After a long still-hunt in Tokio, and a long pursuit through Manchuria, following that Sun-Flag of Japan, I gave up the chase at Liao-Yang. Not being a military expert, my purpose was simply to see under that flag the brown little "gun-man"—as he calls himself in his own tongue—in camp and on the march, in trench and in open field, in assault and in retreat; to tell tales of his heroism, chivalry, devotion, sacrifice, incomparable patriotism; to see him fighting, wounded—and, since such things in war must be—dying, dead. After seven months my spoils of war were post-mortem battle-fields, wounded convalescents in hospitals, deserted trenches, a few graves, and one Russian prisoner in a red shirt. Upon that unimportant personal disaster I No more enthusiastic pro-Japanese than I ever touched foot on the shores of the little island, and no Japanese, however much he might, if only for that reason, value my good opinion, can regret more than I any change that took place within me when I came face to face with a land and a people I had longed since childhood to see. I am very sorry to have sounded the personal note so relentlessly in this little book. That, too, was unavoidable, and will, I hope, be pardoned. Big Stone Gap, Virginia. FOLLOWING THE SUN-FLAGFOLLOWING THE SUN-FLAG I THE TRAIL OF THE SAXON An amphitheatre of feathery clouds ran half around the horizon and close to the water's edge; midway and toward Russia rose a great dark shadow through which the sun shone faintly. Such was the celestial setting for the entrance of a certain ship some ten days since at sunset into the harbor of Yokohama and the Land of the Rising Sun; but no man was to guess from the strange pictures, strange people, and jumbled mass of new ideas and impressions waiting to make his brain dizzy on shore, that the big cloud aloft was the symbol of actual war. No sign was to come, by night or by day, from the tiled roofs, latticed windows, paper houses, the foreign architectural monstrosities of wood and stone; the lights, lanterns, For more than a month I had been on the trail of the Saxon, the westward trail on which he set his feet more than a hundred years ago, "This is a hell of a town," said the conductor cheerfully. I waited for an explanation. It came. "Why, I went to a nigger-minstrel show here the other night. A mountaineer in the gallery shot a nigger and a white man dead in the aisle, but the band struck up 'Dixie,' and the show never stopped. But one man left the house and that was Bones. They found him at the hotel, but he refused to go back. 'I can't be funny in that place,' he said." Along that old wilderness trail I went across the Ohio, through prairie lands, across the rich fields of Iowa, the plains of Nebraska, over the Rockies, and down into the great deserts that stretch to the Sierras. Along went others who were concerned in that trail: three Japanese students hurrying home from England, France, and Germany, bits of that network of eager investigation that Japan has spread over Through the stamping grounds of Wister's "Virginian" and other men of fact and fiction in the West, the trail led—through barren wastes with nothing alive in sight except an occasional flock of gray, starved sheep with a lonely herder and his sheep-dog watching us pass, while a blue-eyed frontiersman gave me more reasons for race arrogance with his tales of Western ethics in the old days: How men trusted each other and were not deceived in friendship and in trade; how they sacrificed themselves for each other without regret, and no wish for reward, and honored and protected women always. Then forty miles of snowsheds over the He had sailed one wide ocean—this Saxon—the other and wider one was by comparison a child's play on a mill-pond with a boat of his own making, and over it I followed him on. On the dock two days later I saw my first crowd of Japanese, in Saxon clothes, waving flags, and giving Saxon yells to their countrymen who were going home to fight. After that, Seven days later, long, slowly rising slopes of mountains veiled in mist came in view, and we saw waves of many colors washing the feet of newest America, where the Saxon has pitched his latest but not his most Eastern—as I must say now—camp; and where he is patching a human crazy quilt of skins from China, Japan, Portugal, America, England, Africa. The patching of it goes swiftly, but there will be one hole in the quilt that will never be filled again on this earth, for the Hawaiian is going—as he himself says, he is "pau," which in English means finished, done for, doomed. Now girls who are three-quarters Saxon dance the hula-hula for tourists, and but for a movement of their feet, it is the dance of the East wretchedly and vulgarly done, and the spectator would wipe away, if he could, every memory but the wailing song of the woman with the guitar—a song which to my ear had no more connection with the At a big white hotel that night hundreds of people sat in a brilliantly lighted open-air garden with a stone floor and stone balustrade, and heard an Hawaiian band of many nationalities play the tunes of all nations, and two women give vent to that adaptation of the Methodist hymn that passes for an Hawaiian song. Every possible human mixture of blood I had seen that day, I fancied, but of the morals that caused the mixture I will not speak, for the looseness of them is climatic and easily explained. I am told that