FROM the spring-time, when I reached Japan in the rain and began to grumble at the weather, and all through the damp and the downpour of the summer months, I had been consoled by the promises of my friends. They assured me that when the autumn came I should have week after week of glorious sunshine, a clear fresh air, and probably not a wet day between Michaelmas and Christmas. Either the season was an exceptional one, or else this is a cherished myth; there certainly were more fine days in October and November, but not a week passed without one or two days when work out-of-doors was impossible. They talked, too, of the glory of the maples, of hill-sides and rocky ravines clothed with scarlet and crimson, and their enthusiasm in this matter was amply

justified, but no one had told me of the beauty of the lilies of the field, which decorate so many of the banks between the rice patches with their tassels of glowing scarlet. I saw them first near Hamamatsu, a pleasant town on the Tokaido, which I reached on the 16th of September, after a little tour in the interior; their brilliant color at once attracted me, and I hastened to make drawings of them, for my passport had almost expired, and I feared that I might not find them elsewhere. There was no need to be in such a hurry, for they seem to grow abundantly wherever they get a chance. Hamamatsu was quite unlike any other Japanese town I had seen; the houses had a projecting upper story and broad overhanging roofs, and the principal trade seemed to be in toys. There were shops full of drums and kites, and dolls with all their belongings, and the thousand and one things which the Japanese delight in giving to their beloved children. As I passed a little garden I saw what looked like a fearful atrocity—dozens of babies’ heads, pale and gray as if in death, cut off at the neck and impaled on short

stakes, stood about the ground; but on coming nearer the mystery was explained: they were life-sized dolls’ heads of papier-machÉ, put out to dry in the sun before receiving their final coat of paint. The neighboring villages were peculiar; every cottage was protected from the winds by a high hedge of clipped yew, and the street seemed to pass between two green walls, over which the heavily thatched roofs just peeped. The openings gave a glimpse of court-yards and cottage fronts where women and men were hard at work, threshing their beans of many colors and spreading them on mats to dry, weaving blue cotton cloths, or winding off the skeins of shining yellow silk. The typhoon a fortnight earlier had strewn the Tokaido with pine-trees; a passage wide enough for a jinrikisha to pass had been sawn through some of the great prostrate trunks, and others were still supported by their mangled limbs, so that we could squeeze under them. They sadly impeded the work of a company of white-clad engineers, who, with all the latest military contrivances, were laying a field-telegraph along the road. What a contrast were these sons of change to the fishermen returning from their morning’s work with heavy loads of bonito, and to the peasants with their simple and primitive implements, all working and living as they have done for centuries past! Politics and changes of government matter very little to them; the rice crop and the take of fish are affairs of much more importance; they are the real life of a country, preserving its habits, costumes, and traditions, and staving off for a time the influences of railroads and steamships, which threaten to reduce man’s condition throughout the world to one dull level of uniformity.

Fortunately they form a solid majority in every land, a mass not easily moved, and even in progressive Japan it will be a long time before ill-cut trousers and steam-ploughs replace the kimono and the spade. The Tokaido Railway takes you in twelve hours from Hamamatsu to Kobe, and while waiting till a new passport came from Tokyo I had time to see a little more of the beautiful country around that hospitable port. The shores near Suma and Maiko, a little to the westward, are picturesque, and close by is the Strait of Akashi, through which a constant stream of traffic passes, ships of all kinds and sizes, from the little fishing-boats towed from the beach, to the big steamers from Europe and America. The island of Awaji lies across the entrance to the Inland Sea, leaving a narrow passage at each end; but the tide rushes so violently through the Naruta Channel to

the south, between Awaji and Shikoku, that it is often unnavigable, and most of the shipping comes this way. There are the remains of a Daimio’s castle at Akashi; the main building is gone, and the plateau on which it stood is now a garden with tea-booths, but the foundation walls, the corner turrets, and the moat show what an important stronghold it must have been; and the view from it, down the Inland Sea to the west, over to the Shikoku Mountains on the south, and eastward to Osaka Bay and the hills of Yamato, is extensive and very fine in its outlines. At Maiko

