Bad roads and bad horses detracted from my enjoyment.
One hour of a good horse would have carried me across the plain; as it
was, seven weary hours were expended upon it. The day degenerated, and
closed in still, hot rain; the air was stifling and electric, the saddle
slipped constantly from being too big, the shoes were more than usually
troublesome, the horseflies tormented, and the men and horses crawled.
The rice-fields were undergoing a second process of puddling, and many
of the men engaged in it wore only a hat, and a fan attached to the girdle.
An avenue of cryptomeria and two handsome and somewhat
gilded Buddhist temples denoted the approach to a place of some importance,
and such Takata is, as being a large town with a considerable trade in
silk, rope, and minjin, and the residence of one of the higher officials
of the ken or prefecture. The street is a mile long, and every house is
a shop. The general aspect is mean and forlorn. In these little-traveled
districts, as soon as one reaches the margin of a town, the first man one
meets turns and flies down the street, calling out the Japanese equivalent
of “Here’s a foreigner!” and soon blind and seeing, old and young,
clothed and naked, gather together. At the yadoya the crowd assembled in
such force that the house-master removed me to some pretty rooms in a garden;
but then the adults climbed on the house- roofs which overlooked it, and
the children on a palisade at the end, which broke down under their weight,
and admitted the whole inundation; so that I had to close the shoji, with
the fatiguing consciousness during the whole time of nominal rest of a
multitude surging outside. Then five policemen in black alpaca frock-coats
and white trousers invaded my precarious privacy, desiring to see my passport—a
demand never made before except where I halted for the night. In their
European clothes they cannot bow with Japanese punctiliousness, but they
were very polite, and expressed great annoyance at the crowd, and dispersed
it; but they had hardly disappeared when it gathered again. When I went
out I found fully 1000 people helping me to realize how the crowded cities
of Judea sent forth people clothed much as these are when the Miracle-Worker
from Galilee arrived, but not what the fatigue of the crowding and buzzing
must have been to One who had been preaching and working during the long
day. These Japanese crowds, however, are quiet and gentle, and never press
rudely upon one. I could not find it in my heart to complain of them except
to you. Four of the policemen returned, and escorted me to the outskirts
of the town. The noise made by 1000 people shuffling along in clogs is
like the clatter of a hail-storm.
After this there was a dismal tramp of five hours
through rice- fields. The moist climate and the fatigue of this manner
of traveling are deteriorating my health, and the pain in my spine, which
has been daily increasing, was so severe that I could neither ride nor
walk for more than twenty minutes at a time; and the pace was so slow that
it was six when we reached Bange, a commercial town of 5000 people, literally
in the rice swamp, mean, filthy, damp, and decaying, and full of an overpowering
stench from black, slimy ditches. The mercury was 84 degrees, and hot rain
fell fast through the motionless air. We dismounted in a shed full of bales
of dried fish, which gave off an overpowering odor, and wet and dirty people
crowded in to stare at the foreigner till the air seemed unbreathable.
But there were signs of progress. A three days’
congress of schoolmasters was being held; candidates for vacant situations
were being examined; there were lengthy educational discussions going on,
specially on the subject of the value of the Chinese classics as a part
of education; and every inn was crowded.
Bange was malarious:there was so much malarious
fever that the Government had sent additional medical assistance; the hills
were only a ri off, and it seemed essential to go on. But not a horse could
be got till 10 p.m.; the road was worse than the one I had traveled; the
pain became more acute, and I more exhausted, and I was obliged to remain.
Then followed a weary hour, in which the Express Agent’s five emissaries
were searching for a room, and considerably after dark I found myself in
a rambling old over- crowded yadoya, where my room was mainly built on
piles above stagnant water, and the mosquitoes were in such swarms as to
make the air dense, and after a feverish and miserable night I was glad
to get up early and depart.
Fully 2000 people had assembled. After I was mounted
I was on the point of removing my Dollond from the case, which hung on
the saddle horn, when a regular stampede occurred, old and young running
as fast as they possibly could, children being knocked down in the haste
of their elders. Ito said that they thought I was taking out a pistol to
frighten them, and I made him explain what the object really was, for they
are a gentle, harmless people, whom one would not annoy without sincere
regret. In many European countries, and certainly in some parts of our
own, a solitary lady- traveler in a foreign dress would be exposed to rudeness,
insult, and extortion, if not to actual danger; but I have not met with
a single instance of incivility or real overcharge, and there is no rudeness
even about the crowding. The mago are anxious that I should not get wet
or be frightened, and very scrupulous in seeing that all straps and loose
things are safe at the end of the journey, and, instead of hanging about
asking for gratuities, or stopping to drink and gossip, they quickly unload
the horses, get a paper from the Transport Agent, and go home. Only yesterday
a strap was missing, and, though it was after dark, the man went back a
ri for it, and refused to take some sen which I wished to give him, saying
he was responsible for delivering everything right at the journey’s end.
They are so kind and courteous to each other, which is very pleasing. Ito
is not pleasing or polite in his manner to me, but when he speaks to his
own people he cannot free himself from the shackles of etiquette, and bows
as profoundly and uses as many polite phrases as anybody else.
In an hour the malarious plain was crossed, and
we have been among piles of mountains ever since. The infamous road was
so slippery that my horse fell several times, and the baggage horse, with
Ito upon him, rolled head over heels, sending his miscellaneous pack in
all directions. Good roads are really the most pressing need of Japan.
It would be far better if the Government were to enrich the country by
such a remunerative outlay as making passable roads for the transport of
goods through the interior, than to impoverish it by buying ironclads in
England, and indulging in expensive western vanities.
That so horrible a road should have so good a bridge
as that by which we crossed the broad river Agano is surprising. It consists
of twelve large scows, each one secured to a strong cable of plaited wisteria,
which crosses the river at a great height, so as to allow of the scows
and the plank bridge which they carry rising and falling with the twelve
feet variation of the water.
Ito’s disaster kept him back for an hour, and I
sat meanwhile on a rice sack in the hamlet of Katakado, a collection of
steep-roofed houses huddled together in a height above the Agano. It was
one mob of pack-horses, over 200 of them, biting, squealing, and kicking.
Before I could dismount, one vicious creature struck at me violently, but
only hit the great wooden stirrup. I could hardly find any place out of
the range of hoofs or teeth. My baggage horse showed great fury after he
was unloaded. He attacked people right and left with his teeth, struck
out savagely with his fore feet, lashed out with his hind ones, and tried
to pin his master up against a wall.
