THE DWELLERS IN THE HILLS
(FUKUSHIMA)
I didn't visit this place in the hope of seeing fine prospects--my study
is man.--BORROW
Before I left the town I had a chat with a landowner who turned his
tenants' rent rice into _saké_. He was of the fifth generation of
brewers. He said that in his childhood drunken men often lay about the
street; now, he said, drunken men were only to be seen on festival
days.
There had been a remarkable development in the trade in flavoured
aerated waters, "lemonade" and "cider champagne" chiefly. I found
these beverages on sale in the remotest places, for the Japanese have
the knack of tying a number of bottles together with rope, which makes
them easily transportable. The new lager beers, which are advertised
everywhere, have also affected the consumption of _saké_.[123] _Saké_
is usually compared with sherry. It is drunk mulled. At a banquet,
lasting five or six hours or longer, a man "strong in _saké_" may
conceivably drink ten _go_ (a _go_ is about one-third of a pint)
before achieving drunkenness, but most people would be affected by
three _go_. Some of the topers who boast of the quantity of _saké_
they can consume--I have heard of men declaring that they could drink
twenty _go_--are cheated late in the evening by the waiting-maids. The
little _saké_ bottles are opaque, and it is easy to remove them for
refilling before they are quite empty.
The brewer, who was a firm adherent of the Jishu sect of Buddhists,
was accustomed to burn incense with his family at the domestic shrine
every morning. But this was not the habit of all the adherents of his
denomination. As to the moral advancement of the neighbourhood, his
grandfather "tried very earnestly to improve the district by means of
religion, but without result." He himself attached most value to
education and after that to young men's associations.
As we left the town we passed a "woman priest" who was walking to
Nikko, eighty miles away. Portraits of dead people, entrusted to her
by their relatives for conveyance to distant shrines, were hung round
her body.
As the route became more and more hilly I realised how accurate is
that representation of hills in Japanese art which seems odd before
one has been in Japan: the landscape stands out as if seen in a flash
of lightning.
Three things by the way were arresting: the number of shrines, mostly
dedicated to the fox god; the rice suspended round the farm buildings
or drying on racks; and the masses of evening primroses, called in
Japan "moon-seeing flowers."
A feature of every village was one or more barred wooden sheds
containing fire-extinguishing apparatus, often provided and worked by
the young men's association. Sometimes a piece of ground was described
to me as "the training ground of the fire defenders." The night
patrols of the village were young fellows chosen in turn by the
constable from the fire-prevention parties, made up by the youths of
the village. There stood up in every village a high perpendicular
ladder with a bell or wooden clapper at the top to give the alarm. The
emblem of the fire brigade, a pole with white paper streamers
attached, was sometimes distinguished by a yellow paper streamer
awarded by the prefecture.
On a sweltering July day it was difficult to realise that the villages
we passed through, now half hidden in foliage, might be under 7 ft. of
snow in winter. In travelling in this hillier region one has an extra
_kurumaya_, who pushes behind or acts as brakeman.
At the "place of the seven peaks" we found a stone dedicated to the
worship of the stars which form the Plough. Again and again I noticed
shrines which had before them two tall trees, one larger than the
other, called "man and wife." It was explained to me that "there
cannot be a more sacred place than where husband and wife stand
together." A small tract of cryptomeria on the lower slopes of a hill
belonged to the school. The children had planted it in honour of the
marriage of the Emperor when he was Crown Prince.
Often the burial-grounds, the stones of which are seldom more than
about 2 ft. high by 6 ins. wide, are on narrow strips of roadside
waste. (The coffin is commonly square, and the body is placed in it in
the kneeling position so often assumed in life.) Here, as elsewhere,
there seemed to be rice fields in every spot where rice fields could
possibly be made.
On approaching a village the traveller is flattered by receiving the
bows of small girls and boys who range themselves in threes and fours
to perform their act of courtesy. I was told that the children are
taught at school to bow to foreigners. I remember that in the remoter
villages of Holland the stranger also received the bows of young
people.
