A SEVERE day of mountain travelling brought us into another region. We
left Ichinono early on a fine morning, with three pack-cows, one of which
I rode [and their calves], very comely kine, with small noses, short
horns, straight spines, and deep bodies. I thought that I might get some
fresh milk, but the idea of anything but a calf milking a cow was so new
to the people that there was a universal laugh, and Ito told me that they
thought it “most disgusting,” and that the Japanese think it “most
disgusting” in foreigners to put anything “with such a strong smell and
taste” into their tea! All the cows had cotton cloths, printed with blue
dragons, suspended under their bodies to keep them from mud and insects,
and they wear straw shoes and cords through the cartilages of their
noses. The day being fine, a great deal of rice and _saké_ was on the
move, and we met hundreds of pack-cows, all of the same comely breed, in
strings of four.
We crossed the Sakuratogé, from which the view is beautiful, got horses
at the mountain village of Shirakasawa, crossed more passes, and in the
afternoon reached the village of Tenoko. There, as usual, I sat under
the verandah of the Transport Office, and waited for the one horse which
was available. It was a large shop, but contained not a single article
of European make. In the one room a group of women and children sat
round the fire, and the agent sat as usual with a number of ledgers at a
table a foot high, on which his grandchild was lying on a cushion. Here
Ito dined on seven dishes of horrors, and they brought me _saké_, tea,
rice, and black beans. The last are very good. We had some talk about
the country, and the man asked me to write his name in English
characters, and to write my own in a book. Meanwhile a crowd assembled,
and the front row sat on the ground that the others might see over their
heads. They were dirty and pressed very close, and when the women of the
house saw that I felt the heat they gracefully produced fans and fanned
me for a whole hour. On asking the charge they refused to make any, and
would not receive anything. They had not seen a foreigner before, they
said, they would despise themselves for taking anything, they had my
“honourable name” in their book. Not only that, but they put up a parcel
of sweetmeats, and the man wrote his name on a fan and insisted on my
accepting it. I was grieved to have nothing to give them but some
English pins, but they had never seen such before, and soon circulated
them among the crowd. I told them truly that I should remember them as
long as I remember Japan, and went on, much touched by their kindness.
The lofty pass of Utsu, which is ascended and descended by a number of
stone slabs, is the last of the passes of these choked-up ranges. From
its summit in the welcome sunlight I joyfully looked down upon the noble
plain of Yonezawa, about 30 miles long and from 10 to 18 broad, one of
the gardens of Japan, wooded and watered, covered with prosperous towns
and villages, surrounded by magnificent mountains not altogether
timbered, and bounded at its southern extremity by ranges white with snow
even in the middle of July.
In the long street of the farming village of Matsuhara a man amazed me by
running in front of me and speaking to me, and on Ito coming up, he
assailed him vociferously, and it turned out that he took me for an Aino,
one of the subjugated aborigines of Yezo. I have before now been taken
for a Chinese!
Throughout the province of Echigo I have occasionally seen a piece of
cotton cloth suspended by its four corners from four bamboo poles just
above a quiet stream. Behind it there is usually a long narrow tablet,
notched at the top, similar to those seen in cemeteries, with characters
upon it. Sometimes bouquets of flowers are placed in the hollow top of
each bamboo, and usually there are characters on the cloth itself.
Within it always lies a wooden dipper. In coming down from Tenoko I
passed one of these close to the road, and a Buddhist priest was at the
time pouring a dipper full of water into it, which strained slowly
through. As he was going our way we joined him, and he explained its
meaning.
[Picture: The Flowing Invocation]
According to him the tablet bears on it the _kaimiyô_, or posthumous name
of a woman. The flowers have the same significance as those which loving
hands place on the graves of kindred. If there are characters on the
cloth, they represent the well-known invocation of the Nichiren sect,
_Namu miô hô ren gé kiô_. The pouring of the water into the cloth, often
accompanied by telling the beads on a rosary, is a prayer. The whole is
called “The Flowing Invocation.” I have seldom seen anything more
plaintively affecting, for it denotes that a mother in the first joy of
maternity has passed away to suffer (according to popular belief) in the
Lake of Blood, one of the Buddhist hells, for a sin committed in a former
state of being, and it appeals to every passer-by to shorten the
penalties of a woman in anguish, for in that lake she must remain until
the cloth is so utterly worn out that the water falls through it at once.
Where the mountains come down upon the plain of Yonezawa there are
several raised banks, and you can take one step from the hillside to a
dead level. The soil is dry and gravelly at the junction, ridges of
pines appeared, and the look of the houses suggested increased
cleanliness and comfort. A walk of six miles took us from Tenoko to
Komatsu, a beautifully situated town of 3000 people, with a large trade
in cotton goods, silk, and _saké_.