Leaving this fractious scene we struck again through
the mountains. Their ranges were interminable, and every view from every
fresh ridge grander than the last, for we were now near the lofty range
of the Aidzu Mountains, and the double-peaked Bandaisan, the abrupt precipices
of Itoyasan, and the grand mass of Miyojintake in the south-west, with
their vast snow-fields and snow-filled ravines, were all visible at once.
These summits of naked rock or dazzling snow, rising above the smothering
greenery of the lower ranges into a heaven of delicious blue, gave exactly
that individuality and emphasis which, to my thinking, Japanese scenery
usually lacks. Riding on first, I arrived alone at the little town of Nozawa,
to encounter the curiosity of a crowd; and, after a rest, we had a very
pleasant walk of three miles along the side of a ridge above a rapid river
with fine gray cliffs on its farther side, with a grand view of the Aidzu
giants, violet colored in a golden sunset.
At dusk we came upon the picturesque village of
Nojiri, on the margin of a rice valley, but I shrank from spending Sunday
in a hole, and, having spied a solitary house on the very brow of a hill
1500 feet higher, I dragged out the information that it was a tea- house,
and came up to it. It took three-quarters of an hour to climb the series
of precipitous zigzags by which this remarkable pass is surmounted; darkness
came on, accompanied by thunder and lightning, and just as we arrived a
tremendous zigzag of blue flame lit up the house and its interior, showing
a large group sitting round a wood fire, and then all was thick darkness
again. It had a most startling effect. This house is magnificently situated,
almost hanging over the edge of the knife-like ridge of the pass of Kuruma,
on which it is situated. It is the only yadoya I have been at from which
there has been any view. The villages are nearly always in the valleys,
and the best rooms are at the back, and have their prospects limited by
the paling of the conventional garden. If it were not for the fleas, which
are here in legions, I should stay longer, for the view of the Aidzu snow
is delicious, and, as there are only two other houses, one can ramble without
being mobbed.
In one a child two and a half years old swallowed
a fish-bone last night, and has been suffering and crying all day, and
the grief of the mother so won Ito’s sympathy that he took me to see her.
She had walked up and down with it for eighteen hours, but never thought
of looking into its throat, and was very unwilling that I should do so.
The bone was visible, and easily removed with a crochet needle. An hour
later the mother sent a tray with a quantity of cakes and coarse confectionery
upon it as a present, with the piece of dried seaweed which always accompanies
a gift. Before night seven people with sore legs applied for “advice.”
The sores were all superficial and all alike, and their owners said that
they had been produced by the incessant rubbing of the bites of ants.
On this summer day the country looks as prosperous as it is beautiful, and one would not think that acute poverty could exist in the steep-roofed village of Nojiri, which nestles at the foot of the hill; but two hempen ropes dangling from a cryptomeria just below tell the sad tale of an elderly man who hanged himself two days ago, because he was too poor to provide for a large family; and the house-mistress and Ito tell me that when a man who has a young family gets too old or feeble for work he often destroys himself.
My hostess is a widow with a family, a good-natured,
bustling woman, with a great love of talk. All day her house is open all
round, having literally no walls. The roof and solitary upper room are
supported on posts, and my ladder almost touches the kitchen fire. During
the day-time the large matted area under the roof has no divisions, and
groups of travelers and magos lie about, for every one who has toiled up
either side of Kurumatoge takes a cup of “tea with eating,” and the house-mistress
is busy the whole day. A big well is near the fire. Of course there is
no furniture; but a shelf runs under the roof, on which there is a Buddhist
god- house, with two black idols in it, one of them being that much- worshipped
divinity, Daikoku, the god of wealth. Besides a rack for kitchen utensils,
there is only a stand on which are six large brown dishes with food for
sale—salt shell-fish, in a black liquid, dried trout impaled on sticks,
sea slugs in soy, a paste made of pounded roots, and green cakes made of
the slimy river confervae, pressed and dried—all ill-favored and unsavory
viands. This afternoon a man without clothes was treading flour paste on
a mat, a traveler in a blue silk robe was lying on the floor smoking, and
five women in loose attire, with elaborate chignons and blackened teeth,
were squatting round the fire. At the house-mistress’s request I wrote
a eulogistic description of the view from her house, and read it in English,
Ito translating it, to the very great satisfaction of the assemblage. Then
I was asked to write on four fans. The woman has never heard of England.
It is not “a name to conjure with” in these wilds. Neither has she heard
of America. She knows of Russia as a great power, and, of course, of China,
but there her knowledge ends, though she has been at Tokyo and Kyoto.
July 1.—I was just falling asleep last night, in
spite of mosquitoes and fleas, when I was roused by much talking and loud
outcries of poultry; and Ito, carrying a screaming, refractory hen, and
a man and woman whom he had with difficulty bribed to part with it, appeared
by my bed. I feebly said I would have it boiled for breakfast, but when
Ito called me this morning he told me with a most rueful face that just
as he was going to kill it it had escaped to the woods!In order to understand
my feelings you must have experienced what it is not to have tasted fish,
flesh, or fowl, for ten days!The alternative was eggs and some of the paste
which the man was treading yesterday on the mat cut into strips and boiled!It
was coarse flour and buckwheat, so, you see, I have learned not to be particular!
I. L. B.
The villages of that district must, I think, have
reached the lowest abyss of filthiness in Hozawa and Saikaiyama. Fowls,
dogs, horses, and people herded together in sheds black with wood smoke,
and manure heaps drained into the wells. No young boy wore any clothing.
Few of the men wore anything but the maro, the women were unclothed to
their waists and such clothing as they had was very dirty, and held together
by mere force of habit. The adults were covered with inflamed bites of
insects, and the children with skin-disease. Their houses were dirty, and,
as they squatted on their heels, or lay face downwards, they looked little
better than savages. Their appearance and the want of delicacy of their
habits are simply abominable, and in the latter respect they contrast to
great disadvantage with several savage peoples that I have been among.
If I had kept to Nikko, Hakone, Miyanoshita, and similar places visited
by foreigners with less time, I should have formed a very different impression.
Is their spiritual condition, I often wonder, much higher than their physical
one? They are courteous, kindly, industrious, and free from gross crimes;
but, from the conversations that I have had with Japanese, and from much
that I see, I judge that their standard of foundational morality is very
low, and that life is neither truthful nor pure.
