CHIUZENJI AND YUMOTO
The Inquisition should have been put in possession of the Japanese kago
as a lesser punishment for heretics, so exquisite and insidious are its
tortures. This kago is a shallow basket with a high back, slung from
a pole carried on the shoulders of two men, and in the mountains and
remote districts is the only means of travel, except by pack-horses. The
Japanese double their knees and sit on their feet with great dignity
and apparent comfort; but the greater size of the foreigner, his stiff
joints and higher head, prevent his fitting into the kago; nor is he
much better off when he gets astride, dangling his long legs over the
edges. Moreover, he not only knows that he looks ridiculous, but suffers
the pangs of conscience for imposing his weight on two small coolies
no larger than the ten-year-old boys of his own land. There are a few
arm-chairs on poles, in which one may ride, like the Pope, or an idol
in a procession, but the long poles, springing with the gait of four
bearers, often make the passenger sea-sick.
[Illustration: FARM LABORERS AND PACK-HORSE]
The pack-horse, a slow-moving beast, has a keeper who pulls him along
by a cord, his extended head and reluctant gait making that seem the
only motive power. Horse and leader wear straw shoes, and new pairs are
strung around the high saddle for reshoeing the beast every few miles.
Iron horseshoes are confined to the capital and the large ports, and
the village blacksmith is unknown. Pack-horses wear a thick straw pad
and a high saddle fashioned like a saw-horse, on which the rider sits
aloft, so well forward that his feet hang over the creature’s neck.
This saddle is merely balanced, not girded on, and the animals are so
sleepy, slow-footed, and stumbling, with a lurching, swinging gait like a
camel’s, that riding one is really a feat.
From Nikko to Chiuzenji you must travel eight miles by kago, pack-horse,
or jinrikisha, the road leading past rich fields of buckwheat, millet,
rice, and potatoes, farm-houses with thatched roofs, wayside shrines and
tea-houses. The ascent of the two thousand feet to the higher region
of the lake is chiefly included in one three-mile stretch, climbing by
easy slopes and broad staircases to the high pass. At every few feet a
stone step was built, or a tree-trunk fastened with a forked stick and
set with small stones. This stair-building, done ages ago, has become a
part of the mountain. At short distances the staircase enters a little
clearing with a rustic tea-house, or the usual tateba, built of poles, a
few planks, branches or mats, and affording sufficient shelter for summer
pilgrims and travellers. The keepers immediately put out cushions for
guests on the edge of the platform that constitutes the floor of the one
room, and bring the tray with its tiny teapot, thimble cups, and dish of
barley-sugar candies. For the refreshment one leaves a few coppers on
the tray, and in mountain jaunts, where the traveller walks to escape
the kago and spare the coolies, these tiny cups of pale yellow tea are
very stimulating. Each tateba commands some particular view, and even the
pilgrim who is tramping the provinces and living on a few cents a day,
will be found inditing poems to the different water-falls and gorges he
looks down upon.
The head of the pass affords a magnificent view of the valley two
thousand feet below, and presently the woodland path is following the
border of the lake and comes out into the open of Chiuzenji village.
Chiuzenji Lake, three miles wide and eight miles long, is surrounded by
steep and thickly-wooded mountains, the great Nantaisan grandly soaring
nine thousand feet above the sea, tapering regularly as a pyramid and
forested to the summit. Nantaisan is a sacred mountain, a temple at its
foot, shrines all along the ascent, and at the top an altar on which
repentant murderers offer up their swords. Each August come hosts of
pilgrims in white clothes and huge straw hats, with pieces of straw
matting for rain-coats bound across their shoulders—devout souls, who,
after purification in the lake, pass under the torii, say a prayer in the
temple, and painfully climb to the summit. Only at such fixed seasons
may visitors ascend the mountain, each one paying twenty cents for the
privilege of toiling up its endless flight of steps. With these fees the
priests keep the underbrush trimmed and the path well cleared, and where
the holy guardian unbars the gate and motions one upward, begins the
flight of stone stairs that extend, with few breaks or zigzags, straight
to the top. The whole way is strewn with the cast-off sandals of the
season, and great heaps of the waraji of past years lie here and there.
The pilgrims sleep in Government barracks in the village, a few coppers
securing a mat on the floor and the use of the common fireplace. Their
vow to Nantaisan being accomplished, they make the half-circuit of the
lake, to visit the hidden shrines and temples of the forest shores, and
then trudge to Yumoto for its hot sulphur baths and scenery, or home to
their ripening rice-fields.
From across the water Chiuzenji village looks a small, yellow patch,
lying between the unbroken green slope of Nantaisan and the great lake.
