OUR LITERARY CORNER.

Press, Volume LXIV, Issue 13231, 26 September 1908, Page 7

OUR LITERARY CORNER.

PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC.

, » 'A FLASHLIGHT VIEW OF JAPAN. I

OFF THE TOURIST TRACK.

(Bt Professor J. Maoijxlan- Beow.v.)

(SP-CIA-I.- WIUTTEN FOX "iTIE rRKSS.') YOKOHAMA, July 4. Those last three weeks I havo boon ;:i all tho odd corners of Japan, travelling with speed from one to tho other. Train and steamer have covered most *pace. hut jinricksha and my own lea-ther-shod nans havo taken mo over the nost picturesque and interesting parte, and tho parts seldom or never visited i 1-v Europeans. In fact, most of tho tno thousand miles and more that I havo done lies out of tho track of tho European tourist, for tho speakers of European languages that I havo como across in the tour can be counted on the fingers of ono hand, and most of them wero Englishmen in Hokkaido to vrom I had cards of introduction. And our party, though it included a Japanese student who could speak English, was the "cynosure of every eye" wherever we went. In many of tho v;noro out-of-the-way towns and villages «.ve gathered as great crowd as we moved along the street as if wo had l>oon a circus procession with a brass band. The shops in Japan, outside' of the great cities, aro all open to the KLrcets on every side, and, whenever •kg bad to make any little purchases, tho audience wo had often filled tho whole breadth of the street, their mouths, ©yes, and ears all wide open. It was evidently a free show they did r.ot of ton enjoy, and wo had just to endure our embarrassing popularity. As a rulo we divided the honours, but at times a young Australian, a fellowrkssenger, who asked leave to accompany mc, a tall, slender "Cornstalk," v is most embarrassed by the curiosity of the crowd; they almost tumbled over him in their anxiety to see everything ho did and hoar everything ho said. Even at tho railway stations, and In the streets of tho larger towns, where tho passing European traveller cannot have been so rare a wonder, there was intense, if not miscroscopic, curiceity. At the beginning and at the closo of cur trin wo visited two of the'three great scenic sights of Jaoan (what aro called sail kei, or the three sights of tho Japanese), Matsushima and Amanohashidato, aud thero wo fully expected to meet parties of Europeans, or at least tho übiquitous Americans. But either it was hot th© season for them, or they' were busy doing the stock tourist sights | of Japan, its show windows, so to cpe-ak, Nikko, Miyaxtoshita, and Mia- ; jima. Wo met none; only in the last place, just as we wore leaving our hotel , at Miyazu, wo heard from our maid of" the arrival of an Englishman; sho told i.s the fact with 'bated breath, and eyes j as wide open as tho oblique slits would : 'allow. In another place wo wero told of a party of three Europeans having . passed through throe montl-s before. j The first place wo rested at on leaving Tokio was the and rather ■, handsome city of Sendai, on the east •■ coast. It lies at tho northern extremity of tho great rice plain that stretches from the south of the capita] between tho mountains and tho Pacific Ocoan.' Just north and east of it begins that coastal range of mountains which makes ; the north-east coast scenic, full of deep bays and fiords that are difficult of approach on tho landward side. It is * this very coastal range that stretches ita feet into the sea to tho east of Sendai, and produces one of the favourit* oceanic resorts of tlje Japanese—the hundreds of islands of Matsushima. . The violence of the Pacific has carved its former peninsulas into this fantastic archipelago. And even on the. calm day on which wo visited it, we could see how oven tho slow surge was eating into tho soft sedimentary rock. Had it been volcanic tufa, as Murray's Guide to Japan describes it, there would have been bolder scenery; the oceanic sculptor would not havo found it such easy work to chisel his way ; through tho former promontories ami capes; thero ■ , would not havo been so many groups of islets, and these would not havo been co' low or so rounded, or so poor in vegetation. In spite of the namo (Mat-" susbima, or Pine Islands), there are , not very many pines on even tho largest, and those that do grow are ctunted and bent before the Pacifio fctorm; bald patches, where not even a wild flower grows, are not infrequent on thorn, and tho bamboo grass has none of tho luxuriance it has on tho hillsides of Japan. Meadow-sweet and the beautiful white wild rose that -rows all over tbe Japanese archipelago,.' were the only flowers that flourished on '< those on which wo landed. The sedi- " raentary soil was too poor. But tho = waves cut into the rocks like cheoso; • some of tho islets were in tho human i form, others in fantastic shapes that might bo anything, according to the .imagination of the spectator. There was one arch as symmetrical as if hewn by tho hnnd of man, and tho variety of form was bewildering, as w sailed and changed our position, opening up Vista after vista into the far distance. Every generation must have seen theso little nrcbipelagoes change like clouds, so soft is the rock and so violent are tho winter storms of the Pacific. j MATSUSHIMA. j : We had~come down by railway to the quaint little sea-smelling harbour of Shiozama, where we hired a boat. for ' the day; all we had to pay for ft was thie regulation price, ono yen eight sen, equal to about two shilling and twopence. We were away eight hours, and the old fisherman rowed quito hatf the time, or, rather, sculled. For all tho boat propulsion all over Japan, exoept in regattas, which, as introduced from Europe, have races in European boats, rowed in European stylo, is done by a long spliced oar that works from ndo to side in a peg fixed on tho gunwale, generally at the stern, often on either bow, and that is circumscribed in its range by a rone about three feet long, tied to the side of the boat. This ; method of propulsion evidently came from China, for it is tho method of . ell the sampans from Tientsin to Canton. But there is a relic of the preChineso method used at the bow, especially in larger boats; it is a short'oar, like a paddle, with a foot-long crosspiece at the upper or handle end. It is worked like a European oar in a loop* of rope that serves as rowlock. This is the same as the Ainu oar, and its use is undoubtedly one of the arts acquired from the people that tho Japanese took twelve or fifteen hundred years to due and absorb. Again and again, we *aw it used in boa3s that easily passed us by means of the additional force applied. In its blade it shows the v-'-lanne-like, leaf-like paddle of the I'oly;;.nesiaa and British Columbian. Tho