I put up here at a crowded yadoya, where they have
given me two cheerful rooms in the garden, away from the crowd. Ito’s great
desire on arriving at any place is to shut me up in my room and keep me
a close prisoner till the start the next morning; but here I emancipated
myself, and enjoyed myself very much sitting in the daidokoro. The house-master
is of the samurai, or two-sworded class, now, as such, extinct. His face
is longer, his lips thinner, and his nose straighter and more prominent
than those of the lower class, and there is a difference in his manner
and bearing. I have had a great deal of interesting conversation with him.
In the same open space his clerk was writing at
a lacquer desk of the stereotyped form—a low bench with the ends rolled
over—a woman was tailoring, coolies were washing their feet on the itama,
and several more were squatting round the irori smoking and drinking tea.
A coolie servant washed some rice for my dinner, but before doing so took
off his clothes, and the woman who cooked it let her kimono fall to her
waist before she began to work, as is customary among respectable women.
The house-master’s wife and Ito talked about me unguardedly. I asked what
they were saying. “She says,” said he, “that you are very polite—for a
foreigner,” he added. I asked what she meant, and found that it was because
I took off my boots before I stepped on the matting, and bowed when they
handed me the tabako-bon.
We walked through the town to find something eatable
for to- morrow’s river journey, but only succeeded in getting wafers made
of white of egg and sugar, balls made of sugar and barley flour, and beans
coated with sugar. Thatch, with its picturesqueness, has disappeared, and
the Tsugawa roofs are of strips of bark weighted with large stones; but,
as the houses turn their gable ends to the street, and there is a promenade
the whole way under the eaves, and the street turns twice at right angles
and terminates in temple grounds on a bank above the river, it is less
monotonous than most Japanese towns. It is a place of 3000 people, and
a good deal of produce is shipped from hence to Niigata by the river. To-day
it is thronged with pack-horses. I was much mobbed, and one child formed
the solitary exception to the general rule of politeness by calling me
a name equivalent to the Chinese Fan Kwai, “foreign;” but he was severely
chidden, and a policeman has just called with an apology. A slice of fresh
salmon has been produced, and I think I never tasted anything so delicious.
I have finished the first part of my land journey, and leave for Niigata
by boat to-morrow morning.
I. L. B.
The boat had a thoroughly “native” look, with its
bronzed crew, thatched roof, and the umbrella hats of all its passengers
hanging on the mast. I enjoyed every hour of the day. It was luxury to
drop quietly down the stream, the air was delicious, and, having heard
nothing of it, the beauty of the Tsugawa came upon me as a pleasant surprise,
besides that every mile brought me nearer the hoped-for home letters. Almost
as soon as we left Tsugawa the downward passage was apparently barred by
fantastic mountains, which just opened their rocky gates wide enough to
let us through, and then closed again. Pinnacles and needles of bare, flushed
rock rose out of luxuriant vegetation—Quiraing without its bareness, the
Rhine without its ruins, and more beautiful than both. There were mountains
connected by ridges no broader than a horse’s back, others with great gray
buttresses, deep chasms cleft by streams, temples with pagoda roofs on
heights, sunny villages with deep- thatched roofs hidden away among blossoming
trees, and through rifts in the nearer ranges glimpses of snowy mountains.
After a rapid run of twelve miles through this enchanting
scenery, the remaining course of the Tsugawa is that of a broad, full stream
winding marvelously through a wooded and tolerably level country, partially
surrounded by snowy mountains. The river life was very pretty. Canoes abounded,
some loaded with vegetables, some with wheat, others with boys and girls
returning from school. Sampans with their white puckered sails in flotillas
of a dozen at a time crawled up the deep water, or were towed through the
shallows by crews frolicking and shouting. Then the scene changed to a
broad and deep river, with a peculiar alluvial smell from the quantity
of vegetable matter held in suspension, flowing calmly between densely
wooded, bamboo-fringed banks, just high enough to conceal the surrounding
country. No houses, or nearly none, are to be seen, but signs of a continuity
of population abound. Every hundred yards almost there is a narrow path
to the river through the jungle, with a canoe moored at its foot. Erections
like gallows, with a swinging bamboo, with a bucket at one end and a stone
at the other, occurring continually, show the vicinity of households dependent
upon the river for their water supply. Wherever the banks admitted of it,
horses were being washed by having water poured over their backs with a
dipper, naked children were rolling in the mud, and cackling of poultry,
human voices, and sounds of industry, were ever floating towards us from
the dense greenery of the shores, making one feel without seeing that the
margin was very populous. Except the boatmen and myself, no one was awake
during the hot, silent afternoon—it was dreamy and delicious. Occasionally,
as we floated down, vineyards were visible with the vines trained on horizontal
trellises, or bamboo rails, often forty feet long, nailed horizontally
on cryptomeria to a height of twenty feet, on which small sheaves of barley
were placed astride to dry till the frame was full
More forest, more dreams, then the forest and the
abundant vegetation altogether disappeared, the river opened out among
low lands and banks of shingle and sand, and by three we were on the outskirts
of Niigata, whose low houses,--with rows of stones upon their roofs, spread
over a stretch of sand, beyond which is a sandy roll with some clumps of
firs. Tea-houses with many balconies studded the river-side, and pleasure-parties
were enjoying themselves with geishas and sake, but, on the whole, the
water-side streets are shabby and tumble down, and the landward side of
the great city of western Japan is certainly disappointing; and it was
difficult to believe it a Treaty Port, for the sea was not in sight, and
there were no consular flags flying. We poled along one of the numerous
canals, which are the carriage-ways for produce and goods, among hundreds
of loaded boats, landed in the heart of the city, and, as the result of
repeated inquiries, eventually reached the Church Mission House, an unshaded
wooden building without verandahs, close to the Government Buildings, where
I was most kindly welcomed by Mr. and Mrs. Fyson.
The house is plain, simple, and inconveniently small;
but doors and walls are great luxuries, and you cannot imagine how pleasing
the ways of a refined European household are after the eternal babblement
and indecorum of the Japanese.
ITINERARY OF ROUTE FROM NIKKO TO NIIGATA
(Kinugawa Route.)
From Tokyo to
No. of houses.Ri.
Cho Nikko36
Kohiaku6218
Kisagoi19118
Fujihara46219
Takahara15210
Ikari252
Nakamiyo10124
Yokokawa2O0221
Itosawa38234
Kayashima5714
Tajima250121
Toyonari120212
Atomi341
Ouchi27212
Ichikawa7222
Takata420211
Bange91034
Katakado50120
Nosawa306324
Nojiri110127
Kurumatoge39
Hozawa20114
Torige211
Sakaiyama2824
Tsugawa615218
Niigata50,000 souls18Ri. 1016 About 247 miles.
