Thoughts on Leaving the Orient

I

FOR ten days on their return from a year’s service with the United States Asiatic Fleet, the light cruisers lay at Yokohama. Those ten short days gave me a glimpse of Japan I shall not soon forget — the old Japan of our childhood fancies, the country of toy houses and fairy gardens, of flowers and flower-like children, of black-eyed women as bright and dainty as nodding nasturtiums. Japan, the land where grave and courteous scholars go hand in hand with little girls among the cherry blossoms, where at dusk the lanterns shine like stars on the steep hillsides, and one seems to hear the violins crying out above the hushed harbors of Japan the longing of Madame Butterfly, who forever waits a foreign ship and a foreign lover. Japan at evening — it is a land of dreams.

And side by side with all this quiet beauty of the past rises the new Japan of crowded cities and smoking factories, built by the pitiless god of modern progress. To defend it his brother, the god of war, is training an army of booted soldiers and building a great gray battle fleet.

We were most graciously received by the Japanese Navy. To them it is an honored duty to welcome with hospitality the stranger at their gates. They try to make friends of us, to show us their way of thinking, to mix just a little high policy with the champagne, hoping that we may return home a bit less prejudiced than before.

And it works. After ail, men rule, or think they rule, the destiny of nations; and men, with their likes and dislikes, are essentially human.

When His Excellency the Admiral entertains foreign officers, he leaves Mrs. Admiral and the ladies at home, He arranges a geisha party at the Maple Leaf Club in Tokyo.

And here let me explain the geisha girl. She is an artist, a kind of professional entertainer of homeless men. As a child she learns to sing and dance, and to make polite and amusing conversation. She appears in her own artistic native costume, as picturesque as if she had just stepped out of some delicate Japanese print. She is taught to kneel beside the great gentlemen, to serve their food and to keep full the cup that cheers. At the end of it all she bows almost to the floor, as if to say, ‘You have indeed honored your little servant,’ and goes home — alone. And if she has brought a moment of color into drab lives, need we be too censorious? There’s many a dull dinner in pious upcountry villages at home, many an evening heavy with cigar smoke and gentlemen’s jokes, that would have been better could she have graced it with her hired charms.

‘And when in Rome,’ said the commander, handing out invitations finely engraved in vertical lines of Oriental characters, ‘see how the Romans do it. Different ships, different long splices — different men, different manners. Inspect for holes in your stockings. They take away your shoes at the door.'

At the appointed hour we arrive at the Maple Leaf Club and check our hats and shoes. We enter a bare room. There are neither tables nor chairs. Clean straw matting covers the deck. We are presented to the Japanese admiral and his staff. They bow stiffly. There follows a halting conversation in English on that internationally dull topic, the weather.

Soon geisha girls enter, carrying low carved benches. They set out wine and food. We scat ourselves on the floor and wonder what to do with our legs and stocking feet.

A geisha kneels beside each guest and fills his glass. The evening proceeds with feasting and drinking. Our hosts do most of the feasting. Balancing oysters between two little chopsticks is not an art to be acquired without practice. Nor is the fare less foreign to us than the etiquette of the table. Pressed shellfish served on seaweed proves strangely reminiscent of New England wharves on a hot day in the herring season. But the champagne is excellent, for which may the Japanese taxpayer be duly thanked. A toast is called to the gallant American cruisers. We reply with an equally eloquent toast to the heroic Japanese Navy. A bespectacled Japanese — M.A., Harvard University — acts as interpreter. We all drink to the mutual understanding between the nations. We wonder how well they understand us and our country. What foreigner can ever unravel those tangled threads that weave themselves into the fabric of our foreign policy, our skeptical self-sufficiency forever at variance with our all-inclusive international idealism? And perhaps they too are wondering how much we as casual visitors to their shores can know of Japan and her aspirations that spring from a past hidden so far down the dim, foreshortened perspective of history.

