Japanese Girls and Women, Alice Mabel Bacon [ebook reader library TXT] 📗

Then there are the every day dishes which our Japanese maiden must learn to prepare. The proper boiling of rice is in itself a study. The construction of the various soups which form the staple in the Japanese bill of fare; the preparation of mochi, a kind of rice dough, which is prepared at the New Year, or to send to friends on various festival occasions: these and many other branches of the culinary art must be mastered before the young girl is prepared to assume the cares of married life.

But though the little girl's life is not without its duties and responsibilities, it is also not at all lacking in simple and innocent pleasures.[*] First among the annual festivals, and bringing with it much mirth and frolic, comes the Feast of the New Year. At this time father, mother, and all older members of the family lay aside their work and their dignity, and join in the fun and sports that are characteristic of this season. Worries and anxieties are set aside with the close of the year, and the first beams of the New Year's sun bring in a season of unlimited joy for the children. For about one week the festival lasts, and the festal spirit remains through the whole month, prompting to fun and amusements of all kinds. From early morning until bedtime the children wear their prettiest clothes, in which they play without rebuke. Guests come and go, bringing congratulations to the family, and often gifts for all. The children's stock of toys is thus greatly increased, and the house overflows with the good things of the season, of which mochi, or cake made from rice dough, prepared always especially for this time, is one of the most important articles.

The children are taken with their parents to make New Year's visits to their friends and to offer them congratulations, and much they enjoy this, as, dressed in their best, they ride from house to house in jinrikishas.[5]

And then, during the long, happy evenings, the whole family, including even the old grandfather and grandmother, join in merry games; the servants, too, are invited to join the family party, and, without seeming forward or out of place, enter into the games with zest. One of the favorite games is "Hyaku nin isshu," literally "The poems of a hundred poets." It consists of two hundred cards, on each of which is printed either the first or last half of one of the hundred famous Japanese poems which give the name to the game. The poems are well known to all Japanese, of whatever sort or condition. All Japanese poems are short, containing only thirty-one syllables, and have a natural division into two parts. The one hundred cards containing the latter halves of the poems are dealt and laid out in rows, face upward, before the players. One person is appointed reader. To him are given the remaining hundred cards, and he reads the beginnings of the poems in whatever order they come from the shuffled pack. Skill in the game consists in remembering quickly the line following the one read, and rapidly finding the card on which it is written. Especially does the player watch his own cards, and if he finds there the end of the poem, the beginning of which has just been read, he must pick it up before any one sees it and lay it aside. If some one else spies the card first, he seizes it and gives to the careless player several cards from his own hand. Whoever first disposes of all his cards is the winner. The players usually arrange themselves in two lines down the middle of the room, and the two sides play against each other, the game not being ended until either one side or the other has disposed of all its cards. The game requires great quickness of thought and of motion, and is invaluable in giving to all young people an education in the classical poetry of their own nation, as well as being a source of great merriment and jollity among young and old.

Scattered throughout the year are various flower festivals, when, often with her whole family, our little girl visits the famous gardens where the plum, the cherry, the chrysanthemum, the iris, or the azalea attain their greatest loveliness, and spends the day out of doors in æsthetic enjoyment of the beauties of nature supplemented by art. And then there is the feast most loved in the whole year, the Feast of Dolls, when on the third day of the third month the great fire-proof storehouse gives forth its treasures of dolls,—in an old family, many of them hundreds of years old,—and for three days, with all their belongings of tiny furnishings in silver, lacquer, and porcelain, they reign supreme, arranged on red-covered shelves in the finest room of the house. Most prominent among the dolls are the effigies of the Emperor and Empress in antique court costume, seated in dignified calm, each on a lacquered dais. Near them are the figures of the five court musicians in their robes of office, each with his instrument. Beside these dolls, which are always present and form the central figures at the feast, numerous others, more plebeian, but more lovable, find places on the lower shelves, and the array of dolls' furnishings which is brought out on these occasions is something marvelous. It was my privilege to be present at the Feast of Dolls in the house of one of the Tokugawa daimiōs, a house in which the old forms and ceremonies were strictly observed, and over which the wave of foreign innovation had passed so slightly that even the calendar still remained unchanged, and the feast took place upon the third day of the third month of the old Japanese year, instead of on the third day of March, which is the usual time for it now. At this house, where the dolls had been accumulating for hundreds of years, five or six broad, red-covered shelves, perhaps twenty feet long or more, were completely filled with them and with their belongings. The Emperor and Empress appeared again and again, as well as the five court musicians, and the tiny furnishings and utensils were wonderfully costly and beautiful. Before each Emperor and Empress was set an elegant lacquered table service,—tray, bowls, cups, saké pots, rice buckets, etc., all complete; and in each utensil was placed the appropriate variety of food. The saké used on this occasion is a sweet, white liquor, brewed especially for this feast, as different from the ordinary saké as sweet cider is from the hard cider upon which a man may drink himself into a state of intoxication.[*] Besides the table service, everything that an imperial doll can be expected to need or desire is placed upon the shelves. Lacquered norimono, or palanquins; lacquered bullock carts, drawn by bow-legged black bulls,—these were the conveyances of the great in Old Japan, and these, in minute reproductions, are placed upon the red-covered shelves. Tiny silver and brass hibachi, or fire boxes, are there, with their accompanying tongs and charcoal baskets,—whole kitchens, with everything required for cooking the finest of Japanese feasts, as finely made as if for actual use; all the necessary toilet apparatus,—combs, mirrors, utensils for blackening the teeth, for shaving the eyebrows, for reddening the lips and whitening the face,—all these things are there to delight the souls of all the little girls who may have the opportunity to behold them. For three days the imperial effigies are served sumptuously at each meal, and the little girls of the family take pleasure in serving their imperial majesties; but when the feast ends, the dolls and their belongings are packed away in their boxes, and lodged in the fire-proof warehouse for another year.

