I
On the twenty-sixth day of the eleventh month of the first year of
Genji (Dec. 25, 1864), the followers of the daimyō of Kaga, who had
been engaged in the safeguarding of Kyōto, put to sea under the
leadership of Chō Osumi-no-kami, from the mouth of the Ajikawa in
Ōsaka, to take part in the impending chastisement of Chōshū.
There were two sub-commanders, Tsukuda Kyudayu and Yamagishi Sanjurō,
and white standards were set up in Tsukuda’s boats and red in
Yamagishi’s. History records that it was a most brave scene as their
Kompira vessels, each of 500 _koku_ burden, left the estuary for
the deep, all with their red and white banners flapping in the wind.
But the men in the boats did not feel at all gallant. In the first
place, every boat was loaded with thirty-four of the party and four
sailors, a total of thirty-eight men. Wherefore, they were so closely
packed together that free movement was impossible. Moreover, in the
waist of each vessel stood so many loach tubs full of pickled radishes
that there was almost no place left to step. Until they got used to it,
the evil odor of the things filled every man who breathed it with a
sudden nausea. Finally, as it was the end of the eleventh month of the
old calendar (December), the wind blowing on the sea was so cold that
it seemed to fairly cut their flesh. Especially when the sun had set,
what with the winds blowing down from Maya and the chill of the sea,
the teeth of most even of these young samurai from the north chattered.
Moreover, in the boats there was an abundance of lice. And they were
not the simple sort of lice that hide themselves in the seams of
garments. They swarmed upon the sails. They swarmed upon the masts.
They swarmed upon the anchors. To exaggerate slightly, it was hard to
tell whether the boats were for men or for lice. Of course in such a
plethora, scores of the pests swarmed upon their clothes. And whenever
they so much as touched the skin of a man, they were straightway elated
and fell to till he tingled. Had there been but some five or ten of the
vermin, they might somehow or other have been brought under control,
but since, as already stated, there were so many that they looked like
a sprinkling of white sesame, there was no possible hope of cleaning
them out. Wherefore, in the Tsukuda party and the Yamagishi party
alike, the bodies of all the samurai in the boats swelled red with
bites all over on breast and abdomen and everywhere, just as if they
had the measles.
But impossible as it was to bring the lice under control, it was still
more impossible to let them go on unmolested. So the people in the
boats spent their leisure time hunting. All of them, from the chief
retainers to the sandal bearers, stripped themselves and went about,
each with a teacup, picking up the ubiquitous lice and putting them
into it. Were he to imagine thirty-odd samurai, each dressed in but a
loin-cloth, with his teacup in his hand, searching with all his might
here and there under the rigging and beneath the anchor in each Kompira
boat with sails alight in the winter sunshine of the Inland Sea, any
man in these days would at once think it a great joke, but it was no
less true before the Restoration than it is now that in the face of
necessity everything becomes serious. So these boats full of naked
samurai, each one himself like a great louse, abode the cold and went
about patiently day after day diligently crushing the lice on the decks.