The city proper is as level as a table, but is bounded on two sides
by low demilunes of charming hills shadowed with evergreen foliage and
crowned with temples or shrines. There are thirty-five thousand souls
dwelling in ten thousand houses forming thirty-three principal and many
smaller streets; and from each end of almost every street, beyond the
hills, the lake, or the eastern rice-fields, a mountain summit is always
visible--green, blue, or grey according to distance. One may ride, walk,
or go by boat to any quarter of the town; for it is not only divided
by two rivers, but is also intersected by numbers of canals crossed
by queer little bridges curved like a well-bent bow. Architecturally
(despite such constructions in European style as the College of
Teachers, the great public school, the Kencho, the new post-office), it
is much like other quaint Japanese towns; the structure of its temples,
taverns, shops, and private dwellings is the same as in other cities of
the western coast. But doubtless owing to the fact that Matsue remained
a feudal stronghold until a time within the memory of thousands still
living, those feudal distinctions of caste so sharply drawn in
ancient times are yet indicated with singular exactness by the varying
architecture of different districts. The city can be definitely divided
into three architectural quarters: the district of the merchants and
shop-keepers, forming the heart of the settlement, where all the houses
are two stories high; the district of the temples, including nearly the
whole south-eastern part of the town; and the district or districts
of the shizoku (formerly called samurai), comprising a vast number
of large, roomy, garden-girt, one-story dwellings. From these elegant
homes, in feudal days, could be summoned at a moment's notice five
thousand 'two-sworded men' with their armed retainers, making a fighting
total for the city alone of probably not less than thirteen thousand
warriors. More than one-third of all the city buildings were then
samurai homes; for Matsue was the military centre of the most ancient
province of Japan. At both ends of the town, which curves in a crescent
along the lake shore, were the two main settlements of samurai; but just
as some of the most important temples are situated outside of the temple
district, so were many of the finest homesteads of this knightly caste
situated in other quarters. They mustered most thickly, however, about
the castle, which stands to-day on the summit of its citadel hill--the
Oshiroyama--solid as when first built long centuries ago, a vast and
sinister shape, all iron-grey, rising against the sky from a cyclopean
foundation of stone. Fantastically grim the thing is, and grotesquely
complex in detail; looking somewhat like a huge pagoda, of which the
second, third, and fourth stories have been squeezed down and telescoped
into one another by their own weight. Crested at its summit, like a
feudal helmet, with two colossal fishes of bronze lifting their curved
bodies skyward from either angle of the roof, and bristling with horned
gables and gargoyled eaves and tilted puzzles of tiled roofing at every
story, the creation is a veritable architectural dragon, made up of
magnificent monstrosities--a dragon, moreover, full of eyes set at all
conceivable angles, above below, and on every side. From under the black
scowl of the loftiest eaves, looking east and south, the whole city can
be seen at a single glance, as in the vision of a soaring hawk; and
from the northern angle the view plunges down three hundred feet to the
castle road, where walking figures of men appear no larger than flies.