THE ENVIRONS OF YOKOHAMA
The environs of Yokohama are more interesting and beautiful than those
of any other foreign settlement, affording an inexhaustible variety of
tramps, rides, drives, railroad excursions, and sampan trips.
At Kanagawa proper the Tokaido comes to the bay’s edge, which it
follows for some distance through double rows of houses and splendid
old shade-trees. Back of Kanagawa’s bluff lie the old and half-deserted
Bukenji temples, crowded on rare fête days with worshippers, merrymakers,
and keepers of booths, and at quieter times serving as favorite picnic
grounds for foreigners.
On the Tokaido, just beyond Kanagawa, is the grave of Richardson, who
was killed by the train of the Prince of Satsuma, September 14, 1862.
Although foreigners had been warned to keep off the Tokaido on that
day, the foolhardy Briton and his friends deliberately rode into the
daimio’s train, an affront for which they were attacked by his retainers
and severely wounded, Richardson himself being left for dead on the
road-side, while the rest escaped. When the train had passed by, a young
girl ran out from one of the houses and covered the body with a piece of
matting, moving it in the night to her house, and keeping it concealed
until his friends claimed it. A memorial stone, inscribed with Japanese
characters, marks the spot where Richardson fell. Since that time the
kindly black-eyed Susan’s tea-house has been the favorite resort for
foreigners on their afternoon rides and drives. Susan is a tall woman,
with round eyes, aquiline nose, and a Roman countenance—quite fit for a
heroine. Riders call at her tea-house for tea, rice, and eels, prawns,
clams, pea-nuts, sponge-cake, or beer, and insist upon seeing her. This
Richardson affair cost the Japanese the bombardment of Kagoshima, and an
indemnity of £125,000; but Susan did not share in the division of that
sum.
According to one version Susan’s strand is the spot where Taro of
Urashima, the Rip Van Winkle of Japan, left his boat and nets, and,
mounting a tortoise, rode away to the home of the sea-king, returning by
the same tortoise to the same spot. On its sands he opened the box the
sea-king had given him, and found himself veiled in a thin smoke, out of
which he stepped an old, old man, whose parents had been dead a hundred
years. The fishermen listened to his strange tale, and carried him to
their daimio, and on fans, boxes, plates, vases, and _fukusas_ Taro sits
relating his wonderful tale to this day.
Ten miles inland from Bukenji’s temples is the little village of Kawawa,
whose headman has a famous collection of chrysanthemums, the goal of many
autumnal pilgrimages. This Kawawa collection has enjoyed its fame for
many years, the owner devoting himself to it heart and soul, and knowing
no cooling of ardor nor change of fancy. His great thatched house in a
court-yard is reached through a black gate-way at the top of a little
hill, and the group of buildings within his black walls gives the place
quite a feudal air. Facing the front of the house are rows of mat sheds,
covering the precious flowers that stand in files as evenly as soldiers,
the tops soft masses of great frowsy, curly-petalled, wide-spreading
blooms, shading to every tint of lilac, pink, rose, russet, brown, gold,
orange, pale yellow, and snow white. It was there that we ate a salad
made of yellow chrysanthemum petals, most æsthetic of dishes. The trays
of golden leaves in the kitchen of the house indicated that the master
enjoyed this ambrosial feast habitually, and perhaps dropped the yellow
shreds in his _saké_ cup to prolong his life and avert calamities, as
they are warranted to do. Beyond Kawawa lies a rich silk district, and
all the region is marked by thrift and comfort, signs of the prosperity
that attends silk-raising communities.
