A Barbarian in Asia

A BARBARIAN IN JAPAN

“It is because we are in Paradise that everything in this world hurts us. Outside of Paradise, nothing embarrasses for nothing matters.”

I should like to find myself excused by these charming words of Komachi, the Japanese poetess, for having had unfavorable impressions of Japan.

What the Japanese lack is a great river. ‘Wisdom accompanies rivers,’ says a Chinese proverb. Wisdom and peace. They have nothing in the way of peace, but instead a volcano, a majestic mountain, no doubt, but none the less a volcano, that inundates them regularly with mud, lava and disasters.

Not only is a great river lacking, but tall trees and wide spaces. I covered twelve hundred kilometers in vaunted provinces of Japan without seeing any fine trees. I know very well that fine landscapes rarely frequent the railways, but all the same…

Japan has a climate that is damp and treacherous. Nowhere in the world is there so much lung trouble.

The trees are sickly, puny, meager, rising feebly, growing with difficulty, fighting against adversity, and tortured as soon as possible by man in order to appear still more dwarfish and miserable.

Japanese bamboos: sad, worn-out things, gray and with no chlorophyl; Ceylon would not have them as reeds.

Anything that is not mediocre finds no friends here. The cedar must hide behind the sickly cherry tree, the sickly cherry tree behind the plum tree in a pot, the plum tree in a pot behind the thimble-like pine.

The men are ugly, with no sparkle — they are sad, wasted and dry, with the look of petty clerks without a future, of corporals, subordinates, servants of Baron X. and of Mr. Z. or of the papaland¹… with little pig eyes and decayed teeth.

The women look like servants (always service), the young ones like pretty soubrettes.

They are stocky, short, and above all hefty, and they are all loins from leg to shoulder. The face is sometimes pretty, but the prettiness lacks purpose and emotion; the head is always so big, big with what? with emptiness? why such a big head, for such a small physiognomy and a still smaller expression?

The same in character as in appearance: a great indifferent, insensitive blanket and just a trifle touchy and sentimental (like the military).

Little superficial bursts of laughter like a charwoman, eyes that disappear as though they were sewn up, clothes like a humpback, a fussy way of doing their hair (the geisha’s style of hairdressing), achieved by calculations, labor, and symbolism — the whole effect completely silly.

An armor compressing and flattening the breasts with a cushion in the back, painted and powdered one hundred per cent, she embodies the unfortunate and typical creation of this nation of esthetes and sergeants that could leave nothing, no, nothing, to its natural impulse.

Gray houses, with empty, icy rooms, constructed and measured according to a fixed, uncompromising rule.

Streets like a seaside resort with garlands of little flowers or of little colored lamps. A useless, impermanent look about it. That white, beachlike side of existence.

Identical, expressionless cities resounding with motor-horns. Shrieking like the devil.

A country which, though full to bursting, looks as if it had nothing in it; where neither men nor plants nor houses seem to have any foundation or scope.

An insular mentality, uncommunicative and proud.

A thin and insignificant language, skin-deep, agreeable and pleasant.

A religion of insects, exactly the religion of ants, Shintoism (with that famous cult of the ant-hill), an ant people.

A country where everything is known, everything open, everything spied upon, where no door can be closed, where one finds a spy even in one’s bath, quite naked, but a spy all the same (they keep you company everywhere); where a young girl who is not very rich is normally sold to a brothel keeper, to serve the multitude (as far as they have individuality!) (service, always service).

A people that is the prisoner of its island, of its masks, of its conventions, of its police, of its discipline, of its wrappings and of the cords that bind it.

But, on the other hand, the most active, the least talkative, the least ‘temperamental,’ as the English say, the most efficient in the world, the best-tempered, the most self-controlled. Having, without a word, reconstructed Tokyo in ten years; colonized and replanted Korea with trees, industrialized Manchuria. Conquered, modernized, beaten the record, and finally… what everyone knows.

A people, in fact, devoid of wisdom, of simplicity and of depth, over-serious, though fond of toys and novelties, not easily amused, ambitious, superficial and obviously doomed to our evils and to our civilization.

No actor in the world bawls like the Japanese with so little result. He does not speak his part, he mews it, belches it, and he trumpets, brays, neighs and gesticulates like one possessed, and in spite of it all I do not believe him.

All this is done ‘on the side,’ ‘to decorate.’ The frightful contortions he makes in the effort to represent his sufferings merely express the hell of a trouble he is taking to express suffering; it is suffering expressed by a man who no longer knows the meaning of it (a lot of esthetes, all of them) in front of an audience of esthetes, equally ignorant of the subject.

He weeps, he moans; a great carcass of groans from which there is nothing to be had.

Like the Japanese smile that only shows the teeth, politeness does not get across.

