Jinrikisha Days in Japan/Chapter 36
CHAPTER XXXVI
THE INLAND SEA AND NAGASAKI
In making six trips through the Inland Sea I have seen its beautiful shores by daylight and moonlight and in all seasons—clothed in the filmy green of spring, golden with ripened grain or stubble, blurred with the haze of midsummer heat, and clear in the keen, midwinter winds that, sweeping from the encircling mountains, sting with an arctic touch.
My first sail on its enchanted waters was a September holiday, the dim horizon and purple lights prophesying of the autumn. From sunrise to dark, shadowy vistas opened, peaceful shores slipped by, and heights and islands rearranged themselves. The coast of south-eastern Alaska is often compared to the Inland Sea, but the narrow channels, wild cañons, and mountain-walls of the Alaska passage have no counterpart in this Arcadian region. The landlocked Japanese water is abroad lake over two hundred miles long, filled with islands, and sheltered by uneven shores. Its jagged mountains of intensest green nowhere become wild enough to disturb the dream-like calm. Its verdant islands lie in groups, the channel is always broad and plain, and signs of human life and achievement are always in sight. Along the shores stretch chains of villages, with stone sea-walls, castles, and temples soaring above the clustered roofs or peeping from wooded slopes, and the terraced fields of rice and grains ridging every hill to its summit and covering every lower level. Stone lanterns and torii mark the way to temple groves, and cemeteries with ancient Buddhas of granite and bronze attest that these little communities are centuries old. Junks and sampans lie anchored in fleets, or creep idly across the water, and small coasting steamers thread their way in and out among the islands. Only one port of the Inland Sea between Kobé and Nagasaki is open to the foreigner, and except by authority of his passport he cannot set foot on these tantalizing shores save at Hiroshima, where the Government naval station is.
At Shimonoseki the Inland Sea ends, and ships pass out by the narrowest of its channels—a channel that boils with tide-rips and across which a chain once held all craft at bay. New forts replace the old ones bombarded by the combined English, Dutch, French, and American fleets in September, 1868. The “Shimonoseki Affair” is conspicuous in the annals of the scandalous diplomacy and international bullying that has constituted the policy of Christian nations in their relations with Japan. The United States did, indeed, make a late and lame apology for its disgraceful share in the plundering of a weaker people, by restoring its portion of the indemnity, thus tardily acknowledging the injustice of its conduct.
Ships following down the coast pass by the island of Ikeshima, the scene of an outrage even less creditable to the United States than the Shimonoseki iniquity. In 1887 the U. S. S. Omaha chose this inhabited island as the scene of target practice, terrifying the inhabitants by throwing their shells quite across the island, and maiming and killing many villagers, who, after the mimic bombardment was over, ventured down, in the pursuit of their labors, among the unexploded shells. Our Government did, indeed, offer $15,000 indemnity to the wounded survivors; but the whole affair affords one more instance of the injustice which stronger nations have always shown towards this weaker power. No British man-of-war would do its torpedo practising on the cliffs of Mount Desert; nor a Russian cruiser carelessly train its guns on the Isle of Wight; nor a German ironclad choose an inhabited island off the coast of France for a target, and expect to atone for “the unfortunate affair” with a beggarly sum of money. In view of the enormous indemnities claimed in earlier days for the death of Richardson and for the commonest brawlers of the ports, the Japanese are free to draw their own conclusions concerning the justice and good faith of Christian peoples.
As travel increases, the harbor of Nagasaki will be everywhere known as one of the most picturesque in the world. Green mountains, terraced and wooded to their very summits, have parted far enough to let an arm of the sea cleave its way inland, and chains of islands with precipitous shores guard the entrance of the tortuous reach. The town seems to have run down from the ravines and spread itself out at the end of the inlet, and temples, tea-houses, and the villas of foreign residents cling to the hill-side and dot the groves on the heights.
