Golfing Round the World
Chapter XIV Rokkosan
The manner of our leaving China was very definite and in a way it was farewell to the Orient, for Japan, the Land of the Rising Sun, was poles apart from anything I had seen hitherto. We left Peking at three in the morning, and dawn found me sleepily gazing over the arid brown and grave strewn plain surrounding Tientsin towards a fringe of snow-capped mountains which presumably verged into Manchuria.
Tientsin itself is about an hours run by rail from the Sea at Taku, and the Peiho river has carried the yellow dust of China such a distance out to sea that vessels of over moderate draught must needs lie far out in the Gulf of Pechihli, fifteen miles away from and out of sight of land.
When we rejoined our "Imperatrice", it was more like a stealthy open sea transhipment than an embarkation. We might have been engaged in rum or gun running instead of the innocent and respectable business of globetrotting.
The first, last, and all the intervening impression of Japan is that it is very wide awake. You come sailing quietly out of the windswept Golf of Pechihli under the lee of Korea and across the Yellow Sea, but no sooner do you enter the exceeding narrow strait of Shimonoseki then the order goes forth that all cameras are to be put away. Shimonoseki is a great naval port and these are strategic waters and Japan will see to it that you do not abuse her hospitality.
Passing through the straits you enter the famous inland sea studded with a thousand islands mostly covered with trees. There seemed to be thousands if not tens of thousands of square sailed fishing boats. In the West we are unquestionably a great maritime nation, but for sheer numbers of small craft I should think China and Japan predominate.
The sea happened to be in a state of oily calm, not a ripple anywhere, and the horizon vanished completely leaving the ship poised in the void. This was extremely interesting for it confirmed that atmosphere of insubstantiality which is so pronounced a characteristic of Japanese art.
It really does not matter two straws what I think of Japan, but to those who are interested let me recommend Lafcadio Hearn's delightful book :- "Japan an Interpretation". I read it between glimpses of the fascinating scenery amid the charm of cherry blossom while journeying by train from Kobe to Yokohama. The Railway Company had thoughtfully provided a small travel library in the most luxurious observation car and inside the cover of each book was a hospitable little notice inviting patrons 'to treat with care this book which has been provided to while away the tedium of the journey'.
If there is one country in the world that needs more interpretation than another I think it must be Japan. It seemed to me completely and utterly foreign, just as much I suppose as Great Britain would appear to the Japanese, and that is probably the considered intention of that extremely versatile and able race.
I did most of my expeditions alone, which might be considered simple and easy enough in a country which possessed such excellent railways and other efficient means of transport. But how to take a ticket and alight at the right stations were problems requiring the utmost alertness and perception to solve with accuracy. The reason is that names of stations, public notices, time tables and other guides for travellers are almost invariably printed in Japanese characters. Even in places like Kobe and Yokohama, the names of the principal stations, though printed in Roman letters, are different from what you naturally expect.
"Why not?" observes the logical Japanese. He says that in London you call your stations Charing Cross or Clapham Junction, and you do not print the names in characters which he can understand, why should he do otherwise than you. What is more, there is a definite agitation to suppress even those few names which still appear in Roman letters.
I went from Kobe to Kyoto, the old capital, with a resident friend who took a return ticket for me, and gave me the times of the trains for the return journey, which I was to make alone. When, however, I got to Kyoto station in the evening, it appeared that there were two trains leaving for Kobe about the same time, one an express, the other stopping at every station. Naturally I went for the express, but dumb show on the part of the ticket collector indicated clearly enough that my ticket was only available for the slow train. I hurried back to the booking hall, where everything looked supremely European except the people and the writing on the walls. I completely failed to induce anyone to excess my ticket for the express.
However, not to be defeated, I ran back to the ticket gate as there were only two minutes before the express departed. I had previously located the platform where the train labelled Shimonoseki was standing. This time the ticket collectors evidently regarded me as hopeless and detailed a porter to show me the slow train. I surmised that this was what they would do, but no sooner had the porter turned his back then I tore off to the express platform and boarded the train in the nick of time.
I made my way into the restaurant car with its quaint little backless seats and low tables and there as I squeezed myself into a place a feeling of guilt overcame me. What had I done? I had boarded a train for Shimonoseki which might possibly not stop at Kobe, the name of whose station Sannomiya I could barely remember, and I had also committed committed goodness knew what crime in not possessing the appropriate ticket. Should I be landed at the far distant terminus and there hauled away to spend the rest of my life in a Japanese fortress, or would things pan out all right?
Clearly I was in need of food, and after an excellent meal during which I observed with interest the skilful manipulation of rice and savories with chop sticks on the part of my fellow travellers, we stopped at Kobe, and I paid the difference to an amazed, though lenient collector of tickets at the exit gate at Sannomiya.
On another occasion I had to carefully memorise some half dozen 'characters' to enable me to select the right tramcar for a suburb of Kobe whence I was to start for Rokkosan.
To attain Rokkosan which is perched in the clouds on the summit of Rokko three thousand feet above Kobe, one must either walk or be carried. It is, however, a delightful walk up a steep and narrow glen. An obliging coolie will take your golf clubs and suitcase and you will arrive at 'Chambers' which is the Dormy House of the Kobe Golf Club in the cool of the evening.
