Comfort disappears—Fine Scenery—An Alarm—A Farm-house—An unusual
Costume—Bridling a Horse—Female Dress and Ugliness—Babies—My
_Mago_—Beauties of the Kinugawa—Fujihara—My Servant—Horse-shoes—An absurd
Mistake.
FUJIHARA, _June_ 24.
ITO’S informants were right. Comfort was left behind at Nikkô!
A little woman brought two depressed-looking mares at six this morning;
my saddle and bridle were put on one, and Ito and the baggage on the
other; my hosts and I exchanged cordial good wishes and obeisances, and,
with the women dragging my sorry mare by a rope round her nose, we left
the glorious shrines and solemn cryptomeria groves of Nikkô behind,
passed down its long, clean street, and where the _In Memoriam_ avenue is
densest and darkest turned off to the left by a path like the bed of a
brook, which afterwards, as a most atrocious trail, wound about among the
rough boulders of the Daiya, which it crosses often on temporary bridges
of timbers covered with branches and soil. After crossing one of the low
spurs of the Nikkôsan mountains, we wound among ravines whose steep sides
are clothed with maple, oak, magnolia, elm, pine, and cryptomeria, linked
together by festoons of the redundant _Wistaria chinensis_, and
brightened by azalea and syringa clusters. Every vista was blocked by
some grand mountain, waterfalls thundered, bright streams glanced through
the trees, and in the glorious sunshine of June the country looked most
beautiful.
We travelled less than a _ri_ an hour, as it was a mere flounder either
among rocks or in deep mud, the woman in her girt-up dress and straw
sandals trudging bravely along, till she suddenly flung away the rope,
cried out, and ran backwards, perfectly scared by a big grey snake, with
red spots, much embarrassed by a large frog which he would not let go,
though, like most of his kind, he was alarmed by human approach, and made
desperate efforts to swallow his victim and wriggle into the bushes.
After crawling for three hours we dismounted at the mountain farm of
Kohiaku, on the edge of a rice valley, and the woman counted her packages
to see that they were all right, and without waiting for a gratuity
turned homewards with her horses. I pitched my chair in the verandah of
a house near a few poor dwellings inhabited by peasants with large
families, the house being in the barn-yard of a rich _saké_ maker. I
waited an hour, grew famished, got some weak tea and boiled barley,
waited another hour, and yet another, for all the horses were eating
leaves on the mountains. There was a little stir. Men carried sheaves
of barley home on their backs, and stacked them under the eaves.
Children, with barely the rudiments of clothing, stood and watched me
hour after hour, and adults were not ashamed to join the group, for they
had never seen a foreign woman, a fork, or a spoon. Do you remember a
sentence in Dr. Macgregor’s last sermon? “What strange sights some of
you will see!” Could there be a stranger one than a decent-looking
middle-aged man lying on his chest in the verandah, raised on his elbows,
and intently reading a book, clothed only in a pair of spectacles?
Besides that curious piece of still life, women frequently drew water
from a well by the primitive contrivance of a beam suspended across an
upright, with the bucket at one end and a stone at the other.
When the horses arrived the men said they could not put on the bridle,
but, after much talk, it was managed by two of them violently forcing
open the jaws of the animal, while a third seized a propitious moment for
slipping the bit into her mouth. At the next change a bridle was a thing
unheard of, and when I suggested that the creature would open her mouth
voluntarily if the bit were pressed close to her teeth, the standers-by
mockingly said, “No horse ever opens his mouth except to eat or to bite,”
and were only convinced after I had put on the bridle myself. The new
horses had a rocking gait like camels, and I was glad to dispense with
them at Kisagoi, a small upland hamlet, a very poor place, with
poverty-stricken houses, children very dirty and sorely afflicted by skin
maladies, and women with complexions and features hardened by severe work
and much wood smoke into positive ugliness, and with figures anything but
statuesque.
