glorious weather, with a sun which turned the wings of the myriad
dragon-flies hovering over the rivers to spots of light, and made all
clothing seem superfluous, I was suddenly arrested by a violent storm at
a little village called Suwara. A number of pilgrims had been driven to
shelter in the same tea-house; they spent the day in chanting prayers,
ringing a little bell, and tapping blocks of wood together to mark the
time; and they began it again at three o’clock the next morning, before
starting on their trudge. The motive of these pilgrimages is not in the
least penitential. Certain hardships have to be endured by every
traveller in mountain regions, but the Japanese are good walkers and
accustomed to simple living, and in their composition they have a large
stock of intelligent curiosity which makes them enjoy all that is new
and beautiful in the country through which they pass. The history and
literature of their fatherland form a large part of their education, and
almost every remarkable spot has some legendary or poetical association
apart from its natural beauty; their religion teaches them, too, that
not only temples and shrines are sacred, but that every poetic thought
or heroic deed, every grand tree or rock or lovely landscape, has in it
something of the divine.
On the banks of the Kisogawa, not far from Suwara, there is a large flat
rock, which is called Nezame-no-toko, the Bed of Awakening, for here
Urashima the fisher-boy, a sort of Japanese Rip Van Winkle, is supposed
by some to have returned to real life after his long trance. The usual
version of the story is this: Urashima lived with his parents at Yura,
by the sea of Japan, helping them in their fishing; but one day his boat
did not return, and he was given up for dead. He had met the Sea-god’s
daughter, who had taken him away to live with her and love her in an
evergreen land. What seemed to him like a few weeks passed by in
happiness, but at last he said, “My parents will be sorrowing for me; I
must go back and comfort them,” and he prevailed on his princess to
spare him for a while. She gave him a casket, saying that as long as he
kept it closed she would always be with him, but if he opened it, she
and the evergreen land would be lost to him forever. He had really been
away for centuries, his home had disappeared, and everything in Yura was
changed. In despair he opened the forbidden box, a faint blue mist
floated out from it across the sea, he turned from a handsome youth to
an old decrepit man, and in a few minutes lay dead upon the shore, for
in that box his princess had enclosed all the hours of their happy life.
No portion of the Nakasendo is finer than that near Midono; the valley
narrows and the road in many places overhangs the rushing Kisogawa, the
vegetation is luxuriant, walnuts, oaks, chestnuts, and maples shade the
road, and great groves of bamboo wave their plumes in every little
breeze which comes down from the mountains through the ravines in which
they grow. By the river-side I noticed many fine-leaved plants; some old
garden friends, and others new to me; yellow wagtails fluttered jauntily
from rock to rock, and lines of swallows on the telegraph wires showed
that autumn was at hand.
I turned off from the Nakasendo at Hashiba, where it begins to ascend
the Magome Pass, and took a little cross-country track, turning eastward
again up the valley of the Hirosegawa, which, after two days’ walking,
brought me to Iida and the banks of the Tenryugawa. This road was not
mentioned in my guide-book, but Nakajima Sanju, the jinrikisha man who
had accompanied me all the way from Kami-no-suwa, maintained that it was
practicable, and that he could take my baggage through in his kuruma. He
did
[Illustration: BANANA-TREES AT ATAMI]
it, too, but I occasionally had to hire two extra men to help him, and
in some places they and Matsuba had to carry kuruma, baggage and all.
There was one long climb through a dense wood which particularly
impressed me; I walked so far ahead of them that I could only just hear
the continual cry, “Yo-sha! Yo-sha!” with which the men encouraged each
other; the masses of foliage above me, the shrubs and ferns below them,
enclosed me in a green maze; from under the arched roots of a colossal
cryptomeria a clear little spring gushed out; occasionally a
raucous-voiced jay flew across the path, or I had to stop and examine
the huge toads, seven or eight inches long and almost as broad, that
sprawled about on the road-side. When my men overtook me at a tea-house
some miles farther on, one of them was carrying a brace of these toads
skinned. They looked as big as the “poulet” of a cheap restaurant, and
he told me that they were very good for weakly children.
