ON SHORT LEAVE TO JAPAN.* THE editorially vague " we
" of this remarkable book began their vacation-trip by a journey from the vicinity of Peshawur to Calcutta late in May last year, with the thermometer at 107 degrees. They started while two black balls (" meaning bad weather," said a clerk at the pay office, "and if a drum is hoisted instead, it means a cyclone ") were up. They did not wait for the dram, but the Catherine Apgar came in for the cyclone in Diamond Harbour, and had three days' and three laights' experience of it, with pouring, driving rain the whole time, two wrecks before the eyes of her passengers, and a sight of the sunken steamer Anglia ' as she put to sea on the third day. The true story of the loss of the Anglia,' one which Mr. Clark Russell has not surpassed in fiction, does not rightly belong to Captain Younghusband's narrative, but we must give it a place :—
"She touched a sand-bank, heeled over, and capsized in the course of a few seconds ; but one side of her remained above water. The majority of the passengers and crew got off in boats or on floating spars ; but a few were caught below in their cabins.
The port-holes were just large enough for a man to put his head through, but no more. The ship was of iron, and to enlarge the holes in the time available was an impossibility, though an endeavour was made with cold chisels. The boats from another ship came alongside, and handed food and drink to the doomed men, and gave them such encouragement as was pos- sible. But the tide rose inch by inch, and at last the time arrived when it seemed better for all that the boats should leave ; for to remain was but to prolong the agony on both sides. Some of the imprisoned cursed and foamed at the mouth with anguish, some prayed, some besought the boats' crew to shoot them ere they went. Sadly, silently the boats slipped away; the tide rose— A prosperous voyage in a first-rate ship well provided with arms, in case of such an attack as that which was made on the Namoa ' a year or two ago, when a large band of Chinese pirates, disguised as peaceful deck-passengers, came on board at Amoa, and one night, a few days from land, systematically seized the ship while the officers and passengers were at dinner, brought the travellers to Penang, "buried in the most extravagant form of tropical verdure." The author delights in the beauties of the place, where the fierce heat of Upper India is unknown, while plants and ferns which struggle along in England in six-inch pots, reach there the size of trees, and the rarest and most delicate orchids grow in the wildest profusion with nothing but trellis-work to protect them from the weather. He is very amusing about the pocket-campaign which has lasted for nearly twenty-five years, just as our great wars did when the armies went regularly into winter quarters. "When a Dutch war-vessel from Acheen (at the north corner of Sumatra) dashes in for stores and dashes off again, as if for a second battle of Trafal- gar, the people of Penang only smile and pocket their dollars." Here the author gets the first hint of the admirable manner in which things are made comfortable all round by the Chinese Government. The proportion of Chinese to the native popula- tion of Penang is ten to one ; the physical persuasive force is a detachment of British infantry and Sikh police; the moral influence is " notice " to any Chinaman who may misbehave that he will be at once restored to his native land. This threat is found quite effective, for on the return of the native he would be taken by the pigtail and then and there beheaded. At Singapore, where the Malays and Madrassis merely em- phasise the preponderance of the Chinamen, the two influences are repeated with a similar result. It seems that Quito is the only town actually on the Equator; but Singapore is near enough to enjoy the credit of being so. The author is ,emphatic about the first-classatess of Singapore as a coaling- station, and in his admiration of the skill with which our coaling-stations are dotted all over the world. He does not want the British Navy of the future to make his mind easy; the present naval force will do for him, for he believes that, 4' in the great war which our Navy will wage all over the • On Short Lcave to Japan. By Captain G. T. Yozingtosbond, Queen a Own Corps of Guides. London: Sampson Low and Co. world, the combined navies of all Europe cannot stand against , her for a moment, so long as her coaling-stations are secure." r In connection with this matter he relates a curious and significant incident, for which we have to refer the reader to the book. The clean and comfortable hotels of Hong- Kong, and the merits of the Chinese waiters, who "wear long white nightgowns, and look like ghosts with pigtails," are foremost among the author's transition topics. Then we come to a charming description of his first impressions of Japan, the inland sea, "a huge lake as smooth as ice, and curiously reflective," with its hundreds of fishing-boats dotting the waters, "full of little, idle men, all seeming to have nothing to do but sit about and laugh," and its "great; two-masted junks lying lazily on the still waters, as if the reaching of any destination was a matter of the very smallest import- ance ; the villages, brought close by field-glasses, "clean and _ neat, with their wooden houses black-roofed, and the great cedar-tree in the middle," seeming absolutely deserted, "or perhaps all the merry little inhabitants were taking their r cheerful little siestas," and everywhere an intense stillness and peace.
