Part 8
followed the course of the old road, from which the railway here diverges, as far as Mishima, and then, after crossing the ridge of mountain which forms the backbone of the Idzu Peninsula, descended to Atami on the western coast of Odawara Bay, a favorite watering-place during the winter months. The orange and banana trees testify to the mildness of its climate, and perhaps the geyser, which every fourth hour squirts out mud and boiling water by the village street, helps to keep up the temperature. Vries Island, with its eternally smoke-capped volcano, lies on the horizon away across the sea, and the natives believe that there is a connection between the two, for whenever Vries is particularly active the geyser discharges more violently.
On the 3d of November I started with a friend from Yokohama to walk over the Ten Province Pass (Jikkoku-toge) to Hakone and Miya-no-shita. It was the Emperor’s birthday, and all Atami was gay with flags; the national ensign with a red ball on a white ground fluttered everywhere. We mounted the steep street, and looked back at the village roofs and the deep blue water of Odawara Bay, and then turned into the woods of old camphor-trees surrounding the temple Ki-no-miya. Some of the camphors are enormous, and the largest of them are encircled with ropes of twisted straw and bunches of gohei, which show that they are sacred objects. Beyond the temple the path ascends, first through rice-fields and then up rough grassy hills, until it reaches the long plateau of turf where the Ten Province stone stands. Though so late in the year, there were still plenty of flowers. Down near Atami long sprays of hototogisu (_Tricyrtis_), with spotty purple flowers, hung out from the sandy banks, and by our path I saw Michaelmas daisies, golden-rod, dark-blue monk’s-hood, sky-blue gentians, magenta-flowered garlic, thistles of various colors, wild chrysanthemums, pink or white with a gold centre, and the beautiful white stars of the grass of Parnassus. The sun was quite hot, and we pulled out some provisions and sat down on the grass near the stone to enjoy them and the marvellous view. To the north the snowy cone of Fuji rose high against the blue sky; between us and it the long crest of down-land was mostly covered with suzuki (_Eulalia japonica_), a lovely grass with tall plumes of seed which shine like silver gossamer, and the ranges of lower mountains were brilliant with the autumnal colors of maples and other trees; below us on the east lay the little peninsula of Manazura, jutting out into Sagami Bay, with a curve of rice-fields on each side of the narrow neck which connects it with the mainland, and beyond it the long straight line of the Pacific was broken only by Vries Island and its cloud of smoke; a succession of hilly promontories and little bays stretched all down the coast of Idzu to the southward, and returned northward again up the other side of the peninsula, past Joyama, with a lake-like inlet of sea, to Numadzu, where the great sweep of Suruga Bay began, bordered with sands and sunny rice-fields, and ended only at Kuno-zan, far to the westward. Our path went on along the downs,
through suzuki, dwarf bamboo, and little stunted woods, until a deep descent led us down to the Hakone Lake, dark blue and sombre among its encircling hills; it then mounted once more for a short distance, passed the hot springs of Ashi-no-yu, and finally, while the grassy hills still glowed in the light of the setting sun, brought us down to the Fujiya at Miya-no-shita, where a delicious natural warm bath and a good dinner made a fitting termination to a glorious day.
At the bottom of a ravine almost perpendicularly below Miya-no-shita lies the little village of Dogashima, with a turbulent mountain stream and a very shaky bamboo bridge. The path and steps leading down to it are kept continually green by the overflow from the warm springs, and when I was there they swarmed with land-crabs, queer little beasts with bodies of dark green, blue, brown, or red, and a pair of light-colored claws, which they held up in a threatening attitude when I attempted to catch them. As they heard me approach they scurried off towards their holes, but they were so clumsy and so numerous that I could hardly help stepping on them.
