“More than Peace”—Geographical Difficulties—Usu-taki—Swimming the
Osharu—A Dream of Beauty—A Sunset Effect—A Nocturnal Alarm—The Coast
Ainos.
LEBUNGÉ, VOLCANO BAY, YEZO,
_September_ 6.
“Weary wave and dying blast
Sob and moan along the shore,
All is peace at last.”
AND more than peace. It was a heavenly morning. The deep blue sky was
perfectly unclouded, a blue sea with diamond flash and a “many-twinkling
smile” rippled gently on the golden sands of the lovely little bay, and
opposite, forty miles away, the pink summit of the volcano of
Komono-taki, forming the south-western point of Volcano Bay, rose into a
softening veil of tender blue haze. There was a balmy breeziness in the
air, and tawny tints upon the hill, patches of gold in the woods, and a
scarlet spray here and there heralded the glories of the advancing
autumn. As the day began, so it closed. I should like to have detained
each hour as it passed. It was thorough enjoyment. I visited a good
many of the Mororan Ainos, saw their well-grown bear in its cage, and,
tearing myself away with difficulty at noon, crossed a steep hill and a
wood of scrub oak, and then followed a trail which runs on the amber
sands close to the sea, crosses several small streams, and passes the
lonely Aino village of Maripu, the ocean always on the left and wooded
ranges on the right, and in front an apparent bar to farther progress in
the volcano of Usu-taki, an imposing mountain, rising abruptly to a
height of nearly 3000 feet, I should think.
In Yezo, as on the main island, one can learn very little about any
prospective route. Usually when one makes an inquiry a Japanese puts on
a stupid look, giggles, tucks his thumbs into his girdle, hitches up his
garments, and either professes perfect ignorance or gives one some vague
second-hand information, though it is quite possible that he may have
been over every foot of the ground himself more than once. Whether
suspicion of your motives in asking, or a fear of compromising himself by
answering, is at the bottom of this I don’t know, but it is most
exasperating to a traveller. In Hakodaté I failed to see Captain
Blakiston, who has walked round the whole Yezo sea-board, and all I was
able to learn regarding this route was that the coast was thinly peopled
by Ainos, that there were Government horses which could be got, and that
one could sleep where one got them; that rice and salt fish were the only
food; that there were many “bad rivers,” and that the road went over “bad
mountains;” that the only people who went that way were Government
officials twice a year, that one could not get on more than four miles a
day, that the roads over the passes were “all big stones,” etc. etc. So
this Usu-taki took me altogether by surprise, and for a time confounded
all my carefully-constructed notions of locality. I had been told that
the one volcano in the bay was Komono-taki, near Mori, and this I
believed to be eighty miles off, and there, confronting me, within a
distance of two miles, was this grand, splintered, vermilion-crested
thing, with a far nobler aspect than that of “_the_” volcano, with a
curtain range in front, deeply scored, and slashed with ravines and
abysses whose purple gloom was unlighted even by the noon-day sun. One
of the peaks was emitting black smoke from a deep crater, another steam
and white smoke from various rents and fissures in its side—vermilion
peaks, smoke, and steam all rising into a sky of brilliant blue, and the
atmosphere was so clear that I saw everything that was going on there
quite distinctly, especially when I attained an altitude exceeding that
of the curtain range. It was not for two days that I got a correct idea
of its geographical situation, but I was not long in finding out that it
was not Komono-taki! There is much volcanic activity about it. I saw a
glare from it last night thirty miles away. The Ainos said that it was
“a god,” but did not know its name, nor did the Japanese who were living
under its shadow. At some distance from it in the interior rises a great
dome-like mountain, Shiribetsan, and the whole view is grand.
A little beyond Mombets flows the river Osharu, one of the largest of the
Yezo streams. It was much swollen by the previous day’s rain; and as the
ferry-boat was carried away we had to swim it, and the swim seemed very
long. Of course, we and the baggage got very wet. The coolness with
which the Aino guide took to the water without giving us any notice that
its broad, eddying flood was a swim, and not a ford, was very amusing.
