LAKE SUWA AND THE NAKASENDO MOUNTAINS, FROM KAMI-NO-SUWA
made of carved and painted wood, where the incidents of the murder of Ii-Kamonno-Kami were represented with a startling fidelity to nature. He was assassinated one winter’s night in the streets of Tōkyō by the retainers of a rival Daimio, and the snowy ground showed to advantage all the details of disembowelled bodies and mangled limbs. The last two figures were mechanical. A retainer kneeling in front of the Daimio slowly opened a bloody handkerchief and showed him the head of his enemy, whereupon the Daimio’s eyebrows went up and the corners of his mouth went down, giving him a most comical expression of horror.
The roads are wider here than in most parts of Japan, and there are comparatively few jinrikishas. Most of the travelling is done in basha, small wagonettes with no springs, which jolt the very life out of you. I engaged one to take me on to Lake Suwa, on the Nakasendo road, a journey of forty miles, and arrived there feeling like an aching jelly. After travelling a few miles from Kofu we came to a river where the bridge had been washed away. I and my baggage were ferried over, and the driver attempted to ford it, but the water was too deep for him, and I was left stranded with my impedimenta on a wide waste of pebbles. Fortunately the man with whom I had made my bargain had foreseen this possibility, and when I could get some coolies to help me with my baggage across half a mile of stones and bowlders, I found another basha waiting for me. All the first part of the journey was a long ascent through wooded, hilly country, with road-side villages at short intervals. In one of them, Tsutaki, where we stopped to change horses, a school treat was going on. The place was gayly decorated with lanterns and arches of leaves and paper flowers, and in the temple court-yard the children had made realistic figures, among them a life-sized tiger, ingeniously constructed with straws of different colors. The low wooden cottages, with broad eaves and stones piled on the top, looked very like Swiss chalets, except that they all had green roof crests, sometimes of iris, but more often of a bunchy kind of lycopodium which the natives called yuwashiba. Almost every one had a screen of bamboo on the south side, with gourds of different kinds growing up it and tumbling over the roof and the out-buildings. At last, with long spells of walking, very welcome as a rest from the weary jolting, we reached the tea-house at the top of the pass, and then rattled down a somewhat better road for about twelve miles, emerging at dusk into the broad mountain-guarded valley in which Suwa lies. The flat lands near the lake are intersected by little streams and canals, along which the peasants go to their work in long, narrow punts, very like those which are used for the same purpose in Picardy—another instance of the way in which similar conditions in widely distant countries lead to similar habits and inventions.
I stayed at Kami-no-suwa in a delightful tea-house, with clean polished wood-work, and quilts covered with a soft thin silk called kaiki, very pleasant and cooling to a mosquito-tortured skin. Cleanliness is the great luxury of the Japanese; their foot-gear is always removed before entering the house, so that the mats may not be soiled; the wood-work is never painted, stained, or varnished, but left with a well-planed surface, which shows its natural color; the ceilings are thin planks, slightly overlapping each other, the grain of each being carefully selected to combine with the lines in those next it; there are no hangings or fixed pieces of furniture to collect the dust, and no carpets to be taken up and shaken, so that spring cleaning, that terror of the Western house-keeper, is unnecessary; the whole room can be swept out every morning, the walls and ceiling rubbed with a duster, and there it is, all as neat as a
TOURISTS AT A WATERFALL