Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan: First Series — Ch 7: The Chief City of the Province of the Gods, Part 3

Sec.

16 The city proper is as level as a table, but is bounded on two sides by low demilunes of charming hills shadowed with evergreen foliage and crowned with temples or shrines.

There are thirty-five thousand souls dwelling in ten thousand houses forming thirty-three principal and many smaller streets; and from each end of almost every street, beyond the hills, the lake, or the eastern rice-fields, a mountain summit is always visible--green, blue, or grey according to distance.

One may ride, walk, or go by boat to any quarter of the town; for it is not only divided by two rivers, but is also intersected by numbers of canals crossed by queer little bridges curved like a well-bent bow.

Architecturally (despite such constructions in European style as the College of Teachers, the great public school, the Kencho, the new post-office), it is much like other quaint Japanese towns; the structure of its temples, taverns, shops, and private dwellings is the same as in other cities of the western coast.

But doubtless owing to the fact that Matsue remained a feudal stronghold until a time within the memory of thousands still living, those feudal distinctions of caste so sharply drawn in ancient times are yet indicated with singular exactness by the varying architecture of different districts.

The city can be definitely divided into three architectural quarters: the district of the merchants and shop-keepers, forming the heart of the settlement, where all the houses are two stories high; the district of the temples, including nearly the whole south-eastern part of the town; and the district or districts of the shizoku (formerly called samurai), comprising a vast number of large, roomy, garden-girt, one-story dwellings.

From these elegant homes, in feudal days, could be summoned at a moment's notice five thousand 'two-sworded men' with their armed retainers, making a fighting total for the city alone of probably not less than thirteen thousand warriors.

More than one-third of all the city buildings were then samurai homes; for Matsue was the military centre of the most ancient province of Japan.

At both ends of the town, which curves in a crescent along the lake shore, were the two main settlements of samurai; but just as some of the most important temples are situated outside of the temple district, so were many of the finest homesteads of this knightly caste situated in other quarters.

They mustered most thickly, however, about the castle, which stands to-day on the summit of its citadel hill--the Oshiroyama--solid as when first built long centuries ago, a vast and sinister shape, all iron-grey, rising against the sky from a cyclopean foundation of stone.

Fantastically grim the thing is, and grotesquely complex in detail; looking somewhat like a huge pagoda, of which the second, third, and fourth stories have been squeezed down and telescoped into one another by their own weight.

Crested at its summit, like a feudal helmet, with two colossal fishes of bronze lifting their curved bodies skyward from either angle of the roof, and bristling with horned gables and gargoyled eaves and tilted puzzles of tiled roofing at every story, the creation is a veritable architectural dragon, made up of magnificent monstrosities--a dragon, moreover, full of eyes set at all conceivable angles, above below, and on every side.

From under the black scowl of the loftiest eaves, looking east and south, the whole city can be seen at a single glance, as in the vision of a soaring hawk; and from the northern angle the view plunges down three hundred feet to the castle road, where walking figures of men appear no larger than flies.

Sec.

17 The grim castle has its legend.

It is related that, in accordance with some primitive and barbarous custom, precisely like that of which so terrible a souvenir has been preserved for us in the most pathetic of Servian ballads, 'The Foundation of Skadra,' a maiden of Matsue was interred alive under the walls of the castle at the time of its erection, as a sacrifice to some forgotten gods.

Her name has never been recorded; nothing concerning her is remembered except that she was beautiful and very fond of dancing.

Now after the castle had been built, it is said that a law had to be passed forbidding that any girl should dance in the streets of Matsue.

For whenever any maiden danced the hill Oshiroyama would shudder, and the great castle quiver from basement to summit.

Sec.

18 One may still sometimes hear in the streets a very humorous song, which every one in town formerly knew by heart, celebrating the Seven Wonders of Matsue.

For Matsue was formerly divided into seven quarters, in each of which some extraordinary object or person was to be seen.

It is now divided into five religious districts, each containing a temple of the State religion.

People living within those districts are called ujiko, and the temple the ujigami, or dwelling-place of the tutelary god.

The ujiko must support the ujigami.

(Every village and town has at least one ujigami.

) There is probably not one of the multitudinous temples of Matsue which has not some marvellous tradition attached to it; each of the districts has many legends; and I think that each of the thirty-three streets has its own special ghost story.

Of these ghost stories I cite two specimens: they are quite representative of one variety of Japanese folk-lore.

Near to the Fu-mon-in temple, which is in the north-eastern quarter, there is a bridge called Adzuki-togi-bashi, or The Bridge of the Washing of Peas.

For it was said in other years that nightly a phantom woman sat beneath that bridge washing phantom peas.

There is an exquisite Japanese iris-flower, of rainbow-violet colour, which flower is named kaki-tsubata; and there is a song about that flower called kaki-tsubata-no-uta.

