THE TOKAIDO—I
As the kago gave way to the jinrikisha, the jinrikisha disappears before
the steam-engine, which reduces a _ri_ to a _cho_, and extends the empire
of the commonplace. The first railroads, built by English engineers and
equipped with English rolling-stock, have been copied by the Japanese
engineers, who have directed the later works. The Tokaido railway line,
built from both ends, put Tokio and Kioto within twenty-four hours of
each other. The forty miles of railroad between Yokohama and Kodzu were
completed in 1887, bringing Miyanoshita, a long day’s journey distant,
within three hours of the great seaport. The long tunnels and difficult
country around Fujiyama, and the expensive engineering work at each
river delayed the opening of the whole line until 1889. Before the iron
horse had cleared all picturesqueness from the region three of us made
the jinrikisha journey down the Tokaido.
The Tokaido having been the great post-road and highway of the empire for
centuries, with daimios and their trains constantly travelling between
the two capitals, its villages and towns were most important, and each
supplied accommodations for every class of travellers. All the world knew
the names of the fifty-three post stations on the route, and there is
a common game, which consists in quickly repeating them in their order
backward or forward. As the railroad touched or left them, some of the
towns grew, others dwindled, and new places sprang up. Each village used
to have its one special occupation, and to ride down the Tokaido was to
behold in succession the various industries of the empire. In one place
only silk cords were made, in another the finely-woven straw coverings
of saké cups and lacquer bowls; a third produced basket-work of wistaria
fibres, and a fourth shaped ink-stones for writing-boxes. Increased trade
and steam communication have interfered with these local monopolies, and
one town is fast becoming like another in its industrial displays.
May is one of the best months for such overland trips in Japan, as the
weather is perfect, pilgrims and fleas are not yet on the road, and the
rainy season is distant. The whole country is like a garden, with its
fresh spring crops, and the long, shaded avenue of trees is everywhere
touched with flaming azaleas and banks of snowy blackberry blossoms. The
tea-house and the tateba everywhere invite one to rest and watch the
unique processions of the highway, and away from foreign settlements
much of the old Japan is left. Tea is everywhere in evidence in May. It
is being picked in the fields, carted along the roads, sold, sorted, and
packed in every town, while charming nesans with trays of tiny cups
fairly line the road.
From Miyanoshita’s comfortable hotel the two foreign women and the
Japanese guide started on the first stage of the Tokaido trip in
pole-chairs, carried by four coolies each. The _danna san_, or master
of the party, scorning such effeminate devices, strode ahead with an
alpenstock, a pith helmet, and russet shoes, while the provision-box and
general luggage, filling a kago, followed after us. We were soon up the
hill in a bamboo-shaded lane, and then out over the grassy uplands to
the lake of Hakone. The singing coolies strode along, keeping even step
on the breathless ascents, past the sulphur baths of Ashinoyu and to the
Hakone Buddha—a giant bass-relief of Amida sculptured on the face of a
wall of rock niched among the hills. The lonely Buddha occupies a fit
place for a contemplative deity—summer suns scorching and winter snows
drifting over the stony face unhindered. A heap of pebbles in Buddha’s
lap is the register of pilgrims’ prayers.
At Hakone village, a single street of thatched houses bordering the
shore of Hakone lake, the narrow foot-path over the hills joins the true
Tokaido, a stone-paved highway shaded by double rows of ancient trees,
a forest aisle recalling, for a brief journey, the avenue to Nikko. The
chrysanthemum-crested gates of the Emperor’s island palace were fast
shut, and Fuji’s cone peeped over the shoulders of encircling mountains,
and reflected its image in the almost bottomless lake—an ancient crater,
whose fires are forever extinguished. Here we tied straw sandals over our
shoes and tried to walk along the smooth flat stones of the Tokaido, but
soon submitted to be carried again up the ascent to Hakone pass, which
looks southward over a broad valley to the ocean. Pack-horses, with their
clumsy feet tied in straw shoes, were led by blue-bloused peasants, their
heads wrapped in the inevitable blue-and-white cotton towel, along the
stony road, that has been worn smooth and slippery by the straw-covered
feet of generations of men and horses.
