degrees in the day to 80 degrees at night. The household is afflicted with lassitude and loss of appetite. Evening does not bring coolness, but myriads of flying, creeping, jumping, running creatures, all with power to hurt, which replace the day mosquitoes, villains with spotted legs, which bite and poison one without the warning hum. The night mosquitoes are legion. There are no walks except in the streets and the public gardens, for Niigata is built on a sand spit, hot and bare. Neither can you get a view of it without climbing to the top of a wooden look-out.
Niigata is a Treaty Port without foreign trade, and almost without foreign residents. Not a foreign ship visited the port either last year or this. There are only two foreign firms, and these are German, and only eighteen foreigners, of which number, except the missionaries, nearly all are in Government employment. Its river, the Shinano, is the largest in Japan, and it and its affluents bring down a prodigious volume of water. But Japanese rivers are much choked with sand and shingle washed down from the mountains. In all that I have seen, except those which are physically limited by walls of hard rock, a river-bed is a waste of sand, boulders, and shingle, through the middle of which, among sand-banks and shallows, the river proper takes its devious course. In the freshets, which occur to a greater or less extent every year, enormous volumes of water pour over these wastes, carrying sand and detritus down to the mouths, which are all obstructed by bars. Of these rivers the Shinano, being the biggest, is the most refractory, and has piled up a bar at its entrance through which there is only a passage seven feet deep, which is perpetually shallowing. The minds of engineers are much exercised upon the Shinano, and the Government is most anxious to deepen the channel and give Western Japan what it has not–a harbour; but the expense of the necessary operation is enormous, and in the meantime a limited ocean traffic is carried on by junks and by a few small Japanese steamers which call outside. {13} There is a British Vice-Consulate, but, except as a step, few would accept such a dreary post or outpost.
But Niigata is a handsome, prosperous city of 50,000 inhabitants, the capital of the wealthy province of Echigo, with a population of one and a half millions, and is the seat of the Kenrei, or provincial governor, of the chief law courts, of fine schools, a hospital, and barracks. It is curious to find in such an excluded town a school deserving the designation of a college, as it includes intermediate, primary, and normal schools, an English school with 150 pupils, organised by English and American teachers, an engineering school, a geological museum, splendidly equipped laboratories, and the newest and most approved scientific and educational apparatus. The Government Buildings, which are grouped near Mr. Fyson’s, are of painted white wood, and are imposing from their size and their innumerable glass windows. There is a large hospital {14} arranged by a European doctor, with a medical school attached, and it, the Kencho, the Saibancho, or Court House, the schools, the barracks, and a large bank, which is rivalling them all, have a go-ahead, Europeanised look, bold, staring, and tasteless. There are large public gardens, very well laid out, and with finely gravelled walks. There are 300 street lamps, which burn the mineral oil of the district.
Yet, because the riotous Shinano persistently bars it out from the sea, its natural highway, the capital of one of the richest provinces of Japan is “left out in the cold,” and the province itself, which yields not only rice, silk, tea, hemp, ninjin, and indigo, in large quantities, but gold, copper, coal, and petroleum, has to send most of its produce to Yedo across ranges of mountains, on the backs of pack-horses, by roads scarcely less infamous than the one by which I came.
The Niigata of the Government, with its signs of progress in a western direction, is quite unattractive-looking as compared with the genuine Japanese Niigata, which is the neatest, cleanest, and most comfortable-looking town I have yet seen, and altogether free from the jostlement of a foreign settlement. It is renowned for the beautiful tea-houses, which attract visitors from distant places, and for the excellence of the theatres, and is the centre of the recreation and pleasure of a large district. It is so beautifully clean that, as at Nikko, I should feel reluctant to walk upon its well-swept streets in muddy boots. It would afford a good lesson to the Edinburgh authorities, for every vagrant bit of straw, stick, or paper, is at once pounced upon and removed, and no rubbish may stand for an instant in its streets except in a covered box or bucket. It is correctly laid out in square divisions, formed by five streets over a mile long, crossed by very numerous short ones, and is intersected by canals, which are its real roadways. I have not seen a pack-horse in the streets; everything comes in by boat, and there are few houses in the city which cannot have their goods delivered by canal very near to their doors. These water-ways are busy all day, but in the early morning, when the boats come in loaded with the vegetables, without which the people could not exist for a day, the bustle is indescribable. The cucumber boats just now are the great sight. The canals are usually in the middle of the streets, and have fairly broad roadways on both sides. They are much below the street level, and their nearly perpendicular banks are neatly faced with wood, broken at intervals by flights of stairs. They are bordered by trees, among which are many weeping willows; and, as the river water runs through them, keeping them quite sweet, and they are crossed at short intervals by light bridges, they form a very attractive feature of Niigata.
The houses have very steep roofs of shingle, weighted with stones, and, as they are of very irregular heights, and all turn the steep gables of the upper stories streetwards, the town has a picturesqueness very unusual in Japan. The deep verandahs are connected all along the streets, so as to form a sheltered promenade when the snow lies deep in winter. With its canals with their avenues of trees, its fine public gardens, and clean, picturesque streets, it is a really attractive town; but its improvements are recent, and were only lately completed by Mr. Masakata Kusumoto, now Governor of Tokiyo. There is no appearance of poverty in any part of the town, but if there be wealth, it is carefully concealed. One marked feature of the city is the number of streets of dwelling-houses with projecting windows of wooden slats, through which the people can see without being seen, though at night, when the andons are lit, we saw, as we walked from Dr. Palm’s, that in most cases families were sitting round the hibachi in a deshabille of the scantiest kind.
The fronts are very narrow, and the houses extend backwards to an amazing length, with gardens in which flowers, shrubs, and mosquitoes are grown, and bridges are several times repeated, so as to give the effect of fairyland as you look through from the street. The principal apartments in all Japanese houses are at the back, looking out on these miniature landscapes, for a landscape is skilfully dwarfed into a space often not more than 30 feet square. A lake, a rock-work, a bridge, a stone lantern, and a deformed pine, are indispensable; but whenever circumstances and means admit of it, quaintnesses of all kinds are introduced. Small pavilions, retreats for tea-making, reading, sleeping in quiet and coolness, fishing under cover, and drinking sake; bronze pagodas, cascades falling from the mouths of bronze dragons; rock caves, with gold and silver fish darting in and out; lakes with rocky islands, streams crossed by green bridges, just high enough to allow a rat or frog to pass under; lawns, and slabs of stone for crossing them in wet weather, grottoes, hills, valleys, groves of miniature palms, cycas, and bamboo; and dwarfed trees of many kinds, of purplish and dull green hues, are cut into startling likenesses of beasts and creeping things, or stretch distorted arms over tiny lakes.
I have walked about a great deal in Niigata, and when with Mrs. Fyson, who is the only European lady here at present, and her little Ruth, a pretty Saxon child of three years old, we have been followed by an immense crowd, as the sight of this fair creature, with golden curls falling over her shoulders, is most fascinating. Both men and women have gentle, winning ways with infants, and Ruth, instead of being afraid of the crowds, smiles upon them, bows in Japanese fashion, speaks to them in Japanese, and seems a little disposed to leave her own people altogether. It is most difficult to make her keep with us, and two or three times, on missing her and looking back, we have seen her seated, native fashion, in a ring in a crowd of several hundred people, receiving a homage and admiration from which she was most unwillingly torn. The Japanese have a perfect passion for children, but it is not good for European children to be much with them, as they corrupt their morals, and teach them to tell lies.
The climate of Niigata and of most of this great province contrasts unpleasantly with the region on the other side of the mountains, warmed by the gulf-stream of the North Pacific, in which the autumn and winter, with their still atmosphere, bracing temperature, and blue and sunny skies, are the most delightful seasons of the year. Thirty-two days of snow-fall occur on an average. The canals and rivers freeze, and even the rapid Shinano sometimes bears a horse. In January and February the snow lies three or four feet deep, a veil of clouds obscures the sky, people inhabit their upper rooms to get any daylight, pack-horse traffic is suspended, pedestrians go about with difficulty in rough snow-shoes, and for nearly six months the coast is unsuitable for navigation, owing to the prevalence of strong, cold, north-west winds. In this city people in wadded clothes, with only their eyes exposed, creep about under the verandahs. The population huddles round hibachis and shivers, for the mercury, which rises to 92 degrees in summer, falls to 15 degrees in winter. And all this is in latitude 37 degrees 55′– three degrees south of Naples! I. L. B.
LETTER XVII
The Canal-side at Niigata–Awful Loneliness–Courtesy–Dr. Palm’s Tandem–A Noisy Matsuri–A Jolting Journey–The Mountain Villages– Winter Dismalness–An Out-of-the-world Hamlet–Crowded Dwellings– Riding a Cow–“Drunk and Disorderly”–An Enforced Rest–Local Discouragements–Heavy Loads–Absence of Beggary–Slow Travelling.
ICHINONO, July 12.
Two foreign ladies, two fair-haired foreign infants, a long-haired foreign dog, and a foreign gentleman, who, without these accompaniments, might have escaped notice, attracted a large but kindly crowd to the canal side when I left Niigata. The natives bore away the children on their shoulders, the Fysons walked to the extremity of the canal to bid me good-bye, the sampan shot out upon the broad, swirling flood of the Shinano, and an awful sense of loneliness fell upon me. We crossed the Shinano, poled up the narrow, embanked Shinkawa, had a desperate struggle with the flooded Aganokawa, were much impeded by strings of nauseous manure- boats on the narrow, discoloured Kajikawa, wondered at the interminable melon and cucumber fields, and at the odd river life, and, after hard poling for six hours, reached Kisaki, having accomplished exactly ten miles. Then three kurumas with trotting runners took us twenty miles at the low rate of 4.5 sen per ri. In one place a board closed the road, but, on representing to the chief man of the village that the traveller was a foreigner, he courteously allowed me to pass, the Express Agent having accompanied me thus far to see that I “got through all right.” The road was tolerably populous throughout the day’s journey, and the farming villages which extended much of the way–Tsuiji, Kasayanage, Mono, and Mari–were neat, and many of the farms had bamboo fences to screen them from the road. It was, on the whole, a pleasant country, and the people, though little clothed, did not look either poor or very dirty. The soil was very light and sandy. There were, in fact, “pine barrens,” sandy ridges with nothing on them but spindly Scotch firs and fir scrub; but the sandy levels between them, being heavily manured and cultivated like gardens, bore splendid crops of cucumbers trained like peas, melons, vegetable marrow, Arum esculentum, sweet potatoes, maize, tea, tiger-lilies, beans, and onions; and extensive orchards with apples and pears trained laterally on trellis-work eight feet high, were a novelty in the landscape.
Though we were all day drawing nearer to mountains wooded to their summits on the east, the amount of vegetation was not burdensome, the rice swamps were few, and the air felt drier and less relaxing. As my runners were trotting merrily over one of the pine barrens, I met Dr. Palm returning from one of his medico-religious expeditions, with a tandem of two naked coolies, who were going over the ground at a great pace, and I wished that some of the most staid directors of the Edinburgh Medical Missionary Society could have the shock of seeing him! I shall not see a European again for some weeks. From Tsuiji, a very neat village, where we changed kurumas, we were jolted along over a shingly road to Nakajo, a considerable town just within treaty limits. The Japanese doctors there, as in some other places, are Dr. Palm’s cordial helpers, and five or six of them, whom he regards as possessing the rare virtues of candour, earnestness, and single-mindedness, and who have studied English medical works, have clubbed together to establish a dispensary, and, under Dr. Palm’s instructions, are even carrying out the antiseptic treatment successfully, after some ludicrous failures!
