Landscape and Life in Japan.

New Zealand Illustrated Magazine, Volume 01, Issue 9, 1 June 1900, Page 50

Landscape and Life in Japan.

By W. Gray Dixon, M.A.,

Sometime Professor of English in the Imperial College of Engineering, Tokyo. t Author of The Land of the Morning.

WN" perhaps no other country in the world 11 have nature and art, God and man, I so combined to make the landscape <^4 beautiful as in that island empire which ysL is the first of the old lands to be wooed by the sun on his entering " the gateK ways of the day," and which after age-long seclusion has in our time been drawn into the light of a wonderful

international publicity. The Japanese landscape is exquisite'y beautiful, luxuriously, vivaciously,serenolyl'eautiful,nevevcommonplace, never prosaic, never repellent, never appalling in its beauty like our own Lake Wakatipu, which tempts to suicide rather than quickens one witli vital feelings of delight, occasionally sternly sublime, but even then softened by colours and lines that

win the heart and excite a delicious eesthetic gladness in the soul, ever with a rare consistency a thing of beauty throughout all its thousand miles of latitude, all its Alpine and Arcadian peaks and slopes, all its valleys noisy with waterfalls, its variegated forests and well-cropped plains, its majestic avenues

and bridle-paths dizzily terracing its slopes, its line of bold headlands and sweeps of island -studded summer soa, its castles, temples, gardens,-— ever a thing of beauty, like* that master-piece in the moulding of mountains, well named Fuji, "the Peerless," whioh, in one's memoi'y-picture of Japan, always rises clear and commanding in her queenliness above the underlying complexity, focussing in her sweet sublimity the spirit and the music of all the happy provinces that do homage at her feet.

And it is largely because this land has entered into -the soul of her people that she has won this unique beauty. In the

appreciation of nature the Japanese have for long been in advance of us Europeans. Our responsiveness to ''the outward show of sea and sky, of hill and valley," is a thing of yesterday ; the awakening hardly dates further back than last century: with the Japanese this gift has been enjoyed, and that

by all classes of the people, from time immemorial. Listen to this song of an ancient Emperor : "Countless are the mountain chains Tow'ring o'er Cipango's plains ; But fairest is Mount Kagu's peak, Whose heavemvard soaring heights I seek And gaze on tull my realms beneath,— Gaze on the land where vapours wreathe O'er many a cot ; gaze on the sea, Where cry tlie sea-gulls merrily. Yes, 'tis a very pleasant land, Sweeter than aught beneath the sky, Dear islands of the dragon-fly ! " " Islands of the dragon-fly " because of a

fancied resemblance to that insect in their configuration on the map. Mr. J. M. Barrie in his appreciation of a certain Scottish glen represents the man in the moon as fondly lingering when passing over it : a similar idea is expressed by a poet of old Japan ; the moon-fairy, loth to leave Japan for heaven, thus speaks : " Heaven hath its joys, but there is beauty here, Blow, blow, ye winds ! that the white eloudballs driv'n Around my path may bar my homeward way : Nor yet would I return to heav'n But here on Mio's pine-clad shore I'd stay."

is at its best and most expressive phase. For instance, around Lake Biwa, the " Lako of the Lyre," so called from its shape, as the Sea of Galilee was anciently called Chinnereth, " the Harp," Japanese toui'ists are directed to what have bcon long known as the " Bight Beauties of Omi " ; and what are these eight beauties? The more montion of them is eloquent of the national insight into the charms of nature: The Autumn Moon from Ishiyama, the Evening Snow on Hirayama, tho Blazo of Evening at Seta, tho Evening Bell at Mii-dora, tho Boats sailing back from Yabaso, a Bright Sky with a

And this apostrophe to the Peerless Mountain is from a very ancient ode : " Great Fujiyama, tow'ring to the sky ! A treasure art thou given to mortal man, A god-protector watching o'er Japan : — On thee for ever let me feast mine eye ! " Even so does the African say of Mount Kenia, "the finger of God " : "A man might look at it for a thousand years, and yet be hungry to see it." Nor is the Japanese response to their landscape only enthusiastic : it is wonderfully discriminating ; they know when eacji scene

Vol. 1.-No. 9.— 51.

Breeze at A wad zu, Rain by Night at Karasaki, aud the Wild Geese alighting at Katada, And not content With viewing the beautieß of nature, the Japanese have set themselves with rare success to represent them, and that not merely in exquisitely delicate and accurato impressionist pictures upon silk, bat in the actual rocks and soil and vegetation of their inimitable landscape gardens. Sitting in one of these gardens you will sometimes see such a wonderful blending of its features with those of the surrounding hills that it is difficult to tell •where art ends and nature

begins. Down in the level ground of the valley, lakes and foothills and background ranges with islands and pines and winding roads and wayside streams, have been so naturally constructed or cultivated in miniature, that your eye passes as in a homogeneous picture from the work of man to the work of God : earth blends, as it were, with heaven. The Japanese landscape, needless to say, has a physiognomy of its own ; for this is