Its five tea-houses rise straight from the water’s edge, each with a
triple row of outer galleries overlooking it. The way of life at the
Tsutaya, Idzumiya, Nakamarya, and the rest is much more Japanese than
in the frequented inns of Nikko. Chairs and tables are conceded to
foreigners, but everybody must sleep on the floor, wash face and hands
in the common wash-basin in the open court, and go about the house
stocking-footed, or wear the stiff, heelless, monkey-skin slippers
furnished by the inn. To call a servant one claps his palms, and a
long-drawn “Hei!” announces that the rosy-cheeked mountain maid has
heard, and the gentle swaying of the house proclaims that she is running
up the stairs. The washing of rice, vegetables, fish, kitchen utensils,
and family clothing goes on from the single plank of a pier running
from the lowest floor of the house. Each inn has a similar pier, where
sociable maidens chatter as they stir and wash the rice in bamboo
baskets. The servants of the houses take the whole lake for wash-hand
basin and tooth-brush cup, and the pier is a small stage, upon which
these local companies play their unstudied parts.
As the finest country walk in England is agreed to be that from Stratford
to Warwick, so is the way from Chiuzenji to Yumoto the finest country
walk in Japan, for its eight miles of infinite variety. First, the broad
foot-path wanders for two miles along the shores of Lake Chiuzenji,
which, however, appears only in glimpses of placid blue through the dense
forest, all stillness, coolness, and enchantment. Then it emerges at the
head of the lake in a grove of pine-trees sheltering a rustic tea-house,
which overlooks the bit of low beach known as the Iris Strand, and all
the grand amphitheatre of mountains walling in Chiuzenji. Farther on are
Hell’s River and the Dragon Head cascade, where a mountain stream slides
in many a separate ribbon down mossy ledges. Thence the foot-path climbs
to a high plain covered with tall grasses and groves of lofty pines—the
famous Red Plain, dyed once with the blood of a conquered army, and
tinged with each autumn’s frost to the same deep hue again. From the
border of this plain rise sombre mountains, Nantaisan a giant among them,
with green and purple veils of shadows and a crown of floating clouds. No
sign of habitation or cultivation marks the high plain, which, with its
loneliness and its scattered pines, is so much like the valleys of the
high Sierras. Everywhere else in Japan the country is wooded and shaded
and cultivated from water’s edge to mountain-top; but in winter all the
region above Nikko is deserted, and deep snows in the passes shut it off
from the rest of the world. Tea-houses close, the people flee to the
valley for warmth, and only the coming of spring and the tourist restores
it again. Even those wizards, the Japanese farmers, do not attempt to
subdue these solitudes, whose wild beauty delights the whole people.
Beyond this lonely plain the way climbs seven hundred feet along the face
of a precipitous hill to the level of Yumoto Lake, which there narrows
to a few feet and slips down the rocks, a mass of foam, spray, and
steam. The lake—small, uneven, walled by perpendicular mountain-slopes
and forests—is a still mirror of these superb heights, one of which,
Shirane-san, is a slumbering volcano. Vaporous sulphur springs bubble
through the hot crust of earth at the end of the lake, and boiling
sulphur wells up, even in the bed of the lake itself, and clouds and
heats the whole body of water so that no fish can live there. The two
miles of winding forest-path, between the fall at one end of Yumoto
Lake and the village of the same name at the opposite end, lead through
an enchanted forest—a picturesque tangle of roots and rocks, covered
with green moss, wound with vines, shaded with ferns, and overhung with
evergreen branches.
Yumoto has two streets and a dozen tea-houses, whose galleries are hung
with red lanterns, as if in perpetual fête, and an atmosphere nearly all
sulphuretted hydrogen. One of the hot springs bubbles up at the entrance
of the village, filling a tank about ten feet square, covered by a roof
resting on four corner pillars. The sides are all open to the air,
and an Arcadian simplicity of bathing arrangements prevails. Citizens
and sojourners stroll hither, because the site commands a view of the
thoroughfare, remove and fold up their garments, and sit down in the
pool. When sufficiently boiled, they cool off occasionally on the edge
of the tank, and then drop into the pool again. If the company prove
agreeable, the bath occupies hours. More open-air pavilions are at the
end of the village, where more bronze figures boil and cool themselves in
the same exoteric fashion. The public bath-houses, that alternate with
the tea-houses in the village streets, have roofs and sides of solid
wood, except the street front, which is open and curtainless, and within
which men, women, and children meet in the hot-water tanks, as at the
market-place or street-corners in other countries. To a new-comer this
extraordinary simplicity is startling, but if he stays long enough, he
finds that the childlike innocence and unconcern of the people make a new
code of the proprieties.