[Picture: Summer and Winter Costume]
I write the truth as I see it, and if my accounts conflict with those of
tourists who write of the Tokaido and Nakasendo, of Lake Biwa and Hakone,
it does not follow that either is inaccurate. But truly this is a new
Japan to me, of which no books have given me any idea, and it is not
fairyland. The men may be said to wear nothing. Few of the women wear
anything but a short petticoat wound tightly round them, or blue cotton
trousers very tight in the legs and baggy at the top, with a blue cotton
garment open to the waist tucked into the band, and a blue cotton
handkerchief knotted round the head. From the dress no notion of the sex
of the wearer could be gained, nor from the faces, if it were not for the
shaven eyebrows and black teeth. The short petticoat is truly
barbarous-looking, and when a woman has a nude baby on her back or in her
arms, and stands staring vacantly at the foreigner, I can hardly believe
myself in “civilised” Japan. A good-sized child, strong enough to hold
up his head, sees the world right cheerfully looking over his mother’s
shoulders, but it is a constant distress to me to see small children of
six and seven years old lugging on their backs gristly babies, whose
shorn heads are frizzling in the sun and “wobbling” about as though they
must drop off, their eyes, as nurses say, “looking over their heads.” A
number of silk-worms are kept in this region, and in the open barns
groups of men in nature’s costume, and women unclothed to their waists,
were busy stripping mulberry branches. The houses were all poor, and the
people dirty both in their clothing and persons. Some of the younger
women might possibly have been comely, if soap and water had been
plentifully applied to their faces; but soap is not used, and such
washing as the garments get is only the rubbing them a little with sand
in a running stream. I will give you an amusing instance of the way in
which one may make absurd mistakes. I heard many stories of the
viciousness and aggressiveness of pack-horses, and was told that they
were muzzled to prevent them from pasturing upon the haunches of their
companions and making vicious snatches at men. Now, I find that the
muzzle is only to prevent them from eating as they travel. Mares are
used exclusively in this region, and they are the gentlest of their race.
If you have the weight of baggage reckoned at one horse-load, though it
should turn out that the weight is too great for a weakly animal, and the
Transport agent distributes it among two or even three horses, you only
pay for one; and though our _cortège_ on leaving Kisagoi consisted of
four small, shock-headed mares who could hardly see through their bushy
forelocks, with three active foals, and one woman and three girls to lead
them, I only paid for two horses at 7 _sen_ a _ri_.
My _mago_, with her toil-hardened, thoroughly good-natured face rendered
hideous by black teeth, wore straw sandals, blue cotton trousers with a
vest tucked into them, as poor and worn as they could be, and a blue
cotton towel knotted round her head. As the sky looked threatening she
carried a straw rain-cloak, a thatch of two connected capes, one
fastening at the neck, the other at the waist, and a flat hat of flags,
2½ feet in diameter, hung at her back like a shield. Up and down, over
rocks and through deep mud, she trudged with a steady stride, turning her
kind, ugly face at intervals to see if the girls were following. I like
the firm hardy gait which this unbecoming costume permits better than the
painful shuffle imposed upon the more civilised women by their tight
skirts and high clogs.
From Kohiaku the road passed through an irregular grassy valley between
densely-wooded hills, the valley itself timbered with park-like clumps of
pine and Spanish chestnuts; but on leaving Kisagoi the scenery changed.
A steep rocky tract brought us to the Kinugawa, a clear rushing river,
which has cut its way deeply through coloured rock, and is crossed at a
considerable height by a bridge with an alarmingly steep curve, from
which there is a fine view of high mountains, and among them Futarayama,
to which some of the most ancient Shintô legends are attached. We rode
for some time within hearing of the Kinugawa, catching magnificent
glimpses of it frequently—turbulent and locked in by walls of porphyry,
or widening and calming and spreading its aquamarine waters over great
slabs of pink and green rock, lighted fitfully by the sun, or spanned by
rainbows, or pausing to rest in deep shady pools, but always beautiful.
The mountains through which it forces its way on the other side are
precipitous and wooded to their summits with coniferæ, while the less
abrupt side, along which the tract is carried, curves into green knolls
in its lower slopes, sprinkled with grand Spanish chestnuts scarcely yet
in blossom, with maples which have not yet lost the scarlet which they
wear in spring as well as autumn, and with many flowering trees and
shrubs which are new to me, and with an undergrowth of red azaleas,
syringa, blue hydrangea—the very blue of heaven—yellow raspberries,
ferns, clematis, white and yellow lilies, blue irises, and fifty other
trees and shrubs entangled and festooned by the wistaria, whose beautiful
foliage is as common as is that of the bramble with us. The redundancy
of the vegetation was truly tropical, and the brilliancy and variety of
its living greens, dripping with recent rain, were enhanced by the slant
rays of the afternoon sun.
The few hamlets we passed are of farm-houses only, the deep-eaved roofs
covering in one sweep dwelling-house, barn, and stable. In every barn
unclothed people were pursuing various industries. We met strings of
pack-mares, tied head and tail, loaded with rice and _saké_, and men and
women carrying large creels full of mulberry leaves. The ravine grew
more and more beautiful, and an ascent through a dark wood of arrowy
cryptomeria brought us to this village exquisitely situated, where a
number of miniature ravines, industriously terraced for rice, come down
upon the great chasm of the Kinugawa. Eleven hours of travelling have
brought me eighteen miles!