ORIGINAL AND SELECTED MATTER.

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'paddling and tho canoe- I saw at Nagasaki aro undoubtedly a survival from the pre-Ainu, puroly pal—olithic, population of the archipelago whose coastal shell-mounds have evidently all' vanishir.hcJ into the sea in tho perpetual seismic remoulding of Japan that has hern going on for hundreds of thousands of years=. In all tho strata, oven tho lowest, of tho existing shcllmounds pottery is found, proving their comparatively recenc neolithic ori_in. No archipelago so closo ..to a continent could havo remained uninhabited till that late period. AMANOHASHIDATE. ! When wo reached, towards tho clos* of our trip, tho second famous scenic asset of Japan, Am.mobashidotc, away on tho west- coast, we found that it hn>i somewhat the same typo of beauty as Matsushima. Although there """ere fiords or bays instead of hundreds of islands, the scenery in both cases wna ! rather pretty than grand. It is a Ion;; promontory of sand covered with pine* run out from a basis of low well-treed hills, between tho open fiord and a subsidiary bay. In Great Britain thero aro do_ens of pieces of scenery as pretty end far more striking, especially on the West of Scotland and Ireland and on the Devonshire ond Cornwall coast, whilst the islands of Matsushima, though they havo sea-charm of their own, aro paralleled by tho Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence, and th? villaed and treed islands of Lako George away to tho south of it. In our own country tho islands and fiords of Cook >Sbrait and of tho district to the north of Auckland supply scenery as beautiful and of a similar type. Tho third great scenic asset of Japan, Miajima, on the Inland Sen, I have scon only from a distance, having reI served it for my journey when I am on my way to Korea. But it is evidently of the same type—quiet archipelago I scenery, varied by old temples strikingly placed. _*» IMPRESSIVE SCENERY. On our journey along tho coasts and through tho mountains of Japan thero" wore scenes far more im press ivo to tho European mind. Up in Yezo, there wero pieces of sylvan river-la ndeoape that were intensely beautiful in their vistas of shado, their rocky rapids and gorges, and their verdant hillsides. In the north of tho main island, Hondo, the valley of the Mnpechi will com-! paro with tho most beautiful river scenery of Europe for the happy bland of tho work of Nature and man. The snowsheds and tunnels on tho railway line tantalise us with their frequency, producing the effect of an intermittent kiiiomatograph. Now wo get a glimpse into a far-rcaohiig valley; then we look down on a village with its beehive thatched roofs nestling amidst itterraced ricefields far below us; again we cross the river brawling over it 3 angry rapids. Above us in tho distance tower t*—-volcanic cones that aroeofrequent all over Japan; nearer us rise timbered ridges rich with tho yellow bloom of the kiri or edible chestnut: hero and there wo see the windings of , the olddaimyo road to the north, with I its delightful shado and its frequent ! lacquer-trees. Still more striking pieces of mountain and glen scenery occur on . the railway lino that runs southward : from Aomori, for a timo along tho coast of the Japanoso Sea, and finally ! right into the tumbled mass of mountains that s fill tho ccntro of Japan. There is not a railway lino in the archij pelago that has not its scenic asset won ; by feats of engineering. The "three finest I havo seen are a piece on the line from Nara to Kamoyama Junction; . where the pilgrim railway to Iso bej gins, the piece between 'Kamo Junction where tho pilgrim railway to Iss 1 begins, the picco between Kamo Junc- | tion and Tsuze Junction, a piece on tho line from Maizuru on the Japan Sea and Osaka, and tho section of tho Tokaido lino that crosses tho western spurs of Fujiyama. These are equal to some of the bert on the Black Forest scenic line, the Swiss Tyrol, and North Italian lines, without the glaciers, snow-capped mountains, and lakes of vthe last three. There aro plenty of ' plantations and low wood and scrub but ho primeval forest; for that on© has to»go into Kyuship, tho southernmost island, and into iezo, tho northernmost. I But, naturally, tho most magnificent scenery is to bo found off the railway routes in parts of the country so ,wild as to have no large centres of population. .The most unique piece I saw was a littlo Rotorua away in tho mountains of Yezo, to tho north .of Murorau. Wo left the railway. lino at Noboribotsu, and drovo for several hours up through a splendid gorge that reminded nic greatly of our West Coast road through Otira, only that the trees wero finer, ■ the foliage deeper, tho climbers more rampant, and the flowers of tree and underscrub more luxuriant., Our destination was a hotel right in tho middle ' cf a not very ancient crater—it had its own hot springs for rheumatic invalids; and there were besides it cascades of hot mineralised waters, under which we found both men and women standing naked. In tho evening and next day wo climbed over into a more recent cr_tor, belonging, I fancy, to last century; tho Ainu remember the explosion. For geysers, fumaroles, blowholes, mud-boilers, sulphur cliffs, hot '■ lakes, and hot streams, it isa miniature r Rotorua. But what makes it most distinctive is that all these phenomena lie in a deep cut set amid splendid red .cliffs that are crowned with Japan's I usual verdancy. It combines tho beauty of tho Otira "Gorge and tho wonders of Waiotapu and Wairakei. Hero we saw in tho undergrowth thousands of } daphnes in bloom, myriads of azalea bushes and lilies of tne valley that had just finished blooming, and tho wholo ground carpeted with funkias that had still to bloom. But thero was a drawback, such as wa havo no fear i of in New Zealand —the bush swarmed with snakes —wo cams across a full j - half-dozen that were out basking in the jsun: most of them were about three ! feet lone, and some of them we hoped wo finally disposed of. . Far more impressive wero two pieces of. road-making we came across in the west of Hondo. Tho first ran across three high passes frvmi Wakamatsu, a laigo town m the mount-aits, to Nugata, a still larger town, with « carnal in. almost every street, on —jg Japan Sea. Extensive zigzags climbed each pass on each 'side, finding their way through villages that clung to the foot of the mountains, and past solitary tea-houses on their tops, tea-houses that peddled vean-fluid for tea and ebocJiu, or coarso potato snirit, as the only intoxicant. Wo walked up all tho passes, though we noticed that up tho steepest pieces of tho road the Japanese, "whether ri_i„ or woman, stuck to their jinrickisha and compelled their human beast of burden to haul it up. It was the same on a still more difficult ipieco O: road that climbed again and a_ain from 500 ft to 1000 ft abovo tho ""sea along the face of the cliff between Naoyetsu and . Toya-ma. on the Sea of \ Japan*. That was as fine a piece of road-making as I have soon. For a dc_en or more miles it is hewn out of the'sheer precipice, only once having to pass through a long.tunnel; and through' the flowering boscage and trees that seemed to get footing on. ali but the smoothest "perpendicular we J could look into the clear.depths of tho effi below. •■.The old daimyo rend for the EcluVo oeople -was along tho pea b?ach, and there was one corner where