One of the common objects by Japanese road-sides is the figure of Jizō, a Buddhist saint who is the helper of all who are in trouble, and especially the patron of travellers and children. Near the path between Hakone and Ashi-no-yu we passed a colossal presentment of him, carved in bold relief out of a mass of andesite rock, a very striking work of some ancient sculptor. It is said to have been done in a single night by that marvellously active saint Kobo Daishi, who, according to popular tradition, climbed all the mountains in Japan, and found time, when he was not preaching and confounding sceptics, to perform wonders in sculpture, painting, and calligraphy. Jizō, in the rudely carved statuettes by the way-sides, is a benevolent-looking priest, holding a traveller’s staff in his right hand and a globe in his left. He stands on a lotus flower, and around his feet are piled many pebbles, placed there by wayfarers. The reason for the custom is this: On the banks of the So-dzu-kawa, the river of the lower world, there lives a hag who catches little children as they attempt to cross, steals their clothes, and makes them toil with her at her endless task of piling the stones on its shores. Jizō helps these children, and every pebble which is laid at his feet lightens the labor of some little one below. I never passed without adding my contribution, and if I cannot attribute my safety during my wanderings to his kindly aid, at least I am indebted to him for many a pleasant thought, and for the memory of many a lovely landscape or flower seen by his side.
AUTUMN IN JAPAN
AUTUMN IN JAPAN
From the spring-time, when I reached Japan in the rain and began to grumble at the weather, and all through the damp and the downpour of the summer months, I had been consoled by the promises of my friends. They assured me that when the autumn came I should have week after week of glorious sunshine, a clear fresh air, and probably not a wet day between Michaelmas and Christmas. Either the season was an exceptional one, or else this is a cherished myth; there certainly were more fine days in October and November, but not a week passed without one or two days when work out-of-doors was impossible. They talked, too, of the glory of the maples, of hill-sides and rocky ravines clothed with scarlet and crimson, and their enthusiasm in this matter was amply
justified, but no one had told me of the beauty of the lilies of the field, which decorate so many of the banks between the rice patches with their tassels of glowing scarlet. I saw them first near Hamamatsu, a pleasant town on the Tokaido, which I reached on the 16th of September, after a little tour in the interior; their brilliant color at once attracted me, and I hastened to make drawings of them, for my passport had almost expired, and I feared that I might not find them elsewhere. There was no need to be in such a hurry, for they seem to grow abundantly wherever they get a chance. Hamamatsu was quite unlike any other Japanese town I had seen; the houses had a projecting upper story and broad overhanging roofs, and the principal trade seemed to be in toys. There were shops full of drums and kites, and dolls with all their belongings, and the thousand and one things which the Japanese delight in giving to their beloved children. As I passed a little garden I saw what looked like a fearful atrocity--dozens of babies’ heads, pale and gray as if in death, cut off at the neck and impaled on short
stakes, stood about the ground; but on coming nearer the mystery was explained: they were life-sized dolls’ heads of papier-maché, put out to dry in the sun before receiving their final coat of paint. The neighboring villages were peculiar; every cottage was protected from the winds by a high hedge of clipped yew, and the street seemed to pass between two green walls, over which the heavily thatched roofs just peeped. The openings gave a glimpse of court-yards and cottage fronts where women and men were hard at work, threshing their beans of many colors and spreading them on mats to dry, weaving blue cotton cloths, or winding off the skeins of shining yellow silk. The typhoon a fortnight earlier had strewn the Tokaido with pine-trees; a passage wide enough for a jinrikisha to pass had been sawn through some of the great prostrate trunks, and others were still supported by their mangled limbs, so that we could squeeze under them. They sadly impeded the work of a company of white-clad engineers, who, with all the latest military contrivances, were laying a field-telegraph along the road. What a contrast were these sons of change to the fishermen returning from their morning’s work with heavy loads of bonito, and to the peasants with their simple and primitive implements, all working and living as they have done for centuries past! Politics and changes of government matter very little to them; the rice crop and the take of fish are affairs of much more importance; they are the real life of a country, preserving its habits, costumes, and traditions, and staving off for a time the influences of railroads and steamships, which threaten to reduce man’s condition throughout the world to one dull level of uniformity.
