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THE DECLINE OF THE JAPANESE TASTE OF TONGUE
MY mind which, as she felt more natural even sublime in the
greyness of silence and general passivity of Winter,
experienced a sudden disturbance in the tempest-like falling
of the cherry-blossoms of April, and wondered like Ki no
Tomonori in his famous uta poem:
"'Tis the Spring day
With lovely far-away light!—
Why must the flowers fall
With heart unquiet?
now seems to be returning most gladly to her original state
of serenity, to resume the world-old dream at the place she
left off some little while ago, now in this month of May, my
best-beloved season as some old hokku
poet well-said
"What to see? Why, green leaves,
There's mountain cuckoos,—
And then—new bonitos."
I thank God (whoever he be), as thanked I him in many
previous Mays, for the fact that, [<58] without being
troubled with any restlessness of mind, but with all
Browning's content in his little song, I can face, as a man
should, Nature who has changed her red dress of Spring for
this greenness of early Summer, and do thrice exclaim, " Oh,
green life," as Fiona McLeod exclaimed, although I may mean
that quite differently ; if I thank God for the trees as I
do, it is not for their flowers or fruits but for their
green leaves under whose magical spell I revive my own
youthfulness and am glad again to start life anew making, so
to say, an eighth rise after seven falls. I confess I had
not heard before our mountain cuckoos; my imagination would
be glad to think of them, like Wordsworth, as an invisible
thing, a voice, a mystery, never seen but eternally longed
for ; are they not like the English cuckoos, a winged ghost
of the hope or love of the golden time we wish to command ?
Although the bonitos have lost their dignity lately, I dare
say, among modern Japanese,' the above 'seventeen
syllables,' a voice of not only the poet but the populace,
must have been written at the time of the height of the old
Japanese civilization that is [<59] during the Tokugawa
feudalism, when the people's taste of tongue grew most
delicate and specialized, and their heart at once responded
to the call of the first bonitos which, as Basho wrote,
would have been left living at Kamakura ; I am told a story
perhaps true that the Yedo people (present Tokyoans) were
pleased to buy them even when they had to raise the price by
pawning. Oh, dear, rotten, foolish, romantic old Tokugawa
civilization! It may not have been their taste itself ; what
they craved was, doubtless, just the feeling that they had
eaten the first bonitos of the year ; indeed, for that
feeling, not only in food but in any other thing, they lived
and died. Oh, most unpractical old Tokyoans, what
slavishness to the senses!
The other day I opened the books written by Shamba, and came across a
little thing called "The Face and the Back of a Man Proud in
Cooking," somewhere, with the following lines
"I presume that your cook has been changed. No, he has not been changed
? Oh, yes, he must have been changed. This honourable [<60]
tongue of mine is a cloudless looking-glass you cannot
deceive."
Although such words as the above were written, of course, by the author
to laugh over a hankatsu or a fellow half-learned,
they cast a light on the time when cooking was studied,
like- flower-arrangement or tea-drinking, even by the
populace; it was the civilization of the Tokugawa feudalism
that found first the development of house-building as it was
natural for the samurais, those uncultured builders
of the city, to think of the house to satisfy their wild
vanity; and when the time was on the speedy way to
advancement, we -saw, as a natural development, the sudden
demonstration of dresses with new designs and coloux
schemes. It was at the Bunkwa and Bunsei (1804-1830) that
the art or, let me say, poetry of cooking had been creating
its own cult, and as a matter natural, the establishment of
the famous restaurants or, so-called tea-houses, for
instance, Hirasei, Kasai Taro, Momokawa, the most of all,
Yaozen under the patronage of Hoitsu and other known artists
and poets, originated in those days ; it is not too much to
[<61] say that those periods, I mean the time of Bunkwa and
Bunsei, are the zenith of our feudal civilization in which
we heard already the voice of the approaching fall.
I have been interested lately in the life of Hoitsu Sakai, one of the
most distinguished decedents of the early nineteenth
century, who, being born the second son of the fifteenth
Lord Sakai, escaped from the formality or pretence attached
to his birth into art and poetry by whose kind restraint his
soul freedom-loving and even dissipated (it was the good old
time when dissipation was thought quite natural) was
distilled and ennobled; we always attribute it to the times
that the high-minded exultation and decorative composure of
Korin of the former age became a delicacy and refinement in
Hoitsu's art, and the care-unknown masculinity of Kikaku's
poetry turned to more frivolity and witticism at the best in
his hokkus ; but there is no denying the fact that
his senses poetical or otherwise had become most sensitive.
And it was indeed wonderful to know what delicacy (that
artistic delicacy might be compared with that of Utamaro's
women who would appear [<62] disturbed, even by one touch of
your fingertip) not only Hoitsu but nearly all the artists
and poets of that age had in all life's questions, from the
dress to the food. Now to return to their, delicate taste of
tongue. It was those people who could distinguish the place
of origin of water from its taste, could tell where the tea
was produced, by what sunlight it was fed, from the drinking
of it ; I was told that once Hoitsu ate a sashimi (slices of
raw fish) of bonito at Yaozen and called the cook and asked
him if he had not used a knife freshly whetted. The cook
surprised by his words begged him to tell him how he knew
it. Hoitsu said that he smelled a faint odour of whetstone
on the fish, and then told him that he should dip the knife,
when newly whetted, into-a well for-several hours before
using.
T'he Tokugawa feudalism fell after long three hundred years of power,
and the new regime has not arisen yet; the people were
suddenly thrown into tumult and suspicion fifty or sixty
years ago; how could they admire the green leaves of early
summer, as I do to-day, in peace and content, and wish to
hear mountain cuckoos [<63] and taste the first bonitos ? It
was a pity that their taste of tongue which, as the last
development of civilization, had highly advanced, now lost
its own place; and when the time began to return to
prosperity quite altered from the former age, after
finishing the so-called civil war of the tenth year, the
cult or art of old Japanese cooking found the situation
unfavourable under the invasion of Western food; it was
since 1880 that the restaurants of Western way of cooking,
here with the name of Western Sea house, like the American
Hall or London Restaurant, began to flock into the city.
Here they met an immediate reception, because the food was
served quickly, unlike the regular old Japanese tea-house,
and above all the charge was small. There is no better
supporter for a restaurant than economy ; with that backing
the foreign restaurants became successful. I myself always
drop in one of those, whether it be London Restaurant (Oh,
what does that mean anyhow ?) or American Hall (again what
does that mean ?) to take a little lunch when I am in town,
because, as I said before, the charge is small (in fact it
is extraordinarily high for what [<64] I shall get) and the
service quick. Pray, gentleman at the other side of the
table, eat your soup without making such a noise. Oh, again,
do not use toothpicks so often while eating; pray, do not
open your mouth so wide, at least to yawn. Who dropped a
knife ? Whose napkin is that I see here? Oh, what
mannerlessness! Is that all the table manners for a people
who claim to, have learned etiquette and rites in the olden
days? And on the other hand, what cooking! How tasteless,
how watery! It always sets my mind to thinking what use to
introduce the superficial Western civilization here; what do
you say, one hundred years we must have before we can digest
it completely. What concerns me here chiefly is how the
people's taste in cooking has declined; is it unrecoverable
? Yes, it is unrecoverable indeed. "We are returning to the
barbarous states of the Middle Age; oh, how meaningless,
when facing the Western dishes; and the cook is no better
than the eater himself," I exclaimed. [<65]
Next: The Fourteenth of December
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