Abominable Weather—Insect Pests—Absence of Foreign Trade—A Refractory
River—Progress—The Japanese City—Water Highways—Niigata Gardens—Ruth
Fyson—The Winter Climate—A Population in Wadding.
NIIGATA, _July_ 9.
I HAVE spent over a week in Niigata, and leave it regretfully to-morrow,
rather for the sake of the friends I have made than for its own
interests. I never experienced a week of more abominable weather. The
sun has been seen just once, the mountains, which are thirty miles off,
not at all. The clouds are a brownish grey, the air moist and
motionless, and the mercury has varied from 82° in the day to 80° at
night. The household is afflicted with lassitude and loss of appetite.
Evening does not bring coolness, but myriads of flying, creeping,
jumping, running creatures, all with power to hurt, which replace the day
mosquitoes, villains with spotted legs, which bite and poison one without
the warning hum. The night mosquitoes are legion. There are no walks
except in the streets and the public gardens, for Niigata is built on a
sand spit, hot and bare. Neither can you get a view of it without
climbing to the top of a wooden look-out.
Niigata is a Treaty Port without foreign trade, and almost without
foreign residents. Not a foreign ship visited the port either last year
or this. There are only two foreign firms, and these are German, and
only eighteen foreigners, of which number, except the missionaries,
nearly all are in Government employment. Its river, the Shinano, is the
largest in Japan, and it and its affluents bring down a prodigious volume
of water. But Japanese rivers are much choked with sand and shingle
washed down from the mountains. In all that I have seen, except those
which are physically limited by walls of hard rock, a river-bed is a
waste of sand, boulders, and shingle, through the middle of which, among
sand-banks and shallows, the river proper takes its devious course. In
the freshets, which occur to a greater or less extent every year,
enormous volumes of water pour over these wastes, carrying sand and
detritus down to the mouths, which are all obstructed by bars. Of these
rivers the Shinano, being the biggest, is the most refractory, and has
piled up a bar at its entrance through which there is only a passage
seven feet deep, which is perpetually shallowing. The minds of engineers
are much exercised upon the Shinano, and the Government is most anxious
to deepen the channel and give Western Japan what it has not—a harbour;
but the expense of the necessary operation is enormous, and in the
meantime a limited ocean traffic is carried on by junks and by a few
small Japanese steamers which call outside. {115a} There is a British
Vice-Consulate, but, except as a step, few would accept such a dreary
post or outpost.
But Niigata is a handsome, prosperous city of 50,000 inhabitants, the
capital of the wealthy province of Echigo, with a population of one and a
half millions, and is the seat of the _Kenrei_, or provincial governor,
of the chief law courts, of fine schools, a hospital, and barracks. It
is curious to find in such an excluded town a school deserving the
designation of a college, as it includes intermediate, primary, and
normal schools, an English school with 150 pupils, organised by English
and American teachers, an engineering school, a geological museum,
splendidly equipped laboratories, and the newest and most approved
scientific and educational apparatus. The Government Buildings, which
are grouped near Mr. Fyson’s, are of painted white wood, and are imposing
from their size and their innumerable glass windows. There is a large
hospital {115b} arranged by a European doctor, with a medical school
attached, and it, the _Kenchô_, the _Saibanchô_, or Court House, the
schools, the barracks, and a large bank, which is rivalling them all,
have a go-ahead, Europeanised look, bold, staring, and tasteless. There
are large public gardens, very well laid out, and with finely gravelled
walks. There are 300 street lamps, which burn the mineral oil of the
district.
Yet, because the riotous Shinano persistently bars it out from the sea,
its natural highway, the capital of one of the richest provinces of Japan
is “left out in the cold,” and the province itself, which yields not only
rice, silk, tea, hemp, _ninjin_, and indigo, in large quantities, but
gold, copper, coal, and petroleum, has to send most of its produce to
Yedo across ranges of mountains, on the backs of pack-horses, by roads
scarcely less infamous than the one by which I came.
The Niigata of the Government, with its signs of progress in a western
direction, is quite unattractive-looking as compared with the genuine
Japanese Niigata, which is the neatest, cleanest, and most
comfortable-looking town I have yet seen, and altogether free from the
jostlement of a foreign settlement. It is renowned for the beautiful
tea-houses, which attract visitors from distant places, and for the
excellence of the theatres, and is the centre of the recreation and
pleasure of a large district. It is so beautifully clean that, as at
Nikkô, I should feel reluctant to walk upon its well-swept streets in
muddy boots. It would afford a good lesson to the Edinburgh authorities,
for every vagrant bit of straw, stick, or paper, is at once pounced upon
and removed, and no rubbish may stand for an instant in its streets
except in a covered box or bucket. It is correctly laid out in square
divisions, formed by five streets over a mile long, crossed by very
numerous short ones, and is intersected by canals, which are its real
roadways. I have not seen a pack-horse in the streets; everything comes
in by boat, and there are few houses in the city which cannot have their
goods delivered by canal very near to their doors. These water-ways are
busy all day, but in the early morning, when the boats come in loaded
with the vegetables, without which the people could not exist for a day,
the bustle is indescribable. The cucumber boats just now are the great
sight. The canals are usually in the middle of the streets, and have
fairly broad roadways on both sides. They are much below the street
level, and their nearly perpendicular banks are neatly faced with wood,
broken at intervals by flights of stairs. They are bordered by trees,
among which are many weeping willows; and, as the river water runs
through them, keeping them quite sweet, and they are crossed at short
intervals by light bridges, they form a very attractive feature of
Niigata.
