Joseph Rudyard Kipling Visited Chionin...

This is from his account of his visit in 1889, very Kiplinesque. There isn't too much written in English about his visit, I think, and I have never managed to find anything written in Japanese.


Mister Oscar Wilde of the Nineteenth Century is a long-toothed liar! He wrote an article some short time back on the ‘decay of lying’. Among other things he, with his tongue in his brazen cheek, averred that there was no such a place as Japan–that it had been created by fans and picture-books just as he himself had been created by pottery and fragments of coloured cloth. Never believe anything that Mister Oscar Wilde tells you.

Very early in the dawn, before the nesting sparrows were awake, there was a sound in the air which frightened me out of my virtuous sleep. It was a lisping mutter—very deep and entirely strange. ‘That’s an earthquake, and the hillside is beginning to slide,’ quoth I, taking measures of defence. The sound repeated itself again and again, till I argued, that if it were the precursor of an earthquake, the affair had stuck half-way. At breakfast men said: ‘That was the great bell of Kyoto just next door to the hotel a little way up to the hillside. As a bell, y’know, it’s rather a failure from an English point of view. They don’t ring it properly, and the volume of sound is comparatively insignificant.’

‘So I fancied when I first heard it, I said casually, and went out up the hill under sunshine that filled the heart, and trees that filled the eye with joy. You know the unadulterated pleasure of that first clear morning in the Hills when a month’s solid idleness lies before the loafer, and the scent of the deodars mixes with the scent of the meditative cigar.

I stepped through the violet-studded long grass into forgotten little Japanese cemeteries—all broken pillars and lichened tablets—till I found, under a cut in the hillside, the big bell of Kyoto—twenty feet of green bronze hung inside a fantastically roofed shed of wooden beams. A beam, by the way, is a beam in Japan; anything under a foot thick is a stick. These beams were the best parts of big trees, clamped with bronze and iron to withstand the pull of the bell. A knuckle rapped lightly on the lip of the latter—it was not more than five feet from the ground—made the great monster breathe heavily, and the blow of a stick started a hundred shrill-voiced echoes round the darkness of its dome. At one side, guyed by half a dozen small hawsers, hung a battering-ram, a twelve-foot spar bound with iron, its nose pointing full-butt at a chrysanthemum in high relief on the belly of the bell.

Then by special favour of Providence, which always looks after a loafer, they began to sound sixty strokes. Half a dozen men swung the ram back and forth with shoutings and outcries, till it had gathered sufficient way, and the loosened ropes let it hurl itself against the chrysanthemum. The boom of the smitten bronze was swallowed up by the earth below and the hillside behind, so that its volume was not proportionate to the size of the bell, exactly as the men had said. An English hanger would have made thrice as much of it. But then he would have lost the crawling jar that ran through rock-stone and pine for twenty yards round, that beat through the body of the listener and died away under his feet like the shock of a distant blasting. I endured twenty strokes and removed myself, not in the least ashamed of mistaking the sound for an earthquake. Many times since I have heard the bell speak when I was far off. It says B-r-r-r very deep down in its throat, but when you have once caught the noise you will never forget it.

インド・ボンベイ（当時は英領）に生まれる。その後、イギリスで青年時代を過ごし、再びインドに戻り、新聞記者となる。やがて詩人として、また小説家として活躍するようになる。　1889年、イギリスに帰国。　1894年、「ジャングル・ブック」を発表、愛国的作家として人気を博す。　1901年に、「キム」を書き、この作品により1907年イギリス人として初めてノーベル文学賞を受賞する。また、兵士や水夫の生活を歌った彼の詩は極めて人気が高く、「兵営の歌」の売行きは、かつてのバイロンをも凌ぐとも言われた。　　　
同時代のコナン・ドイルと同様に、息子を第一次世界大戦で失っている。愛国者、帝国主義者としても知られ、イギリスの植民地政策を擁護した。だが、白人からの視点とはいえ、インドを舞台にした多くの作品からは、人間性への深い洞察と共感が伺える。　『ジャングル・ブック』では、インド人の少年が主人公であり、動物の側にも人間の側にも帰属できずに悩む孤独が描かれている。　"East is East, West is West" との言葉を遺す。

A most heinous theft has occurred! 泥簿にやられたっ！！グルメ鳥の餌が全部無くなってしまった！

LUXURY BIRD SCOFF HEIST strikes Irie-Cho!
事件の現場です。Scene of the crime:

Alas the culprit got away scot-free.
餌泥棒だ！！なんてこったい！！強盗は跡形もなく消えていた。
Identikit woodblock print of the main suspect follows. こちら指名手配人:

主要容疑者の居場所に関する情報をくれる人誰か居ませんか？
Never underestimate the power of the criminal corvid mind, Moriarty... The cunning swine opened the lid of the bird-feeder and took off with the entire bloomin' block of Fruit and Nut Suet Delight, especially imported from the US of A, per gramme the most expensive avian grub available East of the Kamo River. I am mightily enraged, yet I have to admit to a begrudging admiration for crow intelligence.
カラスの洗練されている手口をあんまり見くびらない方が良いですね。
かわいそうメジロちゃん！Poor Mejiro!

しばらく満腹は無理かな〜？

Here is our Japanese White Eye in happier days of post-prandial preening pleasure. Back to cold bento remnants now, alas, my poor feathered friend...
STOP PRESS! Culprit sighted not yards away from the scene of the robbery! The shadowy figure was seen earlier today perched atop a TV arial, brazenly boasting about his crime...
臨時ニュースをお伝えします！
もーう腹が立つたらありゃーしない！！よりによって あのカーカー野郎(極悪人)は、後日私を見下ろしつつ勝利の高笑いしやがったのだ！！！


(photo taken in front of my house earlier today).

Dame Margot Fonteyn by Bassano & Tilly Losch by E.O Hoppé


I like both these portraits, and didn't know either photographer until I looked at a mail from the National Portrait Gallery, London, this evening.
Dame Margot became the chancellor of my alma mater, Durham University, don't you know. But that's not why she is famous. She could dance a bit too.
Photos taken in 1935 and 1928 respectively.

This is our current Chancellor. The one on the right, you understand.

Much as I like Bill Bryson, he's a bit of a let-down after Dame Margot Fonteyn and Peter Ustinov.

Mind you, this is the bloke they are tipping to be his successor.

A scoundrel, for sure. Here is Mr Fry with his mate, a very youthful Huw 'Dr House' Laurie. Now he would be an interesting choice for Chancellor...