With voices like old grumblers, trying to give importance to their nonsense, their mediocre language, and their stories of vendettas, with prolonged groans, syllables spun out like she-cats in heat at night in their loneliness and nervous exasperation, Japanese actors are the most false, the most insupportable of all Asia and of Europe (Korean women singers included).

Their drama snarls, with the Voice of the People, the Voice of a Call to Order and of Remonstrance, but completely lacking in grandeur.

A loud voice that reeks of prejudice a thousand miles away, of life taken up by the wrong end, a background of ancient impostures and obligations, and a series of second-rate notions, but spelled with a capital letter, in the midst of which like the voices of the Categorical Imperative (the great master of Japan) the poor characters move about, victims, subordinate creatures, but giving themselves, as one might expect, great swashbuckling airs, with a peculiarly decorative type of courage, and there is such a lack of variety that one sees why in the No plays they wear a mask and why at Osaka the actors are simply wooden marionettes, life-size.²

Lest this be mistaken for the conventions of a big theater, go to the small ones, the tiniest ones. Listen to the singers of Yosuri; attend a simple recitation, the same inferno can be found here. First some frigid scenery, very precise, and always well done. Then two women seated facing the audience, one on the right, the other on the left. Two. One reciting or howling, the other accompanying or clucking.

The reciter goes into hysterics seated — she howls, screams, but remains seated. Long periods of a nervous external racket that never touches one, but which at times corresponds more or less to a decorative line of feeling; the other accompanies her on a three-stringed instrument, and with a sort of paper-cutter taps sharply on the strings, thus producing the sound of sawing. The sawing act comes about every twenty seconds. A despairing sound. The instrument simply gives up the ghost, and twenty seconds later begins all over again. And so on for twenty-five or thirty minutes. And while she accompanies, she clucks. She goes ‘guieng’ (guieng, or rien, or nieng), then silence, then she goes hom, with a short, narrow, skipping and ridiculous o combining a sniffle, unwillingness, denial, low spirits, and above all a frightful hardness and discipline.

As for Japanese music, even that of the Geishas, it is a sort of sour, fizzy water that stings but does not cheer.

It has a false graviy, it tears, with a nervous tearing — the over-shrillness of the horror play. No volume, no poise. It amuses itself pressing and making a martyr of a nerve at the back of the ear.

The whistling of the wind in the reeds, and a certain uneasiness, produce a painful impression of remoteness, but not at all of immensity and of the infinite.

Remember that the motor horn is used in Japan in a useless and intensive manner. This instrument with its sharp notes delights them and makes Tokyo a noisier and more maddening city than Rome or New York.

Modern music: melodies taken from here and there, from gypsies, etc., others peculiar to Japan. Fresh and melodious young girl voices, the kind that are a bit too dovelike.

JAPAN

While many countries that one has liked become, as the distance from them increases, almost ridiculous or insubstantial, Japan, which I distinctly detested, grows almost dear to me.

It is their own fault, too, with their damned police. But there you are, the police do not bother the Japanese, he likes them. He wants order above everything. He does not necessarily want Manchuria, but he wants order and discipline in Manchuria. He does not necessarily want war with Russia and the United States (it is only a consequence), he wants to clear up the political horizon.

‘Give us Manchuria, let us beat Russia and the United States, and then we shall be able to settle down.’ I was very much struck by this remark by a Japanese, this desire to clean up.

Japan has a mania for cleaning.

In the opinion of a relatively dirty man like myself, washing, like a war, is a trifle puerile, because it has to be done all over again after a while.

But the Japanese likes water, and the ‘Samurai’ likes honor and revenge. The Samurai washes in blood. The Japanese even washes the sky. In a Japanese picture, have you ever seen a dirty sky? and yet!—

He also scrapes the waves clean.

A pure and icy ether reigns over the objects that he draws; as a result of this extraordinary purity, their country is believed to be marvelously bright, whereas it rains there all the time.

Still brighter are their music and their young girls’ voices, sharp and piercing, a kind of knitting needle in musical space.

What a far cry from our orchestras with their tidal waves, in which that sentimental reveler called the saxophone has recently appeared.

What froze me so at the Japanese theater was the emptiness, which one ends by liking, but which hurts at first and which is authoritarian; and the motionless characters, placed at either extremity of the stage, howling and going off alternatively, at a terribly high pressure, like living Leyden jars.

I am not one of those who criticize the Japanese for having reconstructed Tokyo in an ultra-modern style, for filling it with cafés, of the Exposition of Decorative Arts type (Tokyo is a hundred times more modern than Paris). For having adopted the precision and purity of geometry in their furnishings and decoration.