From the top of a steepish ascent beyond the Osharugawa there is a view
into what looks like a very lovely lake, with wooded promontories, and
little bays, and rocky capes in miniature, and little heights, on which
Aino houses, with tawny roofs, are clustered; and then the track dips
suddenly, and deposits one, not by a lake at all, but on Usu Bay, an
inlet of the Pacific, much broken up into coves, and with a very narrow
entrance, only obvious from a few points. Just as the track touches the
bay there is a road-post, with a prayer-wheel in it, and by the shore an
upright stone of very large size, inscribed with Sanskrit characters,
near to a stone staircase and a gateway in a massive stone-faced
embankment, which looked much out of keeping with the general wildness of
the place. On a rocky promontory in a wooded cove there is a large,
rambling house, greatly out of repair, inhabited by a Japanese man and
his son, who are placed there to look after Government interests, exiles
among 500 Ainos. From among the number of rat-haunted, rambling rooms
which had once been handsome, I chose one opening on a yard or garden
with some distorted yews in it, but found that the great gateway and the
_amado_ had no bolts, and that anything might be appropriated by any one
with dishonest intentions; but the house-master and his son, who have
lived for ten years among the Ainos, and speak their language, say that
nothing is ever taken, and that the Ainos are thoroughly honest and
harmless. Without this assurance I should have been distrustful of the
number of wide-mouthed youths who hung about, in the listlessness and
vacuity of savagery, if not of the bearded men who sat or stood about the
gateway with children in their arms.
Usu is a dream of beauty and peace. There is not much difference between
the height of high and low water on this coast, and the lake-like
illusion would have been perfect had it not been that the rocks were
tinged with gold for a foot or so above the sea by a delicate species of
_fucus_. In the exquisite inlet where I spent the night, trees and
trailers drooped into the water and were mirrored in it, their green,
heavy shadows lying sharp against the sunset gold and pink of the rest of
the bay; log canoes, with planks laced upon their gunwales to heighten
them, were drawn upon a tiny beach of golden sand, and in the shadiest
cove, moored to a tree, an antique and much-carved junk was “floating
double.” Wooded, rocky knolls, with Aino huts, the vermilion peaks of
the volcano of Usu-taki redder than ever in the sinking sun, a few Ainos
mending their nets, a few more spreading edible seaweed out to dry, a
single canoe breaking the golden mirror of the cove by its noiseless
motion, a few Aino loungers, with their “mild-eyed, melancholy” faces and
quiet ways suiting the quiet evening scene, the unearthly sweetness of a
temple bell—this was all, and yet it was the loveliest picture I have
seen in Japan.
In spite of Ito’s remonstrances and his protestations that an
exceptionally good supper would be spoiled, I left my rat-haunted room,
with its tarnished gilding and precarious _fusuma_, to get the last of
the pink and lemon-coloured glory, going up the staircase in the
stone-faced embankment, and up a broad, well-paved avenue, to a large
temple, within whose open door I sat for some time absolutely alone, and
in a wonderful stillness; for the sweet-toned bell which vainly chimes
for vespers amidst this bear-worshipping population had ceased. This
temple was the first symptom of Japanese religion that I remember to have
seen since leaving Hakodaté, and worshippers have long since ebbed away
from its shady and moss-grown courts. Yet it stands there to protest for
the teaching of the great Hindu; and generations of Aino heathen pass
away one after another; and still its bronze bell tolls, and its altar
lamps are lit, and incense burns for ever before Buddha. The characters
on the great bell of this temple are said to be the same lines which are
often graven on temple bells, and to possess the dignity of twenty-four
centuries:
“All things are transient;
They being born must die,
And being born are dead;
And being dead are glad
To be at rest.”
The temple is very handsome, the baldachino is superb, and the bronzes
and brasses on the altar are specially fine. A broad ray of sunlight
streamed in, crossed the matted floor, and fell full upon the figure of
Sakya-muni in his golden shrine; and just at that moment a shaven priest,
in silk-brocaded vestments of faded green, silently passed down the
stream of light, and lit the candles on the altar, and fresh incense
filled the temple with a drowsy fragrance. It was a most impressive
picture. His curiosity evidently shortened his devotions, and he came
and asked me where I had been and where I was going, to which, of course,
I replied in excellent Japanese, and then stuck fast.
