"Dwarf Trees" from Isabella L. Bird's
Unbeaten Tracks in Japan


        Isabella Lucy Bird (1831-1904) was born in England and her first journey was for health reasons to Canada and the United States in 1854.  Her account of this journey was a great success -- The English Woman in America (1856) -- but another twenty years elapsed before her extensive travels began. Her first major journey, around the world in 18 months, was in 1873 to Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii -- The Hawaiian Archipelago (1875) -- and the Rocky Mountains -- A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879).  In April 1878 she travelled to Japan.  She travelled for some months in the interior of the main island and in the northern island of Yezo.  From Nikko northwards her route was altogether off the beaten track, and had never been traversed in its entirety by any European.  She lived among the Japanese, and saw their mode of living, in regions unaffected by European contact.  As a lady travelling alone, and the first European lady who had been seen in several districts through which her route lay, her experiences differed more or less widely from those of preceding travellers; and she was able to offer a fuller account of the aborigines of Yezo, obtained by actual acquaintance with them.  The resulting book , Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880), consists mainly of letters written on the spot to her sister and a circle of personal friends.  Her travels to Hong Kong, China and Malaya yielded The Golden Chersonese and The Way Thither (1883).  On her return, she married Dr. John Bishop.  When he died 1886, she began travelling again: after training as a nurse, she went to Tibet -- Among the Tibetans (1886).  In 1890, she travelled as part of a military expedition to Persia -- Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan (1891) -- and in 1897 covered over 8000 miles in China and Korea -- Korea and Her Neighbors (1898).  Her last journey, in 1904, was to Africa.  She was the first woman member of the Royal Geographical Society.   

  Isabella Bird

      Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880):

LETTER VI, Nikko, June 14, 1878
       After running cheerily for several miles my men bowled me into a tea-house, where they ate and smoked while I sat in the garden, which consisted of baked mud, smooth stepping-stones, a little pond with some goldfish, a deformed pine, and a stone lantern.  Observe that foreigners are wrong in calling the Japanese houses of entertainment indiscriminately "tea-houses."  A tea-house or chaya is a house at which you can obtain tea and other refreshments, rooms to eat them in, and attendance.  That which to some extent answers to an hotel is a yadoya, which provides sleeping accommodation and food as required.  The licenses are different.

Letter XVI, Niigata, July 9, 1878
      The fronts are very narrow, and the houses extend backwards to an amazing length, with gardens in which flowers, shrubs, and mosquitoes are grown, and bridges are several times repeated, so as to give the effect of fairyland as you look through from the street.  The principal apartments in all Japanese houses are at the back, looking out on these miniature landscapes, for a landscape is skilfully dwarfed into a space often not more than 30 feet square.  A lake, a rock-work, a bridge, a stone lantern, and a deformed pine, are indispensable; but whenever circumstances and means admit of it, quaintnesses of all kinds are introduced.  Small pavilions, retreats for tea-making, reading, sleeping in quiet and coolness, fishing under cover, and drinking sake; bronze pagodas, cascades falling from the mouths of bronze dragons; rock caves, with gold and silver fish darting in and out; lakes with rocky islands, streams crossed by green bridges, just high enough to allow a rat or frog to pass under; lawns, and slabs of stone for crossing them in wet weather, grottoes, hills, valleys, groves of miniature palms, cycas, and bamboo; and dwarfed trees of many kinds, of purplish and dull green hues, are cut into startling likenesses of beasts and creeping things, or stretch distorted arms over tiny lakes.

LETTER XVIII, Kaminoyama, [no date, but sequentially between July 12 and 16]
       As I entered Komatsu the first man whom I met turned back hastily, called into the first house the words which mean "Quick, here's a foreigner;" the three carpenters who were at work there flung down their tools and, without waiting to put on their kimonos, sped down the street calling out the news, so that by the time I reached the yadoya a large crowd was pressing upon me.  The front was mean and unpromising-looking, but, on reaching the back by a stone bridge over a stream which ran through the house, I found a room 40 feet long by 15 high, entirely open along one side to a garden with a large fish-pond with goldfish, a pagoda, dwarf trees, and all the usual miniature adornments.

LETTER XXXIX, Old Mororan, Volcano Bay, Yezo, September 2, 1878.
      After this had gone on for four hours, the track, with a sudden dip over a hillside, came down on Old Mororan, a village of thirty Aino and nine Japanese houses, very unpromising-looking, although exquisitely situated on the rim of a lovely cove.  The Aino huts were small and poor, with an unusual number of bear skulls on poles, and the village consisted mainly of two long dilapidated buildings, in which a number of men were mending nets.  It looked a decaying place, of low, mean lives.  But at a "merchant's" there was one delightful room with two translucent sides--one opening on the village, the other looking to the sea down a short, steep slope, on which is a quaint little garden, with dwarfed fir-trees in pots, a few balsams, and a red cabbage grown with much pride as a "foliage plant." 1

NOTES

1       Bird, Isabella L.   Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, An Account of Travels in the Interior including Visits to the Aborigines of Yezo and the Shrine of Nikko (London, John Murray; 1911; Project Gutenberg, May, 2000 [Etext #2184] and The University of Adelaide Library Electronic Texts Collection ).  Biographical information from the Preface, Columbia Encyclopedia, and The University of Adelaide Library.  The third passage above contains the first reference RJB has found of dwarfed trees and the Aino, the aboriginal folk of northern Japan.  Photo from Klinglesmith, Dan and Patrick Soran  Colorado, A History in Photographs (Denver: Altitude Publishing Ltd.; 1998), pg. 69.
       The existence of a print version of this book was brought to my attention by an unpublished college paper "From East to West: The Migration of Bonsai" by Timothy C. Yuhas (U of A, Tucson, May 2005), which was partly the result of private e-mail correspondence between RJB and TCY, April and May 2005.

        Letter III of her The Golden Chersonese and The Way Thither, Canton, Jan. 4, 1879, contains the passing mention: "Many Chinese mansions contain six or seven courtyards, each with its colonnade, drawing, dining, and reception rooms, and at the back of all there is a flower garden adorned with rockeries, fish-ponds, dwarf trees, and miniature pagodas and bridges."

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