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23 chapters
PREFACE.
PREFACE.
The object of the present work is to give a concise account of the life we lead at home in Tokyo. I am aware that there are already many excellent works on Japan which may be read with great profit; but as their authors are most of them Europeans or Americans, and naturally look at Japanese life and civilisation from an occidental point of view, it occurred to me that notwithstanding the superabundance of books on Japan, a description of Japanese life by a native of the country might not be with
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CHAPTER I. TOKYO THE CAPITAL.
CHAPTER I. TOKYO THE CAPITAL.
TOKYO is the youngest of the great capitals of the world, for it was only in 1868 that the present Emperor of Japan left the old city where his ancestors had for centuries lived in seclusion and made the Shogun’s stronghold his new home and seat of government. It was a politic move; because though the Shogun had already resigned his office and surrendered the absolute authority he had exercised in the government of the country, there were still many among his followers who were unwilling to give
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CHAPTER II. THE STREETS OF TOKYO.
CHAPTER II. THE STREETS OF TOKYO.
THE area of Tokyo is not so great as is generally supposed. The people of Yedo used to say that their city was ten miles square; but the extreme length, from north-east to south-west, of Tokyo which does not differ materially in its limits from the old city, is no more than eight miles. The actual area is only 18,482 acres, or nearly twenty-nine square miles. The population fell with the decline of the feudal government and was under a million in the early days of the new regime. The registered
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CHAPTER III. HOUSES: EXTERIOR.
CHAPTER III. HOUSES: EXTERIOR.
WE have already said that the complicated way of numbering streets and the inclusion of a large group of buildings in one number make it hard to find any particular house. They necessitate a dreary going to and fro through a series of thoroughfares, which is very trying to one’s temper and would in most cases oblige one after a long search to give it up altogether, were it not for the circumstance that not only shops and private offices, but also nearly every private house, has a name-plate nail
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CHAPTER IV. HOUSES: INTERIOR.
CHAPTER IV. HOUSES: INTERIOR.
A Japanese room is measured, not by feet and inches, but by the number of mats it contains. A mat consists of a straw mattress, about an inch and a half thick, with a covering of fine matting which is sewn on at the edges of the mattress either by itself or with a border, usually dark-blue and an inch wide, of coarse hempen cloth. It is six feet long by three wide; this measure is not always exact, but may vary by an inch or more in either direction. When a house is newly built, the mat-maker co
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CHAPTER V. MEALS.
CHAPTER V. MEALS.
RICE is the staple food of the Japanese; and no other food-stuff stands so high in popular esteem, or has a tutelary deity of its own. This rice-god has more shrines than any other deity, for he is worshipped everywhere, in town and village, and often a small shrine, no bigger than a hut, peeps amid a lonely cluster of trees surrounded on all sides by rice-paddies, its latticed door covered from top to bottom with the ex-votos of the simple peasant folk. Under the feudal government the incomes o
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CHAPTER VI. FOOD.
CHAPTER VI. FOOD.
IT will be seen from the foregoing chapter that the Japanese diet consists almost entirely of fish and vegetables. It is true that we also eat domestic and other fowls, and in Tokyo and other large towns a quantity of beef and pork, and horseflesh as well, is consumed; but their consumption is insignificant compared with the part fish and vegetables play in the Japanese culinary art. We have a great variety of vegetables. The commonest and most useful of them is the garden radish, which is pickl
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CHAPTER VII. MALE DRESS.
CHAPTER VII. MALE DRESS.
A stranger in the streets of Tokyo cannot but be struck by the number of Japanese, especially men and boys, who are dressed in European clothes. The western costume, if less picturesque, is certainly more handy than the Japanese; it allows a greater freedom to the limbs, whereas in the latter the long sleeves are apt to be caught by knobs and corners and the skirt is always in the way when we wish to run or walk fast. For this reason the European male dress is largely worn in schools, government
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CHAPTER VIII. FEMALE DRESS.
CHAPTER VIII. FEMALE DRESS.
THE late Prince Ito’s first administration which lasted from 1886 to 1889, was a period of great pro-European activity when heroic attempts were made to Europeanise the entire social organisation. The most conspicuous of these attempts were the strenuous efforts made to remodel the social life of the nation; and with that object in view, various social customs of the West were introduced. Balls and soirées were given in official circles and among peers and men of wealth. One of the direct conseq
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CHAPTER IX. TOILET.
CHAPTER IX. TOILET.
AMONG the earliest innovations after the Restoration to which the Japanese people took kindly was the clipping of their queues. In the old days men had little queues on the top of their heads. For this purpose they shaved the crown and gathering the hair around, tied it at the top with a piece of paper string; then, they bent the queue and bringing it down forward over the forehead, fastened it with the ends of the same string so that the queue was tied tightly to the first knot. The end of the
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CHAPTER X. OUTDOOR GEAR.
CHAPTER X. OUTDOOR GEAR.
EUROPEAN clothes are, as we have seen, replacing the Japanese male dress in schools, public offices, and other quarters, and are checked in their advance only by the unaltered state of Japanese homes. In the matter of footgear the case is almost similar, only that boots and shoes have superseded clogs and sandals to a far greater extent than coats and trousers have the kimono . For people in foreign clothes almost invariably wear foreign footgear; it is only in wet weather that one sees sometime
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CHAPTER XI. DAILY LIFE.
CHAPTER XI. DAILY LIFE.
