| By Author | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Title | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Language |
|
Download this book: [ ASCII ] Look for this book on Amazon Tweet |
Title: Notes in Japan
Author: Parsons, Alfred
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.
*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Notes in Japan" ***
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)
NOTES IN JAPAN
[Illustration:
[_See page 10_
IN KASUGA PARK, NARA--AN OLD CRYPTOMERIA]
NOTES IN JAPAN
BY
ALFRED PARSONS
_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR_
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1896
Copyright, 1895, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_All rights reserved._
[Illustration]
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE JAPANESE SPRING 3
EARLY SUMMER IN JAPAN 45
THE TIME OF THE LOTUS 81
FUJISAN 119
SOME WANDERINGS IN JAPAN 153
AUTUMN IN JAPAN 193
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
IN KASUGA PARK, NARA--AN OLD CRYPTOMERIA _Frontispiece_
DEDICATION vii
CHERRY-BLOSSOM BADGE, YOSHINO 2
IN THE INLAND SEA 4
HILLS NEAR KŌBE, FROM SUWA-YAMA 5
EARLY PLUM BLOSSOMS, OKAMOTO, NEAR KŌBE 7
THE TORII OF KASUGA TEMPLE, NARA 11
OLD WISTARIA IN KASUGA PARK, NARA 13
THE PAGODA OF KOBŪKUJI, NARA 14
CHERRY-TREE AND LANTERNS, NI-GWATSU-DŌ, NARA 15
THE WELL OF SANKATCHU, NARA 17
CHERRY BLOSSOMS IN THE RAIN, NARA 19
SARA-HIKI-SAKA, NEAR YOSHINO--LATER CHERRIES 21
CHERRY AND LATE PLUM, TEMA-CHO, NEAR NARA 23
A BUDDHIST TEMPLE AT YOSHINO--DOUBLE-FLOWERED CHERRY
AND MAGNOLIA 27
CROSSING THE FERRY AT MUDA, ON THE YOSHINO-GAWA 30
MI KOMORI JINJA, A SHINTO TEMPLE NEAR YOSHINO 31
THE STREET, HASE 34
ANDROMEDA BUSHES IN KASUGA PARK, NARA 35
WHITE WISTARIA, HASE-DERA 37
A TALL WISTARIA, KASUGA PARK, NARA 39
NOTES AT MUDA 41
BADGE OF THE KIKU-SUI-YA 42
IRIS JAPONICA 44
CARRYING HOME TEA LEAVES, NEAR UJI 46
A PLANTATION COVERED WITH MATTING NEAR UJI 47
POND IN THE GARDEN OF RAKU-RAKU-TEI, HIKONE 49
THE CASTLE AT HIKONE 51
THE CASTLE AT NAGOYA, FIELD OF IRIS IN THE FOREGROUND 52
AN OLD CASTLE MOAT, AKASHI, NEAR KŌBE 53
FIELDS NEAR LAKE BIWA 55
O KAZU SAN 57
PREPARING THE RICE-FIELDS 59
MY ROOMS AT TENNENJI 60
BUDDHA AND HIS DISCIPLES, TENNENJI 61
HIKONE AND LAKE BIWA, FROM THE HILLS BEHIND TENNENJI 64
AZALEAS ON THE ROCKS, TENNENJI 65
THE POEM 67
WHITE AZALEA BUSH, RAKU-RAKU-TEI, HIKONE 69
THE BAMBOO GROVE, TENNENJI 71
SUNSET OVER LAKE BIWA, FROM TENNENJI 75
PLANTING RICE 77
A SPRING FLOWER--JIRO-BO 78
PLATYCODON GRANDIFLORUM, “KIKYO” 80
AURATUM LILIES AND BOCCONIA ON THE HILLS NEAR NIKKO 82
A FIELD OF LILIES, OFUNA, NEAR KAMAKURA 83
SEVEN BEAUTIFUL FLOWERS OF LATE SUMMER 85
HYDRANGEA BUSH, TOTSUKA, NEAR YOKOHAMA 87
UNDER THE CRYPTOMERIAS AT NIKKO 89
A LITTLE TEMPLE AT NIKKO 91
KIRIFURI, NEAR NIKKO 93
THE MOOR NEAR YUMOTO 94
A WET DAY AT CHŪZENJI 95
THE FOOT OF NANTAI-ZAN 97
THE MOAT OF BENTEN-SHIBA 99
SPECTATORS 104
THE LAST TEA LEAVES--COTTAGE NEAR YOKOHAMA 105
LOTUS-PONDS AT KAMAKURA 107
LOTUS-PATCH AMONG THE RICE-FIELDS, KAWASAKI, TŌKYŌ 109
A TEA-HOUSE AT KAMAKURA 110
YORITOMO’S WILLOWS AND HIS SHRINE 111
JAPANESE WRESTLERS 113
LESPEDEZA “HAGI” 115
THE HEART-LEAVED LILY 116
CAMPANULAS ON FUJI 118
GOING UP IN THE MIST 121
A CLOUDY EVENING, FROM THE SANDS OF TAGO-NO-URA 123
FUJI FROM THE ABEKAWA, AND THE TOKAIDO BRIDGE 124
ON THE NORTHERN SLOPE OF FUJI--GRASS-CUTTERS RETURNING 126
THE SECOND SHELTER IN THE GOTAMBA PATH 128
FUJI WITH ITS CAP ON 130
FUJI FROM THE KAWAGUCHI LAKE 131
FROM THE TOP OF FUJI, LOOKING NORTH 133
THE GREAT PALM AT RYUGEJI, FUJI IN THE DISTANCE 135
THE CRATER OF FUJI 136
AN OLD RED PINE AT YOSHIDA 139
NAKA-NO-CHAYA, ON THE NORTHERN SLOPE 143
THE RED-PINE GROVE AT YOSHIDA 145
FUJI OVER THE RICE-FIELDS OF SUZUKAWA 146
THE FLOWERY MOORLAND 147
TAIL-PIECE 150
TRICYRTIS HIRTA, ATAMI 152
TAGO-NO-URA 155
COTTAGES AT NEMBA 156
LAKE SUWA AND THE NAKASENDO MOUNTAINS, FROM KAMI-NO-SUWA 159
TOURISTS AT A WATERFALL 163
NIEGAWA, ON THE NAKASENDO 165
A LITTLE SHINTO SHRINE, NEAR THE NAKASENDO 166
A BOAT-MENDER BY THE TENRYUGAWA 167
BANANA-TREES AT ATAMI 171
THE FERRY AT TOKIMATA 173
ON THE TENRYUGAWA 174
THE VILLAGE STREET, ATAMI--VRIES ISLAND IN THE DISTANCE 175
ON THE TENRYUGAWA, NEAR KAJIMA 177
AUTUMN-GRASS (SUZUKI) 179
A RUSTIC BRIDGE AT DOGASHIMA, NEAR MIYA-NO-SHITA 183
AVENUES OF TORII IN FRONT OF AN INARI TEMPLE, NEAR SHIMIZU 185
JIZŌ SAMA, NEAR HAKONE 187
TAIL-PIECE 190
THE AUTUMN LILY 192
FIELDS NEAR HAMAMATSU 194
THE EDGE OF THE TOKAIDO, NEAR HAMAMATSU 195
THE ISLAND OF AWAJI, FROM MAIKO 198
ON THE SHORE NEAR MAIKO, THE STRAIT OF AKASHI TO THE RIGHT 199
LILIES BY THE SHORE, SUMA 200
A GRAVEYARD AT SUMA 201
HILLS BEHIND KŌBE 202
A BAMBOO-YARD AT MAIBARA 203
BLUE WATER-WEED 204
THE TRAVELLING THEATRE AT MAIBARA 205
LAUNCHING A BOAT 208
LAKE BIWA WITH FLOODED RICE-FIELDS, NEAR MAIBARA 209
ONE OF THE “YAMA” AT THE NAGAHAMA MATSURI 213
SOME HATS AT THE NAGAHAMA MATSURI 214
THE TEMPLE GARDEN, SEIGWANJI 215
MINIATURE PAGODA IN THE TEMPLE GARDEN, SEIGWANJI 217
A CHRYSANTHEMUM SHOW AT YOKOHAMA 219
THE ARSENAL GARDEN, KOISHIKAWA, TŌKYŌ 223
TAIL-PIECE 225
LYCHNIS GRANDIFLORA, MISAKA-TOGE 226
THE JAPANESE SPRING
[Illustration: CHERRY-BLOSSOM BADGE, YOSHINO]
THE JAPANESE SPRING
[Illustration]
We had left Hong-Kong enveloped in its usual spring fog, and for five
long, weary days had steamed across the China Sea in regular monsoon
weather, gray and wet and miserable, but during the fifth some rocky
islands, outlying sentinels of the three thousand which compose the
Mikado’s realm, and occasional square-sailed, high-sterned boats, showed
that we were near Japan, the Far East, the Land of Flowers and of the
Rising Sun, the country which for years it had been my dream to see and
paint; and by six o’clock in the evening, on the 9th of March, we were
at anchor in Nagasaki Bay. The aspect of that port on a wet day was not
inviting, nor were the little grimy girls, who in a chattering, laughing
line carried their baskets of coal on board; so, difficult as it was to
decline the hospitable invitations of the English residents, I decided
to go on with the ship to Kōbe. Early in the morning of the 11th we
passed through the Strait of Shimonoseki--the sun shining brightly on
the snowy hills and on the crowd of fishing-boats which had been
sheltering there from the bad weather--and entered the Inland Sea.
After so many days of monotonous gray ocean it was delightful to steam
along in sight of land, and wind about among the islets and rocks, so
near to many of them that we could see the little villages, the mists of
white plum blossoms, the rows of beans and barley growing wherever a
level patch could be made on the steep slopes, the people at work in
their
[Illustration: IN THE INLAND SEA]
fields, and always in the distance the ranges of snow-covered mountains
in Kiushiu and Shikoku, the islands which enclose this lovely sea on the
south. I longed to land and begin work at once, with a nervous dread in
my heart that I should find nothing so good elsewhere, and, indeed,
though there is plenty of material to be found everywhere in Japan, I
saw nothing finer than these islands of the Inland Sea; to cruise about
among them in a comfortable boat would be an ideal way to spend a
summer, and would probably not be devoid of adventure, for our captain
told me many tales of treacherous currents and sudden squalls and sunken
reefs.
[Illustration: HILLS NEAR KŌBE, FROM SUWA-YAMA]
We reached Kōbe next morning, and before I had been on shore more than
an hour I had heard of a village six miles away which was celebrated for
its plum orchards, and had started off to find it. Okamoto lies at the
foot of the hills which rise behind Kōbe on the north, and climbs a
little way up them, and in front of the highest cottage, a modest
tea-house with platforms arranged to accommodate the visitors who come
in crowds to gaze at the blossoms, I unfolded my stool and easel, and in
spite of a bitter wind and vicious little snow-storms made my first
sketch in Japan. All round me and in the village below were the
pink-and-white trees, then a band of rice-lands, pale green with young
barley, and beyond them lay Osaka Bay, and the mountains of Yamato,
which constantly changed in color as snow-storms passed over, or gleams
of sun lighted the shining water and the snow on the distant hills. It
is an exciting thing to begin work in a new country, to compare the
local color and the atmosphere with those you have tried before, and to
find yourself half unconsciously using an entirely new set of pigments.
I was too absorbed with these problems to take any notice of the fact
that my back was aching, but after two hours, when I had finished my
drawing, I found myself unable to rise from that sketching-stool, and
for the next fortnight an attack of lumbago prevented my seeing anything
more of the plum groves. The Buddhist pictures of their Inferno depict
many ingenious tortures; I think they ought to add a man with lumbago
doing six miles over a Japanese by-road in a jinricksha. When at last I
got back to Okamoto there were still some blossoms, and the trees were
tinged with the pink of withered petals, but the luxuriant freshness had
gone.
On the 13th of April I said good-bye to my friends and to the comforts
of the Kōbe Club, and started for Nara, stopping on my way at Osaka to
have a look at the town and see the peach blossoms on Momo-Yama (peach
mountain). The narrow streets leading up the hill were crowded with
visitors, and among the orchards of dwarf trees temporary tea-sheds and
resting-places had been erected for their comfort and refreshment. In
spite of the many picturesque features in these fêtes the whole effect
is at first disappointing: railings and stages of new raw deal, the
untidy and unfinished look of rough bamboo structures, with corners of
matting hanging loosely in places where they interfere with the
perspective lines, the slovenly pathways,
[Illustration: EARLY PLUM BLOSSOMS, OKAMOTO, NEAR KŌBE]
which are mud or dust according to the weather--all these things make
unsatisfactory accessories for the figures and the flowers. After a time
they obtrude themselves less on your notice, and you have learned to
accept the fact that Japan is not a country of big masses and broad
effects, but of interesting bits and amusing details. This is usually
true of its landscape; the forms of mountains and trees are more quaint
than grand, and the cultivated land has no broad stretches of pasture or
corn, but is cut up into patches, mainly rice-fields, with various
vegetables grown in little squares here and there.
It was as yet too early in the year for any rice to be planted out. In
the fertile valley through which the railway runs from Osaka to Nara
some new fields were lying wet or fallow, others were being prepared by
spade labor, and others again, not yet flooded, were covered with the
bright green of young barley, or the strong light yellow of rape in
flower.
Though I had read much about life in Japan, it was an embarrassing
experience to be set down for the first time with my baggage in a
Japanese room, and to try and adapt myself mentally to the possibilities
of living under such conditions. In a bare hut or tent the problem is
comparatively simple; there is always one way by which you must enter;
but in a Japanese room there is too much liberty; three of the walls are
opaque sliding screens, the fourth is a transparent, or rather
translucent, one; you can come in or go out where you like; there is no
table on which things must be put, no chair on which you must sit, no
fireplace to stand with your back to--just a clean, matted floor and
perfect freedom of choice. European trunks look hopelessly ugly and
unsympathetic in such surroundings, nor are matters much improved when
the host, in deference to the habits of a foreigner, sends in a rough
deal table, with a cloth of unhemmed cotton, intended to be white, and
an uncompromising, straight-backed deal chair. These hideous articles
make a man feel ashamed, for though they are only a burlesque of our
civilization, they are produced with an air of pride which shows that
the owner is convinced they are the right thing, and one cannot but be
humiliated by their ugliness and want of comfort. Yet if you want to
read or write you have to keep them and make the best of them, for a
long evening on the floor is only to be borne after a good many weeks of
practice. Things begin to look brighter and pleasanter when the little
waiting-maid appears, bringing first some cushions and the hibachi, with
its pile of glowing charcoal, and then the tea-tray and a few sweet
cakes. This was more the sort of thing I had expected, and made me at
once feel at home with my surroundings. It is the first attention shown
you in every tea-house, no matter how humble; whether you go as an
inmate, or whether you merely sit down for a few minutes’ rest on a
journey, the little tea-pot and the tiny cups are at once produced, and
the hibachi is placed by your side, a pleasant and friendly welcome,
which never failed to make its impression on me, however poor the
quality of the tea might be. The Kiku-sui-ya (which means
Chrysanthemum-water house) is near the entrance to the great Kasuga Park
at Nara; just outside it the road passes under a granite torii flanked
with stone lanterns, and winds up to the temple through an avenue of
cryptomerias, with rows of lanterns on each side, which get closer and
closer together as they near the temple buildings, and are so numerous
that tradition says they have never been counted. There are booths here
and there where pilgrims can rest and get a cup of tea, for pilgrimage
in Japan is not made unnecessarily uncomfortable, and where the tame
deer congregate to take the nuts and cakes which are sold
[Illustration: THE TORII OF KASUGA TEMPLE, NARA]
for them to the passers-by. From early morning till nearly sundown this
road is lively with groups of visitors. Nara is so near to Osaka that
among them a sprinkling of men, mostly no doubt engaged in commerce,
wore foreign dress, but the majority of the people were in their native
clothes, and as I sat and painted by the road-side I could study the
variations of Japanese costume--from that of the old peasant with his
white or blue
[Illustration: OLD WISTARIA IN KASUGA PARK, NARA]
leggings, straw shoes, big hat, and robe tucked into his girdle, his
head shaved down the middle, and the back hair turned up in a queue in
the ancient mode, to that of the gay young musumé with her rich silk
kimono, gorgeous scarlet petticoat, broad obi, and black-lacquered
sandals on her pigeon-toed, white-socked feet. The cryptomerias are
good, but the old wistarias are the glory of Kasuga Park. The great
Fujiwara family formerly owned or were patrons of the temple, and though
it is now imperial property, their crest, the wistaria flower (_fuji no
hana_), is still worn by the little girls who perform the sacred dance
there, and all over the park the wistaria vines are allowed to grow as
they choose, their great snaky stems writhing along the ground and
twisting up to the tops of the highest trees.
[Illustration: THE PAGODA OF KOBŪKUJI, NARA]
One very wet day, when painting out-of-doors was impossible, I went
round to see the sights of Nara--Kobūkuji with its pagoda and fine old
statues, the great Buddha, the celebrated big bell, and beyond these the
Buddhist temple Ni-gwatsu-dō, perched on a hill-side, the steps leading
up to it lined with stone lanterns, little shrines, and booths for the
sale of endless trifles. The platform surrounding this temple is
supported in front by a scaffolding of beams, at the back it abuts
against the hill, and from the heavy projecting roof which covers both
platform and temple hang hundreds of bronze lanterns, votive offerings.
Each of these had been appropriated by a sparrow; trusting to the
sanctity of the spot, they had piled in all the rubbish they could find
to make their nests; odd ends of straw and paper stuck out everywhere,
showing that their stay in the East had not taught them tidy habits. I
am sorry to say that their confidence was misplaced; a temple festival
came round before their eggs were hatched, and the whole of them with
their embryo families were ruthlessly evicted in order that the lanterns
might be lighted.
[Illustration: CHERRY-TREE AND LANTERNS, NI-GWATSU-DŌ, NARA]
The park at Nara is one of the few places in Japan where you can see
real turf, and even there I was struck by the scarcity of ground
flowers; there were plenty of scentless violets, some yellow and white
dandelions, and in the damp ditches a little purple flower called jirobo
by the country people, but there was nothing to compare with the masses
of daisies, buttercups, and cowslips which make the English meadows so
bright in the spring. Perhaps the mountain moorlands would have been as
gay at that time as I found them later in the year; the fields are far
too well cultivated for any weed to get a chance of flowering.
The earlier cherry-trees were in blossom by this time, and I lingered
on, making studies of them, and learning Japanese words and ways from O
Nao San, a young lady about twelve years old, who had appointed herself
my special attendant and protector at the Kiku-sui Hotel. One night at
the theatre I saw a modern farce, with a policeman, an old-fashioned
Japanese gentleman, a Chinaman, and an Englishman as the comic
characters. They were ridiculous and amusing, but when all the earlier
incidents of the piece were narrated with conscientious realism in
evidence before a magistrate the thing became monotonous, and struck me
as faulty in dramatic construction. This was the only theatre I saw in
Japan in which they had discarded the orchestra and chorus and other
traditions of the old stage.
There is a modest little temple opposite Kobūkuji, which is visited by
most of the pilgrims to Nara; in its court-yard is a pile of stones from
which a stream of water flows, fed by the tears of the mother of
Sankatchu, a sacrilegious man who killed some of the sacred deer, who
was killed himself in consequence, and buried here by her. Day after day
groups of visitors stand by the fountain, listening intently to the
guide who tells them the pathetic story, and give their prayers and a
few coppers to her memory. The family affections are strong in Japan,
and the love between parents and children, and among the children
themselves, is always pleasant to see. The little ones are never
slapped or shaken or pulled about roughly; you may wander through the
streets for days without hearing a child cry, nor do they often quarrel
in their play. But it is possible to go too far, even in filial piety.
There was a murder trial while I was in the country, and by the evidence
it appeared that the prisoner’s mother was blind, that the doctor had
prescribed the application of a warm human liver, and that he, as he
could find no other way to get the remedy, had killed his wife in order
to restore his mother’s sight.
