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.
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