We Met
Strings Of Pack-Horses The Whole Way, Carrying Salt-Fish, Which Is
Taken Throughout The Interior.
The mountain-ridge, which runs throughout the Main Island, becomes
depressed in the province of Nambu, but rises again into grand,
abrupt hills at Aomori Bay.
Between Kuroishi and Aomori, however,
it is broken up into low ranges, scantily wooded, mainly with pine,
scrub oak, and the dwarf bamboo. The Sesamum ignosco, of which the
incense-sticks are made, covers some hills to the exclusion of all
else. Rice grows in the valleys, but there is not much
cultivation, and the country looks rough, cold, and hyperborean.
The farming hamlets grew worse and worse, with houses made roughly
of mud, with holes scratched in the side for light to get in, or
for smoke to get out, and the walls of some were only great pieces
of bark and bundles of straw tied to the posts with straw ropes.
The roofs were untidy, but this was often concealed by the profuse
growth of the water-melons which trailed over them. The people
were very dirty, but there was no appearance of special poverty,
and a good deal of money must be made on the horses and mago
required for the transit of fish from Yezo, and for rice to it.
At Namioka occurred the last of the very numerous ridges we have
crossed since leaving Nikko at a point called Tsugarusaka, and from
it looked over a rugged country upon a dark-grey sea, nearly
landlocked by pine-clothed hills, of a rich purple indigo colour.
The clouds were drifting, the colour was intensifying, the air was
fresh and cold, the surrounding soil was peaty, the odours of pines
were balsamic, it looked, felt, and smelt like home; the grey sea
was Aomori Bay, beyond was the Tsugaru Strait, - my long land-
journey was done. A traveller said a steamer was sailing for Yezo
at night, so, in a state of joyful excitement, I engaged four men,
and by dragging, pushing, and lifting, they got me into Aomori, a
town of grey houses, grey roofs, and grey stones on roofs, built on
a beach of grey sand, round a grey bay - a miserable-looking place,
though the capital of the ken.
It has a great export trade in cattle and rice to Yezo, besides
being the outlet of an immense annual emigration from northern
Japan to the Yezo fishery, and imports from Hakodate large
quantities of fish, skins, and foreign merchandise. It has some
trade in a pretty but not valuable "seaweed," or variegated
lacquer, called Aomori lacquer, but not actually made there, its
own speciality being a sweetmeat made of beans and sugar. It has a
deep and well-protected harbour, but no piers or conveniences for
trade. It has barracks and the usual Government buildings, but
there was no time to learn anything about it, - only a short half-
hour for getting my ticket at the Mitsu Bishi office, where they
demanded and copied my passport; for snatching a morsel of fish at
a restaurant where "foreign food" was represented by a very dirty
table-cloth; and for running down to the grey beach, where I was
carried into a large sampan crowded with Japanese steerage
passengers.
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