Fuji-san 12,365. Closer still is the parallel between Japan and the magnificent western coastal regions of North America. Between the two, in the Pacific Ocean, lies the largest depression in diameter and depth of the world's crust. This vast basin has two rims or edges on both sides, an inner and an outer. On the American side both rims are continental ; on the Asiatic side the inner rim is insular. This difference is due to the tilting up of the basin on the American side,

true of the face of evei'y country as of the face of every race. But the physiognomy of the Japanese landscape is very peculiarly its own : there is no other which closely resembles it ; it has not even a cousin among landscapes, except, perhaps, the Korean. The original geological skeleton of the country had, indeed, its counterparts. New Zealand is geologically just an Antipodean Japan ; it is interesting to note that the highest peaks in the two countries differ by only sixteen feet, Mount Cook being 12,349 feet high, and

so that not only both rims but the level reaches between have been raised clear of the sea. What, therefore, is an inland sea on the Asiatic side — the Sea of Japan — is an arid plateau — between the Siorra Nevadas and the Rocky Mountains — on the American side. And a further difference has been brought about, that the ocean is very much deeper on the Asiatic side than on the American, descending, indeed, off the east coast of Japan, to depths almost unequalled. All which means that the Japanese islands are a

series of mountain ranges submerged in the »

sea, washed from the seaboard by the deepest waters in the world, and separated from the Asiatic Continent by much shallower but yet extensive sweeps of water. While only waves of sand lave the great bases of the Rockies or flow into their valleys, among the Japanese heights there is ever the presence or the not very remote influence of the vast rollers of the profound Pacific. Alpine

rapid and ready. So that while among tho Rockies you find a similar bold and picturesque framework, you miss the softoning, tho carpeting, tho colouring, the sparkle, tho luxuriance, the vivacity, the serenity — all those beautiful and subtle effeots which water brings. The copious rainfall marbles the mountain steeps and enlivens the stately forest slopos with innumerable cataracts and cascades,

ridges, then, bold ravines, varied and fantastic volcanic erections, a land which, for threefourths or, as some main tain, fifteen-sixteenths of its area consists of hill and height, and everywhere the influence of water, for from whatever direction the wind blows it comes more or less laden with moisture, which readily breaks on the serrated:; surface into copious showers : such is Japan. And the showers, moreover, fall chiefly in the summer when the air is warm and the growth is

fills the hollows with ]lakes, few] of thorn (l of any great extent, and pours torrents through the valleys, with genorally but little intervention of plain to tamo them into quiet rivers, into the sea. It clothes the soil with the most luxuriant and varied flora in the temperate zone, and wreathes the Bternest precipices with brilliant creepers. The solfatara field blotched like a painter's palette with almost every colour in the rainbow lies close beside the rival colouring of the

wild-flowers on the moor. There are nearly . twice as many varieties of trees in Japan as in the whole of Europe. From Kyushiu in lat. 32° to Yezo in lat, 45° a glorious continuity extends of rich and variegated verdure. The grand Far Eastern pine, with its bronzed scaly stem and its horizontal branches of dense green extended like arms in benediction, everywhere commands the scene. The feathery bamboo contrasts with the pine. The sombre cryptomeria lifts the heart skyward on its flame-shaped ascents.

oppresses the air with its fragrance as you wind up a mountain pass. Under the lichencovered battlements of the old feudal keep the white lotus emerges, angel-like, from the muddy moat and greets heaven with its incense. A land of streams, of forests, of flowers, a bewitching land, of which one can never tire, there is such "Sweet interchange Of hills and valleys, rivers, woods and plains. Now land, now lake, and shores with forest crown'd, Rocks, dens, and caves,"

Spring trips through the land with a procession of blossoms such as no other land can show. Autumn rivals spring with the brilliance of its fading leaves. Camellias brighten the hedges as you pass along the lanes. You look out through peach blossoms over the blue Pacific to the white sweep of I\iji«san curving in virgin purity into the upper blue. Thelilium awatum t with perhaps, as I havfi seen it, sixteen heads on one stem,

so much to exhilarate and so much to soothe, so much to make one smile with pleasure no less than to meditate with wonder and awe, a lai\ghing land amid all its solemnities, well symbolized by the pretty Qeisha that trips in the shade of the vast temple-eaves, or by the butterfly that flits in the spring sunshine around the benignly thoughtful head of the great image of Buddha. Other effects of the copious rainfall have

been to wash the peaks bare and leave them glittering in the sun, their crevices for a great part of the year veined with snow, and to deposit the detritus in fertile Arcadian slopes or in levels which, flattened still more by the hand of man for rice culture, have come to look like green lakes amid their environment of hills. Sometimes these levels

fish in the world. A largo proportion of the people are fisher-folk. It is along tho shores that most of the population is found. Long straggling village streets, interspersed with avenues of the Far Eastern pine, from groat highways bordering tho sea. Forests of masts of high-sterned junks, or smaller draft beached above tho breakers, form a pieturesquo

are extensive plains ; often they are but little flats in the laps of the wooded hills, " Where deep and low the hamlets lie, Each with its little patch of sky, And little plot of stars." Farther, by I'eason of the steepness of the mountains and the narrowness of the valleys, and the consequent impetuousness of the rivers, the organic matter carried from the heights in solution has in great part been swept right into the sea, where it has snpplied abundance of food for fish and other forms of marine life. The Japanese coasts consequently swarm with probably the richest variety of

foreground in the eye of tlio visitor from the sea against tho roofs of thatch or shingle or dark white-tipped encaustic tiles, and behind them, the green foothills and, farther off, the bluo heights which on the hprizon sing their strong sweet psalm. How picturesque, too, the broad white sails that dot the blue straits and tho grey - bluo distances among the myriad isles of tho farfamed Inland Sea! And so naturally wo find the Japanese a race of sailors, long centuries ago the terror of the neighbouring coasts of Korea and China, and now in our own day astonishing tho world by their rapid development into a great naval power.

[to be continued.]