IV. THE PEOPLE

Stature—Cosmetics—Costume—Diet—Etiquette—“Sake”—The tea ceremony—The flower ceremony—Love of nature-Gardens—Homes

This most important people in the contemporary political world is modest in stature, averaging five feet three-and-a-half inches for the men, four feet ten-and-a-half inches for the women. One of their great warriors, Tamura Maro, was described as “a man of very fine figure, . . . five feet five inches tall.”⁴⁵ Some dieticians believe that this brevity is due to insufficiency of lime in the Japanese diet, due in turn to lack of milk, and this to the expensiveness of grazing areas in so crowded a land;⁴⁶ but such a theory, like everything in dietetics, must be looked upon as highly hypothetical. The women seem fragile and weak, but probably their energy, like that of the men, is one of nervous courage rather than of physical strength, and cannot be seen outside of emergencies. Their beauty is a matter of expression and carriage as well as of feature; their dainty grace is a typical product of Japanese art.

Cosmetics are popular and ancient in Japan as elsewhere; even in the early days of Kyoto’s leadership every male of quality rouged his cheeks, powdered his face, sprinkled his clothes with perfume, and carried a mirror with him wherever he went.⁴⁷ Powder has been for centuries the female complexion of Japan; the Lady Sei Shonagon, in her Pillow Sketches (ca. 991 A.D.), says demurely: “I bent my head down and hid my face with my sleeve at the risk of brushing off my powder and appearing with a spotted face.”⁴⁸Fashionable ladies rouged their cheeks, colored their nails, and occasionally gilded the lower lip; to complete their toilette sixteen articles were required in the seventeenth century, and twenty in the eighteenth. They recognized fifteen styles of front hair and twelve styles of back hair; they shaved their eyebrows, painted “crescent moons” or other forms in their place, or substituted for them two little black spots high up on the forehead, to match their artificially blackened teeth. To construct the architecture of a woman’s hair was a task that took from two to six hours of expert labor. In the Heian epoch the majority of the men shaved the crown of the head, gathered the rest in a queue, and laid the queue athwart the crown so as to divide it into equal halves. Beards, though sparse, were a necessity; those who had none by nature wore false ones, and a pair of tweezers for the care of the beard was furnished to every guest at any fashionable house.⁴⁹

Japanese costume, in the Nara age, imitated the Chinese, with tunic and trousers covered by a tight robe. In the Kyoto period the robe became looser and multiple; men as well as women wore from two to twenty superimposed robes, whose colors were determined by the rank of the wearer, and provided many prismatic displays at the edges of the sleeves. At one time the lady’s sleeves reached below her knees, and bore, each of them, a little bell that tinkled as she walked. On days when the streets were wet from rain or snow they walked on wooden slippers raised by wooden cleats an inch or so above the earth. In the Tokugawa era dress became so extravagant that the shoguns, careless of history, tried to check it by sumptuary laws; silk-lined and embroidered breeches and socks were outlawed, beards were forbidden, certain ways of wearing the hair were proscribed, and at times the police were instructed to arrest anyone wearing fine garments in the street. Occasionally these laws were obeyed; for the most part they were circumvented by the ingenuity of human folly.⁵⁰ In time the rage for plural robes abated, and the Japanese became one of the most simply, modestly and tastefully dressed of peoples.

Nor did they yield to any other nation in habits of cleanliness. Among those who could afford it clothes were changed three times a day; and poor as well as rich bathed the body daily.⁵¹* In the villages the people bathed in tubs outside their doors in summer, while gossiping industriously with their neighbors.⁵² Hot baths at no degrees Fahrenheit were used as a method of keeping warm in winter. Diet was simple and wholesome until luxury came; the early Chinese descriptions of the Japanese noted that “they are a long-lived race, and persons who have reached one hundred years are very common.”⁵⁴ The staple food of the people was rice, to which were added fish, vegetables, sea-weed, fruit and meat according to income. Meat was a rare dish except among the aristocracy and the soldiery. On a regimen of rice, a little fish and no meat, the coolie developed good lungs and tough muscles, and could run from fifty to eighty miles in twenty-four hours without distress; when he added meat he lost this capacity.⁵⁵* The emperors of the Kyoto period made pious efforts to enforce Buddhist dietary laws by forbidding the slaughter or eating of animals; but when the people found that the priests themselves clandestinely violated these laws, they took to meat as a delicacy, and used it to excess whenever their means permitted.⁵⁷

To the Japanese, as to the Chinese and the French, fine cooking was an essential grace of civilization. Its practitioners, like artists and philosophers, divided into warring schools, and fought one another with recipes. Table manners became at least as important as religion; elaborate enactments prescribed the order and quantity of bites, and the posture of the body at each stage of the meal. Ladies were forbidden to make a sound while eating or drinking; but men were expected to indicate their appreciation of a host’s generosity by a little grateful belching.⁵⁸ The diners sat on one or two heels on mats, at a table raised but a few inches above the floor; or the food might be laid upon the mat, without any table at all. Usually the meal was begun with a hot drink of rice-wine; for had not the poet Tahito declared, far back in the seventh century, that sake was the one solution for all the problems of life?

That which the seven sages sought,

Those men of olden times,

Was sake, beyond all doubt.

Instead of holding forth

Wisely, with grave mien,

How much better to drink sake

To get drunk, and to shout aloud.

Since it is true

That death comes at last for all,

Let us be joyful

While we are alive.

