Dismissing the kurumas, which could go no farther,
we dived into the crowd, which was wedged along a mean street, nearly a
mile long—a miserable street of poor tea-houses and poor shop-fronts; but,
in fact, you could hardly see the street for the people. Paper lanterns
were hung close together along its whole length. There were rude scaffoldings
supporting matted and covered platforms, on which people were drinking
tea and sake and enjoying the crowd below; monkey theaters and dog theaters,
two mangy sheep and a lean pig attracting wondering crowds, for neither
of these animals is known in this region of Japan; a booth in which a woman
was having her head cut off every half-hour for 2 sen a spectator; cars
with roofs like temples, on which, with forty men at the ropes, dancing
children of the highest class were being borne in procession; a theater
with an open front, on the boards of which two men in antique dresses,
with sleeves touching the ground, were performing with tedious slowness
a classic dance of tedious posturing, which consisted mainly in dexterous
movements of the aforesaid sleeves, and occasional emphatic stampings,
and utterances of the word No in a hoarse howl. It is needless to say that
a foreign lady was not the least of the attractions of the fair. The cultus
of children was in full force, all sorts of masks, dolls, sugar figures,
toys, and sweetmeats were exposed for sale on mats on the ground, and found
their way into the hands and sleeves of the children, for no Japanese parent
would ever attend a matsuri without making an offering to his child.
The police told me that there were 22,000 strangers
in Minato, yet for 32,000 holiday-makers a force of twenty-five policemen
was sufficient. I did not see one person under the influence of sake up
to 3 p.m., when I left, nor a solitary instance of rude or improper behavior,
nor was I in any way rudely crowded upon, for, even where the crowd was
densest, the people of their own accord formed a ring and left me breathing
space.
We went to the place where the throng was greatest,
round the two great matsuri cars, whose colossal erections we had seen
far off. These were structures of heavy beams, thirty feet long, with eight
huge, solid wheels. Upon them there were several scaffoldings with projections,
like flat surfaces of cedar branches, and two special peaks of unequal
height at the top, the whole being nearly fifty feet from the ground. All
these projections were covered with black cotton cloth, from which branches
of pines protruded. In the middle three small wheels, one above another,
over which striped white cotton was rolling perpetually, represented a
waterfall; at the bottom another arrangement of white cotton represented
a river, and an arrangement of blue cotton, fitfully agitated by a pair
of bellows below, represented the sea. The whole is intended to represent
a mountain on which the Shinto gods slew some devils, but anything more
rude and barbarous could scarcely be seen. On the fronts of each car, under
a canopy, were thirty performers on thirty diabolical instruments, which
rent the air with a truly infernal discord, and suggested devils rather
than their conquerors. High up on the flat projections there were groups
of monstrous figures. On one a giant in brass armor, much like the Nio
of temple gates, was killing a revolting-looking demon. On another a daimyo’s
daughter, in robes of cloth of gold with satin sleeves richly flowered,
was playing on the samisen. On another a hunter, thrice the size of life,
was killing a wild horse equally magnified, whose hide was represented
by the hairy wrappings of the leaves of the Chamaerops excelsa. On others
highly-colored gods, and devils equally hideous, were grouped miscellaneously.
These two cars were being drawn up and down the street at the rate of a
mile in three hours by 200 men each, numbers of men with levers assisting
the heavy wheels out of the mud-holes. This matsuri, which, like an English
fair, feast, or revel, has lost its original religious significance, goes
on for three days and nights, and this was its third and greatest day.
We left on mild-tempered horses, quite unlike the
fierce fellows of Yamagata ken. Between Minato and Kado there is a very
curious lagoon on the left, about 17 miles long by 16 broad, connected
with the sea by a narrow channel, guarded by two high hills called Shinzan
and Honzan. Two Dutch engineers are now engaged in reporting on its capacities,
and if its outlet could be deepened without enormous cost it would give
north-western Japan the harbor it so greatly needs. Extensive rice-fields
and many villages lie along the road, which is an avenue of deep sand and
ancient pines much contorted and gnarled. Down the pine avenue hundreds
of people on horseback and on foot were trooping into Minato from all the
farming villages, glad in the glorious sunshine which succeeded four days
of rain. There were hundreds of horses, wonderful- looking animals in bravery
of scarlet cloth and lacquer and fringed nets of leather, and many straw
wisps and ropes, with Gothic roofs for saddles, and dependent panniers
on each side, carrying two grave and stately-looking children in each,
and sometimes a father or a fifth child on the top of the pack-saddle.
I was so far from well that I was obliged to sleep
at the wretched village of Abukawa, in a loft alive with fleas, where the
rice was too dirty to be eaten, and where the house-master’s wife, who
sat for an hour on my floor, was sorely afflicted with skin disease. The
clay houses have disappeared and the villages are now built of wood, but
Abukawa is an antiquated, ramshackle place, propped up with posts and slanting
beams projecting into the roadway for the entanglement of unwary passengers.
The village smith was opposite, but he was not a
man of ponderous strength, nor were there those wondrous flights and scintillations
of sparks which were the joy of our childhood in the Tattenhall forge.
A fire of powdered charcoal on the floor, always being trimmed and replenished
by a lean and grimy satellite, a man still leaner and grimier, clothed
in goggles and a girdle, always sitting in front of it, heating and hammering
iron bars with his hands, with a clink which went on late into the night,
and blowing his bellows with his toes; bars and pieces of rusty iron pinned
on the smoky walls, and a group of idle men watching his skillful manipulation,
were the sights of the Abukawa smithy, and kept me thralled in the balcony,
though the whole clothesless population stood for the whole evening in
front of the house with a silent, open-mouthed stare.
Early in the morning the same melancholy crowd appeared
in the dismal drizzle, which turned into a tremendous torrent, which has
lasted for sixteen hours. Low hills, broad rice valleys in which people
are puddling the rice a second time to kill the weeds, bad roads, pretty
villages, much indigo, few passengers, were the features of the day’s journey.