We dashed through Nakajo as kuruma-runners always dash through towns and villages, got out of it in a drizzle upon an avenue of firs, three or four deep, which extends from Nakajo to Kurokawa, and for some miles beyond were jolted over a damp valley on which tea and rice alternated, crossed two branches of the shingly Kurokawa on precarious bridges, rattled into the town of Kurokawa, much decorated with flags and lanterns, where the people were all congregated at a shrine where there was much drumming, and a few girls, much painted and bedizened, were dancing or posturing on a raised and covered platform, in honour of the god of the place, whose matsuri or festival it was; and out again, to be mercilessly jolted under the firs in the twilight to a solitary house where the owner made some difficulty about receiving us, as his licence did not begin till the next day, but eventually succumbed, and gave me his one upstairs room, exactly five feet high, which hardly allowed of my standing upright with my hat on. He then rendered it suffocating by closing the amado, for the reason often given, that if he left them open and the house was robbed, the police would not only blame him severely, but would not take any trouble to recover his property. He had no rice, so I indulged in a feast of delicious cucumbers. I never saw so many eaten as in that district. Children gnaw them all day long, and even babies on their mothers’ backs suck them with avidity. Just now they are sold for a sen a dozen.
It is a mistake to arrive at a yadoya after dark. Even if the best rooms are not full it takes fully an hour to get my food and the room ready, and meanwhile I cannot employ my time usefully because of the mosquitoes. There was heavy rain all night, accompanied by the first wind that I have heard since landing; and the fitful creaking of the pines and the drumming from the shrine made me glad to get up at sunrise, or rather at daylight, for there has not been a sunrise since I came, or a sunset either. That day we travelled by Sekki to Kawaguchi in kurumas, i.e. we were sometimes bumped over stones, sometimes deposited on the edge of a quagmire, and asked to get out; and sometimes compelled to walk for two or three miles at a time along the infamous bridle-track above the river Arai, up which two men could hardly push and haul an empty vehicle; and, as they often had to lift them bodily and carry them for some distance, I was really glad when we reached the village of Kawaguchi to find that they could go no farther, though, as we could only get one horse, I had to walk the last stage in a torrent of rain, poorly protected by my paper waterproof cloak.
We are now in the midst of the great central chain of the Japanese mountains, which extends almost without a break for 900 miles, and is from 40 to 100 miles in width, broken up into interminable ranges traversable only by steep passes from 1000 to 5000 feet in height, with innumerable rivers, ravines, and valleys, the heights and ravines heavily timbered, the rivers impetuous and liable to freshets, and the valleys invariably terraced for rice. It is in the valleys that the villages are found, and regions more isolated I have never seen, shut out by bad roads from the rest of Japan. The houses are very poor, the summer costume of the men consists of the maro only, and that of the women of trousers with an open shirt, and when we reached Kurosawa last night it had dwindled to trousers only. There is little traffic, and very few horses are kept, one, two, or three constituting the live stock of a large village. The shops, such as they are, contain the barest necessaries of life. Millet and buckwheat rather than rice, with the universal daikon, are the staples of diet The climate is wet in summer and bitterly cold in winter. Even now it is comfortless enough for the people to come in wet, just to warm the tips of their fingers at the irori, stifled the while with the stinging smoke, while the damp wind flaps the torn paper of the windows about, and damp draughts sweep the ashes over the tatami until the house is hermetically sealed at night. These people never know anything of what we regard as comfort, and in the long winter, when the wretched bridle-tracks are blocked by snow and the freezing wind blows strong, and the families huddle round the smoky fire by the doleful glimmer of the andon, without work, books, or play, to shiver through the long evenings in chilly dreariness, and herd together for warmth at night like animals, their condition must be as miserable as anything short of grinding poverty can make it.
I saw things at their worst that night as I tramped into the hamlet of Numa, down whose sloping street a swollen stream was running, which the people were banking out of their houses. I was wet and tired, and the woman at the one wretched yadoya met me, saying, “I’m sorry it’s very dirty and quite unfit for so honourable a guest;” and she was right, for the one room was up a ladder, the windows were in tatters, there was no charcoal for a hibachi, no eggs, and the rice was so dirty and so full of a small black seed as to be unfit to eat. Worse than all, there was no Transport Office, the hamlet did not possess a horse, and it was only by sending to a farmer five miles off, and by much bargaining, that I got on the next morning. In estimating the number of people in a given number of houses in Japan, it is usual to multiply the houses by five, but I had the curiosity to walk through Numa and get Ito to translate the tallies which hang outside all Japanese houses with the names, number, and sexes of their inmates, and in twenty- four houses there were 307 people! In some there were four families–the grand-parents, the parents, the eldest son with his wife and family, and a daughter or two with their husbands and children. The eldest son, who inherits the house and land, almost invariably brings his wife to his father’s house, where she often becomes little better than a slave to her mother-in-law. By rigid custom she literally forsakes her own kindred, and her “filial duty” is transferred to her husband’s mother, who often takes a dislike to her, and instigates her son to divorce her if she has no children. My hostess had induced her son to divorce his wife, and she could give no better reason for it than that she was lazy.
The Numa people, she said, had never seen a foreigner, so, though the rain still fell heavily, they were astir in the early morning. They wanted to hear me speak, so I gave my orders to Ito in public. Yesterday was a most toilsome day, mainly spent in stumbling up and sliding down the great passes of Futai, Takanasu, and Yenoiki, all among forest-covered mountains, deeply cleft by forest-choked ravines, with now and then one of the snowy peaks of Aidzu breaking the monotony of the ocean of green. The horses’ shoes were tied and untied every few minutes, and we made just a mile an hour! At last we were deposited in a most unpromising place in the hamlet of Tamagawa, and were told that a rice merchant, after waiting for three days, had got every horse in the country. At the end of two hours’ chaffering one baggage coolie was produced, some of the things were put on the rice horses, and a steed with a pack-saddle was produced for me in the shape of a plump and pretty little cow, which carried me safely over the magnificent pass of Ori and down to the town of Okimi, among rice-fields, where, in a drowning rain, I was glad to get shelter with a number of coolies by a wood-fire till another pack-cow was produced, and we walked on through the rice-fields and up into the hills again to Kurosawa, where I had intended to remain; but there was no inn, and the farm-house where they take in travellers, besides being on the edge of a malarious pond, and being dark and full of stinging smoke, was so awfully dirty and full of living creatures, that, exhausted as I was, I was obliged to go on. But it was growing dark, there was no Transport Office, and for the first time the people were very slightly extortionate, and drove Ito nearly to his wits’ end. The peasants do not like to be out after dark, for they are afraid of ghosts and all sorts of devilments, and it was difficult to induce them to start so late in the evening.
There was not a house clean enough to rest in, so I sat on a stone and thought about the people for over an hour. Children with scald-head, scabies, and sore eyes swarmed. Every woman carried a baby on her back, and every child who could stagger under one carried one too. Not one woman wore anything but cotton trousers. One woman reeled about “drunk and disorderly.” Ito sat on a stone hiding his face in his hands, and when I asked him if he were ill, he replied in a most lamentable voice, “I don’t know what I am to do, I’m so ashamed for you to see such things!” The boy is only eighteen, and I pitied him. I asked him if women were often drunk, and he said they were in Yokohama, but they usually kept in their houses. He says that when their husbands give them money to pay bills at the end of a month, they often spend it in sake, and that they sometimes get sake in shops and have it put down as rice or tea. “The old, old story!” I looked at the dirt and barbarism, and asked if this were the Japan of which I had read. Yet a woman in this unseemly costume firmly refused to take the 2 or 3 sen which it is usual to leave at a place where you rest, because she said that I had had water and not tea, and after I had forced it on her, she returned it to Ito, and this redeeming incident sent me away much comforted.
From Numa the distance here is only 1.5 ri, but it is over the steep pass of Honoki, which is ascended and descended by hundreds of rude stone steps, not pleasant in the dark. On this pass I saw birches for the first time; at its foot we entered Yamagata ken by a good bridge, and shortly reached this village, in which an unpromising-looking farm-house is the only accommodation; but though all the rooms but two are taken up with silk-worms, those two are very good and look upon a miniature lake and rockery. The one objection to my room is that to get either in or out of it I must pass through the other, which is occupied by five tobacco merchants who are waiting for transport, and who while away the time by strumming on that instrument of dismay, the samisen. No horses or cows can be got for me, so I am spending the day quietly here, rather glad to rest, for I am much exhausted. When I am suffering much from my spine Ito always gets into a fright and thinks I am going to die, as he tells me when I am better, but shows his anxiety by a short, surly manner, which is most disagreeable. He thinks we shall never get through the interior! Mr. Brunton’s excellent map fails in this region, so it is only by fixing on the well-known city of Yamagata and devising routes to it that we get on. Half the evening is spent in consulting Japanese maps, if we can get them, and in questioning the house-master and Transport Agent, and any chance travellers; but the people know nothing beyond the distance of a few ri, and the agents seldom tell one anything beyond the next stage. When I inquire about the “unbeaten tracks” that I wish to take, the answers are, “It’s an awful road through mountains,” or “There are many bad rivers to cross,” or “There are none but farmers’ houses to stop at.” No encouragement is ever given, but we get on, and shall get on, I doubt not, though the hardships are not what I would desire in my present state of health.
Very few horses are kept here. Cows and coolies carry much of the merchandise, and women as well as men carry heavy loads. A baggage coolie carries about 50 lbs., but here merchants carrying their own goods from Yamagata actually carry from 90 to 140 lbs., and even more. It is sickening to meet these poor fellows struggling over the mountain-passes in evident distress. Last night five of them were resting on the summit ridge of a pass gasping violently. Their eyes were starting out; all their muscles, rendered painfully visible by their leanness, were quivering; rills of blood from the bite of insects, which they cannot drive away, were literally running all over their naked bodies, washed away here and there by copious perspiration. Truly “in the sweat of their brows” they were eating bread and earning an honest living for their families! Suffering and hard-worked as they were, they were quite independent. I have not seen a beggar or beggary in this strange country. The women were carrying 70 lbs. These burden-bearers have their backs covered by a thick pad of plaited straw. On this rests a ladder, curved up at the lower end like the runners of a sleigh. On this the load is carefully packed till it extends from below the man’s waist to a considerable height above his head. It is covered with waterproof paper, securely roped, and thatched with straw, and is supported by a broad padded band just below the collar bones. Of course, as the man walks nearly bent double, and the position is a very painful one, he requires to stop and straighten himself frequently, and unless he meets with a bank of convenient height, he rests the bottom of his burden on a short, stout pole with an L-shaped top, carried for this purpose. The carrying of enormous loads is quite a feature of this region, and so, I am sorry to say, are red stinging ants and the small gadflies which molest the coolies.
Yesterday’s journey was 18 miles in twelve hours! Ichinono is a nice, industrious hamlet, given up, like all others, to rearing silk-worms, and the pure white and sulphur yellow cocoons are drying on mats in the sun everywhere.
I. L. B.
LETTER XVIII
Comely Kine–Japanese Criticism on a Foreign Usage–A Pleasant Halt–Renewed Courtesies–The Plain of Yonezawa–A Curious Mistake- -The Mother’s Memorial–Arrival at Komatsu–Stately Accommodation– A Vicious Horse–An Asiatic Arcadia–A Fashionable Watering-place– A Belle–“Godowns.”