On the house of the headman of one village were displayed charms for
protection from fire, theft and epidemic. We spoke of weather signs,
and he quoted a proverb, "Never rely on the glory of the morning or on
the smile of your mother-in-law."
We had before us a week's travel by _kuruma_. Otherwise we should have
liked to have brought away specimens of the wooden utensils of some of
the villages. The travelling woodworker whom we often encountered--he
has to travel about in order to reach new sources of wood supply--has
been despised because of his unsettled habits, but I was told that
there was a special deity to look after him. In the town we had left
there was delightful woodwork, but most of the draper's stuff was
pitiful trash made after what was supposed to be foreign fashions. I
may also mention the large collection of blood-and-thunder stories
upon Western models which were piled up in the stationers' shops.
As we walked up into the hills--the _kuruma_ men were sent by an
easier route--we passed plenty of sweet chestnuts and saw large
masses of blue single hydrangea and white and pink spirea. We came on
the ruined huts of those who had burnt a bit of hillside and taken
from it a few crops of buckwheat. The charred trunks of trees stood up
among the green undergrowth that had invaded the patches. There was a
great deal of plantain and a _kurumaya_ mentioned that sometimes when
children found a dead frog they buried it in leaves of that plant.
Japanese children are also in the habit of angling for frogs with a
piece of plantain. The frogs seize the plantain and are jerked ashore.
We took our lunch on a hill top. It had been a stiff climb and we
marvelled at the expense to which a poor county must be put for the
maintenance of roads which so often hang on cliff sides or span
torrents. The great piles of wood accumulated at the summit turned the
talk to "silent trade." In "silent trade" people on one side of a hill
traded with people on the other side without meeting. The products
were taken to the hill top and left there, usually in a rough shed
built to protect the goods from rain. The exchange might be on the
principle of barter or of cash payment. But the amount of goods given
in exchange or the cash payment made was left to honour. "Silent
trade" still continues in certain parts of Japan. Sometimes the price
expected for goods is written up in the shed. "Silent trade"
originated because of fears of infectious disease; it survives because
it is more convenient for one who has goods to sell or to buy to
travel up and down one side of a mountain than up and down two sides.
As we proceeded on our way we were once more struck by the
extraordinary wealth of wood. Here is a country where every household
is burning wood and charcoal daily, a country where not only the
houses but most of the things in common use are made of wood; and
there seems to be no end to the trees that remain. It is little wonder
that in many parts there has been and is improvident use of wood.
Happily every year the regulation of timber areas and wise planting
make progress. But for many square miles of hillside I saw there is no
fitting word but jungle.
At the small ramshackle hot-spring inns of the remote hills the
guests are mostly country folk. Many of them carefully bring their own
rice and _miso_, and are put up at a cost of about 10 sen a day. In
the passage ways one finds rough boxes about 4 ft. square full of wood
ash in the centre of which charcoal may be burned and kettles boiled.
We were in a region where there is snow from the middle of November to
the middle of April. For two-thirds of December and January the snow
is never less than 2 ft. deep. The attendance of the children at one
school during the winter was 95 per cent. for boys and 90 per cent.
for girls. (See note, p. 112.)
My _kurumaya_ pointed to a mountain top where, he said, there were
nearly three acres of beautiful flowers. The rice fields in the hills
were suffering from lack of water and a deputation of villagers had
gone ten miles into the mountains to pray for rain. It is wonderful at
what altitudes rice fields are contrived. I noted some at 2,500 ft. In
looking down from a place where the cliff road hung out over the river
that flowed a hundred feet below I noticed a stone image lying on its
back in the water. It may have come there by accident, but the ducking
of such a figure in order to procure rain is not unknown.
At an inn I asked one of the greybeards who courteously visited us if
there would be much competition for his seat when he retired from the
village assembly. He thought that there would be several candidates.
