II
Manyemon said there was a soldier at the entrance who wanted to see me.
"Oh, Manyemon, I hope they are not going to billet soldiers upon us!—the house is too small! Please ask him what he wishes."
"I did," answered Manyemon; "he says he knows you."
I went to the door and looked at a fine young fellow in uniform, who smiled and took off his cap as I came forward. I could not recognize him. The smile was familiar, notwithstanding. Where could I have seen it before?
"Teacher, have you really forgotten me?"
For another moment I stared at him, wondering: then he laughed gently, and uttered his name,—
"Kosuga Asakichi."
How my heart leaped to him as I held out both hands! "Come in, come in!" I cried.
"But how big and handsome you have grown! No wonder I did not know you."
He blushed like a girl, as he slipped off his shoes and unbuckled his sword. I remembered that he used to blush the same way in class, both when he made a mistake, and when he was praised. Evidently his heart was still as fresh as then, when he was a shy boy of sixteen in the school at Matsue. He had got permission to come to bid me good-by: the regiment was to leave in the morning for Korea.
We dined together, and talked of old times,—of Izumo, of Kitzuki, of many pleasant things. I tried in vain at first to make him drink a little wine; not knowing that he had promised his mother never to drink wine while he was in the army. Then I substituted coffee for the wine, and coaxed him to tell me all about himself. He had returned to his native place, after graduating, to help his people, wealthy farmers; and he had found that his agricultural studies at school were of great service to him. A year later, all the youths of the village who had reached the age of nineteen, himself among the number, were summoned to the Buddhist temple for examination as to bodily and educational fitness for military service. He had passed as ichiban (first-class) by the verdicts of the examining surgeon and of the recruiting-major (shōsa), and had been drawn at the ensuing conscription. After thirteen months' service he had been promoted to the rank of sergeant. He liked the array. At first he had been stationed at Nagoya, then at Tōkyō; but finding that his regiment was not to be sent to Korea, he had petitioned with success for transfer to the Kumamoto division. "And now I am so glad," he exclaimed, his face radiant with a soldier's joy: "we go to-morrow!" Then he blushed again, as if ashamed of having uttered his frank delight. I thought of Carlyle's deep saying, that never pleasures, but only suffering and death are the lures that draw true hearts. I thought also—what I could not say to any Japanese—that the joy in the lad's eyes was like nothing I had ever seen before, except the caress in the eyes of a lover on the morning of his bridal.
"Do you remember," I asked, "when you declared in the schoolroom that you wished to die for His Majesty the Emperor?"
"Yes," he answered, laughing. "And the chance has come,—not for me only, but for several of my class."
"Where are they?" I asked. "With you?"
"No; they were all in the Hiroshima division, and they are already in Korea. Imaoka (you remember him, teacher: he was very tall), and Nagasaki, and Ishihara,—they were all in the fight at Söng-Hwan. And our drill-master, the lieutenant,—you remember him?"
"Lieutenant Fujii, yes. He had retired from the army."
"But he belonged to the reserves. He has also gone to Korea. He has had another son born since you left Izumo."
"He had two little girls and one boy," I said, "when I was in Matsue."
"Yes: now he has two boys."
"Then his family must feel very anxious about him?"
"He is not anxious," replied the lad. "To die in battle is very honorable; and the Government will care for the families of those who are killed. So our officers have no fear. Only—it is very sad to die if one has no son."
"I cannot see why."
"Is it not so in the West?"
"On the contrary, we think it is very sad for the man to die who has children."
"But why?"
"Every good father must be anxious about the future of his children. If he be taken suddenly away from them, they may have to suffer many sorrows."
"It is not so in the families of our officers. The relations care well for the child, and the Government gives a pension. So the father need not be afraid. But to die is sorrowful for one who has no child."
"Do you mean sorrowful for the wife and the rest of the family?"
"No; I mean for the man himself, the husband."
"And how? Of what use can a son be to a dead man?"
"The son inherits. The son maintains the family name. The son makes the offerings."
"The offerings to the dead?"
"Yes. Do you now understand?"
"I understand the fact, not the feeling. Do military men still hold these beliefs?"
"Certainly. Are there no such beliefs in the West?"
"Not now. The ancient Greeks and Romans had such beliefs. They thought that the ancestral spirits dwelt in the home, received the offerings, watched over the family. Why they thought so, we partly know; but we cannot know exactly how they felt, because we cannot understand feelings which we have never experienced, or which we have not inherited. For the same reason, I cannot know the real feeling of a Japanese in relation to the dead."
"Then you think that death is the end of everything?"