[Illustration: THE FERRY AT TOKIMATA]
At Tokimata I engaged a boat with five men to take me down the rapids as
far as the Tokaido; the river was running high, and they would not do it
for less than twenty-four yen--a good price for a journey of only ten or
twelve hours; but when you remember that it takes them ten days or a
fortnight to haul the boat back, it does not seem excessive. Don
Pedro’s remark, “What need the bridge much wider than the flood?” does
not apply to most of the Japanese rivers; usually they are just a
trickle of water among a wide bed of pebbles, which is filled after
heavy rains with a raging torrent, but Lake Suwa serves as a reservoir
for the Tenryugawa, and it always has enough water to be navigable. The
boats used on it are about thirty feet long, flat-bottomed and
flat-sided, with a square stern and a high, pointed bow; they are very
loosely built and flexible, and the bottom boards are so thin that they
wabble like a sheet of paper when passing over rough water or shallows.
A heavy foot would break through them, and it is necessary to tread only
on the bamboos which are laid lengthwise, resting on the cross-ribs.
[Illustration: ON THE TENRYUGAWA]
My baggage was piled in the middle of the boat, and a seat arranged on
it for Matsuba and myself; one man took the long stern oar while the
other four worked in the bows, and within a few minutes of the start we
were plunging down between high cliffs, charging at rocks which we only
avoided by a few inches, swirling round in eddies at the foot of one
rapid while the men got breath for the next, and until we stopped for
our mid-day meal at the little
[Illustration: THE VILLAGE STREET, ATAMI--VRIES ISLAND IN THE
DISTANCE]
village of Nakabe there was no time to sketch, or think, or do anything
but enjoy the wild, exciting race. The river twists, between high
mountains, down a gorge with such sharp curves that it is often
impossible to see any exit, and our boat would rush down, heading
straight for a cliff against which the water dashed furiously; while one
man in the bows whacked the side with his paddle for luck, and then
stood ready with a pole, the other three pulled like mad, and just when
I thought “we must come to grief this time,” she would suddenly turn and
swish round the corner into smoother water. The rapids continued to be
amusing, though the fun was not quite so fast and furious, all the way
to Kajima, where the mountains end and a broad plain begins; below here
the river still ran swiftly, but smoothly, divided into several channels
by long gravel banks, on which gray willows and bamboos grew, and snipe
and herons congregated. We met strings of boats being laboriously towed
along: the wind generally blows up stream, and they are
[Illustration: ON THE TENRYUGAWA, NEAR KAJIMA]
able on these lower reaches to help themselves by hoisting a sail, but I
shall never understand how they get their boats back through those upper
rapids. It was getting dark when we passed through the ruins of the old
Tokaido bridge, but in the dusk I could distinguish a row of familiar
Noah’s-ark-like forms; they were current-mills moored in the river; and
then I knew what my day had lacked--the companionship of the man with
whom I had passed so many hundreds of them on the Danube. There was
nothing on the Danube quite so sporting as these rapids, but I think it
would be possible to get through them in a decked canoe, such as those
we used on that river. The pace is tremendous; we did the ninety miles
from Tokimata to Naka-no-machi in ten hours of actual travelling, though
the latter portion of the journey was on comparatively sluggish water.
About a month after this I stopped at Shizuoka, a large town on the
Tokaido, where Ieyasu, greatest of the Shoguns, spent the end of his
life in learned leisure, and where Keiki, the last of his successors,
deposed in 1868, when the Mikado came to his own again, still lives
quietly as a private gentleman. How much more dignified and reasonable
is his Oriental acceptance of the accomplished fact than the restless
scheming of some Western pretenders, who are unable to see that their
ancestors, whether kings or emperors, owed their power to national
feeling, and persist in a futile struggle against the inevitable! The
Japanese obedience to law and authority, which must, however indirectly,
be an expression of the will of the people, was never better shown than
in the promptness with which the sword-bearing Samurai ceased to carry
their weapons. The Samurai’s blade had been for centuries his most
sacred possession, a halo of poetry surrounded it, and the right to wear
it in public distinguished him from the common herd; and yet when the
imperial edict was issued in 1876 he laid it aside without a
[Illustration: AUTUMN-GRASS (SUZUKI)]
murmur, and the curio-shops were soon full of swords, which a month
before their owners would sooner have died than lose. It was no doubt
very inconvenient to walk about always with two swords stuck in your
obi, and perhaps he felt like the curate in the “Bab Ballads,” who was
forced by his mild rival to curl his hair and smoke--
“I long have wished for some
Excuse for this revulsion;
Now that excuse has come,
I do it on compulsion;”
but recent events show that though his ordinary life has become peaceful
and bloodless, there has been no falling off in the pluck of a Japanese
soldier.
