YURA, August, 1891.
DEAR PROFESSOR CHAMBERLAIN,--If you are not frightfully busy, which
I suppose nobody is at this time of the year, perhaps some of my
adventures will interest you.
I found that the Bon-odori is different, not only in every village, but
even in every commune. So I was very anxious to see all the varieties
of this curious dance that I could. I heard that at Ōtsuka, near
Yabase, there was a very remarkable kind of dance danced; and I went, in
Japanese costume, with a dozen citizens of Yabase, to see it. It turned
out to be not worth seeing at all: the people had no more knowledge of
dancing--or rather, much less, than Sioux or Comanches.
Ōtsuka is a stony, large, primitive-looking village,--full of rude
energy and, I am sorry to say, of bad manners,--a terrible thing to say
about any Japanese town. But I have been in about 50 Japanese villages,
where I loved all the people, and always made a few of them love me,
and Ōtsuka is the first exception I found to the general rule about
the relation between foreigners and _hyakushō-no-jin_. At Ōtsuka
the people left their dance to pelt the foreigner with little pellets
of sand and mud,--crying out: "Bikki!--bikki!" What that means I do
not know. So both I and the whole of the Yabase people turned back.
The pelting was not very savage--it was just like the work of naughty
children: a foreign mob would have thrown stones, which these folk were
very careful not to do--in spite of the fact that there were no police.
I passed through this village twice since, and found the attitude of its
people peculiarly rough--bordering upon hostility. Compared with the
roughness of--say a Barbadoes mob--it was a very gentle thing, but it
gave me the first decidedly unpleasant sense of being an alien that I
have ever had in Japan.