There Were Large Gardens At The Back, With
Fountains And Flowers, And Streams, Crossed By Light Stone Bridges,
Sometimes Flowed Through The Houses.
From the signs I supposed
them to be yadoyas, but on asking Ito why we had not put up at one
of them, he replied that they were all kashitsukeya, or tea-houses
of disreputable character - a very sad fact.
{8}
As we journeyed the country became prettier and prettier, rolling
up to abrupt wooded hills with mountains in the clouds behind. The
farming villages are comfortable and embowered in wood, and the
richer farmers seclude their dwellings by closely-clipped hedges,
or rather screens, two feet wide, and often twenty feet high. Tea
grew near every house, and its leaves were being gathered and dried
on mats. Signs of silk culture began to appear in shrubberies of
mulberry trees, and white and sulphur yellow cocoons were lying in
the sun along the road in flat trays. Numbers of women sat in the
fronts of the houses weaving cotton cloth fifteen inches wide, and
cotton yarn, mostly imported from England, was being dyed in all
the villages - the dye used being a native indigo, the Polygonum
tinctorium. Old women were spinning, and young and old usually
pursued their avocations with wise-looking babies tucked into the
backs of their dresses, and peering cunningly over their shoulders.
Even little girls of seven and eight were playing at children's
games with babies on their backs, and those who were too small to
carry real ones had big dolls strapped on in similar fashion.
Innumerable villages, crowded houses, and babies in all, give one
the impression of a very populous country.
As the day wore on in its brightness and glory the pictures became
more varied and beautiful. Great snow-slashed mountains looked
over the foothills, on whose steep sides the dark blue green of
pine and cryptomeria was lighted up by the spring tints of
deciduous trees. There were groves of cryptomeria on small hills
crowned by Shinto shrines, approached by grand flights of stone
stairs. The red gold of the harvest fields contrasted with the
fresh green and exquisite leafage of the hemp; rose and white
azaleas lighted up the copse-woods; and when the broad road passed
into the colossal avenue of cryptomeria which overshadows the way
to the sacred shrines of Nikko, and tremulous sunbeams and shadows
flecked the grass, I felt that Japan was beautiful, and that the
mud flats of Yedo were only an ugly dream!
Two roads lead to Nikko. I avoided the one usually taken by
Utsunomiya, and by doing so lost the most magnificent of the two
avenues, which extends for nearly fifty miles along the great
highway called the Oshiu-kaido. Along the Reiheishi-kaido, the
road by which I came, it extends for thirty miles, and the two,
broken frequently by villages, converge upon the village of
Imaichi, eight miles from Nikko, where they unite, and only
terminate at the entrance of the town. They are said to have been
planted as an offering to the buried Shoguns by a man who was too
poor to place a bronze lantern at their shrines. A grander
monument could not have been devised, and they are probably the
grandest things of their kind in the world. The avenue of the
Reiheishi-kaido is a good carriage road with sloping banks eight
feet high, covered with grass and ferns. At the top of these are
the cryptomeria, then two grassy walks, and between these and the
cultivation a screen of saplings and brushwood. A great many of
the trees become two at four feet from the ground. Many of the
stems are twenty-seven feet in girth; they do not diminish or
branch till they have reached a height of from 50 to 60 feet, and
the appearance of altitude is aided by the longitudinal splitting
of the reddish coloured bark into strips about two inches wide.
The trees are pyramidal, and at a little distance resemble cedars.
There is a deep solemnity about this glorious avenue with its broad
shade and dancing lights, and the rare glimpses of high mountains.
Instinct alone would tell one that it leads to something which must
be grand and beautiful like itself. It is broken occasionally by
small villages with big bells suspended between double poles; by
wayside shrines with offerings of rags and flowers; by stone
effigies of Buddha and his disciples, mostly defaced or overthrown,
all wearing the same expression of beatified rest and indifference
to mundane affairs; and by temples of lacquered wood falling to
decay, whose bells sent their surpassingly sweet tones far on the
evening air.
Imaichi, where the two stately aisles unite, is a long uphill
street, with a clear mountain stream enclosed in a stone channel,
and crossed by hewn stone slabs running down the middle. In a room
built over the stream, and commanding a view up and down the
street, two policemen sat writing. It looks a dull place without
much traffic, as if oppressed by the stateliness of the avenues
below it and the shrines above it, but it has a quiet yadoya, where
I had a good night's rest, although my canvas bed was nearly on the
ground. We left early this morning in drizzling rain, and went
straight up hill under the cryptomeria for eight miles. The
vegetation is as profuse as one would expect in so damp and hot a
summer climate, and from the prodigious rainfall of the mountains;
every stone is covered with moss, and the road-sides are green with
the Protococcus viridis and several species of Marchantia. We were
among the foothills of the Nantaizan mountains at a height of 1000
feet, abrupt in their forms, wooded to their summits, and noisy
with the dash and tumble of a thousand streams. The long street of
Hachiishi, with its steep-roofed, deep-eaved houses, its warm
colouring, and its steep roadway with steps at intervals, has a
sort of Swiss picturesqueness as you enter it, as you must, on
foot, while your kurumas are hauled and lifted up the steps; nor is
the resemblance given by steep roofs, pines, and mountains patched
with coniferae, altogether lost as you ascend the steep street, and
see wood carvings and quaint baskets of wood and grass offered
everywhere for sale.
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