The Foundations of Japan Part 28

In the old days notable samurai, fugitives from Tokyo, had kept themselves secluded in the rooms we occupied at Yamaguchi. In Shimane we had small plain low-ceiled rooms in which daimyos had been accommodated. Not here alone had I evidences of the simplicity of the life of Old j.a.pan.

I was wakened in the morning by the voice of a woman earnestly praying. She stood in the yard of the house opposite and faced first in one direction and then in another. A friend of mine once stayed overnight at an inn on the river at Kyoto. In the morning he saw several men and a considerable number of women praying by the waterside. They were the keepers and inmates of houses of ill-fame.

The old Shinto idea was that prayers might be made anywhere at other times than festivals, for the G.o.d was at the shrine at festivals only.

Nowadays some old men go to the shrine every morning, just as many old women are seen at the Buddhist temples daily. Half the visitors to a Shinto shrine, an educated man a.s.sured me, may pray, but in the case of the other half the "worship" is "no more than a motion of respect."

My friend told me that when he prayed at a shrine his prayer was for his children's or his parents' health.

At a county town I found a library of 4,000 volumes, largely an inheritance from the feudal regime. Wherever I went I could not but note the cl.u.s.ter of readers at the open fronts of bookshops.[187]

On our second day's journey in Shimane I had a _kuruma_ with wooden wheels, and in the hills the day after we pa.s.sed a man kneeling in a _kago_, the old-fashioned litter. When we took to a _basha_ we discovered that, owing to the roughness of the road, we had a driver for each of our two horses. We had also an agile lad who hung on first to one part and then another of the vehicle and seemed to be essential in some way to its successful management. The head of the hatless chief driver was shaved absolutely smooth.

It was a rare thing for a foreigner to pa.s.s this way. My companion frequently told me that he had difficulty in understanding what people said.

We saw an extinct volcano called "Green Field Mountain." There was not a tree on it and it was said never to have possessed any. The whole surface was closely cut, the patches cut at different periods showing up in rectangular strips of varying shades. Wherever the hills were treeless and too steep for cultivation they were carefully cut for fodder. In cultivable places houses were standing on the minimum of ground. More than once we had a view of a characteristic piece of scenery, a dashing stream seen through a clump of bamboo.

When our basha stopped for the feeding of the horses, they had a tub of mixture composed of boiled naked barley, rice chaff, chopped straw and chopped green stuff. I noticed near the inn a doll in a tree. It had been put there by children who believe that they can secure by so doing a fine day for an outing. When we started again we met with a company of strolling players: a man, his wife and two girls, all with clever faces. We also saw several peasant anglers fishing or going home with their catch. A licence available from July to December cost 50 sen.

At a shop I made a note of its signs, the usual strips of white wood about 8 ins. by 3, nailed up perpendicularly, with the inscriptions written in black. One sign was the announcement of the name and address of the householder, which must be shown on every j.a.panese house. A second stated that the place was licensed as a shop, a third that the householder's wife was licensed to keep an inn, a fourth that the householder was a coc.o.o.n merchant, a fifth that he was a member of the co-operative credit society, a sixth that he belonged to the Red Cross Society, a seventh that his wife was a member of the Patriotic Women's Society,[188] the eighth, ninth and tenth that the shopkeeper was an adherent of a certain Shinto shrine, a member of a Shinto organisation and had visited three shrines and made donations to them.

An eleventh board proclaimed that he was of the Zen sect of Buddhism.

Finally, there was a box in which was stored the charms from various shrines.

We pa.s.sed a company of villagers working on the road for the local authority. The labourers were chiefly old people and they were taking their task very easily. Farther along the road men and women were working singly. It seemed that the labourers belonged to families which, instead of paying rates, did a bit of roadmending. The work was done when they had time to spare.

