Following the Sun-Flag: A Vain Pursuit Through Manchuria

HARDSHIPS OF THE CAMPAIGN

I have taken to the big hills in some despair and to rest from the hardships of this campaign. Truly the life of the war correspondent is hard in Japan.

The Happy Exile left America three years ago with a Puck-purpose of girdling the world. He got no farther than Japan, and here most likely he will rest. He is a big man and a gentle one, and I have seen his six-feet-two frame quiver with joy like jelly as we rickshawed through the streets, he pointing out to me meanwhile little bits of color and life on either side. I have heard him when the dusk rushes seaward muttering half-unconsciously to himself:

"I'm so glad I am here. I'm so glad I am here."

It is the "lust of the eye" he says, and the lust is as fierce now as on the day he landed—which is rare; for the man who has been here before has genuine envy of the eye that sees Japan for the first time. I have watched the man who has seen, showing around the man who has not, with a look of benevolent sympathy and reflected joy such as one may catch on the face of a middle-aged gentleman in the theatre who is watching the keen delight of some youth to whom he is showing the sights of a great city. The Happy Exile was a painter once, but he came, saw Japanese art, and was conquered.

"I have never touched brush to canvas again. What's the use? Why, I can't even draw their characters. Other nations draw this way"; he worked his hands and fingers from the wrist and elbow. "The Japanese learn, drawing their characters in childhood, to use the whole arm. Imagine the breadth and sweep of movement!" The Happy Exile threw up both hands. "It's of no use, at least not for me. I have given it up." So he studies life and Myth in Japan, collects curios, silks, and satsuma, writes a little, dreams a good deal, and gives up his whole heart to his eye. The Happy Exile has a friend, a Japanese friend, who is one of the new types that one finds now in New Japan. His name is Amenemori. He is the husband of O-kin-san, mistress of the tea-house of One Hundred and One Steps, who herself can talk with her guests from all parts of the world in five languages and is an authority on tea-ceremonies and a poetess of some distinction. Amenemori is not only a linguist, but a scholar. He has English, French, German, Italian and Russian at his command, and more. Not long ago a wandering Indian priest came to Yokohama and could talk with nobody. Amenemori tried him in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese without success, and the two finally found communication in Sanscrit. One of Lafcadio Hearn's books is dedicated to him, and through him that author acquired the widest acquaintance with old Japanese poetry yet attained by any foreigner. Illustrating the change that has taken place in an ancient Japanese word to its modern form, he quotes Chaucer and the modern equivalent for the Chaucerian phrase!

But the lust of the eye! Well, the eye is all the stranger has. The work his brain does has little value. No matter what he may learn one day, that thing next day he may have to unlearn. The eye alone gives pleasure—to the color-loving, picture-loving brain—delight unmeasurable: but the eye does not understand. The ear hears strange new calls and sounds—unmusical except in the xylophonic click of wooden getas, the plaintive cry of the blind masseur, and in the national anthem, which is moving beyond words; and the ear, too, does not understand. But the nose—"that despised poet of the senses"—his faculty holds firm the world over. In Tokio he puts on sable trappings at sunset that would gloom the dark hour before dawn. You will get used to it, you are told, and that frightens you, for you don't want to get used to it. You should go to China, is the comfort you get, and in that suggestion is no comfort. Straightway you swear, and boldly:

No call of the East for me,
Till the stink of the East be dead.

That is why a man who comes from a land where he can fill both lungs fearlessly and stoop to drink from any stream that his feet may cross must go down now and then to the sea or turn his face firmly to the hills.

From Yokohama the little coaches start slowly for the country—so slowly that, like Artemus Ward, you wonder if it wouldn't be wise sometimes to put the cow-catcher on behind. There is the charm of thatched cottage, green squares of wind-shaken barley, long waving grass and little hills, pine-crowned; but by and by your heart gets wrung with sympathy for Mother Nature. Every blade of grass, every rush, every little tree seems to have been let grow only through human sufferance. It is as though a solemn court-martial had been held on the life of everything that grew not to make feed for man and man alone, for nowhere are there sheep, cattle, horses, and rarely even a dog. Here and there the little hills have been cut down sheer, that the rice squares might burrow under them. The face of the earth looked terribly man-handled, but the effect was still lovely. The little rows of pines on the hills seemed to have been so left that no rearrangement would have been necessary to transfer them to canvas, and even the crown of a pine sloping from a group of its fellows seemed to have been spared for no other reason than picturesque effect. Perhaps for that reason Nature herself seemed to enter no protest. It was as though she said:

"I know your needs, my children, you do only what you must; you know just what you do, and I forgive you, for you rob me with loving hands. A little farther on is my refuge."