MANY foreigners think that Japanese women must lead a pretty dull life as they can have little to do in a house bare of furniture. But whether their lives be dull or not compared with the lives of women in other countries, they certainly are not idle. They do not, it is true, go out much; it is a red-letter day with them when they visit a public place in the flower-season or betake themselves to the theatre. But at home they are kept all day to their work. The very scarcity of furniture in a Jap
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CHAPTER XII. SERVANTS.
CHAPTER XII. SERVANTS.
THE servant question is as great a domestic problem with us as it is in other parts of the world. We too complain of our servants’ insubordination, idleness, wilfulness, talkativeness, and general contrariness. Old folk are constantly drumming into our ears that servants are not what they used to be in the good old days and that they have ceased to have their masters’ interests at heart and are ready to leave their present situation whenever better terms are elsewhere obtainable. That the charac
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CHAPTER XIII. MANNERS.
CHAPTER XIII. MANNERS.
IN Japan as in most other oriental countries, etiquette is an extremely intricate art which can be mastered only by diligent study under a professor. It is an important item in a girl’s school curriculum and is among her most valued accomplishments. It is not, however, commonly studied in detail by men, unless they have been brought up under the old regime; they feel in consequence like fish out of water when they have to assist at elaborate ceremonies and fall into many blunders through their n
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CHAPTER XIV. MARRIAGE.
CHAPTER XIV. MARRIAGE.
MARRIAGE is the turning-point of a woman’s life in Japan in a far greater degree than it is in western countries, for the simple reason that she has as yet few openings for earning an independence. Girls are brought up with a view to marriage and are early taught the duties of wife and mother. They look upon the wedded state as their lot in life and are prepared to enter sooner or later into matrimony. There are not many women who remain single all their lives. Girls of the poorer classes find e
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CHAPTER XV. FAMILY RELATIONS.
CHAPTER XV. FAMILY RELATIONS.
WHEN a woman marries, her union with her husband is not more considered than her entry into his family. Marriage, it is true, has in all countries this twofold character; but it is especially the case in Japan where but a few decades separate us from the feudal times when, as in medieval Europe, the family was the unit of society; and it is only in recent years that the individual has begun to receive equal consideration with the family as an element of society. The Chinese sages laid down with
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CHAPTER XVI. DIVORCE.
CHAPTER XVI. DIVORCE.
IN the old days divorces took place on the slightest pretext. Among the higher classes, it is true, the family connections which a marriage brought into existence could not be dissolved without more or less serious consequences, and the parties were, as in other countries, expected to sacrifice their personal happiness to family considerations; but among the other classes which were not influenced, as a rule, by such worldly motives in their marriages, divorces were of pretty frequent occurrence
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CHAPTER XVII. CHILDREN.
CHAPTER XVII. CHILDREN.
JAPAN has been called the Paradise of Babies; and certain it is that childhood passes very happily in this country. In every family its children have a free run of the whole house; there is neither a nursery to which they can be confined nor any room which is exempt from their invasion. They are the real masters of the house; and father, mother, elder brother and sister are their willing slaves. They will romp unchidden into the parlour and interrupt the visitor whom the father or mother is ther
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CHAPTER XVIII. FUNERAL.
CHAPTER XVIII. FUNERAL.
WHEN the Japanese child has passed through its teens without any serious mishap, its mother is not yet altogether free from anxiety; for there are certain stages of its life at which it is threatened by misfortune. Superstition has fixed certain ages, different according to sex, which must be passed with utmost circumspection if one would escape calamities; these ages are the twenty-fifth, forty-second, and sixty-first years for men and the nineteenth, thirty-third, and thirty-seventh years for
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CHAPTER XIX. ACCOMPLISHMENTS.
CHAPTER XIX. ACCOMPLISHMENTS.
THE greatest accomplishment, and the most useful, that the Japanese woman can possess is unquestionably the art of sewing; but the knowledge of needlework is so generally recognised as an indispensable equipment of the housewife, forming as it does an important subject of study in girls’ schools, that it is not often included in the accomplishments recommended in Japanese books for women. The first place among them is given to composition, that is, the art of writing, more particularly, of lette
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CHAPTER XX. PUBLIC AMUSEMENTS.
CHAPTER XX. PUBLIC AMUSEMENTS.
WE Japanese do not take our pleasures sadly; for when upon pleasure bent, we give ourselves to it heart and soul and forget for the nonce the cares and troubles that may at other times weigh upon our minds. And foreign observers, from seeing us in our hours of relaxation, taunted us, at least until our war with Russia showed us in another light, with frivolity and pronounced us a nation incapable of taking things seriously. Nothing could have been further from the truth than to suppose that we l
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CHAPTER XXI. FEASTS AND FESTIVITIES.
CHAPTER XXI. FEASTS AND FESTIVITIES.
THERE are feasts and festivities galore in Tokyo. In the old times the feast-days marked in the calendar were far more numerous than they are now. In those days, while the daimyo and his retainers travelled pretty often between Yedo and their native province, the citizens seldom left town; it was a red-letter day with them when they set out on a pilgrimage to the great shrine of Ise or on a trip to Kyoto; and even these persons formed a very small minority. The high roads were infested by robber
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CHAPTER XXII. SPORTS AND GAMES.
CHAPTER XXII. SPORTS AND GAMES.
FIELD sports cannot be said to thrive in Japan. Fox-hunting, as practised in England, is unknown; indeed, hunting on a grand scale seldom takes place. Every year a large number of shooting licenses are issued; but reckless shooting has made game so scarce in the neighbourhood of Tokyo that any one in search of good sport must go a considerable distance from town. Game preserves are also very few in number, for there is scarcely one man of means in Tokyo who keeps such grounds. Nearly all the sma
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