Niigata is a Treaty Port without foreign trade, and
almost without foreign residents. Not a foreign ship visited the port either
last year or this. There are only two foreign firms, and these are German,
and only eighteen foreigners, of which number, except the missionaries,
nearly all are in Government employment. Its river, the Shinano, is the
largest in Japan, and it and its affluents bring down a prodigious volume
of water. But Japanese rivers are much choked with sand and shingle washed
down from the mountains. In all that I have seen, except those which are
physically limited by walls of hard rock, a river-bed is a waste of sand,
boulders, and shingle, through the middle of which, among sand-banks and
shallows, the river proper takes its devious course. In the freshets, which
occur to a greater or less extent every year, enormous volumes of water
pour over these wastes, carrying sand and detritus down to the mouths,
which are all obstructed by bars. Of these rivers the Shinano, being the
biggest, is the most refractory, and has piled up a bar at its entrance
through which there is only a passage seven feet deep, which is perpetually
shallowing. The minds of engineers are much exercised upon the Shinano,
and the Government is most anxious to deepen the channel and give Western
Japan what it has not—a harbor; but the expense of the necessary operation
is enormous, and in the meantime a limited ocean traffic is carried on
by junks and by a few small Japanese steamers which call outside. {13}There
is a British Vice-Consulate, but, except as a step, few would accept such
a dreary post or outpost.
But Niigata is a handsome, prosperous city of 50,000
inhabitants, the capital of the wealthy province of Echigo, with a population
of one and a half millions, and is the seat of the Kenrei, or provincial
governor, of the chief law courts, of fine schools, a hospital, and barracks.
It is curious to find in such an excluded town a school deserving the designation
of a college, as it includes intermediate, primary, and normal schools,
an English school with 150 pupils, organized by English and American teachers,
an engineering school, a geological museum, splendidly equipped laboratories,
and the newest and most approved scientific and educational apparatus.
The Government Buildings, which are grouped near Mr. Fyson’s, are of painted
white wood, and are imposing from their size and their innumerable glass
windows. There is a large hospital {14} arranged by
a European doctor, with a medical school attached, and it, the Kencho,
the Saibancho, or Court House, the schools, the barracks, and a large bank,
which is rivalling them all, have a go-ahead, Europeanized look, bold,
staring, and tasteless. There are large public gardens, very well laid
out, and with finely graveled walks. There are 300 street lamps, which
burn the mineral oil of the district.
Yet, because the riotous Shinano persistently bars
it out from the sea, its natural highway, the capital of one of the richest
provinces of Japan is “left out in the cold,” and the province itself,
which yields not only rice, silk, tea, hemp, ninjin, and indigo, in large
quantities, but gold, copper, coal, and petroleum, has to send most of
its produce to Yedo across ranges of mountains, on the backs of pack-horses,
by roads scarcely less infamous than the one by which I came.
The Niigata of the Government, with its signs of progress
in a western direction, is quite unattractive-looking as compared with
the genuine Japanese Niigata, which is the neatest, cleanest, and most
comfortable-looking town I have yet seen, and altogether free from the
jostlement of a foreign settlement. It is renowned for the beautiful tea-houses,
which attract visitors from distant places, and for the excellence of the
theaters, and is the center of the recreation and pleasure of a large district.
It is so beautifully clean that, as at Nikko, I should feel reluctant to
walk upon its well-swept streets in muddy boots. It would afford a good
lesson to the Edinburgh authorities, for every vagrant bit of straw, stick,
or paper, is at once pounced upon and removed, and no rubbish may stand
for an instant in its streets except in a covered box or bucket. It is
correctly laid out in square divisions, formed by five streets over a mile
long, crossed by very numerous short ones, and is intersected by canals,
which are its real roadways. I have not seen a pack-horse in the streets;
everything comes in by boat, and there are few houses in the city which
cannot have their goods delivered by canal very near to their doors. These
water-ways are busy all day, but in the early morning, when the boats come
in loaded with the vegetables, without which the people could not exist
for a day, the bustle is indescribable. The cucumber boats just now are
the great sight. The canals are usually in the middle of the streets, and
have fairly broad roadways on both sides. They are much below the street
level, and their nearly perpendicular banks are neatly faced with wood,
broken at intervals by flights of stairs. They are bordered by trees, among
which are many weeping willows; and, as the river water runs through them,
keeping them quite sweet, and they are crossed at short intervals by light
bridges, they form a very attractive feature of Niigata.
The houses have very steep roofs of shingle, weighted
with stones, and, as they are of very irregular heights, and all turn the
steep gables of the upper stories streetwards, the town has a picturesqueness
very unusual in Japan. The deep verandahs are connected all along the streets,
so as to form a sheltered promenade when the snow lies deep in winter.
With its canals with their avenues of trees, its fine public gardens, and
clean, picturesque streets, it is a really attractive town; but its improvements
are recent, and were only lately completed by Mr. Masakata Kusumoto, now
Governor of Tokyo. There is no appearance of poverty in any part of the
town, but if there be wealth, it is carefully concealed. One marked feature
of the city is the number of streets of dwelling-houses with projecting
windows of wooden slats, through which the people can see without being
seen, though at night, when the andons are lit, we saw, as we walked from
Dr. Palm’s, that in most cases families were sitting round the hibachi
in a dishabille of the scantiest kind.
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.
I have walked about a great deal in Niigata, and when
with Mrs. Fyson, who is the only European lady here at present, and her
little Ruth, a pretty Saxon child of three years old, we have been followed
by an immense crowd, as the sight of this fair creature, with golden curls
falling over her shoulders, is most fascinating. Both men and women have
gentle, winning ways with infants, and Ruth, instead of being afraid of
the crowds, smiles upon them, bows in Japanese fashion, speaks to them
in Japanese, and seems a little disposed to leave her own people altogether.
It is most difficult to make her keep with us, and two or three times,
on missing her and looking back, we have seen her seated, native fashion,
in a ring in a crowd of several hundred people, receiving a homage and
admiration from which she was most unwillingly torn. The Japanese have
a perfect passion for children, but it is not good for European children
to be much with them, as they corrupt their morals, and teach them to tell
lies.