KAMINOYAMA.
A severe day of mountain travelling brought us into another region. We left Ichinono early on a fine morning, with three pack-cows, one of which I rode [and their calves], very comely kine, with small noses, short horns, straight spines, and deep bodies. I thought that I might get some fresh milk, but the idea of anything but a calf milking a cow was so new to the people that there was a universal laugh, and Ito told me that they thought it “most disgusting,” and that the Japanese think it “most disgusting” in foreigners to put anything “with such a strong smell and taste” into their tea! All the cows had cotton cloths, printed with blue dragons, suspended under their bodies to keep them from mud and insects, and they wear straw shoes and cords through the cartilages of their noses. The day being fine, a great deal of rice and sake was on the move, and we met hundreds of pack-cows, all of the same comely breed, in strings of four.
We crossed the Sakuratoge, from which the view is beautiful, got horses at the mountain village of Shirakasawa, crossed more passes, and in the afternoon reached the village of Tenoko. There, as usual, I sat under the verandah of the Transport Office, and waited for the one horse which was available. It was a large shop, but contained not a single article of European make. In the one room a group of women and children sat round the fire, and the agent sat as usual with a number of ledgers at a table a foot high, on which his grandchild was lying on a cushion. Here Ito dined on seven dishes of horrors, and they brought me sake, tea, rice, and black beans. The last are very good. We had some talk about the country, and the man asked me to write his name in English characters, and to write my own in a book. Meanwhile a crowd assembled, and the front row sat on the ground that the others might see over their heads. They were dirty and pressed very close, and when the women of the house saw that I felt the heat they gracefully produced fans and fanned me for a whole hour. On asking the charge they refused to make any, and would not receive anything. They had not seen a foreigner before, they said, they would despise themselves for taking anything, they had my “honourable name” in their book. Not only that, but they put up a parcel of sweetmeats, and the man wrote his name on a fan and insisted on my accepting it. I was grieved to have nothing to give them but some English pins, but they had never seen such before, and soon circulated them among the crowd. I told them truly that I should remember them as long as I remember Japan, and went on, much touched by their kindness.
The lofty pass of Utsu, which is ascended and descended by a number of stone slabs, is the last of the passes of these choked-up ranges. From its summit in the welcome sunlight I joyfully looked down upon the noble plain of Yonezawa, about 30 miles long and from 10 to 18 broad, one of the gardens of Japan, wooded and watered, covered with prosperous towns and villages, surrounded by magnificent mountains not altogether timbered, and bounded at its southern extremity by ranges white with snow even in the middle of July.
In the long street of the farming village of Matsuhara a man amazed me by running in front of me and speaking to me, and on Ito coming up, he assailed him vociferously, and it turned out that he took me for an Aino, one of the subjugated aborigines of Yezo. I have before now been taken for a Chinese!
Throughout the province of Echigo I have occasionally seen a piece of cotton cloth suspended by its four corners from four bamboo poles just above a quiet stream. Behind it there is usually a long narrow tablet, notched at the top, similar to those seen in cemeteries, with characters upon it. Sometimes bouquets of flowers are placed in the hollow top of each bamboo, and usually there are characters on the cloth itself. Within it always lies a wooden dipper. In coming down from Tenoko I passed one of these close to the road, and a Buddhist priest was at the time pouring a dipper full of water into it, which strained slowly through. As he was going our way we joined him, and he explained its meaning.
According to him the tablet bears on it the kaimiyo, or posthumous name of a woman. The flowers have the same significance as those which loving hands place on the graves of kindred. If there are characters on the cloth, they represent the well-known invocation of the Nichiren sect, Namu mio ho ren ge kio. The pouring of the water into the cloth, often accompanied by telling the beads on a rosary, is a prayer. The whole is called “The Flowing Invocation.” I have seldom seen anything more plaintively affecting, for it denotes that a mother in the first joy of maternity has passed away to suffer (according to popular belief) in the Lake of Blood, one of the Buddhist hells, for a sin committed in a former state of being, and it appeals to every passer-by to shorten the penalties of a woman in anguish, for in that lake she must remain until the cloth is so utterly worn out that the water falls through it at once.
Where the mountains come down upon the plain of Yonezawa there are several raised banks, and you can take one step from the hillside to a dead level. The soil is dry and gravelly at the junction, ridges of pines appeared, and the look of the houses suggested increased cleanliness and comfort. A walk of six miles took us from Tenoko to Komatsu, a beautifully situated town of 3000 people, with a large trade in cotton goods, silk, and sake.
As I entered Komatsu the first man whom I met turned back hastily, called into the first house the words which mean “Quick, here’s a foreigner;” the three carpenters who were at work there flung down their tools and, without waiting to put on their kimonos, sped down the street calling out the news, so that by the time I reached the yadoya a large crowd was pressing upon me. The front was mean and unpromising-looking, but, on reaching the back by a stone bridge over a stream which ran through the house, I found a room 40 feet long by 15 high, entirely open along one side to a garden with a large fish-pond with goldfish, a pagoda, dwarf trees, and all the usual miniature adornments. Fusuma of wrinkled blue paper splashed with gold turned this “gallery” into two rooms; but there was no privacy, for the crowds climbed upon the roofs at the back, and sat there patiently until night.
These were daimiyo’s rooms. The posts and ceilings were ebony and gold, the mats very fine, the polished alcoves decorated with inlaid writing-tables and sword-racks; spears nine feet long, with handles of lacquer inlaid with Venus’ ear, hung in the verandah, the washing bowl was fine inlaid black lacquer, and the rice-bowls and their covers were gold lacquer.
In this, as in many other yadoyas, there were kakemonos with large Chinese characters representing the names of the Prime Minister, Provincial Governor, or distinguished General, who had honoured it by halting there, and lines of poetry were hung up, as is usual, in the same fashion. I have several times been asked to write something to be thus displayed. I spent Sunday at Komatsu, but not restfully, owing to the nocturnal croaking of the frogs in the pond. In it, as in most towns, there were shops which sell nothing but white, frothy-looking cakes, which are used for the goldfish which are so much prized, and three times daily the women and children of the household came into the garden to feed them.
When I left Komatsu there were fully sixty people inside the house and 1500 outside–walls, verandahs, and even roofs being packed. From Nikko to Komatsu mares had been exclusively used, but there I encountered for the first time the terrible Japanese pack-horse. Two horridly fierce-looking creatures were at the door, with their heads tied down till their necks were completely arched. When I mounted the crowd followed, gathering as it went, frightening the horse with the clatter of clogs and the sound of a multitude, till he broke his head-rope, and, the frightened mago letting him go, he proceeded down the street mainly on his hind feet, squealing, and striking savagely with his fore feet, the crowd scattering to the right and left, till, as it surged past the police station, four policemen came out and arrested it; only to gather again, however, for there was a longer street, down which my horse proceeded in the same fashion, and, looking round, I saw Ito’s horse on his hind legs and Ito on the ground. My beast jumped over all ditches, attacked all foot-passengers with his teeth, and behaved so like a wild animal that not all my previous acquaintance with the idiosyncrasies of horses enabled me to cope with him. On reaching Akayu we found a horse fair, and, as all the horses had their heads tightly tied down to posts, they could only squeal and lash out with their hind feet, which so provoked our animals that the baggage horse, by a series of jerks and rearings, divested himself of Ito and most of the baggage, and, as I dismounted from mine, he stood upright, and my foot catching I fell on the ground, when he made several vicious dashes at me with his teeth and fore feet, which were happily frustrated by the dexterity of some mago. These beasts forcibly remind me of the words, “Whose mouth must be held with bit and bridle, lest they turn and fall upon thee.”
It was a lovely summer day, though very hot, and the snowy peaks of Aidzu scarcely looked cool as they glittered in the sunlight. The plain of Yonezawa, with the prosperous town of Yonezawa in the south, and the frequented watering-place of Akayu in the north, is a perfect garden of Eden, “tilled with a pencil instead of a plough,” growing in rich profusion rice, cotton, maize, tobacco, hemp, indigo, beans, egg-plants, walnuts, melons, cucumbers, persimmons, apricots, pomegranates; a smiling and plenteous land, an Asiatic Arcadia, prosperous and independent, all its bounteous acres belonging to those who cultivate them, who live under their vines, figs, and pomegranates, free from oppression–a remarkable spectacle under an Asiatic despotism. Yet still Daikoku is the chief deity, and material good is the one object of desire.
It is an enchanting region of beauty, industry, and comfort, mountain girdled, and watered by the bright Matsuka. Everywhere there are prosperous and beautiful farming villages, with large houses with carved beams and ponderous tiled roofs, each standing in its own grounds, buried among persimmons and pomegranates, with flower-gardens under trellised vines, and privacy secured by high, closely-clipped screens of pomegranate and cryptomeria. Besides the villages of Yoshida, Semoshima, Kurokawa, Takayama, and Takataki, through or near which we passed, I counted over fifty on the plain with their brown, sweeping barn roofs looking out from the woodland. I cannot see any differences in the style of cultivation. Yoshida is rich and prosperous-looking, Numa poor and wretched-looking; but the scanty acres of Numa, rescued from the mountain-sides, are as exquisitely trim and neat, as perfectly cultivated, and yield as abundantly of the crops which suit the climate, as the broad acres of the sunny plain of Yonezawa, and this is the case everywhere. “The field of the sluggard” has no existence in Japan.
We rode for four hours through these beautiful villages on a road four feet wide, and then, to my surprise, after ferrying a river, emerged at Tsukuno upon what appears on the map as a secondary road, but which is in reality a main road 25 feet wide, well kept, trenched on both sides, and with a line of telegraph poles along it. It was a new world at once. The road for many miles was thronged with well-dressed foot-passengers, kurumas, pack-horses, and waggons either with solid wheels, or wheels with spokes but no tires. It is a capital carriage-road, but without carriages. In such civilised circumstances it was curious to see two or four brown skinned men pulling the carts, and quite often a man and his wife–the man unclothed, and the woman unclothed to her waist– doing the same. Also it struck me as incongruous to see telegraph wires above, and below, men whose only clothing consisted of a sun- hat and fan; while children with books and slates were returning from school, conning their lessons.
At Akayu, a town of hot sulphur springs, I hoped to sleep, but it was one of the noisiest places I have seen. In the most crowded part, where four streets meet, there are bathing sheds, which were full of people of both sexes, splashing loudly, and the yadoya close to it had about forty rooms, in nearly all of which several rheumatic people were lying on the mats, samisens were twanging, and kotos screeching, and the hubbub was so unbearable that I came on here, ten miles farther, by a fine new road, up an uninteresting strath of rice-fields and low hills, which opens out upon a small plain surrounded by elevated gravelly hills, on the slope of one of which Kaminoyama, a watering-place of over 3000 people, is pleasantly situated. It is keeping festival; there are lanterns and flags on every house, and crowds are thronging the temple grounds, of which there are several on the hills above. It is a clean, dry place, with beautiful yadoyas on the heights, and pleasant houses with gardens, and plenty of walks over the hills. The people say that it is one of the driest places in Japan. If it were within reach of foreigners, they would find it a wholesome health resort, with picturesque excursions in many directions.
