On the Noto Highway.
On the morrow morning we took the road in kuruma, the road proper,
as Yejiro called it; for it was the main bond between Noto and the rest
of Japan. This was the nearest approach it had to a proper name,
a circumstance which showed it not to be of the first importance.
For in Japan, all the old arteries of travel had distinctive names,
the Nakasendo or Mid-Mountain road, the Tokaido or Eastern Sea road,
and so forth. Like certain other country relations, their importance
was due to their city connections, not to their own local magnitude.
For, when well out of sight of the town, they do not hesitate to
shrink to anything but imposing proportions. In mid career you might
often doubt yourself to be on so celebrated a thoroughfare. But they
are always delightful to the eye, as they wander through the country,
now bosomed in trees among the mountains, now stalking between their
own long files of pine, or cryptomeria, across the well-tilled plains.
This one had but few sentinels to line it in the open, but lost
little in picturesqueness for its lack of pomp. It was pretty enough
to be very good company itself.
It was fairly patronized by wayfarers to delight the soul; cheerful
bodies, who, though journeying for business, had plenty of time to be
happy, and radiated content. Take it as you please, the Japanese
people are among the very happiest on the face of the globe, which
makes them among the most charming to meet.
Nothing notable beyond such pleasing generalities of path and people
lay in our way, till we came to a place where a steep and perfectly
smooth clay bank shot from a spur of the hills directly into the
thoroughfare. Three urchins were industriously putting this to its
proper use, coasting down it, that is, on the seats of what did them
for breeches. An over-grown-up regard for my own trousers alone
deterred me from instantly following suit. No such scruples
prevented my abetting them, however, to the extent of a trifling
bribe for a repetition. For they had stopped abashed as soon as they
found they had a public. Regardless of maternal consequences, I thus
encouraged the sport. But after all, was it so much a bribe as an
entrance fee to the circus, or better yet, a sort of subsidy from an
ex-member of the fraternity? Surely, if adverse physical circumstances
preclude profession in person, the next best thing is to become a
noble patron of art.
From this accidental instance, I judged that boys in Noto had about
as good a time of it as boys elsewhere; the next sight we chanced
upon made me think that possibly women did not. We had hardly parted
from the coasters on dry ground when we met in the way with a lot of
women harnessed to carts filled with various merchandise, which they
were toilsomely dragging along towards Nanao. It was not so
picturesque a sight as its sex might suggest. For though the women
were naturally not aged, and some had not yet lost all comeliness of
feature, this womanliness made the thing the more appealing. Noto
was evidently no Eden, since the local Adam had thus contrived to
shift upon the local Eve so large a fraction of the primal curse.
It was as bad as the north of Germany. The female porters we had been
offered on the threshold of the province were merely symptomatic of
the state of things within. I wonder what my young Japanese friend,
the new light, to whom I listened once on board ship, while he launched
into a diatribe upon the jinrikisha question, the degrading practice,
as he termed it, of using men for horses,--I wonder, I say, what he
would have said to this! He was a quixotic youth, at the time
returning from abroad, where he had picked up many new ideas.
His proposed applications of them did him great credit, more than
they are likely to win among the class for whom they were designed.
A cent and two thirds a mile, to be had for the running for it, is as
yet too glittering a prize to be easily foregone.
Of the travel in question, we were treated to forty-three miles'
worth that day, by relays of runners. The old men fell off
gradually, to be replaced by new ones, giving our advance the
character of a wave, where the particles merely oscillated, but the
motion went steadily on. The oscillations, however, were not
insignificant in amount. Some of the men must have run their
twenty-five miles or more, broken only by short halts; and this at a
dog-trot, changed of course to a slower pull on bad bits, and when
going up hill. A fine show of endurance, with all allowances.
In this fashion we bowled along through a smiling agricultural
landscape, relieved by the hills upon the left, and with the faintest
suspicion, not amounting to a scent, of the sea out of sight on the
right. The day grew more beautiful with every hour of its age.
The blue depths above, tenanted by castles of cloud, granted fancy
eminent domain to wander where she would. Even the road below gave
free play to its caprice, and meandered like any stream inquisitively
through the valley, visiting all the villages within reach, after a
whimsical fashion of its own. All about it, meadows were tilling,
and the whole landscape breathed an air of well-established age, amid
the lustiness of youth. The very farmhouses looked to have grown
where they stood, as indeed the upper part of them had. For from the
thatch of their roofs, deep bedded in mud, sprang all manner of
plants that made of the eaves gardens in the air. The ridgepoles
stood transformed into beds of flowers; their long tufts of grass
waved in the wind, the blossoms nodding their heads amicably to the
passers-by. What a contented folk this should be whose very homes
can so vegetate! Surely a pretty conceit it is for a peasantry thus
to sleep every night under the sod, and yet awake each morning to
life again!