Ieyasu was first buried at Kuno-zan, which I reached after about an
hour’s ride by jinrikisha from Shizuoka. The first part of the way was
over a rice-covered plain, from which gay-colored hills, striped with
white buckwheat, dark green tea, and pale green daikon, gradually rose,
narrowing down towards the sea, and finally leaving only a strip of
sandy soil, mostly planted with sugar-cane, between the steep cliffs and
the shore. The little villages were odorous with drying fish, slices of
bonito hanging in festoons in front of every cottage, and the shore was
dotted with evaporating-tubs for getting salt. The mortuary temples,
which served as a model for those afterwards built at Nikko, stand on
the top of the cliff, and are reached by a zigzag flight of steps cut
out of the rock; they are not so elaborate as the Nikko temples or the
Shiba shrines, but have a severer beauty of their own, which nature has
helped by decorating every stone and tree-trunk with silvery gray
lichen, lovely in color against the background of red-lacquered
buildings. The interior of the oratory, which, with its surrounding
fence, has a roof of bronze, is mostly black and gold, and there the
very affable priests who had shown me round held a little service in
honor of Ieyasu, presenting me afterwards with the sweet wine and cakes
which had been used as offerings. It is commonly said that the body of
the great Shogun still lies under the simple stone monument behind the
oratory, and that only a few hairs were removed and buried at Nikko;
certainly this is the more impressive spot for a warrior’s grave, with
the wild hills behind, and the sea and coast spread out for miles below
the towering cliff.
The road on to Okitsu, where I had to rejoin the railway, led me inland
past Ryugeji, a temple where there are the finest specimens of the
screw-palm (_Cycas revoluta_) to be seen in Japan, and then to the sea
again at Shimizu, a nice little port, just opposite the sandy fir-clad
spit of land called Mio-no-matsubara, enclosing a smaller bay in the
great curve of Suruga, which often appears in Japanese pictures. This is
the scene of a legend which has been dramatized, if you can call them
dramas, for one of the classical No dances. It tells how a fisherman
watching his nets saw a fairy alight on the sand and lay aside her robe
of feathers; how he managed to steal the robe so that she could not fly
away again, and only restored it to her when she consented to dance for
him under the pine-trees one of the dances which are never seen by
mortal eyes. Near the tea-house in Shimizu where I stopped to refresh
there was a temple dedicated to Inari, the Shinto goddess of the
rice-fields, whose shrines are guarded by foxes; the approach to it was
under three avenues of small red wooden torii placed closely together,
apparently votive offerings, for some of them were old and decayed and
others quite bright and new.
At Numadzu, farther to the east on the Tokaido, but still on the shore
of Suruga Bay, I again left the train and
[Illustration: A RUSTIC BRIDGE AT DOGASHIMA, NEAR MIYA-NO-SHITA]
followed the course of the old road, from which the railway here
diverges, as far as Mishima, and then, after crossing the ridge of
mountain which forms the backbone of the Idzu Peninsula, descended to
Atami on the western coast of Odawara Bay, a favorite watering-place
during the winter months. The orange and banana trees testify to the
mildness of its climate, and perhaps the geyser, which every fourth hour
squirts out mud and boiling water by the village street, helps to keep
up the temperature. Vries Island, with its eternally smoke-capped
volcano, lies on the horizon away across the sea, and the natives
believe that there is a connection between the two, for whenever Vries
is particularly active the geyser discharges more violently.
[Illustration: AVENUES OF TORII IN FRONT OF AN INARI TEMPLE, NEAR
SHIMIZU]
On the 3d of November I started with a friend from Yokohama to walk over
the Ten Province Pass (Jikkoku-toge) to Hakone and Miya-no-shita. It was
the Emperor’s birthday, and all Atami was gay with flags; the national
ensign with a red ball on a white ground fluttered everywhere. We
mounted the steep street, and looked back at the village roofs and the
deep blue water of Odawara Bay, and then turned into the woods of old
camphor-trees surrounding the temple Ki-no-miya. Some of the camphors
are enormous, and the largest of them are encircled with ropes of
twisted straw and bunches of gohei, which show that they are sacred
objects. Beyond the temple the path ascends, first through rice-fields
and then up rough grassy hills, until it reaches the long plateau of
turf where the Ten Province stone stands. Though so late in the year,
there were still plenty of flowers. Down near Atami long sprays of
hototogisu (_Tricyrtis_), with spotty purple flowers, hung out from the
sandy banks, and by our path I saw Michaelmas daisies, golden-rod,
dark-blue monk’s-hood, sky-blue gentians, magenta-flowered garlic,
thistles of various colors, wild chrysanthemums, pink or white with a
gold centre, and the beautiful white stars of the grass of Parnassus.