This is one of the great routes of Japanese travel, and it is interesting to see watering-places with their habits, amusements, and civilisation quite complete, but borrowing nothing from Europe. The hot springs here contain iron, and are strongly impregnated with sulphuretted hydrogen. I tried the temperature of three, and found them 100 degrees, 105 degrees, and 107 degrees. They are supposed to be very valuable in rheumatism, and they attract visitors from great distances. The police, who are my frequent informants, tell me that there are nearly 600 people now staying here for the benefit of the baths, of which six daily are usually taken. I think that in rheumatism, as in some other maladies, the old-fashioned Japanese doctors pay little attention to diet and habits, and much to drugs and external applications. The benefit of these and other medicinal waters would be much increased if vigorous friction replaced the dabbing with soft towels.
This is a large yadoya, very full of strangers, and the house- mistress, a buxom and most prepossessing widow, has a truly exquisite hotel for bathers higher up the hill. She has eleven children, two or three of whom are tall, handsome, and graceful girls. One blushed deeply at my evident admiration, but was not displeased, and took me up the hill to see the temples, baths, and yadoyas of this very attractive place. I am much delighted with her grace and savoir faire. I asked the widow how long she had kept the inn, and she proudly answered, “Three hundred years,” not an uncommon instance of the heredity of occupations.
My accommodation is unique–a kura, or godown, in a large conventional garden, in which is a bath-house, which receives a hot spring at a temperature of 105 degrees, in which I luxuriate. Last night the mosquitoes were awful. If the widow and her handsome girls had not fanned me perseveringly for an hour, I should not have been able to write a line. My new mosquito net succeeds admirably, and, when I am once within it, I rather enjoy the disappointment of the hundreds of drumming blood-thirsty wretches outside.
The widow tells me that house-masters pay 2 yen once for all for the sign, and an annual tax of 2 yen on a first-class yadoya, 1 yen for a second, and 50 cents for a third, with 5 yen for the license to sell sake.
These “godowns” (from the Malay word gadong), or fire-proof store- houses, are one of the most marked features of Japanese towns, both because they are white where all else is grey, and because they are solid where all else is perishable.
I am lodged in the lower part, but the iron doors are open, and in their place at night is a paper screen. A few things are kept in my room. Two handsome shrines from which the unemotional faces of two Buddhas looked out all night, a fine figure of the goddess Kwan-non, and a venerable one of the god of longevity, suggested curious dreams.
I. L. B.
LETTER XIX
Prosperity–Convict Labour–A New Bridge–Yamagata–Intoxicating Forgeries–The Government Buildings–Bad Manners–Snow Mountains–A Wretched Town.
KANAYAMA, July 16.
Three days of travelling on the same excellent road have brought me nearly 60 miles. Yamagata ken impresses me as being singularly prosperous, progressive, and go-ahead; the plain of Yamagata, which I entered soon after leaving Kaminoyama, is populous and highly cultivated, and the broad road, with its enormous traffic, looks wealthy and civilised. It is being improved by convicts in dull red kimonos printed with Chinese characters, who correspond with our ticket-of-leave men, as they are working for wages in the employment of contractors and farmers, and are under no other restriction than that of always wearing the prison dress.
At the Sakamoki river I was delighted to come upon the only thoroughly solid piece of modern Japanese work that I have met with–a remarkably handsome stone bridge nearly finished–the first I have seen. I introduced myself to the engineer, Okuno Chiuzo, a very gentlemanly, agreeable Japanese, who showed me the plans, took a great deal of trouble to explain them, and courteously gave me tea and sweetmeats.
Yamagata, a thriving town of 21,000 people and the capital of the ken, is well situated on a slight eminence, and this and the dominant position of the kencho at the top of the main street give it an emphasis unusual in Japanese towns. The outskirts of all the cities are very mean, and the appearance of the lofty white buildings of the new Government Offices above the low grey houses was much of a surprise. The streets of Yamagata are broad and clean, and it has good shops, among which are long rows selling nothing but ornamental iron kettles and ornamental brasswork. So far in the interior I was annoyed to find several shops almost exclusively for the sale of villainous forgeries of European eatables and drinkables, specially the latter. The Japanese, from the Mikado downwards, have acquired a love of foreign intoxicants, which would be hurtful enough to them if the intoxicants were genuine, but is far worse when they are compounds of vitriol, fusel oil, bad vinegar, and I know not what. I saw two shops in Yamagata which sold champagne of the best brands, Martel’s cognac, Bass’ ale, Medoc, St. Julian, and Scotch whisky, at about one-fifth of their cost price–all poisonous compounds, the sale of which ought to be interdicted.
The Government Buildings, though in the usual confectionery style, are improved by the addition of verandahs; and the Kencho, Saibancho, or Court House, the Normal School with advanced schools attached, and the police buildings, are all in keeping with the good road and obvious prosperity. A large two-storied hospital, with a cupola, which will accommodate 150 patients, and is to be a medical school, is nearly finished. It is very well arranged and ventilated. I cannot say as much for the present hospital, which I went over. At the Court House I saw twenty officials doing nothing, and as many policemen, all in European dress, to which they had added an imitation of European manners, the total result being unmitigated vulgarity. They demanded my passport before they would tell me the population of the ken and city. Once or twice I have found fault with Ito’s manners, and he has asked me twice since if I think them like the manners of the policemen at Yamagata!
North of Yamagata the plain widens, and fine longitudinal ranges capped with snow mountains on the one side, and broken ranges with lateral spurs on the other, enclose as cheerful and pleasant a region as one would wish to see, with many pleasant villages on the lower slopes of the hills. The mercury was only 70 degrees, and the wind north, so it was an especially pleasant journey, though I had to go three and a half ri beyond Tendo, a town of 5000 people, where I had intended to halt, because the only inns at Tendo which were not kashitsukeya were so occupied with silk-worms that they could not receive me.
The next day’s journey was still along the same fine road, through a succession of farming villages and towns of 1500 and 2000 people, such as Tochiida and Obanasawa, were frequent. From both these there was a glorious view of Chokaizan, a grand, snow-covered dome, said to be 8000 feet high, which rises in an altogether unexpected manner from comparatively level country, and, as the great snow- fields of Udonosan are in sight at the same time, with most picturesque curtain ranges below, it may be considered one of the grandest views of Japan. After leaving Obanasawa the road passes along a valley watered by one of the affluents of the Mogami, and, after crossing it by a fine wooden bridge, ascends a pass from which the view is most magnificent. After a long ascent through a region of light, peaty soil, wooded with pine, cryptomeria, and scrub oak, a long descent and a fine avenue terminate in Shinjo, a wretched town of over 5000 people, situated in a plain of rice- fields.
The day’s journey, of over twenty-three miles, was through villages of farms without yadoyas, and in many cases without even tea- houses. The style of building has quite changed. Wood has disappeared, and all the houses are now built with heavy beams and walls of laths and brown mud mixed with chopped straw, and very neat. Nearly all are great oblong barns, turned endwise to the road, 50, 60, and even 100 feet long, with the end nearest the road the dwelling-house. These farm-houses have no paper windows, only amado, with a few panes of paper at the top. These are drawn back in the daytime, and, in the better class of houses, blinds, formed of reeds or split bamboo, are let down over the opening. There are no ceilings, and in many cases an unmolested rat snake lives in the rafters, who, when he is much gorged, occasionally falls down upon a mosquito net.
Again I write that Shinjo is a wretched place. It is a daimiyo’s town, and every daimiyo’s town that I have seen has an air of decay, partly owing to the fact that the castle is either pulled down, or has been allowed to fall into decay. Shinjo has a large trade in rice, silk, and hemp, and ought not to be as poor as it looks. The mosquitoes were in thousands, and I had to go to bed, so as to be out of their reach, before I had finished my wretched meal of sago and condensed milk. There was a hot rain all night, my wretched room was dirty and stifling, and rats gnawed my boots and ran away with my cucumbers.
To-day the temperature is high and the sky murky. The good road has come to an end, and the old hardships have begun again. After leaving Shinjo this morning we crossed over a steep ridge into a singular basin of great beauty, with a semicircle of pyramidal hills, rendered more striking by being covered to their summits with pyramidal cryptomeria, and apparently blocking all northward progress. At their feet lies Kanayama in a romantic situation, and, though I arrived as early as noon, I am staying for a day or two, for my room at the Transport Office is cheerful and pleasant, the agent is most polite, a very rough region lies before me, and Ito has secured a chicken for the first time since leaving Nikko!
I find it impossible in this damp climate, and in my present poor health, to travel with any comfort for more than two or three days at a time, and it is difficult to find pretty, quiet, and wholesome places for a halt of two nights. Freedom from fleas and mosquitoes one can never hope for, though the last vary in number, and I have found a way of “dodging” the first by laying down a piece of oiled paper six feet square upon the mat, dusting along its edges a band of Persian insect powder, and setting my chair in the middle. I am then insulated, and, though myriads of fleas jump on the paper, the powder stupefies them, and they are easily killed. I have been obliged to rest here at any rate, because I have been stung on my left hand both by a hornet and a gadfly, and it is badly inflamed. In some places the hornets are in hundreds, and make the horses wild. I am also suffering from inflammation produced by the bites of “horse ants,” which attack one in walking. The Japanese suffer very much from these, and a neglected bite often produces an intractable ulcer. Besides these, there is a fly, as harmless in appearance as our house-fly, which bites as badly as a mosquito. These are some of the drawbacks of Japanese travelling in summer, but worse than these is the lack of such food as one can eat when one finishes a hard day’s journey without appetite, in an exhausting atmosphere.
July 18.–I have had so much pain and fever from stings and bites that last night I was glad to consult a Japanese doctor from Shinjo. Ito, who looks twice as big as usual when he has to do any “grand” interpreting, and always puts on silk hakama in honour of it, came in with a middle-aged man dressed entirely in silk, who prostrated himself three times on the ground, and then sat down on his heels. Ito in many words explained my calamities, and Dr. Nosoki then asked to see my “honourable hand,” which he examined carefully, and then my “honourable foot.” He felt my pulse and looked at my eyes with a magnifying glass, and with much sucking in of his breath–a sign of good breeding and politeness–informed me that I had much fever, which I knew before; then that I must rest, which I also knew; then he lighted his pipe and contemplated me. Then he felt my pulse and looked at my eyes again, then felt the swelling from the hornet bite, and said it was much inflamed, of which I was painfully aware, and then clapped his hands three times. At this signal a coolie appeared, carrying a handsome black lacquer chest with the same crest in gold upon it as Dr. Nosoki wore in white on his haori. This contained a medicine chest of fine gold lacquer, fitted up with shelves, drawers, bottles, etc. He compounded a lotion first, with which he bandaged my hand and arm rather skilfully, telling me to pour the lotion over the bandage at intervals till the pain abated. The whole was covered with oiled paper, which answers the purpose of oiled silk. He then compounded a febrifuge, which, as it is purely vegetable, I have not hesitated to take, and told me to drink it in hot water, and to avoid sake for a day or two!
I asked him what his fee was, and, after many bows and much spluttering and sucking in of his breath, he asked if I should think half a yen too much, and when I presented him with a yen, and told him with a good deal of profound bowing on my part that I was exceedingly glad to obtain his services, his gratitude quite abashed me by its immensity.
Dr. Nosoki is one of the old-fashioned practitioners, whose medical knowledge has been handed down from father to son, and who holds out, as probably most of his patients do, against European methods and drugs. A strong prejudice against surgical operations, specially amputations, exists throughout Japan. With regard to the latter, people think that, as they came into the world complete, so they are bound to go out of it, and in many places a surgeon would hardly be able to buy at any price the privilege of cutting off an arm.