[Illustration: AT KAWAWA]
From Negishi, where Yokohama’s creek debouches into Mississippi Bay, one
looks across to Sugita, a fishing village with an ancient temple set in
the midst of plum-trees and cherry-trees that make it a place of fêtes in
February and April, when those two great flower festivals of the empire,
the blossoming of the plum and the cherry, are observed. From the bluff
above Sugita, at the end of the watery crescent, is a superb view of
the Bay and its countless sharp, green headlands. Wherever the view is
fine some Japanese family has encamped in a _tateba_, the least little
mat shed of a house, furnished with a charcoal brazier, half a dozen
teapots and cups, and a few low benches covered with the all-pervading
red blanket. Their national passion for landscape and scenery draws the
Japanese to places having fine prospects, and a thrifty woman, with her
family of children, turns many a penny by means of her comfortable seat
and good cheer for the wayfarer. Japan is the picnicker’s own country,
whether he be native or foreign. Everywhere, climbing the mountain-tops,
or crouching in the valleys, hidden in the innermost folds of the hills,
or perched on the narrowest and remotest ledges overhanging the water,
one finds the tea-house, or its summer companion, the tateba, with its
open sides and simmering kettle. Everywhere hot water, tea, rice, fruits,
eggs, cups, plates, glasses, and corkscrews may be had. These things
become so much a matter of course after a time, that the tourist must
banish himself to China, to value, as they deserve, the clean Japanese
tea-house, and the view-commanding tateba with its simple comforts.
Sugita’s plum-trees bud in January, and blossom as mild days and warm
suns encourage, so that the last week of February finds the dead-looking
branches clothed with clouds of starry white flowers. The blossoming
plum-tree is often seen when snow is on the ground, and the hawthorn
pattern of old porcelains is only a conventional representation of
pale blooms fallen on the seamed ice of ponds or garden lakelets. The
plum is the poet’s tree, and symbolic of long life, the snowy blossoms
upon the gnarled, mossy, and unresponsive branches showing that a
vital current still animates it, and the heart lives. At New-years a
dwarf-plum is the ornament of every home, and to give one is to wish your
friend length of days. _Ume_, the plum blossom, has a fresh, delicate,
elusive, and peculiar fragrance, which in the warm sun and open air is
almost intoxicating, but in a closed room becomes heavy and cloying. The
blossoming of the plum-tree is the first harbinger of spring, and to
Sugita regularly every year go the court ladies, many princes, and great
officials to see those billows of bloom that lie under the Bluff, and the
pink and crimson clouds of trees before the old temple.
During the rest of the year little heed is paid to Sugita’s existence,
and the small fishing village in the curve of the Bay, with its green
wall of bluffs, is as quiet as in the days when Commodore Perry’s fleet
anchored off it and Treaty Point acquired its name. With the blossoms
Sugita puts on its holiday air, tea-houses open, tateba spring from the
earth, and scores of low, red-blanketed benches are scattered through
the grove, signals of tea and good cheer, equivalent to the iron tables
and chairs of Parisian boulevards. Strings of sampans float in to shore,
lines of jinrikishas file over the hills, zealous pilgrims come on foot,
and horsemen trot down the long, hard beach. The tiny hamlet often has a
thousand visitors in a day, and the pretty little _nesans_, or tea-house
maids, patter busily about with their trays of tea and solid food,
welcoming and speeding the guests, and looking—quaint, odd, and charming
maidens that they are—like so many _tableaux vivants_ with their scant
kimonos, voluminous sleeves, ornate coiffures, and pigeon-toes.
Notwithstanding the crowds, everything is decorous, quiet, and orderly,
and no more refined pleasure exists than this Japanese beatitude of
sitting lost in revery and rapturous contemplation of a blossoming tree,
or inditing a verse to _ume no hana_, and fastening the bit of paper
to the branches. In this Utopia the spring poem is never rejected, nor
made the subject of cruel jokes. The winds fan it gently, it hangs
conspicuous, it is read by him who runs, but it is not immortal, and the
first heavy rain leaves it a wet and withered wreck, soon to fall to the
ground and disappear.
Just outside the temple door is a plum-tree whose age is lost in legend.
Its bent and crooked limbs and propped-up branches sustain a thick-massed
pyramid of pale rose-pink. The outer boughs droop like a weeping-willow,
and their flowers seem to be slipping down them like rosy rain-drops.