For some time we had been in a part of the country in which the ridges of the houses were of tiles. At an earlier stage of our journey they had been either of straw or of earth with flowers or shrubs growing in it. The shiny, red-brown tiles give place elsewhere to a slate-coloured variety. The surface of all of these tiles is so smooth that they are unlikely to change their hard tint for years.

Meanwhile they give the villages a look of newness. Their use is spreading rapidly. Shiny though the tiles may be, one cannot but admire the neat way in which they interlock. One day when I wondered about the cost involved in recovering roofs with these tiles, a woman worker who overheard me promptly said that, reckoning tiles and labour, the cost was 60 or 70 sen per 22 tiles. In the old days tiled porticoes were forbidden to the commonalty. They were allowed only to daimyos who also used exclusively the arm rests which every visitor to an inn may now command. Besides arm rests I have frequently had kneeling cushions of the white brocade formerly used only for the _zabuton_ of Buddhist priests.

In the county through which we were pa.s.sing the fine water gra.s.s, called _i_, used for mat making, is grown on an area of about 78 _cho_. It is sown in seed beds like rice and is transplanted into inferior paddies in September. (The gra.s.s is better grown in Hiroshima and Okayama.)

I saw a beautiful tree in red blossom. The name given to it is "monkey slip," because of the smoothness of its skin, which recalled the name of that very different ornament of suburban gardens, "monkey puzzle."

During this journey we recovered something of the conditions of old-time travel. There were chats by the way and conferences at the inn in the evening and in the morning concerning distances, the kind of vehicles available, the character of their drivers, the charges, the condition of the road, the probable weather and the places at which satisfactory accommodation might be had. What was different from the old days was that at every stopping-place but one we had electric light. Part of our journey was done in a small motor bus lighted by electricity. Like the automobile we had hired a day or two before, it was driven--by two young men in blue cotton tights--at too high a speed considering the narrowness and curliness of the roads by which we crossed the pa.s.ses. The roads are kept in reasonably good condition, but they were made for hand cart and _kuruma_ traffic.

We pa.s.sed an island on which I was told there were a dozen houses.

When a death occurs a beacon fire is made and a priest on the mainland conducts a funeral ceremony. By the custom of the island it is forbidden to increase the number of the houses, so presumably several families live together. In the mountain communities of the mainland, where the number of houses is also restricted, it is usual for only the eldest brother to be allowed to marry. The children of younger brothers are brought up in the families of their mothers.

We pa.s.sed at one of the fishing hamlets the wreck of a Russian cruiser which came ash.o.r.e after the battle of Tsushima. Two boat derricks from the cruiser served as gate posts at the entrance of the school playground.

A familiar sight on a country road is the itinerant medicine vendor.

He or his employer believes in pushing business by means of an impressive outfit. One typical cure-all seller, who had his medicines in a shiny bag slung over his shoulders, wore yellow shoes, cotton drawers, a frock coat, a peaked cap with three gold stripes, and a mysterious badge. On his hands he had white cotton gloves and as he walked he played a concertina. A common practice is to leave with housewives a bag of medicines without charge. Next year another call is made, when the pills and what not which have been used are paid for and a new bag is exchanged for the old one.

The use of dogs to help to draw _kuruma_ is forbidden in some prefectures, but in three stages of our journey in Shimane we had the aid of robust dogs. During this period, however, I saw, attached to _kuruma_ we pa.s.sed, three dogs which did not seem up to their work.

Dogs suffer when used for draught purposes because their chests are not adapted for pulling and because the pads of their feet get tender.

The animals we had were treated well. Each _kuruma_ had a cord, with a hook at the end, attached to it; and this hook was slipped into a ring on the dog's harness. The dogs were released when we went downhill and usually on the level. Several times during each run, when we came to a stream or a pond or even a ditch, the dogs were released for a bathe.