These infantile views of the Japanese as to bathing make even the
great pay little attention to the seclusion and inviolateness of the
bath-room. In a high-class Japanese house, or at the best tea-houses,
this is an exquisitely artistic nook, with cement walls and floors,
inlaid with fantastic stones and bits of porcelain. The oval tubs are
of pine, bound with withes, and white with scouring. The doors are
generally sliding paper screens without locks, and the wooden wall, or
door, if there be one, is full of fantastic holes and tiny windows with
no curtain. Often the bath-house is a detached pavilion, to which you
are expected to walk in a special bath gown, or ukata, meeting, on the
way, household and guests, who are always ready for a friendly chat.
Europeans can hardly make a Japanese servant understand that in their
order of arrangements, the bath and the bath-room are for the use of
one person at a time. The Japanese wooden tub is vastly better than the
zinc coffins and marble sarcophagi in which we bathe. The wood keeps
the water hotter and is pleasanter to the touch. One kind of tub has
a tiny stove with a long pipe in one end, and with a mere handful of
charcoal such a tub is filled with boiling water in the briefest time.
Many bathers have lost their lives by the carbonic acid gas sent off by
this ingenious contrivance. A Japanese hot bath is only a point or two
from boiling. The natives bear this temperature without wincing, and will
step from this scalding caldron out-of-doors, smoking along the highway
on a frosty day, like the man whom Dr. Griffis describes. Our grave and
statuesque landlord at Yumoto, who sat like a Buddha behind his low table
and held court with his minions, once appeared to us stalking home in the
starlight with all his clothes on his arm. His stride was as stagey and
majestic as ever, there being no reason, in his consciousness, why he
should lay off his dignity with his garments, they representing to him
the temporary and accidental, not the real envelope of the pompous old
soul.
[Illustration: PUBLIC BATH-HOUSE AT YUMOTO]
At some of the great mineral springs there are now separate pools for
men and women, in deference to foreign prejudice; but more than one
generation will pass before promiscuous bathing is done away with.
At all medicinal springs the baths are owned and managed by the
Government and are free to the people. Here at Yumoto, men, women, and
children walk into the one large room containing the pools, undress, lay
their clothing in a little heap on the raised bench or platform running
around the edge of the room, and step into the water; and, as has been
said, no one sees any impropriety in this custom. Women sit or kneel
on the edges of the pool, scouring themselves with bags of rice-bran,
and chattering with their friends in or out of the water. People stop
at the open doors, or breast-high windows, to talk to the bathers, and
conduct is as decorous, as reserved, and as modest as in a drawing-room.
The approach of a foreigner sends all the grown bathers deep into the
water, simply out of respect to his artificial and incomprehensible way
of looking at natural things. They know, though they cannot understand,
that the European finds something objectionable, and even wrong, in so
insignificant a trifle as being seen without clothes.
At our tea-house in Yumoto our three rooms in the upper story were
thrown into one during the daytime, making an apartment open to the
gallery on three sides. Hibachis, or braziers, with mounds of glowing
charcoal, tempered the morning and evening air, and all day we could
sit on piles of futons, and enjoy the superb picture of mountains and
lake before us. We were poled over the placid water in a queer ark of a
boat, and the mountain-paths were always alluring, the roughest trail
often passing under torii, or leading past some shrine, just when it
seemed that no foot had ever preceded ours. At night, when the chilling
air presses the sulphur fumes closer to earth, Yumoto streets resound
with the wailing whistle of the blind shampooer, or amah. These amah
are found everywhere—in the largest cities and in the smallest mountain
villages—and, whether men or women, are never young, or even middle-aged.
Theirs is an indefinite, unscientific system of massage, and their
manipulations often leave their charges with more lame and aching muscles
than before. But the amah are an institution of the country, and Yumoto
streets would ring with their dreary music, and our screens would be
slipped aside by many an ill-favored crone, as soon as it was time for
the usual evening baths to be prepared at the tea-houses.
Upon another visit to Nikko and Chiuzenji in late October there was a
more splendid autumnal pageant than the most gorgeous hill-sides of
America had ever shown me. Frost had done its most wonderful work, and
the air was exhilarating to intoxication. The clear and brilliant weather
moved the coolies to frisk, play, and chant like children—even that
dignified little man, Ito, relaxing his gravity to frolic like a boy, and
to pry bowlders over the edges of precipices to hear them crash and fall
far below. Chiuzenji looked a vast, flawless sapphire, and Nantaisan was
a mosaic of richest Byzantine coloring. Kegon-no-taki, the fall of three
hundred feet by which the waters of Chiuzenji drop to the valley in their
race to the Daiyagawa, seemed a column of snow in its little amphitheatre
hung with autumn vines and branches. But we dared not remain, for already
Yumoto was closed and boarded up for the season, and on any day the
first of the blockading snows of winter might shut the door of the one
tea-house left open at Chiuzenji, and end the travel from the Ashiwo
copper-mines.