Now this song must never be sung near the Adzuki-togi-bashi, because, for some strange reason which seems to have been forgotten, the ghosts haunting that place become so angry upon hearing it that to sing it there is to expose one's self to the most frightful calamities.

There was once a samurai who feared nothing, who one night went to that bridge and loudly sang the song.

No ghost appearing, he laughed and went home.

At the gate of his house he met a beautiful tall woman whom he had never seen before, and who, bowing, presented him with a lacquered box-fumi-bako--such as women keep their letters in.

He bowed to her in his knightly way; but she said, 'I am only the servant--this is my mistress's gift,' and vanished out of his sight.

Opening the box, he saw the bleeding head of a young child.

Entering his house, he found upon the floor of the guest-room the dead body of his own infant son with the head torn off.

Of the cemetery Dai-Oji, which is in the street called Nakabaramachi, this story is told.

In Nakabaramachi there is an ameya, or little shop in which midzu-ame is sold--the amber-tinted syrup, made of malt, which is given to children when milk cannot be obtained for them.

Every night at a late hour there came to that shop a very pale woman, all in white, to buy one rin [8] worth of midzu-ame.

The ame-seller wondered that she was so thin and pale, and often questioned her kindly; but she answered nothing.

At last one night he followed her, out of curiosity.

She went to the cemetery; and he became afraid and returned.

The next night the woman came again, but bought no midzu-ame, and only beckoned to the man to go with her.

He followed her, with friends, into the cemetery.

She walked to a certain tomb, and there disappeared; and they heard, under the ground, the crying of a child.

Opening the tomb, they saw within it the corpse of the woman who nightly visited the ameya, with a living infant, laughing to see the lantern light, and beside the infant a little cup of midzu-ame.

For the mother had been prematurely buried; the child was born in the tomb, and the ghost of the mother had thus provided for it--love being stronger than death.

Sec.

19 Over the Tenjin-bashi, or Bridge of Tenjin, and through small streets and narrow of densely populated districts, and past many a tenantless and mouldering feudal homestead, I make my way to the extreme south-western end of the city, to watch the sunset from a little sobaya [9] facing the lake.

For to see the sun sink from this sobaya is one of the delights of Matsue.

There are no such sunsets in Japan as in the tropics: the light is gentle as a light of dreams; there are no furies of colour; there are no chromatic violences in nature in this Orient.

All in sea or sky is tint rather than colour, and tint vapour-toned.

I think that the exquisite taste of the race in the matter of colours and of tints, as exemplified in the dyes of their wonderful textures, is largely attributable to the sober and delicate beauty of nature's tones in this all-temperate world where nothing is garish.

Before me the fair vast lake sleeps, softly luminous, far-ringed with chains of blue volcanic hills shaped like a sierra.

On my right, at its eastern end, the most ancient quarter of the city spreads its roofs of blue-grey tile; the houses crowd thickly down to the shore, to dip their wooden feet into the flood.

With a glass I can see my own windows and the far-spreading of the roofs beyond, and above all else the green citadel with its grim castle, grotesquely peaked.

The sun begins to set, and exquisite astonishments of tinting appear in water and sky.

Dead rich purples cloud broadly behind and above the indigo blackness of the serrated hills--mist purples, fading upward smokily into faint vermilions and dim gold, which again melt up through ghostliest greens into the blue.

The deeper waters of the lake, far away, take a tender violet indescribable, and the silhouette of the pine-shadowed island seems to float in that sea of soft sweet colour.

But the shallower and nearer is cut from the deeper water by the current as sharply as by a line drawn, and all the surface on this side of that line is a shimmering bronze--old rich ruddy gold-bronze.

All the fainter colours change every five minutes,--wondrously change and shift like tones and shades of fine shot-silks.

Sec.

20 Often in the streets at night, especially on the nights of sacred festivals (matsuri), one's attention will be attracted to some small booth by the spectacle of an admiring and perfectly silent crowd pressing before it.

As soon as one can get a chance to look one finds there is nothing to look at but a few vases containing sprays of flowers, or perhaps some light gracious branches freshly cut from a blossoming tree.

It is simply a little flower-show, or, more correctly, a free exhibition of master skill in the arrangement of flowers.

For the Japanese do not brutally chop off flower-heads to work them up into meaningless masses of colour, as we barbarians do: they love nature too well for that; they know how much the natural charm of the flower depends upon its setting and mounting, its relation to leaf and stem, and they select a single graceful branch or spray just as nature made it.

At first you will not, as a Western stranger, comprehend such an exhibition at all: you are yet a savage in such matters compared with the commonest coolies about you.