Fortunately they form a solid majority in every land, a mass not easily moved, and even in progressive Japan it will be a long time before ill-cut trousers and steam-ploughs replace the kimono and the spade. The Tokaido Railway takes you in twelve hours from Hamamatsu to Kōbe, and while waiting till a new passport came from Tōkyō I had time to see a little more of the beautiful country around that hospitable port. The shores near Suma and Maiko, a little to the westward, are picturesque, and close by is the Strait of Akashi, through which a constant stream of traffic passes, ships of all kinds and sizes, from the little fishing-boats towed from the beach, to the big steamers from Europe and America. The island of Awaji lies across the entrance to the Inland Sea, leaving a narrow passage at each end; but the tide rushes so violently through the Naruta Channel to
the south, between Awaji and Shikoku, that it is often unnavigable, and most of the shipping comes this way. There are the remains of a Daimio’s castle at Akashi; the main building is gone, and the plateau on which it stood is now a garden with tea-booths, but the foundation walls, the corner turrets, and the moat show what an important stronghold it must have been; and the view from it, down the Inland Sea to the west, over to the Shikoku Mountains on the south, and eastward to Osaka Bay and the hills of Yamato, is extensive and very fine in its outlines. At Maiko
there is a grove of curiously blown and twisted pine-trees, with the quaint forms which are loved by all artists, especially by the Japanese; and near Suma, wherever the wiry grasses had got a foothold among the sand, the shore was gay with scarlet lilies. The botanic name of this flower, which is really more like an amaryllis than a lily, is _Nerine japonica_. Its Japanese name is not so easy to determine, for wherever I went it had a different one; some of these names are shiwata-bana, teku-sari, chiridji, and ushino-ninniku (cow-garlic), but I think the commonest is higambana (equinox flower), and the best, for its opening marks the change of the season, the beginning of the end. It is probably because of this that, beautiful as it appears to European eyes, to the Japanese it is a flower of ill omen, associated in their minds with death and decay, and never used in art or in floral arrangements. The children, indeed, gather great armfuls of it; but they never take it inside their homes; the great bunches they have collected are either scattered among the family tombstones or left to wither on the foot-paths. They seem to like picking it because its juicy stem snaps so easily, and often amuse themselves as they sit by the road-side by breaking the stalks half through, leaving them hanging in regular joints, much as our children make dandelion or daisy chains. Near a little graveyard set down among the rice-fields the flowers grew in great profusion, making a gorgeous splash of brilliant color as a foreground to the gray stones, the yellowing grain, and the pale blue distant hills. The rice was ripening fast, and flocks of
rice-birds flew hurriedly across as they were chased from field to field by shouting boys. I wish I had made a sketch of a Japanese scarecrow; there were plenty of them about, and I never saw one without laughing; they were full of quaint humor and invention, and the little birds seemed to enjoy them as much as I did. They recalled the remark of a stranger in a fly-haunted parlor in South Carolina, where a small clock-work windmill revolved in the centre of the table. I asked whether it drove the flies away, and the owner replied,
“At first it scared them some, but now they come in to ride round on it.” The shore was always full of life and activity; bronzed fishermen, naked except for a narrow white loin-cloth, were launching their boats or hauling them ashore, towing along the beach, pulling up nets, or chanting as they rowed their heavy craft, standing up and pushing the long bent oars with a forward jerk, in the same way that a gondolier works. The smaller sailing-boats are all rigged with the simple oblong sail which is so often shown in Japanese drawings, made of narrow strips of cotton cloth loosely laced together; the larger ones have a jib and a jig-sail as well.
Futa-tabi, Maya-san, and the other hills which rise behind Kōbe are as well worth seeing as the shore, full of picturesque walks; the country at the back of them, commonly called “Aden” by the foreign residents, on account of its barenness, is a curious waste of disintegrating granite, seamed and furrowed by the heavy rains, where only some scrubby bushes find a precarious foothold on the shifting soil. Coolies from the neighboring villages come and cut these for firewood, and carry the heavy fagots for miles to earn a few halfpence. In Arima, one of the hill villages, there are hot ferruginous springs where hundreds of people go to bathe; but the arrangements are not so primitive as those I saw at Yumoto; the baths and dressing-rooms are private enough for the shy foreigner. There is so much iron in the water that you come out of it covered with a red deposit which takes some days of washing to remove. On this excursion, as my boots were in hospital, I tried Japanese foot-gear--thick cotton socks and straw sandals; they were very light and comfortable at first, but after a time I was conscious of every little pebble I trod on, and I got back to Kōbe with a good deal of pain and many blisters. Foreigners who have often worn them get hardened between the toes, and many good walkers and mountaineers use them habitually; heavy boots are an encumbrance when not on your feet, and though the straw sandals are quickly worn out, a few extra pairs are no serious addition to your baggage.