The climate of Niigata and of most of this great province contrasts unpleasantly with the region on the other side of the mountains, warmed by the gulf-stream of the North Pacific, in which the autumn and winter, with their still atmosphere, bracing temperature, and blue and sunny skies, are the most delightful seasons of the year. Thirty-two days of snow-fall occur on an average. The canals and rivers freeze, and even the rapid Shinano sometimes bears a horse. In January and February the snow lies three or four feet deep, a veil of clouds obscures the sky, people inhabit their upper rooms to get any daylight, pack-horse traffic is suspended, pedestrians go about with difficulty in rough snow-shoes, and for nearly six months the coast is unsuitable for navigation, owing to the prevalence of strong, cold, north-west winds. In this city people in wadded clothes, with only their eyes exposed, creep about under the verandahs. The population huddles round hibachis and shivers, for the mercury, which rises to 92 degrees in summer, falls to 15 degrees in winter. And all this is in latitude 37 degrees 55’—three degrees south of Naples!
I. L. B.
Though we were all day drawing nearer to mountains
wooded to their summits on the east, the amount of vegetation was not burdensome,
the rice swamps were few, and the air felt drier and less relaxing. As
my runners were trotting merrily over one of the pine barrens, I met Dr.
Palm returning from one of his medico-religious expeditions, with a tandem
of two naked coolies, who were going over the ground at a great pace, and
I wished that some of the most staid directors of the Edinburgh Medical
Missionary Society could have the shock of seeing him!I shall not see a
European again for some weeks. From Tsuiji, a very neat village, where
we changed kurumas, we were jolted along over a shingly road to Nakajo,
a considerable town just within treaty limits. The Japanese doctors there,
as in some other places, are Dr. Palm’s cordial helpers, and five or six
of them, whom he regards as possessing the rare virtues of candour, earnestness,
and single-mindedness, and who have studied English medical works, have
clubbed together to establish a dispensary, and, under Dr. Palm’s instructions,
are even carrying out the antiseptic treatment successfully, after some
ludicrous failures!
We dashed through Nakajo as kuruma-runners always
dash through towns and villages, got out of it in a drizzle upon an avenue
of firs, three or four deep, which extends from Nakajo to Kurokawa, and
for some miles beyond were jolted over a damp valley on which tea and rice
alternated, crossed two branches of the shingly Kurokawa on precarious
bridges, rattled into the town of Kurokawa, much decorated with flags and
lanterns, where the people were all congregated at a shrine where there
was much drumming, and a few girls, much painted and bedizened, were dancing
or posturing on a raised and covered platform, in honor of the god of the
place, whose matsuri or festival it was; and out again, to be mercilessly
jolted under the firs in the twilight to a solitary house where the owner
made some difficulty about receiving us, as his licence did not begin till
the next day, but eventually succumbed, and gave me his one upstairs room,
exactly five feet high, which hardly allowed of my standing upright with
my hat on. He then rendered it suffocating by closing the amado, for the
reason often given, that if he left them open and the house was robbed,
the police would not only blame him severely, but would not take any trouble
to recover his property. He had no rice, so I indulged in a feast of delicious
cucumbers. I never saw so many eaten as in that district. Children gnaw
them all day long, and even babies on their mothers’ backs suck them with
avidity. Just now they are sold for a sen a dozen.
It is a mistake to arrive at a yadoya after dark.
Even if the best rooms are not full it takes fully an hour to get my food
and the room ready, and meanwhile I cannot employ my time usefully because
of the mosquitoes. There was heavy rain all night, accompanied by the first
wind that I have heard since landing; and the fitful creaking of the pines
and the drumming from the shrine made me glad to get up at sunrise, or
rather at daylight, for there has not been a sunrise since I came, or a
sunset either. That day we traveled by Sekki to Kawaguchi in kurumas, i.e.
we were sometimes bumped over stones, sometimes deposited on the edge of
a quagmire, and asked to get out; and sometimes compelled to walk for two
or three miles at a time along the infamous bridle-track above the river
Arai, up which two men could hardly push and haul an empty vehicle; and,
as they often had to lift them bodily and carry them for some distance,
I was really glad when we reached the village of Kawaguchi to find that
they could go no farther, though, as we could only get one horse, I had
to walk the last stage in a torrent of rain, poorly protected by my paper
waterproof cloak.
We are now in the midst of the great central chain
of the Japanese mountains, which extends almost without a break for 900
miles, and is from 40 to 100 miles in width, broken up into interminable
ranges traversable only by steep passes from 1000 to 5000 feet in height,
with innumerable rivers, ravines, and valleys, the heights and ravines
heavily timbered, the rivers impetuous and liable to freshets, and the
valleys invariably terraced for rice. It is in the valleys that the villages
are found, and regions more isolated I have never seen, shut out by bad
roads from the rest of Japan. The houses are very poor, the summer costume
of the men consists of the maro only, and that of the women of trousers
with an open shirt, and when we reached Kurosawa last night it had dwindled
to trousers only. There is little traffic, and very few horses are kept,
one, two, or three constituting the live stock of a large village. The
shops, such as they are, contain the barest necessaries of life. Millet
and buckwheat rather than rice, with the universal daikon, are the staples
of diet The climate is wet in summer and bitterly cold in winter. Even
now it is comfortless enough for the people to come in wet, just to warm
the tips of their fingers at the irori, stifled the while with the stinging
smoke, while the damp wind flaps the torn paper of the windows about, and
damp draughts sweep the ashes over the tatami until the house is hermetically
sealed at night. These people never know anything of what we regard as
comfort, and in the long winter, when the wretched bridle-tracks are blocked
by snow and the freezing wind blows strong, and the families huddle round
the smoky fire by the doleful glimmer of the andon, without work, books,
or play, to shiver through the long evenings in chilly dreariness, and
herd together for warmth at night like animals, their condition must be
as miserable as anything short of grinding poverty can make it.
I saw things at their worst that night as I tramped
into the hamlet of Numa, down whose sloping street a swollen stream was
running, which the people were banking out of their houses. I was wet and
tired, and the woman at the one wretched yadoya met me, saying, “I’m sorry
it’s very dirty and quite unfit for so honorable a guest;” and she was
right, for the one room was up a ladder, the windows were in tatters, there
was no charcoal for a hibachi, no eggs, and the rice was so dirty and so
full of a small black seed as to be unfit to eat. Worse than all, there
was no Transport Office, the hamlet did not possess a horse, and it was
only by sending to a farmer five miles off, and by much bargaining, that
I got on the next morning. In estimating the number of people in a given
number of houses in Japan, it is usual to multiply the houses by five,
but I had the curiosity to walk through Numa and get Ito to translate the
tallies which hang outside all Japanese houses with the names, number,
and sexes of their inmates, and in twenty- four houses there were 307 people!In
some there were four families—the grand-parents, the parents, the eldest
son with his wife and family, and a daughter or two with their husbands
and children. The eldest son, who inherits the house and land, almost invariably
brings his wife to his father’s house, where she often becomes little better
than a slave to her mother-in-law. By rigid custom she literally forsakes
her own kindred, and her “filial duty” is transferred to her husband’s
mother, who often takes a dislike to her, and instigates her son to divorce
her if she has no children. My hostess had induced her son to divorce his
wife, and she could give no better reason for it than that she was lazy.
