The
house-masters here and at Fujihara are not used to passports, and
Ito, who is posing as a town-bred youth, has explained and copied
mine, all the village men assembling to hear it read aloud. He
does not know the word used for "scientific investigation," but, in
the idea of increasing his own importance by exaggerating mine, I
hear him telling the people that I am gakusha, i.e. learned! There
is no police-station here, but every month policemen pay
domiciliary visits to these outlying yadoyas and examine the
register of visitors.
This is a much neater place than the last, but the people look
stupid and apathetic, and I wonder what they think of the men who
have abolished the daimiyo and the feudal regime, have raised the
eta to citizenship, and are hurrying the empire forward on the
tracks of western civilisation!
Since shingle has given place to thatch there is much to admire in
the villages, with their steep roofs, deep eaves and balconies, the
warm russet of roofs and walls, the quaint confusion of the
farmhouses, the hedges of camellia and pomegranate, the bamboo
clumps and persimmon orchards, and (in spite of dirt and bad
smells) the generally satisfied look of the peasant proprietors.
No food can be got here except rice and eggs, and I am haunted by
memories of the fowls and fish of Nikko, to say nothing of the
"flesh pots" of the Legation, and
" - a sorrow's crown of sorrow
Is remembering happier things!"
The mercury falls to 70 degrees at night, and I generally awake
from cold at 3 a.m., for my blankets are only summer ones, and I
dare not supplement them with a quilt, either for sleeping on or
under, because of the fleas which it contains. I usually retire
about 7.30, for there is almost no twilight, and very little
inducement for sitting up by the dimness of candle or andon, and I
have found these days of riding on slow, rolling, stumbling horses
very severe, and if I were anything of a walker, should certainly
prefer pedestrianism. I. L. B.
LETTER XII
A Fantastic Jumble - The "Quiver" of Poverty - The Water-shed - From
Bad to Worse - The Rice Planter's Holiday - A Diseased Crowd - Amateur
Doctoring - Want of Cleanliness - Rapid Eating - Premature Old Age.
KURUMATOGE, June 30.
After the hard travelling of six days the rest of Sunday in a quiet
place at a high elevation is truly delightful! Mountains and
passes, valleys and rice swamps, forests and rice swamps, villages
and rice swamps; poverty, industry, dirt, ruinous temples,
prostrate Buddhas, strings of straw-shod pack-horses; long, grey,
featureless streets, and quiet, staring crowds, are all jumbled up
fantastically in my memory. Fine weather accompanied me through
beautiful scenery from Ikari to Yokokawa, where I ate my lunch in
the street to avoid the innumerable fleas of the tea-house, with a
circle round me of nearly all the inhabitants.