Native rice wine is brought. It is lukewarm, and, to the Western palate, has a vaguely medicinal taste, like paregoric. The rest of the evening leaves a somewhat confused impression of bright kimonos, little men with big glasses, stocking feet that will not be stowed away, and music whose weird minor strains recall the elusive motifs of an ultra-modern symphony.

II

Our ten-day visit drew quickly to its close. The little group of navy wives took passage for San Francisco, to meet their husbands again in Norfolk, unless another sudden change of schedule should come to send these wandering ships hurrying off to some foreign port. Brave women, these navy wives who follow their men up and down the world, young mothers whose children are born in loneliness in strange hospitals, women whose sudden sorrows and scattered weeks of rapturous happiness have no counterpart in the settled lives of their sisters at home.

With the first flush of dawn, the snow-capped peak of Fuji rose pink above its mantle of fleecy clouds. The boats were hoisted aboard and stowed for sea. In that most lovely hour the cruisers formed column and steamed out.

All morning sacred Fujiyama stood up dazzling white above the horizon astern, as if to beckon us back to the ancient lands of the East. Slowly the mountain dwindled and dropped from sight. The light cruisers had left the Orient.

What is the truth, I asked myself as I paced the deck that first morning at sea, the truth behind all the ready phrases that fill the ponderous volumes of international policies — ‘economic penetration,’‘special interests,’ ‘manifest destiny’? These are but words. Do words, not men, govern the fate of nations?

So perhaps it would seem when one seeks the truth, not from the teeming lands and peoples of the East, but from silent and lifeless library stacks. For, if the economic school of historians see aright, the nations are but rudderless ships swept on by a current whose course the economist alone can predict and no man can control. In their philosophy human figures become dwarfed and insignificant. Our genial hosts of yesterday are to them an inanimate entity, ‘ the Japanese Navy’; English statesmen are known as‘Downing Street’; and those whose slightest whim rules Russia’s enslaved millions become ‘the Soviets.’ To them the nations are not masters of their fate, but mere puppets in a show whose strings are pulled by an invisible and all-powerful hand.

The immutable laws of trade, so they tell us, drew the first Portuguese galleons here to the East centuries ago. Have they looked well upon the portraits of those intrepid navigators and noted their sea-gazing eyes? Surely not for trafficking alone they sailed the uncharted seas of the Orient. What would they think, these old explorers, could they return to see the proud banner of Portugal flying over the tiny settlement at Macao, ex-opium port of evil memory? And now the ramparts of Hongkong overshadow the last vestige of Portuguese empire, and great steamers with other and newer flags come threading their way among the changeless harbor junks.

It was destiny, these modern scholars tell us, that broke the power of those first boastful claimants to the lands and oceans of the fabled East and brought in their place the British garrison and the merchants of the Treaty Ports. Destiny again that sent Perry’s squadron to burst open the harbors of Japan, leaving her no other choice but to champion the Orient against the greedy exploitation of traders from overseas. And, farther to the west, these writers see another and perhaps final evidence of economic preordination, the Red Revolution according to the prophecy of Karl Marx, spread eastward by the fanatical priests of Communism, who, from dingy offices under the Kremlin walls, plot the dread harvest of another war, a last great battle in the East, in whose bloody wake each man’s hand shall be against his neighbor.

Are we but helpless pieces on the checkerboard of economic rivalry, I wondered, as I watched the shores of the Orient fading into the distance astern. Were these our ships built but to shatter and be shattered by the ships that carry another flag, that the Devil and the schemers of Moscow may laugh at human folly?

Is not the world weary of the doctrine that a changeless Fate, fixed and inexorable, has drawn and must always draw all peoples into the maelstrom of ' inevitable war ’ ? Can the comradeship of last night mean nothing more than the memory of bright-colored kimonos and little geishas solemnly kneeling to serve the honored guests from distant lands? Is the friendship of nations as light and transitory as those ten short days in Japan, days that saw the cherry flowers blossom and fall?

The shrill whistle of the boatswain’s pipe recalled me from my reverie.

‘Relieve the wheel and lookout!’

I went below with the words of a Japanese verse running through my mind:

When I next came on deck, the Orient had dropped under the horizon astern.