Along the paved avenue, besides the usual stone trough for holy water,
there are on one side the thousand-armed Kwan-non, a very fine relief,
and on the other a Buddha, throned on the eternal lotus blossom, with an
iron staff, much resembling a crozier, in his hand, and that eternal
apathy on his face which is the highest hope of those who hope at all. I
went through a wood, where there are some mournful groups of graves on
the hillside, and from the temple came the sweet sound of the great
bronze bell and the beat of the big drum, and then, more faintly, the
sound of the little bell and drum, with which the priest accompanies his
ceaseless repetition of a phrase in the dead tongue of a distant land.
There is an infinite pathos about the lonely temple in its splendour, the
absence of even possible worshippers, and the large population of Ainos,
sunk in yet deeper superstitions than those which go to make up popular
Buddhism. I sat on a rock by the bay till the last pink glow faded from
Usu-taki and the last lemon stain from the still water; and a beautiful
crescent, which hung over the wooded hill, had set, and the heavens
blazed with stars:
“Ten thousand stars were in the sky,
Ten thousand in the sea,
And every wave with dimpled face,
That leapt upon the air,
Had caught a star in its embrace,
And held it trembling there.”
The loneliness of Usu Bay is something wonderful—a house full of empty
rooms falling to decay, with only two men in it—one Japanese house among
500 savages, yet it was the only one in which I have slept in which they
bolted neither the _amado_ nor the gate. During the night the _amado_
fell out of the worn-out grooves with a crash, knocking down the _shôji_,
which fell on me, and rousing Ito, who rushed into my room half-asleep,
with a vague vision of blood-thirsty Ainos in his mind. I then learned
what I have been very stupid not to have learned before, that in these
sliding wooden shutters there is a small door through which one person
can creep at a time called the _jishindo_, or “earthquake door,” because
it provides an exit during the alarm of an earthquake, in case of the
_amado_ sticking in their grooves, or their bolts going wrong. I believe
that such a door exists in all Japanese houses.
The next morning was as beautiful as the previous evening, rose and gold
instead of gold and pink. Before the sun was well up I visited a number
of the Aino lodges, saw the bear, and the chief, who, like all the rest,
is a monogamist, and, after breakfast, at my request, some of the old men
came to give me such information as they had. These venerable elders sat
cross-legged in the verandah, the house-master’s son, who kindly acted as
interpreter, squatting, Japanese fashion, at the side, and about thirty
Ainos, mostly women, with infants, sitting behind. I spent about two
hours in going over the same ground as at Biratori, and also went over
the words, and got some more, including some synonyms. The _click_ of
the _ts_ before the _ch_ at the beginning of a word is strongly marked
among these Ainos. Some of their customs differ slightly from those of
their brethren of the interior, specially as to the period of seclusion
after a death, the non-allowance of polygamy to the chief, and the manner
of killing the bear at the annual festival. Their ideas of
metempsychosis are more definite, but this, I think, is to be accounted
for by the influence and proximity of Buddhism. They spoke of the bear
as their chief god, and next the sun and fire. They said that they no
longer worship the wolf, and that though they call the volcano and many
other things _kamoi_, or god, they do not worship them. I ascertained
beyond doubt that worship with them means simply making libations of
_saké_ and “drinking to the god,” and that it is unaccompanied by
petitions, or any vocal or mental act.
These Ainos are as dark as the people of southern Spain, and very hairy.
Their expression is earnest and pathetic, and when they smiled, as they
did when I could not pronounce their words, their faces had a touching
sweetness which was quite beautiful, and European, not Asiatic. Their
own impression is that they are now increasing in numbers after
diminishing for many years. I left Usu sleeping in the loveliness of an
autumn noon with great regret. No place that I have seen has fascinated
me so much.
[Picture: My Kuruma-Runner]