In the town from which we had set out on our journey through the
highlands a doctor had spent 500 yen in trying to get on the assembly.
The tea at this resting place was poor and someone quoted the proverb,
"Even the devil was once eighteen and bad tea has its tolerable first
cup." On going to the village office I found that for a population of
2,000 there were, in addition to the village shrine, sixteen other
shrines and three Buddhist temples. Against fire there were four fire
pumps and 155 "fire defenders." A dozen of the young men of the
village were serving in the army, four were home on furlough, six were
invalided and forty were of the reserve. As many as thirty-seven had
medals. The doctors were two in number and the midwives three. There
was a sanitary committee of twenty-three members. The revenue of the
village was 5,740 yen. It had a fund of 740 yen "against time of
famine." The taxes paid were 2,330 yen for State tax, 2,460 yen for
prefectural tax and 4,350 yen for village tax. The village possessed
two co-operative societies, a young men's association, a Buddhist
young men's association, a Buddhist young women's association, a
society for the development of knowledge, a society of the graduates
of the primary school, two thrift organisations, a society for
"promoting knowledge and virtue," and an association the members of
which "aimed at becoming distinguished." There were in the village
ninety subscribers to the Red Cross and two dozen members of the
national Patriotic Women's Association.
In the county through which we were moving there was gold, silver and
copper mining.[124] Out of its population of 36,000 only 632 were
entitled to vote for an M.P.
We rested at a school where the motto was, "Even in this good reign I
pray because I wish to make our country more glorious." There were
portraits of four deceased local celebrities and of Peter the Great,
Franklin, Lincoln, Commander Perry and Bismarck. Illustrated wall
charts showed how to sit on a school seat, how to identify poisonous
plants and how to conform to the requirements of etiquette. The
following admonitions were also displayed--a copy of them is given to
each child, who is expected to read the twelve counsels every morning
before coming to school:
1.--Do your own work and don't rely on others to do it.
2.--Be ardent when you learn or play.
3.--Endeavour to do away with your bad habits and cultivate good ones.
4.--Never tell a lie and be careful when you speak.
5.--Do what you think right in your heart and at the same time have
good manners.
6.--Overcome difficulties and never hold back from hard work.
7.--Do not make appointments which you are uncertain to keep.
8.--Do not carelessly lend or borrow.
9.--Do not pass by another's difficulties and do not give another
much trouble.
10.--Be careful about things belonging to the public as well as
about things belonging to yourself.
11.--Keep the outside and inside of the school clean and also
take care of waste paper.
12.--Never play with a grumbling spirit.
There was stuck on the roofs of many houses a rod with a piece of
white paper attached, a charm against fire. One house so provided was
next door to the fire station. Frequently we passed a children's
_jizō_ or Buddha, comically decked in the hat and miscellaneous
garments of youngsters whose grateful mothers believed them to have
been cured by the power of the deity.
Speaking of clothes, it was the hottest July weather and the natural
garment was at most a loin cloth. The women wore a piece of red or
coloured cotton from their waist to their knees. The backs of the men
and women who were working in the open were protected by a flapping
ricestraw mat or by an armful of green stuff. The boys under ten or so
were naked and so were many little girls. But the influence of the
Westernising period ideas of what was "decent" in the presence of
foreigners survives. So, whenever a policeman was near, people of all
ages were to be seen huddling on their kimonos. I was sorry for a
merry group of boys and girls aged 12 or 13 who in that torrid
weather[125] were bathing at an ideal spot in the river and suddenly
caught sight of a policeman. It is deplorable that a consciousness of
nakedness should be cultivated when nakedness is natural, traditional
and hygienic. (Even in the schools the girls are taught to make their
kimonos meet at the neck--with a pin![126]--much higher than they used
to be worn.) It is only fair to bear in mind, however, that some
hurrying on of clothes by villagers is done out of respect to the
passing superior, before whom it is impolite to appear without
permission half dressed or wearing other than the usual clothing.