IKARI, June 25.—Fujihara has forty-six farm-houses and a _yadoya_—all
dark, damp, dirty, and draughty, a combination of dwelling-house, barn,
and stable. The _yadoya_ consisted of a _daidokoro_, or open kitchen,
and stable below, and a small loft above, capable of division, and I
found on returning from a walk six Japanese in extreme _déshabillé_
occupying the part through which I had to pass. On this being remedied I
sat down to write, but was soon driven upon the balcony, under the eaves,
by myriads of fleas, which hopped out of the mats as sandhoppers do out
of the sea sand, and even in the balcony, hopped over my letter. There
were two outer walls of hairy mud with living creatures crawling in the
cracks; cobwebs hung from the uncovered rafters. The mats were brown
with age and dirt, the rice was musty, and only partially cleaned, the
eggs had seen better days, and the tea was musty.
I saw everything out of doors with Ito—the patient industry, the
exquisitely situated village, the evening avocations, the quiet
dulness—and then contemplated it all from my balcony and read the
sentence (from a paper in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society) which
had led me to devise this journey, “There is a most exquisitely
picturesque, but difficult, route up the course of the Kinugawa, which
seems almost as unknown to Japanese as to foreigners.” There was a pure
lemon-coloured sky above, and slush a foot deep below. A road, at this
time a quagmire, intersected by a rapid stream, crossed in many places by
planks, runs through the village. This stream is at once “lavatory” and
“drinking fountain.” People come back from their work, sit on the
planks, take off their muddy clothes and wring them out, and bathe their
feet in the current. On either side are the dwellings, in front of which
are much-decayed manure heaps, and the women were engaged in breaking
them up and treading them into a pulp with their bare feet. All wear the
vest and trousers at their work, but only the short petticoats in their
houses, and I saw several respectable mothers of families cross the road
and pay visits in this garment only, without any sense of impropriety.
The younger children wear nothing but a string and an amulet. The
persons, clothing, and houses are alive with vermin, and if the word
squalor can be applied to independent and industrious people, they were
squalid. Beetles, spiders, and wood-lice held a carnival in my room
after dark, and the presence of horses in the same house brought a number
of horseflies. I sprinkled my stretcher with insect powder, but my
blanket had been on the floor for one minute, and fleas rendered sleep
impossible. The night was very long. The _andon_ went out, leaving a
strong smell of rancid oil. The primitive Japanese dog—a cream-coloured
wolfish-looking animal, the size of a collie, very noisy and aggressive,
but as cowardly as bullies usually are—was in great force in Fujihara,
and the barking, growling, and quarrelling of these useless curs
continued at intervals until daylight; and when they were not
quarrelling, they were howling. Torrents of rain fell, obliging me to
move my bed from place to place to get out of the drip. At five Ito came
and entreated me to leave, whimpering, “I’ve had no sleep; there are
thousands and thousands of fleas!” He has travelled by another route to
the Tsugaru Strait through the interior, and says that he would not have
believed that there was such a place in Japan, and that people in
Yokohama will not believe it when he tells them of it and of the costume
of the women. He is “ashamed for a foreigner to see such a place,” he
says. His cleverness in travelling and his singular intelligence
surprise me daily. He is very anxious to speak _good_ English, as
distinguished from “common” English, and to get new words, with their
correct pronunciation and spelling. Each day he puts down in his
note-book all the words that I use that he does not quite understand, and
in the evening brings them to me and puts down their meaning and spelling
with their Japanese equivalents. He speaks English already far better
than many professional interpreters, but would be more pleasing if he had
not picked up some American vulgarisms and free-and-easy ways. It is so
important to me to have a good interpreter, or I should not have engaged
so young and inexperienced a servant; but he is so clever that he is now
able to be cook, laundryman, and general attendant, as well as courier
and interpreter, and I think it is far easier for me than if he were an
older man. I am trying to manage him, because I saw that he meant to
manage me, specially in the matter of “squeezes.” He is intensely
Japanese, his patriotism has all the weakness and strength of personal
vanity, and he thinks everything inferior that is foreign. Our manners,
eyes, and modes of eating appear simply odious to him. He delights in
retailing stories of the bad manners of Englishmen, describes them as
“roaring out _ohio_ to every one on the road,” frightening the tea-house
nymphs, kicking or slapping their coolies, stamping over white mats in
muddy boots, acting generally like ill-bred Satyrs, exciting an
ill-concealed hatred in simple country districts, and bringing themselves
and their country into contempt and ridicule. {87} He is very anxious
about my good behaviour, and as I am equally anxious to be courteous
everywhere in Japanese fashion, and not to violate the general rules of
Japanese etiquette, I take his suggestions as to what I ought to do and
avoid in very good part, and my bows are growing more profound every day!