At Morioka and several other villages in this region I noticed that if
you see one large, high, well-built house, standing in enclosed grounds,
with a look of wealth about it, it is always that of the sake brewer. A
bush denotes the manufacture as well as the sale of sake, and these are
of all sorts, from the mangy bit of fir which has seen long service to
the vigorous truss of pine constantly renewed. It is curious that this
should formerly have been the sign of the sale of wine in England.
The wind and rain were something fearful all that
afternoon. I could not ride, so I tramped on foot for some miles under
an avenue of pines, through water a foot deep, and, with my paper waterproof
soaked through, reached Toyoka half drowned and very cold, to shiver over
a hibachi in a clean loft, hung with my dripping clothes, which had to
be put on wet the next day.By 5 a.m. all Toyoka assembled, and while I
took my breakfast I was not only the “cynosure” of the eyes of all the
people outside, but of those of about forty more who were standing in the
doma, looking up the ladder. When asked to depart by the house-master,
they said, “It’s neither fair nor neighborly in you to keep this great
sight to yourself, seeing that our lives may pass without again looking
on a foreign woman;” so they were allowed to remain!
I. L. B.
In Japanese towns and villages you hear every evening
a man (or men) making a low peculiar whistle as he walks along, and in
large towns the noise is quite a nuisance. It is made by blind men; but
a blind beggar is never seen throughout Japan, and the blind are an independent,
respected, and well-to-do class, carrying on the occupations of shampooing,
money-lending, and music.
We have had a very severe journey from Toyoka. That
day the rain was ceaseless, and in the driving mists one could see little
but low hills looming on the horizon, pine barrens, scrub, and flooded
rice-fields; varied by villages standing along roads which were quagmires
a foot deep, and where the clothing was specially ragged and dirty. Hinokiyama,
a village of samurai, on a beautiful slope, was an exception, with its
fine detached houses, pretty gardens, deep-roofed gateways, grass and stone-faced
terraces, and look of refined, quiet comfort. Everywhere there was a quantity
of indigo, as is necessary, for nearly all the clothing of the lower classes
is blue. Near a large village we were riding on a causeway through the
rice-fields, Ito on the pack-horse in front, when we met a number of children
returning from school, who, on getting near us, turned, ran away, and even
jumped into the ditches, screaming as they ran. The mago ran after them,
caught the hindmost boy, and dragged him back—the boy scared and struggling,
the man laughing. The boy said that they thought that Ito was a monkey-player,
i.e. the keeper of a monkey theater, I a big ape, and the poles of my bed
the scaffolding of the stage!
Splashing through mire and water we found that the
people of Tubine wished to detain us, saying that all the ferries were
stopped in consequence of the rise in the rivers; but I had been so often
misled by false reports that I took fresh horses and went on by a track
along a very pretty hillside, overlooking the Yonetsurugawa, a large and
swollen river, which nearer the sea had spread itself over the whole country.
Torrents of rain were still falling, and all out-of-doors industries were
suspended. Straw rain-cloaks hanging to dry dripped under all the eaves,
our paper cloaks were sodden, our dripping horses steamed, and thus we
slid down a steep descent into the hamlet of Kiriishi, thirty-one houses
clustered under persimmon trees under a wooded hillside, all standing in
a quagmire, and so abject and filthy that one could not ask for five minutes’
shelter in any one of them. Sure enough, on the bank of the river, which
was fully 400 yards wide, and swirling like a mill-stream with a suppressed
roar, there was an official order prohibiting the crossing of man or beast,
and before I had time to think the mago had deposited the baggage on an
islet in the mire and was over the crest of the hill. I wished that the
Government was a little less paternal.
Just in the nick of time we discerned a punt drifting
down the river on the opposite side, where it brought up, and landed a
man, and Ito and two others yelled, howled, and waved so lustily as to
attract its notice, and to my joy an answering yell came across the roar
and rush of the river. The torrent was so strong that the boatmen had to
pole up on that side for half a mile, and in about three-quarters of an
hour they reached our side. They were returning to Kotsunagi—the very place
I wished to reach—but, though only 2.5 miles off, the distance took nearly
four hours of the hardest work I ever saw done by men. Every moment I expected
to see them rupture blood-vessels or tendons. All their muscles quivered.
It is a mighty river, and was from eight to twelve feet deep, and whirling
down in muddy eddies; and often with their utmost efforts in poling, when
it seemed as if poles or backs must break, the boat hung trembling and
stationary for three or four minutes at a time. After the slow and eventless
tramp of the last few days this was an exciting transit. Higher up there
was a flooded wood, and, getting into this, the men aided themselves considerably
by hauling by the trees; but when we got out of this, another river joined
the Yonetsurugawa, which with added strength rushed and roared more wildly.
I had long been watching a large house-boat far
above us on the other side, which was being poled by desperate efforts
by ten men. At that point she must have been half a mile off, when the
stream overpowered the crew and in no time she swung round and came drifting
wildly down and across the river, broadside on to us. We could not stir
against the current, and had large trees on our immediate left, and for
a moment it was a question whether she would not smash us to atoms. Ito
was livid with fear; his white, appalled face struck me as ludicrous, for
I had no other thought than the imminent peril of the large boat with her
freight of helpless families, when, just as she was within two feet of
us, she struck a stem and glanced off. Then her crew grappled a headless
trunk and got their hawser round it, and eight of them, one behind the
other, hung on to it, when it suddenly snapped, seven fell backwards, and
the forward one went overboard to be no more seen. Some house that night
was desolate. Reeling downwards, the big mast and spar of the ungainly
craft caught in a tree, giving her such a check that they were able to
make her fast. It was a saddening incident. I asked Ito what he felt when
we seemed in peril, and he replied, “I thought I’d been good to my mother,
and honest, and I hoped I should go to a good place.”
