Torrents of Rain—An unpleasant Detention—Devastations produced by
Floods—The Yadate Pass—The Force of Water—Difficulties thicken—A
Primitive Yadoya—The Water rises.
IKARIGASEKI, AOMORI KEN, _August_ 2.
THE prophecies concerning difficulties are fulfilled. For six days and
five nights the rain has never ceased, except for a few hours at a time,
and for the last thirteen hours, as during the eclipse at Shirasawa, it
has been falling in such sheets as I have only seen for a few minutes at
a time on the equator. I have been here storm-staid for two days, with
damp bed, damp clothes, damp everything, and boots, bag, books, are all
green with mildew. And still the rain falls, and roads, bridges,
rice-fields, trees, and hillsides are being swept in a common ruin
towards the Tsugaru Strait, so tantalisingly near; and the simple people
are calling on the forgotten gods of the rivers and the hills, on the sun
and moon, and all the host of heaven, to save them from this “plague of
immoderate rain and waters.” For myself, to be able to lie down all day
is something, and as “the mind, when in a healthy state, reposes as
quietly before an insurmountable difficulty as before an ascertained
truth,” so, as I cannot get on, I have ceased to chafe, and am rather
inclined to magnify the advantages of the detention, a necessary process,
as you would think if you saw my surroundings!
The day before yesterday, in spite of severe pain, was one of the most
interesting of my journey. As I learned something of the force of fire
in Hawaii, I am learning not a little of the force of water in Japan. We
left Shirasawa at noon, as it looked likely to clear, taking two horses
and three men. It is beautiful scenery—a wild valley, upon which a
number of lateral ridges descend, rendered strikingly picturesque by the
dark pyramidal cryptomeria, which are truly the glory of Japan. Five of
the fords were deep and rapid, and the entrance on them difficult, as the
sloping descents were all carried away, leaving steep banks, which had to
be levelled by the mattocks of the _mago_. Then the fords themselves
were gone; there were shallows where there had been depths, and depths
where there had been shallows; new channels were carved, and great beds
of shingle had been thrown up. Much wreckage lay about. The road and
its small bridges were all gone, trees torn up by the roots or snapped
short off by being struck by heavy logs were heaped together like
barricades, leaves and even bark being in many cases stripped completely
off; great logs floated down the river in such numbers and with such
force that we had to wait half an hour in one place to secure a safe
crossing; hollows were filled with liquid mud, boulders of great size
were piled into embankments, causing perilous alterations in the course
of the river; a fertile valley had been utterly destroyed, and the men
said they could hardly find their way.
At the end of five miles it became impassable for horses, and, with two
of the _mago_ carrying the baggage, we set off, wading through water and
climbing along the side of a hill, up to our knees in soft wet soil. The
hillside and the road were both gone, and there were heavy landslips
along the whole valley. Happily there was not much of this exhausting
work, for, just as higher and darker ranges, densely wooded with
cryptomeria, began to close us in, we emerged upon a fine new road, broad
enough for a carriage, which, after crossing two ravines on fine bridges,
plunges into the depths of a magnificent forest, and then by a long
series of fine zigzags of easy gradients ascends the pass of Yadate, on
the top of which, in a deep sandstone cutting, is a handsome obelisk
marking the boundary between Akita and Aomori _ken_. This is a
marvellous road for Japan, it is so well graded and built up, and logs
for travellers’ rests are placed at convenient distances. Some very
heavy work in grading and blasting has been done upon it, but there are
only four miles of it, with wretched bridle tracks at each end. I left
the others behind, and strolled on alone over the top of the pass and
down the other side, where the road is blasted out of rock of a vivid
pink and green colour, looking brilliant under the trickle of water. I
admire this pass more than anything I have seen in Japan; I even long to
see it again, but under a bright blue sky. It reminds me much of the
finest part of the Brunig Pass, and something of some of the passes in
the Rocky Mountains, but the trees are far finer than in either. It was
lonely, stately, dark, solemn; its huge cryptomeria, straight as masts,
sent their tall spires far aloft in search of light; the ferns, which
love damp and shady places, were the only undergrowth; the trees flung
their balsamy, aromatic scent liberally upon the air, and, in the
unlighted depths of many a ravine and hollow, clear bright torrents leapt
and tumbled, drowning with their thundering bass the musical treble of
the lighter streams. Not a traveller disturbed the solitude with his
sandalled footfall; there was neither song of bird nor hum of insect.
In the midst of this sublime scenery, and at the very top of the pass,
the rain, which had been light but steady during the whole day, began to
come down in streams and then in sheets. I have been so rained upon for
weeks that at first I took little notice of it, but very soon changes
occurred before my eyes which concentrated my attention upon it. The
rush of waters was heard everywhere, trees of great size slid down,
breaking others in their fall; rocks were rent and carried away trees in
their descent, the waters rose before our eyes; with a boom and roar as
of an earthquake a hillside burst, and half the hill, with a noble forest
of cryptomeria, was projected outwards, and the trees, with the land on
which they grew, went down heads foremost, diverting a river from its
course, and where the forest-covered hillside had been there was a great
scar, out of which a torrent burst at high pressure, which in half an
hour carved for itself a deep ravine, and carried into the valley below
an avalanche of stones and sand. Another hillside descended less
abruptly, and its noble groves found themselves at the bottom in a
perpendicular position, and will doubtless survive their transplantation.
Actually, before my eyes, this fine new road was torn away by hastily
improvised torrents, or blocked by landslips in several places, and a
little lower, in one moment, a hundred yards of it disappeared, and with
them a fine bridge, which was deposited aslant across the torrent lower
down.
