Part 9

=March 25.=--At work all day over fossils--then dressed in my green-and-gold Venetian dress and called on Mrs. G---- on the way to the Embassy dinner. She and her children were having a preliminary view of some of the gowns--she is, alas, still in bed. The party was splendid--several Japanese were there in magnificent old court dresses and simply marvellous arrangements for their hair. Baroness _S----_ also wore Japanese court dress. Perhaps I had better shortly describe it. The lower part consists of scarlet trousers with extremely wide stiff legs, and the garment is much like our “divided skirt” of some years ago, but the cloth is much stiffer. Over it is a gorgeously embroidered kimono, with sweeping train. Some of the hair ornaments are extremely bizarre, others (according to the period) rather simple, the hair falling down the back and tied in three places.

One, something like the sketch, was very effective, the funny little brush of hair coming straight out at either side being its speciality. Several of the Englishmen came as Japanese pirates, etc., with great wigs of long hair, rich gold-embroidered robes and swords; the girls were not remarkable. After dinner we all went along to the German Embassy, and met there the parties from all the other Embassies. The scene in the reception-rooms and in the beautiful white ball-room was vivid and gorgeous beyond my power to describe. Whom to describe, when nearly all were beautiful or striking, and nearly all of the important folk in Tokio were present? Count _H----_ (the foreign minister) was in old daimio dress, with two swords and rich brocade--and one could not imagine how he ever came to wear anything else! The evening was one to remember, with its brilliance and beauty and courtliness.

=March 26.=--Yesterday morning at breakfast I had imagined I would remain in my present house as long as I was in Japan. This morning by ten o’clock I had taken a house and garden of my own and engaged a maid!

Apparently, one can do things quickly sometimes in Japan, though it is usually a terrible business to get a house. Of course, I haven’t yet moved in, and “there is many a slip,” etc.

The house is tiny, but is said to have five rooms--the paper walls between these can be taken out at will to make two, or even one room. There are lots of cupboards, for in this, as in all true Japanese houses, the solid walls are all lined with great cupboards, a yard deep and reaching from floor to ceiling. The rent of the house with its garden is about 7s. a week! Less than I have been paying for my two rooms.

The joy of these houses is that one needs almost no furniture, they are provided with the soft, thick straw mats (_tatami_), and these serve as carpets if one likes. I infinitely prefer their delicate straw colour and black borders, which harmonise with the cream walls and unpainted woodwork, to the clashing carpets most people have. Then fireplaces being absent, overmantels, fenders, coal-scuttles and fire-irons are all represented by a little china bowl of ashes, manipulated with metal chop-sticks. Beds, though introduced by many foreigners into such houses, I dispense with, and use the native mattresses on the mats, so that they are folded away in the big cupboards by day and the room is used for what one will. Wardrobes are also needless incumbrances, the wall cupboards serving excellently--wash-stands are but eyesores, as the little bath-rooms are so arranged that one can splash at will and the water all runs away from the sloping floor. So I am a householder, and prepared to lead the simple life.

Providence must have arranged it all, for the cook next door (that is at Mrs. P----’s, I forgot to state) has a protégée who wants an easy place in a foreigner’s house, and doesn’t care so much for money, as she is timid and wants experience before going to a big house--but she can bake bread and Scotch scones and cakes! I pay her 18s. a month and give her no food at all! She even brings her own saucepans and mattresses! Well, it all looks too good to be true, and until I have moved in I had better say no more about my own little house.

I went back to my present abode, for it was my At Home day, and I entertained some Japanese, who were charmed with Arthur Rackham’s illustrations of _Rip Van Winkle_, and thought they showed something of the spirit of Japanese art, which I think is true.

I flew down to the station for Yokohama, and dined there with Mrs. L----, and dressed in a fancy dress costume and set out with her and her daughter to a _mi-carême_ ball. I enjoyed the dance hugely.

