It Was A Terrible Road, With Two Severe Mountain-Passes To
Cross, And I Not Only Had To Walk Nearly The Whole Way, But To Help
The Man With The Kuruma Up Some Of The Steepest Places.
Halting at
the exquisitely situated village of Nosoki, we got one horse, and
walked by a mountain road along the head-waters of the Omono to
Innai.
I wish I could convey to you any idea of the beauty and
wildness of that mountain route, of the surprises on the way, of
views, of the violent deluges of rain which turned rivulets into
torrents, and of the hardships and difficulties of the day; the
scanty fare of sun-dried rice dough and sour yellow rasps, and the
depth of the mire through which we waded! We crossed the Shione
and Sakatsu passes, and in twelve hours accomplished fifteen miles!
Everywhere we were told that we should never get through the
country by the way we are going.
The women still wear trousers, but with a long garment tucked into
them instead of a short one, and the men wear a cotton combination
of breastplate and apron, either without anything else, or over
their kimonos. The descent to Innai under an avenue of
cryptomeria, and the village itself, shut in with the rushing
Omono, are very beautiful.
The yadoya at Innai was a remarkably cheerful one, but my room was
entirely fusuma and shoji, and people were peeping in the whole
time. It is not only a foreigner and his strange ways which
attract attention in these remote districts, but, in my case, my
india-rubber bath, air-pillow, and, above all, my white mosquito
net. Their nets are all of a heavy green canvas, and they admire
mine so much, that I can give no more acceptable present on leaving
than a piece of it to twist in with the hair. There were six
engineers in the next room who are surveying the passes which I had
crossed, in order to see if they could be tunnelled, in which case
kurumas might go all the way from Tokiyo to Kubota on the Sea of
Japan, and, with a small additional outlay, carts also.
In the two villages of Upper and Lower Innai there has been an
outbreak of a malady much dreaded by the Japanese, called kak'ke,
which, in the last seven months, has carried off 100 persons out of
a population of about 1500, and the local doctors have been aided
by two sent from the Medical School at Kubota. I don't know a
European name for it; the Japanese name signifies an affection of
the legs. Its first symptoms are a loss of strength in the legs,
"looseness in the knees," cramps in the calves, swelling, and
numbness. This, Dr. Anderson, who has studied kak'ke in more than
1100 cases in Tokiyo, calls the sub-acute form. The chronic is a
slow, numbing, and wasting malady, which, if unchecked, results in
death from paralysis and exhaustion in from six months to three
years. The third, or acute form, Dr. Anderson describes thus.
After remarking that the grave symptoms set in quite unexpectedly,
and go on rapidly increasing, he says:- "The patient now can lie
down no longer; he sits up in bed and tosses restlessly from one
position to another, and, with wrinkled brow, staring and anxious
eyes, dusky skin, blue, parted lips, dilated nostrils, throbbing
neck, and labouring chest, presents a picture of the most terrible
distress that the worst of diseases can inflict. There is no
intermission even for a moment, and the physician, here almost
powerless, can do little more than note the failing pulse and
falling temperature, and wait for the moment when the brain,
paralysed by the carbonised blood, shall become insensible, and
allow the dying man to pass his last moments in merciful
unconsciousness." {15}
The next morning, after riding nine miles through a quagmire, under
grand avenues of cryptomeria, and noticing with regret that the
telegraph poles ceased, we reached Yusowa, a town of 7000 people,
in which, had it not been for provoking delays, I should have slept
instead of at Innai, and found that a fire a few hours previously
had destroyed seventy houses, including the yadoya at which I
should have lodged. We had to wait two hours for horses, as all
were engaged in moving property and people. The ground where the
houses had stood was absolutely bare of everything but fine black
ash, among which the kuras stood blackened, and, in some instances,
slightly cracked, but in all unharmed. Already skeletons of new
houses were rising. No life had been lost except that of a tipsy
man, but I should probably have lost everything but my money.
LETTER XX - (Continued)
Lunch in Public - A Grotesque Accident - Police Inquiries - Man or
Woman? - A Melancholy Stare - A Vicious Horse - An Ill-favoured Town -
A Disappointment - A Torii.
Yusowa is a specially objectionable-looking place. I took my
lunch - a wretched meal of a tasteless white curd made from beans,
with some condensed milk added to it - in a yard, and the people
crowded in hundreds to the gate, and those behind, being unable to
see me, got ladders and climbed on the adjacent roofs, where they
remained till one of the roofs gave way with a loud crash, and
precipitated about fifty men, women, and children into the room
below, which fortunately was vacant. Nobody screamed - a noteworthy
fact - and the casualties were only a few bruises. Four policemen
then appeared and demanded my passport, as if I were responsible
for the accident, and failing, like all others, to read a
particular word upon it, they asked me what I was travelling for,
and on being told "to learn about the country," they asked if I was
making a map! Having satisfied their curiosity they disappeared,
and the crowd surged up again in fuller force. The Transport Agent
begged them to go away, but they said they might never see such a
sight again!
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