On the descent, when things began to look very bad, and the
mountain-sides had become cascades bringing trees, logs, and rocks down
with them, we were fortunate enough to meet with two pack-horses whose
leaders were ignorant of the impassability of the road to Odaté, and they
and my coolies exchanged loads. These were strong horses, and the _mago_
were skilful and courageous. They said if we hurried we could just get
to the hamlet they had left, they thought; but while they spoke the road
and the bridge below were carried away. They insisted on lashing me to
the pack-saddle. The great stream, whose beauty I had formerly admired,
was now a thing of dread, and had to be forded four times without fords.
It crashed and thundered, drowning the feeble sound of human voices, the
torrents from the heavens hissed through the forest, trees and logs came
crashing down the hillsides, a thousand cascades added to the din, and in
the bewilderment produced by such an unusual concatenation of sights and
sounds we stumbled through the river, the men up to their shoulders, the
horses up to their backs. Again and again we crossed. The banks being
carried away, it was very hard to get either into or out of the water;
the horses had to scramble or jump up places as high as their shoulders,
all slippery and crumbling, and twice the men cut steps for them with
axes. The rush of the torrent at the last crossing taxed the strength of
both men and horses, and, as I was helpless from being tied on, I confess
that I shut my eyes! After getting through, we came upon the lands
belonging to this village—rice-fields with the dykes burst, and all the
beautiful ridge and furrow cultivation of the other crops carried away.
The waters were rising fast, the men said we must hurry; they unbound me,
so that I might ride more comfortably, spoke to the horses, and went on
at a run. My horse, which had nearly worn out his shoes in the fords,
stumbled at every step, the _mago_ gave me a noose of rope to clutch, the
rain fell in such torrents that I speculated on the chance of being
washed off my saddle, when suddenly I saw a shower of sparks; I felt
unutterable things; I was choked, bruised, stifled, and presently found
myself being hauled out of a ditch by three men, and realised that the
horse had tumbled down in going down a steepish hill, and that I had gone
over his head. To climb again on the soaked _futon_ was the work of a
moment, and, with men running and horses stumbling and splashing, we
crossed the Hirakawa by one fine bridge, and half a mile farther
re-crossed it on another, wishing as we did so that all Japanese bridges
were as substantial, for they were both 100 feet long, and had central
piers.
We entered Ikarigaseki from the last bridge, a village of 800 people, on
a narrow ledge between an abrupt hill and the Hirakawa, a most forlorn
and tumble-down place, given up to felling timber and making shingles;
and timber in all its forms—logs, planks, faggots, and shingles—is heaped
and stalked about. It looks more like a lumberer’s encampment than a
permanent village, but it is beautifully situated, and unlike any of the
innumerable villages that I have ever seen.
The street is long and narrow, with streams in stone channels on either
side; but these had overflowed, and men, women, and children were
constructing square dams to keep the water, which had already reached the
_doma_, from rising over the _tatami_. Hardly any house has paper
windows, and in the few which have, they are so black with smoke as to
look worse than none. The roofs are nearly flat, and are covered with
shingles held on by laths and weighted with large stones. Nearly all the
houses look like temporary sheds, and most are as black inside as a Barra
hut. The walls of many are nothing but rough boards tied to the uprights
by straw ropes.
In the drowning torrent, sitting in puddles of water, and drenched to the
skin hours before, we reached this very primitive _yadoya_, the lower
part of which is occupied by the _daidokoro_, a party of storm-bound
students, horses, fowls, and dogs. My room is a wretched loft, reached
by a ladder, with such a quagmire at its foot that I have to descend into
it in Wellington boots. It was dismally grotesque at first. The torrent
on the unceiled roof prevented Ito from hearing what I said, the bed was
soaked, and the water, having got into my box, had dissolved the remains
of the condensed milk, and had reduced clothes, books, and paper into a
condition of universal stickiness. My kimono was less wet than anything
else, and, borrowing a sheet of oiled paper, I lay down in it, till
roused up in half an hour by Ito shrieking above the din on the roof that
the people thought that the bridge by which we had just entered would
give way; and, running to the river bank, we joined a large crowd, far
too intensely occupied by the coming disaster to take any notice of the
first foreign lady they had ever seen.
The Hirakawa, which an hour before was merely a clear, rapid mountain
stream, about four feet deep, was then ten feet deep, they said, and
tearing along, thick and muddy, and with a fearful roar,
“And each wave was crested with tawny foam,
Like the mane of a chestnut steed.”
Immense logs of hewn timber, trees, roots, branches, and faggots, were
coming down in numbers. The abutment on this side was much undermined,
but, except that the central pier trembled whenever a log struck it, the
bridge itself stood firm—so firm, indeed, that two men, anxious to save
some property on the other side, crossed it after I arrived. Then logs
of planed timber of large size, and joints, and much wreckage, came
down—fully forty fine timbers, thirty feet long, for the fine bridge
above had given way. Most of the harvest of logs cut on the Yadate Pass
must have been lost, for over 300 were carried down in the short time in
which I watched the river. This is a very heavy loss to this village,
which lives by the timber trade. Efforts were made at a bank higher up
to catch them as they drifted by, but they only saved about one in
twenty. It was most exciting to see the grand way in which these timbers
came down; and the moment in which they were to strike or not to strike
the pier was one of intense suspense. After an hour of this two superb
logs, fully thirty feet long, came down close together, and, striking the
central pier nearly simultaneously, it shuddered horribly, the great
bridge parted in the middle, gave an awful groan like a living thing,
plunged into the torrent, and re-appeared in the foam below only as
disjointed timbers hurrying to the sea. Not a vestige remained. The
bridge below was carried away in the morning, so, till the river becomes
fordable, this little place is completely isolated. On thirty miles of
road, out of nineteen bridges only two remain, and the road itself is
almost wholly carried away!