On the 6th of October I had finished my drawings among the pines and the sand hills, and a new passport had come, which gave me permission to wander for three months longer through the provinces near the Tokaido, so I bid farewell to my good friends and the comfortable club-house in Kōbe, and Matsuba once more left his wife and family to follow my fortunes.
Our destination was Maibara, a little town on Lake Biwa, not many miles from Hikone. As I passed it by rail I had noticed that the flooded fields on the margin of the lake were covered with a blue-flowered water-plant, a good foreground to the blue water and the distant mountains, and I hoped for blue skies to complete the picture, but they came only at rare intervals. On a piece of waste
ground near my tea-house a travelling theatre had been erected, a structure of bamboo poles with mats hung over them, which was not calculated to keep an audience dry, and not once during my stay were the company able to give a performance. The manager occupied the room next mine; he was an excellent performer on the samisen, and a pious man withal. Every morning from seven till half-past he said his prayers, repeating in a monotonous singsong voice a sentence which sounded to me like “Ya ya yura no,” and tapping two blocks of wood together to keep time. He belonged to the Shingon sect of Buddhists.
The prayer formula of the Monto sect, one of the most popular and powerful, owning the great Hongwanji temples which are found in all large towns, is, “Namu Amida Butsu,” while the followers of Nichiren, as they beat their drums, murmur constantly, “Namu myōhō renge kyō.”
We soon became good friends, the manager and I, and he spent many hours in my room drinking tea, looking at my sketches, and in such conversation as my rudimentary knowledge of the language permitted, but unfortunately I never had an opportunity of seeing him act. When I left he presented me with a printed cotton towel in an ornamental wrapper, and I gave him a penny black-lead pencil, and we parted with mutual expressions of esteem. I had other visitors too: the station-master and the chief of police wanted to see my pictures, and Takaki, O Shige San, and little Kazu, with the brown velvet eyes, came over from Hikone to call on me, and arranged to meet me at the Nagahama matsuri. This annual festival takes place in the middle of October, and seems to be a gathering-ground for all the country-side. In many respects it was very like a country fair in England, but the main event on all the three days is the perambulation of large triumphal cars, called yama, on which companies of children give dramatic performances. I was fortunate in having a brilliantly fine day, and as I bowled along the five miles of level road from Maibara in a kuruma with two good runners, I passed troops of people in holiday attire, old peasants, gayly dressed young girls, and wandering friars with huge bamboo hats that looked like bushel baskets. The town was gayly decorated with flags and with lanterns bearing the device of the city, and crowds were pouring into it by road and rail and boat; for Nagahama is a busy port at the northern end of Lake Biwa, and a regular service of steamers runs between there and Otsu, at the southern end. This mixture of things ancient and modern in Japan always seems amusing, especially when, as in Nagahama, there is not much of the modern. The row-boats which came in with their loads of passengers were of unvarnished wood, decorated with black patterns on the bows, and, except the police and the railway officials, I saw very few men in European dress; there certainly were no women in anything but their own becoming costume, and I was the only foreigner in the town. My landlord had been thoughtful enough to engage a place for me in a tea-house opposite which the yama stopped and gave a performance: all the partitions had been removed, and the floor, divided into squares by low movable railings, was covered with family parties who had brought their own cushions and provisions.
My heart was filled with covetousness as I saw the fine old lacquer bento boxes which they produced after carefully removing many silk wrappings. There are twelve yama in the town, each owned by a different guild or society, the members of which teach the children their parts, provide dresses for their play, and accompany the yama on the festival days. The cars are huge things, taller than most of the Japanese houses, and quite fill up the