The Numa people, she said, had never seen a foreigner,
so, though the rain still fell heavily, they were astir in the early morning.
They wanted to hear me speak, so I gave my orders to Ito in public. Yesterday
was a most toilsome day, mainly spent in stumbling up and sliding down
the great passes of Futai, Takanasu, and Yenoiki, all among forest-covered
mountains, deeply cleft by forest-choked ravines, with now and then one
of the snowy peaks of Aidzu breaking the monotony of the ocean of green.
The horses’ shoes were tied and untied every few minutes, and we made just
a mile an hour!At last we were deposited in a most unpromising place in
the hamlet of Tamagawa, and were told that a rice merchant, after waiting
for three days, had got every horse in the country. At the end of two hours’
chaffering one baggage coolie was produced, some of the things were put
on the rice horses, and a steed with a pack-saddle was produced for me
in the shape of a plump and pretty little cow, which carried me safely
over the magnificent pass of Ori and down to the town of Okimi, among rice-fields,
where, in a drowning rain, I was glad to get shelter with a number of coolies
by a wood-fire till another pack-cow was produced, and we walked on through
the rice-fields and up into the hills again to Kurosawa, where I had intended
to remain; but there was no inn, and the farm-house where they take in
travelers, besides being on the edge of a malarious pond, and being dark
and full of stinging smoke, was so awfully dirty and full of living creatures,
that, exhausted as I was, I was obliged to go on. But it was growing dark,
there was no Transport Office, and for the first time the people were very
slightly extortionate, and drove Ito nearly to his wits’ end. The peasants
do not like to be out after dark, for they are afraid of ghosts and all
sorts of devilments, and it was difficult to induce them to start so late
in the evening.
There was not a house clean enough to rest in, so
I sat on a stone and thought about the people for over an hour. Children
with scald-head, scabies, and sore eyes swarmed. Every woman carried a
baby on her back, and every child who could stagger under one carried one
too. Not one woman wore anything but cotton trousers. One woman reeled
about “drunk and disorderly.” Ito sat on a stone hiding his face in his
hands, and when I asked him if he were ill, he replied in a most lamentable
voice, “I don’t know what I am to do, I’m so ashamed for you to see such
things!”The boy is only eighteen, and I pitied him. I asked him if women
were often drunk, and he said they were in Yokohama, but they usually kept
in their houses. He says that when their husbands give them money to pay
bills at the end of a month, they often spend it in sake, and that they
sometimes get sake in shops and have it put down as rice or tea. “The old,
old story!”I looked at the dirt and barbarism, and asked if this were the
Japan of which I had read. Yet a woman in this unseemly costume firmly
refused to take the 2 or 3 sen which it is usual to leave at a place where
you rest, because she said that I had had water and not tea, and after
I had forced it on her, she returned it to Ito, and this redeeming incident
sent me away much comforted.
From Numa the distance here is only 1.5 ri, but it
is over the steep pass of Honoki, which is ascended and descended by hundreds
of rude stone steps, not pleasant in the dark. On this pass I saw birches
for the first time; at its foot we entered Yamagata ken by a good bridge,
and shortly reached this village, in which an unpromising-looking farm-house
is the only accommodation; but though all the rooms but two are taken up
with silk-worms, those two are very good and look upon a miniature lake
and rockery. The one objection to my room is that to get either in or out
of it I must pass through the other, which is occupied by five tobacco
merchants who are waiting for transport, and who while away the time by
strumming on that instrument of dismay, the samisen. No horses or cows
can be got for me, so I am spending the day quietly here, rather glad to
rest, for I am much exhausted. When I am suffering much from my spine Ito
always gets into a fright and thinks I am going to die, as he tells me
when I am better, but shows his anxiety by a short, surly manner, which
is most disagreeable. He thinks we shall never get through the interior!
Mr. Brunton’s excellent map fails in this region, so it is only by fixing
on the well-known city of Yamagata and devising routes to it that we get
on. Half the evening is spent in consulting Japanese maps, if we can get
them, and in questioning the house-master and Transport Agent, and any
chance travelers; but the people know nothing beyond the distance of a
few ri, and the agents seldom tell one anything beyond the next stage.
When I inquire about the “unbeaten tracks” that I wish to take, the answers
are, “It’s an awful road through mountains,” or “There are many bad rivers
to cross,” or “There are none but farmers’ houses to stop at.” No encouragement
is ever given, but we get on, and shall get on, I doubt not, though the
hardships are not what I would desire in my present state of health.
Very few horses are kept here. Cows and coolies carry
much of the merchandise, and women as well as men carry heavy loads. A
baggage coolie carries about 50 lbs., but here merchants carrying their
own goods from Yamagata actually carry from 90 to 140 lbs., and even more.
It is sickening to meet these poor fellows struggling over the mountain-passes
in evident distress. Last night five of them were resting on the summit
ridge of a pass gasping violently. Their eyes were starting out; all their
muscles, rendered painfully visible by their leanness, were quivering;
rills of blood from the bite of insects, which they cannot drive away,
were literally running all over their naked bodies, washed away here and
there by copious perspiration. Truly “in the sweat of their brows” they
were eating bread and earning an honest living for their families! Suffering
and hard-worked as they were, they were quite independent. I have not seen
a beggar or beggary in this strange country. The women were carrying 70
lbs. These burden-bearers have their backs covered by a thick pad of plaited
straw. On this rests a ladder, curved up at the lower end like the runners
of a sleigh. On this the load is carefully packed till it extends from
below the man’s waist to a considerable height above his head. It is covered
with waterproof paper, securely roped, and thatched with straw, and is
supported by a broad padded band just below the collar bones. Of course,
as the man walks nearly bent double, and the position is a very painful
one, he requires to stop and straighten himself frequently, and unless
he meets with a bank of convenient height, he rests the bottom of his burden
on a short, stout pole with an L-shaped top, carried for this purpose.
The carrying of enormous loads is quite a feature of this region, and so,
I am sorry to say, are red stinging ants and the small gadflies which molest
the coolies.