[Illustration: THE WELL OF SANKATCHU, NARA]
In most forms of Japanese art the technique which is admired by native
connoisseurs, and the associations connected with the subject
represented, can only be understood by those who have studied Japanese
methods and traditions, but the old wooden statuary has more in common
with Western art, and often reaches a high point of realism. In the
religious figures certain traditions had to be followed, and in looking
at these this fact has to be remembered; the exaggerated anatomy,
unnaturally fierce expressions, and arbitrary number of limbs often
disguise their true merits; but in the portrait figures of daimios,
priests, and abbots the treatment is both simple and dignified. Mr.
Takenouchi, a sculptor to whom I had letters, was making admirable
copies of the principal sculptures at Kobūkuji, which were to be
exhibited at Chicago, and afterwards added to the collection of the Fine
Art Museum in Ueno Park, Tōkyō. Among the old masters, Unkei, a sculptor
of the twelfth century, is perhaps the most noteworthy; there is a
mendicant ascetic by him in the Hall of the Thirty-three Thousand
Kwannon at Kyoto, a lean old man, clad only in a few rags, resting on
his staff and holding out his left hand for alms, which might rank with
the work of Rodin.
On the 25th of April the cherry-trees were in full flower, and I left
Nara for Yoshino, a village at the foot of Mount Omine, in Yamato, which
has for centuries been noted for its cherry groves. Here the cult of the
cherry blossom has its headquarters, and during the ten days or so which
the blossoms last the little town is crowded with visitors. I was too
late to see the place in its full glory; it stands at some height above
the sea, and I consequently imagined that the flowers would be later
than those at Nara, but the cherry which grows there in such quantities
is an early species, and three days of wind and rain had covered the
ground with pink petals and left very few of them on the trees in the
celebrated groves. Fortunately there were still some flowery trees to be
found in gardens and sheltered corners, and at this time of year it
would be impossible to settle down in a Japanese village without finding
plenty of subjects to paint. The cherry in the Yoshino groves has a
single flower, pale pink in color; this is followed by another
[Illustration: CHERRY BLOSSOMS IN THE RAIN, NARA]
kind with white blossoms, more like the European species. Both of these
are wild, and from them the Japanese gardeners have raised many
varieties, double and single flowered, some with the growth of the
weeping-willow, and others with a spreading habit. The flowers vary in
color from white to light crimson, and I noticed some young trees with
large double blossoms which were pale yellow with a pink flush on the
outer petals, like a delicate tea-rose.
[Illustration: SARA-HIKI-SAKA, NEAR YOSHINO--LATER CHERRIES]
At the Tatsumi-ya, just by the remains of the huge bronze torii, which,
until it was blown down by a hurricane, formed the entrance to the main
street, I found a little suite of rooms built in the garden away from
the rest of the house, and at once engaged them, in happy anticipation
of quiet nights. These isolated rooms have some disadvantages, such as
having to get to the bath and back on wet nights, but a very short
acquaintance with life in a tea-house makes the traveller disregard such
trifling inconveniences for the certainty of peaceful sleep. The
Japanese wanderers usually finish their day’s journey about five in the
afternoon, and, after the preliminary cup of tea, discard their
travel-stained clothes for the clean kimono which every well-regulated
tea-house supplies to its guests, then bathe in water as near the
boiling-point as possible, eat their dinner, sit talking and smoking
till midnight, snore till five o’clock in the morning, when the clatter
of taking down shutters begins, and the elaborate business of
tooth-cleaning and tongue-scraping, with an accompaniment of complex
noises suggesting seasickness in its worst stages, so it is not till
they have departed at six or seven o’clock that a light sleeper gets
much chance. In the daytime the tea-house is deserted, except by the
proprietor, who sits in the front room and does his accounts, and by the
little servant-girls, who, with their heads tied up in towels, kimono
tucked into their obi, and sleeves fastened back, showing a good deal of
round brown leg and arm, busily sweep and dust the rooms in preparation
for the new set of visitors who will arrive in the evening. The thin
sliding partitions would be little bar to sound even if they reached to
the top of the room, and above them there is generally a foot or so of
open wood-work, which allows free ventilation and conversation between
the different apartments. Privacy, as we understand it, is no part of
the scheme of a Japanese tea-house. Real fresh air from outside is very
difficult to get at night. During the hot weather I was always careful
to examine the fastenings of the wooden shutters with which, after dark,
every house is enclosed like a box, so that I could surreptitiously open
a crack opposite my room, although by so doing I was disobeying the
[Illustration: CHERRY AND LATE PLUM, TEMA-CHO, NEAR NARA]
police regulations. These shutters do not keep out the noise of the
watchman, who all night long wanders round and knocks two blocks of wood
together, just to let burglars know that he is on the lookout.
In these quarters I spent a week or so, painting all day when the
weather would allow me, and in the evening struggling with the language
and gambling for beans with the family and the servant-girls, who played
_vingt-et-un_ (_ni ju ichi_) with such keenness and discretion that I
was generally made a bankrupt, with much laughter and clapping of hands,
quite early in the game, and had to be set up again by general
contribution.
Everything in Yoshino is redolent of the cherry; the pink and white
cakes brought in with the tea are in the shape of its blossoms, and a
conventional form of it is painted on every lantern and printed on every
scrap of paper in the place. The shops sell preserved cherry flowers for
making tea, and visitors to the tea-houses and temples are given maps of
the district--or, rather, broad sheets roughly printed in colors, not
exactly a map or a picture--on which every cherry grove is depicted in
pink. And all this is simply enthusiasm for its beauty and its
associations, for the trees bear no fruit worthy of the name. There is
an old Japanese saying, “What the cherry blossom is among flowers, the
warrior is among men.” I was reminded constantly of a sentence which a
friend had written in one of my books, “Take pains to encourage the
beautiful, for the useful encourages itself.” It is difficult for an
outsider to determine how much of this is genuine enthusiasm and how
much is custom or a traditional æstheticism; but it really matters
little. That the popular idea of a holiday should be to wander about in
the open air, visiting historic places, and gazing at the finest
landscapes and the flowers in their seasons, indicates a high level of
true civilization, and the custom, if it be only custom, proves the
refinement of the people who originated and adhere to it.
The village street of Yoshino winds up a spur of the hills, passing many
temples and little hamlets, and gradually becomes a steep and stony
mountain path, which ascends to Mount Omine. The great tracks of forest
provide occupation for most of the people in this district; as I
sketched by the road-side strings of men and women were constantly
passing, carrying down heavy loads of wood and charcoal from the hills,
and in front of many of the cottages match-wood was spread out on mats
to dry. It was difficult to understand how it could ever get dry, for
all the mists of Japan seemed to collect round these mountains and
forests; the landscape was rarely free from them, and constantly looked
like a Japanese drawing, all vague and white in the valleys, with ridges
of hill and fringes of pine showing in sharp clear lines one behind the
other.
It is a warm climate too, and everything grows luxuriantly. There are
great clumps of bamboo, enormous azalea bushes, and thick undergrowths
of palmetto. On the road-side banks in this last week of April, there
were ferns just unrolling, the fronds of maidenhair (_Adiantum pedatum_)
all bright-red young shoots of lily and orchid and Solomon’s-seal, and a
lovely iris (_I. japonica_), with many lavender-colored flowers on a
branching stalk, each outer petal marked with dark purple lines, and
decorated with a little horn of brilliant orange. The gardens of
tea-houses and temples were gay with azalea, camellia, magnolia, and
cherry, and with the young leaves of maple and andromeda, as bright as
any flowers. During a great part of the year these gardens have but few
blooms--they are only an arrangement of greens and grays--but in the
spring no amount of clipping and training can prevent the shrubs from
blossoming. The cherry-trees and magnolias are let
[Illustration: A BUDDHIST TEMPLE AT YOSHINO--DOUBLE-FLOWERED CHERRY AND
MAGNOLIA]
grow as they choose, but the others are trimmed into more or less formal
shapes, considered suitable to the species, or helping the carefully
studied arrangement of forms, which is the ideal of a Japanese gardener.
There are no beds for flowers. In the little ponds the irises and lotus
bloom, and in odd corners there may be clumps of lilies, chrysanthemums,
or other plants, but these are mere accidents: the designer’s aim is a
composition of rocks, shrubs, stone lanterns, ponds, and bridges, which
will look the same in its general features all the year round, and
conform to established rules. One of my Japanese friends told me, as an
instance of the complexity of the landscape-gardener’s art, that if a
certain shrub were used it would be necessary to place near it a stone
from Tosa, the distant province where it commonly grows. The decorative
garden is quite distinct from the flower garden, where the fine
varieties of iris, pæony, and chrysanthemum, for which Japan is famous,
are grown by professional florists, or by rich amateurs who can devote a
special place to their culture.
On the 3d of May my host at the Ta-tsumiya brought me some pæony flowers
arranged in an old bronze vase. This showed me it was time to move on to
Hase, where there is a great display of them, so next morning I made an
early start for a long jinricksha ride through the hills of Yamato. My
baggage and painting materials could not be packed in less than two
kuruma, two more were necessary for my boy and myself, and the four
vehicles, with two men drawing each, made an imposing procession as we
bumped down the steep village street. The whole staff of the Tatsumi-ya
had turned out to say good-bye; there was a row of little girls kneeling
on the floor, their noses on the matting and their brown hands placed
flat, palms downward, in front of their heads, and the landlord, after
giving me the usual presents and a receipt for my “chadai”--the parting
tip--insisted on accompanying me to the end of the town.
[Illustration: CROSSING THE FERRY AT MUDA, ON THE YOSHINO-GAWA]
Our route for two or three miles, as far as the river Yoshino-gawa, was
the same that I had climbed on my way up; but nine days had made a great
difference in its aspect. Then many of the trees were still bare; now
they were covered with spring leaves. After ferrying over to Muda we
turned northwards, and a good road led us by low passes and through the
grand forests at the foot of Mount Tonomine down to Tosa in the Yamato
Valley. Jinricksha travelling is very pleasant when the roads are good,
the weather fine, and the men active; there is no noise of horses’ hoofs
to disturb the mind, the straw-sandalled feet of the coolies hardly make
a sound, nor is your attention distracted from the landscape by having
to drive; and the frequent short halts at way-side tea-houses give you a
chance of airing your few phrases of Japanese and seeing the ways of the
people. My lunch at Tosa was
[Illustration: MI KOMORI JINJA, A SHINTO TEMPLE NEAR YOSHINO]
enlivened by two charming waitresses, who had evidently seen but few
foreigners, and who were much interested in me and my belongings. My
watch, match-box, cigarette-case, and other small articles had to be
examined, talked over, and shown to the rest of the household, and I was
plied with questions about my age, my family, and other personal
matters, as Japanese etiquette prescribes.
This valley of Yamato is the earliest historic home of the present race;
in it there are many tumuli which mark the burial-places of legendary
emperors, including that of Jimmu Tenno, the first of all, and it is
therefore considered sacred ground by the ancestor-loving Japanese.
Every year crowds of pilgrims walk over the district, making their
“Yamato-meguri,” or tour of the holy places of Yamato, and thereout the
innkeepers suck no small advantage. Hase was full of them, and every
tea-house crammed; in the room next mine at least a dozen must have
slept, and I thought myself lucky to get a place to myself.
There were still some hours of daylight left after I had settled down in
my quarters, so I wandered up the street and climbed the long flight of
steps to the great temple of Kwannon. On each side of the steps small
beds were built up, and in these the pæonies grew, and their big
flowers, ranging in color from white to dark purple, glowed in the
afternoon light against a background of gray stone lanterns. The temple
is built on a hill-side, like Ni-gwatsu-dō at Nara and many other
Buddhist temples, and it consists of a wide veranda filled with
incense-burners and votive pictures and bronze lanterns, and of an inner
sanctuary. Across the entrance to this stands an altar, and over it an
opening in the dark purple curtains allows a glimpse of the great gold
figure of Kwannon, nearly thirty feet high, her face, with its
expression of calm beneficence, only just distinguishable by the light
of a few dim lamps in the gloom of the windowless shrine. Behind this
main temple there are various other buildings, priests’ houses and such
like, and a little pond for the sacred tortoises.
[Illustration: THE STREET, HASE]
The main street of Hase is cut up with rivulets; the middle one is used
for all domestic purposes, and at all hours you may see the women, with
skirts and sleeves tucked up, washing their clothes or their fish and
vegetables, and ladling up water for baths and cooking with their
long-handled wooden dippers. The side streams turn small water-wheels,
which work wooden hammers for pounding and cleaning the rice--an
important part of the day’s work in every Japanese village. In the most
primitive places it is done with a long-headed wooden mallet and the
stump of a tree hollowed out for a mortar; in others big wooden hammers
are fixed on a pivot, and are raised by stepping on the other end of the
handle, tread-mill fashion. A mountain brook, the parent of these little
streams, tumbles along close behind the houses; its banks are overhung
with
[Illustration: ANDROMEDA BUSHES IN KASUGA PARK, NARA]
bamboos, and the rocks at that season were covered with clumps of
lavender iris. From Atago-Yama, a hill just across the river, the view
is fine; below are the flat, gray roofs of Hase, and the _cul-de-sac_ in
which it lies--bordered on either side with green hills, its windings
indicated by the curves of road and shining river, its green surface
spotted here and there with gray hamlets--gradually opens out into the
wider Yamato Valley. Unebi-Yama, which marks the site of Jimmu Tenno’s
mausoleum, rises in the centre of the plain, and beyond it all is an
enclosing barrier of cloudy mountains.
[Illustration: WHITE WISTARIA, HASE-DERA]
A morning’s jinricksha ride took me back to my old quarters at Nara, and
Kwannon must have rejoiced at my departure from Hase-dera, for while I
was there most of the priests and all the acolytes sadly neglected her:
they spent the day looking over my shoulder or gazing open-mouthed in
my face. This was on the 9th of May, and I was glad to find that the
wistaria in Kasuga Park was just in its glory. The masses of flowers
turned the lower trees into big bouquets of pale mauve, and seemed to
drip like fountains from the tall oaks and cryptomerias; and to add to
the beauty, all the undergrowth of andromeda had put out its young
leaves in many shades of color; as Chaucer says, “Some very red, and
some a glad light green.” One glade particularly attracted me: a tiny
clear stream wound along through the brilliant grasses, and the trees
which covered the steep banks on each side of this little meadow were
completely overgrown with the vines, and smothered with their blossoms.
This too was a quiet spot, out of the track of tourists and pilgrims,
and it was a blessed relief to work without a gazing crowd; the only
passers were a few women and children collecting firewood or gathering
the young fern shoots which were sprouting through the grass. These are
cut just as they begin to unroll, and when they are boiled and flavored
with soy, they are really quite good to eat, at least one thinks so in
Japan.
The wistaria blossoms were almost gone when I decided that though there
was still plenty to be done in Nara, it would be better to try some new
sketching-ground, and having heard of a tea-house with a fine old garden
at Hikone, on the shore of Lake Biwa, I determined to move on there for
my next venture. I packed all my belongings, and made arrangements for
the journey next morning, and then walked once more round the park and
the temples, gazing regretfully at all the good things which still
remained to be sketched, and climbed Mikasa Yama, a steep grassy hill
behind the park, which on fine days is dotted all over with picnic
parties. From its summit there is a great view over the plains round
Nara, with the Kizugawa, a good
[Illustration: A TALL WISTARIA, KASUGA PARK, NARA]
broad stream, winding through them. The grassy ridges and the few
wind-beaten pines which grow on them made a fine foreground, and the
little green gullies were spotted with low azalea bushes covered with
flame-colored flowers. It was too good to leave, and I ought to have
unpacked again and prolonged my stay for a few days; but laziness
prevailed, the bore of repacking seemed intolerable, and to my lasting
remorse this subject remained unpainted.
[Illustration: NOTES AT MUDA]
[Illustration: BADGE OF THE KIKU-SUI-YA]
EARLY SUMMER IN JAPAN
[Illustration: IRIS JAPONICA]
EARLY SUMMER IN JAPAN
[Illustration]
It is difficult nowadays to imagine how the Japanese managed to live
without tea; everybody drinks it at all hours of the day, and the
poorest people rarely get a chance of drinking anything stronger, and
yet it is, as things went in old Japan, a comparatively recent
introduction. Tea was introduced with Buddhism from China, and though
some plants were brought as early as the ninth century, it was not much
grown until the end of the twelfth. Daruma, an Indian saint of the sixth
century, often represented in Japanese art either crossing the ocean on
a reed, or sitting a monument of patience, with his hands in his
sleeves, was the father of the tea-plant. After years of sleepless
watching and prayer he suddenly got drowsy, and at last his eyelids
closed and he peacefully slept. When he awoke he was so ashamed of this
pardonable weakness that he cut off the offending eyelids and threw
them on the ground, where they instantly took root and sprouted into the
shrub which has ever since had power to keep the world awake.
[Illustration: CARRYING HOME TEA LEAVES, NEAR UJI]
In the twelfth century Kyoto was the centre of life in Japan, and the
district of Uji, between that city and Nara, has always kept its
reputation for producing the finest tea. The most valuable leaves are
those on the young spring shoots, and when I passed through on the 19th
of May these were just being gathered and dried. Most of the shrubs
grow in the open air without any protection, evergreen bushes from two
to three feet high, and among them the women and children were at work.
As they squatted by the plants, filling their baskets, very little of
them was visible, but their big grass hats shone in the sun, looking
like a crop of gigantic mushrooms. The Japanese “kasa” is made of
various light materials--straw, split bamboo, rushes, or shavings of
deal; it is used, like an umbrella tied to the head, as a protection
against sun and rain; in the evening or on cloudy days it is laid aside,
and the laborers wear only their cotton kerchief, spread out like a
hood, or tied in a band round their brows. Though it cannot be called
the “vast hat the Graces made,” it is, nevertheless, very effective in
the landscape, and the variations of its outline in different positions
indicate happily the action of its wearer.
[Illustration: A PLANTATION COVERED WITH MATTING NEAR UJI]
The plants which produce the most expensive teas, costing from six to
eight dollars a pound, are carefully protected by mats stretched on a
framework of bamboo, so that the tender leaves may neither be scorched
by the sun nor torn by the heavy rains, and there are acres of them so
enclosed. It was a curious thing to look down from a little hill-top on
a sea of matting which filled the whole valley from one pine-clad hill
to another, its surface only broken by the ends of the supporting poles
and by the thatched roofs of the drying-houses which stuck up here and
there like little islands. Underneath the mats women were picking, and
in every wayside cottage those who were not in the fields were busily
sorting and cleaning the leaves. There are no large factories or
firing-houses; each family makes its own brand of tea, labelling it with
some fanciful or poetic name, such as “jewelled dew.”
The road through this fertile district crosses two large rivers, the
Kisugawa and Ujikawa, and many smaller streams. They are all carefully
banked in, and the water is carried where it is needed by endless
ditches and channels. During the heavy rains these rivulets become
raging torrents, and would soon cover the country with stones and gravel
if they were not kept under control; the quantity of débris they bring
from the mountains is so great that, instead of being down in a hollow,
they are raised above the rest of the country, and you have to go
up-hill to ford them. Before getting into the long and uninteresting
suburbs of Kyoto there are some large ponds on either side of the way,
willows and tall reeds growing on their banks, and in every little creek
fishermen with their boats and nets, all very picturesque and paintable.
So was the Nesan at the Tatsu-ya, who when I halted for lunch at once
led me round to the principal room at the back of the house (the best
rooms and the gardens are usually at the back), and showed me her tame
gold and silver carp, which came to be fed when she clapped her hands.
It was a tiny little
[Illustration: POND IN THE GARDEN OF RAKU-RAKU-TEI, HIKONE]
garden, not more than twenty-five feet square, but it had its pond and
bridge, and mountain of rock, and old pine-tree, like the best of them.
