We Are Now In The Midst Of The Great Central Chain Of The Japanese
Mountains, Which Extends Almost Without A
Break for 900 miles, and
is from 40 to 100 miles in width, broken up into interminable
ranges traversable only
By steep passes from 1000 to 5000 feet in
height, with innumerable rivers, ravines, and valleys, the heights
and ravines heavily timbered, the rivers impetuous and liable to
freshets, and the valleys invariably terraced for rice. It is in
the valleys that the villages are found, and regions more isolated
I have never seen, shut out by bad roads from the rest of Japan.
The houses are very poor, the summer costume of the men consists of
the maro only, and that of the women of trousers with an open
shirt, and when we reached Kurosawa last night it had dwindled to
trousers only. There is little traffic, and very few horses are
kept, one, two, or three constituting the live stock of a large
village. The shops, such as they are, contain the barest
necessaries of life. Millet and buckwheat rather than rice, with
the universal daikon, are the staples of diet The climate is wet in
summer and bitterly cold in winter. Even now it is comfortless
enough for the people to come in wet, just to warm the tips of
their fingers at the irori, stifled the while with the stinging
smoke, while the damp wind flaps the torn paper of the windows
about, and damp draughts sweep the ashes over the tatami until the
house is hermetically sealed at night. These people never know
anything of what we regard as comfort, and in the long winter, when
the wretched bridle-tracks are blocked by snow and the freezing
wind blows strong, and the families huddle round the smoky fire by
the doleful glimmer of the andon, without work, books, or play, to
shiver through the long evenings in chilly dreariness, and herd
together for warmth at night like animals, their condition must be
as miserable as anything short of grinding poverty can make it.
I saw things at their worst that night as I tramped into the hamlet
of Numa, down whose sloping street a swollen stream was running,
which the people were banking out of their houses. I was wet and
tired, and the woman at the one wretched yadoya met me, saying,
"I'm sorry it's very dirty and quite unfit for so honourable a
guest;" and she was right, for the one room was up a ladder, the
windows were in tatters, there was no charcoal for a hibachi, no
eggs, and the rice was so dirty and so full of a small black seed
as to be unfit to eat. Worse than all, there was no Transport
Office, the hamlet did not possess a horse, and it was only by
sending to a farmer five miles off, and by much bargaining, that I
got on the next morning. In estimating the number of people in a
given number of houses in Japan, it is usual to multiply the houses
by five, but I had the curiosity to walk through Numa and get Ito
to translate the tallies which hang outside all Japanese houses
with the names, number, and sexes of their inmates, and in twenty-
four houses there were 307 people!
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