Chapter 14
Section 14 of Captain Billy's Whizbang, Volume 2, Number 24, September 1921. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Read by E. Paul. Captain Billy's Whizbang, Volume 2, No. 24, September 1921, by W. H. Fawcett, Japanese Bathing Beauties, by Reverend Golightly Morrill, Pastor, People's Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
To the religious rambler, Japan is divided into two parts, that which is inhabited by the geisha girls, and that cohabited by the Yoshiwara. I thought more of the geisha dancers than the dance, and that wasn't much. The word geisha means accomplished one, and there are schools for their education in music and the arts. People visit the girls more for pleasure than for profit, and since they are one of the institutions of Japan, I went one night to a tea house to see
them, making myself as comfortable as possible on the floor. A screen door was slipped aside, and in came a pretty geisha girl who touched her head to the floor three times, sat down, and looked at each one of our party. Immediately there fluttered in three more, and they made the room look like an oriental birdcage. They sang for us in a tone that suggested an ungreased axle
or a nail drawn across a piece of glass, played on the Samison and Koto, which nothing but the genius of a Wagner could appreciate, went through a fancy fan drill and proved themselves good entertainers, but felt embarrassed because we were not familiar and indecent.
They acted serious and spoke to one another, and I asked what was the trouble. It seems they didn't know what to make of us, as the average tourist was usually boisterous, drunk, and rough. The Yoshiwara is the Red Lantern District of Japan.
One night, we formed a stag party to visit the Tokyo Yoshiwara, but we couldn't shake the deers who were as anxious to go as we were and insisted on accompanying us. Our rickshaws rolled through the squares and the streets and miles of mud and misery
until we came to what was in itself a city of dreadful night, but all ablaze with electric lights. Here were squares of theater-looking buildings in which women, dressed in bright and fancy garb, sat by little stoves and sullen, smiling or smoking pipes,
looked out at the spectators. The government regulates this social as a necessary evil and houses, supervises, and guards the girls. In Japan, it is regarded as noble and filial for a daughter to sell herself to support the father and family who may have failed financially.
The same thing is done in Europe and America for wealth and social position, but differently estimated and under another name. Here they squatted in butterfly regalia with silk kimona, obi, glossy black hair stuck full of combs and gold pins, eyes painted and faces powdered,
thrumming a little guitar, squeaking out a love song, and making goo-goo eyes in a way that would make one smile if he could forget the hell horror of the place. Some of the inmates do not leave until death.
Others return to society, which welcomes and does not disown. One may return to her home, loved and respected, but with none of the fine clothes and jewels given by her admirers during her absence. However, the place often becomes a matrimonial bureau, and the girl is met,
courted, and selected by some Jap as his wife. In addition to segregation, there is such a supervision that the inmates can't leave for even an hour without the consent of the police. Hotel life is interesting. If you are curious, you have only to wet your thumb and thrust it through the wallpaper of your bedchamber to get as many views as Peeping Tom had of Lady Godiva. This whole privilege is, however, only claimed by the traveler who has no respect for the Holy of Holies at inn or temple.
Japan is the land of the rising sun and daughter, who with the whole family will take their bath and leave the same water for you to swim in, unless you set your alarm clock for a very early hour or sit up all night to get there first. Imagine a public bath, if you can, for many homes have no bathroom, where the water by 10 a.m. is like a roily creek after a rain,
by 3 o'clock p.m., yellow as the Missouri, and by bedtime, like the mud geysers of the Yellowstone. The public bath was the one thing we wanted to see and kept asking about. Cleanliness is next to godliness, and after visiting 2,738 of the 3,000 temples in Kobe,
I wanted to get next to a public bath. At last I discovered one and sent the guide ahead to Rackenoitre. He said, come. I passed the word along and the ladies came, but wished they hadn't. We entered and I became a looker-on at Venus in the bath, and not one but many who made the painted females in the effusi look like Chromos or Mrs. Jarley's waxworks.
They eyed us with an indifference that made us blush and look through our fingers for shame. With the ease that only a model for the altogether possesses, they posed before the mirrors, arranging their black hair, or posed like maids of the mist by the steam tank. Their type of beauty is different.
Jap beauty is in angles. the American in curves. Nature made one with a ruler, the other with a compass. As a rule, the baths for men and women are divided by a wooden partition, at the end of which sits the proprietor or his wife on the lookout. Formerly, there was no privacy, and the fastidious foreigners insisted that the sexes should be separated. This was accomplished by placing a bamboo rod
between them, but even that is discarded now in some sections. Everybody gets into the swim, thus beautifully illustrating the proverb, evil to him that evil thinks. Oh tempura, oh mores. One of the strongest impressions made upon me in my journey through Japan was at Mogi, a malodorous little fishing village out from Nagasaki with so large a smell that a blind man could easily find it by following his nose.
Coleridge, the poet, whose business it was to rely on imagination rather than on fact, counted sixty well-defined and several stinks at Cologne. He would have been overpowered here, and called for the help of a professor of higher mathematics to enumerate the volume and variety of odors we encountered from Nagasaki to this town. A well-made road lassos the intervening foothills, which are covered with cultivated fields.
The peasants were all busy, the children were happy, and more so when we threw them peanuts instead of pansies for thoughts. Men, women, and oxen were carrying various loads, but the common one was a bamboo bucket affair balanced on both ends of a bamboo pole. These buckets were not filled with milk or cheese or vegetables,
but with a substance which they had assiduously collected, in accordance with the scripture, gather up the fragments that nothing be lost. I can never forget the ascent or the descent to Mogey. From Rocky Road through Pretty Forest by Picturesque Ravine,
we reach the fishermen's huts with their nets by the shore and beach where bathing mermaids can only be caught and carried home in a camera. End of section 14
