Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (911 page)

“Ha,” snorted the chief of the
Public Opinion
. “You call it picturesque. I call it too. Wait till he light up — incendiate. A Japanese house then is one only fire box.
That
is why we think good to build in European fashion. I tell you, and you must believe, that we take up no change without thinking upon it. Truth, indeed, it is not because we are curious children, wanting new things, as some people have said. We have done with that season of picking up things and throwing them down again. You see?”

“Where did you pick up your Constitution, then?”

I did not know what the question would bring forth, yet I ought to have been wise. The first question that a Japanese on the railway asks an Englishman is: “Have you got the English translation of our Constitution?” All the book-stalls sell it in English and Japanese, and all the papers discuss it. The child is not yet three months old.

“Our Constitution? — That was promised to us — promised twenty years ago. Fourteen years ago the provinces they have been allowed to elect their big men — their heads. Three years ago they have been allowed to have assemblies, and thus Civil Liberty was assured.”

I was baffled here for some time. In the end I thought I made out that the municipalities had been given certain control over police funds and the appointment of district officials. I may have been entirely wrong, but the editor bore me along on a torrent of words, his body rocking and his arms waving with the double agony of twisting a foreign tongue to his service and explaining the to-be-taken-seriouslyness of Japan. Whack come the little hand on the little table, and the little tea-cups jumped again.

“Truly, and indeed, this Constitution of ours has
not
come too soon. It proceeded step-by. You understand that? Now your Constitution, the Constitutions of the foreign nations, are all bloody — bloody Constitutions. Ours has come step-by. We did not fight as the barons fought with King John at Runnymede.”

This was a quotation from a speech delivered at Otsu, a few days previously, by a member of the Government. I grinned at the brotherhood of editors all the world over. Up went the hand anew.

“We shall be happy with this Constitution and a people civilised among civilisations.”

“Of course. But what will you actually do with it? A Constitution is rather a monotonous thing to work after the fun of sending members to Parliament has died out. You have a Parliament, have you not?”

“Oh yes,
with
parties — Liberal and Radical.”

“Then they will both tell lies to you and to each other. Then they will pass bills, and spend their time fighting each other. Then all the foreign governments will discover that you have no fixed policy.”

“Ah, yes. But the Constitution.” The little hands were crossed in his lap. The cigarette hung limply from his mouth.

“No fixed policy. Then, when you have sufficiently disgusted the foreign Powers, they will wait until the Liberals and Radicals are fighting very hard, and then they will blow you out of the water.”

“You are not making fun? I do not quite understand,” said he. “Your Constitutions are all so bloody.”

“Yes. That is exactly what they are. You are very much in earnest about yours, are you not?”

“Oh yes, we all talk politics now.”

“And write politics, of course. By the way, under what — h’m, arrangements with the Government is a Japanese paper published? I mean, must you pay anything before starting a press?”

“Literary, scientific, and religious papers — no. Quite free. All purely political papers pay five hundred yen — give to the Government to keep, or else some man says he will pay.”

“You must give security, you mean?”

“I do not know, but sometimes the Government can keep the money. We are purely political.”

Then he asked questions about India, and appeared astonished to find that the natives there possessed considerable political power, and controlled districts.

“But have you a Constitution in India?”

“I am afraid that we have not.”

“Ah!”

He crushed me there, and I left very humbly, but cheered by the promise that the
Tokio Public Opinion
would contain an account of my words. Mercifully, that respectable journal is printed in Japanese, so the hash will not be served up to a large table. I would give a good deal to discover what meaning he attached to my forecast of Constitutional government in Japan.

“We all talk politics now.” That was the sentence which remained to me. It was true talk. Men of the Educational Department in Tokio told me that the students would “talk politics” by the hour if you allowed them. At present they were talking in the abstract about their new plaything, the Constitution, with its Upper House and its Lower House, its committees, its questions of supply, its rules of procedure, and all the other skittles we have played with for six hundred years.

Japan is the second Oriental country which has made it impossible for a strong man to govern alone. This she has done of her own free will. India, on the other hand, has been forcibly ravished by the Secretary of State and the English M. P.