The fashion of boats varies much on different rivers.
On this one there are two sizes. Ours was a small one, flat-bottomed, 25
feet long by 2.5 broad, drawing 6 inches, very low in the water, and with
sides slightly curved inwards. The prow forms a gradual long curve from
the body of the boat, and is very high.
The mists rolled away as dusk came on, and revealed
a lovely country with much picturesqueness of form, and near Kotsunagi
the river disappears into a narrow gorge with steep, sentinel hills, dark
with pine and cryptomeria. To cross the river we had to go fully a mile
above the point aimed at, and then a few minutes of express speed brought
us to a landing in a deep, tough quagmire in a dark wood, through which
we groped our lamentable way to the yadoya. A heavy mist came on, and the
rain returned in torrents; the doma was ankle deep in black slush. The
daidokoro was open to the roof, roof and rafters were black with smoke,
and a great fire of damp wood was smoking lustily. Round some live embers
in the irori fifteen men, women, and children were lying, doing nothing,
by the dim light of an andon. It was picturesque decidedly, and I was well
disposed to be content when the production of some handsome fusuma created
daimyo’s rooms out of the farthest part of the dim and wandering space,
opening upon a damp garden, into which the rain splashed all night.
The solitary spoil of the day’s journey was a glorious
lily, which I presented to the house-master, and in the morning it was
blooming on the kami-dana in a small vase of priceless old Satsuma china.
I was awoke out of a sound sleep by Ito coming in with a rumor, brought
by some travelers, that the Prime Minister had been assassinated, and fifty
policemen killed![This was probably a distorted version of the partial
mutiny of the Imperial Guard, which I learned on landing in Hokkaido (Yezo).]Very
wild political rumors are in the air in these outlandish regions, and it
is not very wonderful that the peasantry lack confidence in the existing
order of things after the changes of the last ten years, and the recent
assassination of the Home Minister. I did not believe the rumor, for fanaticism,
even in its wildest moods, usually owes some allegiance to common sense;
but it was disturbing, as I have naturally come to feel a deep interest
in Japanese affairs. A few hours later Ito again presented himself with
a bleeding cut on his temple. In lighting his pipe—an odious nocturnal
practice of the Japanese—he had fallen over the edge of the fire-pot. I
always sleep in a Japanese kimono to be ready for emergencies, and soon
bound up his head, and slept again, to be awoke early by another deluge.
We made an early start, but got over very little
ground, owing to bad roads and long delays. All day the rain came down
in even torrents, the tracks were nearly impassable, my horse fell five
times, I suffered severely from pain and exhaustion, and almost fell into
despair about ever reaching the sea. In these wild regions there are no
kago or norimons to be had, and a pack-horse is the only conveyance, and
yesterday, having abandoned my own saddle, I had the bad luck to get a
pack-saddle with specially angular and uncompromising peaks, with a soaked
and extremely unwashed futon on the top, spars, tackle, ridges, and furrows
of the most exasperating description, and two nooses of rope to hold on
by as the animal slid down hill on his haunches, or let me almost slide
over his tail as he scrambled and plunged up hill.
It was pretty country, even in the downpour, when
white mists parted and fir-crowned heights looked out for a moment, or
we slid down into a deep glen with mossy boulders, lichen-covered stumps,
ferny carpet, and damp, balsamy smell of pyramidal cryptomeria, and a tawny
torrent dashing through it in gusts of passion. Then there were low hills,
much scrub, immense rice-fields, and violent inundations. But it is not
pleasant, even in the prettiest country, to cling on to a pack-saddle with
a saturated quilt below you and the water slowly soaking down through your
wet clothes into your boots, knowing all the time that when you halt you
must sleep on a wet bed, and change into damp clothes, and put on the wet
ones again the next morning. The villages were poor, and most of the houses
were of boards rudely nailed together for ends, and for sides straw rudely
tied on; they had no windows, and smoke came out of every crack. They were
as unlike the houses which travelers see in southern Japan as a “black
hut” in Uist is like a cottage in a trim village in Kent. These peasant
proprietors have much to learn of the art of living. At Tsuguriko, the
next stage, where the Transport Office was so dirty that I was obliged
to sit in the street in the rain, they told us that we could only get on
a ri farther, because the bridges were all carried away and the fords were
impassable; but I engaged horses, and, by dint of British doggedness and
the willingness of the mago, I got the horses singly and without their
loads in small punts across the swollen waters of the Hayakuchi, the Yuwase,
and the Mochida, and finally forded three branches of my old friend the
Yonetsurugawa, with the foam of its hurrying waters whitening the men’s
shoulders and the horses’ packs, and with a hundred Japanese looking on
at the “folly” of the foreigner.
I like to tell you of kind people everywhere, and
the two mago were specially so, for, when they found that I was pushing
on to Hokkaido (Yezo) for fear of being laid up in the interior wilds,
they did all they could to help me; lifted me gently from the horse, made
steps of their backs for me to mount, and gathered for me handfuls of red
berries, which I ate out of politeness, though they tasted of some nauseous
drug. They suggested that I should stay at the picturesquely-situated old
village of Kawaguchi, but everything about it was mildewed and green with
damp, and the stench from the green and black ditches with which it abounded
was so overpowering, even in passing through, that I was obliged to ride
on to Odate, a crowded, forlorn, half-tumbling-to-pieces town of 8000 people,
with bark roofs held down by stones.
The yadoyas are crowded with storm-staid travelers,
and I had a weary tramp from one to another, almost sinking from pain,
pressed upon by an immense crowd, and frequently bothered by a policeman,
who followed me from one place to the other, making wholly unrighteous
demands for my passport at that most inopportune time. After a long search
I could get nothing better than this room, with fusuma of tissue paper,
in the center of the din of the house, close to the doma and daidokoro.