[Illustration: THE CASTLE AT HIKONE]
I reached Hikone by rail the same evening, and took up my quarters at
the Raku-raku-tei tea-house, a great rambling place, with a large garden
and suites of rooms to suit all tastes. I was shown into a gorgeous
apartment with gold screens, its floor raised above the level of the
rest of the house, which no doubt was intended for great people, who in
the old days must often have come here to see the Daimio, Ii Kamon no
Kami; but I felt I could not live up to this, and after viewing the
rooms overlooking the lake, and those built on piles over the fish-pond,
I selected some that looked out into the garden, with a trellis of
wistaria just in front under which the purple trails of blossom nearly a
yard long were still hanging. There are no crowds of
[Illustration: THE CASTLE AT NAGOYA, FIELD OF IRIS IN THE FOREGROUND]
visitors now, and the fine old garden looks rather tangled and
neglected, with bushes untrimmed and paths overgrown with weeds. On a
steep rocky hill close by is the castle where the Daimio formerly lived;
the hill is on one side protected by the lake, and on the others by a
wide moat, crossed by picturesque wooden bridges, and the roads which
lead to the plateau at the top are defended by more bridges over dry
moats, gate-houses, and zigzag walls of large, well-fitted stones. The
architecture of all these castles is very much alike, and though there
are not many of them now standing, they must have abounded in the feudal
times. The finest I saw was that at Nagoya; it was a good deal shaken by
the last great earthquake, but is still quite sound, and the great gold
dolphins on its bronze roof shine high above the rest of the city. In
the short period after the introduction of Western ideas, when the craze
for things European
[Illustration: AN OLD CASTLE MOAT, AKASHI, NEAR KŌBE]
led to many acts of vandalism, most of them were pulled down, and this
one at Hikone was only just saved from destruction by the intervention
of the Emperor; now that a reaction has set in, and the Japanese
official mind is not so eager to forget the past and obliterate its
relics, they are likely to be carefully preserved. All of them have a
massive foundation of large stones, not squared except at the angles,
but carefully trimmed and fitted together without mortar; and the
superstructure is of timber and plaster, with roofs and eaves of heavy
tiles or metal. The moats, overhung with pines and filled with lotus
during the summer months, are always interesting. It was a blazing hot
day when I walked
[Illustration: FIELDS NEAR LAKE BIWA]
up and examined the castle; there was not a cloud in the sky, and Lake
Biwa and its mountains lay still and clear and soft in the delicate blue
haze which seems to be their own peculiar property. The fields outside
the town were covered with a bright pink flower like a clover, which is
not used for fodder, as there are hardly any animals to feed, but is dug
in to improve the land for the rice, and this blaze of color consoled me
for not finding as many azaleas as I expected. I set to work at a study
of it, and sent my boy Matsuba, who, with the quickness of his race,
quite understood the kind of thing I was looking for, to search the
neighborhood for azalea bushes. He came back early in the afternoon to
tell me that he had not been successful, but that there were some races
going on in the town, so we wandered up, and established ourselves in a
room just over the starting-post. The course was about two hundred and
fifty yards along the pebbly bed of a dry river, and all the
arrangements were very unlike those of a European racecourse. Two
upright posts of bamboo stood about five yards apart, with a stout pole
slung between them; the vicious little ponies were brought along by two
grooms, each holding a long cord fastened to the bridle, and with a good
deal of shoving and hustling were wedged in, shoulder to shoulder,
between this pole and another behind them at about the height of their
hocks. Their heads were pulled over the front pole, and held firmly by a
groom with a long running cord through the bridle rings, while the
jockeys were fully occupied in preventing the little brutes from
striking each other with their fore and hind legs. Meanwhile the
spectators, who had kept at a respectful distance until the ponies were
safely fixed, crowded up behind them, pulling their tails and whacking
them with bamboos. The starter then appeared, made a few remarks, and
beat a small drum, upon which the men in charge of the pulleys dropped
the front pole, the grooms slipped their ropes out of the bridle rings
and jumped aside, and the ponies scrambled off as best they could. The
jockeys rode without saddles or stirrups, with their great toes hitched
into a surcingle, and directly they were off they dropped the reins,
held their left hands in the air, and plied their whips with the right
until they had passed the winning-post. It was just a scurry, with no
time for scientific riding, and, as far as I could see, the pony who
got over the pole best always won. O Kazu San, my waitress at the
Raku-raku-tei, was helping at the tea-house, and kept me supplied with
tea and cakes, and I stayed watching the races and the spectators, and
being watched by them, until the dusk put a stop to sport. I left too
soon, for my boy told me that there was a fight afterwards about a bet;
it was the only fight I heard of while I
[Illustration: O KAZU SAN]
was in Japan, and I should have liked to see it. Two days of heavy rain
turned the course into a river once more, so that the heats were never
decided. Some few days after, Matsuba told me that there was a “Japanese
man’s circus” in the town. It was not in the least like a circus; it was
a theatrical performance in which all the members of the company, who in
this troupe were women, were mounted on horseback. There was a small
stage, with a set scene at the back, and in front of it, on the same
level as the spectators, a space of bare earth on which the action took
place. The play consisted mostly of combats; the swords and other
necessary properties were brought in by attendants, and placed on a high
stand where they could be easily reached by the actors, and the horses
were then led into position, and held there while the fighting went on.
None of the performers fell off, but beyond this there was no
horsemanship; they could not even get their steeds on and off the stage
without the help of a groom.
My thoughts recurred to another travelling theatre, at
Stratford-on-Avon, where I saw a stirring drama called _Tel-el-Kebir, or
the Bombardment of Alexandria_, in which Sir Beauchamp Seymour had a
hand-to-hand conflict with Arabi Pasha. Mr. Lawrence, the spirited
actor-manager, informed me afterwards, when I congratulated him on the
performance, that it was always popular, and that he had played it
twenty-three times in one day at Nottingham Goose-Fair. In reply to my
objection that it took at least an hour, he said that of course they cut
the dialogue, and only had the combats and the bombardment. I
remembered, too, his remarks when called before the curtain at the end
of his season; he enlarged on the dignity of the actor’s profession, and
how essential it was that he should be a gentleman, saying, in
conclusion; “‘Ow, I harsk, could a chimney-sweep (if there’s a
chimney-sweep present I beg ’is pardon), but ’ow could ’e act the part
of a prince or a nobleman? ’E could not do it, my friends; ’e’s not ’ad
the hedjucation.”
[Illustration: PREPARING THE RICE-FIELDS]
The fine days at this season were perfectly glorious; hot enough to give
an inkling of what it would be like in the full blaze of summer, and yet
with a taste of spring’s freshness left in the air. They were
interspersed with too many wet or uncertain days, but, with the garden
close by, I managed to waste very little time. The first lotus leaves
were just coming up in the ponds and the irises blossoming round the
water’s edge, the azalea bushes were covered with flowers, and the tips
of the pale green maple boughs were tinged with rosy pink. When the
pouring rain had begun to drip through my sketching umbrella, and I was
driven in-doors, there was no lack of society. O Kazu San, a plain
little thing with brown velvet eyes, and the rest of the girls were
never tired of looking at my belongings, thumbing my sketch-books, and
asking me endless questions; and though I was sometimes irritable, their
good-humor was unlimited. This unvaried good temper is itself annoying,
when the foreigner feels that it is not the result of sympathy, but
because he is regarded as a strange animal, not to be judged by the
rules which govern the conduct of civilized people. At last Matsuba told
me that he had found a place, “top side,” with plenty of azaleas, and
rooms where I could stay. It was a small Buddhist temple called
Tennenji, once very popular but now almost deserted, which stood on the
hill-side beyond the rice lands, and somewhat above the swarms of
mosquitoes which haunt the marshy shores and the lagoons of Lake Biwa.
Ji means a Buddhist temple--at least
[Illustration: MY ROOMS AT TENNENJI]
[Illustration: BUDDHA AND HIS DISCIPLES, TENNENJI]
that is one of its meanings--and tennen means “produced by nature.” The
name itself suggested peace and quietness and repose, and these I found
in that delightful place, always seen in my mind through a rosy haze of
azalea blossom.
A granite sign-post where the little temple path turns off from a track
through the rice-fields tells all who can read it that the temple is
dedicated to the five hundred Rakkan (disciples of Buddha), and their
gilded and lacquered effigies sit in long tiers round one large building
within the court-yard; beyond this is the Hondo, where the principal
altars are, and where the services are performed at daybreak by the old
priest who has sole charge of the establishment. My room was a little
annex of the Hondo, quite apart from the living-rooms of the family, and
open on two sides to the air. The angle of my veranda projected over the
fish-pond, and on the right and the left stepping-stones led down from
it into the garden, a small patch of level ground, with a pine-clad
hill-side rising sharply beyond it. Just at the foot of this hill there
was a rocky projection, covered with an undergrowth of azaleas, and
spotted with statues of Buddha and his sixteen principal followers.
These were rudely carved of the natural stone; with their growth of
lichens and mosses they looked as old as the rocks themselves, and were
hardly to be distinguished from them at a little distance. Several stony
zigzagging footpaths, mere tracks through the bushes and pine-trees, led
to the top of the ridge, from which one looked down on fertile valleys
enclosed by more pine-clad ridges, and to the westward on the great
shining plain of Lake Biwa, its lagoons, islands, and distant mountains.
Many times I walked to the top of this hill, sometimes in the clear
brilliant moonlight, when the delicate pinks and reds of the azaleas
were hardly visible, and only their honeysuckle scent made me conscious
of their presence, and when all the world would have been silent but
for the incessant chorus of myriads of frogs which came up from the
rice-fields below.
[Illustration: HIKONE AND LAKE BIWA, FROM THE HILLS BEHIND TENNENJI]
In the daytime the whole of the wood was lively with cicadæ, who kept up
a constant and irritating clatter, but then there was the delight of
finding new flowers, or making the acquaintance of old garden friends in
their own homes. A little damp gully just behind the bamboo grove was
full of deutzia bushes in blossom, and under them grew a clump of pale
pink lilies (_Lilium krameri_), which seemed to me the loveliest flowers
I had ever seen. The priest at Tennenji was so anxious to have some of
my work that I made a drawing of these for him; it hangs among the
temple treasures, and may be a surprise to some wandering foreigner, who
will little expect to find any European traces in such an out-of-the-way
spot. The family, consisting of Sokin the father, O Shige San the
mother, and Takaki, a son employed in the office of police at Hikone,
soon
[Illustration: AZALEAS ON THE ROCKS, TENNENJI]
[Illustration: THE POEM]
adopted me as a friend, and did all they could to make me comfortable.
Takaki had received a modern education (they teach English in the Hikone
schools, as you find out from the small boys, who shout A B C after you
in the streets); but he had not got beyond the word “Yes,” beginning
every sentence with it and then lapsing into Japanese. We made many
excursions together, he, Matsuba, and I, strolling down to the town
after dinner and looking in at the theatres and shops.[A] O Shige San
was great at cooking, and took delight in providing me with new and
strange forms of food every evening; for breakfast and lunch I ate what
European food Matsuba could provide, and as flour and whiskey could be
bought, and a cow was slaughtered in Hikone every Saturday, I did not do
badly; you can get the necessary sustenance in a shorter time on foreign
“chow,” but when work was over and I had taken my hot bath and exchanged
my suit of flannels for a cotton kimono, it was amusing to sit on the
floor and speculate on the composition of the dishes which she brought
me, trying with the aid of a dictionary to find out what they really
were, and to acquire a taste for “daikon.”[B] Among her successes were
eels cooked in soy, broiled fish, and bean curd “à la brochette”; young
bamboo shoots, chrysanthemum leaves fried in batter, and lily bulbs
boiled in sugar were eatable; but a sausage made of rice and herbs, and
some of the quaint vegetables, were simply nauseous. In one of my
water-colors there was a large group of leaves, round ones with a dark
hole where the stem goes in, commonly known as the “foreground plant,”
and I noticed one afternoon to my disgust that these had been cut; the
boiled stalks were given to me at dinner that evening, and I never
tasted anything more unpleasant. When the various dishes had all been
brought in and arranged round me by the priest or Takaki, O Shige San
would appear and kneel in front of me, keeping my sake cup and rice bowl
filled, and watching with intense anxiety my expression as I tasted each
compound, and at the end of my dinner would remark that I had eaten
nothing, and that Japan was a dirty, ugly country, to which I always
replied that I had feasted, that England was dirty and ugly, but that
Japan was a beautiful country. Such is Oriental politeness. Then Sokin
came in with his pipe and pouch and little fire-box, and, after taking a
cup of sake with me, sat and smoked and conversed, or brought out the
tea things of his lamented patron, Ii Kamon no Kami, and made me a bowl
of powder tea with all the correct ceremonies. The Cha-no-yu is not to
be confounded with ordinary tea-drinking. It is an elaborate form of
entertainment which cannot be appreciated by an uneducated foreigner;
every movement is regulated by laws known to the initiated, and the
conversation is confined to some object of art, or poem produced by the
host. The kettle, water-bowl, and other utensils should all have some
historic or artistic interest, and the cup from which the mixture is
drunk is usually an example of archaic pottery. The rules of the game
have not been altered for about two centuries, though there are various
schools which differ as
[Illustration: WHITE AZALEA BUSH, RAKU-RAKU-TEI, HIKONE]
to minor details--whether the whisk with which the drink is stirred
should afterwards be laid on the seventh or thirteenth seam of the
matting, and things of that sort, which seem of infinitely small
importance to the ignorant, but make a vast difference to the
connoisseur. Our love of tobacco was a great bond of sympathy, although
after trying each other’s pipes we both preferred our own. The old man,
who knew that I did not like to be watched while painting, would sit in
his little room and gaze at me as I worked in the garden or among the
stone gods on the hill-side, and when he saw that my pipe was out, would
fill another for me and bring it out with a box of matches, making this
an excuse to look over my shoulder for a few minutes, and to have a
little conversation.
As the summer came on and the weather got hotter the insects became more
and more numerous; there were splendid butterflies and dragon-flies in
the daytime, swarms of fire-flies over the rice-fields at night, and
unfortunately many others which bit at all hours, flying things, and
things which mosquito-curtains could not keep out. The Japanese house
has no separate rooms for living and sleeping; when bedtime comes quilts
are brought in and laid on the floor, and, if necessary, a
mosquito-netting of thick green gauze is slung over them from the four
corners of the apartment. The natives use a small wooden pillow, with a
depression for the neck to rest in; I never could manage this, but after
a time I succeeded in sleeping well with coats or another quilt rolled
up for a bolster.
Certain paragraphs about me in the local papers brought a good many
visitors to the temple to see what I was doing, among them a gentleman
who was introduced to me as the best singer in Hikone, and a little
conversation and whiskey induced him to give me some specimens of his
art--songs of the Buddhist and Shinto priests, and others
[Illustration: THE BAMBOO GROVE, TENNENJI]
which might be described as popular airs. To foreign ears they were
quite devoid of melody, and his elaborate vocalization only produced
sounds which were disagreeable and harsh, or else ludicrously inadequate
to the efforts they cost him. My friend, who appeared to be an all-round
æsthete, spent a good part of the afternoon in arranging a big bronze
jar of azalea boughs and a hanging vase of irises, curling the leaves
and snipping off any stray shoots which did not conform to the
fish-scale arrangement (sakana no uroko no kata) which he was trying to
make.
The family were very busy all through this month with their crop of
silk-worms, which required incessant care and feeding. I was taken to
see them first in an outbuilding when they were just little black
specks; as they got older the air of this shed did not suit them, and
they were moved into the Hondo, where they flourished and grew with
astonishing rapidity under the eye of the Buddha, and devoured the
baskets of chopped mulberry leaves as fast as they could be prepared.
The caterpillars were huddled together on mats hung one above another in
a framework; a netting of string was spread over each mat so that the
whole mass could be lifted and the débris cleared away with very little
trouble. When they had ceased to grow, and began to stand on end, waving
their heads in the air after the idiotic fashion of silk-worms who want
to spin, they were picked off and put in little nests of straw or
bundles of brush-wood, which soon became a mass of soft yellow cocoons.
It was an anxious time for O Shige San, for a considerable part of her
income depended on the crop of silk; the cocoons are worth about thirty
yen a koku, a measure rather less than five bushels.
The pond under my veranda was full of carp and baby tortoises, which
hurried up to be fed as soon as they saw me leaning over the rail; the
old tortoises were more shy, and I only saw them on very hot days,
sunning themselves on the stones, and they slipped into the water with a
flop if I attempted to get near them. I caught one on a patch of sandy
ground, after watching its struggles to cover up the hole in which it
had just laid some leathery-looking white eggs. These days brought out
the snakes too, some of them very big, and all unpleasant to look at,
but quite harmless. There is only one venomous snake in the country, a
small brown beast called “Mamushi”; the other sorts are not ill-treated,
indeed, they are considered lucky, but this is always killed and
skinned, and a medicine is prepared from its dried body.
It would have been easy to dream away months here, but the wise
regulations of the Japanese government, foreseeing that the traveller
might be tempted to neglect his duties and become a mere loafer, forced
me to return to Kōbe and get a new passport, so I had to say good-bye to
my friends, and the Rakkan with the lichen-covered azaleas, still gay
with crimson flowers which trailed round their feet, and the terrace
where every evening I had watched the sun setting over Biwa, and to
descend once more to the railway and the commonplace.
The rain came down in torrents as I left the temple, and continued to do
so all the day, but there was plenty that was amusing to be seen from
the carriage window. The people were busy putting out their young rice
plants, and the fields were full of men and women working in mud and
water half-way up to their knees, and wearing their “kasa” and straw
coats, oiled paper, rush mats, or other contrivances to keep off the
rain. It is surely the dirtiest and most laborious form of agriculture;
the work is almost entirely done by manual labor with a spade and a
heavy four-pronged rake, though I occasionally saw a cow
[Illustration: SUNSET OVER LAKE BIWA, FROM TENNENJI]
or a pony, with a little thatched roof on its back to shoot off the
rain, dragging a sort of harrow through the mud. As soon as the spring
crop of barley or rape-seed is garnered and hung up to dry, the ground
is trenched with the spade, and water is turned over it until it has
become a soft slush, which is worked level with the rake. The young rice
plants, grown thick together in nursery patches, are pulled up when the
fields are ready for planting, their roots are washed, and they are tied
in bundles, which are thrown into the mud and water; then the men and
women wade in, untie a bundle, and set the seedlings in lines by just
pressing them with their fingers into the mud. They do this wonderfully
quickly, and can plant eight or nine in a row without moving from their
places; when the field is all planted it looks like a pond with a
delicate green haze over it. The dividing banks are planted with beans
or other vegetables, so that not a yard of ground is wasted. This was
the 18th of June, the beginning of the “dew month,” a period full of
discomforts for the traveller, and especially for the landscape-painter.
[Illustration: PLANTING RICE]
[Illustration: A SPRING FLOWER--JIRO-BO]
THE TIME OF THE LOTUS
[Illustration: PLATYCODON GRANDIFLORUM, “KIKYO”]
THE TIME OF THE LOTUS
The damp heat of the Japanese summer, which is so trying to human
beings, encourages all vegetation to grow with surprising luxuriance and
rapidity; the buds of yesterday are flowers to-day, and to-morrow
nothing is left but the ruin of a past beauty, making the painter’s
struggle most arduous just when he has least energy to contend with
nature. The young bamboo shoots come up like giant asparagus, growing so
fast that one can almost see them move; some of them are cut and eaten
while young and tender, and those which are allowed to grow to large
poles are used for every imaginable purpose. They are made into
water-pipes and flower-vases, barrel-hoops and umbrellas, baskets and
hats, scaffolding-poles and pipe-stems, fans and delicate whisks for
stirring the powdered tea--more things, in fact, than I could enumerate
in a page. The bamboo is surely the cause of much of the clever
constructive work of the Japanese; for though it will do most things
with proper treatment, it will not stand being handled like ordinary
timber; its peculiar qualities have to be considered, and every way in
which they use it is artistic and good. This is the large species which
grows to twenty or thirty feet high; there are many dwarf kinds, which
clothe the hills with green, and are used only for making fences and
such like.
[Illustration: AUKATUM LILIES AND BOCCONIA ON THE HILLS NEAR NIKKO]
The general aspect of Japan during the summer months is a harmony in
greens, the dark pines and cryptomerias striking the lowest note of a
scale which culminates in the
[Illustration: A FIELD OF LILIES, OFUNA, NEAR KAMAKURA]
brilliancy of the rice-fields--the most vivid green I know. There is
more variety of color in those districts which are not irrigated, such
as that round Kamakura, where the light sandy soil grows a great many
kinds of vegetables, sweet-potatoes, melons, tomatoes, beans, and big
patches of auratum and longiflorum lilies, the bulbs of which are
exported. The lily is not one of the flowers which the Japanese
themselves particularly admire, nor do they often use it for decoration.