Yesterday’s journey was 18 miles in twelve hours!Ichinono
is a nice, industrious hamlet, given up, like all others, to rearing silk-worms,
and the pure white and sulfur yellow cocoons are drying on mats in the
sun everywhere.
I. L. B.
We crossed the Sakuratoge, from which the view is
beautiful, got horses at the mountain village of Shirakasawa, crossed more
passes, and in the afternoon reached the village of Tenoko. There, as usual,
I sat under the verandah of the Transport Office, and waited for the one
horse which was available. It was a large shop, but contained not a single
article of European make. In the one room a group of women and children
sat round the fire, and the agent sat as usual with a number of ledgers
at a table a foot high, on which his grandchild was lying on a cushion.
Here Ito dined on seven dishes of horrors, and they brought me sake, tea,
rice, and black beans. The last are very good. We had some talk about the
country, and the man asked me to write his name in English characters,
and to write my own in a book. Meanwhile a crowd assembled, and the front
row sat on the ground that the others might see over their heads. They
were dirty and pressed very close, and when the women of the house saw
that I felt the heat they gracefully produced fans and fanned me for a
whole hour. On asking the charge they refused to make any, and would not
receive anything. They had not seen a foreigner before, they said, they
would despise themselves for taking anything, they had my “honorable name”
in their book. Not only that, but they put up a parcel of sweetmeats, and
the man wrote his name on a fan and insisted on my accepting it. I was
grieved to have nothing to give them but some English pins, but they had
never seen such before, and soon circulated them among the crowd. I told
them truly that I should remember them as long as I remember Japan, and
went on, much touched by their kindness.
The lofty pass of Utsu, which is ascended and descended
by a number of stone slabs, is the last of the passes of these choked-up
ranges. From its summit in the welcome sunlight I joyfully looked down
upon the noble plain of Yonezawa, about 30 miles long and from 10 to 18
broad, one of the gardens of Japan, wooded and watered, covered with prosperous
towns and villages, surrounded by magnificent mountains not altogether
timbered, and bounded at its southern extremity by ranges white with snow
even in the middle of July.
In the long street of the farming village of Matsuhara
a man amazed me by running in front of me and speaking to me, and on Ito
coming up, he assailed him vociferously, and it turned out that he took
me for an Aino, one of the subjugated aborigines of Hokkaido (Yezo). I
have before now been taken for a Chinese!
Throughout the province of Echigo I have occasionally
seen a piece of cotton cloth suspended by its four corners from four bamboo
poles just above a quiet stream. Behind it there is usually a long narrow
tablet, notched at the top, similar to those seen in cemeteries, with characters
upon it. Sometimes bouquets of flowers are placed in the hollow top of
each bamboo, and usually there are characters on the cloth itself. Within
it always lies a wooden dipper. In coming down from Tenoko I passed one
of these close to the road, and a Buddhist priest was at the time pouring
a dipper full of water into it, which strained slowly through. As he was
going our way we joined him, and he explained its meaning.
According to him the tablet bears on it the kaimiyo,
or posthumous name of a woman. The flowers have the same significance as
those which loving hands place on the graves of kindred. If there are characters
on the cloth, they represent the well-known invocation of the Nichiren
sect, Namu mio ho ren ge kio. The pouring of the water into the cloth,
often accompanied by telling the beads on a rosary, is a prayer. The whole
is called “The Flowing Invocation.” I
have seldom seen anything more plaintively affecting, for it denotes that
a mother in the first joy of maternity has passed away to suffer (according
to popular belief) in the Lake of Blood, one of the Buddhist hells, for
a sin committed in a former state of being, and it appeals to every passer-by
to shorten the penalties of a woman in anguish, for in that lake she must
remain until the cloth is so utterly worn out that the water falls through
it at once.
Where the mountains come down upon the plain of
Yonezawa there are several raised banks, and you can take one step from
the hillside to a dead level. The soil is dry and gravelly at the junction,
ridges of pines appeared, and the look of the houses suggested increased
cleanliness and comfort. A walk of six miles took us from Tenoko to Komatsu,
a beautifully situated town of 3000 people, with a large trade in cotton
goods, silk, and sake.
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. Fusuma of wrinkled blue
paper splashed with gold turned this “gallery” into two rooms; but there
was no privacy, for the crowds climbed upon the roofs at the back, and
sat there patiently until night.
These were daimyo’s rooms. The posts and ceilings
were ebony and gold, the mats very fine, the polished alcoves decorated
with inlaid writing-tables and sword-racks; spears nine feet long, with
handles of lacquer inlaid with Venus’ ear, hung in the verandah, the washing
bowl was fine inlaid black lacquer, and the rice-bowls and their covers
were gold lacquer.
In this, as in many other yadoyas, there were kakemonos
with large Chinese characters representing the names of the Prime Minister,
Provincial Governor, or distinguished General, who had honoured it by halting
there, and lines of poetry were hung up, as is usual, in the same fashion.
I have several times been asked to write something to be thus displayed.
I spent Sunday at Komatsu, but not restfully, owing to the nocturnal croaking
of the frogs in the pond. In it, as in most towns, there were shops which
sell nothing but white, frothy-looking cakes, which are used for the goldfish
which are so much prized, and three times daily the women and children
of the household came into the garden to feed them.
When I left Komatsu there were fully sixty people
inside the house and 1500 outside—walls, verandahs, and even roofs being
packed. From Nikko to Komatsu mares had been exclusively used, but there
I encountered for the first time the terrible Japanese pack-horse. Two
horridly fierce-looking creatures were at the door, with their heads tied
down till their necks were completely arched. When I mounted the crowd
followed, gathering as it went, frightening the horse with the clatter
of clogs and the sound of a multitude, till he broke his head-rope, and,
the frightened mago letting him go, he proceeded down the street mainly
on his hind feet, squealing, and striking savagely with his fore feet,
the crowd scattering to the right and left, till, as it surged past the
police station, four policemen came out and arrested it; only to gather
again, however, for there was a longer street, down which my horse proceeded
in the same fashion, and, looking round, I saw Ito’s horse on his hind
legs and Ito on the ground. My beast jumped over all ditches, attacked
all foot-passengers with his teeth, and behaved so like a wild animal that
not all my previous acquaintance with the idiosyncrasies of horses enabled
me to cope with him. On reaching Akayu we found a horse fair, and, as all
the horses had their heads tightly tied down to posts, they could only
squeal and lash out with their hind feet, which so provoked our animals
that the baggage horse, by a series of jerks and rearings, divested himself
of Ito and most of the baggage, and, as I dismounted from mine, he stood
upright, and my foot catching I fell on the ground, when he made several
vicious dashes at me with his teeth and fore feet, which were happily frustrated
by the dexterity of some mago. These beasts forcibly remind me of the words,
“Whose mouth must be held with bit and bridle, lest they turn and fall
upon thee.”