But even while you are still wondering at popular interest in this simple little show, the charm of it will begin to grow upon you, will become a revelation to you; and, despite your Occidental idea of self-superiority, you will feel humbled by the discovery that all flower displays you have ever seen abroad were only monstrosities in comparison with the natural beauty of those few simple sprays.

You will also observe how much the white or pale blue screen behind the flowers enhances the effect by lamp or lantern light.

For the screen has been arranged with the special purpose of showing the exquisiteness of plant shadows; and the sharp silhouettes of sprays and blossoms cast thereon are beautiful beyond the imagining of any Western decorative artist.

Sec.

21 It is still the season of mists in this land whose most ancient name signifies the Place of the Issuing of Clouds.

With the passing of twilight a faint ghostly brume rises over lake and landscape, spectrally veiling surfaces, slowly obliterating distances.

As I lean over the parapet of the Tenjin-bashi, on my homeward way, to take one last look eastward, I find that the mountains have already been effaced.

Before me there is only a shadowy flood far vanishing into vagueness without a horizon--the phantom of a sea.

And I become suddenly aware that little white things are fluttering slowly down into it from the fingers of a woman standing upon the bridge beside me, and murmuring something in a low sweet voice.

She is praying for her dead child.

Each of those little papers she is dropping into the current bears a tiny picture of Jizo and perhaps a little inscription.

For when a child dies the mother buys a small woodcut (hanko) of Jizo, and with it prints the image of the divinity upon one hundred little papers.

And she sometimes also writes upon the papers words signifying 'For the sake of...'

--inscribing never the living, but the kaimyo or soul-name only, which the Buddhist priest has given to the dead, and which is written also upon the little commemorative tablet kept within the Buddhist household shrine, or butsuma.

Then, upon a fixed day (most commonly the forty-ninth day after the burial), she goes to some place of running water and drops the little papers therein one by one; repeating, as each slips through her fingers, the holy invocation, 'Namu Jizo, Dai Bosatsu!'

Doubtless this pious little woman, praying beside me in the dusk, is very poor.

Were she not, she would hire a boat and scatter her tiny papers far away upon the bosom of the lake.

(It is now only after dark that this may be done; for the police--I know not why--have been instructed to prevent the pretty rite, just as in the open ports they have been instructed to prohibit the launching of the little straw boats of the dead, the shoryobune.

) But why should the papers be cast into running water?

A good old Tendai priest tells me that originally the rite was only for the souls of the drowned.

But now these gentle hearts believe that all waters flow downward to the Shadow-world and through the Sai-no-Kawara, where Jizo is.

Sec.

22 At home again, I slide open once more my little paper window, and look out upon the night.

I see the paper lanterns flitting over the bridge, like a long shimmering of fireflies.

I see the spectres of a hundred lights trembling upon the black flood.

I see the broad shoji of dwellings beyond the river suffused with the soft yellow radiance of invisible lamps; and upon those lighted spaces I can discern slender moving shadows, silhouettes of graceful women.

Devoutly do I pray that glass may never become universally adopted in Japan--there would be no more delicious shadows.

I listen to the voices of the city awhile.

I hear the great bell of Tokoji rolling its soft Buddhist thunder across the dark, and the songs of the night-walkers whose hearts have been made merry with wine, and the long sonorous chanting of the night-peddlers.

'U-mu-don-yai-soba-yai!'

It is the seller of hot soba, Japanese buckwheat, making his last round.

'Umai handan, machibito endan, usemono ninso kaso kichikyo no urainai!'

The cry of the itinerant fortune-teller.

'Ame-yu!'

The musical cry of the seller of midzu-ame, the sweet amber syrup which children love.

'Amail' The shrilling call of the seller of amazake, sweet rice wine.

'Kawachi-no-kuni-hiotan-yama-koi-no-tsuji-ura!'

The peddler of love-papers, of divining-papers, pretty tinted things with little shadowy pictures upon them.

When held near a fire or a lamp, words written upon them with invisible ink begin to appear.

These are always about sweethearts, and sometimes tell one what he does not wish to know.

The fortunate ones who read them believe themselves still more fortunate; the unlucky abandon all hope; the jealous become even more jealous than they were before.

From all over the city there rises into the night a sound like the bubbling and booming of great frogs in a march--the echoing of the tiny drums of the dancing-girls, of the charming geisha.

Like the rolling of a waterfall continually reverberates the multitudinous pattering of geta upon the bridge.

A new light rises in the east; the moon is wheeling up from behind the peaks, very large and weird and wan through the white vapours.

Again I hear the sounds of the clapping of many hands.

For the wayfarers are paying obeisance to O-Tsuki-San: from the long bridge they are saluting the coming of the White Moon-Lady.

[10] I sleep, to dream of little children, in some mouldering mossy temple court, playing at the game of Shadows and of Demons.