The sun was quite hot, and we pulled out some provisions and sat down on
the grass near the stone to enjoy them and the marvellous view. To the
north the snowy cone of Fuji rose high against the blue sky; between us
and it the long crest of down-land was mostly covered with suzuki
(_Eulalia japonica_), a lovely grass with tall plumes of seed which
shine like silver gossamer, and the ranges of lower mountains were
brilliant with the autumnal colors of maples and other trees; below us
on the east lay the little peninsula of Manazura, jutting out into
Sagami Bay, with a curve of rice-fields on each side of the narrow neck
which connects it with the mainland, and beyond it the long straight
line of the Pacific was broken only by Vries Island and its cloud of
smoke; a succession of hilly promontories and little bays stretched all
down the coast of Idzu to the southward, and returned northward again up
the other side of the peninsula, past Joyama, with a lake-like inlet of
sea, to Numadzu, where the great sweep of Suruga Bay began, bordered
with sands and sunny rice-fields, and ended only at Kuno-zan, far to the
westward. Our path went on along the downs,
[Illustration: JIZŌ SAMA, NEAR HAKONE]
through suzuki, dwarf bamboo, and little stunted woods, until a deep
descent led us down to the Hakone Lake, dark blue and sombre among its
encircling hills; it then mounted once more for a short distance, passed
the hot springs of Ashi-no-yu, and finally, while the grassy hills still
glowed in the light of the setting sun, brought us down to the Fujiya at
Miya-no-shita, where a delicious natural warm bath and a good dinner
made a fitting termination to a glorious day.
At the bottom of a ravine almost perpendicularly below Miya-no-shita
lies the little village of Dogashima, with a turbulent mountain stream
and a very shaky bamboo bridge. The path and steps leading down to it
are kept continually green by the overflow from the warm springs, and
when I was there they swarmed with land-crabs, queer little beasts with
bodies of dark green, blue, brown, or red, and a pair of light-colored
claws, which they held up in a threatening attitude when I attempted to
catch them. As they heard me approach they scurried off towards their
holes, but they were so clumsy and so numerous that I could hardly help
stepping on them.
One of the common objects by Japanese road-sides is the figure of Jizō,
a Buddhist saint who is the helper of all who are in trouble, and
especially the patron of travellers and children. Near the path between
Hakone and Ashi-no-yu we passed a colossal presentment of him, carved in
bold relief out of a mass of andesite rock, a very striking work of some
ancient sculptor. It is said to have been done in a single night by that
marvellously active saint Kobo Daishi, who, according to popular
tradition, climbed all the mountains in Japan, and found time, when he
was not preaching and confounding sceptics, to perform wonders in
sculpture, painting, and calligraphy. Jizō, in the rudely carved
statuettes by the way-sides, is a benevolent-looking priest, holding a
traveller’s staff in his right hand and a globe in his left. He stands
on a lotus flower, and around his feet are piled many pebbles, placed
there by wayfarers. The reason for the custom is this: On the banks of
the So-dzu-kawa, the river of the lower world, there lives a hag who
catches little children as they attempt to cross, steals their clothes,
and makes them toil with her at her endless task of piling the stones on
its shores. Jizō helps these children, and every pebble which is laid at
his feet lightens the labor of some little one below. I never passed
without adding my contribution, and if I cannot attribute my safety
during my wanderings to his kindly aid, at least I am indebted to him
for many a pleasant thought, and for the memory of many a lovely
landscape or flower seen by his side.