The people are so kind and courteous, that it is truly brutal in
foreigners not to be kind and courteous to them. You will observe that I
am entirely dependent on Ito, not only for travelling arrangements, but
for making inquiries, gaining information, and even for companionship,
such as it is; and our being mutually embarked on a hard and adventurous
journey will, I hope, make us mutually kind and considerate. Nominally,
he is a Shintôist, which means nothing. At Nikkô I read to him the
earlier chapters of St. Luke, and when I came to the story of the
Prodigal Son I was interrupted by a somewhat scornful laugh and the
remark, “Why, all this is our Buddha over again!”
To-day’s journey, though very rough, has been rather pleasant. The rain
moderated at noon, and I left Fujihara on foot, wearing my American
“mountain dress” and Wellington boots,—the only costume in which ladies
can enjoy pedestrian or pack-horse travelling in this country,—with a
light straw mat—the waterproof of the region—hanging over my shoulders,
and so we plodded on with two baggage horses through the ankle-deep mud,
till the rain cleared off, the mountains looked through the mist, the
augmented Kinugawa thundered below, and enjoyment became possible, even
in my half-fed condition. Eventually I mounted a pack-saddle, and we
crossed a spur of Takadayama at a height of 2100 feet on a well-devised
series of zigzags, eight of which in one place could be seen one below
another. The forest there is not so dense as usual, and the lower
mountain slopes are sprinkled with noble Spanish chestnuts. The descent
was steep and slippery, the horse had tender feet, and, after stumbling
badly, eventually came down, and I went over his head, to the great
distress of the kindly female _mago_. The straw shoes tied with wisps
round the pasterns are a great nuisance. The “shoe strings” are always
coming untied, and the shoes only wear about two _ri_ on soft ground, and
less than one on hard. They keep the feet so soft and spongy that the
horses can’t walk without them at all, and as soon as they get thin your
horse begins to stumble, the _mago_ gets uneasy, and presently you stop;
four shoes, which are hanging from the saddle, are soaked in water and
are tied on with much coaxing, raising the animal fully an inch above the
ground. Anything more temporary and clumsy could not be devised. The
bridle paths are strewn with them, and the children collect them in heaps
to decay for manure. They cost 3 or 4 _sen_ the set, and in every
village men spend their leisure time in making them.
At the next stage, called Takahara, we got one horse for the baggage,
crossed the river and the ravine, and by a steep climb reached a solitary
_yadoya_ with the usual open front and _irori_, round which a number of
people, old and young, were sitting. When I arrived a whole bevy of
nice-looking girls took to flight, but were soon recalled by a word from
Ito to their elders. Lady Parkes, on a side-saddle and in a
riding-habit, has been taken for a man till the people saw her hair, and
a young friend of mine, who is very pretty and has a beautiful
complexion, when travelling lately with her husband, was supposed to be a
man who had shaven off his beard. I wear a hat, which is a thing only
worn by women in the fields as a protection from sun and rain, my
eyebrows are unshaven, and my teeth are unblackened, so these girls
supposed me to be a foreign man. Ito in explanation said, “They haven’t
seen any, but everybody brings them tales how rude foreigners are to
girls, and they are awful scared.” There was nothing eatable but rice
and eggs, and I ate them under the concentrated stare of eighteen pairs
of dark eyes. The hot springs, to which many people afflicted with sores
resort, are by the river, at the bottom of a rude flight of steps, in an
open shed, but I could not ascertain their temperature, as a number of
men and women were sitting in the water. They bathe four times a day,
and remain for an hour at a time.
We left for the five miles’ walk to Ikari in a torrent of rain by a
newly-made path completely shut in with the cascading Kinugawa, and
carried along sometimes low, sometimes high, on props projecting over it
from the face of the rock. I do not expect to see anything lovelier in
Japan.
