Jinrikisha days in Japan

by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

From Negishi, where Yokohama’s creek debouches into Mississippi Bay, one looks across to Sugita, a fishing village with an ancient temple set in the midst of plum-trees and cherry-trees that make it a place of fêtes in February and April, when those two great flower festivals of the empire, the blossoming of the plum and the cherry, are observed. From the bluff above Sugita, at the end of the watery crescent, is a superb view of the Bay and its countless sharp, green headlands. Wherever the view is fine some Japanese family has encamped in a tateba, the least little mat shed of a house, furnished with a charcoal brazier, half a dozen teapots and cups, and a few low benches covered with the all-pervading red blanket. Their national passion for landscape and scenery draws the Japanese to places having fine prospects, and a thrifty woman, with her family of children, turns many a penny by means of her comfortable seat and good cheer for the wayfarer. Japan is the picnicker’s own country, whether he be native or foreign. Everywhere, climbing the mountain-tops, or crouching in the valleys, hidden in the innermost folds of the hills, or perched on the narrowest and remotest ledges overhanging the water, one finds the tea-house, or its summer companion, the tateba, with its open sides and simmering kettle. Everywhere hot water, tea, rice, fruits, eggs, cups, plates, glasses, and corkscrews may be had. These things become so much a matter of course after a time, that the tourist must banish himself to China, to value, as they deserve, the clean Japanese tea-house, and the view-commanding tateba with its simple comforts.

Sugita’s plum-trees bud in January, and blossom as mild days and warm suns encourage, so that the last week of February finds the dead-looking branches clothed with clouds of starry white flowers. The blossoming plum-tree is often seen when snow is on the ground, and the hawthorn pattern of old porcelains is only a conventional representation of pale blooms fallen on the seamed ice of ponds or garden lakelets. The plum is the poet’s tree, and symbolic of long life, the snowy blossoms upon the gnarled, mossy, and unresponsive branches showing that a vital current still animates it, and the heart lives. At New-years a dwarf-plum is the ornament of every home, and to give one is to wish your friend length of days. Ume, the plum blossom, has a fresh, delicate, elusive, and peculiar fragrance, which in the warm sun and open air is almost intoxicating, but in a closed room becomes heavy and cloying. The blossoming of the plum-tree is the first harbinger of spring, and to Sugita regularly every year go the court ladies, many princes, and great officials to see those billows of bloom that lie under the Bluff, and the pink and crimson clouds of trees before the old temple.

During the rest of the year little heed is paid to Sugita’s existence, and the small fishing village in the curve of the Bay, with its green wall of bluffs, is as quiet as in the days when Commodore Perry’s fleet anchored off it and Treaty Point acquired its name. With the blossoms Sugita puts on its holiday air, tea-houses open, tateba spring from the earth, and scores of low, red-blanketed benches are scattered through the grove, signals of tea and good cheer, equivalent to the iron tables and chairs of Parisian boulevards. Strings of sampans float in to shore, lines of jinrikishas file over the hills, zealous pilgrims come on foot, and horsemen trot down the long, hard beach. The tiny hamlet often has a thousand visitors in a day, and the pretty little nesans, or tea-house maids, patter busily about with their trays of tea and solid food, welcoming and speeding the guests, and looking—quaint, odd, and charming maidens that they are—like so many tableaux vivants with their scant kimonos, voluminous sleeves, ornate coiffures, and pigeon-toes.

Notwithstanding the crowds, everything is decorous, quiet, and orderly, and no more refined pleasure exists than this Japanese beatitude of sitting lost in revery and rapturous contemplation of a blossoming tree, or inditing a verse to ume no hana, and fastening the bit of paper to the branches. In this Utopia the spring poem is never rejected, nor made the subject of cruel jokes. The winds fan it gently, it hangs conspicuous, it is read by him who runs, but it is not immortal, and the first heavy rain leaves it a wet and withered wreck, soon to fall to the ground and disappear.

Just outside the temple door is a plum-tree whose age is lost in legend. Its bent and crooked limbs and propped-up branches sustain a thick-massed pyramid of pale rose-pink. The outer boughs droop like a weeping-willow, and their flowers seem to be slipping down them like rosy rain-drops. Poets and peers, dreamers and plodders, coolies, fishermen, and the unspiritual foreigner, all admire this lovely tree, and its wide arms flutter with poems in its praise. All around the thatched roof of the old temple stand plum-trees covered with fragrant blossoms—snow white, palest yellow, rose, or deep carnation-red. The sheltering hill back of the temple is crowded with gravestones, tombs, tablets, and mossy Buddhas, sitting calm and impassive in tangles of grasses and vines under the shadow of ancient trees. A wide-spreading pine on the crest of the hill is a famous landmark, whence one looks down on the flower-wreathed village, the golden bow of the beach curving from headland to headland, and the blue bay flashing with hundreds of square white sails. It is a place for poesy and day-dreams, but the foreign visitor dedicates it to luncheon, table-talk, and material satisfactions, and, perhaps, the warm sun and air, and the mild fragrance of the plum-blossoms aid and abet the insatiable picnic appetite.