From the _Fuji no taira_ (terrace for viewing Fuji), in the village of
Yamanaka, we looked sheer down to the plain of Mishima and saw, almost
beneath us, the town that would mark the end of our day’s journey. The
villages of Sasabara and Mitsuya have each a single row of houses on
either side of the road replacing the shade-trees of the Tokaido, and,
like all Japanese villages, they overflow with children, to whom _Ijin
san_, the foreigner, is still a marvel.
Mishima is a busy, prosperous little town, with a gay main street
and shops overflowing with straw hats, baskets, matting, rain-coats,
umbrellas, tourist and pilgrim necessities. Shops for the sale of foreign
goods are numerous, and besides the familiar cases of “Devoe’s Brilliant
Oil for Japan, 150° test,” American trade is advertised by pictures of
the Waterbury watch, and long hanging signs declaring the merits of the
American time-keepers sold at three _yen_ apiece. Even the chief of the
jinrikisha men, who came to make the bargain for wheeling us down the
Tokaido, pulled out such a watch to tell us the time of day.
Mishima’s best tea-house, where daimios rested in the olden time, is a
most perfect specimen of Japanese architecture, full of darkly-shining
woods, fantastic windows, and tiny courts. In one of our rooms the
tokonoma held a kakemono, with a poem written on it in giant characters,
and three tall pink peonies springing from an exquisite bronze vase. In
another, smiled a wooden image of old Hokorokojin, one of the household
gods of luck, and on a low lacquer table rested a large lacquer box
containing a roll of writing-paper, the ink-box, and brushes. These, with
the soft mats, a few silk cushions, a tea-tray, and tabako bon, were all
that the rooms contained, until our incongruous bags and bundles marred
their exquisite simplicity. The landlord, with many bows and embarrassed
chucklings, greeted us there, and presented a most superb, long-stemmed
Jacqueminot rose, whose fragrance soon filled the whole place.
When we went out for a walk all Mishima joined us; and with a following
of two hundred children and half as many elders, we turned into the
grounds of an old temple shaded by immense trees and protected by an
ancient moat. The brigade clattered after us across the stone bridge of
a great lotus pond, where the golden carp are as large and as old as the
mossy-backed patriarchs at Fontainebleau and Potsdam, and snapped and
fought for the rice-cakes we threw them as if it were their first feast.
Farther in the temple grounds gorgeously-colored cocks with trailing
tails, and pretty pigeons are kept as messengers of the gods, and a
toothless old man makes a slender living by selling popped beans to feed
them. Prayers for rain offered up at this temple always prevail, and we
had barely returned to the tea-house before a soaking storm set in and
restricted us to our inn for entertainment.
The large matted room, or space at the front of the tea-house, was at
once office, hall, vestibule, pantry, and store-room. At one side opened
a stone-floored kitchen with rows of little stone braziers for charcoal
fires, on which something was always steaming and sputtering. Chief-cook,
under-cooks, and gay little maids pattered around on their clogs, their
sleeves tied up, hoisting water from the well, and setting out trays with
the various dishes of a Japanese dinner. There is no general dining-room,
nor any fixed hour for meals in a Japanese inn. At any moment, day or
night, the guest may clap his hands and order his food, which is brought
to his room on a tray and set on the floor, or on the ozen, a table
about four inches high. Rice is boiled in quantities large enough to
last for one, or even two days. It is heated over when wanted, or hot tea
is poured over the cold rice after it is served. Our guide cooked all our
food, laid our high table with its proper furnishings, and was assisted
by the nesans in carrying things up and down the stairs. In a small room
opening from the office two girls were sorting the landlord’s new tea
just brought in from the country. They sat before a large table raised
only a few inches from the floor, and, from a heap of the fragrant leaves
at one end, scattered little handfuls thinly over the lacquer top. With
their deft fingers they slid to one side the smallest and finest leaves
from the tips of the new shoots of the plant, and to the other side the
larger and coarser growth, doing it all so quickly and surely that it
was a pleasure to watch them. In another corner of the office two other
little maids were putting clean cases on all the pillows of the house.
The Japanese pillow is a wooden box, with a little padded roll on top,
which is covered with a fresh bit of soft, white mulberry-paper each day.