there is a grove of curiously blown and twisted pine-trees, with the quaint forms which are loved by all artists, especially by the Japanese; and near Suma, wherever the wiry grasses had got a foothold among the sand, the shore was gay with scarlet lilies. The botanic name of this flower, which is really more like an amaryllis than a lily, is Nerine japonica. Its Japanese name is not so easy to determine, for wherever I went it had a different one; some of these names are shiwata-bana, teku-sari, chiridji, and ushino-ninniku (cow-garlic), but I think the commonest is higambana (equinox flower), and the best, for its opening marks the change of the season, the beginning of the end. It is probably because of this that, beautiful as it appears to European eyes, to the Japanese it is a flower of ill omen, associated in their minds with death and decay, and never used in art or in floral arrangements. The children, indeed, gather great armfuls of it; but they never take it inside their homes; the great bunches they have collected are either scattered among the family tombstones or left to wither on the foot-paths. They seem to like picking it because its juicy stem snaps so easily, and often amuse themselves as they sit by the road-side by breaking the stalks half through, leaving them hanging in regular joints, much as our children make dandelion or daisy chains. Near a little graveyard set down among the rice-fields the flowers grew in great profusion, making a gorgeous splash of brilliant color as a foreground to the gray stones, the yellowing grain, and the pale blue distant hills. The rice was ripening fast, and flocks of

rice-birds flew hurriedly across as they were chased from field to field by shouting boys. I wish I had made a sketch of a Japanese scarecrow; there were plenty of them about, and I never saw one without laughing; they were full of quaint humor and invention, and the little birds seemed to enjoy them as much as I did. They recalled the remark of a stranger in a fly-haunted parlor in South Carolina, where a small clock-work windmill revolved in the centre of the table. I asked whether it drove the flies away, and the owner replied,

“At first it scared them some, but now they come in to ride round on it.” The shore was always full of life and activity; bronzed fishermen, naked except for a narrow white loin-cloth, were launching their boats or hauling them ashore, towing along the beach, pulling up nets, or chanting as they rowed their heavy craft, standing up and pushing the long bent oars with a forward jerk, in the same way that a gondolier works. The smaller sailing-boats are all rigged with the simple oblong sail which is so often shown in Japanese drawings, made of narrow strips of cotton cloth loosely laced together; the larger ones have a jib and a jig-sail as well.

Futa-tabi, Maya-san, and the other hills which rise behind Kobe are as well worth seeing as the shore, full of picturesque walks; the country at the back of them, commonly called “Aden” by the foreign residents, on account of its barenness, is a curious waste of disintegrating granite, seamed and furrowed by the heavy rains, where only some scrubby bushes find a precarious foothold on the shifting soil. Coolies from the neighboring villages come and cut these for firewood, and carry the heavy fagots for miles to earn a few halfpence. In Arima, one of the hill villages, there are hot ferruginous springs where hundreds of people go to bathe; but the arrangements are not so primitive as those I saw at Yumoto; the baths and dressing-rooms are private enough for the shy foreigner. There is so much iron in the water that you come out of it covered with a red deposit which takes some days of washing to remove. On this excursion, as my boots were in hospital, I tried Japanese foot-gear—thick cotton socks and straw sandals; they were very light and comfortable at first, but after a time I was conscious of every little pebble I trod on, and I got back to Kobe with a good deal of pain and many blisters. Foreigners who have often worn them get hardened between the toes, and many good walkers and mountaineers use them habitually; heavy boots are an encumbrance when not on your feet, and though the straw sandals are quickly worn out, a few extra pairs are no serious addition to your baggage.

On the 6th of October I had finished my drawings among the pines and the sand hills, and a new passport had come, which gave me permission to wander for three months longer through the provinces near the Tokaido, so I bid farewell to my good friends and the comfortable club-house in Kobe, and Matsuba once more left his wife and family to follow my fortunes.

Our destination was Maibara, a little town on Lake Biwa, not many miles from Hikone. As I passed it by rail I had noticed that the flooded fields on the margin of the lake were covered with a blue-flowered water-plant, a good foreground to the blue water and the distant mountains, and I hoped for blue skies to complete the picture, but they came only at rare intervals. On a piece of waste

ground near my tea-house a travelling theatre had been erected, a structure of bamboo poles with mats hung over them, which was not calculated to keep an audience dry, and not once during my stay were the company able to give a performance. The manager occupied the room next mine; he was an excellent performer on the samisen, and a pious man withal. Every morning from seven till half-past he said his prayers, repeating in a monotonous singsong voice a sentence which sounded to me like “Ya ya yura no,” and tapping two blocks of wood together to keep time. He belonged to the Shingon sect of Buddhists.

