Marianne in My Home - Japan

Extracts from the interview with Tamaki, participating in the Marianne in My Home project. Read and listen to what she thinks about Marianne North’s recollections of Japan.

Tamaki

"I am a journalist and I once wrote a little book about Queen Victoria so it was very interesting for me…

"This text [Recollections of a Happy Life] was very interesting for me because Marianne by chance came to Japan in a special period…we call it Meiji restoration or revolution, it began in 1868 to 1912 so Marianne came to Japan just after the Meiji period began… So she was just on time for the changing of the society of Japan from the Samurai period-Edo era… everything was changing rapidly…

"Before the Meiji period Japanese people wore kimono and the hairstyle was a bit strange, the men were wearing sort of tufts on their bald head and women when they got married they coloured their teeth black and they removed their eyelashes… so maybe Marianne thought that it is strange but it was our custom… but from the Meiji period the government decided to stop that custom to westernise the nation, so around the period Marianne came to Japan the tuft was forbidden and the black teeth were forbidden… she saw that hairstyle's last moments.

Tamaki talks about Japanese humour

MP3 file | Transcript

"She was talking about mount Fuji and the seashore near mount Fuji… and she says that it is kind of beautiful, most beautiful blue sea…well it became the dirtiest sea after one hundred years… it caused a lot of water pollution and that sea had kind of liquid silver in it and many people died because they ate its fish. And also she describes the name of mount Fuji as Fujiyama…yama is mountain, but now we don’t call it Fujiyama but Fujisan, san is also mountain… the name changed a little bit."

Marianne North on Japan

Extracts from Recollections of a Happy Life by Marianne North. Memories of travel to Japan.

"We jumped in one day from the 28th to the 30th of October, and at daylight on the 7th of November found ourselves within the sight of Fujiyama… The coast is beautifully varied with ins and outs, islands, rocks, the cliffs everywhere fringed with trees and higher then I expected to see them, the water of the clearest aquamarine colour.

Japanese means of transport, 19th century (Photo: Nagasaki University Library)

"It was a real sight to see the boats which surrounded us from all sides filled with tiny men in the oddest dresses, some looking like the straw umbrellas they put over beehives, some in strange stripes and checks, some in no clothes at all, or next to none, but all good-humoured and sensible, with their funny tufts of black-hair turned over their bald crowns, like clowns in pantomimes, and all their ways of doing things so unlike the ways of the rest of the world…

"We drove out into the country, and took funny cups of yellow tea in a bamboo tea-house, with five pretty girls rather over four feet high, in chignons with huge pins, blackened teeth, and no eyelashes, laughing at us all the while…The tiny girls who served us were very pretty, and merry over our gigantic and clumsy ways. I felt quite Brodbingnagian in Japan…

"That very day my three bipeds got into such a state of delight when the steep hill-road was left behind them that they started into the city at full gallop, tearing round the corners and yelling like a wild things, and finally fell down like a pack of cards, upsetting me at a street corner. I heard my skull go crack against the wall of the house. When at last I picked myself up again, and put up my hand to feel if my head was still there, I saw a crowd round me, holding their sides and roaring with laughter. All my three men were more or less bruised, but grinned also, so I followed fashion and did as they did; but no one attempted to help us in any way. They looked on the whole, apparently, as a little scene got up for their amusement…