At a hot spring we found many patrons because, as I was told, "Ox-day
is very suitable for bathing." The old pre-Meiji days of the week were
twelve: Rat-, Ox-, Tiger-, Hare-, Dragon-, Snake-, Horse-, Sheep-,
Monkey-, Fowl-, Dog-and Boar-day. When the Western seven days of the
week were adopted they were rendered into Japanese as: Sun, Moon,
Fire, Water, Wood, Metal and Earth, followed by the word meaning star
or planet and day. For instance, Sunday is _Nichi_ (Sun) _yo_ (star)
_bi_ (day), and Monday, _Getsu_ (Moon) _yo_ (planet) _bi_ (day), or
_Nichi-yo-bi_ and _Getsu-yo-bi_. For brevity the _bi_ is often dropped
off.
The headman of a village we passed through told me that the occasion
of my coming was the first on which English had been heard in those
parts. Talking about the people of his village, he said that there had
been four divorces in the year. Once in four or five years a child was
born within a few months of marriage. In the whole county there had
been among 310 young men examined for the army only four cases of
"disgraceful disease." There was no immoral woman in the 75-miles-long
valley. Elsewhere in the county many young men were in debt, but in
the headman's village no youth was without a savings-bank book. And
the local men-folk "did not use women's savings as in some places."
One shrine we passed seemed to be dedicated to the moon. Another was
intended to propitiate the horsefly. Several villages had boxes
fastened on posts for the reception of broken glass. As we approached
one village I saw an inscription put up by the young men's
association, "Good Crops and Prosperity to the Village." When we came
to the next village the schoolmaster was responsible for an
inscription, "Peace to the World and Safety to the State." In other
places I found young men's society notice boards giving information
about the area of land in a village, how it was cropped, the kind of
crops, the area of forest, lists of famous places, etc.
[Illustration: MOVABLE STAGE AT A FESTIVAL FIFTY MILES FROM A RAILWAY.]
[Illustration: FARMHOUSE AT WHICH MR. UCHIMURA PREACHED.]
In the gorges we rode over many suspension bridges and crossed the
backbone of Japan in unforgettable scenes of romantic beauty. From
the craggy paths of our highlands, amid a wealth not only of gorgeous
flowers and greenery but of great velvety butterflies, we saw the
far-off snow-clad Japanese Alps.
[Illustration: TENANT FARMERS' HOUSES]
[Illustration: AUTHOR AT THE "SPIRIT MEETING."]
[Illustration: SOME PERFORMERS AT THE "SPIRIT MEETING."]
At one of the schools where we lunched I noticed that the large wall
maps were of Siam and Malaya, Borneo, Australia and China (two). The
portraits were of Florence Nightingale, Lincoln, Napoleon and Christ
as the Good Shepherd, the last named being "a present from a believer
friend of the schoolmaster."[127] This school closed at noon from July
10 to July 31, and had twenty days' vacation in August and another
twenty days in the rice-planting and busy sericultural season. The
sewing-room of the school was used in winter as a dormitory for boys
who lived at a distance. Accommodation for girls was provided in the
village. The children brought their rice with them. The products of
the school farm were also eaten by the boarding pupils. It was
estimated that the cost of maintaining the girls was 10 sen a day.
Three-fourths of this expense was borne by the village. The regularity
and strictness of the dormitory management were found to have an
excellent effect. At the winter school, an adjunct of the day school,
there was an attendance of a score of youths and sixty girls.
Speaking of a place where we stayed for the night, one who had a wide
knowledge of rural Japan said that he did not think that there was a
lonelier spot where farming was carried on. There was no market or
fair for 80 or 90 miles and the little groups of houses were 2 or 3
miles apart. In this district, it was explained, "the rich are not so
rich and the poor are not so poor."