Fifty travelers, nearly all men, are here, mostly speaking at the top of
their voices, and in a provincial jargon which exasperates Ito. Cooking,
bathing, eating, and, worst of all, perpetual drawing water from a well
with a creaking hoisting apparatus, are going on from 4.30 in the morning
till 11.30 at night, and on both evenings noisy mirth, of alcoholic inspiration,
and dissonant performances by geishas have added to the dim
In all places lately Hai, “yes,” has been pronounced
He, Chi, Na, Ne, to Ito’s great contempt. It sounds like an expletive or
interjection rather than a response, and seems used often as a sign of
respect or attention only. Often it is loud and shrill, then guttural,
at times little more than a sigh. In these yadoyas every sound is audible,
and I hear low rumbling of mingled voices, and above all the sharp Hai,
Hai of the tea-house girls in full chorus from every quarter of the house.
The habit of saying it is so strong that a man roused out of sleep jumps
up with Hai, Hai, and often, when I speak to Ito in English, a stupid Hebe
sitting by answers Hai.
I don’t want to convey a false impression of the
noise here. It would be at least three times as great were I in equally
close proximity to a large hotel kitchen in England, with fifty Britons
only separated from me by paper partitions. I had not been long in bed
on Saturday night when I was awoke by Ito bringing in an old hen which
he said he could stew till it was tender, and I fell asleep again with
its dying squeak in my ears, to be awoke a second time by two policemen
wanting for some occult reason to see my passport, and a third time by
two men with lanterns scrambling and fumbling about the room for the strings
of a mosquito net, which they wanted for another traveler. These are among
the ludicrous incidents of Japanese traveling. About five Ito woke me by
saying he was quite sure that the moxa would be the thing to cure my spine,
and, as we were going to stay all day, he would go and fetch an operator;
but I rejected this as emphatically as the services of the blind man!Yesterday
a man came and pasted slips of paper over all the “peep holes” in the shoji,
and I have been very little annoyed, even though the yadoya is so crowded.
The rain continues to come down in torrents, and rumors are hourly arriving of disasters to roads and bridges on the northern route.
I. L. B.
The sun shone gloriously and brightened the hill-girdled
valley in which Odate stands into positive beauty, with the narrow river
flinging its bright waters over green and red shingle, lighting it up in
glints among the conical hills, some richly wooded with confers, and others
merely covered with scrub, which were tumbled about in picturesque confusion.
When Japan gets the sunshine, its forest-covered hills and garden-like
valleys are turned into paradise. In a journey of 600 miles there has hardly
been a patch of country which would not have been beautiful in sunlight.
We crossed five severe fords with the water half-way
up the horses’ bodies, in one of which the strong current carried my mago
off his feet, and the horse towed him ashore, singing and capering, his
drunken glee nothing abated by his cold bath. Everything is in a state
of wreck. Several river channels have been formed in places where there
was only one; there is not a trace of the road for a considerable distance,
not a bridge exists for ten miles, and a great tract of country is covered
with boulders, uprooted trees, and logs floated from the mountain sides.
Already, however, these industrious peasants are driving piles, carrying
soil for embankments in creels on horses’ backs, and making ropes of stones
to prevent a recurrence of the calamity. About here the female peasants
wear for field-work a dress which pleases me much by its suitability—light
blue trousers, with a loose sack over them, confined at the waist by a
girdle.
On arriving here in much pain, and knowing that
the road was not open any farther, I was annoyed by a long and angry conversation
between the house-master and Ito, during which the horses were not unloaded,
and the upshot of it was that the man declined to give me shelter, saying
that the police had been round the week before giving notice that no foreigner
was to be received without first communicating with the nearest police
station, which, in this instance, is three hours off. I said that the authorities
of Akita ken could not by any local regulations override the Imperial edict
under which passports are issued; but he said he should be liable to a
fine and the withdrawal of his license if he violated the rule. No foreigner,
he said, had ever lodged in Shirasawa, and I have no doubt that he added
that he hoped no foreigner would ever seek lodgings again. My passport
was copied and sent off by special runner, as I should have deeply regretted
bringing trouble on the poor man by insisting on my rights, and in much
trepidation he gave me a room open on one side to the village, and on another
to a pond, over which, as if to court mosquitoes, it is partially built.
I cannot think how the Japanese can regard a hole full of dirty water as
an ornamental appendage to a house.
My hotel expenses (including Ito’s) are less than
3s. a-day, and in nearly every place there has been a cordial desire that
I should be comfortable, and, considering that I have often put up in small,
rough hamlets off the great routes even of Japanese travel, the accommodation,
minus the fleas and the odorous, has been surprisingly excellent, not to
be equaled, I should think, in equally remote regions in any country in
the world.
This evening, here, as in thousands of other villages,
the men came home from their work, ate their food, took their smoke, enjoyed
their children, carried them about, watched their games, twisted straw
ropes, made straw sandals, split bamboo, wove straw rain- coats, and spent
the time universally in those little economical ingenuities and skillful
adaptations which our people (the worse for them) practice perhaps less
than any other. There was no assembling at the sake shop. Poor though the
homes are, the men enjoy them; the children are an attraction at any rate,
and the brawling and disobedience which often turn our working-class homes
into bear-gardens are unknown here, where docility and obedience are inculcated
from the cradle as a matter of course. The signs of religion become fewer
as I travel north, and it appears that the little faith which exists consists
mainly in a belief in certain charms and superstitions, which the priests
industriously foster.
A low voice is not regarded as “a most excellent
thing,” in man at least, among the lower classes in Japan. The people speak
at the top of their voices, and, though most words and syllables end in
vowels, the general effect of a conversation is like the discordant gabble
of a farm-yard. The next room to mine is full of stormbound travelers,
and they and the house-master kept up what I thought was a most important
argument for four hours at the top of their voices. I supposed it must
be on the new and important ordinance granting local elective assemblies,
of which I heard at Odate, but on inquiry found that it was possible to
spend four mortal hours in discussing whether the day’s journey from Odate
to Noshiro could be made best by road or river.