The prayer formula of the Monto sect, one of the most popular and powerful, owning the great Hongwanji temples which are found in all large towns, is, “Namu Amida Butsu,” while the followers of Nichiren, as they beat their drums, murmur constantly, “Namu myoho renge kyo.”

We soon became good friends, the manager and I, and he spent many hours in my room drinking tea, looking at my sketches, and in such conversation as my rudimentary knowledge of the language permitted, but unfortunately I never had an opportunity of seeing him act. When I left he presented me with a printed cotton towel in an ornamental wrapper, and I gave him a penny black-lead pencil, and we parted with mutual expressions of esteem. I had other visitors too: the station-master and the chief of police wanted to see my pictures, and Takaki, O Shige San, and little Kazu, with the brown velvet eyes, came over from Hikone to call on me, and arranged to meet me at the Nagahama matsuri. This annual festival takes place in the middle of October, and seems to be a gathering-ground for all the country-side. In many respects it was very like a country fair in England, but the main event on all the three days is the perambulation of large triumphal cars, called yama, on which companies of children give dramatic performances. I was fortunate in having a brilliantly fine day, and as I bowled along the five miles of level road from Maibara in a kuruma with two good runners, I passed troops of people in holiday attire, old peasants, gayly dressed young girls, and wandering friars with huge bamboo hats that looked like bushel baskets. The town was gayly decorated with flags and with lanterns bearing the device of the city, and crowds were pouring into it by road and rail and boat; for Nagahama is a busy port at the northern end of Lake Biwa, and a regular service of steamers runs between there and Otsu, at the southern end. This mixture of things ancient and modern in Japan always seems amusing, especially when, as in Nagahama, there is not much of the modern. The row-boats which came in with their loads of passengers were of unvarnished wood, decorated with black patterns on the bows, and, except the police and the railway officials, I saw very few men in European dress; there certainly were no women in anything but their own becoming costume, and I was the only foreigner in the town. My landlord had been thoughtful enough to engage a place for me in a tea-house opposite which the yama stopped and gave a performance: all the partitions had been removed, and the floor, divided into squares by low movable railings, was covered with family parties who had brought their own cushions and provisions.

My heart was filled with covetousness as I saw the fine old lacquer bento boxes which they produced after carefully removing many silk wrappings. There are twelve yama in the town, each owned by a different guild or society, the members of which teach the children their parts, provide dresses for their play, and accompany the yama on the festival days. The cars are huge things, taller than most of the Japanese houses, and quite fill up the

narrow streets; they are built on solid wooden wheels, and are dragged about by strings of coolies, the young men of the guild dancing and shouting in front of them, waving fans by day and lanterns after dark to direct the coolies’ movements, while the older members follow in white-curtained carts. The wood-work around the stage is lacquered, gold and black and red, with elaborate brass ornaments, and the pagoda-like roof which covers it is of burnished gold, surmounted with a dragon or phoenix or other mythical animal. The part behind the stage is enclosed with hangings, Chinese embroideries, Persian rugs, or silk brocades, and two of them had fine pieces of Flemish tapestry, which must have come over with the Dutch centuries ago; the buxom ladies and knights in armor looked odd, and yet pleasantly familiar, and my heart went out to the expatriated strangers, so lonely amid that Eastern crowd. In front of each stage hung a bunch of “gohei,” the twisted strips of white paper which are the universal emblem of the Shinto religion, the only simple things among the masses of gorgeous color, and they seemed to give the key-note to the whole; for Shinto is, above everything else, an ancestor-worship, a religious respect for the country and for the men whose heroic deeds still inspire its people, and the short dramas which the children acted were all founded on old stories—how Yoritomo’s son sacrificed his life to save the young Mikado, and other well-known motives from Japanese history. The boys were admirably trained and beautifully dressed; they rolled their eyes and grimaced in exactly the same way as their elders of the profession, and the crowd vigorously applauded their facial contortions. In one company there was a little mite of two years old; he had not to speak at all, only to cry out once or twice, but he knew his part as well as the rest, and always looked up at his boy father at the right moment. During the afternoon I walked round the town, first to the Buddhist temple, the great hall of which was crowded with people sleeping, eating, and praying, and then up the long avenue leading to the Shinto temple of Hachiman. It was lined with stalls and booths for refreshments of all kinds, with conjurers, purse-trick men, lucky wheels, quack-medicine vendors, and so on, and near the big granite torii and lanterns were the market-gardeners with dwarf pines, oranges laden with fruit, camellias, and other trees. One had nothing but orchid-plants, none of them, unfortunately, in flower. I joined a large circle of spectators who were watching a scriever, which is, I believe, the professional name for the artists who draw on the flag-stones; this one had no pavement, so he prepared an even ground by sprinkling some light gray sand over the dusty road; his colors were bags of black, white, red, and blue sand; from one of these he took a handful, and drew his design by letting the powder run from his closed fist in a line which varied in thickness as he tightened or loosened his grasp. He wrote or drew in this way with wonderful rapidity as he squatted on the ground, and he talked all the time, obliterating each drawing as soon as he had finished it. I watched him draw a figure of a girl, and he began by putting down the spots of the pattern on her kimono with blue, then added the shadow lines of the dress, relieved it here and there with white, sketched the face and hands in red, and finally added a bold outline in black, which completed the picture, thus working in that reverse way to our natural instincts which you so often notice in this land of Topsy-turvydom.

