Y impression that Japan is a

Mit

little country in extent somewhat evaporated during a visit to the slightly known north island. This no doubt was partly due to the almost Oriental leisureliness of Japanese trains, and it is perhaps as much the long day's ride from Tokio to the northern end of the main island as the uninviting aspect of the steamers which set one across to Hokkaido that causes the vast majority of visitors to confine themselves to the beaten track between Nikko and Nagasaki, and miss a region well worth while. Beyond beautiful Volcano Bay, with its smoking cones, lies quite another Japan, inconspicuous on the world map, yet of a surprising vastness. Hakodate, chief landing-place, and burdened with that silly Japanese rule forbidding photography within cannon-shot of fortifications, calls for nothing more than the unavoidable halt of an hour or two. But on the long day's journey thence northward to Sapporo one's coming is already rewarded. Though May will soon be half gone, it is cold enough for an overcoat, and the Imperial Government Railways are still heating their trains. Low, heavily thatched huts hug the ground closely in a way unknown in the main island. Instead of flooded rice-fields, the rich, black soil is given over mainly to corn and potatoes, corn shocked as in the United States, as weather-beaten cones

of it that have stood through the long, arduous winter still testify. Now and again the train rumbles for an hour or more along the very edge of this or that magnificent bay, through collections of miserable huts, with thatched fishingboats, and millions of herring split in twain hung on lines to dry in the sun and millions more in heaps and bales ready for shipment. There is a genuine Japanese atmosphere, as well as scent, about these clusters of toilsome poverty, as if their inhabitants, accustomed for countless generations to a crowded struggle for existence farther south, were mentally incapable of taking advantage of the wide and fertile opportunities all about them. Hundreds of stones laid on their tin roofs testify to the occasional violence of storms, and certainly there is none of that cleanliness which the mind usually associates with the Japanese.

But these, like the rare glimpse of an aged wife with unsightly blackened teeth, are merely the touches of old familiar Japan which give contrast to the real Hokkaido. New-England landscapes of hills, then low mountains dabbled with snow, finally patches of snow beside and below the track, succeed one another as the train struggles inland. Now come rugged, snow-covered peaks rising into the clouds; before long all the mountains in view, more than can be counted on the fingers of both hands, are covered with

snow, great fields of which lie in the hollows far below us. Yet, as I have said, May was well advanced. It required a distinct mental effort to keep in mind that this was Japan.

Lower down there was a profusion of wild flowers, though the buds did not seem so far advanced as they are along our Northern border on the same date. There were whole hours of primeval forest, with at most a rare patch of clearing, then broad vistas of charred stumps and the primitive conditions that go with them, finally some square-cut fields, but only in the deadflat lands, as if there were too much room to spare to trouble with hilly ground. On the whole, the fields, though still small to the American eye, were ten times the size of those of Japan's main island. Also there was much plowing with shaggy horses, cattle grazing here and there; in short, a landscape in which a rural American of our Northern States would have felt almost at home.

$ 2

Yezo, as the island which Japan has renamed Hokkaido for some political reason is still best known to the outside world, has never kept pace with the rest of Japan. Though the primitive Ainus were reduced to serfdom at least a dozen centuries ago, the north island was an almost unknown wilderness even when the Japanese resumed their intercourse with the outside world in the middle of the last century. A plan to make it an independent fief of the crumbling Tokugawa shogunate at the time of the imperial restoration having been bloodily upset a year later, various schemes of government under an executive appointed at Tokio finally crystallized in 1886 in an independent

administration, with Sapporo as the capital. To the already American aspect of the landscape were added, through the initiative of the first governor, charged with the task of colonizing the island, a large group of American experts, who brought with them agricultural machinery, seeds, trees, and other aids of a similar nature. To-day Hokkaido produces, for instance, an ample supply of excellent American apples for all Japan, and incoming travelers must hand over to courteous, but stern, custom officials the last remnants of this fruit in their possession, though a case of oranges or a month's supply of raisins pass dutyfree. It was these same American experts who laid out the capital, Sapporo, thereby wholly depriving it of the picturesqueness of genuine Japanese towns, and giving it the spaciousness, convenience, and solidity of an American city. Its wide, squarely intersecting streets-160 feet from wall to wall, if you must have statistics -have not merely sidewalks, but rows of trees to delimit them from the roadway that is the common battle-ground of pedestrians and vehicles in the rest of Japan. Lawns and lawn-mowers, men shingling the roofs of clapboard houses, even government barracks built in similar fashion, elms and maples in lieu of the rugged and distinctive Japanese pine-tree, the big campus of an agricultural college copied after that of Massachusetts, with a snow-capped mountain background to its broad base-ball, track, and tennis field, are but a few of the constant reminders of Sapporo's origin. Even the women have almost abandoned the elaborate and costly coiffure of their Southern sisters, and dress their hair in American fashion. Paper