But Nagasaki has seen its great days, having lost its importance when the opening of the port of Kobé took the tea trade to the upper end of the Inland Sea, around which lie the great tea districts of Japan. Its coal mines and its million-dollar dry-dock make it a harbor that no ships pass by, more vessels entering annually than at Yokohama. All the naval fleets coal here, and buy the greater part of their supplies in this cheap market, and fleets of foreign men-of-war are always at anchor. Russian convict ships on their way to Vladivostock touch at Nagasaki, but only the few shipping merchants who provision them are allowed on board during the few days which precede the departure of the gloomy hulks for Siberia.
By losing its tea trade and becoming chiefly a station for coal and supplies, Nagasaki remains less affected by foreign influences than any other open port in Japan. Its people are more conservative than those of the northern island, and cling to inherited customs and costume tenaciously. The old festivals are kept up with as much spirit as ever, and boat-loads of farmers praying for rain often make Nagasaki’s harbor ring with their shouts and drum-beating. Twenty of these rustics, sitting by the gunwales in one long boat, and paddling like so many Indians in a war-canoe, go up and down the narrow fiord waving banners and tasselled emblems.
While the inhabitants kept it, Nagasaki’s observance of the Bon, the festival of the dead, was even more picturesque than the Daimonji of Kioto. On the night when Nagasaki’s spirits were doomed to return to the place of the departed, lights twinkled in all the graveyards, and the mourners carried down to the water’s edge tiny straw boats set with food offerings. These they lighted and started off; and the tide, bearing the frail flotilla here and there, finally swept it out to sea—a fleet of fire, a maze of floating constellations. Many junks and bridges were burned on these festival nights, and the authorities have forbidden the observance.
While Nagasaki was the first port opened to foreigners, it now has fewer foreign residents than any other. There are large mission establishments, but, outside of their community, the society open to the consuls and merchants is very limited when the harbor is empty of men-of-war. Their villas on the heights are most luxurious, and the views these command down the narrow fiord and out to the ocean entrancing. Life and movement fill the harbor below. Ships, junks, and sampans come and go; bells strike in chorus around the anchorage-ground; whistles echo, bands play, saluting and signalling flags slip up and down the masts, and the bang and long-rolling echo of the ships’ guns make mimic war. At night the harbor lights are dazzling, and the shores twinkle to the very hill-tops. The crowded masts of native junks are as trees hanging full of golden, glowing spheres, and electric flash-lights from the men-of-war illuminate sections of hill and town and harbor niches.
The Nagasaki winter is delightful—clear, bright, sunny days continually succeeding each other; but in summer-time the climate leaves much to be desired. The air is heavy with moisture, and when the thermometer registers 90° there is a steamy, green-house temperature that encourages the growth of the hundred varieties of ferns that amateur botanists collect on these hills. This damp heat is exhausting and wearing, trying to temper and patience, and annihilating to starch and artificial crimps. Man’s energy fails with his collar, and although all the sights of the empire were just over the hill, the tourist would miss them rather than go to see them. Everything mildews then; boots taken off at night are covered with green mould in the morning, gloves spot and solidify, and fungi gather on any clothing packed away. Every morning, on balconies and clothes-lines, is aired and sunned the clothing that nevertheless mildews. Only a strong sense of reverence for a hero’s memory can then lead one up the terraces of the public gardens near the O Suwo temple to see the tree that General Grant set out. When he came to Nagasaki, both the General and Mrs. Grant planted trees to commemorate the visit, and his autograph certificate recording the event was cut in fac-simile on the face of the large, irregular stone between the two saplings. Though the trees have been most carefully tended, one died and had to be replaced, but both now promise to spread into a generous shade. At the tea-house where the great Japanese dinner was given by the local governor, with maiko and geisha and jugglers performing between the courses, they still preserve the floor-cushion on which their illustrious guest was seated, and bring it out to show to favored Americans. To the Japanese, General Grant and Commodore Perry mean America; nor could we have sent them better types than the great sailor who peaceably opened Japan to the world, and the greater soldier who made use of war only to insure enduring peace.
