There Are Twelve Children In This Yadoya, And After Dark They
Regularly Play At A Game Which Ito Says "Is
Played in the winter in
every house in Japan." The children sit in a circle, and the
adults look on
Eagerly, child-worship being more common in Japan
than in America, and, to my thinking, the Japanese form is the
best.
From proverbial philosophy to personal privation is rather a
descent, but owing to the many detentions on the journey my small
stock of foreign food is exhausted, and I have been living here on
rice, cucumbers, and salt salmon - so salt that, after being boiled
in two waters, it produces a most distressing thirst. Even this
has failed to-day, as communication with the coast has been stopped
for some time, and the village is suffering under the calamity of
its stock of salt-fish being completely exhausted. There are no
eggs, and rice and cucumbers are very like the "light food" which
the Israelites "loathed." I had an omelette one day, but it was
much like musty leather. The Italian minister said to me in
Tokiyo, "No question in Japan is so solemn as that of food," and
many others echoed what I thought at the time a most unworthy
sentiment. I recognised its truth to-day when I opened my last
resort, a box of Brand's meat lozenges, and found them a mass of
mouldiness. One can only dry clothes here by hanging them in the
wood smoke, so I prefer to let them mildew on the walls, and have
bought a straw rain-coat, which is more reliable than the paper
waterproofs. I hear the hum of the children at their lessons for
the last time, for the waters are falling fast, and we shall leave
in the morning.
I. L. B.
LETTER XXIX
Hope deferred - Effects of the Flood - Activity of the Police - A
Ramble in Disguise - The Tanabata Festival - Mr. Satow's Reputation.
KUROISHI, August 5.
After all the waters did not fall as was expected, and I had to
spend a fourth day at Ikarigaseki. We left early on Saturday, as
we had to travel fifteen miles without halting. The sun shone on
all the beautiful country, and on all the wreck and devastation, as
it often shines on the dimpling ocean the day after a storm. We
took four men, crossed two severe fords where bridges had been
carried away, and where I and the baggage got very wet; saw great
devastations and much loss of crops and felled timber; passed under
a cliff, which for 200 feet was composed of fine columnar basalt in
six-sided prisms, and quite suddenly emerged on a great plain, on
which green billows of rice were rolling sunlit before a fresh
north wind. This plain is liberally sprinkled with wooded villages
and surrounded by hills; one low range forming a curtain across the
base of Iwakisan, a great snow-streaked dome, which rises to the
west of the plain to a supposed height of 5000 feet.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 132 of 219
Words from 68997 to 69506
of 115002