Except from books these older men know nothing of the mechanism of the human body, as dissection is unknown to native science. Dr. Nosoki told me that he relies mainly on the application of the moxa and on acupuncture in the treatment of acute diseases, and in chronic maladies on friction, medicinal baths, certain animal and vegetable medicines, and certain kinds of food. The use of leeches and blisters is unknown to him, and he regards mineral drugs with obvious suspicion. He has heard of chloroform, but has never seen it used, and considers that in maternity it must necessarily be fatal either to mother or child. He asked me (and I have twice before been asked the same question) whether it is not by its use that we endeavour to keep down our redundant population! He has great faith in ginseng, and in rhinoceros horn, and in the powdered liver of some animal, which, from the description, I understood to be a tiger–all specifics of the Chinese school of medicines. Dr. Nosoki showed me a small box of “unicorn’s” horn, which he said was worth more than its weight in gold! As my arm improved coincidently with the application of his lotion, I am bound to give him the credit of the cure.
I invited him to dinner, and two tables were produced covered with different dishes, of which he ate heartily, showing most singular dexterity with his chopsticks in removing the flesh of small, bony fish. It is proper to show appreciation of a repast by noisy gulpings, and much gurgling and drawing in of the breath. Etiquette rigidly prescribes these performances, which are most distressing to a European, and my guest nearly upset my gravity by them.
The host and the kocho, or chief man of the village, paid me a formal visit in the evening, and Ito, en grande tenue, exerted himself immensely on the occasion. They were much surprised at my not smoking, and supposed me to be under a vow! They asked me many questions about our customs and Government, but frequently reverted to tobacco.
I. L. B.
LETTER XX
The Effect of a Chicken–Poor Fare–Slow Travelling–Objects of Interest–Kak’ke–The Fatal Close–A Great Fire–Security of the Kuras.
SHINGOJI, July 21.
Very early in the morning, after my long talk with the Kocho of Kanayama, Ito wakened me by saying, “You’ll be able for a long day’s journey to-day, as you had a chicken yesterday,” and under this chicken’s marvellous influence we got away at 6.45, only to verify the proverb, “The more haste the worse speed.” Unsolicited by me the Kocho sent round the village to forbid the people from assembling, so I got away in peace with a pack-horse and one runner. It was a terrible road, with two severe mountain-passes to cross, and I not only had to walk nearly the whole way, but to help the man with the kuruma up some of the steepest places. Halting at the exquisitely situated village of Nosoki, we got one horse, and walked by a mountain road along the head-waters of the Omono to Innai. I wish I could convey to you any idea of the beauty and wildness of that mountain route, of the surprises on the way, of views, of the violent deluges of rain which turned rivulets into torrents, and of the hardships and difficulties of the day; the scanty fare of sun-dried rice dough and sour yellow rasps, and the depth of the mire through which we waded! We crossed the Shione and Sakatsu passes, and in twelve hours accomplished fifteen miles! Everywhere we were told that we should never get through the country by the way we are going.
The women still wear trousers, but with a long garment tucked into them instead of a short one, and the men wear a cotton combination of breastplate and apron, either without anything else, or over their kimonos. The descent to Innai under an avenue of cryptomeria, and the village itself, shut in with the rushing Omono, are very beautiful.
The yadoya at Innai was a remarkably cheerful one, but my room was entirely fusuma and shoji, and people were peeping in the whole time. It is not only a foreigner and his strange ways which attract attention in these remote districts, but, in my case, my india-rubber bath, air-pillow, and, above all, my white mosquito net. Their nets are all of a heavy green canvas, and they admire mine so much, that I can give no more acceptable present on leaving than a piece of it to twist in with the hair. There were six engineers in the next room who are surveying the passes which I had crossed, in order to see if they could be tunnelled, in which case kurumas might go all the way from Tokiyo to Kubota on the Sea of Japan, and, with a small additional outlay, carts also.
In the two villages of Upper and Lower Innai there has been an outbreak of a malady much dreaded by the Japanese, called kak’ke, which, in the last seven months, has carried off 100 persons out of a population of about 1500, and the local doctors have been aided by two sent from the Medical School at Kubota. I don’t know a European name for it; the Japanese name signifies an affection of the legs. Its first symptoms are a loss of strength in the legs, “looseness in the knees,” cramps in the calves, swelling, and numbness. This, Dr. Anderson, who has studied kak’ke in more than 1100 cases in Tokiyo, calls the sub-acute form. The chronic is a slow, numbing, and wasting malady, which, if unchecked, results in death from paralysis and exhaustion in from six months to three years. The third, or acute form, Dr. Anderson describes thus. After remarking that the grave symptoms set in quite unexpectedly, and go on rapidly increasing, he says:- “The patient now can lie down no longer; he sits up in bed and tosses restlessly from one position to another, and, with wrinkled brow, staring and anxious eyes, dusky skin, blue, parted lips, dilated nostrils, throbbing neck, and labouring chest, presents a picture of the most terrible distress that the worst of diseases can inflict. There is no intermission even for a moment, and the physician, here almost powerless, can do little more than note the failing pulse and falling temperature, and wait for the moment when the brain, paralysed by the carbonised blood, shall become insensible, and allow the dying man to pass his last moments in merciful unconsciousness.” {15}
The next morning, after riding nine miles through a quagmire, under grand avenues of cryptomeria, and noticing with regret that the telegraph poles ceased, we reached Yusowa, a town of 7000 people, in which, had it not been for provoking delays, I should have slept instead of at Innai, and found that a fire a few hours previously had destroyed seventy houses, including the yadoya at which I should have lodged. We had to wait two hours for horses, as all were engaged in moving property and people. The ground where the houses had stood was absolutely bare of everything but fine black ash, among which the kuras stood blackened, and, in some instances, slightly cracked, but in all unharmed. Already skeletons of new houses were rising. No life had been lost except that of a tipsy man, but I should probably have lost everything but my money.
LETTER XX–(Continued)
Lunch in Public–A Grotesque Accident–Police Inquiries–Man or Woman?–A Melancholy Stare–A Vicious Horse–An Ill-favoured Town– A Disappointment–A Torii.
Yusowa is a specially objectionable-looking place. I took my lunch–a wretched meal of a tasteless white curd made from beans, with some condensed milk added to it–in a yard, and the people crowded in hundreds to the gate, and those behind, being unable to see me, got ladders and climbed on the adjacent roofs, where they remained till one of the roofs gave way with a loud crash, and precipitated about fifty men, women, and children into the room below, which fortunately was vacant. Nobody screamed–a noteworthy fact–and the casualties were only a few bruises. Four policemen then appeared and demanded my passport, as if I were responsible for the accident, and failing, like all others, to read a particular word upon it, they asked me what I was travelling for, and on being told “to learn about the country,” they asked if I was making a map! Having satisfied their curiosity they disappeared, and the crowd surged up again in fuller force. The Transport Agent begged them to go away, but they said they might never see such a sight again! One old peasant said he would go away if he were told whether “the sight” were a man or a woman, and, on the agent asking if that were any business of his, he said he should like to tell at home what he had seen, which awoke my sympathy at once, and I told Ito to tell them that a Japanese horse galloping night and day without ceasing would take 5.5 weeks to reach my county–a statement which he is using lavishly as I go along. These are such queer crowds, so silent and gaping, and they remain motionless for hours, the wide-awake babies on the mothers’ backs and in the fathers’ arms never crying. I should be glad to hear a hearty aggregate laugh, even if I were its object. The great melancholy stare is depressing.
The road for ten miles was thronged with country people going in to see the fire. It was a good road and very pleasant country, with numerous road-side shrines and figures of the goddess of mercy. I had a wicked horse, thoroughly vicious. His head was doubly chained to the saddle-girth, but he never met man, woman, or child, without laying back his ears and running at them to bite them. I was so tired and in so much spinal pain that I got off and walked several times, and it was most difficult to get on again, for as soon as I put my hand on the saddle he swung his hind legs round to kick me, and it required some agility to avoid being hurt. Nor was this all. The evil beast made dashes with his tethered head at flies, threatening to twist or demolish my foot at each, flung his hind legs upwards, attempted to dislodge flies on his nose with his hind hoof, executed capers which involved a total disappearance of everything in front of the saddle, squealed, stumbled, kicked his old shoes off, and resented the feeble attempts which the mago made to replace them, and finally walked in to Yokote and down its long and dismal street mainly on his hind legs, shaking the rope out of his timid leader’s hand, and shaking me into a sort of aching jelly! I used to think that horses were made vicious either by being teased or by violence in breaking; but this does not account for the malignity of the Japanese horses, for the people are so much afraid of them that they treat them with great respect: they are not beaten or kicked, are spoken to in soothing tones, and, on the whole, live better than their masters. Perhaps this is the secret of their villainy–“Jeshurun waxed fat and kicked.”
Yokote, a town of 10,000 people, in which the best yadoyas are all non-respectable, is an ill-favoured, ill-smelling, forlorn, dirty, damp, miserable place, with a large trade in cottons. As I rode through on my temporary biped the people rushed out from the baths to see me, men and women alike without a particle of clothing. The house-master was very polite, but I had a dark and dirty room, up a bamboo ladder, and it swarmed with fleas and mosquitoes to an exasperating extent. On the way I heard that a bullock was killed every Thursday in Yokote, and had decided on having a broiled steak for supper and taking another with me, but when I arrived it was all sold, there were no eggs, and I made a miserable meal of rice and bean curd, feeling somewhat starved, as the condensed milk I bought at Yamagata had to be thrown away. I was somewhat wretched from fatigue and inflamed ant bites, but in the early morning, hot and misty as all the mornings have been, I went to see a Shinto temple, or miya, and, though I went alone, escaped a throng.
The entrance into the temple court was, as usual, by a torii, which consisted of two large posts 20 feet high, surmounted with cross beams, the upper one of which projects beyond the posts and frequently curves upwards at both ends. The whole, as is often the case, was painted a dull red. This torii, or “birds’ rest,” is said to be so called because the fowls, which were formerly offered but not sacrificed, were accustomed to perch upon it. A straw rope, with straw tassels and strips of paper hanging from it, the special emblem of Shinto, hung across the gateway. In the paved court there were several handsome granite lanterns on fine granite pedestals, such as are the nearly universal accompaniments of both Shinto and Buddhist temples.
After leaving Yakote we passed through very pretty country with mountain views and occasional glimpses of the snowy dome of Chokaizan, crossed the Omono (which has burst its banks and destroyed its bridges) by two troublesome ferries, and arrived at Rokugo, a town of 5000 people, with fine temples, exceptionally mean houses, and the most aggressive crowd by which I have yet been asphyxiated.
There, through the good offices of the police, I was enabled to attend a Buddhist funeral of a merchant of some wealth. It interested me very much from its solemnity and decorum, and Ito’s explanations of what went before were remarkably distinctly given. I went in a Japanese woman’s dress, borrowed at the tea-house, with a blue hood over my head, and thus escaped all notice, but I found the restraint of the scanty “tied forward” kimono very tiresome. Ito gave me many injunctions as to what I was to do and avoid, which I carried out faithfully, being nervously anxious to avoid jarring on the sensibilities of those who had kindly permitted a foreigner to be present.