Japan is luckier than India.

No. XXI

SHOWS THE SIMILARITY BETWEEN THE BABU AND THE JAPANESE. CONTAINS THE EARNEST OUTCRY OF AN UNBELIEVER. THE EXPLANATION OF MR. SMITH OF CALIFORNIA AND ELSEWHERE. TAKES ME ON BOARD SHIP AFTER DUE WARNING TO THOSE WHO FOLLOW.

Very sadly did we leave it, but we gave our hearts in pledge To the pine above the city, to the blossoms by the hedge, To the cherry and the maple and the plum tree and the peach, And the babies — Oh, the babies! — romping fatly under each. Eastward ho! Across the water see the black bow drives and swings From the land of Little Children, where the Babies are the Kings.

The Professor discovered me in meditation amid tea-girls at the back of the Ueno Park in the heart of Tokio. My ‘rickshaw coolie sat by my side drinking tea from daintiest china, and eating maccaroons. I thought of Sterne’s donkey and smiled vacuously into the blue above the trees. The tea-girls giggled. One of them captured my spectacles, perched them on her own snubby-chubby nose, and ran about among her cackling fellows.

“And loose thy fingers in the tresses of The cypress-slender minister of wine,” quoted the Professor, coming round a booth suddenly. “Why aren’t you at the Mikado’s garden party?”

“Because he didn’t invite me, and, anyhow, he wears Europe clothes — so does the Empress — so do all the Court people. Let’s sit down and consider things. This people puzzles me.”

And I told my story of the interview with the Editor of the
Tokio Public Opinion
. The Professor had been making investigation into the Educational Department. “And further,” said he at the end of the tale, “the ambition of the educated student is to get a place under Government. Therefore he comes to Tokio: will accept any situation at Tokio that he may be near to his chance.”

“Whose son is that student?”

“Son of the peasant, yeoman farmer, and shopkeeper,
ryot
,
tehsildar
, and
bunnia
. While he waits he imbibes Republican leanings on account of the nearness of Japan to America. He talks and writes and debates, and is convinced he can manage the Empire better than the Mikado.”

“Does he go away and start newspapers to prove that?”

“He may; but it seems to be unwholesome work. A paper can be suspended without reason given under the present laws; and I’m told that one enterprising editor has just got three years’ simple imprisonment for caricaturing the Mikado.”

“Then there is yet hope for Japan. I can’t quite understand how a people with a taste for fighting and quick artistic perceptions can care for the things that delight our friends in Bengal.”

“You make the mistake of looking on the Bengali as unique. So he is in his own peculiar style; but I take it that the drunkenness of Western wine affects all Oriental folk in much the same way. What misleads you is that very likeness. Followest thou? Because a Jap struggles with problems beyond his grip in much the same phraseology as a Calcutta University student, and discusses Administration with a capital A, you lump Jap and Chatterjee together.”

“No, I don’t. Chatterjee doesn’t sink his money in railway companies, or sit down and provide for the proper sanitation of his own city, or of his own notion cultivate the graces of life, as the Jap does. He is like the
Tokio Public Opinion
— ’purely political.’ He has no art whatever, he has no weapons, and there is no power of manual labour in him. Yet he is like the Jap in the pathos of his politics. Have you ever studied Pathetic Politics?
Why
is he like the Jap?”

“Both drunk, I suppose,” said the Professor. “Get that girl to give back your gig-lamps, and you will be able to see more clearly into the soul of the Far East.”

“The ‘Far East’ hasn’t got a soul. She swapped it for a Constitution on the Eleventh of February last. Can any Constitution make up for the wearing of Europe clothes? I saw a Jap lady just now in full afternoon calling-kit. She looked atrocious. Have you seen the later Japanese art — the pictures on the fans and in the shop windows? They are faithful reproductions of the changed life — telegraph poles down the streets, conventionalised tram-lines, top-hats, and carpet-bags in the hands of the men. The artists can make those things almost passable, but when it comes to conventionalising a Europe dress, the effect is horrible.”

“Japan wishes to take her place among civilised nations,” said the Professor.