All this part of Japan is old, and rich in temples, shrines, and picturesque villages, with a net-work of narrow roads and shady by-paths leading through perpetual scenes of sylvan beauty. Thatched roofs, whose ridge poles are beds of lilies, shaded by glorified green plumes of bamboo-trees, tall, red-barked cryptomerias, crooked pines, and gnarled camphor-trees, everywhere charm the eye. Little red temples, approached through a line of picturesque torii—that skeleton gate-way that makes a part of every Japanese view or picture—red shrines no larger than marten boxes; stone Buddhas, sitting cross-legged, chipped, broken-nosed, headless, and moss-grown; odd stone tablets and lanterns crowd the hedges and banks of the road-side, snuggle at the edges of groves, or stand in the corners of rice fields.

Fair as the spring days are, when the universal green mantle of the earth is adorned with airy drifts of plum and cherry-blossoms, the warm, mellow sunshine, glorious tints and clear bright air of autumn are even fairer. One may forget and forgive the Japanese summer for the sake of the weeks that follow, an Indian summer which often lasts without break for four months after the equinoctial storm. Except that Fujiyama gleams whiter and whiter, there is no suggestion of winter’s terrors, and only a pleasant crispness in the bracing and intoxicating air. Whew the maple leaves begin to turn, and a second rose-blossoming surpasses that of June in color, prodigality, and fragrance, autumnal Japan is the typical earthly Paradise. Every valley is a floor of golden rice stubble, every hill-side a tangle of gorgeous foliage. The persimmon-trees hang full of big golden kaké, sea and sky wear their intensest blue, and Fujiyama’s loveliness shines out against the western sky. In among the yellowing stubble move blue-clad farmers with white mushroom hats. Before the farm-houses men and women swing their flails, beating the grain spread out on straw matting. The rice straw, whether bunched in pretty sheaves, tied across poles, like a New-year’s fringe, or stacked in collars around the tree-trunks, is always decorative. Meditative oxen, drawing a primitive plough made of a pointed stick, loosen the soil for the new planting, and tiny green wheat-shoots, first of the three regular crops of the year, wait for the warm winter sun that opens the plum-blossoms.

Above and beyond Sugita is Minë, a temple on a mountain-top, with a background of dense pine forest, a foreground of bamboos, and an old priest, whose successful use of the moxa brings sufferers from long distances for treatment. A bridle-path follows for several miles the knife-edge of a ridge commanding noble views of sea and shore, of the blue Hakone range, its great sentinel Oyama, and Fuji beyond. The high ridge of Minë is the backbone of a great promontory running out into the sea, the Bay of Yeddo on one side and Odawara Bay on the other. Square sails of unnumbered fishing-boats fleck the blue horizon, and the view seaward is unbroken. Over an old race-course and archery-range of feudal days the path leads, till at a sudden turn it strikes into a pine forest, where the horses’ hoofs fall noiseless on thick carpets of dry pine-needles, and the cave-like twilight, coolness, and stillness seem as solemn as in that wood where Virgil and Dante walked, before they visited the circles of the other world.

A steep plunge down a slippery, clayey trail takes the rider from the melancholy darkness to a solitary forest clearing, with low temple buildings on one side. Here, massed against feathery fronds of giant bamboos, blaze boughs of fine-leafed maples, all vivid crimson to the tips. While the priests bring saké tubs, and the amado, or outside shutters of their house, to make a table, and improvise benches with various temple and domestic properties, visitors may wander through the forest to open spaces, whence all the coasts of the two bays and every valley of the province lie visible, and a column of smoke proclaims the living volcano on Oshima’s island, far down the coast.

Groups of cheery pilgrims come chattering down from the forest, untie their sandals, wash their feet, and disappear within the temple; where the old priest writes sacred characters on their bared backs to indicate where his attendant shall place the lumps of sticky moxa dough. Another attendant goes down the line of victims and touches a light to these cones, which burn with a slow, red glow, and hiss and smoke upon the flesh for agonizing seconds. The priest reads pious books and casts up accounts, while the patients endure without a groan tortures compared with which the searing with the white-hot irons of Parisian moxa treatment is comfortable. The Minë priest has some secret of composition for his moxa dough which has kept it in favor for many years, and almost the only revenue of the temple is derived from this source. Rheumatism, lumbago, and paralysis yield to the moxa treatment, and the Japanese resort to it for all their aches and ills, the coolies’ backs and legs being often finely patterned with its scars.