The Canal-side at Niigata—Awful Loneliness—Courtesy—Dr. Palm’s Tandem—A
Noisy _Matsuri_—A Jolting Journey—The Mountain Villages—Winter
Dismalness—An Out-of-the-world Hamlet—Crowded Dwellings—Riding a
Cow—“Drunk and Disorderly”—An Enforced Rest—Local Discouragements—Heavy
Loads—Absence of Beggary—Slow Travelling.
ICHINONO, _July_ 12.
TWO foreign ladies, two fair-haired foreign infants, a long-haired
foreign dog, and a foreign gentleman, who, without these accompaniments,
might have escaped notice, attracted a large but kindly crowd to the
canal side when I left Niigata. The natives bore away the children on
their shoulders, the Fysons walked to the extremity of the canal to bid
me good-bye, the _sampan_ shot out upon the broad, swirling flood of the
Shinano, and an awful sense of loneliness fell upon me. We crossed the
Shinano, poled up the narrow, embanked Shinkawa, had a desperate struggle
with the flooded Aganokawa, were much impeded by strings of nauseous
manure-boats on the narrow, discoloured Kajikawa, wondered at the
interminable melon and cucumber fields, and at the odd river life, and,
after hard poling for six hours, reached Kisaki, having accomplished
exactly ten miles. Then three _kurumas_ with trotting runners took us
twenty miles at the low rate of 4½ _sen_ per _ri_. In one place a board
closed the road, but, on representing to the chief man of the village
that the traveller was a foreigner, he courteously allowed me to pass,
the Express Agent having accompanied me thus far to see that I “got
through all right.” The road was tolerably populous throughout the day’s
journey, and the farming villages which extended much of the way—Tsuiji,
Kasayanagê, Mono, and Mari—were neat, and many of the farms had bamboo
fences to screen them from the road. It was, on the whole, a pleasant
country, and the people, though little clothed, did not look either poor
or very dirty. The soil was very light and sandy. There were, in fact,
“pine barrens,” sandy ridges with nothing on them but spindly Scotch firs
and fir scrub; but the sandy levels between them, being heavily manured
and cultivated like gardens, bore splendid crops of cucumbers trained
like peas, melons, vegetable marrow, _Arum esculentum_, sweet potatoes,
maize, tea, tiger-lilies, beans, and onions; and extensive orchards with
apples and pears trained laterally on trellis-work eight feet high, were
a novelty in the landscape.
Though we were all day drawing nearer to mountains wooded to their
summits on the east, the amount of vegetation was not burdensome, the
rice swamps were few, and the air felt drier and less relaxing. As my
runners were trotting merrily over one of the pine barrens, I met Dr.
Palm returning from one of his medico-religious expeditions, with a
tandem of two naked coolies, who were going over the ground at a great
pace, and I wished that some of the most staid directors of the Edinburgh
Medical Missionary Society could have the shock of seeing him! I shall
not see a European again for some weeks. From Tsuiji, a very neat
village, where we changed _kurumas_, we were jolted along over a shingly
road to Nakajo, a considerable town just within treaty limits. The
Japanese doctors there, as in some other places, are Dr. Palm’s cordial
helpers, and five or six of them, whom he regards as possessing the rare
virtues of candour, earnestness, and single-mindedness, and who have
studied English medical works, have clubbed together to establish a
dispensary, and, under Dr. Palm’s instructions, are even carrying out the
antiseptic treatment successfully, after some ludicrous failures!
We dashed through Nakajo as _kuruma_-runners always dash through towns
and villages, got out of it in a drizzle upon an avenue of firs, three or
four deep, which extends from Nakajo to Kurokawa, and for some miles
beyond were jolted over a damp valley on which tea and rice alternated,
crossed two branches of the shingly Kurokawa on precarious bridges,
rattled into the town of Kurokawa, much decorated with flags and
lanterns, where the people were all congregated at a shrine where there
was much drumming, and a few girls, much painted and bedizened, were
dancing or posturing on a raised and covered platform, in honour of the
god of the place, whose _matsuri_ or festival it was; and out again, to
be mercilessly jolted under the firs in the twilight to a solitary house
where the owner made some difficulty about receiving us, as his licence
did not begin till the next day, but eventually succumbed, and gave me
his one upstairs room, exactly five feet high, which hardly allowed of my
standing upright with my hat on. He then rendered it suffocating by
closing the _amado_, for the reason often given, that if he left them
open and the house was robbed, the police would not only blame him
severely, but would not take any trouble to recover his property. He had
no rice, so I indulged in a feast of delicious cucumbers. I never saw so
many eaten as in that district. Children gnaw them all day long, and
even babies on their mothers’ backs suck them with avidity. Just now
they are sold for a _sen_ a dozen.