In this, as in most other matters, there are recognized rules of taste,
and the man is considered
[Illustration: SEVEN BEAUTIFUL FLOWERS OF LATE SUMMER
1. Susuki 2. Kikyo 3. Asago 4. Shion 5. Omnia-Meshi 6. Kiku 7. Hagi
Drawing by Teshoto Hario]
an ignoramus who does not know the right thing to like. I was walking
one day at Yoshida with a Japanese artist, a remarkable man who was
engaged in making a series of steel-engravings, half landscape and half
map, of the country round Fuji, and called his attention to a splendid
clump of pink belladonna lilies growing near an old gray tomb; but he
would not have them at all, said they were foolish flowers, and the only
reason he gave me for not liking them was because they came up without
any leaves. When we got back to our tea-house he took my pen and paper,
and showed me what were the seven beautiful flowers of late summer--the
convolvulus, the name of which in Japanese is “asago,” meaning the same
as our “morning-glory;” wild chrysanthemum; yellow valerian; the
lespedeza, a kind of bush clover; _Platycodon grandiflorum_, a
purple-blue campanula; _Eulalia japonica_, the tall grass which covers
so many of the hills; and shion, a rather insignificant-flowered aster.
I noticed that some versions of the seven flowers differed from his; a
large-flowered mallow is often substituted for the last he named. There
are doubtless different schools which hold strong views on the subject,
but on the morning-glory and some others they are evidently agreed. The
auratum lily is a common wild flower in the hilly districts, and boiled
lily bulbs are a favorite vegetable, but I could not find out which was
considered the best variety for the table. O Shige San told me that it
was a red lily; I looked in vain for any of that color in their gardens.
The cottages in the country round Kamakura are thickly thatched, and on
the top of the thatch is laid a mass of earth held together by iris
plants, which form a roof-crest of spiky green; near them in July there
often were large hydrangea bushes covered with balls of blossom, the
young flowers a pale yellow-green, changing as they grew older through
bright blue to purple.
On the 9th of July the heat drove me from Europeanized Yokohama to the
hills. I left the train at Utso-no-miya, a little town which has been
financially ruined by the railway--for every one formerly stayed a night
there instead of travelling straight through--and was delighted to find
myself once more in thoroughly Japanese quarters. It was a wonderful
moonlight night, and I wandered round the town in kimono and clogs,
watched the people, and was stared at by them, climbed the steps to the
big Shinto temple, and
[Illustration: HYDRANGEA BUSH, TOTSUKA, NEAR YOKOHAMA]
gazed over the plains flooded with pale light, and thoroughly enjoyed
myself.
[Illustration: UNDER THE CRYPTOMERIAS AT NIKKO]
There is a railway now to Nikko, and most people rush up there without
seeing the glorious avenue of cryptomerias--described so well in Loti’s
_Japoneries d’Automne_--which line the old road for miles and miles. I
sent my boy and my baggage by rail, and went myself in a kuruma with two
good runners. The road is sadly out of repair in some places, but the
splendid old trees remain, and young ones have been planted where winds
and age have thinned their ranks. It is not like an ordinary avenue with
the trees planted some yards apart; these are so close together that the
trunks have often joined at the base, and I noticed one lot of seven big
trees all grown together at the bottom into a mass that must have been
eight or ten yards long. The road is sunk between the high banks on
which the trees grow, and it must be gloomy enough on such a night as
Loti experienced. Here and there it opens out into a village street,
with abundance of refreshment booths for the pilgrims who still make the
journey on foot.
Nikko itself is a long, steep street, leading up to a rushing mountain
torrent in a rocky ravine, which is crossed by two bridges side by side.
One is an ordinary wooden structure, used by all the world; the other,
which is of red lacquer, with black supports and brass ornaments, is
only opened for the Emperor and his family to pass over. Beyond them the
hills rise, covered with cryptomerias, among which are concealed the
great mortuary temples of Ieyasu and Iemitsu, founders of the great
Tokugawa Shogunate that lasted for two centuries. Marvellous as these
mausolea are, they make no effect in the distance; it is only when you
get close to them, wander about in their successive court-yards, and
examine the lovely details of wood-carving, lacquer, and gilding, that
the wonder of them strikes you. The tombs themselves are plain bronze
pillars, and are reached by long flights of granite steps, green and
gray with mosses and lichens, which lead up under the dark masses of
foliage behind the temples. After passing through all the glories of
color and elaborate workmanship in the preliminary temples their final
peacefulness and simplicity are very striking.
Nikko in the summer is full of foreign ladies and children; the Emperor,
too, has a country-house there, where some of his large family spend the
hot months. I saw the arrival of two little princesses, with a crowd of
nurses, tutors, and officials. They were funny little things, about
three or four years old, not as pretty as most Japanese children, but
dressed in the most gorgeous colors. The red lacquer bridge was opened
for them, decorated with “gohei”--the strips
[Illustration: A LITTLE TEMPLE AT NIKKO]
of white paper which are used so largely in the Shinto religion--and in
the middle of the bridge there was a little table with offerings of food
on it, where the children stopped and made their obeisances to the manes
of their ancestors as they passed over. All the priests of Nikko turned
out in gauze vestments of many colors, Buddhist and Shinto equally
anxious to do honor to the descendants of the gods.
[Illustration: KIKIFURI, NEAR NIKKO]
The hills are alive with little tinkling streams of clear water, and the
favorite walks mostly lead to waterfalls. I spent a soaking day making
a sketch of one of them--Kirifuri; the path to it crossed a wide, stony
river, and went over grassy hills where there were abundant wild
flowers, purple iris, white and mauve funkias, yellow orchids, clusters
of white roses, pink spiræas, hydrangeas, St.-John’s-wort, meadow-rue,
and bocconia appearing here and there, half hidden among the rank
herbage. The big buds of auratum lilies showed how fine they would be in
a few days’ time. Just in front of the waterfall a little tea-house gave
me shelter enough to work in; but the path, up which I had walked
dry-shod, by the time I got back had been turned to a raging torrent,
and I only just crossed the stony river in time, for the light bamboo
bridge was washed down during the night.
[Illustration: THE MOOR NEAR YUMOTO]
Chūzenji is a little hamlet, some hours’ walk from Nikko up a mountain
road, consisting of a group of tea-houses which overlook a charming
lake, a very sacred temple with a large bronze torii, and long rows of
sheds to accommodate the pilgrims who come in early August to make the
[Illustration: A WET DAY AT CHŪZENJI]
ascent of Nantai-zan, the mountain which rises close behind the village.
During five long days of incessant rain I painted everything that was
visible from my room in one of the tea-houses, the water of the lake
rising each day so much higher that on the last two I was able to take a
morning header from my balcony, and I hardly got a chance to explore the
country round. At last a bright morning tempted me to
[Illustration: THE FOOT OF NANTAI-ZAN]
walk on to Yumoto, and see the sulphur springs and the wide moorland,
Senjō-ga-hara, which lies surrounded by mountain-peaks at a height of
nearly five thousand feet above the sea. On the moor the grasses do not
grow high enough to conceal the flowers, and I found it gay with purple
iris and white meadow-rue. The baths in Yumoto are open to the public;
they are large wooden tanks under sheds by the road-side, and as you
walk along the street you see the patients, men, women, and children,
all sitting together, in a state of nature, up to their necks in the
steaming malodorous soup. The clouds were gathering round the
mountain-tops as I started to walk back to Chūzenji, and before I had
finished a rapid sketch on the moor the rain began again in torrents;
the road was a series of small ponds, and my coolie insisted on carrying
me, as well as my sketching materials, through them; but he
unfortunately stumbled under my weight, and dropped me in the deepest of
them, and what with the wet above and below I was well soaked by the
time I reached my tea-house. The hibachi seems a very inadequate means
of warmth on such occasions; a hot bath and whiskey and dry clothes are
more effective, and after dinner a bottle of tamago-sake, a hot compound
of whipped egg and sake, soon produces a pleasing drowsiness. Since
leaving Chūzenji I have recognized the place in many drawings on screens
and fans; the artist always gives its main features--the lake, the
cryptomerias, the huge bronze torii, and the steep wooded slope of
Nantai-zan--but he combines them in one view as you never can see them
in reality. The rain had played havoc with the road back to Nikko;
several bridges were down, but temporary ones built of fagots made it
possible to cross the streams. All the higher woods near the lake are
hung with gray moss, and the flowering shrubs which grow among them are
endless--azaleas, climbing and bushy hydrangeas, weigelia, seringa, and
wild vine; on the ground I found orange Turk’s-cap lilies, columbines,
the big _Lilium cordifolium_, and ferns of many kinds.
Notwithstanding the advantage of cooler nights, I was glad to leave the
green mountains, with their constant rain and mists, and the shut-in
valleys, where it was impossible to see more than a few hundred yards
away, and get down
[Illustration: THE MOAT OF BENTEN-SHIBA]
again to the broader horizons and bigger skies of the plains. On the
journey to Tōkyō I saw my first lotus flowers in a lake near the
railway, and I hurried off at once to the pond which surrounds the
little temple of Benten at Shiba, where I found them in full glory.
The lotus is one of the most difficult plants which it has ever been my
lot to try and paint; the flowers are at their best only in the early
morning, and each blossom after it has opened closes again before noon
the first day, and on the second day its petals drop. The leaves are so
large and so full of modelling that it is impossible to generalize them
as a mass; each one has to be carefully studied, and every breath of
wind disturbs their delicate balance, and completely alters their forms.
Besides this their glaucous surface, like that of a cabbage leaf,
reflects every passing phase of the sky, and is constantly changing in
color as clouds pass over.
Japanese drawings of flowers--and they usually draw them
beautifully--are often influenced in some way by a tradition. The man
who invented the method was a true impressionist; he seized what
appeared to him characteristic of the plant, and insisted on that to the
exclusion of other truths, thus founding a mannerism which all following
artists imitated. In time, what he saw as characteristic became
exaggerated by his disciples, who looked at nature only through his eyes
and not with their own, and I have observed that the flowers which are
most frequently drawn are not depicted so naturally as those less
popular ones, in books of botany and such like, for drawing which there
is no recognized method, and where the draughtsman had to rely entirely
on his own observation for his facts. Take, for example, the spots on
the lotus stems; if you look very closely you can see that there are
spots, but certainly they could not strike every artist as a marked
feature of the plant, for they are not visible three yards away. But
some master noticed them many years ago and spotted his stems, and now
they all spot them, and the spots get bigger and bigger; and so it will
be until some original genius arises who will not be content with other
people’s eyes, but will dare to look for himself, and he may perhaps,
without abandoning Japanese methods, get nearer to nature, and start a
renaissance in Japanese art.
The Japanese treatment of landscape is not more conventional than that
of Claude or David Cox, or than the shorthand of our pencil-sketches,
but it records its facts in a different way. The everlasting question in
art is the imitation of nature; it has never been carried further in
certain directions than by Millais and his pre-Raphaelite brethren, or
in others than by Manet, Monet, and the modern French, but no one can
put in everything; look at a simple bunch of leaves in sunlight against
a wall, and think how long it would take to really imitate all their
complexities of form, color, and light and shade; some facts can only be
given by ignoring others, and the question what is the important thing
which must be insisted on is the personal affair of each individual
artist in every country where art is unfettered and alive. But in
Japanese, as in Byzantine and other Eastern arts, this question is still
decided by the practice of past generations, and it will take all the
vitality of a strong man to infuse new life into it without destroying
its many exquisite qualities. Perhaps when Japanese artists absorb its
spirit instead of merely trying to imitate its methods, Western art may
help in the direction of freedom; at present I fear that its influence
has done more harm than good.
The people are so quick to recognize the meaning of a few lines, and to
understand the poetic idea which they suggest, that it is a wonder the
artists ever learned to draw at all; they might have been content with
symbols, for a few lines like those below are enough to convey all the
poetry that is associated in their minds with any of the well-known art
motives.
[Illustration]
The little island of Benten is a frequented spot, and my easel was
surrounded from morning till night with a crowd of spectators; they
dispersed at the command of the policeman on his hourly round, but after
he had gazed his fill and left me, a new lot instantly assembled. They
were mostly children; and a crowd of Japanese children is twice as many
as any other crowd of its size, for every child has another smaller one
tied to its back. I suppose they are not born in pairs this way, but
they contract the habit of carrying a little one at a very early age,
and often tie on a doll when a sufficiently small human being cannot be
found. The spectators are almost always polite, and take care not to put
themselves between you and your subject; but they squeeze up very close
to your elbow, and trample on your nerves, if not on your materials.
They usually remarked that my work was a photograph; some more educated
ones said that it was an oil-painting, that being the medium which is
associated with foreign art; and one man said that it was enamel, which
I took as a compliment to the brilliancy of my color. The keeper of a
little tea-shed hard by, where I took my lunch, noticed that I was
worried by the people standing so close to me, and when I arrived next
morning I found that he had put up a fence round the place where I
worked; it was only a few slender bamboo sticks, with a thin string
twisted from one to another, but not a soul attempted to come inside it.
They are such an
[Illustration: SPECTATORS]
obedient and docile race that a little string stretched across a road is
quite enough to close the thoroughfare. It is difficult to reconcile the
character of this peaceable and pleasure-loving race which the modern
traveller sees with that which is ascribed to their forefathers--those
heroes of the desperate wars and bloody revolutions which fill the pages
of the early history of Japan. It may be that two centuries of Tokugawa
rule, fatherly but autocratic, developed qualities of unreasoning
obedience, and perhaps all the struggles of the past were merely
dynastic, or affairs between the warriors of different clans; perhaps
the people themselves have always been as gentle as they are now,
cultivating their land and pursuing their ingenious trades, little
affected by these turmoils, except that, like the producers of all times
and countries, they were called on to supply the sinews of war.
[Illustration: THE LAST TEA LEAVES--COTTAGE NEAR YOKOHAMA]
The lotus is intimately connected with Buddhism; most personifications
of the Buddha are represented as seated or standing on its flower, or
holding an unexpanded bud in their hands; it is largely used in temple
decorations, and vases with imitations in metal of the flowers, leaves,
buds, and seed-pods, often very exquisite in workmanship, stand on all
the altars. It is typical to the Buddhist mind of the qualities of the
ideal man: as it grows in the mud, yet produces a lovely flower, it is a
symbol of purity in a naughty world; as its odor sweetens the air
around, so his good deeds influence those about him; it opens in the
morning sunshine, and his mind is expanded by the light of knowledge;
its branchless stalks, rising without a break to the leaf or flower, are
a type of his single-mindedness and directness of purpose; and its
edible root shows that the basis of his life must be usefulness to
others. To this I may add that, like the very good, the flower always
dies young. It is lovely enough in itself without all this halo of
virtue. Hardy says of Tess, “Beauty to her, as to all who have felt, lay
not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized”; this is unavoidable
with most of us, and the suggestion of feelings and memories of our own
does not necessarily obscure our visual sense; but a fixed and
recognized suggestion is the result of mental laziness, and may lead to
the ignoring of intrinsic beauty; as our lovely primrose is to some eyes
a political badge, admired only because of its association with a name
and a faction, or rejected for the same cause. To quote Mr. Punch,
“A primrose by the river’s brim
A party emblem was to him,
And it was nothing more.”
But the lotus has not sunk so low as this; though it has been adopted by
the Buddhists, it excites no animosity in Shinto breasts; and where
temples under the present _régime_ have been handed over from the one
religion to the other, though the pagoda and other distinctively
Buddhist
[Illustration: LOTUS-PONDS AT KAMAKURA]
structures are pulled down, the lotus-ponds are left in their beauty.
The largest I saw were those connected with the great Hachiman temple at
Kamakura, which has been turned over to the state religion; they cover
several acres, and the flowers in them are of three colors--either
white, bright rose, or a delicate shell-like pink. All three varieties
seem to grow equally freely, and one is as lovely as the other. The
white one has been specially adopted by
[Illustration: LOTUS-PATCH AMONG THE RICE-FIELDS, KAWASAKI, TŌKYŌ]
the followers of Nichiren, a noisy sect which beats a drum during the
long hours of prayer, and it is this variety, too, which is usually
grown in patches here and there among the rice-fields for the sake of
its roots. They have not much flavor, except that of the sugar with
which they are boiled, but they are crisp in texture and pleasant to
munch. The children are very fond of the nutlike seeds which are
embedded in the fleshy seed-pod; it looks very like the rose of a
watering-pot. In the tea-booths round the temple of Benten they use a
dried slice of this pod for a mat on which to stand the cup or bowl.
[Illustration: A TEA-HOUSE AT KAMAKURA]
Kamakura was for a long time the capital of Japan; in the twelfth
century it was selected for his headquarters by Yoritomo, the great
warrior whose victories enabled him to take the reins into his own
hands, and to establish that system of military government which only
ended with the deposition of the last Shogun in 1868. But when a rival
family defeated his successors they removed the seat of government, and
Kamakura rapidly declined from a great city of more than a million
inhabitants to the insignificant fishing-village which it now is, with
nothing to show of its former greatness but this temple of Hachiman, and
the Daibutsu, an enormous bronze Buddha, not only remarkable for its
size, but also for being the finest and most dignified production which
the art of Japan can show. The temple buildings which once sheltered it
were destroyed ages ago, and the image is now in the open air, in one of
the little valleys which branch out from the plain and run back among
the pine-clad hills. Centuries of exposure to rain and sun have given
varied colors to the great bronze god. He is seated cross-legged on a
lotus-flower, his hands folded in his lap; the head is bent slightly
forward, and his face gazes down with an expression of calm superiority
which can only come from perfected wisdom and subjugated passions. A new
shrine to Yoritomo’s memory, all of black and gold, stands near one of
the lotus-ponds; in front of it are some splendid old willow-trees,
which he is said to have planted, and under which he sat and composed
poetry when he was not engaged more actively in fighting. It is hardly
possible that these willows can have lived to such a great age; they are
probably descendants of the original trees. Behind the shrine is a large
modern barrack, and I saw bands of white-clad recruits, with side-arms
and repeating rifles, trousers,
[Illustration: YORITOMO’S WILLOWS AND HIS SHRINE]
tunics, and forage-caps, quite European in everything but face and
stature, constantly passing to and fro over the ground where the old
warrior must have seen his quaint soldiers in lacquered armor and bronze
helmets carrying their long-bows and queer-shaped halberds. One day when
I was painting the willows my boy Matsuba, who had plenty of spare time
for investigating the neighborhood while waiting to carry home my
umbrella and things, came and told me that there was a wrestling-match
at a small temple about a mile away. I packed up at once and we walked
over there, for I was very anxious to see what kind of a sport it was.
This was a tournament, and all the professional wrestlers of the
neighborhood, and many youths anxious to distinguish themselves, had
collected to take part in it. They were divided into three classes. The
masters of the art were all past their first youth; not enormously
stout, as they are often represented in drawings and carvings, but fine,
athletic men, taller than the average of Japanese. They wore their hair
in the ancient style, shaved away from the centre of the head, and the
locks from the back and side made into a queue, turned up and knotted
with a string on the top of the poll; they had no clothes except a
loin-cloth and an embroidered apron. In the second class were men who
had won but few prizes; they were not all in the professional get-up,
and some of them were evidently laboring-men with a taste for sport. The
third class was composed of youths, none of them more than nineteen or
twenty years old. The contests took place in the temple court-yard on a
circular bed of sand, under a roof supported by wooden pillars, but not
enclosed at the sides; round the edge of this raised circle there was
laid a straw rope, and the man won who could either fairly throw his
opponent or force him across the rope without being dragged over
himself. The proceedings were conducted by a Shinto priest in full
dress, wide trousers, and a coat sticking out from the shoulders like
that of a modern young lady, who with a peculiar-shaped fan gave the
signal to begin and to stop. For the highest class this umpire was a
venerable old gentleman; for the others the place was taken by young
priests who needed to learn this part of their business. The wrestlers
came on in pairs as their names were called, and after a great deal of
marching round, stamping, rubbing their limbs, making gestures of
defiance, and so on, they squatted opposite each other. When the
[Illustration: JAPANESE WRESTLERS]
signal was given to begin they rested their fingers on the ground
between their knees, and leaned towards each other till their foreheads
touched, sometimes waiting several minutes before attempting to make any
grip. If the grip seemed unfair or unsatisfactory to one of the
opponents, he immediately put down his hands, the priest stopped the
bout, and all the preliminary business had to be gone through again; but
if it seemed all right the struggle began, and sometimes lasted for five
minutes, each man straining every muscle in a splendid way, and using
all the science and cunning he knew. If it lasted too long without
either man gaining any advantage, the priest signalled to them to stop,
and they had to wait till their turn came round again. The preceding
rough sketch, made while jammed in the crowd of spectators, will give
some idea of the attitude of the men waiting for the fan to be lowered.