One might criticize the Frenchman for being modern, not the Japanese. The Japanese has been modern for ten centuries. Nowhere in Japan do you find the slightest trace of that stupid pretentiousness of what is called Louis XIV, XV, Empire, etc.

To find something beautiful in France, to see a chair that will be fairly satisfactory (as far as a chair may be satisfactory), or a painting, a picture that is honest and plain, one must go back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. When you look at a picture by Clouet (and in fact by Memling, Ghirlandajo, etc.), there is something right, assured, attentive and peaceful in it. Next comes the pompous century, then the century of the boudoir pimp, then the ‘stupid nineteenth century,’ ‘the century of heart trouble.’ Since the sixteenth century, the European has been losing himself, and lose himself he must, obviously, so that he may find himself.

In Japan, nothing of the sort; everything was always precise, never over-ornamented (in Japan the houses are not even painted, nor are the rooms, no wallpaper — this kind of pretentiousness is unknown).

The same material for everybody, rich or poor, and one that is never ugly: wood.

No doubt modern geometry is a bit cold. That of Japan was always so. But they have always liked it… Besides, Japan as an imitator seldom goes wrong in the matter of taste. It has not imitated the style of 1900. This idea never occurred to any Japanese. But the ultra-modern style is made for him, or rather, was his own with different materials. In the villages, if a new café is built, it will be completely ultra-modern.

There are something like four thousand ultra-modern cafés in Tokyo, where they serve you with drink and the company of a ‘barmaid.’ There’s no way of being by oneself. No use trying.

The European, after many an effort, has succeeded in belittling himself before God.

The Japanese not only belittles himself before God, or before men, but even before the smallest of waves, before the crumpled leaf of the reed, before distant bamboos that he can hardly see. Modesty, no doubt, reaps its reward. For to no other people do the leaves and the flowers appear with so much beauty and fraternity.

KOREA

It must be admitted that European civilization has every fault. But it has a magnetism that sweeps everything else away. There is in the world a general surge toward a joy without depth, toward excitement. The old Japanese music resembles the moaning of the wind; already the new is quite catchy; the old Chinese music is a perfect marvel, sweet and slow; the new sounds like any other; the old Korean music is tragic and terrible, and yet it used to be sung by prostitutes, but now it is ‘come along, let’s dance.’ (Their present music is a vile gallop and expresses in another way those singular transports that are most typical, among all the yellow races, of the Korean); man is no longer the world’s prey, but the world is his prey, man is at last emerging from his swamp.

So he did suffer with the blues, in the old days, and repression was unbearable to him! Even for an Asiatic.

JAPAN

This happened in the railway station in Okayama (in the stations, on the platforms of incoming trains, there are always quantities of gentlemen, ready to give their combined greetings to important personages on the train).

There are at first five or six hurried salutations on both sides, then it calms down and one can begin to get in a glance between each bow. Presently one may venture to speak, politely, though, of course, with a fresh bow at the first words to remove any doubt as to the good feelings of each one toward the other.

At Okayama, a lady was taking the train. She was there on the platform, in deep mourning, her style of dress exceedingly distinguished (in black, with a few white dots here and there that looked as if they might have fallen by chance, like raindrops).

She stood, during the eight minutes the train stopped, with her back to the compartment, while her waiting-women prepared the places for her, for her son and her brother (though the latter may have been her major-domo) and installed some baskets of flowers, covered with white silk, with one black dot beside the bow.

Thirteen persons in a semi-circle on the platform surrounded her; motionless, no particular sign of any sentiment other than deference. Two or three, however, appeared to be ‘touched.’…

She meanwhile, very white, blinked her eyelids.

Her eyes were slightly reddened; twice she dabbed them lightly with a little handkerchief hitherto concealed.

She neither looked at anyone in particular nor away in the distance. She was not exactly sad, but was plainly conscious of an important ceremony, and that the actual circumstances in which she found herself were, or should have been, rather ‘chic.’

And finally she bent low repeatedly, smiled a little, the train whistle blew a first time, she said three words to her sister(?) when the latter approached, smiled at her distinctly, bowed again to the semi-circle; the semi-circle bowed, bending at right angles; she got on the train, it whistled again and was off.

At that moment one of the group remembered something he wanted to let the major-domo know and ran alongside the train, bowing low as he ran, and bowed and bowed so much that a post in the station, which owing to his bent position he had not been able to see in time, put an end to his race; it must have hurt him considerably.

Now that one has spoken of the mentality of certain peoples, one really wonders if it was worth while, if one’s time would not have been put to a better use otherwise.

Take as an example a nation supposed to be great, England.

What is the Englishman? Not such an extraordinary creature. But there are fifty-five millions of them. This is the important fact. Suppose you had thirty Englishmen in all, throughout the whole world. Thirty chosen at random. Who would notice them? It is the same way with all the nations. For they are made up of ‘the average.’