The illness was a short one, and there had been no time either for prayers or pilgrimages on the sick man’s behalf. When death occurs the body is laid with its head to the north (a position that the living Japanese scrupulously avoid), near a folding screen, between which and it a new zen is placed, on which are a saucer of oil with a lighted rush, cakes of uncooked rice dough, and a saucer of incense sticks. The priests directly after death choose the kaimiyo, or posthumous name, write it on a tablet of white wood, and seat themselves by the corpse; his zen, bowls, cups, etc., are filled with vegetable food and are placed by his side, the chopsticks being put on the wrong, i.e. the left, side of the zen. At the end of forty-eight hours the corpse is arranged for the coffin by being washed with warm water, and the priest, while saying certain prayers, shaves the head. In all cases, rich or poor, the dress is of the usual make, but of pure white linen or cotton.
At Omagori, a town near Rokugo, large earthenware jars are manufactured, which are much used for interment by the wealthy; but in this case there were two square boxes, the outer one being of finely planed wood of the Retinospora obtusa. The poor use what is called the “quick-tub,” a covered tub of pine hooped with bamboo. Women are dressed for burial in the silk robe worn on the marriage day, tabi are placed beside them or on their feet, and their hair usually flows loosely behind them. The wealthiest people fill the coffin with vermilion and the poorest use chaff; but in this case I heard that only the mouth, nose, and ears were filled with vermilion, and that the coffin was filled up with coarse incense. The body is placed within the tub or box in the usual squatting position. It is impossible to understand how a human body, many hours after death, can be pressed into the limited space afforded by even the outermost of the boxes. It has been said that the rigidity of a corpse is overcome by the use of a powder called dosia, which is sold by the priests; but this idea has been exploded, and the process remains incomprehensible.
Bannerets of small size and ornamental staves were outside the house door. Two men in blue dresses, with pale blue over-garments resembling wings received each person, two more presented a lacquered bowl of water and a white silk crepe towel, and then we passed into a large room, round which were arranged a number of very handsome folding screens, on which lotuses, storks, and peonies were realistically painted on a dead gold ground. Near the end of the room the coffin, under a canopy of white silk, upon which there was a very beautiful arrangement of artificial white lotuses, rested upon trestles, the face of the corpse being turned towards the north. Six priests, very magnificently dressed, sat on each side of the coffin, and two more knelt in front of a small temporary altar.
The widow, an extremely pretty woman, squatted near the deceased, below the father and mother; and after her came the children, relatives, and friends, who sat in rows, dressed in winged garments of blue and white. The widow was painted white; her lips were reddened with vermilion; her hair was elaborately dressed and ornamented with carved shell pins; she wore a beautiful dress of sky-blue silk, with a haori of fine white crepe and a scarlet crepe girdle embroidered in gold, and looked like a bride on her marriage day rather than a widow.
Indeed, owing to the beauty of the dresses and the amount of blue and white silk, the room had a festal rather than a funereal look. When all the guests had arrived, tea and sweetmeats were passed round; incense was burned profusely; litanies were mumbled, and the bustle of moving to the grave began, during which I secured a place near the gate of the temple grounds.
The procession did not contain the father or mother of the deceased, but I understood that the mourners who composed it were all relatives. The oblong tablet with the “dead name” of the deceased was carried first by a priest, then the lotus blossom by another priest, then ten priests followed, two and two, chanting litanies from books, then came the coffin on a platform borne by four men and covered with white drapery, then the widow, and then the other relatives. The coffin was carried into the temple and laid upon trestles, while incense was burned and prayers were said, and was then carried to a shallow grave lined with cement, and prayers were said by the priests until the earth was raised to the proper level, when all dispersed, and the widow, in her gay attire, walked home unattended. There were no hired mourners or any signs of grief, but nothing could be more solemn, reverent, and decorous than the whole service. [I have since seen many funerals, chiefly of the poor, and, though shorn of much of the ceremony, and with only one officiating priest, the decorum was always most remarkable.] The fees to the priests are from 2 up to 40 or 50 yen. The graveyard, which surrounds the temple, was extremely beautiful, and the cryptomeria specially fine. It was very full of stone gravestones, and, like all Japanese cemeteries, exquisitely kept. As soon as the grave was filled in, a life-size pink lotus plant was placed upon it, and a lacquer tray, on which were lacquer bowls containing tea or sake, beans, and sweetmeats.
The temple at Rokugo was very beautiful, and, except that its ornaments were superior in solidity and good taste, differed little from a Romish church. The low altar, on which were lilies and lighted candles, was draped in blue and silver, and on the high altar, draped in crimson and cloth of gold, there was nothing but a closed shrine, an incense-burner, and a vase of lotuses.
LETTER XX–(Concluded)
A Casual Invitation–A Ludicrous Incident–Politeness of a Policeman–A Comfortless Sunday–An Outrageous Irruption–A Privileged Stare.
At a wayside tea-house, soon after leaving Rokugo in kurumas, I met the same courteous and agreeable young doctor who was stationed at Innai during the prevalence of kak’ke, and he invited me to visit the hospital at Kubota, of which he is junior physician, and told Ito of a restaurant at which “foreign food” can be obtained–a pleasant prospect, of which he is always reminding me.
Travelling along a very narrow road, I as usual first, we met a man leading a prisoner by a rope, followed by a policeman. As soon as my runner saw the latter he fell down on his face so suddenly in the shafts as nearly to throw me out, at the same time trying to wriggle into a garment which he had carried on the crossbar, while the young men who were drawing the two kurumas behind, crouching behind my vehicle, tried to scuttle into their clothes. I never saw such a picture of abjectness as my man presented. He trembled from head to foot, and illustrated that queer phrase often heard in Scotch Presbyterian prayers, “Lay our hands on our mouths and our mouths in the dust.” He literally grovelled in the dust, and with every sentence that the policeman spoke raised his head a little, to bow it yet more deeply than before. It was all because he had no clothes on. I interceded for him as the day was very hot, and the policeman said he would not arrest him, as he should otherwise have done, because of the inconvenience that it would cause to a foreigner. He was quite an elderly man, and never recovered his spirits, but, as soon as a turn of the road took us out of the policeman’s sight, the two younger men threw their clothes into the air and gambolled in the shafts, shrieking with laughter!
On reaching Shingoji, being too tired to go farther, I was dismayed to find nothing but a low, dark, foul-smelling room, enclosed only by dirty shoji, in which to spend Sunday. One side looked into a little mildewed court, with a slimy growth of Protococcus viridis, and into which the people of another house constantly came to stare. The other side opened on the earthen passage into the street, where travellers wash their feet, the third into the kitchen, and the fourth into the front room. Even before dark it was alive with mosquitoes, and the fleas hopped on the mats like sand-flies. There were no eggs, nothing but rice and cucumbers. At five on Sunday morning I saw three faces pressed against the outer lattice, and before evening the shoji were riddled with finger-holes, at each of which a dark eye appeared. There was a still, fine rain all day, with the mercury at 82 degrees, and the heat, darkness, and smells were difficult to endure. In the afternoon a small procession passed the house, consisting of a decorated palanquin, carried and followed by priests, with capes and stoles over crimson chasubles and white cassocks. This ark, they said, contained papers inscribed with the names of people and the evils they feared, and the priests were carrying the papers to throw them into the river.
I went to bed early as a refuge from mosquitoes, with the andon, as usual, dimly lighting the room, and shut my eyes. About nine I heard a good deal of whispering and shuffling, which continued for some time, and, on looking up, saw opposite to me about 40 men, women, and children (Ito says 100), all staring at me, with the light upon their faces. They had silently removed three of the shoji next the passage! I called Ito loudly, and clapped my hands, but they did not stir till he came, and then they fled like a flock of sheep. I have patiently, and even smilingly, borne all out-of- doors crowding and curiosity, but this kind of intrusion is unbearable; and I sent Ito to the police station, much against his will, to beg the police to keep the people out of the house, as the house-master was unable to do so. This morning, as I was finishing dressing, a policeman appeared in my room, ostensibly to apologise for the behaviour of the people, but in reality to have a privileged stare at me, and, above all, at my stretcher and mosquito net, from which he hardly took his eyes. Ito says he could make a yen a day by showing them! The policeman said that the people had never seen a foreigner.
I. L. B.
LETTER XXI
The Necessity of Firmness–Perplexing Misrepresentations–Gliding with the Stream–Suburban Residences–The Kubota Hospital–A Formal Reception–The Normal School.
KUBOTA, July 23.
I arrived here on Monday afternoon by the river Omono, what would have been two long days’ journey by land having been easily accomplished in nine hours by water. This was an instance of forming a plan wisely, and adhering to it resolutely! Firmness in travelling is nowhere more necessary than in Japan. I decided some time ago, from Mr. Brunton’s map, that the Omono must be navigable from Shingoji, and a week ago told Ito to inquire about it, but at each place difficulties have been started. There was too much water, there was too little; there were bad rapids, there were shallows; it was too late in the year; all the boats which had started lately were lying aground; but at one of the ferries I saw in the distance a merchandise boat going down, and told Ito I should go that way and no other. On arriving at Shingoji they said it was not on the Omono at all, but on a stream with some very bad rapids, in which boats are broken to pieces. Lastly, they said there was no boat, but on my saying that I would send ten miles for one, a small, flat-bottomed scow was produced by the Transport Agent, into which Ito, the luggage, and myself accurately fitted. Ito sententiously observed, “Not one thing has been told us on our journey which has turned out true!” This is not an exaggeration. The usual crowd did not assemble round the door, but preceded me to the river, where it covered the banks and clustered in the trees. Four policemen escorted me down. The voyage of forty-two miles was delightful. The rapids were a mere ripple, the current was strong, one boatman almost slept upon his paddle, the other only woke to bale the boat when it was half-full of water, the shores were silent and pretty, and almost without population till we reached the large town of Araya, which straggles along a high bank for a considerable distance, and after nine peaceful hours we turned off from the main stream of the Omono just at the outskirts of Kubota, and poled up a narrow, green river, fringed by dilapidated backs of houses, boat-building yards, and rafts of timber on one side, and dwelling-houses, gardens, and damp greenery on the other. This stream is crossed by very numerous bridges.
I got a cheerful upstairs room at a most friendly yadoya, and my three days here have been fully occupied and very pleasant. “Foreign food”–a good beef-steak, an excellent curry, cucumbers, and foreign salt and mustard, were at once obtained, and I felt my “eyes lightened” after partaking of them.
Kubota is a very attractive and purely Japanese town of 36,000 people, the capital of Akita ken. A fine mountain, called Taiheisan, rises above its fertile valley, and the Omono falls into the Sea of Japan close to it. It has a number of kurumas, but, owing to heavy sand and the badness of the roads, they can only go three miles in any direction. It is a town of activity and brisk trade, and manufactures a silk fabric in stripes of blue and black, and yellow and black, much used for making hakama and kimonos, a species of white silk crepe with a raised woof, which brings a high price in Tokiyo shops, fusuma, and clogs. Though it is a castle town, it is free from the usual “deadly-lively” look, and has an air of prosperity and comfort. Though it has few streets of shops, it covers a great extent of ground with streets and lanes of pretty, isolated dwelling-houses, surrounded by trees, gardens, and well-trimmed hedges, each garden entered by a substantial gateway. The existence of something like a middle class with home privacy and home life is suggested by these miles of comfortable “suburban residences.” Foreign influence is hardly at all felt, there is not a single foreigner in Government or any other employment, and even the hospital was organised from the beginning by Japanese doctors.
