LAKE BIWA AND KIOTO
After the pace of the jinrikisha the slow train from Nagoya to Nagahama,
on Lake Biwa, seemed to attain a dizzy speed. Rising continually, we
reached a hilly region where the road-bed crossed a chain of tiny
valleys, penetrated mountain-tunnels, and cut through pine forests and
bamboo groves.
At Nagahama we rested in a lake-side tateba, content with the glorious
view, and in no way eager to search for its famous _kabe_ crapes. Lake
Biwa, with long, wooded slopes running down to the shore, and mountains
barring all the horizon, with smooth water and a blue sky, offers sixty
miles of charming sail. Little thatched-roof villages, and the wide
sweeping gables of temples show here and there in the solitude of pines,
and the crest of one high promontory is girt with the white walls of
Hikone castle. Many legends belong to this mediæval fortress, the scene
of so many famous events, whose last daimio was murdered in Tokio by
disaffected followers, soon after he negotiated, as prime-minister, the
treaties of 1858.
At Otsu, at the lower end of the lake, the splendid old temple of Miidera
and its monastery on the heights command the town and lake, and the
soldiers’ memorial column overlooks the eight great sights of Lake Biwa
which are painted on half the fans, kakemonos, and screens of Japan.
One of these eight wonders is Miidera, with its long and lofty avenues,
the green twilight of its primeval groves, its yellow, moated walls
and frowning gate-ways that hide in the enchanted forest; its ancient
shrines, its terraces, and lichen-covered bell-tower, home of the legend
of Benkei and his bell. Benkei was a muscular priest who lived on Mount
Hiyeizan overlooking the lake. The other priests coveted the splendid
bell of Miidera, which had been presented by the ruler of the kingdom of
women living at the bottom of Lake Biwa to Hidesato for valiantly slaying
a giant centipede that had frightened these ladies of the lake by its
forays. The priests induced Benkei to steal the bell by promising him as
much soup as he could eat, and he threw it over his shoulder and carried
it to the top of the mountain. But its silvery tongue kept crying “I want
to return,” and the priests threw it down the mountain-side, over which
it rolled, receiving many dents and scratches, to its old bell-tower.
Near by it is the giant soup-kettle, in which the priests cooked Benkei’s
mess of pottage, and touching both relics of course verifies the legends.
At the end of the monastery groves are large barracks, and troops of the
chubby-faced, boyish-looking soldiers are always strolling through the
arching avenues of the still old forest.
The greatest sight of Biwa, and one of the wonders of Japan, is the old
pine-tree of Karasaki, which has stood for three hundred years on a
little headland a couple of miles above Otsu, with a tiny village and
a Shinto temple all its own. Its trunk is over four feet in diameter,
and, at a height of fifteen feet, its boughs are trained laterally and
supported by posts, so that it looks like a banyan-tree. The branches,
twisted, bent, and looped like writhing dragons, cover more than an
acre of ground with their canopy. The tips of the boughs reach far out
over the water, and the sensitive Japanese hear a peculiar music in the
sifting of the rain-drops through the foliage into the lake. High up in
the tree is a tiny shrine, and the pilgrims clap their hands and stand
with clasped palms, turning their faces upward as they pray. A heavy
stone wall protects this sylvan patriarch from the washing of storms and
floods.
Under the branches a legion of small villagers, intimating by pantomime
their desire to dive for pennies, untied their belts and dropped their
solitary cotton garments as unconcernedly as one might take off hat
or gloves. They frolicked and capered in the water as much at home as
fishes and as loath to leave it. Fleeing from this body of too attached
followers, we were whirled down the road to Otsu to eat the famous Biwa
trout, passing on the way a woman, who sat at ease in her bath-tub by
her own door-step, calmly scrubbing herself with a bag of rice bran, and
contemplating her neighbors, the road, and the lake scenery the while.
On Mount Hiyeizan, by the ruined Buddhist temples and monasteries, the
American missionaries of different denominations have a long-established
summer camp, where they enjoy a sort of Japanese Chautauqua circle,
their tents and buildings the only signs of habitation where once stood
hundreds of temples with their thousands of priests.
[Illustration: THE GREAT PINE-TREE AT KARASAKI]
From the old temple of Ishiyama, east of Otsu, is seen the famous Seta
bridge and Awatsu, where the lake takes on a wondrous silvery sheen when
the sun shines and the wind blows, these being three more of the famous
sights of Biwa. The grounds of Ishiyama contain what is known as a dry
garden, where blackened rocks and rocks free from every green thing are
piled fantastically with strange landscape resemblances. In the temple is
a prayer-wheel, which is turned by thousands of pilgrims every summer,
and in a small room off the temple a priest showed us the writing-box
and ink-stone of Murusaki Shikibu, a poetess and novelist of the tenth
century, whose work, the _Genji Monogatari_, is the great classic of
its age. The remaining wonders of Lake Biwa are the flights of the wild
geese, the return of the fishing-boats to Yabashi, and Mount Hira with
the winter snows on its summit.