A nation containing five hundred thousand Edgar Poes would obviously be a little more impressive.

Who will weigh the imbeciles in the scales when a civilization is set up?

The yellow soul is the only one that drags no mud along with it. It is never muddy. We do not know what it does with the mud. There is none. I was given, in Singapore, some obscene Chinese postcards. The Chinese has written some obscene things, and among others some plays. Well, what of that? Fifty per cent of the canvases in the Luxembourg seem dirty to me, and yet these obscene postcards seem to me amazingly delicate and quite incapable of causing inner damage. They are not at all exciting. It is not without reason, too, that the Japanese is at home with flowers, worships them and loves them fraternally as others love dogs, and that the Chinese likes to be among the leaves of the willow and of the bamboo.

When I went from Bengal to Darjeeling there was a halt at the Nepalese frontier, and a young Nepalese girl came and smiled at me. I believe she wanted to know whether I would buy some chocolate that she offered to fetch for me from a shop. But she knew no other English word than the one for ‘chocolate.’ (In a Nepalese there is some Hindu and some Mongol. She was entirely Mongol.) That smile, not in the least awkward, so bright, made such an impression on me and I looked at her with such delight that she herself was moved by it. Finally she broke away as though caught up by the wind, ran to get the chocolates, and put them in my hand. But the car that I was sharing with other travelers was about to leave, there was no hotel, she did not speak English, no one spoke English.

Oh! first smile of the yellow race.

Everything is hard inside me and arid, but that smile of hers, so sweet, seemed to be the mirror of myself.

When I went back, I sought, I looked, I stopped. No one: at last, at the moment when the train whistled and was leaving, someone ran quickly with a light step to my window, breathless, came to smile, to smile for the last time, to smile sadly. So she too remembered. Why did I not go back? Was not my destiny there?

A people’s dress tells one a great deal more about them than their poetry. Which may come from elsewhere and take everybody in like that of Japan.

Dress is a conception of oneself, worn by oneself.

Who would dream of wearing something that was contrary to himself and that contradicted him constantly?

The Japanese woman is difficult to dress, but there is no necessity for her to compress her breasts as she does, which are fine and well shaped, and to put a cushion on her back: nothing but a love of discipline. Japanese dress is extremely decorative, but esthetic.

In adopting a dress, a people sometimes makes a mistake as to what suits it, but rarely. It is not the color of the skin nor the shape of the body alone that guide the choice of clothing, but the soul, the expression. And general concepts.

The Balinese women quite frankly leave the breasts naked.

Mind you, this is not merely by chance; their legs are carefully covered down to the feet with very pretty stuffs that they dye themselves, and they could quite as easily be completely dressed. Besides, nudity is very difficult to wear; it is a technique of the soul. It is not enough to remove one’s clothing. One must remove one’s vileness. (I once saw some nudists in the neighborhood of Vienna. They took themselves for ‘nude people.’ But all I saw was some meat.)

The poetry of a people is more deceptive than its dress; it is manufactured by esthetes, who are bored and who are only understood among themselves.

Plays are more truthful (at least in the way they are produced), for the public would not go regularly to performances that bored them.

I have seen plays of the Chinese, Koreans, Malayans, Tamils, Bengalis, Hindus, Turks, modern Greeks, Annamites, Hungarians, Spanish, Serbians, etc.; films of the Chinese, Japanese, Bengalis, Hindus, and dances of the Javanese, Balinese, Hindus, Somalis, and of the South American Indians.

The subject is of no importance. Many of them are similar. Likewise, the history of races (everywhere similar) is of little importance. It is the manner, the style and not the facts that matter. A people about which one knows nothing and that has stolen everything from others — ideas, religion, institutions — has its own gestures, its accent, its physiognomy.. . its reflexes.

And each man has a face that betrays him, and his face, at the same time, betrays his race, his family and his religion. Everyone is responsible for his face.

No one wears it undeservedly.

Will there be another war? Look at yourselves, Europeans, look at yourselves.

Nothing is peaceful in your faces.

All is struggle, desire, avidity.

Even peace you want violently.

¹In French “papatrie,” untranslatable. (Translator’s note)

²One day I saw an actor who was miming drunkenness. It was quite a while before I realized it. He had made up his part by taking from one drunkard this, from another that, from such a one the break-down of his speech, from another of his gestures, or his fumbling acts, or his lapses of memory; and so with these scraps he had made himself a harlequin’s costume for drunkenness that had no connection with any possible drunkard, no center, no truth, and had been constituted as if by a man who did not know what drunkenness was, and would be unable to picture it to his inner self. And yet that seems unbelievable in Japan, which is so full of drunkards. I must say it was amazing.