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Read Ebook: Mysterious Japan by Street Julian
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Ebook has 1147 lines and 93120 words, and 23 pages
PART I
PART II
PART IV
FACING PAGE
With his drum and his monkey he is Japan's nearest equivalent for our old-style organ-grinder . . 22
The Japanese is not a slave to his possessions . . . 38
Sawing and planing are accomplished with a pulling instead of a driving motion . . . . . . . . . 38
The bath of the proletariat consists of a large barrel . 54
While Yuki's fortune was being told I photographed her . 70
You cannot understand Japan without understanding the Japanese woman . . . . . . . . . . . 86
A laundry on the river's brim . . . . . . . 94
Digging clams at low-tide in Tokyo Bay . . . . . 94
Cocoons--Five thousand silk worms make one kimono . . 118
No one without a sweet nature could smile the smile of one of these tea-house maids . . . . . . . . 118
Family luncheon ? la Japonaise . . . . . . . 134
Kimi-chiyo was at almost every Japanese-style party I attended . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
It takes two hours to do a geisha's hair . . . . 162
Mrs. Charles Burnett in a 15th-Century Japanese Court costume . . . . . . . . . . . 170
A teahouse garden, Tokyo . . . . . . . . 178
Viscount Shibusawa . . . . . . . . . . 190
Viscount Kentaro Kaneko . . . . . . . . . 190
The film was not large enough to hold the family of this youngish fisherman at Nabuto . . . . . . . 214
Tai-no-ura . . . . . . . . . . . . 230
The theatre street in Kyoto is one of the most interesting highways in the world . . . . . . . . . 246
The gates of the Tanjo-ji temple . . . . . . 246
Pretty Gen was between the shafts . . . . . . 278
The middle-aged coolie hurriedly seated him on the bank . 294
Asakusa, the great popular temple of Tokyo . . . . 310
Saki, the housekeeper, obligingly posed for me . . . 326
PART I
MYSTERIOUS JAPAN
Far lie the Isles of Mystery, With never a port between; Green on the yellow of Asia's breast, Like a necklace of tourmaline.
A peculiar ocean, the Pacific. A large and lonely ocean with few ships and many rutty spots that need mending. Ploughing westward over its restless surface for a week, you come to the place where East meets West with a bump that dislocates the calendar. It is as though a date-pad in your hand were knocked to pieces and the days distributed about the deck. You pick them up and reassemble them, but one is missing. Poor little lost day! It became entangled with the 180th meridian and was dragged overboard never to be seen again.
Had this been the Atlantic crossing we should by now have landed on the other side; yet here we were, pitching upon a cold gray waste a few miles south of Behring Sea, with Yokohama a full week away.
Yet land--land of a kind--was not so distant as I had imagined. Early one morning in the middle of the voyage my steward, Sugimoto, came to my cabin and woke me up to see it.
"Good morning, gentleman," said he. "Gentleman look porthole, he see land."
I arose and looked.
A flounce of foam a mile or two away across the water edged the skirt of a dark mountain jutting abruptly from the sea. Through a mist, like a half-raised curtain of gray gauze, I saw a wintry peak from which long tongues of snow trailed downward, marking seams and gorges. It was, in short, just such an island as is discovered in the nick of time by a shipwrecked whaler who, famished and freezing in an open boat, has drifted for days through the storm-tossed pages of a sea story. He would land in a sheltered cove and would quickly discover a spring and a cave. He would devise a skilful means of killing seals, would dress himself in their skins, and subsist upon their meat--preceded by the customary clam and fish courses. For three years he would live upon the island, believing himself alone. Then suddenly would come to him the knowledge that life in this place was no longer safe. About the entrance to his cave he would find the tracks of a predatory animal--fresh prints of French heels in the snow!
Austere though the island looked, my heart warmed at the sight of it; for there is no land so miserable that it is not to be preferred above the sea. Moreover I saw in this land a harbinger. The Empire of Japan, I knew, consisted of several large islands--to the chief one of which we were bound--and some four thousand smaller ones stretching out in a vast chain. This island, then, must be the first one of the chain. From now on we would no doubt be passing islands every little while. The remainder of the voyage would be like a trip down the St. Lawrence River.
Soothed and encouraged by this pleasant thought, and wishing always to remember this outpost of the Island Empire, I asked its name of Sugimoto.
"That Araska, gentleman," he answered.
"Are you glad to see Japan again, Sugimoto?"
"That Araska," he repeated.
"Yes. A part of Japan, isn't it?"
Sugimoto shook his head.
"No, gentleman. Araska American land."
"That island belongs to the United States?"
"Yes, gentleman. That Araska."
I had never heard of an island of that name. Surely Sugimoto was mistaken in thinking it an American possession.
"Could you show it to me on the map?" I asked.
I began to study the map and look up statistics concerning the Pacific Ocean. It was a great mistake. It is not pleasant to discover that three quarters of the world is worse than wasted, being entirely given over to salt water. Nor is it pleasant to discover, when far out on the Pacific, that more than a third of the surface of the earth is taken up by this one ocean. Any thought of getting General Goethals to remedy this matter by filling up the Pacific is, moreover, hopeless, for all the land in the world, if spread over the Pacific's surface, would only make an island surrounded by twenty million square miles of sea.
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