Jinrikisha Days in Japan/Chapter 11
CHAPTER XI
THE IMPERIAL FAMILY
European sovereigns and reigning families are parvenus compared to the ruler and the imperial house of Japan, which shows an unbroken line from the accession of Jimmu Tenno, the first Emperor in 660 b.c., down to the present son of Heaven, Mutsu Hito, one hundred and twenty-first Emperor of his line.
During the feudal period, the Emperors, virtually prisoners of their vassals, the Shoguns, lived and died within the yellow palace walls of Kioto, knowing nothing of their subjects, and unknown by them. After death, each was deified under a posthumous appellation, and there his history ceased. Too sacred a being to be spoken of by his personal name, at the mention of his title all Japanese make an unconscious reverence even now. When his patronymic was written, it was purposely left incomplete by the omission of one stroke of the writing-brush. In the spoken language, the ruler is the Shujo, the Heika, or the Tenno, while in the written language he is the Tenno, the Kotei, or the Mikado. The Empress is the Kogo in both the spoken and the written language, and the honorific sama follows all of these imperial appellations.
Mutsu Hito, the most significant figure in Japanese history, was born in the Kioto palace, November 3, 1852, and, taught and trained as imperial princes had been before him, succeeded to the throne after the death of his father, February 13, 1867. In the following autumn the Shogun sent in his formal resignation, gave back the supreme power to the rightful ruler, and retired to Osaka. In February, 1868, the Emperor, not yet sixteen years of age, received the foreign envoys in the Kioto palace with uncovered face; then, defeating the rebellious Shogun at Osaka, removed his capital to Yeddo, and chose the name Meiji (enlightenment), to designate the era of his reign.
As seen at the rare court functions, at military reviews, and races, the Emperor is easily the central figure. Taller than the average of his race, and possessing great dignity and majesty, his slow, military step and trailing sword effectually conceal the unequal gait rheumatism sometimes obliges. He wears a trimmed beard, and his features, more decided and strongly marked than is usual with the aristocratic type of Japanese countenance, wear a calm and composure as truly Oriental as imperial. In public he wears the uniform of generalissimo of the army, a heavily-frogged and braided one of dark-blue broadcloth in winter, and of white duck in summer, with a gold-mounted sword and many decorations. In recognition of the honors and orders conferred upon him by other royalties, the Emperor bestows the cordon and jewel of the princely Order of the Chrysanthemum. The Order of the Rising Sun is given for merit and distinguished services, and its red button is worn by many foreigners as well as natives.
Of late, the Emperor has abandoned his attempts to learn English and German, and relies upon interpreters, but he reads translations of foreign literature with great interest. When he passes through the streets, he is received with silent reverence, an advance guard of police and a body-guard of lancers escorting him. While his own people never shout or cheer, he accepts very graciously the foreign custom, and bows an acknowledgment to the hurrahs that sometimes greet him at Yokohama. While the Emperor has been absorbed in the changing affairs of state during the two decades of his reign, he still seems, in comparison with European sovereigns, to dwell in absolute quiet and seclusion. Often, for weeks together, he remains within the palace grounds, where he has riding courts, archery, and rifle ranges, well- stocked fish-ponds, and every means of amusing himself. Disliking the sea, he has no yacht, a chartered mail-steamer or man-of-war carrying him to naval stations or new fortifications, when the railroad is impracticable. His mountain palaces and remote game preserves he never visits.
Immediately after establishing his court at Yeddo, the boy-Emperor returned to Kioto to wed Haruko, daughter of Ichijo Takada, a kago, or court noble of the highest rank. The marriage was solemnized by some Shinto ceremony within the temple of the palace, a ceremony so sacred and private that no Japanese even conjectures its form.
The Empress Haruko, born May 29, 1850, was educated in the strictest conventions of old Japan, and taught only the Chinese classics, her own literature and poetic composition, the use of the koto, the forms of cha no yu, needle-work, and the arrangement of flowers—a broad and most liberal education for a maiden even of high degree.
Upon her marriage, an extraordinary life opened before the little Empress, demanding a very unusual activity and study, courage, adaptiveness, and comprehension. She is poetic as well as practical, and her poems are not only traced on imperial screens and kakemono in autograph characters, but several of them have been set to music as well.