And a little farther on was her refuge in the big volcanic hills, guarded by great white solemn Fuji, where birds sing and torrents lash with swirling foam and a great roar through deep gorges or drop down in white cataracts through masses of trembling green. But you have an hour first in an electric car, with a bell ringing always to keep multitudinous children from the track, along the old road that the Daimios took in their semi-annual trip from their up-country estates to Tokio and back again—the Daimios—gorgeously arrayed, in palanquins, with their retinues following, while the people kept their foreheads to the earth and dared not raise their eyes—honors which they no longer pay even to the great Mikado. It seemed a sacrilege. Then an hour in a rickshaw—two pushers behind, up a deep winding gorge from which comes the wild call of free rushing water, and you are in the untainted air of the primeval Cumberland.

It is pleasant to be welcomed by a host and a host of servants bent at right angles with courtesy—a courtesy that follows you everywhere. Ten minutes later, as I stepped from behind the screen—the ever-present screen—in my room, the Maid of Miyanoshita—another new type in New Japan—stood bowing at my door, and I am afraid I gave her scant greeting. I had read of feminine service, and Saxon-like I was fearsome; but how could I know that she was the daughter of mine host—a man more well-to-do than most of his guests, who include the princes and princesses at times of the royal household—and that she had come merely to welcome me? And how could I know that she was a lady, as I understand the word, for how can a stranger know who is gentlewoman or gentleman in a land where gentle manners are universal, when he has not learned the distinctions of dress and when face and voice give no unerring guidance in any land? Later I was sorry and tried to make good, but here lack of breeding is condoned in a barbarian. Straightway one little maid came in to build a fire, while another swiftly unpacked my bag, laid out evening clothes, and played the part of a blind automatic valet. Embarrassment, even consciousness, fled like a flash, as it must flee with any man who is not blackguard or fool, and I am thinking now how foreigners have lied about the women of Japan.

I want no better dinner than the one that came later, and I went to sleep with mountain air coming like balm through the windows, the music of hushed falling water somewhere, and a cherry tree full-blown shining like a great white, low star at the foot of a mountain that rose darkly toward the stars. This life of the war correspondent in Japan—truly 'tis hard!

Next morning I heard the scampering of many feet and much laughter in the hallways, and I thought there were children out there playing games. It was those brown little chambermaids hard at work. I wonder whence comes the perpetual sunny cheer of these little people; whether it be simple temperament or ages of philosophy—or both.

"You have your troubles," they say, "therefore I must not burden you with mine." And a man will tell you, with a smile, of some misfortune that is almost breaking his heart.

The little maid who had unpacked my bag brought breakfast to me, and I could see that I was invested with some interest which was not at all apparent the night before. Presently it came out:

"You are going to Korea?"

"Yes, I am going to Korea."

"I want to go to Korea, but they won't let girls go."

"Why do you want to go to Korea?"

For the first time I saw Japanese eyes flash, and her answer came like the crack of a whip:

"To fight!"

Among the thousands of applications, many of them written in blood, which the war office has received from men who are anxious to go to the front, is one from just such a girl. In her letter she said that she was the last of an old Samurai family. Her father was killed in the war with China; her only brother died during the Boxer troubles. She begged to be allowed to take the place in the ranks which had always belonged to her family. She could shoot, she said, and ride; and it would be a lasting disgrace if her family name should be missing from the rolls, where it has had an honored place for centuries, now that her country and her Emperor are in such sore need.