At the threshold of Kaga we turned abruptly to the left, and attacked
the pass leading over into Etchiu. As we wound our way up the narrow
valley, day left the hollows to stand on rosy tiptoe on the sides of
the hills, the better to take flight into the clouds. There it
lingered a little, folding the forests about with its roseate warmth.
Even the stern old pines flushed to the tips of their shaggy branches,
while here and there a bit of open turned a glowing cheek full to the
good-night kiss of the sun. And over beyond it all rose the twilight
bow, in purplish insubstantiality creeping steadily higher and
higher, above the pine-clad heights.
I reached the top before the jinrikisha, and as a sort of reward of
merit scrambled a little farther up the steep slope to the left.
From here I commanded the pass, especially that side of it I had not
come up. The corkscrew of the road carried the eye most pleasingly
down with it. I could see a teahouse a few hundred feet below, and
beyond it, at a much lower level, a bridge. Beyond this came a
comparatively flat stretch, and then the road disappeared into a
gorge. Here and there it was pointed with people toiling slowly up.
Of the encircling hills the shoulders alone were visible. While I
was still surveying the scene, the jinrikisha men, one after the
other, emerged from the gulf out of sight on the right and proceeded
to descend into the one on the left. When the last had well passed,
and I had tickled myself with the sense of abandonment, I scrambled
back, took a jump into the road and slipped down after them. The
last had waited for me at the teahouse, and stowing me in started to
rattle down the descent. The road, unlike us, seemed afraid of its
own speed, and brought itself up every few hundred feet with a round
turn. About each of these we swung, only to dash down the next bend,
and begin the oscillation over again. The men were in fine excitement,
and kept up a shouting out of mere delight. In truth we all enjoyed
the dissipated squandering in a few minutes of the energy of position
we had so laboriously gained by toiling up the other side. Over the
bridge we rattled, bowled along the level stretch, and then into the
gorge and once more down, till in another ten minutes the last fall
had shot us out into the plain with mental momentum enough to carry
us hilariously into Imaisurugi, where we put up for the night.
At breakfast the next morning the son of the house, an engaging lad,
presented me with an unexpected dish, three fossil starfish on a
platter. They were found, he said, in numbers, on the sides of the
hill hard by; a fact which would go to prove that this part of Japan
has been making in later geologic time. Indeed, I take it the better
part of Etchiu has thus been cast up by the sea, and now lies between
its semicircle of peaks and its crescent of beach, like a young moon
in the western sky, a new bay of ricefield in the old bay's arms.
We had come by way of its ocean terminator along its fringe of sand;
we were now to cross its face.
As we pulled out from the town and entered the great plain of
paddyfields it was like adventuring ourselves in some vast expanse of
ocean, cut up only by islets of trees. So level the plain and so
still the air on this warm May morning, the clumps shimmered in
mirage in the distance like things at sea. Farmhouses and peasants
at work in the fields loomed up as ships, past which we slowly tacked
and then dropped them out of sight behind. And still no end of the
same infinite level. New clumps rose doubtfully afar, took on form
and vanished in their turn. Our men rolled along at a good six-knot
gait, and mile went to join mile with little perceptible effect on
the surroundings. Only the misty washes of the mountains, glistening
in spots with snow, came out to the south and then swung slowly round
like the sun himself. Occasionally, we rolled into a village of
which I duly inquired the distance from the last known point. One of
these, Takaoka, was a very large place and stretched a mile or more
along the road, with ramifications to the side.
At last we neared some foothills which we crossed by a baby pass, and
from the farther side looked off against the distant Tateyama range.
Descending again, another stretch of plain brought us to Toyama,
the old feudal capital of the province. It is still a bustling town,
and does a brisk business, I was told, in patent medicine, which is
hawked over Japan generally and cures everything. But the former
splendor of the place has left it forever. The rooms in the inn,
where neighboring daimyos were wont to rest on their journeys
through, are still superb with carving, lacquer and paintings, but no
daimyo will ever again hold his traveling court before their tokonoma.
The man perchance may again tarry there, but the manner of it all has
gone to join the past. Now he who wills may ensconce himself in the
daimyo's corner, and fancy himself a feudal lord; nor will the
breeding of those about him disillusion his midday dream.
The castle they have turned into a public school; and as I strolled
into its close I met bands of boys in foreign lycee-like uniform
trooping out; chubby-faced youngsters in stiff visored caps. Girls
there were too, in knots of twos and threes, pretty little things in
semi-European dress, their hair done a la grecque, stuck with a
single flower, who stopped in their chatter to stare at me. To think
that the feudal times are to them as much a tale as the making of the
plain itself where its ruins stand already mantled with green!