Even now, her Majesty is more delicately pretty than her younger sisters, although for years an invalid. She is short in stature, slender, and small, with the long, oval face and refined features of the ideal aristocratic type of Japanese beauty. At her marriage, she shaved her eyebrows, painted two shadowy suggestions of them high up on her forehead, and blackened her teeth, in accordance with Japanese custom; but after a few years, she ceased to disfigure herself in this way. It was an event, in 1873, when she gave her first audience to the envoys’ wives. It cost the court chamberlains months of study to arrange for the appearance of the Emperor and Empress together, to reconcile the pretensions of their suites as to rank and precedence, and to harmonize the Occidental, chivalrous ideas of deference to women with the unflattering estimate of the Orient. When, on the day of the declaration of the new constitution (February 11, 1890), the Emperor and Empress rode side by side in the same state carriage through the streets of Tokio, and when, that night, he offered his arm to lead her to a twin arm-chair in the state dining-hall, a new era was begun in Japanese history.
The Empress has her secretaries and readers, and gives a part of each day to informal audiences. She visits her schools and hospitals, and makes liberal purchases at charity bazaars. She exercises in the saddle within the palace grounds, and drives in a brougham with half-drawn curtains, her men on the box wearing a dark-blue livery with red cords and facings, silver buttons, and cocked hats.
IN THE PALACE GARDENS
One of the two annual imperial garden-parties is given when the chrysanthemums are in bloom, and the other at the time of the cherry blossoms.
The etiquette of these is quite simple, although an appearance at one is still equivalent to a presentation at court. A few days before the festivity each guest receives a large chrysanthemum-bordered card:
By order of their Majesties, the Emperor and Empress, the Minister of State for the Household Department presents his compliments to , and asks their company at the “Chrysanthemum Party” at the garden of the Imperial Temporary Palace on the 8th inst., at 3 o’clock in the afternoon.
On an accompanying slip are these instructions:
- Frock-coat required.
- To alight at the “Kurumayose” after entering the palace gate.'
- This card to be shown to officers in attendance on arrival.
- No party to be held if the day happens rainy.
The guests having assembled in the gardens at the hour indicated, the Kimigayo, or national anthem, announces the approach of the imperial personages. The Emperor, the Empress, and their suite, passing between the rows of guests and the flower-tents, lead the way to marquees on the lawn, where a collation is served, the Emperor addressing a few remarks to the ministers and envoys as he greets them. Sometimes special presentations are made to him and the Empress, and often the Empress summons an envoy’s wife or a peeress to her, while she sits at table. After another tour of the flower-tents, the company, following the imperial lead, desert the gardens. Calls of ceremony must be made upon the wife of the premier within one week after these parties.
IN THE PALACE GARDENS
shielded from sun and wind by matted awnings, screens, and silk hangings, and all the myriad flowers were at one even and perfect period of unfolding. Under silk tents by themselves stood single plants bearing from two hundred to four hundred blossoms each, every blossom full and symmetrical.
The peeresses waiting in that sunny garden were most brilliant figures, rivalling the glow of the flowers in their splendid old brocade robes. At last came the Empress and the whole gorgeous train of her attendants, following the shore of the mirror-like lake, past camellia hedges to the esplanade of the upper garden of the great Asakasa park. As the Emperor was housed by illness, the Empress, for the first time, conducted a general court ceremony alone. Her costume consisted of the loose hakama, or divided skirt, of the heaviest scarlet silk, under a long loose kimono of dull heliotrope, brocaded with conventional wistarias and the imperial crests in white. No outer obi, or sash, was worn, and the neck was closed high with surplice folds of rainbow-tinted silks. Many under-kimonos of fine white and scarlet silk showed beneath the long, square sleeves of the heavy brocade kimono. The imperial hair was stiffened into a thin halo behind the face, falling thence to the waist, but tied here and there with bits of silky white rice-paper, like that of a Shinto priestess. Above her forehead shone a little golden ornament in the shape of the ho-o, or phœnix, and she carried a parasol and an old court fan of painted sticks of wood, wound with long cords of many-colored silks. The dignity and majesty of the little woman were most impressive. Every head bowed low, and when she had passed eyes were lifted to her reverently and admiringly. All the princesses and peeresses following her wore a similar costume, many of their brocade kimonos being stiffened with embroidery and gold thread, and making dazzling effects of color. When, in the brilliant sunset flush, the imperial train retraced its steps, its kaleidoscopic flashes of white and gold and color reflected in the still lake, and showing vividly as the ladies formed in a semicircle on the lawn, while the Empress withdrew to her apartments, there ended a series of pictures so beautiful that they seemed an illusion of the imagination.