=March 27.=--Rushed up to Tokio in the morning; to the University for lunch, where I had a long talk with the Dean. The Mitsui family (the Japanese Rothschilds) gave the money for the fossil laboratory and part of the apparatus, and the Dean proposes (now that everything is practically finished in the making of the arrangements) to give a tea-party in the Botanic Gardens to show the building apparatus and slides (I have cut 221 so far), as well as the new herbarium buildings. As I have often remarked, he is very English in his tastes and culture, and he planned to give what would be usual in England--tea and coffee and cakes. But when I saw him yesterday, how he had fallen! Nothing less than meats and wines and jellies would satisfy him. It was not his own wish, but he had been driven into it by the strength of the custom in Japan, which demands that if you have guests at all (even at 3 or 4 in the afternoon) you must give them a meat feed, and that they must eat like greedy schoolboys. Whence comes it? This mad ostentatious display, and the guzzling, which is so foreign to their real culture. A mutation derived from crossing such distinct cultures as those of Japan and Europe, not even a hybrid with the characters of one of the parents. Well, I laughed at Professor _S----_, for he said he hated the custom and had hoped to set the fashion for simplicity in this party of his, but that he was really afraid to do so; he would be the laughing-stock of the Japanese if he _only_ gave tea, coffee, and chocolate, ice-cream, cakes and sandwiches from 3 to 6 o’clock! I asked him where the spirit of his Samurai ancestors lay sleeping--asked him who could set the fashion for reasonable entertainments if not himself, in his exalted position of Dean of the University--and got him to swear to me that he would be a pioneer, that he would be brave and face the ordeal of being the laughing-stock of the Japanese. I wonder how it will go.

This unwritten law, which demands such a lavish hospitality if any is given, is, I see, one of the chief causes that there is so little social life, in our sense of the thing, among the Japanese. It is a real strain on their purse and their time, and they naturally ask guests seldom when they give so much trouble.

To ask a guest to come to your house and give him only tea and cake, or a dinner of no greater magnificence than the one you eat yourself every night, is almost impossibly rude.

After cutting fossils till 5, I went home to entertain a Japanese to the same food that I eat every day. Am I a laughing-stock among them? Doubtless, and for more things than one.

=March 28.=--Fossil-cutting all morning. Late in the afternoon I called on Mr. and Mrs. B----, who have come up to Tokio for a couple of weeks from Sapporo, where the snow is in parts 28 feet deep--the worst they have had for more than twenty years. They have brought up their adopted daughter--the Aino girl I described from Sapporo--this time we were able to talk in Japanese, which of course she generally speaks.

=March 31.=--I am making the experiment of going on a walking tour for a few days with friends, and we have chosen Boshu peninsula, as it is little frequented and beautiful. We were up at 5 o’clock this morning. Very late too, as we should have got up at 4.30. However, we managed to catch the boat which is to take us to Boshu Province, the scene of our tour. The sail past Tokio down the bay was very calm and lovely; we had perfect weather and were allowed, as a special privilege, to go on the top front part of the deck, where we had a good view. Fuji gleamed white over clouds and pine tree foregrounds, and the sky was blue. The journey lasted seven hours, and we saw many small bays and islands down the coast, of perfect loveliness.

Landing at Hojo in Boshu about 1 o’clock, we walked across a point of the peninsula to Mera. Here the inn we expected to find was demolished, but we found another and got put up. It was next door to a big school, however, and we had a very large and very interested audience of about a hundred children in constant attendance. C---- had never been to a Japanese inn before, and we were a very merry party indeed. The scenery here was in no way striking, that I hope is to come.

=April 1–5.=--We have been walking all day all these days, and there was no time to write in this journal, for though we have walked and slept very little we have eaten and talked and laughed so much that we had time for nothing else.

The first day’s walk was disappointing, flat, not very near the sea, and with villages every half-mile or so, but we reached a pretty place by 5 o’clock, and slept at Chikura in greater comfort than we did at Mera.