Captain Younghusband travelled on Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, Murray's Guide (rendering the corporeal and odious one superfluous), and Things Japanese, by Professor Cham- berlain, and in addition to the other so readily divined com- ponent of the "we," carried with him an open mind, ready sym- pathies, up-to-date knowledge of the past history and the actual conditions of life in Japan, an invaluable capacity for lively interest, quick observation, and ready appreciation—that best equipment of the inquirer abroad—humour, and good-humour, and, to the great advantage of his readers, a clear, pleasant, and unaffected style. Therefore it is that, although perhaps we should be unable to assert under cross-examination that the record of the exceedingly good purpose to which he turned his short leave in Japan last year contains absolutely new information respecting Japan, or suggests quite novel views of the country, we derive greater pleasure from his book, and are filled by it with a more friendly, familiar, and amused feeling towards the clever, kindly, amiable, hurrying, cheerful Japs than any previous writer has been able to in- spire. The author certainly dissipates much of the romance of Old Japan, by revealing to us the Mikado dressed in a French uniform, seated in an ordinary landau, and followed by "gentlemen in frock-coats or European uniforms; possibly the terrible daimios of twenty years ago, with their wings clipped, and disguised as marquises and counts;" and by complaining that the streets of Tokyo are to the foreigner simply ruined by the " bowler " hat "To meet a daimio in a frock-coat," says the author, "was as great a shock to me as it would be to meet my revered parent in Oxford Street attired as a Chippeway Indian. Let us have progress, by all means; but for heaven's sake let us stick to " our clothes." To us, as to him, it is news that the rickshaw is not a remnant of Old Japan, not an "indigenous vehicle," but a part of the new civilisation, invented and introduced by an American missionary, and, although the exact vehicle to suit the country, not an unalloyed boon ; for the rickshaw kills the rickshawman, that "wonderful little fellow, with an ex- traordinary partiality for tea." He works too hard, and ' pulmonary diseases are making vast strides amongst these indomitable people. The farm-labourer lives twice as long as the rickshawman. Captain Younghusband draws many a con- trast between the labour-lives of India and those of Japan ; in this instance he tells us that "in India four men, and sturdy men too, are employed to draw the rickshaw of a lady, while in Japan one man breaks his heart, up hill and down dale,
dragging a full-grown European male." The theatre, the temples, the tea-houses, the lilliputian gardens, the dwarfed trees and plants—products of an art still a profound secret —the vast tracts of exquisite fruit blossom, the calculating- boards, the merry Japanese boy, the ubiquitous Japanese
baby, the invariable Japanese politeness,—these are familiar features, but we see them more clearly, in a more personal way, through the glasses of Captain Younghusband. What would Wemmick have thought of a garden contained in a shallow two-dozen wine-case, with everything complete down: to the fish in the lake, a sheet of water only a few inches square, and the footbridges over the watercuts P In this garden there were two houses, and numerous trees of various kinds, each about six inches high; old as the hills these, but full of vitality and yet never growing bigger. "Needless to
say, a special gardener had to be kept for this tiny gem, and his wages were those of an archbishop."
A description of the Cormorant-fishing at Gifu, which occurs in the author's account of the interior of the country, is very curious. To his visit to the great mausoleum of the first Shogun at Nikko, to the Nikko valley, "which might be almost anywhere "—only with the addition of the avenues of giant cryptomerias—to the hot springs and the lake district of Hakone, vivid interest attaches; he misses nothing ; he writes as though he were commenting on the various scenes and characteristics to an intelligent companion. In his descrip- tion of the park and temples of Nara, we find the following addition to the well-known Daihatsu record :—
"Behind the images, amidst a collection of relics, we came across the mummy of an undoubted mermaid. It was in very good preservation, and showed distinctly a human head, with the body and tail of a fish. The head was as large as that of a small boy, and the body was that of a good-sized salmon, some thirty to thirty-six inches long. This curiosity is not ment-oned by any writers, so far as my researches go."
We wonder who was the Barnum of old Nippon. The two concluding chapters are of mach practical interest. The first, to all those whose good fortune it may be to visit Japan ; the second to all who desire to understand the strength, the resources, the military status, and the political outlook of Japan. The writer is just a little Chauvinist, and he is rather unreasonably anti-Chinese; we do not apprehend that the "huge, unwholesome, semi-barbarous empire of China" will "fall to England," in any case ; nor do we see that it would be our business to assist its "falling to Japan." But we do consider Captain Younghusband's comments on the hostile attitude of the journals, American and British, printed in English, towards the Japanese, very well worth the serious attention de qui de droit. Here is Ms practical advice :— " The purchase of one of the existing journals, or the estab-
lishment of a thoroughly friendly daily paper well served with foreign telegrams, would be an investment which, I am convinced, would repay us a hundredfold in the years to come. For a British Minister to impress upon the Mikado's counsellors the friendly feeling of the British nation, in face of the bitter hostility of papers published at his very door, is a task beyond the powers of the most silver-tongued diplomatist."
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