Even the jewel that sparkles in the night

Is less to us than the uplifting of the heart

Which comes by drinking sake.⁵⁹

More sacred than sake, to the aristocracy, was tea. This gracious remedy for the tastelessness of boiled water was introduced from China into Japan, unsuccessfully in 805, successfully in 1191. At first the people shunned the leaf as a poison, and would have nothing to do with it; but when a few cups of the outlandish beverage quickly cleared the head of a shogun who had drunk too much sake the night before, the Japanese recognized the utility of tea. Its costliness added to its charm: tiny jars of it were given as precious gifts, even to reward warriors for mighty deeds of valor, and the fortunate possessors gathered their friends about them to share the royal drink. The Japanese made a graceful and complex ceremony out of tea-drinking, and Rikyu-established for it six inviolable rules that raised it to a cult. The signal bidding the guests to enter the tea pavilion, said Rikyu, must be given by wooden clappers; the ablution bowl must be kept constantly filled with pure water; any guest conscious of inadequacy or inelegance in the furniture or the surroundings must leave at once, and as quietly as possible; no trivial gossip was to be indulged in, but only matters of noble and serious import were to be discussed; no word of deceit or flattery should pass any lip; and the affair should not last beyond four hours. No tea-pot was used at such Cha-no-yu (“hot water for tea”) reunions; powdered tea was placed in a cup of choice design, hot water was added, and the cup was passed from guest to guest, each wiping its rim carefully with a napkin. When the last drinker had consumed the last drop the cup was passed around again, to be critically examined as a work of ceramic art.⁶⁰ In this way the tea-ceremony stimulated the potters to produce ever lovelier cups and bowls, and helped to form the manners of the Japanese into tranquillity, courtesy and charm.*

Flowers, too, became a cult in Japan, and the same Rikyu who formulated the ritual of tea valued his flowers as much as his cups. When he heard that Hideyoshi was coming to see his famous collection of chrysanthemums, Rikyu destroyed all the blossoms in his garden but one, so that this might shine unrivaled before the terrible shogun*⁶² The art of flower-arrangement grew step by step with “Teaism” in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and became in the seventeenth an independent devotion. “Flower-masters” arose who taught men and women how flowers should be grown in the garden and placed in the home; it was not enough, they said, to admire the blossoms, but one must learn to see as much loveliness in the leaf, the bough or the stalk as in the flower, as much beauty in one flower as in a thousand; and one must arrange them with a view not merely to color but to grouping and line.⁶⁴ Tea, flowers, poetry, and the dance became requisites of womanhood among the aristocracy of Japan.

Flowers are the religion of the Japanese; they worship them with sacrificial fervor and national accord. They watch for the blossoms appropriate to each season; and when, for a week or two in early April, the cherry-tree blooms, all Japan seems to leave its work to gaze at it, or even to make pilgrimages to places where the miracle is most abundant and complete.† The cherry-tree is cultivated not for any fruit but for its blossom—the emblem of the faithful warrior ready to die for his country at the moment of his fullest life.⁶⁵ Criminals en route to execution will sometimes ask for a flower.⁶⁶ The Lady Chiyo, in a famous poem, tells of a girl who came to draw water from a well, but, finding bucket and rope entwined with con-volvuli, went elsewhere for water rather than break the tendrils.⁶⁷ “The heart of man,” says Tsurayuki, “can never be understood; but in my native village the flowers give forth their perfume as before.”⁶⁸ These simple lines are among the greatest of Japanese poems, for they express in perfect and irreducible form a profound characteristic of a race, and one of the rare conclusions of philosophy. Never has another people shown such love of nature as one finds in Japan; nowhere else have men and women accepted so completely all natural moods of earth, sky and sea; nowhere else have men so carefully cultivated gardens, or nourished plants in their growth, or tended them in the home. Japan did not have to wait for a Rousseau or a Wordsworth to tell it that mountains were sublime, or that lakes might be beautiful. There is hardly a dwelling in Japan without a vase of flowers in it, and hardly a poem in Japanese literature without a landscape in its lines. As Oscar Wilde thought that England should not fight France because the French wrote perfect prose, so America might seek peace to the end with a nation that thirsts for beauty almost as passionately as it hungers for power.

The art of gardening was imported from China along with Buddhism and tea; but here again the Japanese transformed creatively what they had absorbed through imitation. They found an esthetic value in asymmetry, a new charm in the surprises of unhackneyed forms; they dwarfed trees and shrubs by confining their roots in pots, and with impish humor and tyrannical affection trained them into shapes that might within a garden wall represent the wind-twisted trees of stormy Japan; they searched the craters of their volcanoes and the most precipitous shores of their seas to find rocks fused into metal by hidden fires, or moulded by patient breakers into quaint and gnarled forms; they dug little lakes, channeled roving rivulets, and crossed them with bridges that seemed to spring from the natural growth of the woods; and through all these varied formations they wore, with imperceptible design, footpaths that would lead now to startling novelties and now to cool and silent retreats.

Where space and means allowed they attached their homes to their gardens rather than their gardens to their homes. Their houses were frail but pretty; earthquakes made tall buildings dangerous, but the carpenter and woodworker knew how to bind eaves, gables and lattices into a dwelling ascetically simple, esthetically perfect, and architecturally unique. Here were no curtains, sofas, beds, tables or chairs, no obtrusive display of the dweller’s wealth and luxury, no museum of pictures, statuary or bric-a-brac; but in some alcove a blossoming branch, on the wall a silk or paper painting or specimen of calligraphy, on the matted floor a cushion fronted by a lectern and flanked by a bookcase on one side and an arm-rest on the other, and, hidden in a cupboard, mattresses and coverings to be spread on the floor when the time should come to sleep. Within such modest quarters, or in the peasant’s fragile hut, the Japanese family lived, and through all storms of war and revolution, of political corruption and religious strife, carried on the life and civilization of the Sacred Isles.