After breakfast I climbed the mountain that I could see from my window—it ran not so high by day—and up there great Fuji was gracious enough for one fleeting moment to throw back the gray mantle of a cloud and bare for me for the first time his sacred white head. Coming down, I found a pretty story of American Chivalry and the Maid of Miyanoshita. There was a man here whose nationality will not be mentioned, and a big young American who hasn't lost the traditions of his race and country. With the lack of understanding that is not uncommon with foreigners during their first days in Japan, this particular foreigner said something to the little lady that he would not have said under similar circumstances at home. Now, just behind the hotel are two foaming cascades which drop into a clear pool of water wherein sport many fishes big and little—green, silver, gold, or mottled with white and scarlet—which it is the pleasure of the guests to feed. A few minutes later there was a commotion on the margin of the pond, and those fishes, gathering as usual for biscuit and sugar, got a surprise. The American had invited the other foreigner out there, and the two were having a mighty mill. After a nice solar-plexus landing, the American caught up his opponent and threw him bodily into the fish-pond. The man disappeared next morning by the first train. Wallah, but it was grateful to the soul—striking a Saxon trail like that!

After tiffin I was struggling with Japanese idioms in a guide-book. "I will be glad to help you," said the Maid of Miyanoshita.

She had gone to school in a convent in Tokio. Only Japanese girls and a few Eurasians, girls whose fathers are foreigners, were students, and they were allowed to speak only French. There she was taught to read and write English. To speak it, she had learned only from guests at the hotel.

"Well," I said, "if the Japanese in this book is as bad as the English, I don't think I want to learn it." She looked at the book.

"It iss bad," she said; "there are words here you must not use." (It is impossible to give dialectic form to her quaint variations from normal pronunciation.) By and by we found an example.

"Yes," she said, "sukimas means 'I like.' I like flowers, birds, and so on, but you must not use that—" with one pointed finger on a word that I proceeded straightway to damn forever.

"What is the proper word for that word?"

"Ai suru," she said.

"And what does that mean?"

A vertical line of mental effort broke the smoothness of her forehead.

"It iss deeper than 'like.'"

"Oh," I said. She continued her mental search for an English equivalent. I tried to help.

"Love?" I ventured.

With straight eyes she met purely impersonal inquiry with response even more impersonal.

"Yess," she said.

That afternoon I walked farther up the gorge, past curio shops, with the river roaring far beneath and water tumbling from far above, and I turned in for a moment where the word "Archery" curved in big letters over a doorway, to see an old chap put eight arrows out of ten in a small target a hundred feet away, and triumphantly shout:

"Russian!"

And then on past tea-houses and workshops and rice-mills with undershot water-wheels such as I had left in the Cumberland Mountains. In a rice square below and beyond me three little girls were playing. When they saw me they ran toward the road, stooping now and then to pick up something as they ran. The littlest one held up to me a bunch of blue flowers. I was thrilled; here I thought is where I get the courtesy of the land even from the peasant class and untainted by the rude manners of the Saxon and his Caucasian kind. I took off my hat.

"Arigato," I said, which means "Thank you." Out came the mite's chubby hand.

"Shinga!" she said, "mucha shinga!"

Now I have not been able to find anyone who knows what "shinga" means except the little highway robbers who held me up in the road and made it plain by signs. I went down into my pocket for a coin. Up stepped number two of the little hold-ups, with number three in close support; but I was too disappointed and sore, and I declined. Those three little ones followed me half a mile and up many score of steep steps to a temple in a grove, still proffering flowers and saying,

"Shinga." It was sad.

Going back I met another mite of a girl in a many-colored kimono. She said something. I am afraid I glowered, but she said it again, with a bow and a smile, and it was—

"Konnichi-wa!" which means "Good-day." Then wasn't I sorry! This was the real thing. I took off my hat, and then and there this little maid and I exchanged elaborate Oriental ceremonies in the middle of the road, concluding with three right-angle bows of farewell, each saying three times that very beautiful Japanese good-by,

"Sayonara."

I went on cheered and thinking. This was Old and New Japan, the lingering beauty of one, the trail of the tourist over the other, and this was Japan in general. When you are looking for a thing you get something else; when you look for something else you get what you were looking for. The trouble was that in neither case should I have been surprised, for the Japanese even say,

"It is not surprising if the surprising does not surprise," which must be thought about for a while. And then again, What's the odds, no matter what happens.

"Shikata ga nai," says the Japanese; "It can't be helped"—a fatalistic bit of philosophy that may play an important part on many future battle-fields.

