Jinrikisha days in Japan

by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

Once out of the streets of this little provincial capital, the way to Nikko leads up a straight broad avenue, lined on both sides for twenty-seven miles with tall and ancient cryptomerias, whose branches meet in a Gothic arch overhead. The blue outlines of the Nikko mountains showed in the distance as we entered the grand avenue. The road is a fine piece of engineering, with its ascent so slow and even as to seem level; but at times the highway, with its superb walls of cryptomeria, is above the level of the fields, then even with them, and then below them, as it follows its appointed lines. Before the railway reached Utsonomiya, travellers from Tokio had a boat journey, and then a jinrikisha ride of seventy miles through the shaded avenue. This road was made two centuries ago, when the Shoguns chose Nikko as their burial place, and these venerable trees have shaded the magnificent funeral trains of the old warriors, and the splendid processions of their successors, who made pilgrimages to the tombs of Iyeyasu and Iyemitsu. In our day, alas, instead of mighty daimios and men-at-arms in coats of mail, or brocaded grandees in gilded palanquins, telegraph-poles, slim, ugly, and utilitarian, impertinently thrust themselves forward before the grand old tree-trunks, and the jinrikisha and the rattle-trap basha take their plebeian way.

The cryptomeria has the reddish bark and long, smooth bole of the California sequoia, and through the mat of leaves and branches, high overhead, the light filters down in a soft twilight that casts a spell over the place. After sunset the silence and stillness of the shaded avenue were solemn, and its coolness and the fragrance of moist earth most grateful. Two men ran tandem with each jinrikisha, and they went racing up the avenue for ten miles, halting only once for a sip of cold water before they stopped at the hamlet of Osawa. The villages, a row of low houses on either side of the way, make the only break in the long avenue. With its dividing screens drawn back, the Osawa tea-house was one long room, with only side walls and a roof, the front open to the street, and the back facing a garden where a stream dashed through a liliputian landscape, fell in a liliputian fall, and ran under liliputian bridges. At the street end was a square fireplace, sunk in the floor, with a big teakettle swinging by an iron chain from a beam of the roof, teapots sitting in the warm ashes, and bits of fowl and fish skewered on chopsticks and set up in the ashes to broil before the coals. The coolies, sitting around this kitchen, fortified their muscle and brawn with thimble cups of green tea, bowls of rice, and a few shreds of pickled fish. We, as their masters and superiors, were placed as far as possible from them, and picnicked at a table in the pretty garden. After the severe exertion of sitting still and letting the coolies draw us, we restored our wasting tissues by rich soup, meats, and all the stimulating food that might be thought more necessary to the laboring jinrikisha men.

When we started again, with all the tea-house staff singing sweet sayonaras, a glow in the east foretold the rising moon, and a huge stone torii at the end of the village loomed ghostly against the blackness of the forest. The glancing moonlight shot strange shadows across the path, and we went whirling through this lattice of light and darkness in stillness and solitude. The moon rose higher and was hidden in the leafy arch overhead, and before we realized that its faint light was fading, came flashes of lightning, the rumble of approaching thunder, and a sudden crash, as the flood of rain struck the tree-tops and poured through. The hoods of the jinrikishas were drawn up, the oil-papers fastened across us, and through pitch darkness the coolies raced along. Vivid flashes of lightning showed the thick, white sheet of rain, which gusts of wind blew into our faces, while insidious streams slipped down our shoulders and glided into our laps. Putting their heads down, the coolies beat their way against the rain for two more soaking miles to Imaichi, the last village on the road, only five miles from Nikko. The tea-house into which we turned for shelter was crowded with belated and storm-bound pilgrims coming down from the sacred places of Nikko and Chiuzenji. All Japanese are talkative, the lower in station the more loquacious, and the whole coolie company was chattering at once. As the place was too comfortless to stay in, we turned out again in the rain, and the coolies splashed away at a walk, through a darkness so dense as to be felt. At midnight our seven jinrikishas rattling into the hotel court, and fourteen coolies shouting to one another as they unharnessed and unpacked, roused the house and the whole neighborhood of Nikko. Awakened sleepers up-stairs looked out at us and banged the screens angrily, but no sounds can be deadened in a tea-house.