The Tokugawa collection, of which I have spoken, is remarkably full and costly, for it has been making for hundreds of years in one of the younger branches of a family which for two and a half centuries was possessed of almost imperial power, and lived in more than imperial luxury; but there are few households so poor that they do not from year to year accumulate a little store of toys wherewith to celebrate the feast, and, whether the toys are many or few, the feast is the event of the year in the lives of the little girls of Japan.[*]

Beside the regular feasts at stated seasons, our little girl has a great variety of toys and games, some belonging to particular seasons, some played at any time during the year. At the New Year the popular out-of-door games are battledoor and shuttlecock, and ball. There is no prettier sight, to my mind, than a group of little girls in their many-colored wide-sleeved dresses playing with battledoor or ball. The graceful, rhythmic motion of their bodies, the bright upturned eyes, the laughing faces, are set off to perfection by the coloring of their flowing drapery; and their agility on their high, lacquered clogs is a constant source of wonder and admiration to any one who has ever made an effort to walk upon the clumsy things. There are dolls, too, that are not relegated to the storehouse when the Feast of Dolls is ended, but who are the joy and comfort of their little mothers during the whole year; and at every kwan-ko-ba, or bazaar, an endless variety of games, puzzles, pictures to be cut out and glued together, and amusements of all kinds, may be purchased at extremely low rates. There is no dearth of games for our little girl, and many pleasant hours are spent in the household sitting room with games, or conundrums, or stories, or the simple girlish chatter that elicits constant laughter from sheer youthful merriment.

As for fairy tales, so dear to the hearts of children in every country, the Japanese child has her full share. Often she listens, half asleep, while cuddling under the warm quilted cover of the kotatsu,[6] in the cold winter evenings, to the drowsy voice of the old grandmother or nurse, who carries her away on the wings of imagination to the wonderful palace of the sea gods, or to the haunts of the terrible oni, monsters with red, distorted faces and fearful horns. Momotaro, the Peach Boy, with his wonderful feats in the conquest of the oni, is her hero, until he is supplanted by the more real ones of Japanese history.

There are occasional all-day visits to the theatre, too, where, seated on the floor in a box, railed off from those adjoining, our little girl, in company with her mother and sisters, enjoys, though with paroxysms of horror and fear, the heroic historical plays which are now almost all that is left of the heroic old Japan. Here she catches the spirit of passionate loyalty that belonged to those days, forms her ideals of what a noble Japanese woman should be willing to do for parents or husband, and comes away taught, as she could be by no other teaching, what the spirit was that animated her ancestors,—what spirit must animate her, should she wish to be a worthy descendant of the women of old.

Among these surroundings, with these duties and amusements, our little girl grows to womanhood. The unconscious and beautiful spirit of her childhood is not driven away at the dawn of womanhood by thoughts of beaux, of coming out in society, of a brief career of flirtation and conquest, and at the end as fine a marriage, either for love or money, as her imagination can picture. She takes no