Yet Still Daikoku Is The
Chief Deity, And Material Good Is The One Object Of Desire.
It is an enchanting region of beauty, industry, and comfort,
mountain girdled, and watered by the bright Matsuka.
Everywhere
there are prosperous and beautiful farming villages, with large
houses with carved beams and ponderous tiled roofs, each standing
in its own grounds, buried among persimmons and pomegranates, with
flower-gardens under trellised vines, and privacy secured by high,
closely-clipped screens of pomegranate and cryptomeria. Besides
the villages of Yoshida, Semoshima, Kurokawa, Takayama, and
Takataki, through or near which we passed, I counted over fifty on
the plain with their brown, sweeping barn roofs looking out from
the woodland. I cannot see any differences in the style of
cultivation. Yoshida is rich and prosperous-looking, Numa poor and
wretched-looking; but the scanty acres of Numa, rescued from the
mountain-sides, are as exquisitely trim and neat, as perfectly
cultivated, and yield as abundantly of the crops which suit the
climate, as the broad acres of the sunny plain of Yonezawa, and
this is the case everywhere. "The field of the sluggard" has no
existence in Japan.
We rode for four hours through these beautiful villages on a road
four feet wide, and then, to my surprise, after ferrying a river,
emerged at Tsukuno upon what appears on the map as a secondary
road, but which is in reality a main road 25 feet wide, well kept,
trenched on both sides, and with a line of telegraph poles along
it.
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