Japanese and were never likely to catch on where the prudish and self-conscious British were concerned.
All that crawling into coffin-like, curtained upper berths in which you were expected to undress and wriggle into a nightdress or pyjamas. This after (or before, take your choice) washing in a two-by-four communal lavatory-cum-washroom at the far end of a corridor full of scurrying Europeans bundled in dressing-gowns and laden with sponge bags, plus scores of blithely uninhibited and totally naked Japanese of both sexes, who have never considered that there is anything particularly interesting or attractive in the naked body, and happily dress and undress in the aisle without bothering to go through all those bashful contortions behind the inadequate curtains of a pint-sized bunk.
As an ex-art student, accustomed to drawing the nude, I was not as startled by this lavish display of nudity as my elders and betters – in particular, a party of elderly globe-trotters from the English Midlands, who were obviously speechless from shock and doing their best not to look, an exercise that proved impossible, since there was a naked bod wherever they turned their ho
rrified gaze. The poor things could only sidle past, shielding their eyes with one hand, and bolting for cover into their berths like startled rabbits.
The Japanese children, dressed or undressed, were adorable. One of these cherubic creatures, however, got a black mark from the foreign contingent in the sleeper. The little blighter woke up at far too early an hour, and having nagged its mother into dressing it and letting it loose, armed itself with a toy drum and scampered up and down the aisle between the curtained ranks of sleeping-berths, banging on the drum and shouting war-cries.
One could hear and feel the stir and rustle of numerous sleepers prematurely roused from their slumbers and hoping that the brat’s owners would take the necessary steps to shut up their darling. But no such luck.
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For Tacklow and myself, the high spot of our visit to Japan was Nikko. Nikko was where the author of The Crimson Azaleas began his story. He made it sound so attractive that Tacklow and I can have been only two among thousands of readers who had made a vow to try and visit it some day. One day …