Between Chikura and Wada, our next day’s walk, the coast was prettier, but the weather dull, raining, in fact, and we did not get the sea-bathing we had hoped. At luncheon-time it was very wet, and we sat in a row under the porch of a Buddhist temple (it is like a country lich-gate) and ate our cold rations. An old woman stopped to gaze at us, and M---- (who speaks excellent Japanese, having been here since she was two years old) asked her if she thought we were funny to sit there. “No,” she said, “you came to play and you are playing. This child” (pointing to a baby of nine months on her back) “also plays.” Parts of the road were fascinating, through bits of pine wood and past many a little temple. I particularly noticed the great hedges, walls really, of podocarpus, and the numerous lovely blooming camellias, peach and cherry trees. Between Wada and Kominato the road was still prettier, with rocky bays and pines. We attracted a good deal of attention, because C---- and M---- had red hair and J---- yellow. I alone escaped most of it. The evenings were really very funny. We all dropped into Japanese ways soon enough. We had many jokes, but none of them would interest folk eleven thousand miles away. Wada to Kominato was our longest day, and half the walking party got driven! What with our pack-horse laden with luggage and the two _kurumas_, M---- and I were highly amused at the walking tour. We were able to get milk nearly everywhere, which is noteworthy in Japan, where it is usually a great difficulty to find it outside the cities. The Boshu people drink it themselves, and excellent it was.

Kominato to Katsuura was a short walk, but a very wet one, and we became more Japanese than ever. I discarded boots and walked with my skirts up to my knees, bare legs and Japanese _tabi_, as did J---- and C----. We bought the great round bamboo hats the coolies wear, and were altogether very picturesque. I came to no harm, but the others were not so well wrapped up in woollen under-things, and C---- in particular suffered. It was funny, when she broke down, to see her gobble up three hard-boiled eggs faster than M---- could peel them for her! It became one of the jokes of the party. My saucepan (the little one I have carried in all my walking and many other tours, and that I bought in beloved München and made jam in) has also become proverbial. I told every one to bring one, but they all laughed the advice to scorn, and now grudgingly acknowledge the service mine does, though it runs itself off its legs to provide them with cocoa, and to turn hard uneatable meat into soup.

The hotels we have stopped at have been fairly good, but Japanese cooking does not always coincide with our tastes.

At Katsuura we turned in, wet to the skin, and very hungry, to the inn recommended to us, but found it rather more of a pot-house than any we had been in, so M---- and I went out in the torrents and sought another and found it--one with three stories (the first I have seen outside the city), the top one consisting of two lovely rooms, with verandah, which we took, and the beauty of the wooden trellis-work in the _soji_, the reverential politeness of the men and maids, and the luxury of silk to lie on and to cover us, was well worth the 5s. a day it cost! Hotels in Boshu are very cheap, and for the first time I have been astonished by the smallness of our bills--of course it is out of the way of Tokio and Yokohama people (seven hours in a small steamer, with sudden and frequent storms, keeps off a crowd), and there are no mines or special industries to bring commercial people. It seems to be a little scrap of Japan of thirty years ago, where the people were all simple-minded and polite, and content with little money. The beauty is not superlative, but is really very charming, and unspoiled, and with the lovely shore and blue sea, the place is well worth the visit.

On Sunday (5th) it was simply pelting with rain, and the roads were unspeakably awful with the heavy recent rains, so that we were quite gloomy. The third miserable day in succession, and we had such brilliant weather in Tokio for weeks! Ōhara is about 10 miles off, and we had reckoned to walk in there in time to catch the 3 train to Tokio, but it was impossible, and we chartered a _basha_ (a kind of carriage), reputed to hold eight, but we four found it a tight fit. I went with the others in it, instead of walking, though I felt like a shorn Samson, because I wanted to see them off at Ōhara, and really walking was an impossibility. After seeing them to the train, I was going on farther by myself. They had to return, because they teach in a school, and the holidays were to be over on Monday--but I am free a little longer.