This fact made me greatly desire to see it, but, on going there at the proper hour for visitors, I was met by the Director with courteous but vexatious denial. No foreigner could see it, he said, without sending his passport to the Governor and getting a written order, so I complied with these preliminaries, and 8 a.m. of the next day was fixed for my visit Ito, who is lazy about interpreting for the lower orders, but exerts himself to the utmost on such an occasion as this, went with me, handsomely clothed in silk, as befitted an “Interpreter,” and surpassed all his former efforts.
The Director and the staff of six physicians, all handsomely dressed in silk, met me at the top of the stairs, and conducted me to the management room, where six clerks were writing. Here there was a table, solemnly covered with a white cloth, and four chairs, on which the Director, the Chief Physician, Ito, and I sat, and pipes, tea, and sweetmeats, were produced. After this, accompanied by fifty medical students, whose intelligent looks promise well for their success, we went round the hospital, which is a large two- storied building in semi-European style, but with deep verandahs all round. The upper floor is used for class-rooms, and the lower accommodates 100 patients, besides a number of resident students. Ten is the largest number treated in any one room, and severe cases are treated in separate rooms. Gangrene has prevailed, and the Chief Physician, who is at this time remodelling the hospital, has closed some of the wards in consequence. There is a Lock Hospital under the same roof. About fifty important operations are annually performed under chloroform, but the people of Akita ken are very conservative, and object to part with their limbs and to foreign drugs. This conservatism diminishes the number of patients.
The odour of carbolic acid pervaded the whole hospital, and there were spray producers enough to satisfy Mr. Lister! At the request of Dr. K. I saw the dressing of some very severe wounds carefully performed with carbolised gauze, under spray of carbolic acid, the fingers of the surgeon and the instruments used being all carefully bathed in the disinfectant. Dr. K. said it was difficult to teach the students the extreme carefulness with regard to minor details which is required in the antiseptic treatment, which he regards as one of the greatest discoveries of this century. I was very much impressed with the fortitude shown by the surgical patients, who went through very severe pain without a wince or a moan. Eye cases are unfortunately very numerous. Dr. K. attributes their extreme prevalence to overcrowding, defective ventilation, poor living, and bad light.
After our round we returned to the management room to find a meal laid out in English style–coffee in cups with handles and saucers, and plates with spoons. After this pipes were again produced, and the Director and medical staff escorted me to the entrance, where we all bowed profoundly. I was delighted to see that Dr. Kayabashi, a man under thirty, and fresh from Tokiyo, and all the staff and students were in the national dress, with the hakama of rich silk. It is a beautiful dress, and assists dignity as much as the ill-fitting European costume detracts from it. This was a very interesting visit, in spite of the difficulty of communication through an interpreter.
The public buildings, with their fine gardens, and the broad road near which they stand, with its stone-faced embankments, are very striking in such a far-off ken. Among the finest of the buildings is the Normal School, where I shortly afterwards presented myself, but I was not admitted till I had shown my passport and explained my objects in travelling. These preliminaries being settled, Mr. Tomatsu Aoki, the Chief Director, and Mr. Shude Kane Nigishi, the principal teacher, both looking more like monkeys than men in their European clothes, lionised me.
The first was most trying, for he persisted in attempting to speak English, of which he knows about as much as I know of Japanese, but the last, after some grotesque attempts, accepted Ito’s services. The school is a commodious Europeanised building, three stories high, and from its upper balcony the view of the city, with its gray roofs and abundant greenery, and surrounding mountains and valleys, is very fine. The equipments of the different class-rooms surprised me, especially the laboratory of the chemical class-room, and the truly magnificent illustrative apparatus in the natural science class-room. Ganot’s “Physics” is the text book of that department.
I. L. B.
LETTER XXII
A Silk Factory–Employment for Women–A Police Escort–The Japanese Police Force.
KUBOTA, July 23.
My next visit was to a factory of handloom silk-weavers, where 180 hands, half of them women, are employed. These new industrial openings for respectable employment for women and girls are very important, and tend in the direction of a much-needed social reform. The striped silk fabrics produced are entirely for home consumption.
Afterwards I went into the principal street, and, after a long search through the shops, bought some condensed milk with the “Eagle” brand and the label all right, but, on opening it, found it to contain small pellets of a brownish, dried curd, with an unpleasant taste! As I was sitting in the shop, half stifled by the crowd, the people suddenly fell back to a respectful distance, leaving me breathing space, and a message came from the chief of police to say that he was very sorry for the crowding, and had ordered two policemen to attend upon me for the remainder of my visit. The black and yellow uniforms were most truly welcome, and since then I have escaped all annoyance. On my return I found the card of the chief of police, who had left a message with the house- master apologising for the crowd by saying that foreigners very rarely visited Kubota, and he thought that the people had never seen a foreign woman.
I went afterwards to the central police station to inquire about an inland route to Aomori, and received much courtesy, but no information. The police everywhere are very gentle to the people,- -a few quiet words or a wave of the hand are sufficient, when they do not resist them. They belong to the samurai class, and, doubtless, their naturally superior position weighs with the heimin. Their faces and a certain hauteur of manner show the indelible class distinction. The entire police force of Japan numbers 23,300 educated men in the prime of life, and if 30 per cent of them do wear spectacles, it does not detract from their usefulness. 5600 of them are stationed at Yedo, as from thence they can be easily sent wherever they are wanted, 1004 at Kiyoto, and 815 at Osaka, and the remaining 10,000 are spread over the country. The police force costs something over 400,000 pounds annually, and certainly is very efficient in preserving good order. The pay of ordinary constables ranges from 6 to 10 yen a month. An enormous quantity of superfluous writing is done by all officialdom in Japan, and one usually sees policemen writing. What comes of it I don’t know. They are mostly intelligent and gentlemanly-looking young men, and foreigners in the interior are really much indebted to them. If I am at any time in difficulties I apply to them, and, though they are disposed to be somewhat de haut en bas, they are sure to help one, except about routes, of which they always profess ignorance.
On the whole, I like Kubota better than any other Japanese town, perhaps because it is so completely Japanese and has no air of having seen better days. I no longer care to meet Europeans– indeed I should go far out of my way to avoid them. I have become quite used to Japanese life, and think that I learn more about it in travelling in this solitary way than I should otherwise. I. L. B.
LETTER XXIII
“A Plague of Immoderate Rain”–A Confidential Servant–Ito’s Diary- -Ito’s Excellences–Ito’s Faults–Prophecy of the Future of Japan– Curious Queries–Superfine English–Economical Travelling–The Japanese Pack-horse again.
KUBOTA, July 24.
I am here still, not altogether because the town is fascinating, but because the rain is so ceaseless as to be truly “a plague of immoderate rain and waters.” Travellers keep coming in with stories of the impassability of the roads and the carrying away of bridges. Ito amuses me very much by his remarks. He thinks that my visit to the school and hospital must have raised Japan in my estimation, and he is talking rather big. He asked me if I noticed that all the students kept their mouths shut like educated men and residents of Tokiyo, and that all country people keep theirs open. I have said little about him for some time, but I daily feel more dependent on him, not only for all information, but actually for getting on. At night he has my watch, passport, and half my money, and I often wonder what would become of me if he absconded before morning. He is not a good boy. He has no moral sense, according to our notions; he dislikes foreigners; his manner is often very disagreeable; and yet I doubt whether I could have obtained a more valuable servant and interpreter. When we left Tokiyo he spoke fairly good English, but by practice and industrious study he now speaks better than any official interpreter that I have seen, and his vocabulary is daily increasing. He never uses a word inaccurately when he has once got hold of its meaning, and his memory never fails. He keeps a diary both in English and Japanese, and it shows much painstaking observation. He reads it to me sometimes, and it is interesting to hear what a young man who has travelled as much as he has regards as novel in this northern region. He has made a hotel book and a transport book, in which all the bills and receipts are written, and he daily transliterates the names of all places into English letters, and puts down the distances and the sums paid for transport and hotels on each bill.
He inquires the number of houses in each place from the police or Transport Agent, and the special trade of each town, and notes them down for me. He takes great pains to be accurate, and occasionally remarks about some piece of information that he is not quite certain about, “If it’s not true, it’s not worth having.” He is never late, never dawdles, never goes out in the evening except on errands for me, never touches sake, is never disobedient, never requires to be told the same thing twice, is always within hearing, has a good deal of tact as to what he repeats, and all with an undisguised view to his own interest. He sends most of his wages to his mother, who is a widow–“It’s the custom of the country”– and seems to spend the remainder on sweetmeats, tobacco, and the luxury of frequent shampooing.
That he would tell a lie if it served his purpose, and would “squeeze” up to the limits of extortion, if he could do it unobserved, I have not the slightest doubt. He seems to have but little heart, or any idea of any but vicious pleasures. He has no religion of any kind; he has been too much with foreigners for that. His frankness is something startling. He has no idea of reticence on any subject; but probably I learn more about things as they really are from this very defect. In virtue in man or woman, except in that of his former master, he has little, if any belief. He thinks that Japan is right in availing herself of the discoveries made by foreigners, that they have as much to learn from her, and that she will outstrip them in the race, because she takes all that is worth having, and rejects the incubus of Christianity. Patriotism is, I think, his strongest feeling, and I never met with such a boastful display of it, except in a Scotchman or an American. He despises the uneducated, as he can read and write both the syllabaries. For foreign rank or position he has not an atom of reverence or value, but a great deal of both for Japanese officialdom. He despises the intellects of women, but flirts in a town-bred fashion with the simple tea-house girls.
He is anxious to speak the very best English, and to say that a word is slangy or common interdicts its use. Sometimes, when the weather is fine and things go smoothly, he is in an excellent and communicative humour, and talks a good deal as we travel. A few days ago I remarked, “What a beautiful day this is!” and soon after, note-book in hand, he said, “You say ‘a beautiful day.’ Is that better English than ‘a devilish fine day,’ which most foreigners say?” I replied that it was “common,” and “beautiful” has been brought out frequently since. Again, “When you ask a question you never say, ‘What the d-l is it?’ as other foreigners do. Is it proper for men to say it and not for women?” I told him it was proper for neither, it was a very “common” word, and I saw that he erased it from his note-book. At first he always used fellows for men, as, “Will you have one or two FELLOWS for your kuruma?” “FELLOWS and women.” At last he called the Chief Physician of the hospital here a FELLOW, on which I told him that it was slightly slangy, and at least “colloquial,” and for two days he has scrupulously spoken of man and men. To-day he brought a boy with very sore eyes to see me, on which I exclaimed, “Poor little fellow!” and this evening he said, “You called that boy a fellow, I thought it was a bad word!” The habits of many of the Yokohama foreigners have helped to obliterate any distinctions between right and wrong, if he ever made any. If he wishes to tell me that he has seen a very tipsy man, he always says he has seen “a fellow as drunk as an Englishman.” At Nikko I asked him how many legal wives a man could have in Japan, and he replied, “Only one lawful one, but as many others (mekake) as he can support, just as Englishmen have.” He never forgets a correction. Till I told him it was slangy he always spoke of inebriated people as “tight,” and when I gave him the words “tipsy,” “drunk,” “intoxicated,” he asked me which one would use in writing good English, and since then he has always spoken of people as “intoxicated.”
He naturally likes large towns, and tries to deter me from taking the “unbeaten tracks,” which I prefer–but when he finds me immovable, always concludes his arguments with the same formula, “Well, of course you can do as you like; it’s all the same to me.” I do not think he cheats me to any extent. Board, lodging, and travelling expenses for us both are about 6s. 6d. a day, and about 2s. 6d. when we are stationary, and this includes all gratuities and extras. True, the board and lodging consist of tea, rice, and eggs, a copper basin of water, an andon and an empty room, for, though there are plenty of chickens in all the villages, the people won’t be bribed to sell them for killing, though they would gladly part with them if they were to be kept to lay eggs. Ito amuses me nearly every night with stories of his unsuccessful attempts to provide me with animal food.
