picture alcove, drives away whatever beauty may
reside there.
Why should this propensity to seek beauty in
darkness be so strong only in Orientals? The West
too has known a time when there was no
electricity, gas, or petroleum, and yet so far as I
know the West has never been disposed to delight
in shadows. Japanese ghosts have traditionally
had no feet; Western ghosts have feet, but are
transparent. As even this trifle suggests, pitch
darkness has always occupied our fantasies, while
in the West even ghosts are as clear as glass. This
is true too of our household implements: we prefer
colors compounded of darkness, they prefer the
colors of sunlight. And of silver and copperware:
we love them for the burnish and patina, which
they consider unclean, insanitary, and polish to a
glittering brilliance. They paint their ceilings and
walls in pale colors to drive out as many of the
shadows as they can. We fill our gardens with
dense plantings, they spread out a flat expanse of
grass.
But what produces such differences in taste? In
my opinion it is this: we Orientals tend to seek our
satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen
to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things
47
as they are; and so darkness causes Us no
discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable.
If light is scarce then light is scarce; we will
immerse ourselves in the darkness and there
discover its own particular beauty. But the progressive
Westerner is determined always to betrcr
his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to
gaslight, gaslight to electric light - his quest for a
brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to
eradicate even the minutest shadow.
But beyond such differences in temperament, I
should like to consider the importance of the
difference in the color of our skin. From ancient
times we have considered white skin more elegant,
more beautiful than dark skin, and yet somehow
this whiteness of ours differs from that of the
white races. Taken individually there are Japanese
who are whiter than Westerners and Westerners
who are darker than Japanese, but their whiteness
and darkness is not the same. Let me take an
example from my own experience. When I lived
on the Bluff in Yokohama I spent a good deal of
my leisure in the company of foreign residents, at
their banquets and balls. At close range I was not
particularly struck by their whiteness, but from a
distance I could distinguish them quite clearly
from the Japanese. Among the Japanese were
ladies who were dressed in gowns no less splendid
48
than the foreigners', and whose skin was whiter
than theirs. Yet from across the room these ladies,
even one alone, would stand out unmistakably
from amongst a group of foreigners. For the
Japanese complexion, no matter how white, is
tinged by a slight cloudiness. These women were
in no way reticent about powdering themselves.
Every bit of exposed flesh - even their backs and
arms - they covered with a thick coat of white.
Still they could not efface the darkness that lay
below their skin^It was as plainly visible as dirt at
the bottom of a pool of pure water. Between the
fingers, around the nostrils, on the nape of the
neck, along the spine - about these places
especially, dark, almost dirty, shadows gathered.
But the skin of the Westerners, even those of a
darker complexion, had a limpid glow. Nowhere
were they tainted by this gray shadow. From the
tops of their heads to the tips of their fingers the
whiteness was pure and unadulterated. Thus it is
that when one of us goes among a group of
Westerners it is like a grimy stain on a sheet of
white paper. The sight offends even our own eyes
and leaves none too pleasant a feeling.
We can appreciate, then, the psychology that in
the past caused the white races to reject the
colored races. A sensitive white person could not
but be upset by the shadow that even one or two
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colored persons cast over a social gathering. What
the situation is today I do not know, but at the
time of the American Civil War, when persecution
of Negroes was at its most intense, the hatred and
scorn were directed not only at full-blooded
Negroes, but at mulattos, the children of mulattos,
and even the children of mulattos and whites.
Those with the slightest taint of Negro blood, be
it but a half, a quarter, a sixteenth, or a thirtysecond,
had to be ferreted out and made to suffer.
Not even those who at a glance were indistinguishable
from pure-blooded whites, but among
whose ancestors two or three generations earlier
there had been a Negro, .escaped the searching
gaze, no matter how faint the tinge that lay hidden
beneath their white skin.
