A Japanese Boy
the manifestation of filial piety! Fortunately for my sister-in-law, my
mother, who has four daughters living with their husbands' relatives,
made every household task as light and easy as she could for her and
expressed sympathy when needed, knowing that her own daughters were
laboring in the like circumstances.
We do not eat at one large dining table with chairs round it; we sit on
our heels on the matted floor with a separate small table in front of
each of us. I remember my table was in the form of a box about a foot
square, the lid of which I lifted and laid on the body of the box with
the inner surface up. The inner surface was japanned red, the outer
surface and the sides of the box green. The convenience of this form of
table is, that you can store away your own rice-bowl, vegetable-dish and
chop-stick case in the box. Some tables stand on two flat and broad
legs, others have drawers in their sides. We do not ring the bell in
announcing dinner; in large families they clap two oblong blocks of hard
wood. Grace before meat was a thing unknown to us; my brother, however,
had a queer habit of bowing to his chopsticks at the close of meals. He
did it from simple heart-felt gratitude and not for show. In his
ignorance of Him who provideth our daily bread, he concluded to return
thanks to the tools of immediate usefulness. Chopsticks are of various
materials--bamboo, mahogany, ivory, etc.,--and in different
shapes--round, angular, slender at one end and stout at the other, etc.
In a great public feast where there is no knowing the number present, or
a religious fete where reverential cleanliness is formally insisted
upon, fork-shaped splints of soft wood are distributed among the guests
who rend them asunder into pairs of impromptu chopsticks. On the morning
of New Year's Day tradition requires us to use chopsticks prepared
hastily of mulberry twigs in handling rice-paste cakes called mochi,
which the people cook with various edibles and eat, as a sort of
religious ceremony.
Rice is the staple food. Vegetables and fishes are also consumed, yet no
meat is eaten. Partridge and game, however, were sanctioned from early
times as food or rather as luxuries. To cook rice just right--not too
soft nor too hard--is not an easy matter; it is considered an art every
Japanese maiden of marriageable age must needs acquire. The rice is
first washed in a wooden tub, and then transferred to a deep iron
cooking-pot with some water. The point lies in the question, how much
water is needed? Neither too much nor too little; there is a golden
mean. If the rice be cooked either the very least little bit soft or
hard the young servant-wife, for really that she is, is blamed for it.
The right amount of water is only ascertained by trial. No less puzzling
is the degree of heat to be applied to the pot, and the point at which
to withdraw the fuel and leave the cooking to be completed without any
further application of heat. These things I speak of not merely from
observation but from personal experience. When I was off at a boarding
school, which I may have occasion to speak of, I experimented in
boarding myself for a while; I learned there how to cook as at a young
ladies' seminary, as well as how to write and read.
Hot boiled rice we always have at dinner; at supper and breakfast we
pour boiling tea over cold rice in the bowl and are content. Tea is
boiling in the kitchen from morning till night. It is drunk with no
sugar or milk; indeed, the scrupulous inhabitants of the "land of the
gods" never dreamt of tasting the milk of a brute. If a babe is
nourished with cow's milk, it is believed that the horns will grow on
his forehead. When no palatable dishes are to be had we eat our rice
with pickled plums and preserved radishes, turnips, egg-plants and
cabbage. The preserves are not done up in glass jars; they are kept in a
huge tub of salt and rice-bran. During the summer months when vegetables
are plenty and cheap we buy a great quantity of them from a farmer of
our acquaintance. He brings them on the back of a horse. The poor
animal is usually loaded so heavily that only his head and tail are
visible amidst the mountain of cabbage leaves. Days are spent in washing
and scrubbing the roots and bulbs of the garden, many more in drying
them in the sun. House-tops, weather-beaten walls, fences and all
available windy corners are utilized in hanging up the vegetables. When
partly dried they are packed in salt and rice-bran and subjected to
pressure in bamboo-hooped wooden tubs, commonly by laying old millstones
on them. Being but partially dry, the vegetables deliver the remaining
moisture to the powder in which they are packed, and in course of time
the whole contents become soaked in a yellowish, muddy, pungent liquid.
Kōkŏ, as the vegetables are then called, can be preserved in this way
throughout the whole year. They are taken out from time to time, washed
and sliced and relished with great satisfaction. They are something that
is sure to be obtained in any house at any time; with cold rice and hot
tea they make up our simplest fare.
When I was late from school I made out my dinner with the rice and kōkŏ.
Frequently, however, my provident mother set aside for me something
nice.
CHAPTER IV.