Japanese women have their own gatherings, where
gossip and chit- chat, marked by a truly Oriental indecorum of speech,
are the staple of talk. I think that in many things, specially in some
which lie on the surface, the Japanese are greatly our superiors, but that
in many others they are immeasurably behind us. In living altogether among
this courteous, industrious, and civilized people, one comes to forget
that one is doing them a gross injustice in comparing their manners and
ways with those of a people molded by many centuries of Christianity. Would
to God that we were so Christianized that the comparison might always be
favorable to us, which it is not!
July 30.—In the room on the other side of mine were
two men with severe eye-disease, with shaven heads and long and curious
rosaries, who beat small drums as they walked, and were on pilgrimage to
the shrine of Fudo at Megura, near Yedo, a seated, flame-surrounded idol,
with a naked sword in one hand and a coil of rope in the other, who has
the reputation of giving sight to the blind. At five this morning they
began their devotions, which consisted in repeating with great rapidity,
and in a high monotonous key for two hours, the invocation of the Nichiren
sect of Buddhists, Namu miyo ho ren ge Kiyo, which certainly no Japanese
understands, and on the meaning of which even the best scholars are divided;
one having given me, “Glory to the salvation-bringing Scriptures;” another,
“Hail, precious law and gospel of the lotus flower;” and a third, “Heaven
and earth!The teachings of the wonderful lotus flower sect.” Namu amidu
Butsu occurred at intervals, and two drums were beaten the whole time!
The rain, which began again at eleven last night, fell from five till eight this morning, not in drops, but in streams, and in the middle of it a heavy pall of blackness (said to be a total eclipse) enfolded all things in a lurid gloom. Any detention is exasperating within one day of my journey’s end, and I hear without equanimity that there are great difficulties ahead, and that our getting through in three or even four days is doubtful. I hope you will not be tired of the monotony of my letters. Such as they are, they represent the scenes which a traveler would see throughout much of northern Japan, and whatever interest they have consists in the fact that they are a faithful representation, made upon the spot, of what a foreigner sees and hears in traveling through a large but unfrequented region.
I. L. B.
The day before yesterday, in spite of severe pain,
was one of the most interesting of my journey. As I learned something of
the force of fire in Hawaii, I am learning not a little of the force of
water in Japan. We left Shirasawa at noon, as it looked likely to clear,
taking two horses and three men. It is beautiful scenery—a wild valley,
upon which a number of lateral ridges descend, rendered strikingly picturesque
by the dark pyramidal cryptomeria, which are truly the glory of Japan.
Five of the fords were deep and rapid, and the entrance on them difficult,
as the sloping descents were all carried away, leaving steep banks, which
had to be leveled by the mattocks of the mago. Then the fords themselves
were gone; there were shallows where there had been depths, and depths
where there had been shallows; new channels were carved, and great beds
of shingle had been thrown up. Much wreckage lay about. The road and its
small bridges were all gone, trees torn up by the roots or snapped short
off by being struck by heavy logs were heaped together like barricades,
leaves and even bark being in many cases stripped completely off; great
logs floated down the river in such numbers and with such force that we
had to wait half an hour in one place to secure a safe crossing; hollows
were filled with liquid mud, boulders of great size were piled into embankments,
causing perilous alterations in the course of the river; a fertile valley
had been utterly destroyed, and the men said they could hardly find their
way.
At the end of five miles it became impassable for
horses, and, with two of the mago carrying the baggage, we set off, wading
through water and climbing along the side of a hill, up to our knees in
soft wet soil. The hillside and the road were both gone, and there were
heavy landslides along the whole valley. Happily there was not much of
this exhausting work, for, just as higher and darker ranges, densely wooded
with cryptomeria, began to close us in, we emerged upon a fine new road,
broad enough for a carriage, which, after crossing two ravines on fine
bridges, plunges into the depths of a magnificent forest, and then by a
long series of fine zigzags of easy gradients ascends the pass of Yadate,
on the top of which, in a deep sandstone cutting, is a handsome obelisk
marking the boundary between Akita and Aomori ken. This is a marvelous
road for Japan, it is so well graded and built up, and logs for travelers’
rests are placed at convenient distances. Some very heavy work in grading
and blasting has been done upon it, but there are only four miles of it,
with wretched bridle tracks at each end. I left the others behind, and
strolled on alone over the top of the pass and down the other side, where
the road is blasted out of rock of a vivid pink and green color, looking
brilliant under the trickle of water. I admire this pass more than anything
I have seen in Japan; I even long to see it again, but under a bright blue
sky. It reminds me much of the finest part of the Brunig Pass, and something
of some of the passes in the Rocky Mountains, but the trees are far finer
than in either. It was lonely, stately, dark, solemn; its huge cryptomeria,
straight as masts, sent their tall spires far aloft in search of light;
the ferns, which love damp and shady places, were the only undergrowth;
the trees flung their balsamy, aromatic scent liberally upon the air, and,
in the unlighted depths of many a ravine and hollow, clear bright torrents
leapt and tumbled, drowning with their thundering bass the musical treble
of the lighter streams. Not a traveler disturbed the solitude with his
sandalled footfall; there was neither song of bird nor hum of insect.
In the midst of this sublime scenery, and at the
very top of the pass, the rain, which had been light but steady during
the whole day, began to come down in streams and then in sheets. I have
been so rained upon for weeks that at first I took little notice of it,
but very soon changes occurred before my eyes which concentrated my attention
upon it. The rush of waters was heard everywhere, trees of great size slid
down, breaking others in their fall; rocks were rent and carried away trees
in their descent, the waters rose before our eyes; with a boom and roar
as of an earthquake a hillside burst, and half the hill, with a noble forest
of cryptomeria, was projected outwards, and the trees, with the land on
which they grew, went down heads foremost, diverting a river from its course,
and where the forest-covered hillside had been there was a great scar,
out of which a torrent burst at high pressure, which in half an hour carved
for itself a deep ravine, and carried into the valley below an avalanche
of stones and sand. Another hillside descended less abruptly, and its noble
groves found themselves at the bottom in a perpendicular position, and
will doubtless survive their transplantation. Actually, before my eyes,
this fine new road was torn away by hastily improvised torrents, or blocked
by landslides in several places, and a little lower, in one moment, a hundred
yards of it disappeared, and with them a fine bridge, which was deposited
aslant across the torrent lower down.