The bath-room was as accessible as the kitchen, without a door, but with
glass screens, and one large tank in which three or four could sociably
dip together. Here were splashing and talking until midnight, and steam
issued forth continually, as guests and the household staff took their
turn. The landlord requested the masculine head of our party to use a
special tub that stood in an alcove of the office, a folding-screen about
three feet high being set up to conceal him from the populous precincts
of office, corridor, garden, and main street. A too vigorous sweep of
his stalwart arm, however, knocked down his defence, and dropping to his
chin in the water, he called for help; whereupon the two maids, who were
sorting tea, ran over and set the barrier up again, as naturally as a
foreign servant would place the fire-screen before a grate.
In old Tokaido days the home bath-tub was often set beside the door-step,
that bathers might lose nothing that was going on. Government regulations
and stern policemen have interfered with this primitive innocency, except
in the most remote districts, and these Oriental Arcadians are obliged to
wear certain prescribed fig-leaves, although they curtail them as much
as possible in warm weather, and dispense with them when beating out
wheat ears in their own farm-yards, and treading the rice-mill in-doors.
Privacy is unknown to the lower classes, and in warm weather their whole
life is lived out-of-doors. With their open-fronted houses, they are
hardly in-doors even when under their own roofs. On pleasant mornings
women wash and cook, mend, spin, reel, and set up the threads for the
loom on the open road-side, and often bring the clumsy wooden loom
out-of-doors, throwing the bobbins back and forth, while keeping an eye
on their neighbors’ doings and the travelling public. One runs past miles
of such groups along the Tokaido, and the human interest is never wanting
in any landscape picture.
From Mishima southward the country is most beautiful, Fujiyama standing
at the end of the broad valley with the spurs of its foot-hills running
down to the sea. This Yoshiwara plain is one wide wheat-field, golden in
May-time with its first crop, and the Tokaido’s line marked with rows
of picturesque pine-trees rising from low embankments brilliant with
blooming bushes. In the villages each little thatched house is fenced
with braided reeds, enclosing a few peonies, iris-beds, and inevitable
chrysanthemum plants. The children, with smaller children on their
backs, chase, tumble, and play, cage fire-flies, and braid cylinders
and hexagonal puzzles of wheat straws; and in sunshine or in rain,
indifferently stroll along the road in the aimless, uncertain way of
chickens.
Beyond the poor, unfragrant town of Yoshiwara, a creaking, springing
bridge leaped the torrent of a river fed by Fuji’s snows and clouds. In
the good old days, when the traveller sat on a small square platform,
carried high above the shoulders of four men, to be ferried over,
these bearers often stopped in the most dangerous place to extort more
pay—which was never refused. Above the river bank the road climbs a
ridge, traverses the tiniest of rice valleys, and then follows the ocean
cliffs for hours. This Corniche road, overhanging the sea, presents
a succession of pictures framed by the arching branches of ancient
pine-trees, and the long Pacific rollers, pounding on the beach and
rocks, fill the air with their loud song. At sunset we came to the old
monastery of Kiomiidera, high on the terraced front of a bold cliff.
Climbing to a gate-way and bell tower worthy of a fortress, we roused the
priests from their calm meditations. An active young brother in a white
gown flew to show us the famous garden with its palm-trees and azaleas
reflected in a tiny lake, a small water-fall descending musically from
the high mountain wall of foliage behind it. Superbly decorated rooms,
where Shoguns and daimios used to rest from their journeys, look out on
this green shade. The main temple is a lofty chamber with stone flooring
and gorgeous altar, shady, quiet, and cool, and a corner of the temple
yard has been filled by pious givers with hundreds upon hundreds of
stone Buddhas, encrusted with moss and lichens, and pasted bits of paper
prayers.
All through those first provinces around Fuji the garden fences, made of
bamboo, rushes, twigs, or coarse straw, are braided, interlaced, woven
and tied in ingenious devices, the fashion and pattern often changing
completely in a few hours’ ride. This region is the happy hunting-ground
of the artist and photographer, where everything is so beautiful, so
picturesque, and so artistic that even the blades of grass and ears
of millet “compose,” and every pine-tree is a kakemono study. Thatched
roofs, and arching, hump-backed bridges made of branches, twigs, and
straw seem only to exist for landscape effects; but, unhappily, the old
bridges, like the lumbering junks with their laced and shirred sails, are
disappearing, and, in a generation or two, will be as unfamiliar to the
natives as they now are to foreigners.