It is a mistake to arrive at a _yadoya_ after dark. Even if the best
rooms are not full it takes fully an hour to get my food and the room
ready, and meanwhile I cannot employ my time usefully because of the
mosquitoes. There was heavy rain all night, accompanied by the first
wind that I have heard since landing; and the fitful creaking of the
pines and the drumming from the shrine made me glad to get up at sunrise,
or rather at daylight, for there has not been a sunrise since I came, or
a sunset either. That day we travelled by Sekki to Kawaguchi in
_kurumas_, i.e. we were sometimes bumped over stones, sometimes deposited
on the edge of a quagmire, and asked to get out; and sometimes compelled
to walk for two or three miles at a time along the infamous bridle-track
above the river Arai, up which two men could hardly push and haul an
empty vehicle; and, as they often had to lift them bodily and carry them
for some distance, I was really glad when we reached the village of
Kawaguchi to find that they could go no farther, though, as we could only
get one horse, I had to walk the last stage in a torrent of rain, poorly
protected by my paper waterproof cloak.
We are now in the midst of the great central chain of the Japanese
mountains, which extends almost without a break for 900 miles, and is
from 40 to 100 miles in width, broken up into interminable ranges
traversable only by steep passes from 1000 to 5000 feet in height, with
innumerable rivers, ravines, and valleys, the heights and ravines heavily
timbered, the rivers impetuous and liable to freshets, and the valleys
invariably terraced for rice. It is in the valleys that the villages are
found, and regions more isolated I have never seen, shut out by bad roads
from the rest of Japan. The houses are very poor, the summer costume of
the men consists of the _maro_ only, and that of the women of trousers
with an open shirt, and when we reached Kurosawa last night it had
dwindled to trousers only. There is little traffic, and very few horses
are kept, one, two, or three constituting the live stock of a large
village. The shops, such as they are, contain the barest necessaries of
life. Millet and buckwheat rather than rice, with the universal
_daikon_, are the staples of diet The climate is wet in summer and
bitterly cold in winter. Even now it is comfortless enough for the
people to come in wet, just to warm the tips of their fingers at the
_irori_, stifled the while with the stinging smoke, while the damp wind
flaps the torn paper of the windows about, and damp draughts sweep the
ashes over the _tatami_ until the house is hermetically sealed at night.
These people never know anything of what we regard as comfort, and in the
long winter, when the wretched bridle-tracks are blocked by snow and the
freezing wind blows strong, and the families huddle round the smoky fire
by the doleful glimmer of the _andon_, without work, books, or play, to
shiver through the long evenings in chilly dreariness, and herd together
for warmth at night like animals, their condition must be as miserable as
anything short of grinding poverty can make it.
I saw things at their worst that night as I tramped into the hamlet of
Numa, down whose sloping street a swollen stream was running, which the
people were banking out of their houses. I was wet and tired, and the
woman at the one wretched _yadoya_ met me, saying, “I’m sorry it’s very
dirty and quite unfit for so honourable a guest;” and she was right, for
the one room was up a ladder, the windows were in tatters, there was no
charcoal for a _hibachi_, no eggs, and the rice was so dirty and so full
of a small black seed as to be unfit to eat. Worse than all, there was
no Transport Office, the hamlet did not possess a horse, and it was only
by sending to a farmer five miles off, and by much bargaining, that I got
on the next morning. In estimating the number of people in a given
number of houses in Japan, it is usual to multiply the houses by five,
but I had the curiosity to walk through Numa and get Ito to translate the
tallies which hang outside all Japanese houses with the names, number,
and sexes of their inmates, and in twenty-four houses there were 307
people! In some there were four families—the grand-parents, the parents,
the eldest son with his wife and family, and a daughter or two with their
husbands and children. The eldest son, who inherits the house and land,
almost invariably brings his wife to his father’s house, where she often
becomes little better than a slave to her mother-in-law. By rigid custom
she literally forsakes her own kindred, and her “filial duty” is
transferred to her husband’s mother, who often takes a dislike to her,
and instigates her son to divorce her if she has no children. My hostess
had induced her son to divorce his wife, and she could give no better
reason for it than that she was lazy.
The Numa people, she said, had never seen a foreigner, so, though the
rain still fell heavily, they were astir in the early morning. They
wanted to hear me speak, so I gave my orders to Ito in public. Yesterday
was a most toilsome day, mainly spent in stumbling up and sliding down
the great passes of Futai, Takanasu, and Yenoiki, all among
forest-covered mountains, deeply cleft by forest-choked ravines, with now
and then one of the snowy peaks of Aidzu breaking the monotony of the
ocean of green. The horses’ shoes were tied and untied every few
minutes, and we made just a mile an hour! At last we were deposited in a
most unpromising place in the hamlet of Tamagawa, and were told that a
rice merchant, after waiting for three days, had got every horse in the
country. At the end of two hours’ chaffering one baggage coolie was
produced, some of the things were put on the rice horses, and a steed
with a pack-saddle was produced for me in the shape of a plump and pretty
little cow, which carried me safely over the magnificent pass of Ori and
down to the town of Okimi, among rice-fields, where, in a drowning rain,
I was glad to get shelter with a number of coolies by a wood-fire till
another pack-cow was produced, and we walked on through the rice-fields
and up into the hills again to Kurosawa, where I had intended to remain;
but there was no inn, and the farm-house where they take in travellers,
besides being on the edge of a malarious pond, and being dark and full of
stinging smoke, was so awfully dirty and full of living creatures, that,
exhausted as I was, I was obliged to go on. But it was growing dark,
there was no Transport Office, and for the first time the people were
very slightly extortionate, and drove Ito nearly to his wits’ end. The
peasants do not like to be out after dark, for they are afraid of ghosts
and all sorts of devilments, and it was difficult to induce them to start
so late in the evening.
