The container is a chamber pot: Seiyo Ishokuju
The container is a chamber pot: Seiyo Ishokuju
I. Clothing. . . . Umbrellas are all made of silk. There are none made of paper in the Japanese manner. An umbrella, when folded, can also be used as a cane. . . .Western clothes have pockets in various places inside where one can keep all small belongings. A handkerchief, for example, should be kept in the pocket of the coat, money in the pocket of the trousers. A watch should be put inside the pocket of the waistcoat and its chain should be put through a buttonhole.
The following is the proper way to go to the toilet: to urinate, simply unbutton the front of your trousers. To defecate, however, you must unbutton your suspenders front and back; putting them back on again is quite clumsy and troublesome.
II. Food. Westerners do not use chopsticks for eating. Meat is cut very carefully and then transferred to each individual’s plate. Set in front of each person are a knife which is held in the right hand in order to cut a small piece of meat, and a fork which is held in the left hand in order to stick the piece of meat and bring it to the mouth. It is awfully bad manners to use a knife to carry food to your mouth.
Soup is also served in a plate, and is eaten with a spoon. It has to be remembered that slurping is bad manners, even when you drink tea. . . .
III. Homes. . . . A mirror [is] placed on top of a chest of drawers. Since Western clothes have numerous buttons, it helps to use a mirror to look at yourself while buttoning and unbuttoning. You also need a mirror for combing your hair every morning and evening. That is why you find a mirror in every room in a Western house. For the finishing touch, you sprinkle perfume over the collar for purification. The small flask in front of the mirror is a perfume bottle and beside it is a brush for dusting off clothes. . . .
There are no tatami mats in Western houses. A thick carpet is placed over wooden floors and beautiful rugs are thrown on top of the carpet. There are usually several chairs on which to sit.
Since you do not sit directly on the floor, it is perfectly all right to go inside the house with shoes on. Besides, very often you find a mat in front of the entrance of homes. You wipe your shoes on it and clean off the dirt before entering the house. A Westerner who has just arrived in Japan tends to make the mistake of entering a Japanese house without taking off his shoes, but we should overlook this ignorance of our customs. . . .
The container that you see under the bed . . . is a chamber pot. You always find this thing underneath the bed when you stay in a Westerner’s house. You should be careful not to mistake this container for something else when you visit a Western country as some Japanese actually did.
A watch is a somewhat irrelevant subject as regards Western living, but the author believes it is quite necessary to familiarize oneself with reading the time; all people carry a watch in the West to know the time without relying on temple bells as in our country.
Context.
Japan’s most famous 19th century modernizer probably was Fukuzawa Yukichi, who traveled widely with official missions in the West when he was young and captured people’s imagination with his 1866 book Seiyō jijō (Conditions in the West), which sold 150,000 copies. Two years later he wrote this short work on lifestyles in Europe and America. The popularity of his works showed how eager the highly educated, yet isolated Japanese were to learn about foreign ways after more than two centuries of being denied the right to travel abroad. Works such as these helped to stimulate a wave of modernization in Japan’s central cities in the 1870s and 1880s.
Questions.
1. Note the detail of Fukuzawa’s observations. What do they tell you about both Western and Japanese ways of living in the middle 1800s?
2. Is there any significance in the fact that Fukuzawa pays so much attention to manners and etiquette—of the Japanese as well as the Westerners? If so, what?
Terms.
Soup. Even today, Japanese speak of “drinking” soup; they usually consume it by drinking directly from a bowl rather than by using a spoon. Slurping shows that one appreciates the quality of the liquid; it is not generally considered rude.
Tatami. The floors of most Japanese homes were covered with tatami mats, each about three feet by six feet. Two and a half inches thick and made of woven rush, they were firm but cushiony. To avoid soiling them, Japanese never wore shoes inside a house.
Chamber pot. Prior to indoor plumbing and toilets, Western homes generally provided porcelain containers in bedrooms to provide for people’s bodily needs during the nighttime. They would be emptied and washed each morning.
Temple bells. Japan’s huge Buddhist temple bells are rung at key hours of the day, including dawn and dusk. Since most Japanese lived within sound of a temple, it was typical in premodern times for people to rely on the bells to mark the main hours of the day.
Source: Fukuzawa Yukichi, Seiyō ishokujū (Western clothing, food, and homes), in Julia Meech-Pekarik, The World of the Meiji Print: Impressions of a New Civilization. New York: Weatherhill, 1986, 65-71.
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