Well, that _basha_, it was quite worth going into! No windows, but sides of beaten brass that would let down at our pleasure. The only drawback to brass as a window is that it necessitates patience. Unless we opened the windows we couldn’t see out, if we shut them they crashed and clattered like drums and cymbals. If we shut them we were stuffy, and if we opened them we were frozen and drowned by driving rain. We managed with forbearance and care to fit our knees into the space between the seats, but thought with wonder how a single other knee could get in, and the space was legally that for four more! The road was as indescribably rutty and muddy as a country road can be in any country of the world, and it had further a dash of a Swiss mountain road as it came along some of the cliffs by the sea. We were frightfully cold, and stopped at a tea-house to fill “Tommy,” the hot-water bottle, who had hitherto been a useless burden to the party, but was at a premium to-day. At this tea-house we also bought three bright red lobsters for 1¼d. each, and they helped to amuse us. Not long after we found that the wheel was only held together by its rim, and it had to be knocked into shape every few minutes; fortunately it was the off-side one from the cliff. When I said farewell at the train we were loath to part--but as I tucked up my skirts, slung on my knapsack and put on my mountaineering cloak, I was consoled by the thought I was really off _walking_ and _alone_, and once more had the open road before me and my fancy as my guide.

As the roads were so terrible, and it was late and wet, I decided to stop off for the night near by--and went about a mile and a half to the coast and found a perfectly ideal inn. It was in a tiny bay, all by itself, or rather on the cliff above a tiny bay, on the peninsular point of which was a miniature temple. No human foot-print but mine was on the sand of the shore, and none but the maids of the house within call. I took a small room upstairs, facing the sea, where the breakers dashed on to the cliffs, and found that though inside the house, on one side it was open, because a big piece of cliff stuck right into the building. This gave a charming view of moss-grown rocks, and a hollow stone with a lake in it, all lying between me and the next-door room.

The bath-room was downstairs, and to reach it one went along a long corridor hewn out of solid rock. The bath-room itself was also built in the solid rock, and was a great vault-like place. How J---- and M---- would have revelled in it!

The food was such that my saucepan worked wonders with it, and converted stony chicken, hard rice, and half-cooked green pickle into a very tasty stew. The beds were excellent, though not of silk, and I slept splendidly. Last night we had talked till one o’clock, so to-night I turned in at 8.30 and slept till 8.15. Alternations of solitude and company are refreshing, and though I enjoyed those girls immensely, and laughed as I haven’t done since I left England, it is delicious to be alone with the grey sea in a hotel half hewn out of solid rock.

=April 6.= After pouring all night the clouds broke about 9 o’clock, and I set forth in sight of gleams of blue between the grey; the hotel people were all very polite, though all they got out of me was 2s. 8d. It is a hotel I shall note and hope to return to, I wish I could bring some of my friends there from home. In the next little bay, where the cliffs are also very steep right down to the sea, so that there is no beach at high tide, the fishermen beach their boats on a series of piles and trestles, and very picturesque and quaint they look.

The cliffs here are all limestony and sandy, and seem rather recent and unfossiliferous.

I walked partly by road, partly along the shore about 14 miles, a short distance, but the way was very heavy and the day hot. About half-way were some lovely pine woods with mossy floor and May-flowers, and I lay there for lunch. Violets of many kinds had been the chief, almost I might say the only, wild flower we had noted hitherto, but here were several others. Daisies, like our home ones, only bigger and _purple_; a lovely intense blue sedum, and a small shrub, with crimson flowers, the Japonica, were the most striking and beautiful of those I noticed.

