Read Ebook: Following the Sun-Flag: A Vain Pursuit Through Manchuria by Fox John Jr

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Ebook has 497 lines and 38395 words, and 10 pages

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:

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.

"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.

"Ai suru," she said.

"And what does that mean?"

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

"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?"

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