An Infamous Road—Monotonous Greenery—Abysmal Dirt—Low Lives—The Tsugawa
_Yadoya_—Politeness—A Shipping Port—A Barbarian Devil.
TSUGAWA, _July_ 2.
YESTERDAY’S journey was one of the most severe I have yet had, for in ten
hours of hard travelling I only accomplished fifteen miles. The road
from Kurumatogé westwards is so infamous that the stages are sometimes
little more than a mile. Yet it is by it, so far at least as the Tsugawa
river, that the produce and manufactures of the rich plain of Aidzu, with
its numerous towns, and of a very large interior district, must find an
outlet at Niigata. In defiance of all modern ideas, it goes straight up
and straight down hill, at a gradient that I should be afraid to hazard a
guess at, and at present it is a perfect quagmire, into which great
stones have been thrown, some of which have subsided edgewise, and others
have disappeared altogether. It is the very worst road I ever rode over,
and that is saying a good deal! Kurumatogé was the last of seventeen
mountain-passes, over 2000 feet high, which I have crossed since leaving
Nikkô. Between it and Tsugawa the scenery, though on a smaller scale, is
of much the same character as hitherto—hills wooded to their tops, cleft
by ravines which open out occasionally to divulge more distant ranges,
all smothered in greenery, which, when I am ill-pleased, I am inclined to
call “rank vegetation.” Oh that an abrupt scaur, or a strip of flaming
desert, or something salient and brilliant, would break in, however
discordantly, upon this monotony of green!
The villages of that district must, I think, have reached the lowest
abyss of filthiness in Hozawa and Saikaiyama. Fowls, dogs, horses, and
people herded together in sheds black with wood smoke, and manure heaps
drained into the wells. No young boy wore any clothing. Few of the men
wore anything but the _maro_, the women were unclothed to their waists
and such clothing as they had was very dirty, and held together by mere
force of habit. The adults were covered with inflamed bites of insects,
and the children with skin-disease. Their houses were dirty, and, as
they squatted on their heels, or lay face downwards, they looked little
better than savages. Their appearance and the want of delicacy of their
habits are simply abominable, and in the latter respect they contrast to
great disadvantage with several savage peoples that I have been among.
If I had kept to Nikkô, Hakone, Miyanoshita, and similar places visited
by foreigners with less time, I should have formed a very different
impression. Is their spiritual condition, I often wonder, much higher
than their physical one? They are courteous, kindly, industrious, and
free from gross crimes; but, from the conversations that I have had with
Japanese, and from much that I see, I judge that their standard of
foundational morality is very low, and that life is neither truthful nor
pure.
I put up here at a crowded _yadoya_, where they have given me two
cheerful rooms in the garden, away from the crowd. Ito’s great desire on
arriving at any place is to shut me up in my room and keep me a close
prisoner till the start the next morning; but here I emancipated myself,
and enjoyed myself very much sitting in the _daidokoro_. The
house-master is of the _samurai_, or two-sworded class, now, as such,
extinct. His face is longer, his lips thinner, and his nose straighter
and more prominent than those of the lower class, and there is a
difference in his manner and bearing. I have had a great deal of
interesting conversation with him.
In the same open space his clerk was writing at a lacquer desk of the
stereotyped form—a low bench with the ends rolled over—a woman was
tailoring, coolies were washing their feet on the _itama_, and several
more were squatting round the _irori_ smoking and drinking tea. A coolie
servant washed some rice for my dinner, but before doing so took off his
clothes, and the woman who cooked it let her _kimono_ fall to her waist
before she began to work, as is customary among respectable women. The
house-master’s wife and Ito talked about me unguardedly. I asked what
they were saying. “She says,” said he, “that you are very polite—for a
foreigner,” he added. I asked what she meant, and found that it was
because I took off my boots before I stepped on the matting, and bowed
when they handed me the _tabako-bon_.
We walked through the town to find something eatable for to-morrow’s
river journey, but only succeeded in getting wafers made of white of egg
and sugar, balls made of sugar and barley flour, and beans coated with
sugar. Thatch, with its picturesqueness, has disappeared, and the
Tsugawa roofs are of strips of bark weighted with large stones; but, as
the houses turn their gable ends to the street, and there is a promenade
the whole way under the eaves, and the street turns twice at right angles
and terminates in temple grounds on a bank above the river, it is less
monotonous than most Japanese towns. It is a place of 3000 people, and a
good deal of produce is shipped from hence to Niigata by the river.
To-day it is thronged with pack-horses. I was much mobbed, and one child
formed the solitary exception to the general rule of politeness by
calling me a name equivalent to the Chinese _Fan Kwai_, “foreign;” but he
was severely chidden, and a policeman has just called with an apology. A
slice of fresh salmon has been produced, and I think I never tasted
anything so delicious. I have finished the first part of my land
journey, and leave for Niigata by boat to-morrow morning.