Everything was conducted in the most ceremonious and orderly manner, and
there was no drunkenness or rowdyism, although the multitudes who had
assembled were entirely of the poorest class. The most fashionable
wrestling-matches are held in Tōkyō in spring and autumn, and the
champion is as much a popular favorite as a famous torero in Spain, or a
well-known prize-fighter in England and America.
Those who read these notes will have gathered that the heat and the rain
make summer life in Japan not wholly enjoyable; let me also say some
words of warning to the thin-skinned against the mosquitoes, and even
more against a horrible little insect which lives in the grass or sand
and bites your legs and feet. It is so small that I never succeeded in
finding it, but its bite brings up a blister which breaks and leaves
troublesome sores. There were few nights from June till October when I
was not obliged to get up once or twice and bathe them in cold water to
allay the intolerable itching. The sea, too, has its terrors. I went
down to the shore near Kamakura one hot night, hoping that a swim would
soothe my troubled skin, but no sooner had I plunged into the
approaching wave than my neck and arms were embraced by jelly-fish, and
I scrambled out feeling and looking as if I had taken my bath in a bed
of nettles. The Japanese, although they grumble and fan themselves a
good deal, do not really mind the heat; their draughty houses are
admirably adapted for fine summer weather, and their clothing is
sensible and scanty. But the foreigners suffer, and as September comes,
and the lotus flowers fade, they hail with relief the approach of the
cooler and dryer weather of autumn.
[Illustration: LESPEDEZA “MAGI”]
[Illustration: THE HEART-LEAVED LILY]
FUJISAN
[Illustration: CAMPANULAS ON FUJI]
FUJISAN
[Illustration]
The great mountain of Japan is well known to us all; its form appears on
countless screens and fans, and its foreign name, Fusiyama, is as
familiar as Mont Blanc or Pike’s Peak. By the Japanese it is called
Fuji, or Fujisan, or sometimes Fuji-noyama when speaking poetically: it
is difficult to understand how an _s_ came to be substituted for the _j_
by foreigners, but under any name there is a peculiar fascination about
the mountain, and the first sight of it, from the hundred steps in
Yokohama, from Ueno in Tōkyō through a haze of telephone wires, or
across the waves of Suruga Bay from the deck of a steamer, is an event
which will be fixed in the traveller’s memory.
I can never see a high place without wishing to be on the top of it,
and Fuji looks obtrusively high. The long sweep with which it heaves its
twelve thousand feet above the shore, the absence of any competitive
mountains, and the exaggerated perspective of its broad base and narrow
summit, all add to this impression, and the ambitious soul longs to be
on such a superior eminence. And there is no better way of taking a
holiday than to climb a mountain. To go down a river leads to laziness;
things glide by which look as if they ought to be sketched, but to do so
would involve stopping the boat, and interfering with the forces of
nature which are gently furthering the traveller’s ends, and thus the
mind is tossed to and fro between the delight of seeing things and the
unpleasant feeling that it is a duty to work. Thinking is the one thing
to be especially avoided on a holiday, and there is too much time for
thinking on an ordinary river. The same objection holds against walking
on easy roads; in fact, the farther you walk the more you think; but in
climbing a really big hill all thought is killed for hours by the simple
physical exertion, and you become a mere machine, with a laboriously
pumping heart and very heavy legs. And what a sense of superiority comes
when the highest point is at last reached, when the world is all below
you, half cloud and half solid earth, lovely, mysterious, and absolutely
unpaintable. Even this sense fades from me in a few minutes, and I
become a nonentity, with only a vague feeling of the hugeness of the
universe and the infinitesimal smallness of the individual, and the
opening verse of Adam’s morning hymn always comes into my mind, as it
did years ago on the top of a Somersetshire hill overlooking the
Glastonbury flats, just after my first reading of “Paradise Lost.”
An artist often hears the remark, “You must find painting a great
resource,” as if it were an amusement like golf or trout-fishing; and no
doubt to many people a landscape-painter’s life seems like one long
holiday; but the struggle with ever-changing skies and fast-fading
flowers has its fatigues, and the mind gets wearied of constantly
thinking how this and that ought to be painted, so when a friend in
Yokohama suggested that we should go up Fuji together, I accepted his
proposal with alacrity, and we chose the first week in August for our
excursion, that being the time when there is the best chance of good
weather, and when most pilgrims are to be seen on the mountain. One of
the most boring things in life is to walk through new and interesting
country with a man who has no eyes for anything but his watch, and who
insists on telling you how many minutes the last mile has taken; but my
friend’s figure was a sufficient guarantee against any attempt at
“record-cutting,”
[Illustration: GOING UP IN THE MIST]
and I felt sure that his pace would give me plenty of time for looking
about.
The weather for our start was not promising--that damp summer heat of
which there is so much in Japan, heavy and depressing, shrouding the
mountains from morning till night in dense masses of cloud, which seem
to slowly drag themselves up from the valley, and never succeed in
getting clear of the hill-tops. From Miya-no-shita to the Hakone Lake we
were from time to time enveloped in these clouds, and a thin drizzling
rain prevented us from enjoying what in fine weather would be a very
lovely walk. The moor at the northern end of the lake, Sengoku-hara, is
dotted with herds of cattle, and is perhaps the only place in Japan
where this familiar sight can be seen. You may wander for miles over the
green hills and moorlands which cover so large a portion of its surface
without ever seeing a four-footed animal; perhaps because the tall,
coarse grasses and the leaves of the dwarf bamboos are unsuitable for
fodder; perhaps because the Japanese are not a meat-eating nation, and
do not need herds and flocks.
Our intention was to cross this moor, and join the road which leads from
Miya-no-shita by way of the Maiden’s Pass, Otome-no-toge, to Gotemba, a
village at the foot of Fuji, but our coolie assured us that he knew a
shorter road by the Nagao-toge, so we struggled up the hill-side on our
left, reached a post which marked the top of the pass, and then stopped
in the mist to consider which track we should follow. Suddenly appeared
to us an aged man, whose venerable face inspired us with confidence, and
by him we were led astray. He took us by the semblance of a path along
the hill-top, and for about half an hour we plunged through wet grass up
to our necks, the thick white mist hiding everything more than ten yards
distant; then he confessed that he had lost his way, that he had heard
of that road, but had never taken it before, and that it was all grown
over--an obvious fact; so there was nothing to be done but find our way
back to the post, and try the wider track from which he had beguiled us.
He was a cheerful old soul, seventy-four years of age, who had just
walked to some hot springs about twenty miles from his home to take the
baths for a couple of days because he suffered from rheumatism. Either
it was a very mild case or the baths were marvellously efficacious, for
he led us down the hill at a rattling pace, and went five or six miles
out of his way to atone for his error, and to put us in the right road
for Gotemba.
[Illustration: A CLOUDY EVENING, FROM THE SANDS OF TAGO-NO-URA]
The mists reached far down the hill, and when we were at last free from
them we looked eagerly for Fuji. There was the sea below us, with the
great curve of sand, Tago-no-ura, bordering Suruga Bay, and the green
slopes rising from it showed where our mountain must be, but at the
height of about two thousand feet a straight bank of white cloud ruled
off the landscape, and of the summit we could see no sign. The path led
us along the hill-side, where men were cutting the rough grass, and
loading it on pack-horses; it wandered in and out of the dry gulleys,
and over the intervening ridges, and at last, descending to the
northward, brought us through cultivated fields to a tea-house near the
railway station, where our baggage and provisions were waiting for us.
Gotemba is on the Tōkaidō Railway, and is therefore a much-frequented
place during the six weeks or so when Fuji is considered to be “open.”
It has been ascended at all seasons, the laborious walking through soft
snow being the only difficulty, and the chance of bad weather the only
danger; but except from the latter part of July to the beginning of
September the numerous rest-houses are unoccupied, and the climber is
obliged to carry all provisions with him.
[Illustration: FUJI FROM THE ABEKAWA, AND THE TOKAIDO BRIDGE]
There were plenty of pilgrims about, waiting to start on the morrow or
just returned from the mountain, some washing their weary feet, others
tying their big hats and long walking-sticks in bundles for the
luggage-van, and all chattering incessantly. After dinner a travelling
company entertained us in front of our tea-house with songs and dances.
The band consisted of two samisen, a bell tapped with a stick, and
bamboo castanets. The dancers were all little girls, from ten to fifteen
years old, dressed in the ordinary long-sleeved kimono, and the
movements of their bodies and slim little hands and limbs were full of
grace and variety. Each performance was a mixture of song, dance, and
dialogue, with instrumental accompaniment; the music was queer,
tuneless, and often harsh to the European ear, but with the
blood-stirring quality of all genuine national music.
Before daybreak next morning the whole house was stirring, and it was
useless to hope for more sleep. Most of the pilgrims start early in
order to get to the top by sunset, sleep there, and descend the
following day, but we had decided to sleep two nights on the mountain,
and were in no hurry. Our heavier baggage was sent by pack-horse to
Yoshida, on the north side of the mountain, and three coolies went with
us as guides and porters, carrying some extra clothing and the solid
food which seems necessary for European stomachs. In the village street
our strolling players were already wandering round, trying with some
preliminary chords on the samisen to attract an audience. Daylight did
not suit them, they looked draggled and discouraged, and it was
difficult to believe that those dirty little figures shuffling along in
the mud could ever have had any charm or grace of movement.
The path from Gotemba to the summit is one steady ascent over beds of
old ashes. At first it is a very gentle rise; the lanes wind through the
fields with various crops,
[Illustration: ON THE NORTHERN SLOPE OF FUJI--GRASS-CUTTERS RETURNING]
and past cottages with hedges of pink and white hibiscus; but after a
few miles it begins to get steeper, the ashes are less disintegrated,
cultivation only appears in isolated spots, and there are large
stretches of gray moorland varied only with bushes and wild-flowers. The
mist still hung round us, there was no landscape to be seen in any
direction, and if it had not been for the flowers and the ever-new and
quaint figures on the road, this part of the walk would have been dull.
Besides the regular pilgrims there were many men and women leading
pack-horses, those on their way up carrying provisions and fuel for the
rest-houses, and those coming down bringing bundles of grass so large
that they looked like walking hay-stacks, and the wiry little ponies
that carried them were almost invisible. In front a misshapen head
peeped out, underneath were four thin little legs with enormous feet,
and as they passed, their narrow drooping quarters, cat-hammed and
cow-hocked, swayed at every step under the heavy load. Japanese drawings
of horses have risen in my estimation since I have seen the models the
artists have to work from; there never was a more ill-shaped beast than
the ordinary horse of the country. In this as in many other hill
districts mares only are used; they are shod with big straw over-shoes,
which give a finishing touch to their ludicrous shape; under them is
slung a square of dark-blue cotton cloth to keep off the flies, and a
narrow strip of the same material, with a big crimson cord and tassel
printed on it for decoration, is draped across their quarters. Many of
the pilgrims ride up as far as the tea-house called Uma-gaeshi (horse
send back), and the ponies look almost as much eclipsed under the big
pack-saddle with its trappings, and the pilgrim with his, as they do
under the loads of grass.
When all cultivation had disappeared, and the road was a mere cinder
track over a moorland of ashes, the flowers and bushes still grew in
clusters here and there. The most abundant plant was a large bushy
knotweed covered with sprays of white blossoms, and this grew far up the
mountain-side. There were also clumps of tall bocconia, a campanula with
large pink or lavender flowers sprinkled in each bell with tiny
ink-spots, and various less showy flowers. The flora on this side of the
mountain, devastated by the last eruption, in 1706, is not so rich as
that on the northern slope. As the ascent became steeper we got into a
wood of dwarfed and scraggy pine-trees, which extended as far as Tarōbō,
a large tea-house with a little temple attached, and then suddenly
ceased; above this there was only an occasional dead stump to break the
monotonous surface of ashes. Here every pilgrim purchases a stick to
help him up the mountain--an octagonal staff of birch, about five feet
long, with an inscription burned on it, and for a few coppers the
priests on duty at the summit will add a red stamp to prove that the
owner has actually been there.
We reached the second shelter beyond Tarōbō quite early in the
afternoon; great masses of wet mist came constantly driving up the
mountain-side; there was plenty of room in the hut, and nothing to be
gained by going higher, so we decided to stay there for the night. All
the regular tracks up Fuji are divided into ten portions, and a
rest-house is supposed to mark the end of each division; but they vary
much in their accommodation for travellers, and often get destroyed
during the winter, so it is well to find out before starting which are
habitable and which are not. Number Two (Ni-go-me), on the Gotemba path,
was a roomy hut, built with blocks of lava; from below it looked like a
wall with a hole in it, from above it was not visible, for the ashes
covering its roof of rough planks were simply a continuation of the
mountain slope; there was no chimney, but a mass of snow was piled over
the fireplace, which dripped through the roof into a tub and supplied
the establishment with water. By each shelter a small white flag
fluttered on a pole to make its situation obvious.
[Illustration: THE SECOND SHELTER IN THE GOTAMBA PATH]
Nothing could be more dreary than this spot on such an afternoon: above,
below, and on each side the waste of purple-gray ashes, light-green
spots of knotweed and thistle, only enforcing the gloom of its color,
seemed to stretch interminably into the mist, and nothing broke the
monotony of the long oblique line except the little eminence of
Hoei-zan, sticking up like a pimple on the great slope of Fuji, which
occasionally showed its outline through the vague and formless clouds.
Inside it was, at any rate, warm; the raised floor was covered with
coarse matting, and on this quilts were spread, and soon after dark we
were all in bed. Some later arrivals had added to our numbers, and we
slept thirteen in that hut, including the host and hostess; but this was
nothing to the crowd at the top, where I think we were nineteen, perhaps
more, for in some parts of the floor there must have been two or three
under a quilt, and it was difficult to count them. Even here on Fuji you
do not escape the all-seeing eye of the Japanese police; your passport
is examined by the keepers of the hut, and is copied into a book which
gives every night the names and addresses of those who sleep under the
roof. About two o’clock in the morning we were wakened by our host, who
took us outside, and there at last was Fuji itself, straight over our
heads, every detail softened, but clearly visible, and the summit
looking ridiculously near in the brilliant moonlight. Below us was the
slope of ashes and the moorland over which we had walked; and in the
distance the Hakone Mountains, already far below our level, lay half
hidden by masses of moonlit cloud. More energetic men might have started
at once for the final climb, but after gazing and shivering for a few
minutes we turned into our hard beds again, and it was not till after
sunrise that we left our hut, our party increased by a dreary and
footsore young soldier in a soiled white uniform, and a cheerful coolie,
carrying about a hundred-weight of planks to repair one of the higher
shelters.
The path goes zigzagging up to one rest-house after another, and there
was not one of them which we failed to patronize; even Number Seven,
which was a heap of ruins with nothing in the way of drink but a tub of
melted snow, was an excuse for a few minutes’ halt. In the clear morning
sunlight Fuji looked small, as most mountains do when there are no
clouds to give mystery and suggest height; but it was a grand morning
for distant views, and the sunshine brought out vividly the strange and
brilliant colors of the various materials which form the mountain--gray
ashes, blue lava, and the reds and oranges of burned earth.
[Illustration: FUJI WITH ITS CAP ON]
Above the seventh station the path turns to the left and passes behind
Hoei-zan; already bands of pilgrims, who had seen the sunrise from the
summit, were making their way back towards Gotemba, going at a great
pace down the glissade of loose sand and ashes on its side, while we
toiled on over harder cinders, with an occasional ridge of lava, on the
upward path. At this altitude the knotweed and thistles had disappeared,
and the only plants I saw were a dwarf sedge and a little starwort in
some of the sheltered nooks; higher still only a few lichens and mosses
can grow; there is no regular alpine flora on Fuji.
[Illustration: FUJI FROM THE KAWAGUCHI LAKE]
A big gully full of snow lies just below Number Eight, and from this
point the ascent is steeper than ever, winding among a chaos of
shapeless blocks of lava; a sharp spur on our left crowned with them
made a most curious outline against the sky. In front of us was a
strange pilgrim, an old and feeble Buddhist priest in canonicals and a
big cane hat; two coolies were hauling him by a cord round his waist,
and another was pushing from behind, and even with this help he had to
stop every few minutes to get his wind. He smiled a sickly smile as we
went by; he was even slower than we were, and it seemed cruel to pass
him; but he got to the top finally.
A sharp pull up a rocky gully at last brought us to a little wooden
torii, and to the “Famous Silver Water,” a clear, cold spring on the
edge of the crater. The supply is not large, and the priest in charge
of the enclosure doles it out to pilgrims at the rate of one brass cash
for a small teacupful. The principal temple, and the cluster of huts
round it, form a little square on the south side of the crater, just at
the top of the Mura-yama path, and are reached from the Silver Water by
means of a couple of ladders and a small fee. At the top of the ladders
there is a tiny shrine, serving as stable to a toy model of a horse, and
in front of this the coppers are deposited. There are only three
entrances to the crater of Fuji, and each of these is marked by a small
torii, the sacred gateway of the Shinto religion; two of them I have
already mentioned, the third is on the north side, where the paths from
Yoshida and Subashiri, which meet at Number Eight station, reach the
summit.
Clouds had, as usual, begun to form about mid-day, and there were only
occasional peeps of distance, but the crater itself was worthy of the
journey, and occupied us until the bitterly cold wind drove us to
shelter. Here, as on other mountains, I noticed that the first object of
the native is to get under cover; all the kingdoms of the world and the
glory of them may be spread before his eyes, but if there is a little
smoky cabin, however rough and uncomfortable, the professional
mountaineer goes inside and stays there. This one was not luxurious;
near the doorway, the only aperture for admitting light, there was a
smouldering wood-fire, where our food was cooked before we lay down to
try and rest on the loose and creaky floor-boards; little blasts came
like squirts of cold water through the cracks of the unmortared walls,
and it was a relief when a general movement of the sleepers--for a
Japanese can apparently sleep anywhere--showed the approach of sunrise.
The morning was clear and bright, and we all crouched in nooks of the
rocks, wrapped in our quilts, and gazed at the straight gray line of the
Pacific and the gradually brightening line above it, watching for the
first sign of the approaching god. On the most prominent rock a priest
knelt, waving strips of paper tied to a stick and chanting prayers and
eulogies, and soon the sun rose, as he assuredly will every morning,
whether he is prayed to or not. There
[Illustration: FROM THE TOP OF FUJI, LOOKING NORTH]
was such a vast space of mysterious blue sea and distance below the
horizon that the big orange ball appeared to be already half-way up the
heavens when we first saw it. This daily occurrence seems ever new and
wonderful, always has something of the miraculous about it, and to most
minds it brings a sense of thankfulness, as the sunset gives that of
repose; though why we should feel grateful both that it is time to begin
to work and time to leave off is a puzzle to me. My thoughts turned to
an early morning near Plevna, and to an honest Turk, who, as the sun
rose over the bare Bulgarian hills, turned on his box-seat, and, gravely
touching his forehead, wished a good-day to his “little brothers” in the
carriage he was driving. There was a mixture of courteousness and
solemnity in his manner which seemed exactly suited to the important
moment.