walls are all but unknown; baby-carriages-but what gain are perambulators in a land where children come so thick and fast that every one of them seems to hold, and is designed for, twins, while a still later arrival dozes on the propeller's back? With its big fruit-stores, its self-sufficient, well supplied people, an extent seeming to belie its mere half century of age, Sapporo looks almost a transplanted bit of our own land, for all the rickshaws racing noiselessly through its streets, and despite some of the unfortunately still Japanese personal habits of many of its inhabitants. And by the same token, it does not, of course, offer the mere traveler a tithe the interest of almost any village of Japan proper.

Beyond Sapporo lies nearly the whole island, wonderful plains of black-loam soil almost as flat as our prairies, now stretching from the distant sea on one hand to faintly delimned ranges of mountains on the other, and filling some vast basin between whitened rival ramparts, which merge in each direction into the horizon. It is a land like the richest of Illinois or Kansas, yet gangs of women are piling up great logs, or a score of them supply the motive power of a primitive, singsong pile-driver, and half-starved fisherfolks still battle for existence along the coasts. Evidently they do not know how to enjoy the prosperity of ample elbowroom and opportunity, or they are incapable of casting out the centuries-old sense of inequality which still reigns in their hearts. There are signs that the Government is doing its best to turn Hokkaido into a cleared and settled land. A hundred telegraph or telephone wires, on half a dozen rows of posts,

parallel the track, not to mention an elaborate power-line; pine, or at least evergreen, nurseries cover a sloping hillside here and there; much forest has recently been denuded and burned, though with somewhat less wasteful methods than those to be seen before the spreading sugar-fields of Cuba. But second-growth saplings rising above the stumps suggest that it is a losing battle.

The great valleys now and again are pinched out between brown hills littered with charred stumps, growing gradually into heavily wooded mountains, with many a snow-clad peak more massive and well nigh as symmetrical as Fujiyama, yet still doomed to fameless isolation. Big rivers brought down thousands of fresh-cut logs, whole acres of which were gathered in placid back-waters. But fertile plains always came again soon, now with wigwam-like stacks of hop-poles, recalling Bavaria in spring,-Sapporo beer is famous throughout Japan,— now mile after mile of fields completely flooded, though plainly not destined for rice, with plowing horses and their drivers, and scattered hand-workers wading thigh-deep in the cold mud and water. Perhaps of all the obstacles its people set against the laborious efforts of the Japanese Government to equalize more nearly the density of population of this north island with the rest of the empire, their dread of battling with the rigorous climate stands first. The man of Japan is not on the whole adaptable. He hesitates at the limits of heat or cold which are unfitted to his age-long frail type of architecture and his thin, flowing garb; he is, above all, no pioneer, but resembles those militant birds that prefer to settle down in the warm, well feathered nests

built by another species. If he goes to If he goes to a new and undeveloped land, it is by choice as a hanger-on, as shopkeeper or official, rather than to do his share in the rude labor of reducing the primitive to the cultivated. No one, I believe, has ever accused the Japanese of laziness; it seems to be rather his inherent dread of the primeval, of great unpeopled spaces, that leaves Hokkaido, large and fertile enough to support in unaccustomed style a third of the people of all Japan, with a scattered population barely a fifth of that of the city of Tokio.

§ 3

But things are progressing, if slowly, in the direction of official desires. Asahigawa, for example, north of the geographic center of the island, in what was an unpeopled wilderness at the beginning of the present century, is "a whale of a town," spreading out for miles on the floor of a magnificent valley, with a great row of snow-clads all along its far eastern horizon. There is scarcely a typically Japanese building in it except two or three Shinto shrines; hardly a shoji or a tiled roof. Yet the spirit of Japan has in no way been lost in the transplanting. That courteous, yet subtle, something which tells the foreigner that he is welcome as a visitor, but as nothing more, that unspoken, yet ever-sensed, insistence on "Japan for the Japanese," is as evident here as in the most crowded portions of the main island.

