But the chief charm of Shiba to me was its absolute Orientalness compared to the rest of Tokyo.
No sooner are you inside the great red gateway of the temples than you are in the world of fairy-tales. For temple after temple opens up before you, low fantastic structures, on which Oriental imagination has run riot in colour and form. You are bewildered by the innumerable courtyards of stone lanterns, the paraphernalia of drum-tower and bell-tower, fountain and dancing-stage, which surround them. You are sobered by the dark groves between the temples, which contain the tombs.
Temple and tomb are thronged by streams of dignified natives, some come to worship and some to see the sights. Here you will find a service going on, with white-robed priests kneeling on the mirrored floor of black lacquer, for which you have to remove your boots. Outside the actual temples the shows are in full blast, and picnicking proceeds everywhere. All the Japanese are in their native dress. Gay little musumes and gorgeous geishas flutter before you. The grand tea-houses offer fresh visions of the Orient with their Geisha dances and their fantastic gardens.
Ueno has the added charm of a large lake, covered with lotus-blossoms in summer.
At no great distance from Shiba is the Shinagawa Yoshiwara, which, for fantastic beauty, surpasses anything in Japan. With these and the water life of the Nihombashi, and the life of the poor going on all day in the streets—for the poor Japanese takes the front off his house all through the day to air it—I should have found good occupation for my notebook and camera for years.
If we had not been urged by other foreigners, I do not know when we should have left Tokyo. And we saw little enough of them except at meal-times, or when we went to the Frasers (Hugh Fraser was British Minister of Tokyo, and husband of the well-known author, Mrs. Hugh Fraser, Marion Crawford’s sister), or the Napiers. The Master of Napier, the Lord Napier and Ettrick, just dead, was his First Secretary. But at meal-times they talked so much of Easter at Miyanoshita, and the cherry-blossom festival at Kyoto, and the annual festival at Nikko, and the Great Buddha at Kamakura, and the sacred shrines of Ise, that we fortunately felt obliged to visit them.
Miyanoshita, the favourite holiday-resort of the Europeans in Japan, is high up in the mountains. The valley on the right of the long ridge which leads up to it in spring is ablaze with azaleas and flowering trees. It, itself, is perched on a mountain-side, above a densely-wooded valley. Exquisite walks can be taken from it, such as the trip to Hakone, the beautiful village which stands on the blue lake at the foot of Fujiyama, in which the immortal grace of the great mountain is reflected whenever the sun or moon is above the horizon. Miyanoshita is equally famous for its mountain air and its mountain baths. The boiling water, highly impregnated with sulphur, is brought down in bamboo pipes from the bosom of the mountain to deep wooden baths sunk in the floor of the hotel bathing-house. Life here is one long picnic: the energetic take walks, the lazy are carried in chairs over the hills: people fly here for week-ends in spring, and from the heat and damp of the summer.
Its great rival is Nikko, another mountain village, embosomed in shady groves, with woods full of wild hydrangeas. In June Nikko is crowded for the festival of Toshogu, the deified founder of the dynasty of Shoguns, which was ended by the revolution of 1868—the principal festival of Japan, inaugurated with the grandest procession to be seen nowadays, in which all who take part in it wear the ceremonial dresses of three hundred years ago.
Nikko has the two most beautiful temples in the magic land—those of Iyeyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa dynasty, and his grandson, Iyemitsu. Here you see the most perfect lacquer and carving in all Japan. And their courtyards are exquisitely terraced on the mountain-side. Here, too, besides these and other glorious temples, there are the added charms of scenery, a foaming sky-blue river, running beneath the sacred scarlet bridge, and between the avenue of Buddhas, commons of scarlet azalea, and thickets of wild wistaria.
Having seen Nikko, the sacred city of the Shoguns, one must needs see Kyoto, the city of the Mikados, and Nara.