[Picture: Street and Canal]
The houses have very steep roofs of shingle, weighted with stones, and,
as they are of very irregular heights, and all turn the steep gables of
the upper stories streetwards, the town has a picturesqueness very
unusual in Japan. The deep verandahs are connected all along the
streets, so as to form a sheltered promenade when the snow lies deep in
winter. With its canals with their avenues of trees, its fine public
gardens, and clean, picturesque streets, it is a really attractive town;
but its improvements are recent, and were only lately completed by Mr.
Masakata Kusumoto, now Governor of Tôkiyô. There is no appearance of
poverty in any part of the town, but if there be wealth, it is carefully
concealed. One marked feature of the city is the number of streets of
dwelling-houses with projecting windows of wooden _slats_, through which
the people can see without being seen, though at night, when the _andons_
are lit, we saw, as we walked from Dr. Palm’s, that in most cases
families were sitting round the _hibachi_ in a _déshabillé_ of the
scantiest kind.
The fronts are very narrow, and the houses extend backwards to an amazing
length, with gardens in which flowers, shrubs, and mosquitoes are grown,
and bridges are several times repeated, so as to give the effect of
fairyland as you look through from the street. The principal apartments
in all Japanese houses are at the back, looking out on these miniature
landscapes, for a landscape is skilfully dwarfed into a space often not
more than 30 feet square. A lake, a rock-work, a bridge, a stone
lantern, and a deformed pine, are indispensable; but whenever
circumstances and means admit of it, quaintnesses of all kinds are
introduced. Small pavilions, retreats for tea-making, reading, sleeping
in quiet and coolness, fishing under cover, and drinking _saké_; bronze
pagodas, cascades falling from the mouths of bronze dragons; rock caves,
with gold and silver fish darting in and out; lakes with rocky islands,
streams crossed by green bridges, just high enough to allow a rat or frog
to pass under; lawns, and slabs of stone for crossing them in wet
weather, grottoes, hills, valleys, groves of miniature palms, cycas, and
bamboo; and dwarfed trees of many kinds, of purplish and dull green hues,
are cut into startling likenesses of beasts and creeping things, or
stretch distorted arms over tiny lakes.
I have walked about a great deal in Niigata, and when with Mrs. Fyson,
who is the only European lady here at present, and her little Ruth, a
pretty Saxon child of three years old, we have been followed by an
immense crowd, as the sight of this fair creature, with golden curls
falling over her shoulders, is most fascinating. Both men and women have
gentle, winning ways with infants, and Ruth, instead of being afraid of
the crowds, smiles upon them, bows in Japanese fashion, speaks to them in
Japanese, and seems a little disposed to leave her own people altogether.
It is most difficult to make her keep with us, and two or three times, on
missing her and looking back, we have seen her seated, native fashion, in
a ring in a crowd of several hundred people, receiving a homage and
admiration from which she was most unwillingly torn. The Japanese have a
perfect passion for children, but it is not good for European children to
be much with them, as they corrupt their morals, and teach them to tell
lies.
The climate of Niigata and of most of this great province contrasts
unpleasantly with the region on the other side of the mountains, warmed
by the gulf-stream of the North Pacific, in which the autumn and winter,
with their still atmosphere, bracing temperature, and blue and sunny
skies, are the most delightful seasons of the year. Thirty-two days of
snow-fall occur on an average. The canals and rivers freeze, and even
the rapid Shinano sometimes bears a horse. In January and February the
snow lies three or four feet deep, a veil of clouds obscures the sky,
people inhabit their upper rooms to get any daylight, pack-horse traffic
is suspended, pedestrians go about with difficulty in rough snow-shoes,
and for nearly six months the coast is unsuitable for navigation, owing
to the prevalence of strong, cold, north-west winds. In this city people
in wadded clothes, with only their eyes exposed, creep about under the
verandahs. The population huddles round _hibachis_ and shivers, for the
mercury, which rises to 92° in summer, falls to 15° in winter. And all
this is in latitude 37° 55′—three degrees south of Naples!