The travelling is the nearest approach to “a ride on a rail” that I have ever made. I have now ridden, or rather sat, upon seventy-six horses, all horrible. They all stumble. The loins of some are higher than their shoulders, so that one slips forwards, and the back-bones of all are ridgy. Their hind feet grow into points which turn up, and their hind legs all turn outwards, like those of a cat, from carrying heavy burdens at an early age. The same thing gives them a roll in their gait, which is increased by their awkward shoes. In summer they feed chiefly on leaves, supplemented with mashes of bruised beans, and instead of straw they sleep on beds of leaves. In their stalls their heads are tied “where their tails should be,” and their fodder is placed not in a manger, but in a swinging bucket. Those used in this part of Japan are worth from 15 to 30 yen. I have not seen any overloading or ill- treatment; they are neither kicked, nor beaten, nor threatened in rough tones, and when they die they are decently buried, and have stones placed over their graves. It might be well if the end of a worn-out horse were somewhat accelerated, but this is mainly a Buddhist region, and the aversion to taking animal life is very strong. I. L. B.
LETTER XXIV
The Symbolism of Seaweed–Afternoon Visitors–An Infant Prodigy–A Feat in Caligraphy–Child Worship–A Borrowed Dress–A Trousseau– House Furniture–The Marriage Ceremony.
KUBOTA, July 25.
The weather at last gives a hope of improvement, and I think I shall leave to-morrow. I had written this sentence when Ito came in to say that the man in the next house would like to see my stretcher and mosquito net, and had sent me a bag of cakes with the usual bit of seaweed attached, to show that it was a present. The Japanese believe themselves to be descended from a race of fishermen; they are proud of it, and Yebis, the god of fishermen, is one of the most popular of the household divinities. The piece of seaweed sent with a present to any ordinary person, and the piece of dried fish-skin which accompanies a present to the Mikado, record the origin of the race, and at the same time typify the dignity of simple industry.
Of course I consented to receive the visitor, and with the mercury at 84 degrees, five men, two boys, and five women entered my small, low room, and after bowing to the earth three times, sat down on the floor. They had evidently come to spend the afternoon. Trays of tea and sweetmeats were handed round, and a labako-bon was brought in, and they all smoked, as I had told Ito that all usual courtesies were to be punctiliously performed. They expressed their gratification at seeing so “honourable” a traveller. I expressed mine at seeing so much of their “honourable” country. Then we all bowed profoundly. Then I laid Brunton’s map on the floor and showed them my route, showed them the Asiatic Society’s Transactions, and how we read from left to right, instead of from top to bottom, showed them my knitting, which amazed them, and my Berlin work, and then had nothing left. Then they began to entertain me, and I found that the real object of their visit was to exhibit an “infant prodigy,” a boy of four, with a head shaven all but a tuft on the top, a face of preternatural thoughtfulness and gravity, and the self-possessed and dignified demeanour of an elderly man. He was dressed in scarlet silk hakama, and a dark, striped, blue silk kimono, and fanned himself gracefully, looking at everything as intelligently and courteously as the others. To talk child’s talk to him, or show him toys, or try to amuse him, would have been an insult. The monster has taught himself to read and write, and has composed poetry. His father says that he never plays, and understands everything just like a grown person. The intention was that I should ask him to write, and I did so.
It was a solemn performance. A red blanket was laid in the middle of the floor, with a lacquer writing-box upon it. The creature rubbed the ink with water on the inkstone, unrolled four rolls of paper, five feet long, and inscribed them with Chinese characters, nine inches long, of the most complicated kind, with firm and graceful curves of his brush, and with the ease and certainty of Giotto in turning his O. He sealed them with his seal in vermilion, bowed three times, and the performance was ended. People get him to write kakemonos and signboards for them, and he had earned 10 yen, or about 2 pounds, that day. His father is going to travel to Kiyoto with him, to see if any one under fourteen can write as well. I never saw such an exaggerated instance of child worship. Father, mother, friends, and servants, treated him as if he were a prince.
The house-master, who is a most polite man, procured me an invitation to the marriage of his niece, and I have just returned from it. He has three “wives” himself. One keeps a yadoya in Kiyoto, another in Morioka, and the third and youngest is with him here. From her limitless stores of apparel she chose what she considered a suitable dress for me–an under-dress of sage green silk crepe, a kimono of soft, green, striped silk of a darker shade, with a fold of white crepe, spangled with gold at the neck, and a girdle of sage green corded silk, with the family badge here and there upon it in gold. I went with the house-master, Ito, to his disgust, not being invited, and his absence was like the loss of one of my senses, as I could not get any explanations till afterwards.
The ceremony did not correspond with the rules laid down for marriages in the books of etiquette that I have seen, but this is accounted for by the fact that they were for persons of the samurai class, while this bride and bridegroom, though the children of well-to-do merchants, belong to the heimin.
In this case the trousseau and furniture were conveyed to the bridegroom’s house in the early morning, and I was allowed to go to see them. There were several girdles of silk embroidered with gold, several pieces of brocaded silk for kimonos, several pieces of silk crepe, a large number of made-up garments, a piece of white silk, six barrels of wine or sake, and seven sorts of condiments. Jewellery is not worn by women in Japan.
The furniture consisted of two wooden pillows, finely lacquered, one of them containing a drawer for ornamental hairpins, some cotton futons, two very handsome silk ones, a few silk cushions, a lacquer workbox, a spinning-wheel, a lacquer rice bucket and ladle, two ornamental iron kettles, various kitchen utensils, three bronze hibachi, two tabako-bons, some lacquer trays, and zens, china kettles, teapots, and cups, some lacquer rice bowls, two copper basins, a few towels, some bamboo switches, and an inlaid lacquer etagere. As the things are all very handsome the parents must be well off. The sake is sent in accordance with rigid etiquette.
The bridegroom is twenty-two, the bride seventeen, and very comely, so far as I could see through the paint with which she was profusely disfigured. Towards evening she was carried in a norimon, accompanied by her parents and friends, to the bridegroom’s house, each member of the procession carrying a Chinese lantern. When the house-master and I arrived the wedding party was assembled in a large room, the parents and friends of the bridegroom being seated on one side, and those of the bride on the other. Two young girls, very beautifully dressed, brought in the bride, a very pleasing-looking creature dressed entirely in white silk, with a veil of white silk covering her from head to foot. The bridegroom, who was already seated in the middle of the room near its upper part, did not rise to receive her, and kept his eyes fixed on the ground, and she sat opposite to him, but never looked up. A low table was placed in front, on which there was a two- spouted kettle full of sake, some sake bottles, and some cups, and on another there were some small figures representing a fir-tree, a plum-tree in blossom, and a stork standing on a tortoise, the last representing length of days, and the former the beauty of women and the strength of men. Shortly a zen, loaded with eatables, was placed before each person, and the feast began, accompanied by the noises which signify gastronomic gratification.
After this, which was only a preliminary, the two girls who brought in the bride handed round a tray with three cups containing sake, which each person was expected to drain till he came to the god of luck at the bottom.
The bride and bridegroom then retired, but shortly reappeared in other dresses of ceremony, but the bride still wore her white silk veil, which one day will be her shroud. An old gold lacquer tray was produced, with three sake cups, which were filled by the two bridesmaids, and placed before the parents-in-law and the bride. The father-in-law drank three cups, and handed the cup to the bride, who, after drinking two cups, received from her father-in- law a present in a box, drank the third cup, and then returned the cup to the father-in-law, who again drank three cups. Rice and fish were next brought in, after which the bridegroom’s mother took the second cup, and filled and emptied it three times, after which she passed it to the bride, who drank two cups, received a present from her mother-in-law in a lacquer box, drank a third cup, and gave the cup to the elder lady, who again drank three cups. Soup was then served, and then the bride drank once from the third cup, and handed it to her husband’s father, who drank three more cups, the bride took it again, and drank two, and lastly the mother-in- law drank three more cups. Now, if you possess the clear- sightedness which I laboured to preserve, you will perceive that each of the three had inbibed nine cups of some generous liquor! {16}
After this the two bridesmaids raised the two-spouted kettle and presented it to the lips of the married pair, who drank from it alternately, till they had exhausted its contents. This concluding ceremony is said to be emblematic of the tasting together of the joys and sorrows of life. And so they became man and wife till death or divorce parted them.
This drinking of sake or wine, according to prescribed usage, appeared to constitute the “marriage service,” to which none but relations were bidden. Immediately afterwards the wedding guests arrived, and the evening was spent in feasting and sake drinking; but the fare is simple, and intoxication is happily out of place at a marriage feast. Every detail is a matter of etiquette, and has been handed down for centuries. Except for the interest of the ceremony, in that light it was a very dull and tedious affair, conducted in melancholy silence, and the young bride, with her whitened face and painted lips, looked and moved like an automaton. I. L. B.
LETTER XXV
A Holiday Scene–A Matsuri–Attractions of the Revel–Matsuri Cars- -Gods and Demons–A Possible Harbour–A Village Forge–Prosperity of Sake Brewers–A “Great Sight.”
TSUGURATA, July 27.
Three miles of good road thronged with half the people of Kubota on foot and in kurumas, red vans drawn by horses, pairs of policemen in kurumas, hundreds of children being carried, hundreds more on foot, little girls, formal and precocious looking, with hair dressed with scarlet crepe and flowers, hobbling toilsomely along on high clogs, groups of men and women, never intermixing, stalls driving a “roaring trade” in cakes and sweetmeats, women making mochi as fast as the buyers ate it, broad rice-fields rolling like a green sea on the right, an ocean of liquid turquoise on the left, the grey roofs of Kubota looking out from their green surroundings, Taiheisan in deepest indigo blocking the view to the south, a glorious day, and a summer sun streaming over all, made up the cheeriest and most festal scene that I have seen in Japan; men, women, and children, vans and kurumas, policemen and horsemen, all on their way to a mean-looking town, Minato, the junk port of Kubota, which was keeping matsuri, or festival, in honour of the birthday of the god Shimmai. Towering above the low grey houses there were objects which at first looked like five enormous black fingers, then like trees with their branches wrapped in black, and then–comparisons ceased; they were a mystery.
Dismissing the kurumas, which could go no farther, we dived into the crowd, which was wedged along a mean street, nearly a mile long–a miserable street of poor tea-houses and poor shop-fronts; but, in fact, you could hardly see the street for the people. Paper lanterns were hung close together along its whole length. There were rude scaffoldings supporting matted and covered platforms, on which people were drinking tea and sake and enjoying the crowd below; monkey theatres and dog theatres, two mangy sheep and a lean pig attracting wondering crowds, for neither of these animals is known in this region of Japan; a booth in which a woman was having her head cut off every half-hour for 2 sen a spectator; cars with roofs like temples, on which, with forty men at the ropes, dancing children of the highest class were being borne in procession; a theatre with an open front, on the boards of which two men in antique dresses, with sleeves touching the ground, were performing with tedious slowness a classic dance of tedious posturings, which consisted mainly in dexterous movements of the aforesaid sleeves, and occasional emphatic stampings, and utterances of the word No in a hoarse howl. It is needless to say that a foreign lady was not the least of the attractions of the