On the descent, when things began to look very bad,
and the mountain-sides had become cascades bringing trees, logs, and rocks
down with them, we were fortunate enough to meet with two pack- horses
whose leaders were ignorant of the impassability of the road to Odate,
and they and my coolies exchanged loads. These were strong horses, and
the mago were skillful and courageous. They said if we hurried we could
just get to the hamlet they had left, they thought; but while they spoke
the road and the bridge below were carried away. They insisted on lashing
me to the pack-saddle. The great stream, whose beauty I had formerly admired,
was now a thing of dread, and had to be forded four times without fords.
It crashed and thundered, drowning the feeble sound of human voices, the
torrents from the heavens hissed through the forest, trees and logs came
crashing down the hillsides, a thousand cascades added to the din, and
in the bewilderment produced by such an unusual concatenation of sights
and sounds we stumbled through the river, the men up to their shoulders,
the horses up to their backs. Again and again we crossed. The banks being
carried away, it was very hard to get either into or out of the water;
the horses had to scramble or jump up places as high as their shoulders,
all slippery and crumbling, and twice the men cut steps for them with axes.
The rush of the torrent at the last crossing taxed the strength of both
men and horses, and, as I was helpless from being tied on, I confess that
I shut my eyes!After getting through, we came upon the lands belonging
to this village—rice-fields with the dikes burst, and all the beautiful
ridge and furrow cultivation of the other crops carried away. The waters
were rising fast, the men said we must hurry; they unbound me, so that
I might ride more comfortably, spoke to the horses, and went on at a run.
My horse, which had nearly worn out his shoes in the fords, stumbled at
every step, the mago gave me a noose of rope to clutch, the rain fell in
such torrents that I speculated on the chance of being washed off my saddle,
when suddenly I saw a shower of sparks; I felt unutterable things; I was
choked, bruised, stifled, and presently found myself being hauled out of
a ditch by three men, and realized that the horse had tumbled down in going
down a steepish hill, and that I had gone over his head. To climb again
on the soaked futon was the work of a moment, and, with men running and
horses stumbling and splashing, we crossed the Hirakawa by one fine bridge,
and half a mile farther re-crossed it on another, wishing as we did so
that all Japanese bridges were as substantial, for they were both 100 feet
long, and had central piers.
We entered Ikarigaseki from the last bridge, a village
of 800 people, on a narrow ledge between an abrupt hill and the Hirakawa,
a most forlorn and tumble-down place, given up to felling timber and making
shingles; and timber in all its forms—logs, planks, faggots, and shingles—is
heaped and stalked about. It looks more like a lumberer’s encampment than
a permanent village, but it is beautifully situated, and unlike any of
the innumerable villages that I have ever seen.
The street is long and narrow, with streams in stone
channels on either side; but these had overflowed, and men, women, and
children were constructing square dams to keep the water, which had already
reached the doma, from rising over the tatami. Hardly any house has paper
windows, and in the few which have, they are so black with smoke as to
look worse than none. The roofs are nearly flat, and are covered with shingles
held on by laths and weighted with large stones. Nearly all the houses
look like temporary sheds, and most are as black inside as a Barra hut.
The walls of many are nothing but rough boards tied to the uprights by
straw ropes.
In the drowning torrent, sitting in puddles of water,
and drenched to the skin hours before, we reached this very primitive yadoya,
the lower part of which is occupied by the daidokoro, a party of storm-bound
students, horses, fowls, and dogs. My room is a wretched loft, reached
by a ladder, with such a quagmire at its foot that I have to descend into
it in Wellington boots. It was dismally grotesque at first. The torrent
on the unceiled roof prevented Ito from hearing what I said, the bed was
soaked, and the water, having got into my box, had dissolved the remains
of the condensed milk, and had reduced clothes, books, and paper into a
condition of universal stickiness. My kimono was less wet than anything
else, and, borrowing a sheet of oiled paper, I lay down in it, till roused
up in half an hour by Ito shrieking above the din on the roof that the
people thought that the bridge by which we had just entered would give
way; and, running to the river bank, we joined a large crowd, far too intensely
occupied by the coming disaster to take any notice of the first foreign
lady they had ever seen.
The Hirakawa, which an hour before was merely a
clear, rapid mountain stream, about four feet deep, was then ten feet deep,
they said, and tearing along, thick and muddy, and with a fearful roar,
“And each wave was crested with tawny foam, Like
the mane of a chestnut steed.”
Immense logs of hewn timber, trees, roots, branches,
and faggots, were coming down in numbers. The abutment on this side was
much undermined, but, except that the central pier trembled whenever a
log struck it, the bridge itself stood firm—so firm, indeed, that two men,
anxious to save some property on the other side, crossed it after I arrived.
Then logs of planed timber of large size, and joints, and much wreckage,
came down—fully forty fine timbers, thirty feet long, for the fine bridge
above had given way. Most of the harvest of logs cut on the Yadate Pass
must have been lost, for over 300 were carried down in the short time in
which I watched the river. This is a very heavy loss to this village, which
lives by the timber trade. Efforts were made at a bank higher up to catch
them as they drifted by, but they only saved about one in twenty. It was
most exciting to see the grand way in which these timbers came down; and
the moment in which they were to strike or not to strike the pier was one
of intense suspense. After an hour of this two superb logs, fully thirty
feet long, came down close together, and, striking the central pier nearly
simultaneously, it shuddered horribly, the great bridge parted in the middle,
gave an awful groan like a living thing, plunged into the torrent, and
re- appeared in the foam below only as disjointed timbers hurrying to the
sea. Not a vestige remained. The bridge below was carried away in the morning,
so, till the river becomes fordable, this little place is completely isolated.
