A few days before they left for good I overheard a conversation between Bill and his mate, who had begun to feel the hopelessness of attempting work of a different nature. "What shall we do, Bill, when this blooming job's over?" said the foreman. "I suppose we shall go a-'opping!" replied Bill. It was then just about the hopping season.
Perhaps one of the most admirable features in the character of the Japanese is their great power of self-control. The superficial observer on his first visit to Japan, because of this very quality of theirs, is at first liable to imagine that the Japanese have no emotion. This is a mistake. I have lived with them; I know them through and through; and I know that they are a people of great emotions, emotions that are perhaps all the deeper and stronger because they are unexpressed. Self-control is almost a religion with the Japanese. In their opinion it is wrong and selfish to the last degree to inflict one's sorrows and one's cares upon other people. The world is sad enough, they argue, without being made sadder by the petty emotions of one's neighbour: so the people of Japan all contrive to present a gay and happy appearance to the outside world. You may express your feelings in the solitude of your own room, and there is no doubt that the Japanese suffer terribly among themselves, although a stranger, and especially a European, will never detect a trace of it.
I once went to call, with a resident of Japan, on an old Japanese lady, to condole with her on the loss of her husband and her only son, who had both been swept away, with thousands of others, in a great tidal wave only a few days previously. As we neared the house we saw, through the partially-opened sliding door, the old woman rocking herself to and fro in an agony of sorrow, literally contending with emotion, and suffering as I have never seen a human being suffer before. I was terribly shocked, and we naturally hesitated for some time before announcing ourselves; but by the time the mourner appeared at the door to greet us, she was all smiles. It was difficult to believe that she was the same woman. Her face shone with radiant happiness, and all traces of sorrow had disappeared. In the course of the conversation she did not avoid the sore subject, but rather chose it, and talked of the death of her husband and her son with a smiling face and an expression by which one might very pardonably have judged that she had no feelings whatever. This was self-control indeed, and it is only in Japan that one encounters such striking illustrations of superb pluck and endurance.