The Little Maid of Miyanoshita and I were tossing bits of cracker to the gold-fishes in the pond, and each bit made a breaking, flashing rainbow as they rushed for it in a writhing heap. She had never been to America nor to England.

"Wouldn't you like to go?"

"Verry much," she said.

"Well, aren't you going some day?"

"I hope so, but—" she paused; "if I wore these clothes the people would follow me about the streets. If I wore European clothes, I would look like—what you say—a fright."

"Never!" Again she shook her head.

"Yess, yess I would." And the pity of it is I am afraid she was right.

The Little Maid did not walk the hills much.

"Japanese men do not like for women to go about much," she said. "My uncle does not like that I go about alone, but my father he does not care. He has been in America."

"It is perfectly safe?"

"Yes, perrfectly safe. Is it not so in America?"

"Well, no, not always; at least not in the South, where I come from."

She did not ask why, though I should not have been surprised to learn that she knew, and I did not explain.

She was very fond of Schiller, she said, and she had read many American and English novels. She liked "The Crisis" very much—she did not mention others—though she liked better the novels that were written by women.

"Because you understand them better?"

"Not only that," she said slowly, "but I think that men who write novels try to make the women happy, and the women who write novels do not do that so much; and I think the women must be nearer the truth."

She turned suddenly on me:

"You have written a book."

"Guilty," I said.

"And what does that mean?"

"It means that I have," I said lamely. We talked international differences.

"American women use very many pins, is it not true?"

"I think it is true," I said.

"We do not," she said; "we use what you call"—with her fingers on a little cord at the breast of her kimono—"strings. But," she added suddenly, "an American says to me that I must not speak of such things."

"Tut!"

"Well," she said, "I do not see anything wrong."

In America, I explained, we put the woman in a high place and looked up at her.

"Is it not so in Japan?" I said.

"No," she said simply, "it is not so in Japan." She thought a while. "That must be very nice for the woman in America," she said.

"I think it is," I said.

"But then," she said, to explain the mystery, they are so well ed-u-ca-ted."

"Well, I don't think it is because they are so well educated," I said.

"Then they are worthy," said the Little Maid.

I have been to Big Hell—a climb of some three thousand feet past rice squares and barley fields and little forests of bamboo trees, where on a God-forsaken mountain top sulphurous smoke belches into the clouds that drift about it. Now smoke suggests human habitation, human food, and human comfort, and that smoke swirling up there gave the spot a loneliness unspeakable. Under you the gray earth was hot, here and there were springs of boiling water, and the ashy crust crackled under your feet. Around the crest we went, and down through a forest of big trees left standing because the place was a royal preserve. The absence of animals, tame or wild, has constantly depressed me ever since I have been in Japan. Even up there in the hills I had seen nothing hopping, crawling, or climbing by the roadside or in the woods, and I could see nothing now.

"Is there nothing wild up here?" I said.

"Oh, yes," said the guide, "there are deer and monkeys." If he had said there were dodos I could have been no more surprised; but to this day I have seen nothing in freedom except a few birds in the air.

By and by a thatched roof came in view. The path led sharply around one corner of the house and I was brought up with a gasp. I had read and heard much about bathing customs in Japan. The government has tried, I believe, to legislate into the people Occidental ideas of modesty. One regulation provided that the sexes should be separated. They were separated—by a bamboo rod floating on the water. Another time it was announced that bathing trunks must be worn at a certain place by the sea. One old chap issued leisurely from his house on the hill-side and stalked down without clothes, swinging his trunks in his hand. After he got into the water he put the trunks on, and as soon as he came out he took them off again and stalked home swinging them as before.

Well, there they were, old and young and of both sexes, and it was apparent that the regulations of the bamboo rod and the bathing trunks had not reached that high. It was a natural Turkish bath-house, and it seems that the farmers around Big Hell furnish a certain amount of produce each year to the proprietor for the privilege of hot baths, and when work is slack they go up there—husbands and wives, sons and daughters—and stay for days. Apparently work was slack just then. The bath, some ten feet square, and sunk in the floor, was screened from the gaze of the passing pedestrian and the coldness of the outer air merely by slender bamboo rods, some eighteen inches apart. It was full to the brim.

That night an Englishman seemed greatly taken with Big Hell.

