NIEGAWA, ON THE NAKASENDO
new pin. At Shimo-no-suwa, about three miles on, the Koshu-kaido, along which I had been travelling from Kofu, joins the Nakasendo, the central mountain road, one of the main routes between Kyoto and Tōkyō. A new road has been made most of the way, admirably engineered, with gentle gradients, but so badly executed that it had already fallen to pieces in some places, and it was covered with loose road-metal which made jinrikisha travelling very laborious. My men usually preferred the old steep road, which cuts off corners, and is solid though very rough, and after a couple of days I sent back all the jinrikishas except the one which carried my baggage, finding my own legs the best means of conveyance. From the Shiojiri Pass I looked back over Suwa, saw Fuji through the blue haze of a lovely autumn morning, a long way off, but still towering above all the other hills, and then dropped down into a new set of mountains, rivers, and valleys. The scenery of the Nakasendo gets more and more picturesque, until it reaches a climax in the valley of the Kisogawa, on which I first looked from the summit of the Torii Pass, four thousand and odd feet above the sea. Each village on the road had its own peculiarities of costume, architecture, and manufacture—cheap lacquer-ware, combs, pickles, and so on, and of all these Matsuba bought a stock, for it is the habit of every Japanese on his travels to take back with him “meibutsu,” the characteristic productions of the places he has visited, as presents for those he has left at home.
A LITTLE SHINTO SHRINE, NEAR THE NAKASENDO
There are many celebrated mountains in this district, each with its own special god and shrines, and I constantly met bands of pilgrims dressed in white, with long staves and big hats, or saw boat-loads of them going down