24

Here’s a shock: it has started raining again.

So, while we wait, some of Isabella’s observations about the people around here. Warning: her language is very much a reflection of the time.

“This evening, here, as in thousands of other villages, the men came home from their work, ate their food, took their smoke, enjoyed their children, carried them about, watched their games, twisted straw ropes, made straw sandals, split bamboo, wove straw raincoats, and spent time universally in those little economical ingenuities and skillful adaptations which out people (the worse for them) practice perhaps less than any other. Poor though the homes are, the men enjoy them; the children are an attraction at any rate, and the brawling disobedience which often turn our working-class homes into bear-gardens are unknown here, where docility and obedience are inculcated from the cradle as a matter of course.”

Part of this, Isabella observes, is because the men don’t congregate at the sake shop every night like British men do.

“Japanese women have their own gatherings, where gossip and chit-chat, marked by truly Oriental indecorum of speech,* are the staple of talk. I think that in many things, specially in some which lie on the surface, the Japanese are greatly our superiors, but that in many others they are immeasurably behind us. In living together among this courteous, industrious, and civilized people, one comes to forget that one is doing them a gross injustice in comparing their manners and ways with those of a people moulded by many centuries of Christianity. Would to God that we were so Christianized that the comparison might always be favorable to us, which it is not!”

Which is a very interesting thing to unpack from a 2020 perspective. The image I carry around in my head of an Englishwoman of the 1870s is of a woman who sees her way of living as THE way of living. And maybe it was for those who stayed home.

The next few days of the trip are the sort that would lead any traveler to wish she’d stayed home. Reports from the road ahead are grim and she hears without “equanimity that there are great difficulties ahead.”

Shit’s about to get real, y’all.

* Is the “indecorum” the subject matter? The volume? Both?