{6} The list of my equipments is given as a help to future
travellers, especially ladies, who desire to travel long distances
in the interior of Japan. One wicker basket is enough, as I
afterwards found.
{7} My fears, though quite natural for a lady alone, had really no
justification. I have since travelled 1200 miles in the interior,
and in Yezo, with perfect safety and freedom from alarm, and I
believe that there is no country in the world in which a lady can
travel with such absolute security from danger and rudeness as in
Japan.
{8} In my northern journey I was very frequently obliged to put up
with rough and dirty accommodation, because the better sort of
houses were of this class. If there are few sights which shock the
traveller, there is much even on the surface to indicate vices
which degrade and enslave the manhood of Japan.
{9} I advise every traveller in the ruder regions of Japan to take
a similar stretcher and a good mosquito net. With these he may
defy all ordinary discomforts.
{10} This can only be true of the behaviour of the lowest
excursionists from the Treaty Ports.
{11} Many unpleasant details have necessarily been omitted. If
the reader requires any apology for those which are given here and
elsewhere, it must be found in my desire to give such a faithful
picture of peasant life, as I saw it in Northern Japan, as may be a
contribution to the general sum of knowledge of the country, and,
at the same time, serve to illustrate some of the difficulties
which the Government has to encounter in its endeavour to raise
masses of people as deficient as these are in some of the first
requirements of civilisation.
{12} The excess of males over females in the capital is 36,000,
and in the whole Empire nearly half a million.
{13} By one of these, not fitted up for passengers, I have sent
one of my baskets to Hakodate, and by doing so have come upon one
of the vexatious restrictions by which foreigners are harassed. It
would seem natural to allow a foreigner to send his personal
luggage from one Treaty Port to another without going through a
number of formalities which render it nearly impossible, but it was
only managed by Ito sending mine in his own name to a Japanese at
Hakodate with whom he is slightly acquainted.
{14} This hospital is large and well ventilated, but has not as
yet succeeded in attracting many in-patients; out-patients,
specially sufferers from ophthalmia, are very numerous. The
Japanese chief physician regards the great prevalence of the malady
in this neighbourhood as the result of damp, the reflection of the
sun's rays from sand and snow, inadequate ventilation and charcoal
fumes.
