The Map Is Blank In This Region, But I
Judged, As I Afterwards Found Rightly, That At That Pass We Had
Crossed The Water-Shed, And That The Streams Thenceforward No
Longer Fall Into The Pacific, But Into The Sea Of Japan.
At
Itosawa the horses produced stumbled so intolerably that I walked
the last stage, and reached Kayashima, a miserable
Village of
fifty-seven houses, so exhausted that I could not go farther, and
was obliged to put up with worse accommodation even than at
Fujihara, with less strength for its hardships.
The yadoya was simply awful. The daidokoro had a large wood fire
burning in a trench, filling the whole place with stinging smoke,
from which my room, which was merely screened off by some
dilapidated shoji, was not exempt. The rafters were black and
shiny with soot and moisture. The house-master, who knelt
persistently on the floor of my room till he was dislodged by Ito,
apologised for the dirt of his house, as well he might. Stifling,
dark, and smoky, as my room was, I had to close the paper windows,
owing to the crowd which assembled in the street. There was
neither rice nor soy, and Ito, who values his own comfort, began to
speak to the house-master and servants loudly and roughly, and to
throw my things about - a style of acting which I promptly
terminated, for nothing could be more hurtful to a foreigner, or
more unkind to the people, than for a servant to be rude and
bullying; and the man was most polite, and never approached me but
on bended knees. When I gave him my passport, as the custom is, he
touched his forehead with it, and then touched the earth with his
forehead.
I found nothing that I could eat except black beans and boiled
cucumbers. The room was dark, dirty, vile, noisy, and poisoned by
sewage odours, as rooms unfortunately are very apt to be. At the
end of the rice planting there is a holiday for two days, when many
offerings are made to Inari, the god of rice farmers; and the
holiday-makers kept up their revel all night, and drums, stationary
and peripatetic, were constantly beaten in such a way as to prevent
sleep.
A little boy, the house-master's son, was suffering from a very bad
cough, and a few drops of chlorodyne which I gave him allayed it so
completely that the cure was noised abroad in the earliest hours of
the next morning, and by five o'clock nearly the whole population
was assembled outside my room, with much whispering and shuffling
of shoeless feet, and applications of eyes to the many holes in the
paper windows. When I drew aside the shoji I was disconcerted by
the painful sight which presented itself, for the people were
pressing one upon another, fathers and mothers holding naked
children covered with skin-disease, or with scald-head, or
ringworm, daughters leading mothers nearly blind, men exhibiting
painful sores, children blinking with eyes infested by flies and
nearly closed with ophthalmia; and all, sick and well, in truly
"vile raiment," lamentably dirty and swarming with vermin, the sick
asking for medicine, and the well either bringing the sick or
gratifying an apathetic curiosity. Sadly I told them that I did
not understand their manifold "diseases and torments," and that, if
I did, I had no stock of medicines, and that in my own country the
constant washing of clothes, and the constant application of water
to the skin, accompanied by friction with clean cloths, would be
much relied upon by doctors for the cure and prevention of similar
cutaneous diseases. To pacify them I made some ointment of animal
fat and flowers of sulphur, extracted with difficulty from some
man's hoard, and told them how to apply it to some of the worst
cases. The horse, being unused to a girth, became fidgety as it
was being saddled, creating a STAMPEDE among the crowd, and the
mago would not touch it again. They are as much afraid of their
gentle mares as if they were panthers. All the children followed
me for a considerable distance, and a good many of the adults made
an excuse for going in the same direction.
These people wear no linen, and their clothes, which are seldom
washed, are constantly worn, night and day, as long as they will
hold together. They seal up their houses as hermetically as they
can at night, and herd together in numbers in one sleeping-room,
with its atmosphere vitiated, to begin with, by charcoal and
tobacco fumes, huddled up in their dirty garments in wadded quilts,
which are kept during the day in close cupboards, and are seldom
washed from one year's end to another. The tatami, beneath a
tolerably fair exterior, swarm with insect life, and are
receptacles of dust, organic matters, etc. The hair, which is
loaded with oil and bandoline, is dressed once a week, or less
often in these districts, and it is unnecessary to enter into any
details regarding the distressing results, and much besides may be
left to the imagination. The persons of the people, especially of
the children, are infested with vermin, and one fruitful source of
skin sores is the irritation arising from this cause. The floors
of houses, being concealed by mats, are laid down carelessly with
gaps between the boards, and, as the damp earth is only 18 inches
or 2 feet below, emanations of all kinds enter the mats and pass
into the rooms.
The houses in this region (and I believe everywhere) are
hermetically sealed at night, both in summer and winter, the amado,
which are made without ventilators, literally boxing them in, so
that, unless they are falling to pieces, which is rarely the case,
none of the air vitiated by the breathing of many persons, by the
emanations from their bodies and clothing, by the miasmata produced
by defective domestic arrangements, and by the fumes from charcoal
hibachi, can ever be renewed.
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