But
Truly This Is A New Japan To Me, Of Which No Books Have Given Me
Any Idea, And It Is Not Fairyland.
The men may be said to wear
nothing.
Few of the women wear anything but a short petticoat
wound tightly round them, or blue cotton trousers very tight in the
legs and baggy at the top, with a blue cotton garment open to the
waist tucked into the band, and a blue cotton handkerchief knotted
round the head. From the dress no notion of the sex of the wearer
could be gained, nor from the faces, if it were not for the shaven
eyebrows and black teeth. The short petticoat is truly barbarous-
looking, and when a woman has a nude baby on her back or in her
arms, and stands staring vacantly at the foreigner, I can hardly
believe myself in "civilised" Japan. A good-sized child, strong
enough to hold up his head, sees the world right cheerfully looking
over his mother's shoulders, but it is a constant distress to me to
see small children of six and seven years old lugging on their
backs gristly babies, whose shorn heads are frizzling in the sun
and "wobbling" about as though they must drop off, their eyes, as
nurses say, "looking over their heads." A number of silk-worms are
kept in this region, and in the open barns groups of men in
nature's costume, and women unclothed to their waists, were busy
stripping mulberry branches. The houses were all poor, and the
people dirty both in their clothing and persons. Some of the
younger women might possibly have been comely, if soap and water
had been plentifully applied to their faces; but soap is not used,
and such washing as the garments get is only the rubbing them a
little with sand in a running stream. I will give you an amusing
instance of the way in which one may make absurd mistakes. I heard
many stories of the viciousness and aggressiveness of pack-horses,
and was told that they were muzzled to prevent them from pasturing
upon the haunches of their companions and making vicious snatches
at men. Now, I find that the muzzle is only to prevent them from
eating as they travel. Mares are used exclusively in this region,
and they are the gentlest of their race. If you have the weight of
baggage reckoned at one horse-load, though it should turn out that
the weight is too great for a weakly animal, and the Transport
agent distributes it among two or even three horses, you only pay
for one; and though our cortege on leaving Kisagoi consisted of
four small, shock-headed mares who could hardly see through their
bushy forelocks, with three active foals, and one woman and three
girls to lead them, I only paid for two horses at 7 sen a ri.
My mago, with her toil-hardened, thoroughly good-natured face
rendered hideous by black teeth, wore straw sandals, blue cotton
trousers with a vest tucked into them, as poor and worn as they
could be, and a blue cotton towel knotted round her head. As the
sky looked threatening she carried a straw rain-cloak, a thatch of
two connected capes, one fastening at the neck, the other at the
waist, and a flat hat of flags, 2.5 feet in diameter, hung at her
back like a shield. Up and down, over rocks and through deep mud,
she trudged with a steady stride, turning her kind, ugly face at
intervals to see if the girls were following. I like the firm
hardy gait which this unbecoming costume permits better than the
painful shuffle imposed upon the more civilised women by their
tight skirts and high clogs.
From Kohiaku the road passed through an irregular grassy valley
between densely-wooded hills, the valley itself timbered with park-
like clumps of pine and Spanish chestnuts; but on leaving Kisagoi
the scenery changed. A steep rocky tract brought us to the
Kinugawa, a clear rushing river, which has cut its way deeply
through coloured rock, and is crossed at a considerable height by a
bridge with an alarmingly steep curve, from which there is a fine
view of high mountains, and among them Futarayama, to which some of
the most ancient Shinto legends are attached. We rode for some
time within hearing of the Kinugawa, catching magnificent glimpses
of it frequently - turbulent and locked in by walls of porphyry, or
widening and calming and spreading its aquamarine waters over great
slabs of pink and green rock, lighted fitfully by the sun, or
spanned by rainbows, or pausing to rest in deep shady pools, but
always beautiful. The mountains through which it forces its way on
the other side are precipitous and wooded to their summits with
coniferae, while the less abrupt side, along which the tract is
carried, curves into green knolls in its lower slopes, sprinkled
with grand Spanish chestnuts scarcely yet in blossom, with maples
which have not yet lost the scarlet which they wear in spring as
well as autumn, and with many flowering trees and shrubs which are
new to me, and with an undergrowth of red azaleas, syringa, blue
hydrangea - the very blue of heaven - yellow raspberries, ferns,
clematis, white and yellow lilies, blue irises, and fifty other
trees and shrubs entangled and festooned by the wistaria, whose
beautiful foliage is as common as is that of the bramble with us.
The redundancy of the vegetation was truly tropical, and the
brilliancy and variety of its living greens, dripping with recent
rain, were enhanced by the slant rays of the afternoon sun.
The few hamlets we passed are of farm-houses only, the deep-eaved
roofs covering in one sweep dwelling-house, barn, and stable. In
every barn unclothed people were pursuing various industries. We
met strings of pack-mares, tied head and tail, loaded with rice and
sake, and men and women carrying large creels full of mulberry
leaves.
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