And so we see how profound is the relationship
between shadows and the yellow races. Because
no one likes to show himself to bad advantage, it
is natural that we should have chosen cloudy
colors for our food and clothing and houses, and
sunk ourselves back into the shadows. I am not
saying that our ancestors were conscious of the
cloudiness in their skin. They cannot have known
that a whiter race existed. But one must conclude
that something in their sense of color led them
naturally to this preference.
50
Our ancestors cut off the brightness on the land
from above and created a world of shadows, and
far'in the depths of it they placed woman, marking
her the whitest of beings. If whiteness was to be
indispensable, to supreme beauty, then for us there
was no other way, nor do I find this objectionable.
The white races are fair-haired, but our hair is
dark; so nature taught us the laws of darkness,
which we instinctively used to turn a yellow skin
white. I have spoken of the practice of blackening
the teeth, but was not the shaving of the eyebrows
also a device to make the white face stand out?
What fascinates me m6st of all, however, is that
green, iridescent lipstick, so rarely used today even
by Kyoto geisha. One caii guess nothing of its
power unless one imagines it In the low, unsteady
light of a candle. The woman of old was made to
h i d e ^ e red of her mouth under green-black
lipstick, to put shimmering ornaments in her hair;
and so the last trace of color was taken from her
rich skin. I know of nothing whiter than the face
of a young girl in the wavering shadow of a
lantern, her teeth now and then as she smiles
shining a lacquered black through lips like elfin
fires. It is whiter than the whitest white woman I
can imagine. The whiteness of the white woman is
clear, tangible, famihac, it is not this other-worldly
whiteness. Perhaps the latter does not even exist.
Perhaps it is only a mischievous trick of light ati^
shadow, a thing of a moment only. But even so it
is enough. We can ask for nothing more.
And while I am talking of this whiteness I want
to talk also of the color of the darkness that
enfolds it. I think of an unforgettable vision of
darkness I once had when I took a friend from
Tokyo to the old Sumiya teahouse in Kyoto. I was
in a large room, the 'Pine Room' I think, since
destroyed by fire, and the darkness, broken only
by a few candles, was of a richness quite different
from the darkness of a small room. As we came in
the door an elderly waitress with shaven eyebrows
and blackened teeth was kneeling by a candle
behind which stood a large screen. On the far side
of the screen, at the edge of the little circle of light,
the darkness seemed to fall from the ceiling, lofty,
intense, monolithic, the fragile light of the candle
unable to pierce its thickness, turned back as from
a black wall. I wonder if my readers know the
color of that 'darkness seen by candlelight'. It was
different in quality from darkness on the road at
night. It was a repletion, a pregnancy of tiny
particles like fine ashes, each particle luminous as
a rainbow. I blinked in spite of myself, as though
to keep it out of my eyes.
Smaller rooms are the fashion now, and even if
one were to use candles in them one would not get
52the
color of that darkness; but in the old palace
and the old house of pleasure the ceilings were
high, the skirting corridors were wide, the rooms
themselves were usually tens of feet long and wide,
and the darkness must always have pressed in like
a fog. The elegant aristocrat of old was immersed
in this suspension of ashen particles, soaked in it,
but the man of today, long used to the electric
hght, has forgotten that such a darkness existed. It
must have been simple for specters to appear in a
'visible darkness', where always something seemed
to be flickering and shimmering, a darkness that
on occasion held greater terrors than darkness
out-pf-doors. This was the darkness in which
ghosts and monsters were active, and indeed was
not the woman who' lived in it,. behind thick
curtains, behind laVer after layer of screens and
doors - was she not of a kind with them? The
darkness wrapped her round tenfold, twentyfold,
it filled the collar, the sleeves of her kimono, the
folds of her skirt, wherever a hollow invited.
Further yet: might it not have been the reverse,
might not the darkness have emerged from her
mouth and those black teeth, from the black of her
hair, like the thread from the great earth spider?
The novelist Takebayashi Musoan said when he i
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