The last 4 or 5 miles lay along a curious shore. A greater contrast to that of my last night’s lodging could not be imagined. The whole coast was flat for several miles inland, and the beach was a great stretch of dark grey sand with the small beginnings of dunes here and there, and must have been more than a mile in width. Along its desolate extent were dotted little houses, grey as the sand, and built with their roofs touching the ground on two sides!--these sides presumably being those of the prevailing winds. They looked as though the full tide should sweep over them, the beach behind them appeared so unreclaimed, but they seem to have stood there for long, some were almost buried under the piled-up sand. I can give no idea of the vastness and the desolation of this view. The houses seemed mere hummocks in the wilderness, for under the eaves a man can hardly stand upright, and the boats look almost as big as the houses. There is absolutely no vegetation near them, only, at the edge of the dunes, a few small pine trees venture farther out than anything, but the little ones run grave risks of being buried. I had intended to spend the night at Jehinomiya, but found it lies a mile from the coast, so when I found groves of pine trees, a broad river, with a tiny village and a lot of country houses of the summer-house type, I put up at the inn, which is not bad. The hamlet is called Sendocre, and the inn looks out over a broad river and into deep groves of pine. The frogs are all making as much noise as they can with their watchman’s rattle-like voices, but otherwise there is perfect peace; everything is in complete contrast to last night’s cliff-perched, spray-splashed, storm-tossed house.

=April 7.=--What a day of sights and impressions! I cannot tell a quarter of them, or to-day’s experiences would fill this volume.

The mile to Jehinomiya lay along the river by a narrow foot-path, with pine plantations near at hand. From thence to the next town (Mobara) was 10 miles of road, at first between villages and large farm-houses. The rice fields lying on each side of the road were the scene of the country people’s labours, men and women working together up to their knees in the soft black squelchy mud. They were dressed quite alike, with dark-blue cotton clothes, very tight-fitting trousers down to the ankle, and long tunics with a blue-and-white towel tied over their heads. Some of them burrowed in the mud for roots of weeds, some used a heavy fork to bring the soil into ridges, and in one field I saw a wooden plough dragged by a dejected-looking horse. The chickens, everywhere abundant, seem a particularly large and healthy type, and they too worked in the rice fields, hopping from ridge to ridge after the workers had turned it over and revealed small grains and worms, which they captured. As in Boshu, so in this province, cows are remarkably plentiful and good-looking. The clusters of cottages with their grey thatched roofs made a series of lovely pictures, beside each was one or more glowing bush of apricot or peach, and the white feathery branches of cherry flower, soft, rich, and with a feeling like whipped-cream when you kissed them, floated over the rest like white clouds. For 3 or 4 miles the road lay through pine woods, real pine woods, with a soft mossy floor and violets, not the high, coarse bamboo usual in Japan, that makes it impossible to pass. At the edge of the road were many low shrubs with thick masses of the terra-cotta-coloured flowers, like Japonica, so that a line glowed on either side of the sandy track. There were also purple pansies and pale violets, and the world seemed a very fair place.

At Mobara I passed a school just coming out, and very few of the little boys even troubled to follow me; none called out any remarks. My knapsack is carried in somewhat the native fashion for slinging bundles, and even though I wear skirts, they think I am a man--their men wear skirts too, and a plain panama sun hat very like mine. Thank heaven my hair isn’t red. A few discover I am a woman, but the fact excites little interest.

A less beautiful 5 miles took me to Chōnan, and from there 2½ more to the place where I branched off across the rice fields to see a famous temple of great age. The last mile of the road was splendidly hilly and well wooded, and on the banks were huge blue forget-me-nots. The road passed under one of the hills by a bent tunnel, pitch dark, and very weirdly echoing. I could not see where my feet were going, and wondered if any local bandits made it their headquarters; they could not have found a more excellent place. Slightly disappointing, was it not, that I went through that cavernous tunnel alone and without any incident? To reach the temple I had then to follow narrow paths across the rice fields, and was not surprised to learn from the people at a tea-house at the foot of the temple hill that they had never seen a foreign lady before. The hill on which the Buddhist temple of Kasamori is built is magnificently wooded; on the summit stands a high isolated pyramid of rock, and on the top of this the temple is built. This main building dates from 1028, extremely old for Japan, where the original buildings of the oldest temples have usually been destroyed by fire and rebuilt again and again.