The Portuguese and Dutch have left records of their occupancy here in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Francis Xavier and the Jesuit fathers who succeeded him converted thousands of Japanese to Christianity, and though it had been supposed that the persecutions and tortures under Iyeyasu had destroyed the Christians, the opening of the country after the Restoration discovered whole communities of them near Nagasaki, who retained their belief, wore the peculiar dress prescribed for them by the Jesuits, knew the prayers and forms, and made the sign of the cross. Nothing in the Book of Martyrs exceeds the tortures and suffering of these Christians, who would not deny their religion, nor tread upon the paper picture of Christ, as they were bidden to do. The tradition goes that at Pappenberg, the precipitous little island at the mouth of the harbor, thousands of converts were forced by spear-points into the sea, but the best scholars and authorities now discredit this wholesale horror, of which no trustworthy record exists.
From 1641 the Dutch lived as prisoners on the little island of Deshima, where the porcelain bazaar now stands, suffering incredible restrictions and humiliations for the sake of monopolizing the trade of the country. Nagasaki’s children and beggars still follow strangers with the shout, “Hollander san! Hollander san!” as a remembrance of those first foreign residents, and in curio-shops queer clocks and ornaments show the adaptation and imitation of many Dutch articles by the Japanese.
The fact of Nagasaki's being only a port of call makes its curio market fluctuate in proportion to the number of merchantmen and men-of-war in port. When the harbor is full, no resident visits the curio-shops, whose prices always soar at such times. Tortoise-shell carving is a great industry of the place, but porcelain is still the specialty of this southern province, where the art was first introduced. Those wares of South Japan known anciently as Nabeshima and Hirado are the finest of Japanese porcelains, their blue and white beauty being simply perfect. The potters who brought the art from Korea and China settled in Satsuma and Hizen, and the kilns of Arita and Kagoshima are still firing. The Dutch carried the Arita ware to Europe under the name of Hizen. This porcelain is now more commonly termed Imari, while Deshima is another general name for the modern product, and Nabeshima and Hirado are the words used by connoisseurs in classifying the older wares. This confusion of names misleads the traveller, who cannot at once discern that Hizen is the name of the province, Arita of the town where the potters live and the kilns are at work, Imari of the port from which it is shipped, Nabeshima the family name of that daimio of Hizen who brought the potters from Korea, and Hirado of the town on the island of that name which produced the priceless pieces sent as gifts to Shogun or fellow-daimios. Modern Imari ware is much too fascinating and tempting to the slender purse, but when one acquires a fondness for the exquisite porcelains the old Nabeshima made for themselves, learns the comb-like lines and the geometrical and floral marks on the underside that characterize them, and is aroused to the perception of the incomparable “seven boy” Hirado, his peace of mind is gone. Genuine old Hirado vases or plates, with the seven boys at play, or even five boys or three boys, are hardly to be bought to-day, and the countless commercial imitations of the old designs do not deceive even the amateur connoisseur. Old Satsuma is even rarer, and a purchaser needs to be more suspicious of it in Japan than in London. It is true that the air is full of tales of impoverished noblemen finally selling their treasures; of forgotten godowns being rediscovered; and of rich uncles leaving stores of Hirado and Satsuma to poor relations, whose very rice-box is empty. But the wise heed not the voice of the charmer. The credulity of the stranger and the tourist is not greater than the ignorance of residents who have been in the country for years without learning to beware of almost everything on which the Emperor’s chrysanthemum crest, the Tokugawa trefoil, or the Satsuma square and circle stand conspicuous.
