The Hair, Which Is
Loaded With Oil And Bandoline, Is Dressed Once A Week, Or Less
Often In These Districts, And It Is Unnecessary To Enter Into Any
Details Regarding The Distressing Results, And Much Besides May Be
Left To The Imagination.
The persons of the people, especially of
the children, are infested with vermin, and one fruitful source of
skin sores is the irritation arising from this cause.
The floors
of houses, being concealed by mats, are laid down carelessly with
gaps between the boards, and, as the damp earth is only 18 inches
or 2 feet below, emanations of all kinds enter the mats and pass
into the rooms.
The houses in this region (and I believe everywhere) are
hermetically sealed at night, both in summer and winter, the amado,
which are made without ventilators, literally boxing them in, so
that, unless they are falling to pieces, which is rarely the case,
none of the air vitiated by the breathing of many persons, by the
emanations from their bodies and clothing, by the miasmata produced
by defective domestic arrangements, and by the fumes from charcoal
hibachi, can ever be renewed. Exercise is seldom taken from
choice, and, unless the women work in the fields, they hang over
charcoal fumes the whole day for five months of the year, engaged
in interminable processes of cooking, or in the attempt to get
warm. Much of the food of the peasantry is raw or half-raw salt
fish, and vegetables rendered indigestible by being coarsely
pickled, all bolted with the most marvellous rapidity, as if the
one object of life were to rush through a meal in the shortest
possible time. The married women look as if they had never known
youth, and their skin is apt to be like tanned leather. At
Kayashima I asked the house-master's wife, who looked about fifty,
how old she was (a polite question in Japan), and she replied
twenty-two - one of many similar surprises. Her boy was five years
old, and was still unweaned.
This digression disposes of one aspect of the population. {11}
LETTER XII - (Concluded)
A Japanese Ferry - A Corrugated Road - The Pass of Sanno - Various
Vegetation - An Unattractive Undergrowth - Preponderance of Men.
We changed horses at Tajima, formerly a daimiyo's residence, and,
for a Japanese town, rather picturesque. It makes and exports
clogs, coarse pottery, coarse lacquer, and coarse baskets.
After travelling through rice-fields varying from thirty yards
square to a quarter of an acre, with the tops of the dykes utilised
by planting dwarf beans along them, we came to a large river, the
Arakai, along whose affluents we had been tramping for two days,
and, after passing through several filthy villages, thronged with
filthy and industrious inhabitants, crossed it in a scow. High
forks planted securely in the bank on either side sustained a rope
formed of several strands of the wistaria knotted together. One
man hauled on this hand over hand, another poled at the stern, and
the rapid current did the rest.
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