They invariably leapt into the water, drank moderately, and then, if the water was too shallow for swimming, sat down in it and then lay down. Sometimes a dog temporarily at liberty would find on his own account a small water hole, and it was comical to see him taking a sitz bath in it. When the sun was hot a dog would sometimes be retained on his cord when not pulling in order that he might trot along in the shade below the _kuruma_. The dog of the _kuruma_ following mine usually managed when pulling to take advantage of the shade thrown by my vehicle. A _kurumaya_ told me that he had given 8 yen for his dog. Dogs were sometimes sold for from 10 to 15 yen. The difficulty was to get a dog that had good feet and would pull. The dogs I saw were all mongrels with sometimes a retriever, bloodhound or Great Dane strain.

I made enquiries about another county town library. There were 18,000 volumes of which 300 consisted of European books and 600 of bound magazines. The annual expenditure on books, and I presume magazines, was 600 yen.

We pa.s.sed a "special tribe" hamlet. Here the Eta were devoting themselves to tanning and bamboo work. I was told of other "peculiar people" called Hachia, also of a hawker-beggar cla.s.s which sells small things of bra.s.s or bamboo or travels with performing monkeys.

Water from hot springs is piped long distances in water pipes made of bamboo trunks, the ends of which are pushed into one another. A turn is secured by running two pipes at the angle required into a block of wood which has been bored to fit.

When we got down to the sand dunes there were windbreaks, 10 or 15 ft.

high, made of closely planted pines cut flat at the top. Elsewhere I saw such windbreaks 30 ft. high. On the telegraph wires there were big spiders' webs about 4 ft. in diameter.

As we sped through a village my attention was attracted by a funeral feast. The pushed-back _shoji_ showed about a dozen men sitting in a circle eating and drinking. Women were waiting on them. At the back of the room, making part of the circle, was the square coffin covered by a white canopy.

While pa.s.sing a Buddhist temple I heard the sound of preaching. It might have been a voice from a church or chapel at home.

Shortly afterwards I came on a memorial to the man who introduced the sweet potato into the locality 150 years before. This was the first of many sweet-potato memorials which I encountered in the prefecture and elsewhere. Sometimes there were offerings before the monuments.

Occasionally the memorial took the form of a stone cut in the shape of a potato. There is a great exportation of sweet potatoes--sliced and dried until they are brittle--to the north of j.a.pan where the tuber cannot be cultivated.[189]

While we rested at the house of a friend of my companion we spoke of emigration. There are four or five emigration companies, and it is an interesting question just how much emigration is due to the initiative of the emigrants themselves and how much to the activity of the companies. The chief reason which induces emigrants to go to South America is that, under the contract system, they get twice as much money as they would obtain, say, in Formosa.[190]

Our host did not remember any foreigner visiting his village since his boyhood, though it is on the main road. It took nearly four days for a Tokyo newspaper to arrive. This region is so little known that when a resident mentioned it in Tokyo he was sometimes asked if it was in Hokkaido.

I was interested to see how many villages had erected monuments to young men who had won distinction away from home as wrestlers.

I had often noticed bulls drawing carts and behaving as sedately as donkeys, but it was new to see a bull tethered at the roadside with children playing round it. Why are the j.a.panese bulls so friendly?

In the mountainous regions we pa.s.sed through I saw several paddies no bigger than a hearthrug. At one spot a land crab scurried across the road. It was red in colour and about 2-1/2 ins. long.

At a village office the headman's gossip was that priests had been forbidden by the prefecture to interfere in elections. We looked through the expenses of the village agricultural a.s.sociation. For a lecture series 5 yen a month was being paid. Then there had been an expenditure by way of subsidising a children's campaign against insects preying on rice. For ten of the little cl.u.s.ters of eggs one may see on the backs of leaves 4 rin was paid, while for 10 moths the reward was 2 rin. The a.s.sociation spent a further 10 yen on helping young people to attend lectures at a distance. The commune in which those things had been done numbered 3,100 people. There had been two police offences during the year, but both offenders were strangers to the locality.