As evening approached, all the yama began to collect in the square in front of another Shinto temple, where the great Hachiman car with colossal swords, and the Mikoshi, a shrine carried about on men’s shoulders, were already placed. In the river on one side of this square many boats were moored, spread with rush mats and with the red blankets which have become so common in Japan, and in them people were picknicking; over the bridge which crossed it the unwieldy structures were dragged from the town by shouting crowds; each in turn gave a final performance in front of the temple, and was then drawn aside to make room for the next. This began at half-past five, and it was eleven o’clock before the last of

them had been ranged with the others to the right of the temple steps. As night came on they were covered with big lanterns, the stages were lighted by lamps in glass shades, and attendants with candles on long sticks illuminated the face of each little actor while he was speaking. When the six gorgeous yama with their attendants and gayly dressed performers were all drawn up in line against

a background of solemn cryptomerias, with an excited crowd dancing and waving lanterns in front of them, the spectacle was more beautiful than any words of mine can suggest. In spite of the excitement, I saw only one quarrel; a young man, in order to get nearer to the stage, had pushed past a big coolie, who had evidently taken as much sakÉ as he could carry, and for a few seconds I thought there would be a fight; but a bystander pointed out to the indignant man that the youth had to get nearer because he was short-sighted and wore spectacles, and peace was at once restored. On the way back to our tea-house, where my friends from Tennenji had dined with me, we passed a street full of stalls, with pipes and pouches, cheap jewelry, hair-pins and combs, and many other knick-knacks suitable for presents. I wanted a few of them, and found that O Shige San was a talented shopper; she had her limit, ten sen, and usually succeeded in getting the article for that sum, whatever the original price might have been. As I wandered round early the next morning I found that the yama had already been moved to their stations in various

streets, and were being cleaned up in preparation for the day’s performances. The town is studded with tall fire-proof go-downs, in which the precious vehicles are safely stored during the rest of the year.

Near Maibara there were large orchards of persimmons with brilliant-colored fruit, which, as Andrew Marvel says of the oranges, “hang like gold lamps in a green night.” They were particularly beautiful in the well-designed garden of Seigwanji, where I made some sketches. It is a fine example of a temple garden, and some massive evergreen oaks form an impressive background to the gray stones, the carefully trained pines, and the trimly clipped shrubs; but except for the persimmons, a few reddening maple leaves, some late blooms of platycodon, and the scarlet berries of a little ardisia, it was all green and gray.

In the cottage gardens near Suzukawa, a little station on the Tokaido to the south of Fuji where I made a short halt late in October, I began to see some chrysanthemum flowers; they were not particularly fine or effective, but I found plenty to paint there, and wished very much that the days and my remaining weeks in Japan were not getting so short. The village lies behind a range of sand dunes, which are overgrown with ancient pines, and beyond them is the shore of Suruga Bay, a grand expanse of gray volcanic sand, called by the Japanese Tago-no-ura, where fishermen are always hauling at nets in lines of naked brown figures against the blue sea, or wandering back in groups across the sands in long dark-blue coats, with pale-blue and white handkerchiefs tied over their heads, carrying their nets and parcels of fish wrapped in straw. At my tea-house, the Koshuya, I reaped the result of their labors, and got excellent dinners of red or gray tai, lobsters, and huge prawns, cooked by a man who was a real artist and took a pride in his profession.