Before the following April Paris fashions had set in with great rigor, and all the soft, pink reflections from the clouds of cherry blossoms in the Hama Rikiu palace garden could not give the groups of little women in dark, ugly, close-fitting gowns any likeness to the beautiful assemblages of other years. Gone were poetry and picturesqueness. Progress and Philistia were come. Except for the costumes of the Chinese and Korean legations, and that of the Chinese Minister's wife, with its cap-like ornaments of filigree and pearls, and tiny jewelled slippers, nothing Oriental or Asiatic in aspect remained to that court gathering.
The Empress ordained and defended this change of dress in a famous court circular, whose chief argument seemed to be that the alteration from the sitting and kneeling etiquette of the Orient to the standing etiquette of the Occident required western fashions for women as well as men. Every lover of the picturesque protested, but it was suspected that this manifesto was a shrewd political move of Count Ito’s to convince the treaty powers that the Japanese do not differ from other civilized people. Should the sacrifice of the old life and the beautiful national dress help to secure for Japan a revision of the shameful and unjust treaties forced upon her from 1854 to 1858, and promote the political liberty and commercial prosperity of the country, the Empress’s patriotic iconoclasm may be justified. The sacredness of the imperial person long postponed her Majesty’s change of fashion, as no ignoble 
IN THE PALACE GARDENS
In adopting the expensive foreign dress court ladies ruthlessly sacrificed irreplaceable heirlooms of rich old brocades and embroideries. For a long time their countenances and mien betrayed the discomfort of the new dress, but they soon acquired ease with familiarity, and no Japanese woman, in her first Parisian gown, was ever such a burlesque and caricature as are the foreign visitors who essay the kimono, and, blind to the ridiculous, are photographed with its folds and fulness all awry. Only two foreign women have I ever seen who could wear Japanese dress gracefully in the Japanese way, with full regard to the meaning which each color, fold, pucker, and cord implies.
Asahiko, the Empress Dowager, one of the Kujo family of kuges, and of Fujiwara descent, has her separate palace and court, where old customs are followed. Born in 1834, she lives by the traditional code, and the use of a landau with liveried and cockaded men on the box is almost her only concession to the new order. She never appears at any of the state functions at the palace, though the ladies of her suite are sometimes seen in the imperial loges at a Koyokwan No performance, when given for the benefit of her pet charities.
The Empress Dowager has nominal charge of the imperial nurseries in the Nakayama Yashiki, where the children of the Emperor and his inferior wives remain until their fourth or fifth years. These wives are all of kuge birth, and have establishments within the palace enclosure. They are an Oriental survival, of which little is said or definitely known, although they still have a fixed rank.
The Empress Haruko has no children, and Prince Haru, the Crown Prince, is the son of the Emperor and Madame Yanagiwara. One little imperial princess living, but ten imperial children have died. Prince Haru was born September 6, 1879, proclaimed heir apparent August 31, 1887, and elected Crown Prince November 3, 1889, dispossessing as heir to the throne Prince Arisugawa Takehito, a young cousin, who had been adopted by the Emperor in the absence of any direct heirs. Prince Haru attends the Nobles’ school, reciting in classes with other boys, and enjoying a more democratic life than any other crown prince of this era. He is quick, energetic, and ambitious, inclined to foreign ways, and is altogether the most emancipated and untrammelled little man in Tokio. When he is older Prince Haru will be sent around the world to see other countries and courts, and it is prophesied that this energetic young man will make great changes in the already changed order of things. To Emperor, Empress, and Empress Dowager he is a marvel, but to him these august personages are but ordinary mortals. Yet the princeling can be a stickler for etiquette, and boy companions venturing too far, or becoming too democratic, have been sharply brought to task by Jimmu Tenno's latest descendant.