Poets and peers, dreamers and plodders, coolies, fishermen, and the
unspiritual foreigner, all admire this lovely tree, and its wide arms
flutter with poems in its praise. All around the thatched roof of the
old temple stand plum-trees covered with fragrant blossoms—snow white,
palest yellow, rose, or deep carnation-red. The sheltering hill back
of the temple is crowded with gravestones, tombs, tablets, and mossy
Buddhas, sitting calm and impassive in tangles of grasses and vines under
the shadow of ancient trees. A wide-spreading pine on the crest of the
hill is a famous landmark, whence one looks down on the flower-wreathed
village, the golden bow of the beach curving from headland to headland,
and the blue bay flashing with hundreds of square white sails. It is a
place for poesy and day-dreams, but the foreign visitor dedicates it to
luncheon, table-talk, and material satisfactions, and, perhaps, the warm
sun and air, and the mild fragrance of the plum-blossoms aid and abet the
insatiable picnic appetite.
All this part of Japan is old, and rich in temples, shrines, and
picturesque villages, with a net-work of narrow roads and shady by-paths
leading through perpetual scenes of sylvan beauty. Thatched roofs, whose
ridge poles are beds of lilies, shaded by glorified green plumes of
bamboo-trees, tall, red-barked cryptomerias, crooked pines, and gnarled
camphor-trees, everywhere charm the eye. Little red temples, approached
through a line of picturesque _torii_—that skeleton gate-way that makes
a part of every Japanese view or picture—red shrines no larger than
marten boxes; stone Buddhas, sitting cross-legged, chipped, broken-nosed,
headless, and moss-grown; odd stone tablets and lanterns crowd the hedges
and banks of the road-side, snuggle at the edges of groves, or stand in
the corners of rice fields.
Fair as the spring days are, when the universal green mantle of the
earth is adorned with airy drifts of plum and cherry-blossoms, the warm,
mellow sunshine, glorious tints and clear bright air of autumn are even
fairer. One may forget and forgive the Japanese summer for the sake of
the weeks that follow, an Indian summer which often lasts without break
for four months after the equinoctial storm. Except that Fujiyama gleams
whiter and whiter, there is no suggestion of winter’s terrors, and only
a pleasant crispness in the bracing and intoxicating air. Whew the maple
leaves begin to turn, and a second rose-blossoming surpasses that of
June in color, prodigality, and fragrance, autumnal Japan is the typical
earthly Paradise. Every valley is a floor of golden rice stubble, every
hill-side a tangle of gorgeous foliage. The persimmon-trees hang full of
big golden kaké, sea and sky wear their intensest blue, and Fujiyama’s
loveliness shines out against the western sky. In among the yellowing
stubble move blue-clad farmers with white mushroom hats. Before the
farm-houses men and women swing their flails, beating the grain spread
out on straw matting. The rice straw, whether bunched in pretty sheaves,
tied across poles, like a New-year’s fringe, or stacked in collars
around the tree-trunks, is always decorative. Meditative oxen, drawing
a primitive plough made of a pointed stick, loosen the soil for the new
planting, and tiny green wheat-shoots, first of the three regular crops
of the year, wait for the warm winter sun that opens the plum-blossoms.
Above and beyond Sugita is Minë, a temple on a mountain-top, with a
background of dense pine forest, a foreground of bamboos, and an old
priest, whose successful use of the _moxa_ brings sufferers from long
distances for treatment. A bridle-path follows for several miles the
knife-edge of a ridge commanding noble views of sea and shore, of the
blue Hakone range, its great sentinel Oyama, and Fuji beyond. The high
ridge of Minë is the backbone of a great promontory running out into
the sea, the Bay of Yeddo on one side and Odawara Bay on the other.