There was not a house clean enough to rest in, so I sat on a stone and
thought about the people for over an hour. Children with scald-head,
_scabies_, and sore eyes swarmed. Every woman carried a baby on her
back, and every child who could stagger under one carried one too. Not
one woman wore anything but cotton trousers. One woman reeled about
“drunk and disorderly.” Ito sat on a stone hiding his face in his hands,
and when I asked him if he were ill, he replied in a most lamentable
voice, “I don’t know what I am to do, I’m so ashamed for you to see such
things!” The boy is only eighteen, and I pitied him. I asked him if
women were often drunk, and he said they were in Yokohama, but they
usually kept in their houses. He says that when their husbands give them
money to pay bills at the end of a month, they often spend it in _saké_,
and that they sometimes get _saké_ in shops and have it put down as rice
or tea. “The old, old story!” I looked at the dirt and barbarism, and
asked if this were the Japan of which I had read. Yet a woman in this
unseemly costume firmly refused to take the 2 or 3 _sen_ which it is
usual to leave at a place where you rest, because she said that I had had
water and not tea, and after I had forced it on her, she returned it to
Ito, and this redeeming incident sent me away much comforted.
From Numa the distance here is only 1½ _ri_, but it is over the steep
pass of Honoki, which is ascended and descended by hundreds of rude stone
steps, not pleasant in the dark. On this pass I saw birches for the
first time; at its foot we entered Yamagata _ken_ by a good bridge, and
shortly reached this village, in which an unpromising-looking farm-house
is the only accommodation; but though all the rooms but two are taken up
with silk-worms, those two are very good and look upon a miniature lake
and rockery. The one objection to my room is that to get either in or
out of it I must pass through the other, which is occupied by five
tobacco merchants who are waiting for transport, and who while away the
time by strumming on that instrument of dismay, the _samisen_. No horses
or cows can be got for me, so I am spending the day quietly here, rather
glad to rest, for I am much exhausted. When I am suffering much from my
spine Ito always gets into a fright and thinks I am going to die, as he
tells me when I am better, but shows his anxiety by a short, surly
manner, which is most disagreeable. He thinks we shall never get through
the interior! Mr. Brunton’s excellent map fails in this region, so it is
only by fixing on the well-known city of Yamagata and devising routes to
it that we get on. Half the evening is spent in consulting Japanese
maps, if we can get them, and in questioning the house-master and
Transport Agent, and any chance travellers; but the people know nothing
beyond the distance of a few _ri_, and the agents seldom tell one
anything beyond the next stage. When I inquire about the “unbeaten
tracks” that I wish to take, the answers are, “It’s an awful road through
mountains,” or “There are many bad rivers to cross,” or “There are none
but farmers’ houses to stop at.” No encouragement is ever given, but we
get on, and shall get on, I doubt not, though the hardships are not what
I would desire in my present state of health.
Very few horses are kept here. Cows and coolies carry much of the
merchandise, and women as well as men carry heavy loads. A baggage
coolie carries about 50 lbs., but here merchants carrying their own goods
from Yamagata actually carry from 90 to 140 lbs., and even more. It is
sickening to meet these poor fellows struggling over the mountain-passes
in evident distress. Last night five of them were resting on the summit
ridge of a pass gasping violently. Their eyes were starting out; all
their muscles, rendered painfully visible by their leanness, were
quivering; rills of blood from the bite of insects, which they cannot
drive away, were literally running all over their naked bodies, washed
away here and there by copious perspiration. Truly “in the sweat of
their brows” they were eating bread and earning an honest living for
their families! Suffering and hard-worked as they were, they were quite
independent. I have not seen a beggar or beggary in this strange
country. The women were carrying 70 lbs. These burden-bearers have
their backs covered by a thick pad of plaited straw. On this rests a
ladder, curved up at the lower end like the runners of a sleigh. On this
the load is carefully packed till it extends from below the man’s waist
to a considerable height above his head. It is covered with waterproof
paper, securely roped, and thatched with straw, and is supported by a
broad padded band just below the collar bones. Of course, as the man
walks nearly bent double, and the position is a very painful one, he
requires to stop and straighten himself frequently, and unless he meets
with a bank of convenient height, he rests the bottom of his burden on a
short, stout pole with an L-shaped top, carried for this purpose. The
carrying of enormous loads is quite a feature of this region, and so, I
am sorry to say, are red stinging ants and the small gadflies which
molest the coolies.
Yesterday’s journey was 18 miles in twelve hours! Ichinono is a nice,
industrious hamlet, given up, like all others, to rearing silk-worms, and
the pure white and sulphur yellow cocoons are drying on mats in the sun
everywhere.