On thirty miles of road, out of nineteen bridges only two remain, and the
road itself is almost wholly carried away!
IKARIGASEKI.
I have well-nigh exhausted the resources of this
place. They are to go out three times a day to see how much the river has
fallen; to talk with the house-master and Kocho; to watch the children’s
games and the making of shingles; to buy toys and sweetmeats and give them
away; to apply zinc lotion to a number of sore eyes three times daily,
under which treatment, during three days, there has been a wonderful amendment;
to watch the cooking, spinning, and other domestic processes in the daidokoro;
to see the horses, which are also actually in it, making meals of green
leaves of trees instead of hay; to see the lepers, who are here for some
waters which are supposed to arrest, if not to cure, their terrible malady;
to lie on my stretcher and sew, and read the papers of the Asiatic Society,
and to go over all possible routes to Aomori. The people have become very
friendly in consequence of the eye lotion, and bring many diseases for
my inspection, most of which would never have arisen had cleanliness of
clothing and person been attended to. The absence of soap, the infrequency
with which clothing is washed, and the absence of linen next the skin,
cause various cutaneous diseases, which are aggravated by the bites and
stings of insects. Scald-head affects nearly half the children here.
I am very fond of Japanese children. I have never
yet heard a baby cry, and I have never seen a child troublesome or disobedient.
Filial piety is the leading virtue in Japan, and unquestioning obedience
is the habit of centuries. The arts and threats by which English mothers
cajole or frighten children into unwilling obedience appear unknown. I
admire the way in which children are taught to be independent in their
amusements. Part of the home education is the learning of the rules of
the different games, which are absolute, and when there is a doubt, instead
of a quarrelsome suspension of the game, the fiat of a senior child decides
the matter. They play by themselves, and don’t bother adults at every turn.
I usually carry sweeties with me, and give them to the children, but not
one has ever received them without first obtaining permission from the
father or mother. When that is gained they smile and bow profoundly, and
hand the sweeties to those present before eating any themselves. They are
gentle creatures, but too formal and precocious.
They have no special dress. This is so queer that
I cannot repeat it too often. At three they put on the kimono and girdle,
which are as inconvenient to them as to their parents, and childish play
in this garb is grotesque. I have, however, never seen what we call child’s
play—that general abandonment to miscellaneous impulses, which consists
in struggling, slapping, rolling, jumping, kicking, shouting, laughing,
and quarreling!Two fine boys are very clever in harnessing paper carts
to the backs of beetles with gummed traces, so that eight of them draw
a load of rice up an inclined plane. You can imagine what the fate of such
a load and team would be at home among a number of snatching hands. Here
a number of infants watch the performance with motionless interest, and
never need the adjuration, “Don’t touch.” In most of the houses there are
bamboo cages for “the shrill-voiced Katydid,” and the children amuse themselves
with feeding these vociferous grasshoppers. The channels of swift water
in the street turn a number of toy water-wheels, which set in motion most
ingenious mechanical toys, of which a model of the automatic rice-husker
is the commonest, and the boys spend much time in devising and watching
these, which are really very fascinating. It is the holidays, but “holiday
tasks” are given, and in the evenings you hear the hum of lessons all along
the street for about an hour. The school examination is at the re-opening
of the school after the holidays, instead of at the end of the session—an
arrangement which shows an honest desire to discern the permanent gain
made by the scholars.
This afternoon has been fine and windy, and the
boys have been flying kites, made of tough paper on a bamboo frame, all
of a rectangular shape, some of them five feet square, and nearly all decorated
with huge faces of historical heroes. Some of them have a humming arrangement
made of whale-bone. There was a very interesting contest between two great
kites, and it brought out the whole population. The string of each kite,
for 30 feet or more below the frame, was covered with pounded glass, made
to adhere very closely by means of tenacious glue, and for two hours the
kite-fighters tried to get their kites into a proper position for sawing
the adversary’s string in two. At last one was successful, and the severed
kite became his property, upon which victor and vanquished exchanged three
low bows. Silently as the people watched and received the destruction of
their bridge, so silently they watched this exciting contest. The boys
also flew their kites while walking on stilts—a most dexterous performance,
in which few were able to take part—and then a larger number gave a stilt
race. The most striking out-of-door games are played at fixed seasons of
the year, and are not to be seen now.
There are twelve children in this yadoya, and after
dark they regularly play at a game which Ito says “is played in the winter
in every house in Japan.” The children sit in a circle, and the adults
look on eagerly, child-worship being more common in Japan than in America,
and, to my thinking, the Japanese form is the best.
From proverbial philosophy to personal privation
is rather a descent, but owing to the many detentions on the journey my
small stock of foreign food is exhausted, and I have been living here on
rice, cucumbers, and salt salmon—so salt that, after being boiled in two
waters, it produces a most distressing thirst. Even this has failed to-day,
as communication with the coast has been stopped for some time, and the
village is suffering under the calamity of its stock of salt-fish being
completely exhausted. There are no eggs, and rice and cucumbers are very
like the “light food” which the Israelites “loathed.” I had an omelet one
day, but it was much like musty leather. The Italian minister said to me
in Tokyo, “No question in Japan is so solemn as that of food,” and many
others echoed what I thought at the time a most unworthy sentiment. I recognized
its truth to-day when I opened my last resort, a box of Brand’s meat lozenges,
and found them a mass of moldiness. One can only dry clothes here by hanging
them in the wood smoke, so I prefer to let them mildew on the walls, and
have bought a straw rain-coat, which is more reliable than the paper waterproofs.
I hear the hum of the children at their lessons for the last time, for
the waters are falling fast, and we shall leave in the morning.