Square sails of unnumbered fishing-boats fleck the blue horizon, and the
view seaward is unbroken. Over an old race-course and archery-range of
feudal days the path leads, till at a sudden turn it strikes into a pine
forest, where the horses’ hoofs fall noiseless on thick carpets of dry
pine-needles, and the cave-like twilight, coolness, and stillness seem as
solemn as in that wood where Virgil and Dante walked, before they visited
the circles of the other world.
A steep plunge down a slippery, clayey trail takes the rider from the
melancholy darkness to a solitary forest clearing, with low temple
buildings on one side. Here, massed against feathery fronds of giant
bamboos, blaze boughs of fine-leafed maples, all vivid crimson to the
tips. While the priests bring saké tubs, and the _amado_, or outside
shutters of their house, to make a table, and improvise benches with
various temple and domestic properties, visitors may wander through the
forest to open spaces, whence all the coasts of the two bays and every
valley of the province lie visible, and a column of smoke proclaims the
living volcano on Oshima’s island, far down the coast.
Groups of cheery pilgrims come chattering down from the forest, untie
their sandals, wash their feet, and disappear within the temple; where
the old priest writes sacred characters on their bared backs to indicate
where his attendant shall place the lumps of sticky moxa dough. Another
attendant goes down the line of victims and touches a light to these
cones, which burn with a slow, red glow, and hiss and smoke upon the
flesh for agonizing seconds. The priest reads pious books and casts up
accounts, while the patients endure without a groan tortures compared
with which the searing with the white-hot irons of Parisian moxa
treatment is comfortable. The Minë priest has some secret of composition
for his moxa dough which has kept it in favor for many years, and almost
the only revenue of the temple is derived from this source. Rheumatism,
lumbago, and paralysis yield to the moxa treatment, and the Japanese
resort to it for all their aches and ills, the coolies’ backs and legs
being often finely patterned with its scars.
The prospect from Minë’s promontory is rivalled by that at Kanozan,
directly across the Bay, one of the highest points on the long tongue
of separating land. Here are splendid old temples, almost unvisited by
foreigners, but the glory of the place is the view of the ninety-nine
valleys, of Yeddo Bay, the ocean, and the ever-dominant Fujiyama. Every
Japanese knows the famous landscapes of his country, and the mention of
these ninety-nine valleys and the thousand pine-clad islands of Matsuyama
brings a light to his eyes.
At Yokosuka, fifteen miles below Yokohama, are the Government arsenal,
navy-yard, and dry docks, with their fleets of war-ships that put to
shame the American squadron in Asiatic waters. The Japanese Government
has both constructed and bought a navy; some vessels coming from Glasgow
yards, and others having been built at these docks.
Uraga, reached from Yokosuka by a winding, Cornice-like road along the
coast, is doubly notable as being the port off which Commodore Perry’s
ships first anchored, and the place where _midzu ame_, or millet honey,
is made. The whole picturesque, clean little town is given up to the
production of the amber sweet, and there are certain families whose midzu
ame has not varied in excellence for more than three hundred years. The
rice, or millet, is soaked, steamed, mixed with warm water and barley
malt, and left to stand a few hours, when a clear yellow liquid is
drawn off and boiled down to a thick syrup or paste, or cooked until
it can be moulded into hard balls. Unaffected by weather, it is the
best of Japanese sweets, and in its semiliquid stage is twisted out on
chopsticks at all seasons of the year. The older and browner the midzu
ame is, the better. It may be called the apotheosis of butter-scotch, a
glorified Oriental taffy, constantly urged upon one for one’s own good,
and conceded by foreign physicians in Japan to be of great value for
dyspeptics and consumptives. Though prepared all over the empire, this
curative sweet is the specialty of Uraga; and the secrets and formulas
held in the old families make for Uraga midzu ame, as compared with
other productions, a reputation akin to that of the Grande Chartreuse,
or Schloss Johannisberger, among other cordials or wines. Street artists
mould midzu ame paste, and blow it with a pipe into myriad fantastic
shapes for their small patrons; while at the greatest banquets, and even
on the Emperor’s table, it appears in the fanciful flowers that decorate
every feast.