To the traveller the tea-house presents many phases of comfort, interest, and amusement altogether wanting in the conventional hotel, which is, unfortunately, becoming common on the great routes of travel. The dimensions of every house in the empire conform to certain unvarying rules. The verandas, or outer galleries of the house, are always exactly three feet wide. A foreigner, who insisted on a nine-feet-wide veranda, entailed upon his Nikko carpenter many days of painful thought, pipe-smoking, and conference with his fellows. These mechanics were utterly upset in their calculations. They sawed the boards and beams too long or too short, and finally produced a very bad, un-Japanese piece of work. The floors of these galleries are polished to a wonderful smoothness and surface. They are not varnished, nor oiled, nor waxed, but every morning rubbed with a cloth wrung out of hot bath-water which contains oily matter enough to give, in time, this peculiar lustre. Three years of daily rubbing with a hot cloth are required to give a satisfactory result, and every subsequent year adds to the richness of tone and polish, until old tea-houses and temples disclose floors of common pine looking like rosewood, or six-century-old oak.

The area of every room is some multiple of three feet, because the soft tatami, or floor-mats, measure six feet in length by three in width. These are woven of common straw and rushes, faced with a closely-wrought mat of rice-straw. It is to save these tatami and the polished floors that shoes are left outside the house.

The thick screens, ornamented with sketches or poems, that separate one room from another, are the fusuma; the screens shutting off the veranda, pretty lattice frames covered with rice-paper that admit a peculiarly soft light to the rooms, are the shoji, and in their management is involved an elaborate etiquette. In opening or closing them, well-bred persons and trained servants kneel and use each thumb and finger with ordered precision, while it is possible to convey slight, contempt, and mortal insult in the manner of handling these sliding doors. The outer veranda is closed at night and in bad weather by amados, solid wooden screens or shutters, that rumble and bang their way back and forth in their grooves. These amados are without windows or air-holes, and the servants will not willingly leave a gap for ventilation. “But thieves may get in, or the kappa!” they cry, the kappa being a mythical animal always ready to fly away with them. In every room is placed an andon, or night-lamp. If one clap his hands at any hour of the twenty-four, he hears a chorus of answering Hei! hei! hei’s! and the thump of the nesans’ bare feet, as they run to attend him. While he talks to them, they keep ducking and saying Heh! heh! which politely signifies that they are giving their whole attention.

The Japanese bed is the floor, with a wooden box under the neck for a pillow and a futon for a covering. To the foreigner the Japanese landlord allows five or six futons, or cotton-wadded comforters, and they make a tolerable mattress, although not springy, and rather apt to be damp and musty. The traveller carries his own sheets, woolen blankets, feather or air pillows, and flea-powder, the latter the most necessary provision of all. The straw mats and the futons swarm with fleas, and without a liberal powdering, or, better, an anointing with oil of pennyroyal, it is impossible to sleep. These sleeping arrangements are not really comfortable, and, after the fatigue of walking and mountain-climbing, stiffen the joints. By day the futons are placed in closets out of sight, or hung over the balconies to air, coming back damper than ever, if the servants forget to bring them in before sunset. The bedroom walls are the sliding paper screens; and if one’s next neighbor be curious, he may slip the screen a little or poke a hole through the paper. A whisper or a pin-drop travels from room to room, and an Anglo-Saxon snorer would rock the whole structure.

At ordinary Japanese inns the charge for a day’s accommodation ranges from a half-yen upward. A Japanese can get his lodgings and all his meals for about thirty cents, but foreigners are so clumsy, untidy, and destructive, and they demand so many unusual things, that they are charged the highest price, which includes lodging, bedding, and all the tea, rice, and hot water they may wish. All other things are extra. In the beaten tracks bread and fresh beef may always be found, and each year there is less need of carrying the supplies formerly so essential. Chairs and tables, cots, knives and forks, and corkscrews have gradually penetrated to the remotest mountain hamlets. At the so-called foreign hotels at Nikko and other resorts, charges are usually made at a fixed price for each day, with everything included, as at an American hotel.