a sheer pecipic© of several thousand teet p'.is'H-s it„ way right into tho sea, and here, when tho winter storms blow fro in rlio north-west, life was not safe from the lent cf the'surf. It was cal'ed according to my student-compan-ion who had read the story in t'is earlier school books, Oyashiradzu, or "Everyone for himself and devil take the hindmost*'; parent atandon-ed.child, and husband wife, in the passioa of fear that overtook thorn as tried to get past this wild Charybiis. Almost as difficult a piece- of engineering wo found between Maizru and Amartohashidate ; but it evaded tho worst gn- | dients by three, tunnels, ono of them about a'mile long, and by miscalculation wo had to do it in tlw dark, seeing tho sea shimmer iar b?low us, and hearing the £or.;:d of tho sculls and the boatman's call echo up tho cliffs. JAPANESE ENGINEERING. Tho Japanoso engineer- havo done wonders \i\ roading and railroading their niouiitainoiis islands, and thenbb.urs .still continue. Again and again we carr.e acrosa immc_so c„>bankments and cuttings aud huge ii'tr bridges preparatory to carrying t-t? higii roans or steam roads farther into dt_tcu!c country. And they havo problems to golvc that the <-ngtneers cf few other lands haro to face. Not only arc their islands a tumbled mass of "mountainous confusion, but the forces of Nature aro ranged against tham. Tho earthquake is constantly undoing their work; some new vol.-ante outburst is over burying it. But are not annual like tho storms and fleeds that sweep away their bridges and embankments or cover up their roads with landslips. It was net uncommon to find our way getting cleared of sorno block, ard yet this was not an especially rainy July, though in Juno and the early part of tho following month it rained all day onco every two days. And all over tip north there wero in/numerable- expedients for guarding against the storms and stows of winter; thero wero miles of fencing and embankment and plantation oa the western side of the railways, and we" pa.*s_d through dozens of miles of snow she-di. Railway traffic would havo to bo very lucrative in Japan to meet all throe incidental expenditures. It is extremely doubtful whether the Government* has made a profitable purchase in taking over the raihrays, when all these exceptional circ:mst ; nnccs aro taken into consideration. Nor can they increase* tho faros without reducing tho traffic, although they are extremely moderate, being cno penny a mile for first-class, and a halfpenny a mile for third. They doubtless trust to the increnrc) of population and trado in the future; for tho Japanese are migratory by nature, and their industry is increasing. Night trains aro as crowded in their third-class as day trains, and from dawn to dusk you never sco anyone idle in tho country. It is tho higher classes that travel least; theTO is general]- only half a carriage devoted to first-class passengers, and in most of my train journeys that wore not express I had the carriage to myself. What theso immense crowds of third-class passengers wero moving for by night it is difficult, to conjecture, for tho traffic was local. Tho greatest crowds occurred where the train stopped at every station. All tho oasy routes and those between largo towns have been railroaded. -What has to Do dono yet will bo extremely expensive, and though they will bo scenic tho tourist traffic will never mako them pay. Tho only chance of these being profitably built is the harnessing of the immense water, power in tho mountains for industrial purposes, a process already begun. To pidgo by tho choice of Matsushima, Amanohashidato, and Miajima, as three traditional scenic assets of Japan, tho Japanese tourist traffic into tho wilder scenery will never mako such railways profitable. Tho Japajicso mird is evidently drawn to what is pretty and sylvan and maritime, seldom or never to what is