When the orange glow had turned to a dazzling glare, we walked round to
the foot of Kenga-mine, the highest of the peaks encircling the crater,
and looked westward at the shadow of Fuji, a great pyramid of tender
blue stretching for miles across the country at its foot, darkening a
slice of the sunlit distant mountains, and towering above them into the
sky, clearly defined on the light mists and clouds of the horizon. So
sharp was the outline that it seemed as if our two shadows ought to show
on the distant sky; but though we waved our arms frantically there was
no visible movement on the edge; we were too small. When we returned to
get some breakfast many of the pilgrims were saying their morning
prayers at the little temple. “Sengen Sama” is the goddess of Fuji; a
prettier name for her is “Ko no hana saku ya Hime”--“the princess who
makes the blossoms of the trees to open.” There is another little temple
dedicated to her on the north side of the crater, and many more imposing
ones in various parts of Japan. On a banner which floated in front of
this second temple there was an inscription in Japanese, and under it
these words in English, “Place for worship the Heaven.” I suppose this
was an effort in the direction of civilization and rationalism, but I
resented it as an attempt to explain away the flower-loving princess,
and to dethrone her from the mountain-top where she has been worshipped
in peace for so many centuries. Close by the banner is another spring,
“The Famous Golden Water,” and a small shed, where bundles of chopsticks
and other mementos are sold, and where for ten sen you can buy a tin can
full of the famous water to take home to your friends. Most of the
descending pilgrims have one or two of these tins slung round them with
the rest of their travelling-kit. The regular Fuji pilgrim is dressed in
a white tunic with loose sleeves, close-fitting white cotton drawers,
white socks and gaiters, and a pair of straw sandals; he wears the usual
big hat, which serves as an umbrella, and slung round his shoulders he
has a light rush mat, which can be shifted to either side to keep off
sun or rain. Round his neck he has a string of beads, a little
incessantly tinkling bell, and a few pairs of extra sandals on a cord,
and fastened to his waistband is the small package containing his
personal baggage; he carries in his hand either the octagonal birch
staff or a
[Illustration: THE GREAT PALM AT RYUGEJI, FUJI IN THE DISTANCE]
longer peeled wand, with some paper tied round the end of it. The dress
of the women is the same as that of the men, except that they wear a
short petticoat under the tunic, about as long as a Highlander’s kilt. I
saw none of them adorned with the bell and beads, so perhaps these are
reserved for the men. It is only of late years that women have been
allowed to climb the sacred mountain.
[Illustration: THE CRATER OF FUJI]
No one point of the crater’s edge is high enough to give a panorama; you
have to walk all round, about two miles, in order to see the view on
every side. Eastward is the country round Yokohama and Tōkyō, with the
Pacific beyond as horizon; southward, too, is the ocean, with the Izu
Peninsula jutting out into it, and the sweep of Suruga Bay bringing it
close under your feet; westward you get a glimpse of the Fujikawa River,
with range after range of mountains behind it; and to the northward a
chain of little lakes lies at the base of Fuji, these, too, backed up by
mountains, which rise, one behind another, as far as you can see.
In some places the outer wall descends abruptly into the crater; in
others, as by the Golden Water, there is a narrow plateau between the
two. The crater itself is four or five hundred feet deep, the north side
mostly precipitous rock, and the south side, under Kenga-mine, a steep
slope of snow and débris; all the peaks round it have names, and one of
them near the Silver Water is dotted with cairns raised in honor of
Jizó, the patron saint of travellers, who helps little children to cross
the Buddhist Styx. There is a rough path all round the crater, leading
over some of the peaks, inside some, and outside others, which is kept
in passable condition by men who collect a few coppers for their labor:
the pilgrim season is harvest-time for the dwellers round Fuji, and its
barren top pays well for cultivation.
It was after ten o’clock before we had made the circuit and seen all the
sights; we met our coolies by the long row of huts at the top of the
Yoshida path, and could see the village itself, our destination, lying
in the blue hollow below us. Groups of ascending and descending pilgrims
were visible for a long distance on the slope; as we looked down on them
we saw only big round hats with an arm sticking out, and two little feet
working underneath. After a final cup of tea at one of the guest-houses
we passed under the wooden torii, and began the descent, a very steep
and stony one, the loose cinders and lumps of lava requiring attention
at every footstep. At Number Nine station there is a little shrine
called “Sengen’s Welcome,” and at Number Eight there are six or eight
good-sized huts built on a spur of harder lava, making quite a little
village, which can be seen on a clear morning from the foot of the
mountain. Here the Subashiri route branches off to the right; ours to
Yoshida turned to the left, and we went sliding with long strides down
an incline of loose ashes and sand, into which our legs sank up to the
knee at every step. It was rapid but fatiguing, and required very high
stepping to avoid heavy and ignominious falls. The track is marked by
hundreds of cast-off “waraji”--straw sandals--a common object on all
Japanese roads, but here especially plentiful. My companion had provided
himself in Yokohama with a stock of them, specially made to fit over the
European boot; they were carefully adjusted and tied on by our servants
and porters, but I noticed that after the first hundred yards they had
always worked loose, and after a quarter of a mile they were hanging
gracefully round his ankles instead of protecting his feet. The
enjoyment of walking depends so much upon foot-gear that I am shy of
trying experiments, and I found that my stout boots with plenty of nails
served as well on Fuji as on any other mountain. Worn as Japanese wear
them, with a thong passing between the big toe and the next, the waraji
hold on well; they are soon worn out, or made useless by the breaking of
one of the strings of twisted grass which tie them to the ankles; but
this does not matter, for new ones can be bought for about a half-penny
at any road-side house. This part of Fuji was very desolate, the rocks
were formless blocks piled up without any arrangement of line, and the
débris was too loose for any plant to find a foothold; but after a few
thousand feet a ridge of more solid lava rose on each side of the gully
we were descending, and
[Illustration: AN OLD RED PINE AT YOSHIDA]
that on our left soon began to show some vegetation. There were pines
and larches, whose dwarfed and twisted forms showed the hardship of
their lives, and among them were some flowers too, clusters of a
delicate pink rhododendron, crimson wild roses, columbines, clematis,
golden-rod, and orange lilies.
The glissade of fine ashes brought us down as far as Number Five
station, and there we rejoined the upward path, for no one tries to
ascend over this loose stuff. High up in the gully we had seen men
digging out snow from under the ashes, and taking it across the flank of
the mountain to supply one of the rest-houses on the ridge to our right,
and troops of ascending pilgrims were visible now and then as a turn of
their path brought them in profile against the sky. Below Number Five
there is but one track; it plunges at once into a thick undergrowth of
bushes, and after this we had no more desolate wastes of ashes, but a
constant succession of trees and flowers, temples, and luxurious
rest-houses, gay with the cotton flags presented to them by their
patrons. The forest through which this path leads covers a steep ridge
of lava; the trees are mostly pine and other conifers, often very fine
old specimens, and under them is a tangle of flowering shrubs and plants
and of fallen timber. The people we met coming up seemed to appear
suddenly under our feet out of the green gloom; one party had always to
draw aside while the other passed; at times the path was a stairway of
old roots, at others a ditch between high banks, and never wide enough
for two to walk abreast. We heard a sound of singing below us, and stood
on the bank while about twenty white-clad pilgrims filed by, men of all
ages, each with a little bell tinkling at his waist; the front ones
chanted a short strain, which those at the back took up and answered,
and their song was faintly audible in the woods above us long after the
last had disappeared up the winding path. The chant is called “Rokkon
shōjō”--the six senses purified--the six, according to the Buddhists,
being eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and heart, and it is only sung by
the Fuji pilgrims.
At Number Two station we made a long halt, emptied the ashes out of our
boots, and washed our feet in the tubs of water which the little
servants brought us. It was a very different kind of place from the
rough shelter on the Gotemba side; the path came down a few steps as it
emerged from the wood, passed under a torii by a small temple, and then
spread out into quite a wide space in front of a long tea-house crowded
with pilgrims. On the opposite side of this space were three or four
platforms, spread with blankets and shaded with matting; these too were
occupied by groups of guests, who smoked and drank tea as they rested,
and below them the tops of the trees were cut away to give a space of
open sky and a view of the distance. Hundreds of little flags were
fluttering from long bamboo poles, and at the other end of this lively
scene the path went down a few more steps, and became again a narrow
track through the dense forest. The flowers all the way were abundant
and beautiful, constantly varying as we descended from one zone to
another; at last the wood became thinner, and we could get glimpses of
the distance, and of the grassy ridges on each side of us, tinged with
pale mauve by masses of funkia in blossom; and when we reached the
temple and the large open square of the Uma-gaeshi we were at the end of
the trees, and before us was a great slope of moorland leading down for
miles and miles to the pine grove by Yoshida.
There is but one break in the long walk through flowers and grass--a
little tea-house called Naka-no-chaya, whose three pine-trees are
distinguishable for a long distance across the moor. All round it there
are monumental pillars covered
[Illustration: NAKA-NO-CHAYA, ON THE NORTHERN SLOPE]
with inscriptions, which look like tombstones, but were really erected
by pilgrims to commemorate the number of ascents which they have made.
The variety of plants which grow and flourish on this slope of fine
cinders is truly remarkable. The most abundant flower was a pale mauve
scabious, which gave a prevailing tint to the whole moorland, but the
most conspicuous was a tall, slender day-lily
[Illustration: THE RED-PINE GROVE AT YOSHIDA]
with a pale yellow flower, which shone like a star in the evening when
the color had gone from all the others. A dark purple-blue campanula
(_Platycodon grandiflorum_) was also very effective, and a bright
crimson pink (_Dianthus superbus_) with beautifully fringed petals. But
it would be hopeless to try and enumerate them. I find in a sketchbook a
list of fifty-seven which I noted on the way between Naka-no-chaya and
Yoshida. A little later in the year this mass of flowers and grass is
mown down and carried to the villages at the foot of the mountain.
The last part of our walk was through a grove of grand red pines, which
seem to do better on this volcanic soil than anywhere else in Japan, and
then across a few fields to the top of the long village street, where we
at last found our tea-house and our baggage, and comfortable rooms, and
settled down for a night of well-earned repose.
[Illustration: FUJI OVER THE RICE-FIELDS OF SUZUKAWA]
FUJI FROM SUZUKAWA.
Oct. 3, 1892.
Fuji is quite free from clouds this morning, and in the soft autumnal
sunshine every detail is clearly visible as I sit with the shutters wide
open and eat my breakfast. The foreground is a level plain of
rice-fields, which stretches away for three or four miles to where the
first gentle ascent is marked by a line of villages and trees, and in
some
[Illustration: THE FLOWERY MOORLAND]
places, where irrigation is possible, the terraced fields climb a little
way up the mountain. Above them is a band of cultivated country, the
general effect of it dark green, varied by stripes of paler green
fields. At first the forms are sharply defined, but higher up the whole
becomes a blue-green mass. Next above this is a band of moorland with no
trees on it, lighter and warmer in color, the grasses and plants which
cover it tinged with yellow or orange by the autumn. As the morning sun
shines on it little blue shadows, in spots and waving lines, mark the
undulations of its surface. This belt of moorland reaches to the height
of about five thousand feet, and is very rich in flowers. Above it,
again, is a great band of forest; the warm color of the deciduous trees
at its lower edge gradually merges into the dark blue-green of the
pines, which mount a long way up on the summits of the ridges that at
this point seam the surface of the mountain. It is over this forest-land
that the morning clouds generally begin to form. As I write, a little
one, that looks like a puff of white steam, is beginning to float over
the trees, and this will grow until in an hour’s time the upper part of
Fuji will be invisible. The well-defined gullies are a light orange-red
tint, and the contrast between them and the dark pines on the dividing
ridges is the strongest opposition of color on Fuji, except that where
the snow and the black lava meet at its summit. As the gullies ascend
and the pines disappear the color again becomes more uniform, dark gray
with a tinge of Indian red, the red disappearing and the gray becoming a
rich purple as it runs up in irregular points and lines among the lower
snows. Only the very highest band is a solid white; on the left of the
truncated top is Kenga-mine, the highest point of the crater’s edge, and
next it a flat line shows where the Murayama path enters; to the right
of this a well-marked ridge of lava runs high up into the snow, and can
be traced down to the moorland, cutting off the Hōeizan portion from the
rest of the mountain. Beyond this ridge are two flatter curves--the
summits of Jizotaké and Kwannon-také--on the eastern side of the crater.
The general outline of the mountain on the left is one simple curve, the
almost level line where it begins to ascend from the Fujikawa River
becoming steeper and steeper towards the top. The most distinct
acceleration of grade is where the forests end and the ridges of lava
begin. The outline on the right is broken just above the pine-clad
ridges by the projection of Hōeizan, and again at the top of the
moorland by another smaller hill--Tsurugi-zan; and the effect on this
side is not so much a curve as two inclined planes, the first from
Kwannon-také to Hōeizan, the second from there to the moorland, after
which it becomes an undulating line of mounds leading away to the
Ashitaka range of older mountains. On this right side there is much less
variety of color, a sharp ridge of warm orange lava makes a crest to
Hōeizan, but the great cup-like hollow behind it and the treeless slope
below it are one uniform gray. Nearly two centuries have passed since
the eruption which altered this outline of Fuji and destroyed the
vegetation, and many more will have to elapse before the ashes are
sufficiently disintegrated to entice back the trees and flowers.
[Illustration]
SOME WANDERINGS IN JAPAN
[Illustration: TRICYRTIS HIRTA, ATAMI]
SOME WANDERINGS IN JAPAN
[Illustration]
The lakes which lie to the north of Fuji are not much visited by
foreigners; they are rather difficult of access, and the accommodation
in the tea-houses in that district is not luxurious; but for those who
can walk well, and put up with ordinary Japanese food and lodging, the
scenery will atone for everything. The old hills on the north once
looked over a great sloping plain to the shore of Suruga Bay, but the
upstart Fuji arose and blocked their view to the south; streams of lava
poured from it, and rolled down till they were stopped by these
buttresses of ancient rock, damming the rivers, and so forming this
chain of lakes at their base. Where the lava has been covered with fine
ashes, vegetation soon begins to conceal the work of destruction, but
the larger flows resist all attempts at cultivation; they still stand
in wide ridges above the rest of the country, gray lichens cover them,
and dwarfed trees find a foothold in the crevices between their blocks.
The winding tracks which lead across them are bad enough, for every
little hump in the path is not a pebble which rolls aside as your foot
touches it, but is a knob of solid rock, and it is your toe that has to
give way; the untrodden part of the scrubby forest would stop any animal
but an active monkey. We traversed one of the widest flows, called
Aoki-ga-hara (green-tree moor), from the number of evergreens which grow
over it, on the way between Shoji, the smallest, and Motosu, the largest
of the lakes, walking for hours in single file along a narrow trail with
hardly an opening anywhere in the dense foliage; it was late in the
evening, and the imprecations in Japanese and English ought to have
thrown a lurid light on that dusky path. The dividing-line between the
lava and the older rock is as clearly visible now as it was on that day
when the molten torrent was arrested in its course and piled itself in a
solid wave against the immovable hills. Some subterranean settling must
still be going on, for a few years ago the lakes began to rise, and they
have remained at the higher level, so that as we rowed along the shore
we could see below us the roofs of cottages and the fences of
rice-fields, and forests of dead pines rose gaunt and bare out of the
water. Of all the places I saw in Japan, Motosu seemed the most remote;
the rise of the lake must have ruined many of the inhabitants, and a
settled gloom seemed to hang over the few charcoal-burners,
wood-cutters, and fishermen who remain. We found rooms in an old
tea-house, where fine wood-work, now blackened and decayed, showed signs
of a former prosperity which will hardly revive unless prices rise, for
when we left the next morning the landlord sadly presented us with a
bill for nineteen sen (about sixpence), which for two foreigners and
two servants came to a very modest sum per head. We crossed the lake by
boat, and were landed at the foot of a trackless hill-side, overgrown
with tall grasses and wild flowers, through which it was difficult to
walk, but our local guides soon found a path which led us in the
direction of the Fujikawa. Here we were off the volcanic soil, the
beeches and other trees were magnificent, and in one wood we walked
between banks of maidenhair fern (_Adiantum pedatum_) growing five or
six feet high. How well I remember that day of glorious sunshine, the
view back over the lake with Fuji towering
[Illustration: TAGO-NO-URA]
behind it, the mountain road through forests with new trees and plants
at every turn, the gaudy butterflies, the long zigzag descent by the
pine-clad spur which brought us to the Suzukawa Valley, and the gorgeous
sunset as we whirled down the rapids to Shimoyama. There are five lakes
in the chain, Motosu, Shoji, Nemba, Kawaguchi, and Yamanaka, and they
descend in level from Motosu on the west to Yamanaka on the east. Nemba
lies in a hollow of wooded hills, with a couple of partially drowned
villages on its shore, in which the cottage roofs are strangely
constructed, and the people wear long knickerbockers of blue striped
cotton. Kawaguchi is the most beautiful of them all; its waters have
only risen a foot or two, so that no damage has been done except the
submersion of a few fields, and Funatsu and Kodachi, with picturesque
old temples and cottages shaded with gourds, like Jonah’s, are thriving
towns compared with the other lake-side hamlets.
[Illustration: COTTAGES AT NEMBA]
I was staying at Yoshida, within easy walking distance of Funatsu, in
the early part of September, when all the countryside was keeping the
Bon festival in memory of the dead--a sort of Japanese All-Souls day
which lasts for a week. Fires were lighted at night on all the
hill-sides; the path leading up to every little temple could be traced
by a line of blazing spots, and the great lonely slope of Fuji was
dotted with them here and there, marking the positions of the
rest-houses and the few scattered huts of grass-cutters and
charcoal-burners. I have seen the same thing in Switzerland, near
Martigny, where on the eve of St. John’s day every cattle-tender far up
the mountains greeted his distant neighbors with a bonfire. This part of
the ceremony is called, in Japanese, _hi-matsuri_ (fire festival). Other
observances are placing offerings of food before the family graves,
which in Yoshida were generally at the end of the back garden, and
erecting a little altar in the house, on which dishes of rice, fruit,
and sweetmeats are laid, and before which prayers are said.
We had a typhoon on the 4th of September, with such torrents of rain and
gusts of wind that the houses had to be enclosed with their wooden
shutters, and there was nothing to be done but lie on the floor in the
darkness and listen to the turmoil of the elements outside. Suddenly,
above all the other noises, I heard a monotonous chant, and, opening a
crack in my shutters, I saw a procession of men, dressed only in “kasa”
and straw rain-coats passing down the village street. Some of them
carried big drums slung to poles, on which the others banged, while all
of them groaned in unison a sentence which I could not catch. It was a
long time before I could induce Matsuba to tell me what it all meant;
but at last he confessed that it was done to drive away the storm-demon;
he was evidently ashamed of this method of praying for fair weather, and
explained that it was only in these out-of-the-way places his countrymen
were so superstitious. Anyhow, it was efficacious, for the typhoon blew
itself out during the night. There was more or less rain for some days
after, but we had nothing again like that day’s downpour, and I started
in more promising weather for a walk over the hills to Kofu. From
Funatsu I crossed a corner of Kawaguchi, and took a steep mountain road
on the other side; some kind of matsuri was going on there too, and the
lake was dotted with boatfuls of people beating drums and singing. The
road we took is said in the guide-books to be practicable for
jinrikishas, but the typhoon had completed the work of destruction which
the heavy rains in July had begun, and there were very few yards of it
left over which a wheeled vehicle could travel. On the other side of the
pass, Misaka-toge, where I stayed to lunch and admire the view of Fuji,
and to collect seeds of a grand red lychnis which grew there abundantly,
we went through a village, Nakagawa, that had been almost destroyed by a
torrent. The street and the gardens were filled with bowlders and gravel
and fallen tree trunks, and the roofs only were visible above the mass
of wreckage. The well-fitted timbers of a Japanese roof, especially when
there is a heavy thatch over them, make it the least destructible part
of the house; the lower part may collapse in a typhoon or earthquake,
but the roof settles down over the ruins practically uninjured. I saw
one near the Tokaido which had been taken off bodily by the wind and
deposited in a field the other side of the road without losing its
shape. I looked for the river which had done all this damage to
Nakagawa, and found only a little, innocent, prattling brook about a
yard wide.