We passed somewhere a fine shrine for the welfare of horses. At a
certain festival hundreds of horses are driven down there to gallop
round and round the sacred buildings. Thousands of people attend this
festival, but it was declared that no one was ever hurt by the horses.
The poetical names of country inns would make an interesting
collection. I remember that it was at "the inn of cold spring water"
that the waiting-maid had never seen cow's milk. She proved to be the
daughter of the host and wore a gold ring by way of marking the fact.
This girl told us that on the banks of the river there was only one
house in 70 miles. The village was having the usual holiday to
celebrate the end of the toilsome sericultural season.
On our way to the next village we met two far-travelled young women
selling the dried seaweed which, in many varieties, figures in the
Japanese dietary.[128] (There are shops which sell nothing but
prepared seaweeds.) A notice board there informed us that the road was
maintained at the cost of the local young men's society. As we were on
foot we felt grateful, for the road was well kept. We passed for miles
over planking hung on the cliff side or on roadway carried on
embankments. On the suspended pathways there was now and then a plank
loose or broken, and there was no rail between the pedestrian and the
torrent dashing below. Where there was embanked roadway it was almost
always uphill and downhill and it frequently swung sharply round the
corner of a cliff. As the river increased in volume we saw many rafts
of timber shooting the rapids. At one place twenty-six raftsmen had
been drowned. The remnants of two bridges showed the force of the
floods.
In this region the _kurumaya_ were hard put to it at times and once a
_kuruma_ broke down. Its owner cheerfully detached its broken axle and
went off with it at a trot ten miles or so to a blacksmith. Later he
traversed the ten miles once more to refit his _kuruma_, afterwards
coming on fifteen more miles to our inn. The endurance and cheeriness
of the _kurumaya_ were surprising. It was usually in face of their
protests that we got out to ease them while going uphill. Every
morning they wanted to arrange to go farther than we thought
reasonable. Each man had not only his passenger but his passenger's
heavy bag. One day we did thirty-six miles over rough roads. The
_kurumaya_ proposed to cover fifty. They showed spirit, good nature
and loyalty. The character of their conversation is worth mentioning.
At one point they were discussing the plays we had witnessed, at other
times the scenery, local legends, the best routes and the crops,
material condition and disposition of the villagers. Our _kurumaya_
compared very favourably indeed with men of an equal social class at
home. Their manners were perfect. They stayed at the same inns as we
did--once in the next room--and behaved admirably. Every evening the
men washed their white cotton shorts and jackets--their whole costume
except for a wide-brimmed sun hat and straw _waraji_. Tied to the axle
of each _kuruma_ were several pairs of _waraji_, for on the rough hill
roads this simple form of footgear soon wears out. Discarded _waraji_
are to be seen on every roadside in Japan.
The inscriptions on some of the wayside stones we passed had been
written by priests so ignorant that the wording was either ridiculous
or almost without meaning. But there was no difficulty in deciphering
an inscription on a stone which declared that it had been erected by a
company of Buddhists who claimed to have repeated the holy name of
Amida 2,000,000 times. (The idea is that salvation may be obtained by
the repetition of the phrase _Namu Amida Butsu_.) A small stone set up
on a rock in the middle of paddy fields intimated that at that spot
"people gathered to see the moon one night every month." A third stone
was dedicated to the monkey as the messenger of a certain god, just as
the fox is regarded as the messenger of Inari.
We saw during our journey large numbers of _kiri_ (Paulownia) used for
making _geta_ and bride's chests. Some farmers seem to plant _kiri_
trees at the birth of a daughter so as to have wood for her wedding
chest or money for her outfit[129]. _Kiri_ seems to be increasingly
grown. On the other hand in the same districts lacquer trees were now
seldom planted. The farmers complained that they were cheated by the
collectors of lacquer who come round to cut the trees. The age of
cutting was given me as the eighth or ninth year, but poor farmers
sometimes allowed a young tree to be cut. A tree may be cut once a
year for three or four years. After that it is useless even for fuel,
owing to the smell it gives off, and is often left standing. The old
scarred trunks, sometimes headless, suggested the tattooed faces and
bodies of Maori veterans. As lacquer is poisonous to the skin the wood
calls for careful handling. I saw one of the itinerant lacquer
collectors, his hands wrapped in cotton, operating on a tree.
