Women keep yadoyas and shops, and cultivate farms as
freely as men.
Boards giving the number of inhabitants, male and
female, and the number of horses and bullocks, are put up in each
village, and I noticed in Ichikawa, as everywhere hitherto, that
men preponderate. {12} I. L. B.
LETTER XIII
The Plain of Wakamatsu - Light Costume - The Takata Crowd - A Congress
of Schoolmasters - Timidity of a Crowd - Bad Roads - Vicious Horses -
Mountain Scenery - A Picturesque Inn - Swallowing a Fish-bone -
Poverty and Suicide - An Inn-kitchen - England Unknown! - My Breakfast
Disappears.
KURUMATOGE, June 30.
A short ride took us from Ichikawa to a plain about eleven miles
broad by eighteen long. The large town of Wakamatsu stands near
its southern end, and it is sprinkled with towns and villages. The
great lake of Iniwashiro is not far off. The plain is rich and
fertile. In the distance the steep roofs of its villages, with
their groves, look very picturesque. As usual not a fence or gate
is to be seen, or any other hedge than the tall one used as a
screen for the dwellings of the richer farmers.
Bad roads and bad horses detracted from my enjoyment. One hour of
a good horse would have carried me across the plain; as it was,
seven weary hours were expended upon it. The day degenerated, and
closed in still, hot rain; the air was stifling and electric, the
saddle slipped constantly from being too big, the shoes were more
than usually troublesome, the horseflies tormented, and the men and
horses crawled. The rice-fields were undergoing a second process
of puddling, and many of the men engaged in it wore only a hat, and
a fan attached to the girdle.
An avenue of cryptomeria and two handsome and somewhat gilded
Buddhist temples denoted the approach to a place of some
importance, and such Takata is, as being a large town with a
considerable trade in silk, rope, and minjin, and the residence of
one of the higher officials of the ken or prefecture. The street
is a mile long, and every house is a shop. The general aspect is
mean and forlorn. In these little-travelled districts, as soon as
one reaches the margin of a town, the first man one meets turns and
flies down the street, calling out the Japanese equivalent of
"Here's a foreigner!" and soon blind and seeing, old and young,
clothed and naked, gather together. At the yadoya the crowd
assembled in such force that the house-master removed me to some
pretty rooms in a garden; but then the adults climbed on the house-
roofs which overlooked it, and the children on a palisade at the
end, which broke down under their weight, and admitted the whole
inundation; so that I had to close the shoji, with the fatiguing
consciousness during the whole time of nominal rest of a multitude
surging outside. Then five policemen in black alpaca frock-coats
and white trousers invaded my precarious privacy, desiring to see
my passport - a demand never made before except where I halted for
the night.
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