Kofu is a busy place in the centre of a large silk-growing district. All
the hill-sides around are covered with scrubby-looking mulberry bushes,
and in the villages almost every cottage had its pile of golden cocoons,
which the women were winding off into skeins as they sat and chattered
by their doorways. As you pass Japanese houses in fine weather you see
almost everything that is going on inside; they are set down close to
the road, and the sliding-screens allow you to look right through to the
garden at the back. When it is cold or wet all the wooden shutters are
closed, and they have then a very sad and deserted appearance. I went to
a very good theatre in Kofu, and afterwards to what might be called a
wax-work show, but that the figures were
[Illustration: LAKE SUWA AND THE NAKASENDO MOUNTAINS, FROM
KAMI-NO-SUWA]
made of carved and painted wood, where the incidents of the murder of
Ii-Kamonno-Kami were represented with a startling fidelity to nature. He
was assassinated one winter’s night in the streets of Tōkyō by the
retainers of a rival Daimio, and the snowy ground showed to advantage
all the details of disembowelled bodies and mangled limbs. The last two
figures were mechanical. A retainer kneeling in front of the Daimio
slowly opened a bloody handkerchief and showed him the head of his
enemy, whereupon the Daimio’s eyebrows went up and the corners of his
mouth went down, giving him a most comical expression of horror.
The roads are wider here than in most parts of Japan, and there are
comparatively few jinrikishas. Most of the travelling is done in basha,
small wagonettes with no springs, which jolt the very life out of you. I
engaged one to take me on to Lake Suwa, on the Nakasendo road, a journey
of forty miles, and arrived there feeling like an aching jelly. After
travelling a few miles from Kofu we came to a river where the bridge had
been washed away. I and my baggage were ferried over, and the driver
attempted to ford it, but the water was too deep for him, and I was left
stranded with my impedimenta on a wide waste of pebbles. Fortunately the
man with whom I had made my bargain had foreseen this possibility, and
when I could get some coolies to help me with my baggage across half a
mile of stones and bowlders, I found another basha waiting for me. All
the first part of the journey was a long ascent through wooded, hilly
country, with road-side villages at short intervals. In one of them,
Tsutaki, where we stopped to change horses, a school treat was going on.
The place was gayly decorated with lanterns and arches of leaves and
paper flowers, and in the temple court-yard the children had made
realistic figures, among them a life-sized tiger, ingeniously
constructed with straws of different colors. The low wooden cottages,
with broad eaves and stones piled on the top, looked very like Swiss
chalets, except that they all had green roof crests, sometimes of iris,
but more often of a bunchy kind of lycopodium which the natives called
yuwashiba. Almost every one had a screen of bamboo on the south side,
with gourds of different kinds growing up it and tumbling over the roof
and the out-buildings. At last, with long spells of walking, very
welcome as a rest from the weary jolting, we reached the tea-house at
the top of the pass, and then rattled down a somewhat better road for
about twelve miles, emerging at dusk into the broad mountain-guarded
valley in which Suwa lies. The flat lands near the lake are intersected
by little streams and canals, along which the peasants go to their work
in long, narrow punts, very like those which are used for the same
purpose in Picardy--another instance of the way in which similar
conditions in widely distant countries lead to similar habits and
inventions.
I stayed at Kami-no-suwa in a delightful tea-house, with clean polished
wood-work, and quilts covered with a soft thin silk called kaiki, very
pleasant and cooling to a mosquito-tortured skin. Cleanliness is the
great luxury of the Japanese; their foot-gear is always removed before
entering the house, so that the mats may not be soiled; the wood-work is
never painted, stained, or varnished, but left with a well-planed
surface, which shows its natural color; the ceilings are thin planks,
slightly overlapping each other, the grain of each being carefully
selected to combine with the lines in those next it; there are no
hangings or fixed pieces of furniture to collect the dust, and no
carpets to be taken up and shaken, so that spring cleaning, that terror
of the Western house-keeper, is unnecessary; the whole room can be swept
out every morning, the walls and ceiling rubbed with a duster, and there
it is, all as neat as a
[Illustration: TOURISTS AT A WATERFALL]
[Illustration: NIEGAWA, ON THE NAKASENDO]
new pin. At Shimo-no-suwa, about three miles on, the Koshu-kaido, along
which I had been travelling from Kofu, joins the Nakasendo, the central
mountain road, one of the main routes between Kyoto and Tōkyō. A new
road has been made most of the way, admirably engineered, with gentle
gradients, but so badly executed that it had already fallen to pieces in
some places, and it was covered with loose road-metal which made
jinrikisha travelling very laborious. My men usually preferred the old
steep road, which cuts off corners, and is solid though very rough, and
after a couple of days I sent back all the jinrikishas except the one
which carried my baggage, finding my own legs the best means of
conveyance. From the Shiojiri Pass I looked back over Suwa, saw Fuji
through the blue haze of a lovely autumn morning, a long way off, but
still towering above all the other hills, and then dropped down into a
new set of mountains, rivers, and valleys. The scenery of the Nakasendo
gets more and more picturesque, until it reaches a climax in the valley
of the Kisogawa, on which I first looked from the summit of the Torii
Pass, four thousand and odd feet above the sea. Each village on the road
had its own peculiarities of costume, architecture, and
manufacture--cheap lacquer-ware, combs, pickles, and so on, and of all
these Matsuba bought a stock, for it is the habit of every Japanese on
his travels to take back with him “meibutsu,” the characteristic
productions of the places he has visited, as presents for those he has
left at home.
[Illustration: A LITTLE SHINTO SHRINE, NEAR THE NAKASENDO]
There are many celebrated mountains in this district, each with its own
special god and shrines, and I constantly met bands of pilgrims dressed
in white, with long staves and big hats, or saw boat-loads of them going
down
[Illustration: A BOAT-MENDER BY THE TENRYUGAWA]
the Kisogawa in the few places where it is navigable. After some days of
glorious weather, with a sun which turned the wings of the myriad
dragon-flies hovering over the rivers to spots of light, and made all
clothing seem superfluous, I was suddenly arrested by a violent storm at
a little village called Suwara. A number of pilgrims had been driven to
shelter in the same tea-house; they spent the day in chanting prayers,
ringing a little bell, and tapping blocks of wood together to mark the
time; and they began it again at three o’clock the next morning, before
starting on their trudge. The motive of these pilgrimages is not in the
least penitential. Certain hardships have to be endured by every
traveller in mountain regions, but the Japanese are good walkers and
accustomed to simple living, and in their composition they have a large
stock of intelligent curiosity which makes them enjoy all that is new
and beautiful in the country through which they pass. The history and
literature of their fatherland form a large part of their education, and
almost every remarkable spot has some legendary or poetical association
apart from its natural beauty; their religion teaches them, too, that
not only temples and shrines are sacred, but that every poetic thought
or heroic deed, every grand tree or rock or lovely landscape, has in it
something of the divine.
On the banks of the Kisogawa, not far from Suwara, there is a large flat
rock, which is called Nezame-no-toko, the Bed of Awakening, for here
Urashima the fisher-boy, a sort of Japanese Rip Van Winkle, is supposed
by some to have returned to real life after his long trance. The usual
version of the story is this: Urashima lived with his parents at Yura,
by the sea of Japan, helping them in their fishing; but one day his boat
did not return, and he was given up for dead. He had met the Sea-god’s
daughter, who had taken him away to live with her and love her in an
evergreen land. What seemed to him like a few weeks passed by in
happiness, but at last he said, “My parents will be sorrowing for me; I
must go back and comfort them,” and he prevailed on his princess to
spare him for a while. She gave him a casket, saying that as long as he
kept it closed she would always be with him, but if he opened it, she
and the evergreen land would be lost to him forever. He had really been
away for centuries, his home had disappeared, and everything in Yura was
changed. In despair he opened the forbidden box, a faint blue mist
floated out from it across the sea, he turned from a handsome youth to
an old decrepit man, and in a few minutes lay dead upon the shore, for
in that box his princess had enclosed all the hours of their happy life.
No portion of the Nakasendo is finer than that near Midono; the valley
narrows and the road in many places overhangs the rushing Kisogawa, the
vegetation is luxuriant, walnuts, oaks, chestnuts, and maples shade the
road, and great groves of bamboo wave their plumes in every little
breeze which comes down from the mountains through the ravines in which
they grow. By the river-side I noticed many fine-leaved plants; some old
garden friends, and others new to me; yellow wagtails fluttered jauntily
from rock to rock, and lines of swallows on the telegraph wires showed
that autumn was at hand.
I turned off from the Nakasendo at Hashiba, where it begins to ascend
the Magome Pass, and took a little cross-country track, turning eastward
again up the valley of the Hirosegawa, which, after two days’ walking,
brought me to Iida and the banks of the Tenryugawa. This road was not
mentioned in my guide-book, but Nakajima Sanju, the jinrikisha man who
had accompanied me all the way from Kami-no-suwa, maintained that it was
practicable, and that he could take my baggage through in his kuruma. He
did
[Illustration: BANANA-TREES AT ATAMI]
it, too, but I occasionally had to hire two extra men to help him, and
in some places they and Matsuba had to carry kuruma, baggage and all.
There was one long climb through a dense wood which particularly
impressed me; I walked so far ahead of them that I could only just hear
the continual cry, “Yo-sha! Yo-sha!” with which the men encouraged each
other; the masses of foliage above me, the shrubs and ferns below them,
enclosed me in a green maze; from under the arched roots of a colossal
cryptomeria a clear little spring gushed out; occasionally a
raucous-voiced jay flew across the path, or I had to stop and examine
the huge toads, seven or eight inches long and almost as broad, that
sprawled about on the road-side. When my men overtook me at a tea-house
some miles farther on, one of them was carrying a brace of these toads
skinned. They looked as big as the “poulet” of a cheap restaurant, and
he told me that they were very good for weakly children.
[Illustration: THE FERRY AT TOKIMATA]
At Tokimata I engaged a boat with five men to take me down the rapids as
far as the Tokaido; the river was running high, and they would not do it
for less than twenty-four yen--a good price for a journey of only ten or
twelve hours; but when you remember that it takes them ten days or a
fortnight to haul the boat back, it does not seem excessive. Don
Pedro’s remark, “What need the bridge much wider than the flood?” does
not apply to most of the Japanese rivers; usually they are just a
trickle of water among a wide bed of pebbles, which is filled after
heavy rains with a raging torrent, but Lake Suwa serves as a reservoir
for the Tenryugawa, and it always has enough water to be navigable. The
boats used on it are about thirty feet long, flat-bottomed and
flat-sided, with a square stern and a high, pointed bow; they are very
loosely built and flexible, and the bottom boards are so thin that they
wabble like a sheet of paper when passing over rough water or shallows.
A heavy foot would break through them, and it is necessary to tread only
on the bamboos which are laid lengthwise, resting on the cross-ribs.
[Illustration: ON THE TENRYUGAWA]
My baggage was piled in the middle of the boat, and a seat arranged on
it for Matsuba and myself; one man took the long stern oar while the
other four worked in the bows, and within a few minutes of the start we
were plunging down between high cliffs, charging at rocks which we only
avoided by a few inches, swirling round in eddies at the foot of one
rapid while the men got breath for the next, and until we stopped for
our mid-day meal at the little
[Illustration: THE VILLAGE STREET, ATAMI--VRIES ISLAND IN THE
DISTANCE]
village of Nakabe there was no time to sketch, or think, or do anything
but enjoy the wild, exciting race. The river twists, between high
mountains, down a gorge with such sharp curves that it is often
impossible to see any exit, and our boat would rush down, heading
straight for a cliff against which the water dashed furiously; while one
man in the bows whacked the side with his paddle for luck, and then
stood ready with a pole, the other three pulled like mad, and just when
I thought “we must come to grief this time,” she would suddenly turn and
swish round the corner into smoother water. The rapids continued to be
amusing, though the fun was not quite so fast and furious, all the way
to Kajima, where the mountains end and a broad plain begins; below here
the river still ran swiftly, but smoothly, divided into several channels
by long gravel banks, on which gray willows and bamboos grew, and snipe
and herons congregated. We met strings of boats being laboriously towed
along: the wind generally blows up stream, and they are
[Illustration: ON THE TENRYUGAWA, NEAR KAJIMA]
able on these lower reaches to help themselves by hoisting a sail, but I
shall never understand how they get their boats back through those upper
rapids. It was getting dark when we passed through the ruins of the old
Tokaido bridge, but in the dusk I could distinguish a row of familiar
Noah’s-ark-like forms; they were current-mills moored in the river; and
then I knew what my day had lacked--the companionship of the man with
whom I had passed so many hundreds of them on the Danube. There was
nothing on the Danube quite so sporting as these rapids, but I think it
would be possible to get through them in a decked canoe, such as those
we used on that river. The pace is tremendous; we did the ninety miles
from Tokimata to Naka-no-machi in ten hours of actual travelling, though
the latter portion of the journey was on comparatively sluggish water.
About a month after this I stopped at Shizuoka, a large town on the
Tokaido, where Ieyasu, greatest of the Shoguns, spent the end of his
life in learned leisure, and where Keiki, the last of his successors,
deposed in 1868, when the Mikado came to his own again, still lives
quietly as a private gentleman. How much more dignified and reasonable
is his Oriental acceptance of the accomplished fact than the restless
scheming of some Western pretenders, who are unable to see that their
ancestors, whether kings or emperors, owed their power to national
feeling, and persist in a futile struggle against the inevitable! The
Japanese obedience to law and authority, which must, however indirectly,
be an expression of the will of the people, was never better shown than
in the promptness with which the sword-bearing Samurai ceased to carry
their weapons. The Samurai’s blade had been for centuries his most
sacred possession, a halo of poetry surrounded it, and the right to wear
it in public distinguished him from the common herd; and yet when the
imperial edict was issued in 1876 he laid it aside without a
[Illustration: AUTUMN-GRASS (SUZUKI)]
murmur, and the curio-shops were soon full of swords, which a month
before their owners would sooner have died than lose. It was no doubt
very inconvenient to walk about always with two swords stuck in your
obi, and perhaps he felt like the curate in the “Bab Ballads,” who was
forced by his mild rival to curl his hair and smoke--
“I long have wished for some
Excuse for this revulsion;
Now that excuse has come,
I do it on compulsion;”
but recent events show that though his ordinary life has become peaceful
and bloodless, there has been no falling off in the pluck of a Japanese
soldier.
Ieyasu was first buried at Kuno-zan, which I reached after about an
hour’s ride by jinrikisha from Shizuoka. The first part of the way was
over a rice-covered plain, from which gay-colored hills, striped with
white buckwheat, dark green tea, and pale green daikon, gradually rose,
narrowing down towards the sea, and finally leaving only a strip of
sandy soil, mostly planted with sugar-cane, between the steep cliffs and
the shore. The little villages were odorous with drying fish, slices of
bonito hanging in festoons in front of every cottage, and the shore was
dotted with evaporating-tubs for getting salt. The mortuary temples,
which served as a model for those afterwards built at Nikko, stand on
the top of the cliff, and are reached by a zigzag flight of steps cut
out of the rock; they are not so elaborate as the Nikko temples or the
Shiba shrines, but have a severer beauty of their own, which nature has
helped by decorating every stone and tree-trunk with silvery gray
lichen, lovely in color against the background of red-lacquered
buildings. The interior of the oratory, which, with its surrounding
fence, has a roof of bronze, is mostly black and gold, and there the
very affable priests who had shown me round held a little service in
honor of Ieyasu, presenting me afterwards with the sweet wine and cakes
which had been used as offerings. It is commonly said that the body of
the great Shogun still lies under the simple stone monument behind the
oratory, and that only a few hairs were removed and buried at Nikko;
certainly this is the more impressive spot for a warrior’s grave, with
the wild hills behind, and the sea and coast spread out for miles below
the towering cliff.
The road on to Okitsu, where I had to rejoin the railway, led me inland
past Ryugeji, a temple where there are the finest specimens of the
screw-palm (_Cycas revoluta_) to be seen in Japan, and then to the sea
again at Shimizu, a nice little port, just opposite the sandy fir-clad
spit of land called Mio-no-matsubara, enclosing a smaller bay in the
great curve of Suruga, which often appears in Japanese pictures. This is
the scene of a legend which has been dramatized, if you can call them
dramas, for one of the classical No dances. It tells how a fisherman
watching his nets saw a fairy alight on the sand and lay aside her robe
of feathers; how he managed to steal the robe so that she could not fly
away again, and only restored it to her when she consented to dance for
him under the pine-trees one of the dances which are never seen by
mortal eyes. Near the tea-house in Shimizu where I stopped to refresh
there was a temple dedicated to Inari, the Shinto goddess of the
rice-fields, whose shrines are guarded by foxes; the approach to it was
under three avenues of small red wooden torii placed closely together,
apparently votive offerings, for some of them were old and decayed and
others quite bright and new.
At Numadzu, farther to the east on the Tokaido, but still on the shore
of Suruga Bay, I again left the train and
[Illustration: A RUSTIC BRIDGE AT DOGASHIMA, NEAR MIYA-NO-SHITA]
followed the course of the old road, from which the railway here
diverges, as far as Mishima, and then, after crossing the ridge of
mountain which forms the backbone of the Idzu Peninsula, descended to
Atami on the western coast of Odawara Bay, a favorite watering-place
during the winter months. The orange and banana trees testify to the
mildness of its climate, and perhaps the geyser, which every fourth hour
squirts out mud and boiling water by the village street, helps to keep
up the temperature. Vries Island, with its eternally smoke-capped
volcano, lies on the horizon away across the sea, and the natives
believe that there is a connection between the two, for whenever Vries
is particularly active the geyser discharges more violently.
[Illustration: AVENUES OF TORII IN FRONT OF AN INARI TEMPLE, NEAR
SHIMIZU]
On the 3d of November I started with a friend from Yokohama to walk over
the Ten Province Pass (Jikkoku-toge) to Hakone and Miya-no-shita. It was
the Emperor’s birthday, and all Atami was gay with flags; the national
ensign with a red ball on a white ground fluttered everywhere. We
mounted the steep street, and looked back at the village roofs and the
deep blue water of Odawara Bay, and then turned into the woods of old
camphor-trees surrounding the temple Ki-no-miya. Some of the camphors
are enormous, and the largest of them are encircled with ropes of
twisted straw and bunches of gohei, which show that they are sacred
objects. Beyond the temple the path ascends, first through rice-fields
and then up rough grassy hills, until it reaches the long plateau of
turf where the Ten Province stone stands. Though so late in the year,
there were still plenty of flowers. Down near Atami long sprays of
hototogisu (_Tricyrtis_), with spotty purple flowers, hung out from the
sandy banks, and by our path I saw Michaelmas daisies, golden-rod,
dark-blue monk’s-hood, sky-blue gentians, magenta-flowered garlic,
thistles of various colors, wild chrysanthemums, pink or white with a
gold centre, and the beautiful white stars of the grass of Parnassus.
The sun was quite hot, and we pulled out some provisions and sat down on
the grass near the stone to enjoy them and the marvellous view. To the
north the snowy cone of Fuji rose high against the blue sky; between us
and it the long crest of down-land was mostly covered with suzuki
(_Eulalia japonica_), a lovely grass with tall plumes of seed which
shine like silver gossamer, and the ranges of lower mountains were
brilliant with the autumnal colors of maples and other trees; below us
on the east lay the little peninsula of Manazura, jutting out into
Sagami Bay, with a curve of rice-fields on each side of the narrow neck
which connects it with the mainland, and beyond it the long straight
line of the Pacific was broken only by Vries Island and its cloud of
smoke; a succession of hilly promontories and little bays stretched all
down the coast of Idzu to the southward, and returned northward again up
the other side of the peninsula, past Joyama, with a lake-like inlet of
sea, to Numadzu, where the great sweep of Suruga Bay began, bordered
with sands and sunny rice-fields, and ended only at Kuno-zan, far to the
westward. Our path went on along the downs,
[Illustration: JIZŌ SAMA, NEAR HAKONE]
through suzuki, dwarf bamboo, and little stunted woods, until a deep
descent led us down to the Hakone Lake, dark blue and sombre among its
encircling hills; it then mounted once more for a short distance, passed
the hot springs of Ashi-no-yu, and finally, while the grassy hills still
glowed in the light of the setting sun, brought us down to the Fujiya at
Miya-no-shita, where a delicious natural warm bath and a good dinner
made a fitting termination to a glorious day.
