Though We Were All Day Drawing Nearer To Mountains Wooded To Their
Summits On The East, The Amount Of Vegetation
Was not burdensome,
the rice swamps were few, and the air felt drier and less relaxing.
As my runners were
Trotting merrily over one of the pine barrens, I
met Dr. Palm returning from one of his medico-religious
expeditions, with a tandem of two naked coolies, who were going
over the ground at a great pace, and I wished that some of the most
staid directors of the Edinburgh Medical Missionary Society could
have the shock of seeing him! I shall not see a European again for
some weeks. From Tsuiji, a very neat village, where we changed
kurumas, we were jolted along over a shingly road to Nakajo, a
considerable town just within treaty limits. The Japanese doctors
there, as in some other places, are Dr. Palm's cordial helpers, and
five or six of them, whom he regards as possessing the rare virtues
of candour, earnestness, and single-mindedness, and who have
studied English medical works, have clubbed together to establish a
dispensary, and, under Dr. Palm's instructions, are even carrying
out the antiseptic treatment successfully, after some ludicrous
failures!
We dashed through Nakajo as kuruma-runners always dash through
towns and villages, got out of it in a drizzle upon an avenue of
firs, three or four deep, which extends from Nakajo to Kurokawa,
and for some miles beyond were jolted over a damp valley on which
tea and rice alternated, crossed two branches of the shingly
Kurokawa on precarious bridges, rattled into the town of Kurokawa,
much decorated with flags and lanterns, where the people were all
congregated at a shrine where there was much drumming, and a few
girls, much painted and bedizened, were dancing or posturing on a
raised and covered platform, in honour of the god of the place,
whose matsuri or festival it was; and out again, to be mercilessly
jolted under the firs in the twilight to a solitary house where the
owner made some difficulty about receiving us, as his licence did
not begin till the next day, but eventually succumbed, and gave me
his one upstairs room, exactly five feet high, which hardly allowed
of my standing upright with my hat on. He then rendered it
suffocating by closing the amado, for the reason often given, that
if he left them open and the house was robbed, the police would not
only blame him severely, but would not take any trouble to recover
his property. He had no rice, so I indulged in a feast of
delicious cucumbers. I never saw so many eaten as in that
district. Children gnaw them all day long, and even babies on
their mothers' backs suck them with avidity. Just now they are
sold for a sen a dozen.
It is a mistake to arrive at a yadoya after dark. Even if the best
rooms are not full it takes fully an hour to get my food and the
room ready, and meanwhile I cannot employ my time usefully because
of the mosquitoes. There was heavy rain all night, accompanied by
the first wind that I have heard since landing; and the fitful
creaking of the pines and the drumming from the shrine made me glad
to get up at sunrise, or rather at daylight, for there has not been
a sunrise since I came, or a sunset either. That day we travelled
by Sekki to Kawaguchi in kurumas, i.e. we were sometimes bumped
over stones, sometimes deposited on the edge of a quagmire, and
asked to get out; and sometimes compelled to walk for two or three
miles at a time along the infamous bridle-track above the river
Arai, up which two men could hardly push and haul an empty vehicle;
and, as they often had to lift them bodily and carry them for some
distance, I was really glad when we reached the village of
Kawaguchi to find that they could go no farther, though, as we
could only get one horse, I had to walk the last stage in a torrent
of rain, poorly protected by my paper waterproof cloak.
We are now in the midst of the great central chain of the Japanese
mountains, which extends almost without a break for 900 miles, and
is from 40 to 100 miles in width, broken up into interminable
ranges traversable only by steep passes from 1000 to 5000 feet in
height, with innumerable rivers, ravines, and valleys, the heights
and ravines heavily timbered, the rivers impetuous and liable to
freshets, and the valleys invariably terraced for rice. It is in
the valleys that the villages are found, and regions more isolated
I have never seen, shut out by bad roads from the rest of Japan.
The houses are very poor, the summer costume of the men consists of
the maro only, and that of the women of trousers with an open
shirt, and when we reached Kurosawa last night it had dwindled to
trousers only. There is little traffic, and very few horses are
kept, one, two, or three constituting the live stock of a large
village. The shops, such as they are, contain the barest
necessaries of life. Millet and buckwheat rather than rice, with
the universal daikon, are the staples of diet The climate is wet in
summer and bitterly cold in winter. Even now it is comfortless
enough for the people to come in wet, just to warm the tips of
their fingers at the irori, stifled the while with the stinging
smoke, while the damp wind flaps the torn paper of the windows
about, and damp draughts sweep the ashes over the tatami until the
house is hermetically sealed at night. These people never know
anything of what we regard as comfort, and in the long winter, when
the wretched bridle-tracks are blocked by snow and the freezing
wind blows strong, and the families huddle round the smoky fire by
the doleful glimmer of the andon, without work, books, or play, to
shiver through the long evenings in chilly dreariness, and herd
together for warmth at night like animals, their condition must be
as miserable as anything short of grinding poverty can make it.
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