From Otsu over to the Kioto side of the mountains we went by train,
rushing down the long grade and through tunnels to the great plain, where
sits the sacred city, the capital and heart of old Japan, incomparable
Kioto, Saikio, or Miako. We saw it in the sunset light, the western hills
throwing purple shadows on their own slopes, and the long stretch of
wheat-fields at their base turned to a lake of pure gold. The white walls
of the Shogun’s castle, the broad roof of the old palace, and the ridges
of temples rose above the low, gray plain of house roofs and held the
sun’s last level beams.
After the imitations and tawdriness of modern Tokio, the unchanged
aspect of the old capital is full of dignity. After many long stays in
spring-time, midsummer, and midwinter, Kioto has always remained to me
foremost of Japanese cities. Yaami’s, the foreigner’s Kioto home, with
its steep terraced garden, its dwarf-pine and blooming monkey-tree,
its many buildings at different levels, its flitting figures on the
outer galleries, is like no other hostelry. Yaami, proprietor of this
picturesque hotel, is a personage indeed. He and his brother were
professional guides until they made their fortunes. Their shrewd eyes
saw further fortunes in a Kioto inn, where foreigners might find beds,
chairs, tables, knives, forks, and foreign food, and they secured the
old Ichiriki tea-house, midway on the slope of Maruyama, the mountain
walling in Kioto on the east. The Ichiriki tea-house was the place
where Oishi Kura no Suke, the leader of the Forty-seven Ronins, played
the drunkard during the two years that he lived near Kioto, before
he avenged the death of his lord. With it was bought an adjoining
monastery, belonging to one of the temples on Mount Hiyeizan, and these
two original buildings have expanded and risen story upon story, with
detached wings here and there, until the group of tall white buildings,
with the white flag floating high up in the midst of Maruyama’s foliage,
is quite castle-like. While the obnoxious foreign treaties were in
force, no foreigners except those in Japanese employ were allowed to
live in Kioto, or even to visit it without a passport, and this secured
Yaami in his monopoly. As a matter of fact, Yaami is not the family
name of the two pleasant and prosperous-looking men who walk about in
silk kimonos, with heavy gold watch-chains wound about their broad silk
belts, and who have the innocent faces of young children, save for the
shrewdness of their eyes. Yaami is the corruption of Yama Amida (Hill
of Buddha), which is the name of the hotel, and the two men belong to
the Inowye family, a clan not less numerous in Japan than the Smiths of
English-speaking countries. In parts of the house one finds relics of
monastery days in dim old screens of fine workmanship, and there is a
stone-floored kitchen, vast as a temple, with cooks serious as priests,
wielding strange sacrificial knives, and who, in midsummer, wear an apron
only, apparently as a professional badge rather than as a garment. The
_momban_, or gate-keeper, sits, spider-like, in a web of his own, a mere
doll’s house by the gate-way. In olden times, and even to-day, in large
establishments, the momban announces an arrival with strokes upon his
gong, but this particular functionary corresponds more nearly to the
Parisian _octroi_. All who enter the gates answer for themselves and pay
tribute, or they are forever barred out. Even coolies disgorge their
black-mail to the colony of fleet-footed brethren who hold a valuable
monopoly at Yaami’s gate, and in guilds and labor organizations the
Orient is ages older and wiser than the Occident.
All of Maruyama’s slope is holy ground and pleasure-ground. Tea-houses
and bath-houses are scattered in between the great temples, and
prayer-gongs and pious hand-clapping are heard in unison with samisens
and revellers’ songs. Praying and pleasuring go together, and the
court-yard of the Gion temple at the foot of the hill is lined with
monkey-shows and archery ranges, and in the riding-schools the
adventurous may, for a few coppers, mount a jerky horse and be jolted
around a shady ring. There, too, are many rows of images of fierce,
red-cloaked Daruma, the Buddhist saint, who sailed across from Korea on
a rush-leaf. He sat facing a wall for nine years, and wore off his lower
limbs, and now his image, weighted with lead, is the target for merry
ball-throwers, and is seen in every quarter of the empire.