“That’s where the pathos comes in. It’s enough to make you weep to watch this misdirected effort — this wallowing in unloveliness for the sake of recognition at the hands of men who paint their ceilings white, their grates black, their mantelpieces French grey, and their carriages yellow and red. The Mikado wears blue and gold and red, his guards wear orange breeches with a stone-blue stripe down them; the American missionary teaches the Japanese girl to wear bangs — ”shingled bangs” — on her forehead, plait her hair into a pigtail, and to tie it up with magenta and cobalt ribbons. The German sells them the offensive chromos of his own country and the labels of his beer-bottles. Allen and Ginter devastate Tokio with their blood-red and grass-green tobacco-tins. And in the face of all these things the country wishes to progress toward civilisation! I have read the entire Constitution of Japan, and it is dearly bought at the price of one of the kaleidoscope omnibuses plying in the street there.”

“Are you going to inflict all that nonsense on them at home?” said the Professor.

“I am. For this reason. In the years to come, when Japan has sold her birthright for the privilege of being cheated on equal terms by her neighbours; when she has so heavily run into debt for her railways and public works that the financial assistance of England and annexation is her only help; when the Daimios through poverty have sold the treasures of their houses to the curio-dealer, and the dealer has sold them to the English collector; when all the people wear slop-trousers and ready-made petticoats, and the Americans have established soap factories on the rivers and a boarding-house on the top of Fujiyama, some one will turn up the files of the
Pioneer
and say: ‘This thing was prophesied.’ Then they will be sorry that they began tampering with the great sausage-machine of civilisation. What is put into the receiver must come out at the spout; but it must come out mincemeat.
Dixi!
And now let us go to the tomb of the Forty-Seven Ronins.”

“It has been said some time ago, and much better than you can say it,” said the Professor,
apropos
of nothing that I could see.

Distances are calculated by the hour in Tokio. Forty minutes in a ‘rickshaw, running at full speed, will take you a little way into the city; two hours from the Ueno Park brings you to the tomb of the famous Forty-Seven, passing on the way the very splendid temples of Shiba, which are all fully described in the guide-books. Lacquer, gold-inlaid bronze-work, and crystals carved with the words “Om” and “Shri” are fine things to behold, but they do not admit of very varied treatment in print. In one tomb of one of the temples was a room of lacquer panels overlaid with gold leaf. An animal of the name of V. Gay had seen fit to scratch his entirely uninteresting name on the gold. Posterity will take note that V. Gay never cut his fingernails, and ought not to have been trusted with anything prettier than a hog-trough.

“It is the handwriting upon the wall,” I said.

“Presently there will be neither gold nor lacquer — nothing but the finger-marks of foreigners. Let us pray for the soul of V. Gay all the same. Perhaps he was a missionary.”

The Japanese papers occasionally contain, sandwiched between notes of railway, mining, and tram concessions, announcements like the following: “Dr. —  — committed
hara-kiri
last night at his private residence in such and such a street. Family complications are assigned as the reason of the act.” Nor does
hara-kiri
merely mean suicide by any method.
Hara-kiri
is
hara-kiri
, and the private performance is even more ghastly than the official one. It is curious to think that any one of the dapper little men with top-hats and reticules who have a Constitution of their own, may in time of mental stress, strip to the waist, shake their hair over their brows, and, after prayer, rip themselves open. When you come to Japan, look at Farsari’s
hara-kiri
pictures and his photos of the last crucifixion (twenty years ago) in Japan. Then at Deakin’s, inquire for the modelled head of a gentleman who was not long ago executed in Tokio. There is a grim fidelity in the latter work of art that will make you uncomfortable. The Japanese, in common with the rest of the East, have a strain of blood-thirstiness in their compositions. It is very carefully veiled now, but some of Hokusai’s pictures show it, and show that not long ago the people revelled in its outward expression. Yet they are tender to all children beyond the tenderness of the West, courteous to each other beyond the courtesy of the English, and polite to the foreigner alike in the big towns and in the Mofussil. What they will be after their Constitution has been working for three generations the Providence that made them what they are alone knows!