In a cutting which was being made for the new railway, girl labourers were steering their trucks of soil down a half-mile descent and singing as they made the exhilarating run. The building of a railway through a closely cultivated and closely populated country involves the destruction of a large amount of fertile land and the rebuilding of many houses. The area of agricultural land taken during the preceding and present reigns, not only for railways and railway stations but for roads, barracks, schools and other public buildings, has been enormous. "The owner of land removed from cultivation may seem to do well by turning his property into cash," a man said to me.

"He may also profit to some extent while the railway is building by the jobs he is able to do for the contractor, with the a.s.sistance of his family and his horse or bull; but afterwards he has often to seek another way of earning his living than farming."

We neared railhead on a market day and many folk in their best were walking along the roads. Of fourteen umbrellas used as parasols to keep off the sun that I counted one only was of the j.a.panese paper sort; all the others were black silk on steel ribs in "foreign style"

except for a crude embroidery on the silk.

When we got into the town it was as much as our _kurumaya_ could do to move through the dense crowd of rustics in front of booths and shops.

Once more I was impressed by the imperturbability and natural courtesy of the people. At the station quite a number of farmers and their families had a.s.sembled, not to travel by the train but to see it start.

During the short journey by train I noticed lagoons in which fish were artificially fed. At an agricultural experiment station in the place at which we alighted there were two specimen windmills set up to show farmers who were fortunate enough to have ammonia water on their land the cheapest means of raising it for their paddies. The tendency here as elsewhere was to apply too much of the ammonia water. All rubbish on this extensive experiment station was carefully burnt under cover in order to demonstrate the importance not only of getting all the potash possible but of preserving it when obtained.

Farmers who are without secondary industries are short of cash except at the times when barley, rice and coc.o.o.ns are sold, and in certain places they seem to have taken to saving money on salt. An old man told us with tears in his eyes how he had protested to his neighbours against the tendency to do without salt. An excuse for attempting to save on salt, besides the economical one, was the size of the salt cubes. Neighbours clubbed together to buy a cube, and thus a family, when it had finished its share, had to wait until the neighbours had disposed of theirs and market day came round.[191]

I saw a monument erected to the memory of "a good farmer" who had planted a wood and developed irrigation.

We made a stay at the spot where, on a forest-clad hill overlooking the sea, there stands in utter simplicity the great shrine of Izumo.

The customary collection of shops and hotels cl.u.s.tering at the town end of the avenue of _torii_ cannot impair the impression which is made on the alien beholder by this shrine in the purest style of Shinto architecture. In the month in which we arrived at Izumo the deities are believed to gather there. Before the shrine the j.a.panese visitor makes his obeisance and his offering at the precise spot--four places are marked--to which his rank permits him to advance. (This inscription may be read: "Common people at the doorway.") The estimate which an official gave me of the number of visitors last year, 40,000, bore no relation to the "quarter of a million" of the guide book. But it had been a bad year for farmers. Forty-seven geisha, who had reported the previous year that they had received 35,000 yen--there is no limit to what is tabulated in j.a.pan--now reported that they had gained only half that sum in twelve months, "the price of coc.o.o.ns being so low that even well-to-do farmers could not come." I noticed that there was a clock let into one of the granite votive pillars of the avenue along which one walks from the town to the shrine. As I glanced at the clock it happened that the sound of children's voices reached me from a primary school. I wondered what time and modern education, which have brought such changes in j.a.pan, might make of it all.

FOOTNOTES:

[186] The railway has now been extended in the direction of Yamaguchi.

[187] See Appendix LI.

[188] Protests have been made against the way in which the country people are dunned for subscriptions to these semi-official organisations. A high agricultural authority has stated that in Nagano the farmers' taxes and subscriptions to the Red Cross and Patriotic Women Societies are from 65 to 70 per cent. of their expenditure as against 30 to 35 per cent. spent on outlay other than food and clothing.