In This, As In Many Other Yadoyas, There Were Kakemonos With Large
Chinese Characters Representing The Names Of The Prime Minister,
Provincial Governor, Or Distinguished General, Who Had Honoured It
By Halting There, And Lines Of Poetry Were Hung Up, As Is Usual, In
The Same Fashion.
I have several times been asked to write
something to be thus displayed.
I spent Sunday at Komatsu, but not
restfully, owing to the nocturnal croaking of the frogs in the
pond. In it, as in most towns, there were shops which sell nothing
but white, frothy-looking cakes, which are used for the goldfish
which are so much prized, and three times daily the women and
children of the household came into the garden to feed them.
When I left Komatsu there were fully sixty people inside the house
and 1500 outside - walls, verandahs, and even roofs being packed.
From Nikko to Komatsu mares had been exclusively used, but there I
encountered for the first time the terrible Japanese pack-horse.
Two horridly fierce-looking creatures were at the door, with their
heads tied down till their necks were completely arched. When I
mounted the crowd followed, gathering as it went, frightening the
horse with the clatter of clogs and the sound of a multitude, till
he broke his head-rope, and, the frightened mago letting him go, he
proceeded down the street mainly on his hind feet, squealing, and
striking savagely with his fore feet, the crowd scattering to the
right and left, till, as it surged past the police station, four
policemen came out and arrested it; only to gather again, however,
for there was a longer street, down which my horse proceeded in the
same fashion, and, looking round, I saw Ito's horse on his hind
legs and Ito on the ground. My beast jumped over all ditches,
attacked all foot-passengers with his teeth, and behaved so like a
wild animal that not all my previous acquaintance with the
idiosyncrasies of horses enabled me to cope with him. On reaching
Akayu we found a horse fair, and, as all the horses had their heads
tightly tied down to posts, they could only squeal and lash out
with their hind feet, which so provoked our animals that the
baggage horse, by a series of jerks and rearings, divested himself
of Ito and most of the baggage, and, as I dismounted from mine, he
stood upright, and my foot catching I fell on the ground, when he
made several vicious dashes at me with his teeth and fore feet,
which were happily frustrated by the dexterity of some mago. These
beasts forcibly remind me of the words, "Whose mouth must be held
with bit and bridle, lest they turn and fall upon thee."
It was a lovely summer day, though very hot, and the snowy peaks of
Aidzu scarcely looked cool as they glittered in the sunlight. The
plain of Yonezawa, with the prosperous town of Yonezawa in the
south, and the frequented watering-place of Akayu in the north, is
a perfect garden of Eden, "tilled with a pencil instead of a
plough," growing in rich profusion rice, cotton, maize, tobacco,
hemp, indigo, beans, egg-plants, walnuts, melons, cucumbers,
persimmons, apricots, pomegranates; a smiling and plenteous land,
an Asiatic Arcadia, prosperous and independent, all its bounteous
acres belonging to those who cultivate them, who live under their
vines, figs, and pomegranates, free from oppression - a remarkable
spectacle under an Asiatic despotism. Yet still Daikoku is the
chief deity, and material good is the one object of desire.
It is an enchanting region of beauty, industry, and comfort,
mountain girdled, and watered by the bright Matsuka. Everywhere
there are prosperous and beautiful farming villages, with large
houses with carved beams and ponderous tiled roofs, each standing
in its own grounds, buried among persimmons and pomegranates, with
flower-gardens under trellised vines, and privacy secured by high,
closely-clipped screens of pomegranate and cryptomeria. Besides
the villages of Yoshida, Semoshima, Kurokawa, Takayama, and
Takataki, through or near which we passed, I counted over fifty on
the plain with their brown, sweeping barn roofs looking out from
the woodland. I cannot see any differences in the style of
cultivation. Yoshida is rich and prosperous-looking, Numa poor and
wretched-looking; but the scanty acres of Numa, rescued from the
mountain-sides, are as exquisitely trim and neat, as perfectly
cultivated, and yield as abundantly of the crops which suit the
climate, as the broad acres of the sunny plain of Yonezawa, and
this is the case everywhere. "The field of the sluggard" has no
existence in Japan.
We rode for four hours through these beautiful villages on a road
four feet wide, and then, to my surprise, after ferrying a river,
emerged at Tsukuno upon what appears on the map as a secondary
road, but which is in reality a main road 25 feet wide, well kept,
trenched on both sides, and with a line of telegraph poles along
it. It was a new world at once. The road for many miles was
thronged with well-dressed foot-passengers, kurumas, pack-horses,
and waggons either with solid wheels, or wheels with spokes but no
tires. It is a capital carriage-road, but without carriages. In
such civilised circumstances it was curious to see two or four
brown skinned men pulling the carts, and quite often a man and his
wife - the man unclothed, and the woman unclothed to her waist -
doing the same. Also it struck me as incongruous to see telegraph
wires above, and below, men whose only clothing consisted of a sun-
hat and fan; while children with books and slates were returning
from school, conning their lessons.
At Akayu, a town of hot sulphur springs, I hoped to sleep, but it
was one of the noisiest places I have seen. In the most crowded
part, where four streets meet, there are bathing sheds, which were
full of people of both sexes, splashing loudly, and the yadoya
close to it had about forty rooms, in nearly all of which several
rheumatic people were lying on the mats, samisens were twanging,
and kotos screeching, and the hubbub was so unbearable that I came
on here, ten miles farther, by a fine new road, up an uninteresting
strath of rice-fields and low hills, which opens out upon a small
plain surrounded by elevated gravelly hills, on the slope of one of
which Kaminoyama, a watering-place of over 3000 people, is
pleasantly situated.
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