Surely, too, the public ceremonies I chanced to witness were strictly national. It seemed to be dedication day for new buildings, and at least half a dozen scattered about the town, still in their two-by-four skeleton form, were preparing to receive the blessings

of the gods. The gangs of carpenters simultaneously left off toward five in the afternoon the work of erecting, and took to raising instead, with a plethora of amateur assistance, various symbolic contrivances at the tops of the structures. First came five big upright banners, respectively red, saffron, white, green, and purple in color. Then arose a central support, bearing a small mirror, unfailing symbol of Shintoism, and a fantastically misshapen doll god in a red bib. A rude platform having been laid across the joists high up under this improvised chapel, and various other minor preparations being concluded, there gingerly ascended the sagging ladder a Shinto-priest, I suppose we must call him, for want of a more exact term. His shaven head, covered with a sort of mitered cap from which undulated the well known Tokugawa head-dress, the projecting tail-like after-piece, apparently made of window-screening, his brilliant green robe and purple sash, and varied minor decorative paraphernalia, gave him an appearance strikingly out of keeping with the generally matter-of-fact Asahigawa style of architecture and costume. was much as if an actor in a Shakspere rôle had suddenly appeared in costume among a Broadway crowd.

It

While the owner of the new structure and a dozen of his male assistants or relatives sat down on their heels along the platform, high above the increasing throng in the street below, the Shinto functionary set up beneath the banners several little conventionalized houses, or shrines, of baked clay. Of the host of antics in which he indulged during the succeeding half-hour the most conspicuous was the frenzied shaking of one of those bundles of

white paper strips on a handle, like a feather-duster or fly-dislodger, which abound in Shinto shrines, apparently for the purpose of driving off the host of evil spirits which might menace the new building. Finally he sprinkled everything and every one within reach with a sprig of pine-branch dipped in a bowl of what may have been mere water, but which more probably was sake, the rice wine of Japan. With that his fee seemed to be earned, though he remained long enough to grace the beginning of the last act of the ceremony before speeding away in a rickshaw to the next skeleton structure in need of his ministrations.

The now large and jostling multitude in the street below was plainly, and quite properly, most interested in this final formality. From his point of vantage high above it, the now broadly smiling proprietor held up a wooden ticket, made a speech which the throng applauded with increasing evidence of pleasure and approval, then flung the token to the multitude. My subsequent discovery that it was exchange able for a rather costly kimono accounted for the applause and the wild scramble for its possession that took place in the dust-deep street. Various less valuable and perishable gifts followed, after which came a deluge of presents for every one. All the men on the platform took to tearing open veritable bales of bonbons, those heavy, white dough-balls inclosing a sort of jam, which take the place of candy in Japan, and to flinging them in great handfuls in all directions. Fully a quarter of an hour the frenzied bombardment lasted, the several hundred townsmen of both sexes and every age and social standing engaging in a good-natured, but riotous, battle for

possession of the tidbits. The purpose evidently was to make sure that every person within sight received a present, that he might vouchsafe the new building his blessing or good-will; for when I showed no eagerness to engage in the scramble, one of the flingers made it his special task to throw bonbons at me until I had accepted one. The "housing crisis" is as acute in Japan as in the rest of the civilized world. If the country has no grafting contractors and labor leaders, and rumor says it has,-there seems to be at least the appreciable obstacle of dispensing in religious fees and community gifts a sum about equal to the cost of the unboarded building.

84

The chief interest of the average casual visitor to Japan's north island is, no doubt, in the remnants of its primitive people, the "hairy Ainu." A cluster of them dwell in the outskirts of Asahigawa, there are scattered Ainu villages along the farther reaches of the Hokkaido coast, and here and there in the forested mountains. As subservient now to their conquerors as our own Indians, their customs and even their language have taken on many imitations of the Japanese. In theory the mikado's government acts the rôle of altruistic guardian over the scanty twenty thousand of these aborigines which its records claim still survive in Yezo and the once Russian island of Karafuto, or Saghalien, farther north. There are no cases listed, however, of its helpless wards amassing pianos and automobiles from natural resources discovered on their reservations. Driven, if admittedly faulty historical records. be accepted as veracious evidence, from their once solid foothold on the