I believe we had no afternoon session in the old-fashioned school; and
the boys had two or three pet games to play in leisure hours. One of
them was played in this manner: each one is provided with a number of
pointed iron sticks a few inches long. The leader pitches one of his
sticks in soft soil; the second follows suit, aiming to root out his
predecessor's by the force of pitching in his own close to it; then the
third, the fourth, and all around the company. Another of the games was
played with square chips of wood, on which were painted heads of men,
demons and all sorts of fanciful figures. A triangle was drawn on hard
level ground and at a distance from its base a parallel line; from which
line the boys each in turn threw a common lot of the chips, contributed
by all, into the inside of the triangle. It must be done with the same
nicety of aim and attitude as in throwing quoits. A habit established
itself among us of the players coming down to the ground on all fours
immediately after the act of throwing; it was the consequence of bending
too far forward in order to get in all the chips at the peril of
neglecting the centre of gravity. The chips that flew outside of the
triangle were gathered by the next player and those in the inside
allowed to be taken by the player, should he be able to throw a chip
from his hand and lay it on them one by one. If he failed at any moment,
the next player gathered together all the remaining chips and played his
turn. A modification of this game consists in throwing the chips against
a wall, and counting good those only that remain inside a straight line
parallel with the foot of the wall, and turning over to the next player
those on the outside. The game is played by girls as well as by boys,
although they rarely play together.
We also used to play hide-and-seek, blind-man's-bluff and other games
that are familiar in this country.
Later in my school days the government underwent great changes, and it
adopted the common school system of the West. My father was to pay a
school-tax and I to attend a new school, where instruction was not in
penmanship alone but extended over various subjects. Text-books on
arithmetic, Japanese geography and history had been compiled after the
American pattern, but no grammar appeared; the educational department
left the language to be taught by the purely inductive method. The fact
is that the Japanese language has not been systematized; should one
attempt it he would find it a tremendous task.
When I was on the point of leaving for America my brother put into my
hand a Japanese grammar in two thin volumes, written by a literary man
in Tokio, and said that it was being used in schools. I have them still
by me and privately consider the attempt not a very great success. The
gentleman tries to follow the steps of the European grammarian; he
cleverly makes out "noun" and "pronoun," "verb" and "adverb"--even
"article," (which, in good faith, I never in the slightest suspected our
language was guilty of possessing) from the chaos. Upon the whole, the
book has the effect of confusing instead of enlightening me; after my
dabbling in languages, in Japanese I prefer to be taught like a babe.
Japanese dictionaries are for the purpose of hunting up Japanese
meanings of Chinese letters, answering to your Latin and Greek lexicons.
So much of Chinese has been introduced into our language in the course
of centuries, that it is now impossible to read one line in a Japanese
newspaper, for instance, without coming across Chinese characters. In
books for women and children and in popular novels Japanese equivalents
are written beside Chinese words. In getting lessons we made little use
of the dictionaries; once learned by dictation from the teacher we
relied on our memory and that of others; hence frequent review was
needed to retain them. As the new school system took root, the school
books began to have vocabularies and keys; and the Chinese classics
pursued by advanced students their "pony."
Just at present a movement is on foot to simplify our tongue in its
complication with Chinese. People generally suppose the two languages
are alike; many of them have asked me if I could interpret to them what
the down-town "washees" were so merrily babbling about over their
flat-irons. It is a mistake; Japanese and Chinese are totally
different, strange as it may appear. And yet I had to learn my Chinese
in order to read our standard works. If the common people could
understand Chinese as well as the learned persons, I believe we could
get along very well with our language as it is; but they do not. It
would be very inconvenient indeed if, for instance, in this country the
"educated" people should use long words all the while, or employ French
expressions freely in talking and writing. Just such a pedantry exists
in my native country, and truly educated men are crying out for
reformation. There are two parties. One party thinks it can do it by
using unadulterated Japanese, while the other deems nothing short of the
Romanization of the whole fabric--that is, the adoption of the Roman
alphabet in spelling Japanese words--could accomplish the end. Opinion
is equally divided between them; the second party may appear slightly
stronger on account of its members for the greater part being students
of other languages beside their own. Both these parties issue
periodicals to advocate their theories and at the same time to carry
their ideas into practice. These are worthy efforts; as yet they are
experiments. We are told that the growth of a language is a matter of
generations, that language has life like everything else, and that it
must undergo changes despite feeble human efforts.
But to return. Happily our former schoolmaster was hired by the new
organization and still took charge of us. He was a gifted young
gentleman, a writer of lucid sentences and also something of a poet. He
encouraged us greatly in polishing our Japanese-Chinese composition. It
was his custom to select the best composition from the class, on a given
subject, copy it on the blackboard and point out before the class what
elegant epithets could be substituted for vulgar ones. It was a pleasure
with him to do this, whereas in mathematics he did not show much zeal.
Above all, he inherited from his father the art of fine penmanship. His
brother, too, had a well-formed hand quite like our teacher's; evidently
it was a case of hereditary genius.