The Surface of Japan

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLVIII, Issue 7, 14 August 1912, Page 36

The Surface of Japan

A Muscular Race — Ever)) Famity its Own Per ambulator

By

WILLIAM ARCHER

T'DAVINII now been ten days in LA .Japan, I am naturally in a p >si I I tion to sum the country up in / a sweeping generalisation. People who have lived here for twenty years are chary of attempting such a feat ; hut why should not I have the courage of my superficiality.' Indeed. 1 am prepared, not with one geneialisation. but with two. Japan is the Land of Children: and it cannot but seem, to European eyes, a Toy land. This does not mean that the children play with the toys: it means that everything is, or tends to be. toylike in style and scale. Ami 1 am c(»n\hired that this fact has had fairea filing and terrible historic consequeilecs. \\ e all know that tin* ( zai. while still Czarevitch, travelled in J.i pan: was not his life attempted in the streets of Tokyo? We have all heard it reported that, b ‘fore the online ik of the Russo-Japanese War. he expressed himself in derisive terms of the little yellow men whom his soldiers would crush like cockroaches. After a week in dap.in. one van easily see that, whether hi* uttered it or not, he would be apt to fall into this illusion. He could scarcely fad to hold it absurd that the beardless toy-soldiers of this country of fragile, finicking, diminutive things, should dream of measuring themselves against his tempestuous Cossacks ami his great-boned grenadiers. True. they had beaten the Chinese: but the Chinese were notorious imbeciles and poltroons. 'I rue. they had ikons in abundance: but they were* the graven images of a grotesque idolatry, not the bejewelled fetishes of tin* orthodox faith. It seemed absurd and almo-t idispheimms to suppose that Holy Russia Could have anything to fear from this country of toy god-, toy temples. toy houses, toy gardens, and fields, and trees. Figlitins Value. What his Majesty failed to observe was that its warships were not toy>. that its guns were not toys, and that tin* fighting value of the soldiers is not to le measured in pounds or in lies. Purl hermore. his Majesty probably omitted to do .1 highly instructive thing which I h,ive done; he did not go far .1 week's tramp among tin* mountains. Japan. be it noted, is practically all mountains. In the whole country there 'is only twelve per cent, of cultivable ground: and no small part of that is obtained by the elaborate terracing of rugged hillsides. Thus the struggle between Japan and Russia was a struggle between wiry mountaineers, who are their own beasts of burden, and the heavy, lumbering, flat-footed peasantry of interminable plains, accustomed, moreover. to have the heaviest part of their work done for them by horses or oxen. The coolies who carry your baggage are an object-lesson in themselves, ( lad in loose blue cotton coats, each with some ( hinese character or fantastic device stamped upon it in white: their legs emased in tight cotton breeches; with a blue ami white towel or some nondescript cotton clout wound round their forehead: these good-humoured. uncomplaining creatures will trot along on their straw sandals for six or eight hours with scarcely a pause, under loads which you or I would not care to carry for twenty yards, and up mountain paths so steep as to make the unburdened climber pause to admire the view almost every second step. For this toil they now receive about three shillings a day. tin* rate of pay having been nearly doubled within the past few years. Behind the Guns. It is clear that a man can keep. going all da\ long, niidci a burden far heavier than the heaviest military equipment, an I at a pace of something like three mile* an hour, will make a mighty good soldier if he have any lighting spirit in

him; and in that the Japanese is certainly not deficient. Even a glance at the sturdy calves of the jinrickisha-men (two of whom saved his life) might have taught the Tsar that the toy soldiers of Japan were by no means to be despised. Xor must it be overlooked that, though more ‘’sake” than is strictly speaking desirable is consumed in these islands, its ravages are as nothing to those of vodka in Russia. ’’Their own beasts of burden”—in that phrase, I seriously 'believe, lies the explanation of the physical sturdiness and power of endnraii'ce which, as much as anything else, won tin* battles of Nanshan and of Mukden. Almost from the cradle upwards (though, by the way, he hasn’t any cradle) the Japanese is accustomed to carrying great loads. See a boy of eight plodding along with a baby of three or four on his back (a very common spectacle) and you see a recruit already in training. “Every family its own perambulator” is the motto in Japan. True, 'it is generally the mother or the elder daughter who carries the baby, or the twins; but bur-den-bearing is not, as in some countries, confined to woman. The num take their full share. The Man With the Hoe. Pack-horses, no doubt, are employed to a certain extent; 'but. on the whole, animals contribute comparatively little to Japanese agriculture or transport. The wonderfully regular furrows of the wheat, millet, or barley beds—to call them “fields” would be absurd — are made, for the most part, not with the plough, but with the Huge, heavy, adzelike hoe. which takes the place of both plough and spade, One does occasionally see a primitive ox-drawn plough, and in the rhe-swamps, a sort of rake, like a large back-hair comb. ti:gg.da!o:g by ox or horse. But by far the greater part of the field work is sheer manual labour, involving a constant strain upon the muscles of the hack and arms. “Bushido,” indeed, may do much for lap.au. but I fancy it was the hoe and he hod that really drove the Russians out of Manvhuria.