From the airy galleries on Maruyama the city lies below one like a relief
map. The river, the Kamogawa, crossed at intervals by long bridges,
cuts the city in two. From each bridge a street runs straight on to the
westward. By day these thoroughfares look like furrows ploughed through
the solid plain of gray-tiled roofs; but at night they shine with
thousands of lamps and lanterns, and their narrow, wavering lines of fire
look like so many torchlight processions, and the river is one broad
belt of light.
I first saw Kioto on the last day of the Gion matsuri, a festival which
lasts for a month and brings all the population out-of-doors into one
quarter during the evening. By dusk a babel of music and voices had
arisen, which finally drew us down the steep and shady road, and through
the great stone torii, to the Gion’s precincts. The court-yard was almost
deserted, and looking through the great gate-way to Shijo Street the view
was dazzling and the shouts and chatter deafening. The narrow street was
lined with rows of large white paper lanterns hanging above the house
doors, and rows hanging from the eaves. Lanterned booths lined the curb,
while humbler venders spread their wares on the ground in the light of
flaring torches. Crowds surged up and down, every man carrying a paper
lantern on the end of a short bamboo stick—the literal lamp for the
feet—women bearing smaller lanterns, and children delighting themselves
with gayly-colored paper shells for tiny candles. Boys marched and ran
in long single files, shouting a measured chant as they cut their way
through the crowd and whirled giant lanterns and blazing torches at the
end of long poles.
From Gion gate to Shijo bridge the street was one wavering, glittering
line of light, and crowded solidly with people. Where the street narrows
near the bridge there is a region of theatres and side-shows, and there
banners and pictures, drums and shouting ticket-sellers, and a denser
crowd of people gathered. A loud shout and a measured chorus heralded
a group of men carrying a Brobdingnagian torch, a giant bamboo pole
blazing fiercely at its lofty tip. The crowd surged back to the walls
as the torch-bearers ran by and on to the middle of Shijo bridge, where
they waved the burning wand in fiery signals to the other bridges that
the real procession was starting. More torches and lanterns, lines of
priests in garments of silk and gauze, wearing strange hats, beating and
blowing strange instruments; and a sacred red chair, reason for all this
ceremony, was borne on from the Gion to a distant Shinto sanctuary to
remain until the matsuri of the following year.
From Shijo bridge to Sanjo bridge Kioto’s river-bed is like a scene
from fairy-land throughout the summer, and during the Gion matsuri
the vision is enhanced. The tea-houses that line the river-bank with
picturesquely galleried fronts set out acres of low platform tables in
the clear, shallow stream. The water ripples pleasantly around them,
giving a grateful sense of coolness to these æsthetic Japanese, who sit
in groups on the open platforms, smoking their pipes and feasting under
the light of their rows of lanterns. All the broad river-bed is ablaze
with lights and torches, and on the dry, gravelly stretches a multitude
of small peddlers, venders, and showmen set up their attractive tents
and add to the general glitter and illumination. Hundreds linger and
stroll on the bridges to admire the gay sight, for as only this people
could have conjured up so brilliant a spectacle out of such simple and
every-day means, so only they can fully enjoy its beauty and charm. All
the children wear their gayest holiday clothes on such a great matsuri
night, and the graceful women of the old capital, bareheaded, rustling
in silk and gauze, their night-black hair spread in fantastic loops and
caught with beautiful hair-pins, are worthy of their surroundings.
We left the bridge and wandered over the loose gravel and rocks of the
river-beds, crossing by many planks and tiny bridges from one small
island of shingle to another. There were countless fruit-stands, with
their ingenious little water-fountains spraying melons and peaches
to a dewy coolness and freshness, hair-pin stands glittering with
silver flowers, and fan and toy and flower booths, and all the while
we wandered there the people watched and followed with a respectful
curiosity that amused but could not annoy. Attracted by the beautiful
face of a young girl just within the curtained door of a side-show, we
paid the one cent entrance fee to see the conjurers. The tent was empty
when we entered, but such a stream of natives poured in after us as to
delight the proprietor and encourage the musicians to pound out more
violent airs. A few miserable poodles were made to walk on two legs and
otherwise discomfort themselves at the bidding of the beautiful girl,
whose strange soft eyes and lovely face were set off by an elaborate
coiffure, a coronet of silvery hair-pins, and a kimono of gray silk shot
with many tinsel threads. We foreigners found the faces and holiday garb
of the people more interesting than the performance, and the natives in
turn seemed equally absorbed in watching us. Horse-shows, where daring
but terrified Japanese bestrode steeds and ambled three times around the
ring for a penny, puppet-shows, juggler-shows, and peep-shows drew us
in turn from one end of the river-bed fair to the other, and when too
weary to walk we remounted to the bridge to admire afresh this feast of
lanterns, until at midnight we sought the groves of Maruyama.