I. L. B.
In one town two very shabby policemen rushed upon
us, seized the bridle of my horse, and kept me waiting for a long time
in the middle of a crowd, while they toilsomely bored through the passport,
turning it up and down, and holding it up to the light, as though there
were some nefarious mystery about it. My horse stumbled so badly that I
was obliged to walk to save myself from another fall, and, just as my powers
were failing, we met a kuruma, which by good management, such as being
carried occasionally, brought me into Kuroishi, a neat town of 5500 people,
famous for the making of clogs and combs, where I have obtained a very
neat, airy, upstairs room, with a good view over the surrounding country
and of the doings of my neighbors in their back rooms and gardens. Instead
of getting on to Aomori I am spending three days and two nights here, and,
as the weather has improved and my room is remarkably cheerful, the rest
has been very pleasant. As I have said before, it is difficult to get any
information about anything even a few miles off, and even at the Post Office
they cannot give any intelligence as to the date of the sailings of the
mail steamer between Aomori, twenty miles off, and Hakodate.
The police were not satisfied with seeing my passport,
but must also see me, and four of them paid me a polite but domiciliary
visit the evening of my arrival. That evening the sound of drumming was
ceaseless, and soon after I was in bed Ito announced that there was something
really worth seeing, so I went out in my kimono and without my hat, and
in this disguise altogether escaped recognition as a foreigner. Kuroishi
is unlighted, and I was tumbling and stumbling along in overhaste when
a strong arm cleared the way, and the house-master appeared with a very
pretty lantern, hanging close to the ground from a cane held in the hand.
Thus came the phrase, “Thy word is a light unto my feet.”
We soon reached a point for seeing the festival procession advance towards us, and it was so beautiful and picturesque that it kept me out for an hour. It passes through all the streets between 7 and 10 p.m. each night during the first week in August, with an ark, or coffer, containing slips of paper, on which (as I understand) wishes are written, and each morning at seven this is carried to the river and the slips are cast upon the stream. The procession consisted of three monster drums nearly the height of a man’s body, covered with horsehide, and strapped to the drummers, end upwards, and thirty small drums, all beaten rub-a-dub-dub without ceasing. Each drum has the tomoye painted on its ends. Then there were hundreds of paper lanterns carried on long poles of various lengths round a central lantern, 20 feet high, itself an oblong 6 feet long, with a front and wings, and all kinds of mythical and mystical creatures painted in bright colors upon it—a transparency rather than a lantern, in fact. Surrounding it were hundreds of beautiful lanterns and transparencies of all sorts of fanciful shapes—fans, fishes, birds, kites, drums; the hundreds of people and children who followed all carried circular lanterns, and rows of lanterns with the tomoye on one side and two Chinese characters on the other hung from the eaves all along the line of the procession. I never saw anything more completely like a fairy scene, the undulating waves of lanterns as they swayed along, the soft lights and soft tints moving aloft in the darkness, the lantern-bearers being in deep shadow. This festival is called the tanabata, or seiseki festival, but I am unable to get any information about it. Ito says that he knows what it means, but is unable to explain, and adds the phrase he always uses when in difficulties, “Mr. Satow would be able to tell you all about it.”
I. L. B.
The fashions of dressing the hair are fixed. They
vary with the ages of female children, and there is a slight difference
between the coiffure of the married and unmarried. The two partings on
the top of the head and the chignon never vary. The amount of stiffening
used is necessary, as the head is never covered out of doors. This arrangement
will last in good order for a week or more—thanks to the wooden pillow.
The barber’s work was only partially done when the
hair was dressed, for every vestige of recalcitrant eyebrow was removed,
and every downy hair which dared to display itself on the temples and neck
was pulled out with tweezers. This removal of all short hair has a tendency
to make even the natural hair look like a wig. Then the lady herself took
a box of white powder, and laid it on her face, ears, and neck, till her
skin looked like a mask. With a camel’s-hair brush she then applied some
mixture to her eyelids to make the bright eyes look brighter, the teeth
were blackened, or rather reblackened, with a feather brush dipped in a
solution of gall-nuts and iron-filings—a tiresome and disgusting process,
several times repeated, and then a patch of red was placed upon the lower
lip. I cannot say that the effect was pleasing, but the girl thought so,
for she turned her head so as to see the general effect in the mirror,
smiled, and was satisfied. The remainder of her toilet, which altogether
took over three hours, was performed in private, and when she reappeared
she looked as if a very unmeaning- looking wooden doll had been dressed
up with the exquisite good taste, harmony, and quietness which characterize
the dress of Japanese women.
A most rigid social etiquette draws an impassable
line of demarcation between the costume of the virtuous woman in every
rank and that of her frail sister. The humiliating truth that many of our
female fashions are originated by those whose position we the most regret,
and are then carefully copied by all classes of women in our country, does
not obtain credence among Japanese women, to whom even the slightest approximation
in the style of hair- dressing, ornament, or fashion of garments would
be a shame.
I was surprised to hear that three “Christian students”
from Hirosaki wished to see me—three remarkably intelligent-looking, handsomely-dressed
young men, who all spoke a little English. One of them had the brightest
and most intellectual face which I have seen in Japan. They are of the
samurai class, as I should have known from the superior type of face and
manner. They said that they heard that an English lady was in the house,
and asked me if I were a Christian, but apparently were not satisfied till,
in answer to the question if I had a Bible, I was able to produce one.
Hirosaki is a castle town of some importance, 3.5
ri from here, and its ex-daimyo supports a high-class school or college
there, which has had two Americans successively for its headmasters. These
gentlemen must have been very consistent in Christian living as well as
energetic in Christian teaching, for under their auspices thirty young
men have embraced Christianity. As all of these are well educated, and
several are nearly ready to pass as teachers into Government employment,
their acceptance of the “new way” may have an important bearing on the
future of this region.
I. L. B.