It is a charming bungalow, poised on the edge of a precipice, and a night, spent within its hospitable walls, is a memory to be treasured for all time. There you meet the brotherhood of golfers who receive you with open arms. After the solemnities of the cocktail are duly observed, you retire to your cell for a bath in the quaint little wooden troughs attached thereto, and shortly reappear for dinner in the comfortable garb of Old Japan, to wit - kimonos and sandals worn barefooted. The steward knew the great art of cooking to perfection, and after a climb of three thousand feet one feels not only virtuous but hungry.
From 'Chambers' up to the links is the most delightful walk imaginable. You are literally on the crest of Japan and command a marvellous prospect of ocean and coast, mountain and plain, and the innumerable green and shapely islands of the Inland Sea. Near at hand the aromatic foliage of plantation and heath with here and there a mountain tarn. You feel absolutely on the tip top of everything, though the view extends to snow cloud mountains of three and four times the height of Rokko. You see the wide sweep of the Bay of Osaka, and Osaka itself with its teeming population, and far off over Osaka towards great Fujiyama beneath which lies Tokyo and Yokohama. You have a sense of elevation which is the seventh and most satisfactory of all senses.
Imagine yourself playing golf under these circumstances. Instead of being told to take your line on the house with two gables or the corner of the church tower, you play to hit the summit of Fuji fifty leagues away. Now the links of Rokkosan are a little bit hard to describe. If however you removed the rocks and heather from that most delightful of all courses on the fells above Windermere, and substituted flat rolled sand putting greens for the natural turf of the Westmoreland hills you would enjoy the same type of golf, and flatter yourself you were playing a mighty fine game as your ball sailed over valleys and ridges and your little chip shots lay dead by the pin.
Sand greens, or 'browns' if you desire to be meticulous, are not half bad, they have at least the advantage of being flat and perfectly true. I found no difficulty in running up and holing the average put. The fairway was all fine turf, right through, sown with Bermuda grass, which, if it is not so close set as our British grasses affords a most satisfactory and springy lie for a golf ball.
There are three holes on that charming mountain top named respectively, Paradise, Purgatory and Hell. I believe I got a three at the first, was bunkered but made a good recovery at the second, and I am dead certain that in Hell I lost my ball over a precipitous tree clad chasm about a thousand feet deep and very semicircular in shape, round which a very hefty iron second must be played to reach the green snugly reposing on the smooth slope above. But, as at Fanling, the devils got at me, and I hooked and lost my ball in what is certainly the huget and most desperate hazard I have ever seen.
I was very loth to leave that little playground in the clouds, but, as I had previously discovered, the "Imperatrice" had a way of sticking to her schedule, so I had to be content with my brief tantalising glimpse of Elysium.
I enjoyed another fine days golf at Naruo, a seaside course about midway between Kobe and Osaka. It was in the process of being extended into an eighteen hole course, and, if the new holes which we tackled in spite of their rough immaturity turn out to be as good as the original nine it will make one of Japan's best courses.
Here, were natural turf, sandhills and star grass and all the best features of the true sea coast links which were the fons at origo of all golf. Japan is taking up the game with avidity. A super course to cost eighty thousand yen say eigt thousand pounds, was being made at Ibaraki in the great valley which sweeps up from the Inland Sea at Osaka to Kyoto and Biwa, Japan's largest lake. Prosperous Osaka has already subscribed sixty thousand yen towards achieving their object.
This new course would be almost in the centre of the last great earthquake of 1926 [1923?]. You cannot be long in Japan without coming into contact with the effects of these catastrophes. In Yokohama, the "Imperatrice" lay alongside a quay from which the debris had not yet been cleared away and where the huge cavity which had swallowed up the scores of taxicabs carrying refugees to the harbour was still visible, and only partly filled in. In the streets, what had been great buildings were just heaps of stone. Cracks could be seen across the road and here and there were houses split in two, with their interiors laid bare, just as they must have appeared on the morrow of the disaster.
But the spirit of the people is indomitable, and a new Yokohama is rising from the ashes of the burnt and shattered city. In the temporary wooden office of a friend I saw a photograph which portrayed the headquarters of his firm a few days after the earthquake. They consisted of a tent and a large noticeboard, with the names of the Steamship Companies for which they were agents, nailed to a broken telegraph pole standing amid a tangle of wreckage and twisted wires. Nearby was the little army hut known as "Quake Cafe" which will soon be perpetuated in stone.
A celebrated Japanese proverb bids you "Call nothing excellent until you have seen Nikko". Nikko is certainly worth seeing for its marvellous wooden and lacquer temples, its unspoilt atmosphere of the Japan of 'Madame Butterfly' and the 'Mikado' its chubby children and its setting amid pine forests, streams, waterfalls and snow capped mountains. April however, is too early in the year to do Nikko full justice. Among the temples there is a tall five tiered red Pagoda standing amid still loftier cryptomeria trees. It is several centuries old and the architects must have well understood the risk of earthquakes; for they introduced, what is almost a unique feature in constructional engineering, a huge wooden beam suspended from the top of the tower, hanging freely in the centre, and extending down to the base, thus maintaining a low centre of gravity, and affording an automatic counter check to any swaying of the structure caused by wind or earthquake.