The first really fine chrysanthemums I saw were in Yokohama, when I got back there early in November; I was disappointed to find that they were in temporary sheds put up to protect them from rain and sun, and not in masses out-of-doors, as I expected to see them; but they were excellently grown, and in the softened light of the oil-paper shades their colors showed to great advantage. The plants are treated much as they are with us, raised in pots from cuttings taken in the spring, and encouraged with plenty of manure until the buds are formed; before flowering they are removed from their pots and planted out in bold groups of color in the beds which have been prepared for them. Some plants are reduced to a single stem, on which only one enormous blossom is allowed to develop; these are generally arranged in a line, with each flower stiffly tied to a horizontal bamboo support, and the effect is very sad; but the excellence of the gardeners is best shown in growing large bushes, which have been known to carry as many as four hundred flowers of medium size, all in perfect condition, on the same day. An English gardener who had visited every show within reach of Tokyo, including the Emperor’s celebrated collection in the palace grounds, told me that he had seen no individual blossoms equal to the best dozen or so at a first-rate London exhibition, but that these great plants with their hundreds of flowers were

triumphs of horticulture. The most curious examples of chrysanthemum-growing were to be seen in the Dangozaka quarter of Tokyo. The long hilly street is bordered on each side with gardens enclosed with high bamboo fences, and in every one, by paying three rin, you could see groups of life-size figures mainly covered with chrysanthemum leaves and flowers. They represented scenes from history, the drama, or Buddhist mythology, and were constructed with frame-works of bamboo, inside which the flower-pots were concealed, the shoots being brought through the openings and trained over the outer surface. The heads and hands were made of painted wood, and swords and other accessories were added to make them more life-like; the draperies of living leaves and flowers were skilfully arranged in large folds, and, as in most of the popular shows, they depicted the costumes of Daimio and Samurai of the past. At each entrance I was given a sort of play-bill, a roughly printed broad-sheet with a wood-cut and a description of the different groups, serving as an advertisement of the gardener’s establishment. One of the finest places for autumn colors is the large garden behind the arsenal in the Koishikawa quarter, laid out by a former Prince of Mito as a quiet retreat for his old age. It covers several acres, and is certainly very beautiful, with its lakes and islands, solemn groves and shrines; but it is silent and deserted; the people are only admitted by a special permission; and I liked better the maples which line the banks of the Taki-no-gawa near Oji, where crowds were quietly enjoying themselves, sipping tea and sakÉ as they sat in front of the tea-houses and gazed down on the trees, or strolling along in picturesque groups under the crimson canopy of foliage. The little river glides along with barely a ripple, and it reflected all the glory of the leaves which stretched over it in sprays of scarlet and gold, reminding me of a Japanese poem, “I wish to cross the river, but fear to cut the brocade on its surface.” Another poem, dating from the time when it was customary to present silk or cloth to the Shinto gods instead of the “gohei,” which now serve as a symbol, shows the national admiration of the autumn leaves: “This time I bring no offering; the gods can take the damask of the maple-trees on Tamukeyama.”

There are many other trees in the rich flora of Japan which are as gay as the maples, though no others which show as great a variety of color; the dark leaves of the tulip-tree turn to a rich cadmium yellow, and the icho (Salisburia) is covered with pale gold, while many of the shrubs, grasses, and herbaceous plants with bright and varied tints help to relieve the solemn everlasting green of the pines and cryptomerias which clothe the eternal hills.

And so in a blaze of glory the Japanese year ends; but long before these last leaves have fallen the camellias are once more in flower, and continue until the plum blossom comes in February, a connecting link in the chain of beauty and flowers which encircles this happy land. One of my last days in Tokyo was spent in showing my drawings to the students of the Uyeno School of Art, where Professor Okakura, the president, who combines with a good knowledge of Western art a great reverence for that of his own country, is attempting with no small success to keep up the artistic tradition, and to revive those artistic industries which were falling into decay. He had invited artists of other schools, some of whom had studied in Paris and Rome, but I was most interested in the remarks and questions of the purely Japanese students, and in their eagerness to discover any motive, besides the reproduction of nature, in work so different from their own.

At the Asakusa matsuri they were already selling emblems suited for the new year—the rice-rake to scrape

together dollars; the rice-bag, daikon, and red tai, suggestive of good fare; and the target with an arrow in the bull’s-eye, meaning, “May you hit the mark!” arranged round a mask of the goddess of fortune; and with a stock of these to bring me good-luck, I sailed away on the 10th of December across the dreary and flowerless Pacific.

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