after five or six years the molecules even in the granite of the New England character begin to get restless. Still there seems to be hope on the horizon. At midnight a bibulous gentleman descended from a hack in front of the hotel. "Roderick Random," he said to his Portuguese driver, "this is a bum-m town," spelling the word out thickly. Roderick smiled with polite acquiescence. The bibulous gentleman spoke likewise to the watchman at the door. "Quite right, sir," said the watchman. The elevator got the same blighting criticism from the visitor, whose good-night to the clerk at the desk still was: "This is a bum-m town." The clerk, too, agreed, and the man turned away in disgust. "I can't get an argument out of anybody on that point," he said—all of which would seem to cast some doubt on the public late-at-night flaunting of vice in Honolulu. Two pictures only I carried away of the many I hoped to see—the Hawaiian swimmers, bronzed and perfect as statues, who floated out to meet us and dive for coins, and a crowd of little yellow fellows, each on the swaying branch of the monkey-pod tree, black hair shaking in the wind, white teeth flashing, faces merry, and mouths stretched wide with song. Thence eleven long, long days to that sunset entrance into the Land of the Rising Sun—where Perry came to throw open to the world the long-shut sea portals of Japan. The Japanese way of revealing heart-beats is not the way of the Occidental world, and On a certain bluff sits a certain tea-house—you can see it from the deck of the ship. It is the tea-house of One Hundred and One Steps, and the mistress of it is O-kin-san, daughter of the man who was mayor when Perry opened the sea portals at the mouth of the cannon, whose guest Perry was, and whose friend. O-kin-san's people lost their money once, and she opened the tea-house, as the American girl under similar circumstances would have taken to the typewriter and the stenographer's pen. The house has a year of life for almost every one of the steps that mount to it, which is ancient life for Japan, where fires make an infant life of three years for the average Japanese home. The tea-girls are O-kin-san's own kin. Everything under her roof is blameless, and the women of any home in any land can be taken there fearlessly. An American enthusiast—a voluntary exile, After tea and sake and little Japanese cakes and peanuts, thence straightway to Tokio, whence the soldiers went to the front and the unknown correspondent was going, at that time, to an unknown destination in an unknown time. It is an hour between little patches of half-drowned rice bulbs, cottages thatched with rice straw, with green things growing on the roof, and little gardens laid out with an art minute and exquisite, blossoming trees of wild cherry, that beloved symbol of Japanese bravery because it dares to spread its petals under falling snow, dashed here and there with the red camellia that is unlucky because it drops its blossom whole and suggests the time when the Japanese head might fall At Tokio outward evidences of war were as meagre as ever. But to that lack, the answer is, "It is not the Japanese custom." I am told that the night war was declared the Japanese went to bed, but about every bulletin board there is now always an eager crowd of watchers. The shout of "Nippon banzai!" from the foreigner, which means "Good luck to Japan," always gets a grateful response from the child in the street, the coolie with his ricksha, policeman on his beat, or the Japanese gentleman in his carriage. And then the stories I heard of the devotion "Sir, we cannot allow that; it is an honor for us to give, and it would be you who would be doing our duty for us to Japan." A Japanese lady apologized profusely for being late at dinner. She had been to the station to see her son off for the front, where already were three of her sons. Said another straightway: "How fortunate to be able to give four sons to Japan!" In a tea-house I saw an old woman with blackened teeth, a servant, who bore herself proudly, and who, too, was honored because she had sent four sons to the Yalu. Hundreds There is a war play on the boards of one theatre. The heroine, a wife, says that her unborn child in a crisis like this must be a man-child, and that he shall be reared a soldier. To provide means, she will herself, if necessary, go to the yoshiwara. On every gateway is posted a red slab where a man has gone to the war, marked "Gone to the front"—to be supplanted with a black one—"Bravery forever"—should he be brought home dead. And when he is brought home dead his body is received at the station by his kin with proud faces and no tears. The Roman mother has come back to earth again, and it is the Japanese mother who makes Japan the high priestess of patriotism among the nations of the world. In that patriotism are the passionate Here forks the trail of the Saxon. One branch goes straight to the Philippines. The other splits here into a thousand tiny paths—where railway coach has supplanted the palanquin, battle-ship the war-junk, electricity the pictured lantern; where factory chimneys smoke and the Japanese seems prouder of his commerce than of his art and his exquisite manners; where the boycott has started, and even the word strike—"strikey, strikey" it sounds—has become the refrain of a song. How shallow, after all, the tiny paths are, no man may know; for who can penetrate the |