During a particularly hot run we had the good fortune to come on a
soda-water spring from which we all drank freely. A factory erected to
tap the spring was in ruins. Evidently the cost of carriage was
prohibitive.
In these hills the rice was planted farther apart than is usual so
that the sun might warm the water. Here as elsewhere _daikon_ were
hung up to dry on walls and trees, and looked like giant tallow
candles. Below a bridge, which marked the village boundary, flags had
been flung down by way of keeping off epidemics. Evil spirits were
warded off by special dances.
The porch of a little tea-house where we rested was covered with
grapes. Soon after leaving it we reached our destination for the
night, a small town of houses of several storeys which clustered on a
hillside under the shadow of a Zen temple. Meat and eggs were
forbidden to the town, but as the residents were all Zen Buddhists the
restriction was no hardship. There was no cow in the place, but
condensed milk was allowed. A man at the inn told me that he knew of
ten Shinto shrines which forbade the use of chickens and eggs in their
localities. The view from the temple, perched high on its rock above
the wide riverway, was exceptionally fine. Parties of boys and girls
of thirteen paid visits to this temple "because thirteen is known as a
perilous age." The people of the vegetarian town, instead of feeding
on the fish in the river, fed them. I saw a shoal of fish being given
scraps at the water edge.
As we went on our way and spoke of the bad roads it was suggested that
in the old days roads were purposely left uphill and downhill in order
that the advance of enemies might be hindered. We came to a
dilapidated tea-house kept by an ugly old woman who showed a touching
fondness for a cat and a dog. From her shack we had a view of a
volcano which had destroyed two villages a few years before. Our
hostess, who made much of us, said that the catastrophe had been
preceded by "horrible da-da-da-bang" sounds and lightnings, and that
it was accompanied by "thunderbolts and heavy thick smoke." The old
woman had beheld "soil boiling and cracking."
Along our route we had more evidences of "fire farming." The procedure
was to sow buckwheat the first year and rape and millet the second
year. In the cryptomeria forests there was a variety which, when cut,
sprouts from the ground and makes a new growth like an elm. One crop
we saw was ginseng, protected by low structures covered by matting.
At length we heard the distant sound of a locomotive whistle. We were
approaching the newly opened railway which was to take us the short
run to the sea. Soon we were in a rather unkempt village which had
hardly recovered from its surprise at finding that it had a railway
station. We paid our _kurumaya_ the sum contracted for and something
over for their faithful service and for their long return run, and
having exchanged bows and cordial greetings, we left for a time the
glorified perambulators which a foreign missionary is supposed to have
introduced half a century ago. (The Japanese claim the honour of
"inventing" the jinrikisha.)
FOOTNOTES:
[123] See Appendix XXXVII.
[124] See Appendix XXXVIII.
[125] In Tokyo one may sleep night after night in summer with no
covering but the thinnest loose cotton kimono and have an electric fan
going within the mosquito curtain, and still feel the heat.
[126] The kimono has no button, hook, tie, or fastening of any kind,
and is kept in place by the waist string and _obi_.
[127] It is an illustration of the difficulty of using a foreign
symbolism that it is unlikely that a single child in the school had
ever seen a shepherd or a sheep.
[128] In 1918 the value of seaweed was returned at 13,600,000 yen.
[129] In fifteen years a _kiri_ tree may be about 20 ft. high and 3
ft. in circumference and be worth 30 yen. _Kiri_ trees to the value of
3 million yen were felled in 1918.