As I entered Komatsu the first man whom I met turned back hastily, called
into the first house the words which mean “Quick, here’s a foreigner;”
the three carpenters who were at work there flung down their tools and,
without waiting to put on their _kimonos_, sped down the street calling
out the news, so that by the time I reached the _yadoya_ a large crowd
was pressing upon me. The front was mean and unpromising-looking, but,
on reaching the back by a stone bridge over a stream which ran through
the house, I found a room 40 feet long by 15 high, entirely open along
one side to a garden with a large fish-pond with goldfish, a pagoda,
dwarf trees, and all the usual miniature adornments. _Fusuma_ of
wrinkled blue paper splashed with gold turned this “gallery” into two
rooms; but there was no privacy, for the crowds climbed upon the roofs at
the back, and sat there patiently until night.
These were _daimiyô’s_ rooms. The posts and ceilings were ebony and
gold, the mats very fine, the polished alcoves decorated with inlaid
writing-tables and sword-racks; spears nine feet long, with handles of
lacquer inlaid with Venus’ ear, hung in the verandah, the washing bowl
was fine inlaid black lacquer, and the rice-bowls and their covers were
gold lacquer.
In this, as in many other _yadoyas_, there were _kakémonos_ with large
Chinese characters representing the names of the Prime Minister,
Provincial Governor, or distinguished General, who had honoured it by
halting there, and lines of poetry were hung up, as is usual, in the same
fashion. I have several times been asked to write something to be thus
displayed. I spent Sunday at Komatsu, but not restfully, owing to the
nocturnal croaking of the frogs in the pond. In it, as in most towns,
there were shops which sell nothing but white, frothy-looking cakes,
which are used for the goldfish which are so much prized, and three times
daily the women and children of the household came into the garden to
feed them.
When I left Komatsu there were fully sixty people inside the house and
1500 outside—walls, verandahs, and even roofs being packed. From Nikkô
to Komatsu mares had been exclusively used, but there I encountered for
the first time the terrible Japanese pack-horse. Two horridly
fierce-looking creatures were at the door, with their heads tied down
till their necks were completely arched. When I mounted the crowd
followed, gathering as it went, frightening the horse with the clatter of
clogs and the sound of a multitude, till he broke his head-rope, and, the
frightened _mago_ letting him go, he proceeded down the street mainly on
his hind feet, squealing, and striking savagely with his fore feet, the
crowd scattering to the right and left, till, as it surged past the
police station, four policemen came out and arrested it; only to gather
again, however, for there was a longer street, down which my horse
proceeded in the same fashion, and, looking round, I saw Ito’s horse on
his hind legs and Ito on the ground. My beast jumped over all ditches,
attacked all foot-passengers with his teeth, and behaved so like a wild
animal that not all my previous acquaintance with the idiosyncrasies of
horses enabled me to cope with him. On reaching Akayu we found a horse
fair, and, as all the horses had their heads tightly tied down to posts,
they could only squeal and lash out with their hind feet, which so
provoked our animals that the baggage horse, by a series of jerks and
rearings, divested himself of Ito and most of the baggage, and, as I
dismounted from mine, he stood upright, and my foot catching I fell on
the ground, when he made several vicious dashes at me with his teeth and
fore feet, which were happily frustrated by the dexterity of some _mago_.
These beasts forcibly remind me of the words, “Whose mouth must be held
with bit and bridle, lest they turn and fall upon thee.”
It was a lovely summer day, though very hot, and the snowy peaks of Aidzu
scarcely looked cool as they glittered in the sunlight. The plain of
Yonezawa, with the prosperous town of Yonezawa in the south, and the
frequented watering-place of Akayu in the north, is a perfect garden of
Eden, “tilled with a pencil instead of a plough,” growing in rich
profusion rice, cotton, maize, tobacco, hemp, indigo, beans, egg-plants,
walnuts, melons, cucumbers, persimmons, apricots, pomegranates; a smiling
and plenteous land, an Asiatic Arcadia, prosperous and independent, all
its bounteous acres belonging to those who cultivate them, who live under
their vines, figs, and pomegranates, free from oppression—a remarkable
spectacle under an Asiatic despotism. Yet still Daikoku is the chief
deity, and material good is the one object of desire.
It is an enchanting region of beauty, industry, and comfort, mountain
girdled, and watered by the bright Matsuka. Everywhere there are
prosperous and beautiful farming villages, with large houses with carved
beams and ponderous tiled roofs, each standing in its own grounds, buried
among persimmons and pomegranates, with flower-gardens under trellised
vines, and privacy secured by high, closely-clipped screens of
pomegranate and cryptomeria. Besides the villages of Yoshida, Semoshima,
Kurokawa, Takayama, and Takataki, through or near which we passed, I
counted over fifty on the plain with their brown, sweeping barn roofs
looking out from the woodland. I cannot see any differences in the style
of cultivation. Yoshida is rich and prosperous-looking, Numa poor and
wretched-looking; but the scanty acres of Numa, rescued from the
mountain-sides, are as exquisitely trim and neat, as perfectly
cultivated, and yield as abundantly of the crops which suit the climate,
as the broad acres of the sunny plain of Yonezawa, and this is the case
everywhere. “The field of the sluggard” has no existence in Japan.
