SAMURAI TRAILS
After our melodramatic toast of the night before it would have been only orthodox to have said good-bye to our Occidental inn at sunrise and to have sought the road. But we had a call to make. The fulfilling of the obligation proved to be momentous. There is one never-to-be-broken rule for the foreigner in the Orient: He must consider himself always to be of extreme magnitude in the perspective, and that any action which concerns himself is momentous. If Asia had possessed this supreme self-concern, she might to-day be playing political chess with colonies in Europe. The details of our call are thus set down in faithful sequence.
“If ever you come to Japan, be sure to look me up.” This had been the farewell of Kenjiro Hori when he said good-bye to his university days inAmerica. Hori’s affection for America had had the vigour which marks the vitality of Japanese loyalty. He had always singled out our better qualities with gratifying disregard for opposites.
We were, however, without an address except that we thought he might be in Kobe; but it seemed unreasonable that after travelling all the way to the Antipodes we should then be baulked by a mere detail. In the faith of this logic we took an early train to Kobe, and the first sign that we saw read: “Information Bureau for Foreigners.”
The man in uniform peering out of the box window was so smiling and so evidently desirous of being helpful that whether we had needed information or not, it would have been exceedingly discourteous not to have asked some question. We inquired the address of Dr. Kenjiro Hori. The information dispenser thumbed all his heap of directories. He appeared to be unravelling his thread by a most intricate system of cross reference. Then he looked at us with another smile.
“Did you find it?” we asked.
“I find no address,” said he, “but I tell ’ricksha boys take you. Ah, so!”
Such a challenge was impossible to refuse.We got into the ’rickshas and the men bent their necks and jerked the wheels into motion with strange disregard for any bee-line direction to any particular place. It appeared to be a most casual choice whether we took one corner or another. This rambling went on for some time. Suddenly they held back on the shafts and said: “Here!” We were at the door of a wholesale importing house. No one within had ever heard of O-Hori-san. When we came back to the street with this information the coolies seemed not at all surprised. They shrugged their shoulders at our mild expostulation as if implying, “Of course, if he isn’t here he must be some other place.”
After another panting dash they stopped and said: “Here!” It was obvious without inquiring that Hori could not be in that shallow, open-fronted shop. “Very well,” the shoulders answered us and on we went. We stopped for another time with the now familiar “Here!” We had traversed half Kobe. Our futile questions seemed to have nothing to do with any next step. Strangely, instead of having lost our faith it had been growing that by some system the coolies were following the quest. At this stop, when we looked inside the entrance, there was the nameof Dr. Kenjiro Hori on a brass plate. We walked up the stairs and rang a bell and inquired for Dr. Hori of the boy who came.
We asked him to tell O-Hori-san that O-Owre-san and O-Kirt-land-san would like to see him. Of all arrangements of consonants (w’s, r’s, k’s, and l’s) to harass the Japanese tongue, our two names stand in the first group of the first list of impossibles. We could overhear the distressed boy’s struggle with “O-Owre-san.” I was impressed that from that instant Alfred Owre became “O-Owre-san.” It was a secular confirmation too positive to be gainsaid.
Small wonder then that Hori had not the slightest idea who was waiting at the door; but his surprise, when he appeared, was so smoothed out and repressed in his formalsamuraiwelcome that we were tempted into moody thinking that through some psychosis the frightful slaughter of our names had destroyed his remembrance of our rightful personalities.
Friends appeared and were introduced with ceremonial formalism. We sat in a circle and sipped iced mineral water. Hori inquired politely of our plans and then sat back in silence behind his thick spectacles. The icy temperature of the mineral water was the temperatureof the verve of the conversation. The day itself was rather hot; a damp, depressing heat. I tried to fan off the flies which stuck tenaciously with sharp, sudden buzzings.
Of all varieties of uncreative activity, the analyzing of moods brings the least compensation—but that does not mean avoidance. During that hour a disturbing remoteness to everyday reality rasped as if something untoward had been conjured up. O-Owre-san and I talked, trying to explain our plans. We repeated that we hadn’t any desire to visit the great places, but our saying so sounded childish and impertinent,—very tiresome. A dignified ancient kept forcing us into a position of defence. To put us out of ease was his most remote wish, of course, but he did insist with patriotic eloquence (suggesting a Californian defending his climate) that the show places deserved to be paid respect. We insisted that our tourist consciences had been appeased long before, and that we now intended to run away from foreign hotels, from the Honourable Society of Guides, from the Imperial Welcome Society, from all cicerones, and from all centres where the customs and conveniences of our Western variety of civilization are so cherishingly catered to.
“But,” interrupted Hori, “you do not understand. You will find no one prepared for foreigners. You will find not one word of English. You must not do such a thing.” With Japan so earnestly providing the proper accommodations at the proper places, it was not playing the game, so to speak, to refuse.
When an argument of policy is between an amateur and an expert (particularly so when between a foreigner and a native) the tyro can afford to compromise on not one atom of his ignorance. If he concedes at all he will be overwhelmed completely. We refused Hori’s warnings, remaining impervious to any advice which did not further our plan of action exactly as outlined.
“Very well, then,” said Hori, “I shall have to go with you.”
Under the excitement of talking plans Hori slipped out of his formalism, and became exactly his old-time self. Until the following week, however, he would not be able to turn his solicitude into action. He did not lose his cataclysm of positive doubt over entrusting the Empire in our hands, but as there was no escape from leaving us to our own devices for those days (and wemade known a certain vanity in our own resources) he at length agreed to meet us in Nagoya, and we planned a route which would bring us there with our rendezvous at the European hotel.