"Most extraordinary!" he said. "Do you know, they never minded us at all—not at all. A chap had a camera, and one dear old lady actually stood upright when he was taking a picture. They asked me to come in, and I really think I would, but—gad, you know, there wasn't any room."

The key-note of this symphony of ills will not be sounded here.

She could play the koto (the harp), and the piano a little—could the Maid of Miyanoshita. She would play neither for me, but that afternoon she would take me, she said, to hear a friend play the koto—an elderly friend, whom she called, she said, her aunt. Later, she said she had asked another gentleman also. Now when I spoke once of the musical click of the getas, the Happy Exile had told me that the wearers often chose them, taking only such pairs as pleased the individual ear. The statement has since been much laughed at, so I asked the Maid of Miyanoshita for confirmation. She at least did not choose her getas for their sound.

"But," she said, "the Japanese say the getas go—

The notes she gave were the notes I had heard on the stone platforms of every station between Tokio and Yokohama, and going straightway to the piano I found those notes to be F and D in the scale of F Minor. Let the laugh proceed. The Happy Exile possibly might say that those notes were the prominent ones in some old national song, and that the geta-makers had been unconsciously reproducing them ever since.

It was raining. Alack and alas! the Little Maid carried an American umbrella—impious trail of the Saxon! while the Other Man and I bore picturesque Japanese ones that would have given the crowning touch to her, but looked simply ridiculous over us. Thus we went to meet the exquisite courtesy and genuine kindness of a real Japanese home.

Two kotos were played for us, while the players sang "Wind Among the Pines," and the tale of the fairies who fell in love with the fisherman.

"Do you like Japanese music?" said the Little Maid to the Other Man.

"Yes," he said promptly, lying like a gentleman.

"Don't you think it is rather monotonous?" she asked.

"Well—um—um. Don't you like Japanese music?" he said, taking refuge.

"Well," she said, "I like your music better, I think. It is more lively and has more variety."

Then we had tea, and after tea of the kind usually served in Japan, the husband, a fierce Samurai in the pictures he showed us, but now a genial, broad-smiling doctor of the old Japanese school, insisted that we should take bowls of powdered tea which he prepared with his own hands. In the drinking of this the Little Maid instructed us. We were to take the bowl, the left hand underneath, the fingers of the right hand clasped about it, lift it to the forehead, a movement of unspoken thanks, and very gently, so as not to suggest that the tea needed to be dissolved, were to roll the tea around in the bowl three times and then take one drink—making much noise, meanwhile, with the lips to show how much we enjoyed it.

"That is very vulgar in your country," interrupted the Little Maid, "is it not so?"

"Well," I said, "lots of people do it, but not for the reason of courtesy."

We were to roll it around three times more, and then drink again; three times more, and a third drink, leaving this time but a little, which, without being rolled around again, was to be drunk at a swallow—three drinks and one swallow to the bowl. O-kin-san says that this last swallow should be only the foam, which must be drunk to show that the tea is so good that the guest must have even the foam; and that not until then does the noise of appreciation come, and then only because the foam cannot be drunk without noise. It was well. We exchanged autographs and cards. With the kind permission of the Little Maid's aunt we took pictures of the interior, and then with much bowing and many "sayonaras" we passed out under the cherry trees.

"We say 'Good-morning,'" said the Little Maid, explaining the courtesies of Japanese greeting and good-by, "and we bow; and we say 'It is a long while since I have seen you,' or 'It is a fine day,' and we bow again. At the end of each sentence you must bow, and it is the same when you say good-by."

Before I learned that the Mikado had sent a general edict through the land that all foreigners in Japan were to be treated with particular consideration while this war is going on—thus making it safer for the tourist now in this country than it ever has been or will be, perhaps, for a long time—I had been greatly impressed by the absence of all signs of disorder, street quarrels, loud talking, and by the fact that in Tokio, one of the largest cities in the world, one could go about day or night in perfect safety. I told this to the Maid of Miyanoshita.

"So desuka," she said without surprise, and that means "Indeed." And when she said later that there were many Japanese novelists, but they did not write love stories, I was reminded further that I had seen no man in Japan turn his head to look at a woman who had passed him—no exchange of glances, no street gallantry at all.

