I have spent over a week in Niigata, and leave it regretfully to-
morrow, rather for the sake of the friends I have made than for its
own interests.
I never experienced a week of more abominable
weather. The sun has been seen just once, the mountains, which are
thirty miles off, not at all. The clouds are a brownish grey, the
air moist and motionless, and the mercury has varied from 82
degrees in the day to 80 degrees at night. The household is
afflicted with lassitude and loss of appetite. Evening does not
bring coolness, but myriads of flying, creeping, jumping, running
creatures, all with power to hurt, which replace the day
mosquitoes, villains with spotted legs, which bite and poison one
without the warning hum. The night mosquitoes are legion. There
are no walks except in the streets and the public gardens, for
Niigata is built on a sand spit, hot and bare. Neither can you get
a view of it without climbing to the top of a wooden look-out.
Niigata is a Treaty Port without foreign trade, and almost without
foreign residents. Not a foreign ship visited the port either last
year or this. There are only two foreign firms, and these are
German, and only eighteen foreigners, of which number, except the
missionaries, nearly all are in Government employment. Its river,
the Shinano, is the largest in Japan, and it and its affluents
bring down a prodigious volume of water. But Japanese rivers are
much choked with sand and shingle washed down from the mountains.
In all that I have seen, except those which are physically limited
by walls of hard rock, a river-bed is a waste of sand, boulders,
and shingle, through the middle of which, among sand-banks and
shallows, the river proper takes its devious course.
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