[Illustration]
AUTUMN IN JAPAN
[Illustration: THE AUTUMN LILY]
AUTUMN IN JAPAN
From the spring-time, when I reached Japan in the rain and began to
grumble at the weather, and all through the damp and the downpour of the
summer months, I had been consoled by the promises of my friends. They
assured me that when the autumn came I should have week after week of
glorious sunshine, a clear fresh air, and probably not a wet day between
Michaelmas and Christmas. Either the season was an exceptional one, or
else this is a cherished myth; there certainly were more fine days in
October and November, but not a week passed without one or two days when
work out-of-doors was impossible. They talked, too, of the glory of the
maples, of hill-sides and rocky ravines clothed with scarlet and
crimson, and their enthusiasm in this matter was amply
[Illustration: FIELDS NEAR HAMAMATSU]
justified, but no one had told me of the beauty of the lilies of the
field, which decorate so many of the banks between the rice patches with
their tassels of glowing scarlet. I saw them first near Hamamatsu, a
pleasant town on the Tokaido, which I reached on the 16th of September,
after a little tour in the interior; their brilliant color at once
attracted me, and I hastened to make drawings of them, for my passport
had almost expired, and I feared that I might not find them elsewhere.
There was no need to be in such a hurry, for they seem to grow
abundantly wherever they get a chance. Hamamatsu was quite unlike any
other Japanese town I had seen; the houses had a projecting upper story
and broad overhanging roofs, and the principal trade seemed to be in
toys. There were shops full of drums and kites, and dolls with all their
belongings, and the thousand and one things which the Japanese delight
in giving to their beloved children. As I passed a little garden I saw
what looked like a fearful atrocity--dozens of babies’ heads, pale and
gray as if in death, cut off at the neck and impaled on short
[Illustration: THE EDGE OF THE TOKAIDO, NEAR HAMAMATSU]
stakes, stood about the ground; but on coming nearer the mystery was
explained: they were life-sized dolls’ heads of papier-maché, put out to
dry in the sun before receiving their final coat of paint. The
neighboring villages were peculiar; every cottage was protected from the
winds by a high hedge of clipped yew, and the street seemed to pass
between two green walls, over which the heavily thatched roofs just
peeped. The openings gave a glimpse of court-yards and cottage fronts
where women and men were hard at work, threshing their beans of many
colors and spreading them on mats to dry, weaving blue cotton cloths, or
winding off the skeins of shining yellow silk. The typhoon a fortnight
earlier had strewn the Tokaido with pine-trees; a passage wide enough
for a jinrikisha to pass had been sawn through some of the great
prostrate trunks, and others were still supported by their mangled
limbs, so that we could squeeze under them. They sadly impeded the work
of a company of white-clad engineers, who, with all the latest military
contrivances, were laying a field-telegraph along the road. What a
contrast were these sons of change to the fishermen returning from their
morning’s work with heavy loads of bonito, and to the peasants with
their simple and primitive implements, all working and living as they
have done for centuries past! Politics and changes of government matter
very little to them; the rice crop and the take of fish are affairs of
much more importance; they are the real life of a country, preserving
its habits, costumes, and traditions, and staving off for a time the
influences of railroads and steamships, which threaten to reduce man’s
condition throughout the world to one dull level of uniformity.
Fortunately they form a solid majority in every land, a mass not easily
moved, and even in progressive Japan it will be a long time before
ill-cut trousers and steam-ploughs replace the kimono and the spade.
The Tokaido Railway takes you in twelve hours from Hamamatsu to Kōbe,
and while waiting till a new passport came from Tōkyō I had time to see
a little more of the beautiful country around that hospitable port. The
shores near Suma and Maiko, a little to the westward, are picturesque,
and close by is the Strait of Akashi, through which a constant stream of
traffic passes, ships of all kinds and sizes, from the little
fishing-boats towed from the beach, to the big steamers from Europe and
America. The island of Awaji lies across the entrance to the Inland Sea,
leaving a narrow passage at each end; but the tide rushes so violently
through the Naruta Channel to
[Illustration: THE ISLAND OF AWAJI, FROM MAIKO]
the south, between Awaji and Shikoku, that it is often unnavigable, and
most of the shipping comes this way. There are the remains of a Daimio’s
castle at Akashi; the main building is gone, and the plateau on which it
stood is now a garden with tea-booths, but the foundation walls, the
corner turrets, and the moat show what an important stronghold it must
have been; and the view from it, down the Inland Sea to the west, over
to the Shikoku Mountains on the south, and eastward to Osaka Bay and the
hills of Yamato, is extensive and very fine in its outlines. At Maiko
[Illustration: ON THE SHORE NEAR MAIKO, THE STRAIT OF AKASHI TO THE
RIGHT]