"That is not the explanation of my difficulty. Some feelings are inherited,—perhaps also some ideas. Your feelings and your thoughts about the dead, and the duty of the living to the dead, are totally different from those of an Occidental. To us the idea of death is that of a total separation, not only from the living, but from the world. Does not Buddhism also tell of a long dark journey that the dead must make?"
"The journey to the Meido,—yes. All must make that journey. But we do not think of death as a total separation. We think of the dead as still with us. We speak to them each day."
"I know that. What I do not know are the ideas behind the facts. If the dead go to the Meido, why should offerings be made to ancestors in the household shrines, and prayers be said to them as if they were really present? Do not the common people thus confuse Buddhist teachings and Shintō belief?"
"Perhaps many do. But even by those who are Buddhists only, the offerings and the prayers to the dead are made in different places at the same time,—in the parish temples, and also before the family butsudan."
"But how can souls be thought of as being in the Meido, and also in various other places at the same time? Even if the people believe the soul to be multiple, that would not explain away the contradiction. For the dead, according to Buddhist teaching, are judged."
"We think of the soul both as one and as many. We think of it as of one person, but not as of a substance. We think of it as something that may be in many places at once, like a moving of air."
"Or of electricity?" I suggested.
"Yes."
Evidently, to my young friend's mind the ideas of the Meido and of the home-worship of the dead had never seemed irreconcilable; and perhaps to any student of Buddhist philosophy the two faiths would not appear to involve any serious contradictions. The Sutra of the Lotus of the Good Law teaches that the Buddha state "is endless and without limit,—immense as the element of ether." Of a Buddha who had long entered into Nirvana it declares, "Even after his complete extinction, he wanders through this whole world in all ten points of space." And the same Sutra, after recounting the simultaneous apparition of all the Buddhas who had ever been, makes the teacher proclaim, "All these you see are my proper bodies, by kotis of thousands, like the sands of the Ganges: they have appeared that the law may be fulfilled." But it seemed to me obvious that, in the artless imagination of the common people, no real accord could ever have been established between the primitive conceptions of Shintō and the much more definite Buddhist doctrine of a judgment of souls.
"Can you really think of death," I asked, "as life, as light?"
"Oh yes," was the smiling answer. "We think that after death we shall still be with our families. We shall see our parents, our friends. We shall remain in this world,—the light as now."
(There suddenly recurred to me, with new meaning, some words of a student's composition regarding the future of a just man: His soul shall hover eternally in the universe.)
"And therefore," continued Asakichi, "one who has a son can die with a cheerful mind."
"Because the son will make those offerings of food and drink without which the spirit would suffer?" I queried.
"It is not only that. There are duties much more important than the making of offerings. It is because every man needs some one to love him after he is dead. Now you will understand."
"Only your words," I replied, "only the facts of the belief. The feeling I do not understand. I cannot think that the love of the living could make me happy after death. I cannot even imagine myself conscious of any love after death. And you, you are going far away to battle,—do you think it unfortunate that you have no son?"
"I? Oh no! I myself am a son,—a younger son. My parents are still alive and strong, and my brother is caring for them. If I am killed, there will be many at home to love me,—brothers, sisters, and little ones. It is different with us soldiers: we are nearly all very young."
"For how many years," I asked, "are the offerings made to the dead?"
"For one hundred years."
"Only for a hundred years?"
"Yes. Even in the Buddhist temples the prayers and the offerings are made only for a hundred years."
"Then do the dead cease to care for remembrance in a hundred years? Or do they fade out at last? Is there a dying of souls?"
"No, but after one hundred years they are no longer with us. Some say they are born again; others say they become kami, and do reverence to them as kami, and on certain days make offerings to them in the toko."
(Such were, I knew, the commonly accepted explanations, but I had heard of beliefs strangely at variance with these. There are traditions that, in families of exceeding virtue, the souls of ancestors took material form, and remained sometimes visible through hundreds of years. A sengaji pilgrim[1] of old days has left an account of two whom he said he had seen in some remote part of the interior. They were small, dim shapes, "dark like old bronze." They could not speak, but made little moaning sounds, and they did not eat, but only inhaled the warm vapor of the food daily set before them. Every year, their descendants said, they became smaller and vaguer.)
"Do you think it is very strange that we should love the dead?" Asakichi asked.
"No," I replied, "I think it is beautiful. But to me, as a Western stranger, the custom seems not of to-day, but of a more ancient world. The thoughts of the old Greeks about the dead must have been much like those of the modern Japanese. The feelings of an Athenian soldier in the age of Pericles were perhaps the same as yours in this era of Meiji. And you have read at school how the Greeks sacrificed to the dead, and how they paid honor to the spirits of brave men and patriots?"
