A Fantastic Jumble—The “Quiver” of Poverty—The Water-shed—From Bad to
Worse—The Rice Planter’s Holiday—A Diseased Crowd—Amateur Doctoring—Want
of Cleanliness—Rapid Eating—Premature Old Age.
KURUMATOGE, _June_ 30.
AFTER the hard travelling of six days the rest of Sunday in a quiet place
at a high elevation is truly delightful! Mountains and passes, valleys
and rice swamps, forests and rice swamps, villages and rice swamps;
poverty, industry, dirt, ruinous temples, prostrate Buddhas, strings of
straw-shod pack-horses; long, grey, featureless streets, and quiet,
staring crowds, are all jumbled up fantastically in my memory. Fine
weather accompanied me through beautiful scenery from Ikari to Yokokawa,
where I ate my lunch in the street to avoid the innumerable fleas of the
tea-house, with a circle round me of nearly all the inhabitants. At
first the children, both old and young, were so frightened that they ran
away, but by degrees they timidly came back, clinging to the skirts of
their parents (skirts, in this case, being a metaphorical expression),
running away again as often as I looked at them. The crowd was filthy
and squalid beyond description. Why should the “quiver” of poverty be so
very full? one asks as one looks at the swarms of gentle, naked,
old-fashioned children, born to a heritage of hard toil, to be, like
their parents, devoured by vermin, and pressed hard for taxes. A horse
kicked off my saddle before it was girthed, the crowd scattered right and
left, and work, which had been suspended for two hours to stare at the
foreigner, began again.
A long ascent took us to the top of a pass 2500 feet in height, a
projecting spur not 30 feet wide, with a grand view of mountains and
ravines, and a maze of involved streams, which unite in a vigorous
torrent, whose course we followed for some hours, till it expanded into a
quiet river, lounging lazily through a rice swamp of considerable extent.
The map is blank in this region, but I judged, as I afterwards found
rightly, that at that pass we had crossed the water-shed, and that the
streams thenceforward no longer fall into the Pacific, but into the Sea
of Japan. At Itosawa the horses produced stumbled so intolerably that I
walked the last stage, and reached Kayashima, a miserable village of
fifty-seven houses, so exhausted that I could not go farther, and was
obliged to put up with worse accommodation even than at Fujihara, with
less strength for its hardships.
The _yadoya_ was simply awful. The _daidokoro_ had a large wood fire
burning in a trench, filling the whole place with stinging smoke, from
which my room, which was merely screened off by some dilapidated _shôji_,
was not exempt. The rafters were black and shiny with soot and moisture.
The house-master, who knelt persistently on the floor of my room till he
was dislodged by Ito, apologised for the dirt of his house, as well he
might. Stifling, dark, and smoky, as my room was, I had to close the
paper windows, owing to the crowd which assembled in the street. There
was neither rice nor soy, and Ito, who values his own comfort, began to
speak to the house-master and servants loudly and roughly, and to throw
my things about—a style of acting which I promptly terminated, for
nothing could be more hurtful to a foreigner, or more unkind to the
people, than for a servant to be rude and bullying; and the man was most
polite, and never approached me but on bended knees. When I gave him my
passport, as the custom is, he touched his forehead with it, and then
touched the earth with his forehead.
I found nothing that I could eat except black beans and boiled cucumbers.
The room was dark, dirty, vile, noisy, and poisoned by sewage odours, as
rooms unfortunately are very apt to be. At the end of the rice planting
there is a holiday for two days, when many offerings are made to Inari,
the god of rice farmers; and the holiday-makers kept up their revel all
night, and drums, stationary and peripatetic, were constantly beaten in
such a way as to prevent sleep.
A little boy, the house-master’s son, was suffering from a very bad
cough, and a few drops of chlorodyne which I gave him allayed it so
completely that the cure was noised abroad in the earliest hours of the
next morning, and by five o’clock nearly the whole population was
assembled outside my room, with much whispering and shuffling of shoeless
feet, and applications of eyes to the many holes in the paper windows.
When I drew aside the _shôji_ I was disconcerted by the painful sight
which presented itself, for the people were pressing one upon another,
fathers and mothers holding naked children covered with skin-disease, or
with scald-head, or ringworm, daughters leading mothers nearly blind, men
exhibiting painful sores, children blinking with eyes infested by flies
and nearly closed with ophthalmia; and all, sick and well, in truly “vile
raiment,” lamentably dirty and swarming with vermin, the sick asking for
medicine, and the well either bringing the sick or gratifying an
apathetic curiosity. Sadly I told them that I did not understand their
manifold “diseases and torments,” and that, if I did, I had no stock of
medicines, and that in my own country the constant washing of clothes,
and the constant application of water to the skin, accompanied by
friction with clean cloths, would be much relied upon by doctors for the
cure and prevention of similar cutaneous diseases. To pacify them I made
some ointment of animal fat and flowers of sulphur, extracted with
difficulty from some man’s hoard, and told them how to apply it to some
of the worst cases. The horse, being unused to a girth, became fidgety
as it was being saddled, creating a _stampede_ among the crowd, and the
_mago_ would not touch it again. They are as much afraid of their gentle
mares as if they were panthers. All the children followed me for a
considerable distance, and a good many of the adults made an excuse for
going in the same direction.
These people wear no linen, and their clothes, which are seldom washed,
are constantly worn, night and day, as long as they will hold together.
They seal up their houses as hermetically as they can at night, and herd
together in numbers in one sleeping-room, with its atmosphere vitiated,
to begin with, by charcoal and tobacco fumes, huddled up in their dirty
garments in wadded quilts, which are kept during the day in close
cupboards, and are seldom washed from one year’s end to another. The
_tatami_, beneath a tolerably fair exterior, swarm with insect life, and
are receptacles of dust, organic matters, etc. The hair, which is loaded
with oil and bandoline, is dressed once a week, or less often in these
districts, and it is unnecessary to enter into any details regarding the
distressing results, and much besides may be left to the imagination.
The persons of the people, especially of the children, are infested with
vermin, and one fruitful source of skin sores is the irritation arising
from this cause. The floors of houses, being concealed by mats, are laid
down carelessly with gaps between the boards, and, as the damp earth is
only 18 inches or 2 feet below, emanations of all kinds enter the mats
and pass into the rooms.
The houses in this region (and I believe everywhere) are hermetically
sealed at night, both in summer and winter, the _amado_, which are made
without ventilators, literally boxing them in, so that, unless they are
falling to pieces, which is rarely the case, none of the air vitiated by
the breathing of many persons, by the emanations from their bodies and
clothing, by the miasmata produced by defective domestic arrangements,
and by the fumes from charcoal _hibachi_, can ever be renewed. Exercise
is seldom taken from choice, and, unless the women work in the fields,
they hang over charcoal fumes the whole day for five months of the year,
engaged in interminable processes of cooking, or in the attempt to get
warm. Much of the food of the peasantry is raw or half-raw salt fish,
and vegetables rendered indigestible by being coarsely pickled, all
bolted with the most marvellous rapidity, as if the one object of life
were to rush through a meal in the shortest possible time. The married
women look as if they had never known youth, and their skin is apt to be
like tanned leather. At Kayashima I asked the house-master’s wife, who
looked about fifty, how old she was (a polite question in Japan), and she
replied twenty-two—one of many similar surprises. Her boy was five years
old, and was still unweaned.