Chapter 3

THE EDGE OF THE EAST

The mist was clearing off Yokohama harbour and a hundred junks had their
sails hoisted for the morning breeze, and the veiled horizon was
stippled with square blurs of silver. An English man-of-war showed
blue-white on then haze, so new was the daylight, and all the water lay
out as smooth as the inside of an oyster shell. Two children in blue and
white, their tanned limbs pink in the fresh air, sculled a marvellous
boat of lemon-hued wood, and that was our fairy craft to the shore
across the stillness and the mother o' pearl levels.

There are ways and ways of entering Japan. The best is to descend upon
it from America and the Pacific--from the barbarians and the deep sea.
Coming from the East, the blaze of India and the insolent tropical
vegetation of Singapore dull the eye to half-colours and little tones.
It is at Bombay that the smell of All Asia boards the ship miles off
shore, and holds the passenger's nose till he is clear of Asia again.
That is a violent, and aggressive smell, apt to prejudice the stranger,
but kin none the less to the gentle and insinuating flavour that stole
across the light airs of the daybreak when the fairy boat went to
shore--a smell of very clean new wood; split bamboo, wood-smoke, damp
earth, and the things that people who are not white people eat--a
homelike and comforting smell. Then followed on shore the sound of an
Eastern tongue, that is beautiful or not as you happen to know it. The
Western races have many languages, but a crowd of Europeans heard
through closed doors talk with the Western pitch and cadence. So it is
with the East. A line of jinrickshaw coolies sat in the sun discoursing
to each other, and it was as though they were welcoming a return in
speech that the listener must know as well as English. They talked and
they talked, but the ghosts of familiar words would not grow any clearer
till presently the Smell came down the open streets again, saying that
this was the East where nothing matters, and trifles old as the Tower of
Babel mattered less than nothing, and that there were old acquaintances
waiting at every corner beyond the township. Great is the Smell of the
East! Railways, telegraphs, docks, and gunboats cannot banish it, and it
will endure till the railways are dead. He who has not smelt that smell
has never lived.

Three years ago Yokohama was sufficiently Europeanised in its shops to
suit the worst and wickedest taste. To-day it is still worse if you keep
to the town limits. Ten steps beyond into the fields all the
civilisation stops exactly as it does in another land a few thousand
miles further West. The globe-trotting, millionaires anxious to spend
money, with a hose on whatever caught their libertine fancies,