majestic or overawing. Thoy .climb mountains ; but it i 3 as pilgrims and not as admirers of scenery; they are mountain-worshippers, rather than mountain-inspired. Their wilder scenery is left to the labour-absorhed mountaineers or fishermen who livo amid3t it and remain unconscious of it. PILGRIMAGES IN JAPAN. It is true that thero is a pilgrim railway that runs thirty miles to the great Shinto shrines of Iso hut it is through oasy country, and half a million travel to these tempios every year, whilst ono largo town, Yamada, subsists on nothing elso but pilgrims. It is, like so many pilgrim resprt3 in Jaoan, mainly a caterer for tho amusement of tho pilgrims; it is full of small theatres and peep shows, and stalls and shops for tho salo of relics and toys, and odds and ends; thero aro dozens of so-called hotels, many of them artistically built and richly furnished, that are no better than brothels. I joined a part? of American gentlemen and ladies whom our hotel manager had organised to see tho Ishi Ondo, a me.ro posturing and arm-waving dance, dono in ono of theso gorgeous institutions, and ono could: see in the , eyes of tho elderly harridan.*, who managed tho affair that, they objected to tho presence of ladies. It is not the first timo in history that holiness and lust havo gone arm in arm. But the frequency of tho combination of pilgrimage and prostitution in Japan takes us back to tho Middle Ages in Europe. In fact, ono may say without hesitation that all Japan, outside of tourist resorts, is still largely medifeval, and no better pictnro of medi-eval ways of life can bo found in tho world than in the country districts of Japan. Again and again wo camo across bands of pilgrims making for one or other of tho great shrines; they often had rosary and bells, and they wero begging their way. Pilgrim?go is. in short, as in' the. European Middle Ages, a cloak for vagabondage and beggary. Those we met in tho mountains.an/I on the west roast had as their goal tho ancient Shinto shrino of Idzut-o, that has never boon appropriated by fluddhism. I meant to reach it; bat it was several days' travel by jinricksha or ono day's rough travel by eea beyond Am_nnoha-?hidate. I went to tho more easily approachable fhrines of Ise, on the east coast, instead; And here the ancient form of worship and tho ancient form of temple have boen preserved rigidly from timo'lmmemorial. Everj- twenty years a new temple is built of wood, a facsimile of tho old, and-then tho old, is burnt down. SHINTO AND POLYNESIA. Wo have, in fact, in these temples tho ancient pre-hisioric form of tho Japanese house preserved. It is but a roof on pillars, like tho Satnoan house, and was evidently meant for a tropical or sub-tropical climate. It has nothing underground, but is always raised on piles, and has little resemblance to tho houses of the Ainu, an aboriginal people of Japan, who came into tbe archipelago from the colder regions cf the north. It evidently belonged to a people who were before tho Ainu, and came in from Korea duriiv. ono of those temporary rises of temperature that must have occurred several times in the North Pacific through the narrowing and shallowing of Behring Straits. ~ . This very ancient religion, brunto, now imoressed with the mark of Imperial Jaoan, and made tho national religion, has. because of its primeval simpficitv, taken into it but few exotic elements. It has a trace of neolithic times in the fire-drill that is still used in the shrine of Idzumo to make fire. It has a trace of megalithism in its dolmen-liko torii cf stono, and in its worship of great blocks of stone. It has a trace of the motal ages in the mirror and sword that are preserved in I the rear chamber of the Idzumo shrino. It has a trace of tho Ainu worship in the strips of white paper that are tho offerings, exactly like tho mao or wil-low-shavings that I have seen in the