At the bottom of a ravine almost perpendicularly below Miya-no-shita
lies the little village of Dogashima, with a turbulent mountain stream
and a very shaky bamboo bridge. The path and steps leading down to it
are kept continually green by the overflow from the warm springs, and
when I was there they swarmed with land-crabs, queer little beasts with
bodies of dark green, blue, brown, or red, and a pair of light-colored
claws, which they held up in a threatening attitude when I attempted to
catch them. As they heard me approach they scurried off towards their
holes, but they were so clumsy and so numerous that I could hardly help
stepping on them.
One of the common objects by Japanese road-sides is the figure of Jizō,
a Buddhist saint who is the helper of all who are in trouble, and
especially the patron of travellers and children. Near the path between
Hakone and Ashi-no-yu we passed a colossal presentment of him, carved in
bold relief out of a mass of andesite rock, a very striking work of some
ancient sculptor. It is said to have been done in a single night by that
marvellously active saint Kobo Daishi, who, according to popular
tradition, climbed all the mountains in Japan, and found time, when he
was not preaching and confounding sceptics, to perform wonders in
sculpture, painting, and calligraphy. Jizō, in the rudely carved
statuettes by the way-sides, is a benevolent-looking priest, holding a
traveller’s staff in his right hand and a globe in his left. He stands
on a lotus flower, and around his feet are piled many pebbles, placed
there by wayfarers. The reason for the custom is this: On the banks of
the So-dzu-kawa, the river of the lower world, there lives a hag who
catches little children as they attempt to cross, steals their clothes,
and makes them toil with her at her endless task of piling the stones on
its shores. Jizō helps these children, and every pebble which is laid at
his feet lightens the labor of some little one below. I never passed
without adding my contribution, and if I cannot attribute my safety
during my wanderings to his kindly aid, at least I am indebted to him
for many a pleasant thought, and for the memory of many a lovely
landscape or flower seen by his side.
[Illustration]
AUTUMN IN JAPAN
[Illustration: THE AUTUMN LILY]
AUTUMN IN JAPAN
From the spring-time, when I reached Japan in the rain and began to
grumble at the weather, and all through the damp and the downpour of the
summer months, I had been consoled by the promises of my friends. They
assured me that when the autumn came I should have week after week of
glorious sunshine, a clear fresh air, and probably not a wet day between
Michaelmas and Christmas. Either the season was an exceptional one, or
else this is a cherished myth; there certainly were more fine days in
October and November, but not a week passed without one or two days when
work out-of-doors was impossible. They talked, too, of the glory of the
maples, of hill-sides and rocky ravines clothed with scarlet and
crimson, and their enthusiasm in this matter was amply
[Illustration: FIELDS NEAR HAMAMATSU]
justified, but no one had told me of the beauty of the lilies of the
field, which decorate so many of the banks between the rice patches with
their tassels of glowing scarlet. I saw them first near Hamamatsu, a
pleasant town on the Tokaido, which I reached on the 16th of September,
after a little tour in the interior; their brilliant color at once
attracted me, and I hastened to make drawings of them, for my passport
had almost expired, and I feared that I might not find them elsewhere.
There was no need to be in such a hurry, for they seem to grow
abundantly wherever they get a chance. Hamamatsu was quite unlike any
other Japanese town I had seen; the houses had a projecting upper story
and broad overhanging roofs, and the principal trade seemed to be in
toys. There were shops full of drums and kites, and dolls with all their
belongings, and the thousand and one things which the Japanese delight
in giving to their beloved children. As I passed a little garden I saw
what looked like a fearful atrocity--dozens of babies’ heads, pale and
gray as if in death, cut off at the neck and impaled on short
[Illustration: THE EDGE OF THE TOKAIDO, NEAR HAMAMATSU]
stakes, stood about the ground; but on coming nearer the mystery was
explained: they were life-sized dolls’ heads of papier-maché, put out to
dry in the sun before receiving their final coat of paint. The
neighboring villages were peculiar; every cottage was protected from the
winds by a high hedge of clipped yew, and the street seemed to pass
between two green walls, over which the heavily thatched roofs just
peeped. The openings gave a glimpse of court-yards and cottage fronts
where women and men were hard at work, threshing their beans of many
colors and spreading them on mats to dry, weaving blue cotton cloths, or
winding off the skeins of shining yellow silk. The typhoon a fortnight
earlier had strewn the Tokaido with pine-trees; a passage wide enough
for a jinrikisha to pass had been sawn through some of the great
prostrate trunks, and others were still supported by their mangled
limbs, so that we could squeeze under them. They sadly impeded the work
of a company of white-clad engineers, who, with all the latest military
contrivances, were laying a field-telegraph along the road. What a
contrast were these sons of change to the fishermen returning from their
morning’s work with heavy loads of bonito, and to the peasants with
their simple and primitive implements, all working and living as they
have done for centuries past! Politics and changes of government matter
very little to them; the rice crop and the take of fish are affairs of
much more importance; they are the real life of a country, preserving
its habits, costumes, and traditions, and staving off for a time the
influences of railroads and steamships, which threaten to reduce man’s
condition throughout the world to one dull level of uniformity.
Fortunately they form a solid majority in every land, a mass not easily
moved, and even in progressive Japan it will be a long time before
ill-cut trousers and steam-ploughs replace the kimono and the spade.
The Tokaido Railway takes you in twelve hours from Hamamatsu to Kōbe,
and while waiting till a new passport came from Tōkyō I had time to see
a little more of the beautiful country around that hospitable port. The
shores near Suma and Maiko, a little to the westward, are picturesque,
and close by is the Strait of Akashi, through which a constant stream of
traffic passes, ships of all kinds and sizes, from the little
fishing-boats towed from the beach, to the big steamers from Europe and
America. The island of Awaji lies across the entrance to the Inland Sea,
leaving a narrow passage at each end; but the tide rushes so violently
through the Naruta Channel to
[Illustration: THE ISLAND OF AWAJI, FROM MAIKO]
the south, between Awaji and Shikoku, that it is often unnavigable, and
most of the shipping comes this way. There are the remains of a Daimio’s
castle at Akashi; the main building is gone, and the plateau on which it
stood is now a garden with tea-booths, but the foundation walls, the
corner turrets, and the moat show what an important stronghold it must
have been; and the view from it, down the Inland Sea to the west, over
to the Shikoku Mountains on the south, and eastward to Osaka Bay and the
hills of Yamato, is extensive and very fine in its outlines. At Maiko
[Illustration: ON THE SHORE NEAR MAIKO, THE STRAIT OF AKASHI TO THE
RIGHT]
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
[Illustration: LILIES BY THE SHORE, SUMA]
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,
[Illustration: A GRAVEYARD AT SUMA]
“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.
[Illustration: HILLS BEHIND KŌBE]
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.
[Illustration: A BAMBOO YARD AT MAIBARA]
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
[Illustration: BLUE WATER-WEED]
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.
[Illustration: THE TRAVELLING THEATRE, MAIBARA]
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.
[Illustration: LAUNCHING A BOAT]
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
[Illustration: LAKE BIWA WITH FLOODED RICE-FIELDS, NEAR MAIBARA]
narrow streets; they are built on solid wooden wheels, and are dragged
about by strings of coolies, the young men of the guild dancing and
shouting in front of them, waving fans by day and lanterns after dark to
direct the coolies’ movements, while the older members follow in
white-curtained carts. The wood-work around the stage is lacquered, gold
and black and red, with elaborate brass ornaments, and the pagoda-like
roof which covers it is of burnished gold, surmounted with a dragon or
phœnix or other mythical animal. The part behind the stage is enclosed
with hangings, Chinese embroideries, Persian rugs, or silk brocades, and
two of them had fine pieces of Flemish tapestry, which must have come
over with the Dutch centuries ago; the buxom ladies and knights in armor
looked odd, and yet pleasantly familiar, and my heart went out to the
expatriated strangers, so lonely amid that Eastern crowd. In front of
each stage hung a bunch of “gohei,” the twisted strips of white paper
which are the universal emblem of the Shinto religion, the only simple
things among the masses of gorgeous color, and they seemed to give the
key-note to the whole; for Shinto is, above everything else, an
ancestor-worship, a religious respect for the country and for the men
whose heroic deeds still inspire its people, and the short dramas which
the children acted were all founded on old stories--how Yoritomo’s son
sacrificed his life to save the young Mikado, and other well-known
motives from Japanese history. The boys were admirably trained and
beautifully dressed; they rolled their eyes and grimaced in exactly the
same way as their elders of the profession, and the crowd vigorously
applauded their facial contortions. In one company there was a little
mite of two years old; he had not to speak at all, only to cry out once
or twice, but he knew his part as well as the rest, and always looked up
at his boy father at the right moment. During the afternoon I walked
round the town, first to the Buddhist temple, the great hall of which
was crowded with people sleeping, eating, and praying, and then up the
long avenue leading to the Shinto temple of Hachiman. It was lined with
stalls and booths for refreshments of all kinds, with conjurers,
purse-trick men, lucky wheels, quack-medicine vendors, and so on, and
near the big granite torii and lanterns were the market-gardeners with
dwarf pines, oranges laden with fruit, camellias, and other trees. One
had nothing but orchid-plants, none of them, unfortunately, in flower. I
joined a large circle of spectators who were watching a scriever, which
is, I believe, the professional name for the artists who draw on the
flag-stones; this one had no pavement, so he prepared an even ground by
sprinkling some light gray sand over the dusty road; his colors were
bags of black, white, red, and blue sand; from one of these he took a
handful, and drew his design by letting the powder run from his closed
fist in a line which varied in thickness as he tightened or loosened his
grasp. He wrote or drew in this way with wonderful rapidity as he
squatted on the ground, and he talked all the time, obliterating each
drawing as soon as he had finished it. I watched him draw a figure of a
girl, and he began by putting down the spots of the pattern on her
kimono with blue, then added the shadow lines of the dress, relieved it
here and there with white, sketched the face and hands in red, and
finally added a bold outline in black, which completed the picture, thus
working in that reverse way to our natural instincts which you so often
notice in this land of Topsy-turvydom.
As evening approached, all the yama began to collect in the square in
front of another Shinto temple, where the great Hachiman car with
colossal swords, and the Mikoshi, a shrine carried about on men’s
shoulders, were already placed. In the river on one side of this square
many boats were moored, spread with rush mats and with the red blankets
which have become so common in Japan, and in them people were
picknicking; over the bridge which crossed it the unwieldy structures
were dragged from the town by shouting crowds; each in turn gave a final
performance in front of the temple, and was then drawn aside to make
room for the next. This began at half-past five, and it was eleven
o’clock before the last of
[Illustration: ONE OF THE “YAMA” AT THE NAGAHAMA MATSURI
From a printed programme sold on the street]
them had been ranged with the others to the right of the temple steps.
As night came on they were covered with big lanterns, the stages were
lighted by lamps in glass shades, and attendants with candles on long
sticks illuminated the face of each little actor while he was speaking.
When the six gorgeous yama with their attendants and gayly dressed
performers were all drawn up in line against
[Illustration: SOME HATS AT THE NAGAHAMA MATSURI]
a background of solemn cryptomerias, with an excited crowd dancing and
waving lanterns in front of them, the spectacle was more beautiful than
any words of mine can suggest. In spite of the excitement, I saw only
one quarrel; a young man, in order to get nearer to the stage, had
pushed past a big coolie, who had evidently taken as much saké as he
could carry, and for a few seconds I thought there would be a fight; but
a bystander pointed out to the indignant man that the youth had to get
nearer because he was short-sighted and wore spectacles, and peace was
at once restored. On the way back to our tea-house, where my friends
from Tennenji had dined with me, we passed a street full of stalls, with
pipes and pouches, cheap jewelry, hair-pins and combs, and many other
knick-knacks suitable for presents. I wanted a few of them, and found
that O Shige San was a talented shopper; she had her limit, ten sen, and
usually succeeded in getting the article for that sum, whatever the
original price might have been. As I wandered round early the next
morning I found that the yama had already been moved to their stations
in various
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE GARDEN, SEIGWANJI]
streets, and were being cleaned up in preparation for the day’s
performances. The town is studded with tall fire-proof go-downs, in
which the precious vehicles are safely stored during the rest of the
year.
Near Maibara there were large orchards of persimmons with
brilliant-colored fruit, which, as Andrew Marvel says of the oranges,
“hang like gold lamps in a green night.” They were particularly
beautiful in the well-designed garden of Seigwanji, where I made some
sketches. It is a fine example of a temple garden, and some massive
evergreen oaks form an impressive background to the gray stones, the
carefully trained pines, and the trimly clipped shrubs; but except for
the persimmons, a few reddening maple leaves, some late blooms of
platycodon, and the scarlet berries of a little ardisia, it was all
green and gray.
[Illustration: MINIATURE PAGODA IN THE TEMPLE GARDEN, SEIGWANJI]
In the cottage gardens near Suzukawa, a little station on the Tokaido to
the south of Fuji where I made a short halt late in October, I began to
see some chrysanthemum flowers; they were not particularly fine or
effective, but I found plenty to paint there, and wished very much that
the days and my remaining weeks in Japan were not getting so short. The
village lies behind a range of sand dunes, which are overgrown with
ancient pines, and beyond them is the shore of Suruga Bay, a grand
expanse of gray volcanic sand, called by the Japanese Tago-no-ura,
where fishermen are always hauling at nets in lines of naked brown
figures against the blue sea, or wandering back in groups across the
sands in long dark-blue coats, with pale-blue and white handkerchiefs
tied over their heads, carrying their nets and parcels of fish wrapped
in straw. At my tea-house, the Koshuya, I reaped the result of their
labors, and got excellent dinners of red or gray tai, lobsters, and huge
prawns, cooked by a man who was a real artist and took a pride in his
profession.
The first really fine chrysanthemums I saw were in Yokohama, when I got
back there early in November; I was disappointed to find that they were
in temporary sheds put up to protect them from rain and sun, and not in
masses out-of-doors, as I expected to see them; but they were
excellently grown, and in the softened light of the oil-paper shades
their colors showed to great advantage. The plants are treated much as
they are with us, raised in pots from cuttings taken in the spring, and
encouraged with plenty of manure until the buds are formed; before
flowering they are removed from their pots and planted out in bold
groups of color in the beds which have been prepared for them. Some
plants are reduced to a single stem, on which only one enormous blossom
is allowed to develop; these are generally arranged in a line, with each
flower stiffly tied to a horizontal bamboo support, and the effect is
very sad; but the excellence of the gardeners is best shown in growing
large bushes, which have been known to carry as many as four hundred
flowers of medium size, all in perfect condition, on the same day. An
English gardener who had visited every show within reach of Tōkyō,
including the Emperor’s celebrated collection in the palace grounds,
told me that he had seen no individual blossoms equal to the best dozen
or so at a first-rate London exhibition, but that these great plants
with their hundreds of flowers were
[Illustration: A CHRYSANTHEMUM SHOW AT YOKOHAMA]
triumphs of horticulture. The most curious examples of
chrysanthemum-growing were to be seen in the Dangozaka quarter of Tōkyō.
The long hilly street is bordered on each side with gardens enclosed
with high bamboo fences, and in every one, by paying three rin, you
could see groups of life-size figures mainly covered with chrysanthemum
leaves and flowers. They represented scenes from history, the drama, or
Buddhist mythology, and were constructed with frame-works of bamboo,
inside which the flower-pots were concealed, the shoots being brought
through the openings and trained over the outer surface. The heads and
hands were made of painted wood, and swords and other accessories were
added to make them more life-like; the draperies of living leaves and
flowers were skilfully arranged in large folds, and, as in most of the
popular shows, they depicted the costumes of Daimio and Samurai of the
past. At each entrance I was given a sort of play-bill, a roughly
printed broad-sheet with a wood-cut and a description of the different
groups, serving as an advertisement of the gardener’s establishment. One
of the finest places for autumn colors is the large garden behind the
arsenal in the Koishikawa quarter, laid out by a former Prince of Mito
as a quiet retreat for his old age. It covers several acres, and is
certainly very beautiful, with its lakes and islands, solemn groves and
shrines; but it is silent and deserted; the people are only admitted by
a special permission; and I liked better the maples which line the banks
of the Taki-no-gawa near Oji, where crowds were quietly enjoying
themselves, sipping tea and saké as they sat in front of the tea-houses
and gazed down on the trees, or strolling along in picturesque groups
under the crimson canopy of foliage. The little river glides along with
barely a ripple, and it reflected all the glory of the leaves which
stretched over it in sprays of scarlet and gold, reminding me of a
Japanese poem, “I wish to cross the river, but fear to cut the brocade
on its surface.” Another poem, dating from the time when it was
customary to present silk or cloth to the Shinto gods instead of the
“gohei,” which now serve as a symbol, shows the national admiration of
the autumn leaves: “This time I bring no offering; the gods can take the
damask of the maple-trees on Tamukeyama.”
There are many other trees in the rich flora of Japan which are as gay
as the maples, though no others which show as great a variety of color;
the dark leaves of the tulip-tree turn to a rich cadmium yellow, and the
icho (Salisburia) is covered with pale gold, while many of the shrubs,
grasses, and herbaceous plants with bright and varied tints help to
relieve the solemn everlasting green of the pines and cryptomerias which
clothe the eternal hills.
And so in a blaze of glory the Japanese year ends; but long before these
last leaves have fallen the camellias are once more in flower, and
continue until the plum blossom comes in February, a connecting link in
the chain of beauty and flowers which encircles this happy land. One of
my last days in Tōkyō was spent in showing my drawings to the students
of the Uyeno School of Art, where Professor Okakura, the president, who
combines with a good knowledge of Western art a great reverence for that
of his own country, is attempting with no small success to keep up the
artistic tradition, and to revive those artistic industries which were
falling into decay. He had invited artists of other schools, some of
whom had studied in Paris and Rome, but I was most interested in the
remarks and questions of the purely Japanese students, and in their
eagerness to discover any motive, besides the reproduction of nature, in
work so different from their own.
At the Asakusa matsuri they were already selling emblems suited for the
new year--the rice-rake to scrape
[Illustration: THE ARSENAL GARDEN, KOISHIKAWA, TŌKYŌ]
together dollars; the rice-bag, daikon, and red tai, suggestive of good
fare; and the target with an arrow in the bull’s-eye, meaning, “May you
hit the mark!” arranged round a mask of the goddess of fortune; and with
a stock of these to bring me good-luck, I sailed away on the 10th of
December across the dreary and flowerless Pacific.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: LYCHNIS GRANDIFLORA, MISAKA-TOGE]
* * * * *
BOOKS WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALFRED PARSONS
A SELECTION FROM THE SONNETS OF WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. Illustrated by
ALFRED PARSONS. 4to, Full Leather, Gilt Edges, $5 00. (_In a Box._)
THE WARWICKSHIRE AVON. Notes by A. T. QUILLER-COUCH. Illustrations
by ALFRED PARSONS. 8vo, Ornamental Half Leather, $2 00.
THE QUIET LIFE. Certain Verses by Various Hands: the Motive set
forth in a Prologue and Epilogue by AUSTIN DOBSON; the whole
Adorned with Numerous Drawings by EDWIN A. ABBEY and ALFRED
PARSONS. 4to, Ornamental Leather, Gilt Edges, $7 50. (_In a Box._)
OLD SONGS. With Drawings by EDWIN A. ABBEY and ALFRED PARSONS. With
Mounted India Proof Frontispiece, left loose for framing. 4to,
Ornamental Leather Cover, Gilt Edges, $7 50. (_In a Box._)
PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] Before I left Tennenji he wrote in one of my sketch-books the poem
inscribed above in Japanese characters. The reading is, “Yukuri no
Omi no midzu-umi no fukaki kokoro wa chiyomo chigiran,” and it may be
roughly translated thus: Deep as the water of Lake Biwa, my heart has
been ever true and changeless since chance brought us together.
[B] “Daikon” is a large kind of white radish, which is boiled and cut
in strips and served as a savor with every meal; it is very tough, and
both the smell and the flavor are repulsive. A well-known Yokohama poet
has written some verses on the subject, which show a great knowledge of
culinary French, and a rooted dislike to the vegetable which is shared
by most foreigners. It commences in this way:
_Cook loquitur (gently)._
Won’t daikon do
To stew
With carrots and a bean or two?
Methinks ’twould give a savor rare
To cutlets à la Financière.
Won’t daikon do?
_Master (decisively)._
No--daikon will _not_ do!
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Notes in Japan" ***
Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.