The fine modern Satsuma, all small pieces decorated in microscopically fine work, is painted chiefly by a few artists in Kioto and Osaka, and their work and signatures are easily recognized. The commoner Satsuma—large urns, koros, vases, and plates—is made in the province of Satsuma and in the Awata district of Kioto, but it is decorated anywhere—Kobé, Kioto, Yokohama, and Tokio all coating it with the blaze of cheap gilding that catches and delights the foreign eye. Once upon a time ship-loads of porcelains, bronzes, and lacquer were sold for a song; fine bells going for ship ballast, and ships’ cooks using veritable old Satsuma jars to put their drippings in. But that time is not now. A collection of old Satsuma lately gathered up in Europe by a Japanese buyer brought five times its cost when disposed of in Japan. Some notion of the wealth of art works, and of the great stores the country contained in the old days, may be conveyed by the drain of these twenty years, since Japanese art began to revolutionize the art world. The Restoration, the Satsuma rebellion, the adoption of foreign dress for the army and the court, each sent a flood of rare things into the curio market, and hard times still bring forth treasures. The great collectors and connoisseurs are now so generally known that sacrifices of choice curios are made directly to them by private sale, and not in the open market. Government has begun to realize the irrecoverable loss of the country, and the necessity of retaining what still remains, and lists and photographs are being made of all art treasures stored in the Government and temple godowns throughout the empire. Much has been destroyed by fire, of course, and it is said that the priests themselves have put the torch to their temples at the approach of the official commission that would have discovered what priceless temple treasures they had sold in times of need. All the Buddhist establishments suffered loss of revenues after the Restoration, and only by secretly disposing of the sacred objects in the godowns were many priests kept from starvation.
While the Dutch were there, Nagasaki had a large trade with China, and still does a great business with that country in the exportation of dried fish. It smells to heaven all along the Bund, and in the court-yards of the large warehouses men and women turn in the sun and pack into bags oblong brown things that might be either the billets of wood used in cricket, or old boot-soles. These hard blocks are the dried bonito which, shaved on a plane, stewed, and eaten with rice, are a staple of food in both countries, and not unpalatable, as we found while storm-bound on Fuji.
Almost all the coal used in China and Japan, and by the Asiatic fleets of the different nations, comes from the mines on the island of Takashima, at the entrance of Nagasaki’s fiord-like harbor. Cargoes of it have been sent even to San Francisco with profit, although this soft and very dirty fuel is much inferior to the Australian coal. The Takashima mines and the dry-dock at Nagasaki are owned by the Mitsu Bishi company, which retained those properties when it sold its steamship line to the Government, and the coal-mine brings in two million yen a year to its owners. Its deepest shaft is only one hundred and fifty feet down, and barges carry the coal from the mouth of the shafts to the waiting ships in harbor.
In 1885. the year of the great cholera epidemic, the village of mining employés was almost depopulated. The harbor was nearly deserted, the American and English mission stations were closed, and the missionaries and their families tied to Mount Hiyeizan. Only the Catholic fathers and the nuns remained, much to the concern of the governor and officials, who begged them to go. On our way to China we touched at Nagasaki while the epidemic was at its height, but no passenger was allowed to go ashore, and all day we kept to the decks that were saturated with carbolic acid. It took six hours to coal the ship, and from noon to sundown we beheld a water carnival. As the first coal-barge drew near, a man in the airy summer costume of the harbor country—which consisted of a rope around his waist—jumped over the side and swam to the stern of our steamer. He was like a big, brown frog kicking about in the water, and when he came dripping up the gang-way the faithful steerage steward gave him a carbolic spraying with his bucket and brush. The barge was hauled up alongside and made fast, and our consignment of coal was passed on board in half-bushel baskets from hand to hand along a line of chanting men and women. Nothing more primitive could be imagined, for, with block, tackle, windlass, steam, and a donkey engine on board, it took a hundred pairs of hands to do their work. At the end of each hour there was a breathing spell. Many of the women were young and pretty, and some of them had brought their children, who, throwing back the empty baskets and helping to pass them along the line, thus began their lives of toil and earned a few pennies. The passengers threw to the grimy children all the small Japanese coins they possessed, and when the ship swung loose and started away their cheerful little sayonaras long rang after us.