"Yes. Some of their customs were very like our own. Those of us who fall in battle against China will also be honored. They will be revered as kami. Even our Emperor will honor them."
"But," I said, "to die so far away from the graves of one's fathers, in a foreign land, would seem, even to Western people, a very sad thing."
"Oh no. There will be monuments set up to honor our dead in their own native villages and towns, and the bodies of our soldiers will be burned, and the ashes sent home to Japan. At least that will be done whenever possible. It might be difficult after a great battle."
(A sudden memory of Homer surged back to me, with, a vision of that antique plain where "the pyres of the dead burnt continually in multitude.")
"And the spirits of the soldiers slain in this war," I asked,—"will they not always be prayed to help the country in time of national danger?"
"Oh yes, always. We shall be loved and worshiped by all the people."
He said "we" quite naturally, like one already destined. After a little pause he resinned:—
"The last year that I was at school we had a military excursion. We marched to a shrine in the district of In, where the spirits of heroes are worshiped. It is a beautiful and lonesome place, among hills; and the temple is shadowed by very high trees. It is always dim and cool and silent there. We drew up before the shrine in military order; nobody spoke. Then the bugle sounded through the holy grove, like a call to battle; and we all presented arms; and the tears came to my eyes,—I do not know why. I looked at my comrades, and I saw they felt as I did. Perhaps, because you are a foreigner, you will not understand. But there is a little poem, that every Japanese knows, which expresses the feeling very well. It was written long ago by the great priest Saigyo Hōshi, who had been a warrior before becoming a priest, and whose real name was Sato Norikyo:—
"'Nani go to no
Owashimasu ka wa
Shirane domo
Arigata sa ni zo
Namida kobururu.'"[2]
It was not the first time that I had heard such a confession. Many of my students had not hesitated to speak of sentiments evoked by the sacred traditions and the dim solemnity of the ancient shrines. Really the experience of Asakichi was no more individual than might be a single ripple in a fathomless sea. He had only uttered the ancestral feeling of a race,—the vague but immeasurable emotion of Shintō.
We talked on till the soft summer darkness fell. Stars and the electric lights of the citadel twinkled out together; bugles sang; and from Kiyomasa's fortress rolled into the night a sound deep as a thunder-peal, the chant of ten thousand men:—
Nishi mo higashi mo
Mina teki zo,
Minami mo kita mo
Mina teki zo:
Yose-kura teki wa
Shiranuhi no
Tsukushi no hate no
Satsuma gata.[3]
"You have learned that song, have you not?" I asked.
"Oh yes," said Asakichi. "Every soldier knows it."
It was the Kumamoto Rōjō, the Song of the Siege. We listened, and could even catch some words in that mighty volume of sound:—
Tenchi mo kuzuru
Bakari nari,
Tenchi wa kuzure
Yama kawa wa
Saicuru tameshi no
Araba tote,
Ugokanu mono wa
Kimi ga mi yo.[4]
For a little while Asakichi sat listening, swaying his shoulders in time to the strong rhythm of the chant; then, as one suddenly waking, he laughed, and said:—
"Teacher, I must go! I do not know how to thank you enough, nor to tell you how happy this day has been for me. But first,"—taking from his breast a little envelope,—"please accept this. You asked me for a photograph long ago: I brought it for a souvenir."
He rose, and buckled on his sword. I pressed his hand at the entrance.
"And what may I send you from Korea, teacher?" he asked.
"Only a letter," I said,—"after the next great victory."
"Surely, if I can hold a pen," he responded.
Then straightening up till he looked like a statue of bronze, he gave me the formal military salute, and strode away in the dark.
I returned to the desolate guest-room and dreamed. I heard the thunder of the soldiers' song. I listened to the roar of the trains, bearing away so many young hearts, so much priceless loyalty, so much splendid faith and love and valor, to the fever of Chinese rice-fields, to gathering cyclones of death.
[1] A sengaji pilgrim is one who makes the pilgrimage to the thousand famous temples of the Nichiren sect; a journey requiring many years to perform.
[2] "What thing (cause) there may he, I cannot tell. But [whenever I come in presence of the shrine] grateful tears overflow."
[3] This would be a free translation in nearly the same measure:—
Oh! the land to south and north
All is full of foes!
Westward, eastward, looking forth,
All is full of foes!
None can well the number tell
Of the hosts that pour
From the strand of Satsuma,
From Tsukushi's shore.
[4] What if Earth should sundered he?
What if Heaven fall?
What if mountain mix with sea?
Brave hearts each and all,
Know one thing shall still endure,
Ruin cannot whelm,
Everlasting, holy, pure,—
This Imperial Realm.