It was a lovely summer day, though very hot, and
the snowy peaks of Aidzu scarcely looked cool as they glittered in the
sunlight. The plain of Yonezawa, with the prosperous town of Yonezawa in
the south, and the frequented watering-place of Akayu in the north, is
a perfect garden of Eden, “tilled with a pencil instead of a plough,” growing
in rich profusion rice, cotton, maize, tobacco, hemp, indigo, beans, egg-plants,
walnuts, melons, cucumbers, persimmons, apricots, pomegranates; a smiling
and plenteous land, an Asiatic Arcadia, prosperous and independent, all
its bounteous acres belonging to those who cultivate them, who live under
their vines, figs, and pomegranates, free from oppression—a remarkable
spectacle under an Asiatic despotism. Yet still Daikoku is the chief deity,
and material good is the one object of desire.
It is an enchanting region of beauty, industry,
and comfort, mountain girdled, and watered by the bright Matsuka. Everywhere
there are prosperous and beautiful farming villages, with large houses
with carved beams and ponderous tiled roofs, each standing in its own grounds,
buried among persimmons and pomegranates, with flower-gardens under trellised
vines, and privacy secured by high, closely-clipped screens of pomegranate
and cryptomeria. Besides the villages of Yoshida, Semoshima, Kurokawa,
Takayama, and Takataki, through or near which we passed, I counted over
fifty on the plain with their brown, sweeping barn roofs looking out from
the woodland. I cannot see any differences in the style of cultivation.
Yoshida is rich and prosperous-looking, Numa poor and wretched-looking;
but the scanty acres of Numa, rescued from the mountain-sides, are as exquisitely
trim and neat, as perfectly cultivated, and yield as abundantly of the
crops which suit the climate, as the broad acres of the sunny plain of
Yonezawa, and this is the case everywhere. “The field of the sluggard”
has no existence in Japan.
We rode for four hours through these beautiful villages
on a road four feet wide, and then, to my surprise, after ferrying a river,
emerged at Tsukuno upon what appears on the map as a secondary road, but
which is in reality a main road 25 feet wide, well kept, trenched on both
sides, and with a line of telegraph poles along it. It was a new world
at once. The road for many miles was thronged with well-dressed foot-passengers,
kurumas, pack-horses, and wagons either with solid wheels, or wheels with
spokes but no tires. It is a capital carriage-road, but without carriages.
In such civilized circumstances it was curious to see two or four brown
skinned men pulling the carts, and quite often a man and his wife—the man
unclothed, and the woman unclothed to her waist—doing the same. Also it
struck me as incongruous to see telegraph wires above, and below, men whose
only clothing consisted of a sun- hat and fan; while children with books
and slates were returning from school, conning their lessons.
At Akayu, a town of hot sulfur springs, I hoped
to sleep, but it was one of the noisiest places I have seen. In the most
crowded part, where four streets meet, there are bathing sheds, which were
full of people of both sexes, splashing loudly, and the yadoya close to
it had about forty rooms, in nearly all of which several rheumatic people
were lying on the mats, samisens were twanging, and kotos screeching, and
the hubbub was so unbearable that I came on here, ten miles farther, by
a fine new road, up an uninteresting strath of rice-fields and low hills,
which opens out upon a small plain surrounded by elevated gravelly hills,
on the slope of one of which Kaminoyama, a watering-place of over 3000
people, is pleasantly situated. It is keeping festival; there are lanterns
and flags on every house, and crowds are thronging the temple grounds,
of which there are several on the hills above. It is a clean, dry place,
with beautiful yadoyas on the heights, and pleasant houses with gardens,
and plenty of walks over the hills. The people say that it is one of the
driest places in Japan. If it were within reach of foreigners, they would
find it a wholesome health resort, with picturesque excursions in many
directions.
This is one of the great routes of Japanese travel,
and it is interesting to see watering-places with their habits, amusements,
and civilization quite complete, but borrowing nothing from Europe. The
hot springs here contain iron, and are strongly impregnated with sulphuretted
hydrogen. I tried the temperature of three, and found them 100 degrees,
105 degrees, and 107 degrees. They are supposed to be very valuable in
rheumatism, and they attract visitors from great distances. The police,
who are my frequent informants, tell me that there are nearly 600 people
now staying here for the benefit of the baths, of which six daily are usually
taken. I think that in rheumatism, as in some other maladies, the old-fashioned
Japanese doctors pay little attention to diet and habits, and much to drugs
and external applications. The benefit of these and other medicinal waters
would be much increased if vigorous friction replaced the dabbing with
soft towels.
This is a large yadoya, very full of strangers,
and the house- mistress, a buxom and most prepossessing widow, has a truly
exquisite hotel for bathers higher up the hill. She has eleven children,
two or three of whom are tall, handsome, and graceful girls. One blushed
deeply at my evident admiration, but was not displeased, and took me up
the hill to see the temples, baths, and yadoyas of this very attractive
place. I am much delighted with her grace and savoir faire. I asked the
widow how long she had kept the inn, and she proudly answered, “Three hundred
years,” not an uncommon instance of the heredity of occupations.
My accommodation is unique—a kura, or godown, in
a large conventional garden, in which is a bath-house, which receives a
hot spring at a temperature of 105 degrees, in which I luxuriate. Last
night the mosquitoes were awful. If the widow and her handsome girls had
not fanned me perseveringly for an hour, I should not have been able to
write a line. My new mosquito net succeeds admirably, and, when I am once
within it, I rather enjoy the disappointment of the hundreds of drumming
blood-thirsty wretches outside.
The widow tells me that house-masters pay 2 yen
once for all for the sign, and an annual tax of 2 yen on a first-class
yadoya, 1 yen for a second, and 50 cents for a third, with 5 yen for the
license to sell sake.
These “godowns” (from the Malay word gadong), or
fire-proof store- houses, are one of the most marked features of Japanese
towns, both because they are white where all else is gray, and because
they are solid where all else is perishable.
I am lodged in the lower part, but the iron doors are open, and in their place at night is a paper screen. A few things are kept in my room. Two handsome shrines from which the unemotional faces of two Buddhas looked out all night, a fine figure of the goddess Kwan-non, and a venerable one of the god of longevity, suggested curious dreams.
I. L. B.