We rode for four hours through these beautiful villages on a road four
feet wide, and then, to my surprise, after ferrying a river, emerged at
Tsukuno upon what appears on the map as a secondary road, but which is in
reality a main road 25 feet wide, well kept, trenched on both sides, and
with a line of telegraph poles along it. It was a new world at once.
The road for many miles was thronged with well-dressed foot-passengers,
_kurumas_, pack-horses, and waggons either with solid wheels, or wheels
with spokes but no tires. It is a capital carriage-road, but without
carriages. In such civilised circumstances it was curious to see two or
four brown skinned men pulling the carts, and quite often a man and his
wife—the man unclothed, and the woman unclothed to her waist—doing the
same. Also it struck me as incongruous to see telegraph wires above, and
below, men whose only clothing consisted of a sun-hat and fan; while
children with books and slates were returning from school, conning their
lessons.
At Akayu, a town of hot sulphur springs, I hoped to sleep, but it was one
of the noisiest places I have seen. In the most crowded part, where four
streets meet, there are bathing sheds, which were full of people of both
sexes, splashing loudly, and the _yadoya_ close to it had about forty
rooms, in nearly all of which several rheumatic people were lying on the
mats, _samisens_ were twanging, and _kotos_ screeching, and the hubbub
was so unbearable that I came on here, ten miles farther, by a fine new
road, up an uninteresting strath of rice-fields and low hills, which
opens out upon a small plain surrounded by elevated gravelly hills, on
the slope of one of which Kaminoyama, a watering-place of over 3000
people, is pleasantly situated. It is keeping festival; there are
lanterns and flags on every house, and crowds are thronging the temple
grounds, of which there are several on the hills above. It is a clean,
dry place, with beautiful _yadoyas_ on the heights, and pleasant houses
with gardens, and plenty of walks over the hills. The people say that it
is one of the driest places in Japan. If it were within reach of
foreigners, they would find it a wholesome health resort, with
picturesque excursions in many directions.
This is one of the great routes of Japanese travel, and it is interesting
to see watering-places with their habits, amusements, and civilisation
quite complete, but borrowing nothing from Europe. The hot springs here
contain iron, and are strongly impregnated with sulphuretted hydrogen. I
tried the temperature of three, and found them 100°, 105°, and 107°.
They are supposed to be very valuable in rheumatism, and they attract
visitors from great distances. The police, who are my frequent
informants, tell me that there are nearly 600 people now staying here for
the benefit of the baths, of which six daily are usually taken. I think
that in rheumatism, as in some other maladies, the old-fashioned Japanese
doctors pay little attention to diet and habits, and much to drugs and
external applications. The benefit of these and other medicinal waters
would be much increased if vigorous friction replaced the dabbing with
soft towels.
[Picture: The Belle of Kaminoyama]
This is a large _yadoya_, very full of strangers, and the house-mistress,
a buxom and most prepossessing widow, has a truly exquisite hotel for
bathers higher up the hill. She has eleven children, two or three of
whom are tall, handsome, and graceful girls. One blushed deeply at my
evident admiration, but was not displeased, and took me up the hill to
see the temples, baths, and _yadoyas_ of this very attractive place. I
am much delighted with her grace and _savoir faire_. I asked the widow
how long she had kept the inn, and she proudly answered, “Three hundred
years,” not an uncommon instance of the heredity of occupations.
My accommodation is unique—a _kura_, or godown, in a large conventional
garden, in which is a bath-house, which receives a hot spring at a
temperature of 105°, in which I luxuriate. Last night the mosquitoes
were awful. If the widow and her handsome girls had not fanned me
perseveringly for an hour, I should not have been able to write a line.
My new mosquito net succeeds admirably, and, when I am once within it, I
rather enjoy the disappointment of the hundreds of drumming blood-thirsty
wretches outside.
The widow tells me that house-masters pay 2 _yen_ once for all for the
sign, and an annual tax of 2 _yen_ on a first-class _yadoya_, 1 _yen_ for
a second, and 50 cents for a third, with 5 _yen_ for the license to sell
_saké_.
These “godowns” (from the Malay word _gadong_), or fire-proof
store-houses, are one of the most marked features of Japanese towns, both
because they are white where all else is grey, and because they are solid
where all else is perishable.
I am lodged in the lower part, but the iron doors are open, and in their
place at night is a paper screen. A few things are kept in my room. Two
handsome shrines from which the unemotional faces of two Buddhas looked
out all night, a fine figure of the goddess Kwan-non, and a venerable one
of the god of longevity, suggested curious dreams.