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"Grandmother wept, and stroked us, and sang a little song that she made herself. I can remember it still:—
Oy a no nai ko to
Hamab no chidori:
Higur-higur ni
Sod shiboru.[2]
"So the third grave was made,—but it was not a ningy-no-haka;—and that was the end of our house. We lived with kindred until winter, when grandmother died. She died in the night,—when, nobody knew: in the morning she seemed to be sleeping, but she was dead. Then I and my little sister were separated. My sister was adopted by a tatamiya, a mat-maker,—one of father's friends. She is kindly treated: she even goes to school!"
"Aa fushigi na koto da!—aa komatta ne?" murmured Manyemon. Then there was a moment or two of sympathetic silence. In prostrated herself in thanks, and rose to depart. As she slipped her feet under the thongs of her sandals, I moved toward the spot where she had been sitting, to ask the old man a question. She perceived my intention, and immediately made an indescribable sign to Manyemon, who responded by checking me just as I was going to sit down beside him.
"She wishes," he said, "that the master will honorably strike the matting first."
"But why?" I asked in surprise,—-noticing only that under my unshod feet, the spot where the child had been kneeling felt comfortably warm.
Manyemon answered:—
"She believes that to sit down upon the place made warm by the body of another is to take into one's own life all the sorrow of that other person,—unless the place be stricken first."
Whereat I sat down without performing the rite; and we both laughed.
"In," said Manyemon, "the master takes your sorrows upon him. He wants "—(I cannot venture to render Manyemon's honorifics)—"to understand the pain of other people. You need not tear for him, In."
[1] The posthumous Buddhist name of the person buried is chiseled upon the tomb or haka.
[2] "Children without parents, like the seagulls of the coast. Evening after evening the sleeves are wrung." The word chidori—indiscriminately applied to many kinds of birds,—is here used for seagull. The cries of the seagull are thought to express melancholy and desolation: hence the comparison. The long sleeve of the Japanese robe is used to wipe the eyes as well as to hide the face in moments of grief. To "wring the sleeve"—that is, to wring the moisture from a tear-drenched sleeve—is a frequent expression in Japanese poetry.
Takaki ya ni
Noborit mirba
Kemuri tat su;—
Tami no kamado wa
Nigiwai ni kri.
(When I ascend a high place and look about me, lo! the smoke is rising: the cooking ranges of the people are busy.)
Song of the Emperor NINTOKU.
Nearly three hundred years ago, Captain John Saris, visiting Japan in the service of the "Eight Honourable Companye, ye. marchants of London trading into ye. East Indyes," wrote concerning the great city of saka (as the name is now transliterated): "We found Osaca to be a very great towne, as great as London within the walls, with many faire timber bridges of a great height, seruing to passe over a riuer there as wide as the Thames at London. Some faire houses we found there, but not many. It is one of the chiefe sea-ports of all Iapan; hauing a castle in it, maruellous large and strong" ... What Captain Saris said of the Osaka of the seventeenth century is almost equally true of the saka of to-day. It is still a very great city and one of the chief seaports of all Japan; it contains, according to the Occidental idea, "some faire houses;" it has many "faire timber bridges" (as well as bridges of steel and stone)—"seruing to passe ouer a river as wide as the Thames at London,"—the Yodogawa; and the castle "marvellous large and strong," built by Hideyoshi after the plan of a Chinese fortress of the Han dynasty, still remains something for military engineers to wonder at, in spite of the disappearance of the many-storied towers, and the destruction (in 1868) of the magnificent palace.
saka is more than two thousand five hundred years old, and therefore one of the most ancient cities of Japan,—though its present name, a contraction of Oye no Saka, meaning the High Land of the Great River, is believed to date back only to the fifteenth century, before which time it was called Naniwa. Centuries before Europe knew of the existence of Japan, Osaka was the great financial and commercial centre of the empire; and it is that still. Through all the feudal era, the merchants of Osaka were the bankers and creditors of the Japanese princes: they exchanged the revenues of rice for silver and gold;—they kept in their miles of fireproof warehouses the national stores of cereals, of cotton, and of silk;—and they furnished to great captains the sinews of war. Hideyoshi made Osaka his military capital;—Iyeyasu, jealous and keen, feared the great city, and deemed it necessary to impoverish its capitalists because of their financial power.
The saka of 1896, covering a vast area has a population of about 670,000. As to extent and population, it is now only the second city of the empire; but it remains, as Count Okuma remarked in a recent speech, financially, industrially, and commercially superior to Tky. Sakai, and Hygo, and Kob are really but its outer ports; and the last-named is visibly outgrowing Yokohama. It is confidently predicted, both by foreigners and by Japanese, that Kob will become the chief port of foreign trade, because Osaka is able to attract to herself the best business talent of the country. At present the foreign import and export trade of saka represents about $120,000,000 a year; and its inland and coasting trade are immense. Almost everything which everybody wants is made in saka; and there are few comfortable Japanese homes in any part of the empire to the furnishing of which saka industry has not contributed something. This was probably the case long before Tokyo existed. There survives an ancient song of which the burden runs,—"Every day to saka come a thousand ships." Junks only, in the time when the song was written; steamers also to-day, and deep-sea travelers of all rigs. Along the wharves you can ride for miles by a seemingly endless array of masts and funnels,—though the great Trans-Pacific liners and European mail-steamers draw too much water to enter the harbor, and receive their saka freight at Kob. But the energetic city, which has its own steamship companies, now proposes to improve its port, at a cost of 116,000,000. An saka with a population of two millions, and a foreign trade of at least $300,000,000 a year, is not a dream impossible to realize in the next half century. I need scarcely say that saka is the centre of the great trade-guilds,[1] and the headquarters of those cotton-spinning companies whose mills, kept running with a single shift twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four, turn out double the quantity of yarn per spindle that English mills turn out, and from thirty to forty per cent, more than the mills of Bombay.