sacred nlaces of Ainu houses. A, I**1*** 1 * has taken oa a good many Buddhist features from tho Buddhist priests who performed the services for many centuries. Iso and Idzumo wero kept free from the Continental religion, and henco their importance to the new Imperial era. The first thing the manager of the Gonikai Hotel at _amada did when he took mo upstairs to my bedroom, was to push aside two snoii or paper slides and reveal to mo a handsome chamber dono in lacquer work and without any light; he informed me.that this was the bedroom of the Mikado when, in 1905, at the conclusion of the Russian war, ho came down to worship his own ancestry in their unpolluted shrines; it was to bo kept ever sacred Hero was iho mediaeval doctrine of the divino right of sovereigns m its tnllest vi-our. " Ar.d vet ancestor-worship was not ono of the orim-eval elements; iv was introduced into it evidently when the nucleus of the Japanese, Empire had abandoned the religion of the people it w-! onoucring about tho Inland Sea, __d S "fc had nocd of basing its power over them on religious mythology and gonealo_y. . . ~ This ancestor-worship is » «rW ; in Shinto than 000 8.C., the onto o: Jimmu Tenno, the fonnaer or the LmIt is acknowledged by all s"ho!ars to 1» in its origin a worship of tho powers of Nature, and fpccial y of the sun. tho heaven, and the earth, like tho religion of Polynesia., dts temple was evidently but tne primeval h.~uto of tho aborigines., and in. its purest forn this is identical with >ho Polvncsian honse. And when I visited "the two cttered enclosuros of lse and studied tho plan of the sacred cnc'osure of Idzumo, I could -not fail to aoa its identity with the liaon pa ITu-re is th* .double fence right roirnu tho enclosure each of tbsm made double of upright beams bound to higher and stronger beams every tow feet, tho cuter ore of especial stren«th. In front of tho gateway is tho swoon. In the centre of tho euciosuro is tho chief temple, like the Maori carved house; on each side are tho treasuries, like tho Maori storehouses for implements and weapons; and "behind on piles is the temple for food offerings like tho Maori pataka. And all is made with materaal from the. forest. I saw the bbaros getting prepared by the carpenter- of hinoki and keyaki" trees for tho now temple, land the si to was being fenced round vith a ditch and a cyclopean wall, ihe whole scone reminded mc cf a pa I had &?en building in the I'rewera country. Religion we Imow to bo the greatest conservator of the past; in itn rite* and ceremonies aro preserved, like the fly in ambor, tho life of far distant ages. But thero is no ir._t-_n©c> the established worship of a civili.<v*l people that opera np fo clear and farstretching a vista # into a distant, primeval past as Shinto does. It is as f.unplo and pristino in its features am tho cult of the Polynesian peoples wbrm tho first European voyagers reached thorn, and it has almost complete identity with it in its main ehnracters and outlines. lb tn kr„ us hack hundreds of thons'>nd.s of yeans into thn earliest palreolithic times, when tiro CaucJisiars from whom the first inhabitants of Polynesia came occupied tho Japanese- archipelago. CTo bo continued.)