The river, always crystal-blue or crystal-green, largely increased in
volume by the rains, forces itself through gates of brightly-coloured
rock, by which its progress is repeatedly arrested, and rarely lingers
for rest in all its sparkling, rushing course. It is walled in by high
mountains, gloriously wooded and cleft by dark ravines, down which
torrents were tumbling in great drifts of foam, crashing and booming,
boom and crash multiplied by many an echo, and every ravine afforded
glimpses far back of more mountains, clefts, and waterfalls, and such
over-abundant vegetation that I welcomed the sight of a gray cliff or
bare face of rock. Along the path there were fascinating details,
composed of the manifold greenery which revels in damp heat, ferns,
mosses, _confervæ_, fungi, trailers, shading tiny rills which dropped
down into grottoes feathery with the exquisite _Trichomanes radicans_, or
drooped over the rustic path and hung into the river, and overhead the
finely incised and almost feathery foliage of several varieties of maple
admitted the light only as a green mist. The spring tints have not yet
darkened into the monotone of summer, rose azaleas still light the
hillsides, and masses of cryptomeria give depth and shadow. Still,
beautiful as it all is, one sighs for something which shall satisfy one’s
craving for startling individuality and grace of form, as in the
coco-palm and banana of the tropics. The featheriness of the maple, and
the arrowy straightness and pyramidal form of the cryptomeria, please me
better than all else; but why criticise? Ten minutes of sunshine would
transform the whole into fairyland.
There were no houses and no people. Leaving this beautiful river we
crossed a spur of a hill, where all the trees were matted together by a
very fragrant white honeysuckle, and came down upon an open valley where
a quiet stream joins the loud-tongued Kinugawa, and another mile brought
us to this beautifully-situated hamlet of twenty-five houses, surrounded
by mountains, and close to a mountain stream called the Okawa. The names
of Japanese rivers give one very little geographical information from
their want of continuity. A river changes its name several times in a
course of thirty or forty miles, according to the districts through which
it passes. This is my old friend the Kinugawa, up which I have been
travelling for two days. Want of space is a great aid to the
picturesque. Ikari is crowded together on a hill slope, and its short,
primitive-looking street, with its warm browns and greys, is quite
attractive in “the clear shining after rain.” My halting-place is at the
express office at the top of the hill—a place like a big barn, with
horses at one end and a living-room at the other, and in the centre much
produce awaiting transport, and a group of people stripping mulberry
branches. The nearest _daimiyô_ used to halt here on his way to Tôkiyô,
so there are two rooms for travellers, called _daimiyôs_’ rooms, fifteen
feet high, handsomely ceiled in dark wood, the _shôji_ of such fine work
as to merit the name of fret-work, the _fusuma_ artistically decorated,
the mats clean and fine, and in the alcove a sword-rack of old gold
lacquer. Mine is the inner room, and Ito and four travellers occupy the
outer one. Though very dark, it is luxury after last night. The rest of
the house is given up to the rearing of silk-worms. The house-masters
here and at Fujihara are not used to passports, and Ito, who is posing as
a town-bred youth, has explained and copied mine, all the village men
assembling to hear it read aloud. He does not know the word used for
“scientific investigation,” but, in the idea of increasing his own
importance by exaggerating mine, I hear him telling the people that I am
_gakusha_, _i.e._ learned! There is no police-station here, but every
month policemen pay domiciliary visits to these outlying _yadoyas_ and
examine the register of visitors.
This is a much neater place than the last, but the people look stupid and
apathetic, and I wonder what they think of the men who have abolished the
_daimiyô_ and the feudal _régime_, have raised the _eta_ to citizenship,
and are hurrying the empire forward on the tracks of western
civilisation!
Since shingle has given place to thatch there is much to admire in the
villages, with their steep roofs, deep eaves and balconies, the warm
russet of roofs and walls, the quaint confusion of the farmhouses, the
hedges of camellia and pomegranate, the bamboo clumps and persimmon
orchards, and (in spite of dirt and bad smells) the generally satisfied
look of the peasant proprietors.
No food can be got here except rice and eggs, and I am haunted by
memories of the fowls and fish of Nikkô, to say nothing of the “flesh
pots” of the Legation, and
“—a sorrow’s crown of sorrow
Is remembering happier things!”
The mercury falls to 70° at night, and I generally awake from cold at 3
a.m., for my blankets are only summer ones, and I dare not supplement
them with a quilt, either for sleeping on or under, because of the fleas
which it contains. I usually retire about 7.30, for there is almost no
twilight, and very little inducement for sitting up by the dimness of
candle or _andon_, and I have found these days of riding on slow,
rolling, stumbling horses very severe, and if I were anything of a
walker, should certainly prefer pedestrianism.