"The song of the 'Goo-goo Eyes,'" I said, "would never have been written in Japan."

"What iss 'Goo-goo Eyes'?" said the Little Maid, mystified.

Then had I trouble—but I must have made it clear at last.

"Perhaps the Japanese girl does not want to be seen—looking."

"Oh, you mean that she may look, but the foreigner doesn't see it?"

"Well, we are all human. That is very frank, is it not?"

It was frank—very frank—and of an innocence not to be misunderstood save by a fool. Then I got a degree.

"But I am always frank with you, for if you are what you say 'guilty,' I think you must understand. I call you to myself a Doctor of Humanity."

Wallah, but the life is hard!

By and by this remarkable Little Maid went on:

"The Japanese may be what you call in love, but they must not tell it—must not even show it."

"Not even the men?"

"No, not even the men. Is it not so in your country?"

I laughed.

"No, it is not so in my country." I found myself suddenly imitating her own slow speech. "That's the first thing the man in my country does. Sometimes he tells it, even when he can't ask the girl to marry him, and sometimes they even tell it over there when they don't mean it."

"So desuka!"

"They call that 'flirting.'"

"Yes, I know 'flirting,'" said the Little Maid.

"It is not a very nice word," I said. "There is no flirting in Japan?"

"There is no chance. Parents and friends make marriage in Japan."

"They don't marry for love?"

"It is as in France—not for love. And in America?"

"Well, we don't think it nice for people to marry unless they are in love."

"So desuka," she said, which still means "Indeed." And then she went on:

"Japanese girls obey their parents." And then she added, rather sadly, I thought, "and sometimes they are very unhappy."

"And what then?"

"Oh, deevorces—are very common among the lower classes, but among the middle and upper classes it is verry difficult."

"So desuka!" I said, for I was surprised.

"So desu," said the Little Maid, which is the proper answer.

The Maid of Miyanoshita loves flowers, and at sunset this afternoon I saw her coming down from her garden, where she had been at work. She had a great round straw hat on her black hair. I got her to draw it about her face with both hands, and with a camera she was caught as she laughed. We went down the steps and stopped above the cascade which shook the water where the goldfishes were playing.

Now I have been a month in Japan; I have seen the opening of the Diet, heard the Emperor chant the fact that he was at peace with all the world save Russia, and observed that he must show origin from the gods in other ways than in his stride. I have dined with the gracious representative of the Stars and Stripes and his staff, who seem to have taken on an Oriental suavity that bodes well for our interests in this Far East, and have seen an Imperial Highness play the delicate and difficult double rÔle of hand-shaking Democrat to Americans and God-head to his own people—while both looked on. I have eaten a Japanese dinner at the Maple Club, while Geishas and dancing-girls held fast the wondering Occidental eye; have heard, there, American college songs sung by Japanese statesmen, and have joined hands with them in a swaying performance of "Auld Lang Syne." I have seen wrestling matches that looked at first sight like two fat ladies trying to push each other out of a ring—but which was much more. I have been to the theatre, to find the laugh checked at my lips and to sit thereafter in silence, mystification, and wonder. I have tossed pennies to children—the "babies" who here "are kings"—while wandering through blossoming parks and among people whom I cannot yet realize as real. I have visited shrines, temples; have heard the wail of kite and the croak of raven over the tombs of the Shoguns, and have seen a Holy Father beating a drum and praying a day-long prayer with a cigarette-stub behind one ear. I have learned that this is the land of the seductive "chit" and the deceptive yen which doubles your gold when you arrive and makes you think that when you have spent fifty cents you still have a dollar of it left. Moreover, I have seen the glory of cherry-blossoms. But of all these trifles and more—more, perhaps, anon. I pulled a little red guide-book out of my pocket.

"That word," I asked, pointing to the proper one, "would you use that word to your—well, your mother?"

"No," she said very slowly, and with straight eyes, again answering impersonal inquiry with response even more impersonal, "I—don'—don't—think—you—would—use—that word—to your—mother."

The sunlight lay only on the great white crest of Fuji. Everywhere else the swift dusk of Japan was falling. In it the cherry-tree was fast taking on the light of a great white star. In the grove above us a nightingale sang.

Truly 'tis hard.

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