Foreigners travelling away from the ports take with them a guide, who acts as courier, cooks and serves the meals, and asks two and a half yens a day with expenses. Thus accompanied, everything goes smoothly and easily; rooms are found ready, meals are served promptly, show-places open their doors, the best conveyances await the traveller’s wish, and an encyclopædic interpreter is always at his elbow. Without a guide or an experienced servant, even a resident who speaks the language fares hardly. Like all Orientals, the Japanese are impressed by a retinue and the appearances of wealth. They wear their best clothes when travelling, make a great show, and give liberal tips. The foreigner who goes to the Nakasendo or to remote provinces alone, trusting to the phrase-book, finds but little consideration or comfort. He ranks with the class of pilgrims, and the guest-room and the choicest dishes are not for him. The guide may swindle his master a little, but the comforts and advantages he secures are well worth the cost. All the guides are well-to-do men with tidy fortunes. They exact commissions wherever they bring custom, and can make or break landlords or merchants if they choose to combine. Some travellers, who, thinking it sharp to deprive the guides of these percentages, have been left by them in distant provinces and forced to make their way alone, have found the rest of the journey a succession of impositions, difficulties, and even of real hardships. After engaging a guide and handing him the passport, the traveller has only to enjoy Japan and pay his bill at the end of the journey. The guides know more than the guide-book; and with Ito, made famous by Miss Bird, Nikko and Kioto yielded to us many pleasures which we should otherwise have missed. An acquaintance with Miyashta and his sweet-potato hash made the Tokaido a straight and pleasant way; and Moto’s judicial countenance caused Nikko, Chiuzenji, and Yumoto to disclose unimagined beauties and luxuries; and Utaki always marshalled the impossible and the unexpected.
CHAPTER XV
NIKKO
Of all Japan’s sacred places, Nikko, or Sun’s Brightness, is dearest to the Japanese heart. Art, architecture, and landscape-gardening add to Nature’s opulence, history and legend people it with ancient splendors, and all the land is full of memories. “He who has not seen Nikko cannot say Kekko!” (beautiful, splendid, superb), runs the Japanese saying.
With its forest shades, its vast groves, and lofty avenues, its hush, its calm religious air, Nikko is an ideal and dream-like place, where rulers and prelates may well long to be buried, and where priests, poets, scholars, artists, and pilgrims love to abide. Each day of a whole summer has new charms, and Nikko’s strange fascination but deepens with acquaintance.
The one long street of Hachi-ishi, or lower Nikko village, ends at the banks of the Dayagawa, a roaring stream that courses down a narrow valley, walled at its upper end by the bold, blue bar of Nantaisan, the sacred mountain. Legend has peopled this valley of the Dayagawa with impossible beings—giants, fairies, demons, and monsters. Most of the national fairy stories begin with, “Once upon a time in the Nikko mountains,” and one half expects to meet imp or fay in the green shadows. Mound builder and prehistoric man had lived their squalid lives here; the crudest and earliest forms of religion had been observed in these forest sanctuaries long before Kobo Daishi induced the Shinto priests to believe that their god of the mountain was but a manifestation of Buddha. Everything proclaims a hoary past—trees, moss-grown stones, battered images, crumbling tombs, overgrown and forgotten graveyards.
Each summer half the Tokio legations move bodily to Nikko, and temples, monastery wings, priests’ houses, and the homes of the dwellers in the upper village are rented to foreigners in ever-increasing numbers. Nikko habitations do not yet bring the prices of Newport cottages, but the extravagant rate of three and even five hundred yens for a season of three months is a Japanese equivalent. Besides the foreigners, there are many Japanese residents; and, while the Crown-Prince occupies his summer palace, he is daily to be met in the streets, the forest paths, or temple grounds. The white-clad pilgrims throng hither by thousands during July and early August, march picturesquely to the jingle of their staffs and bells round the great temples, and trudge on to the sanctuary on Chiuzenji’s shores within the shadow of holy Nantaisan.
Two bridges cross the Daiyagawa, and lead to the groves and temples that make Nikko’s fame. One bridge is an every-day affair of plain, unpainted timbers, across which jinrikishas rumble noisily, and figures pass and repass. The other is the sacred bridge, over which only the Emperor may pass, in lieu of the Shoguns of old, for whom it was reserved. It is built of wood, covered with red lacquer, with many brass plates and tips, and rests on foundation piles of Titanic stone columns, joined by cross-pieces of stone, carefully fitted and mortised in. Tradition maintains that the gods sent down this rainbow bridge from the clouds in answer to saintly prayer. Its sanctity is so carefully preserved, that when the Emperor wished to pay the highest conceivable honor to General Grant, he ordered the barrier to the bridge to be opened that his guest might walk across. Greatly to his credit, that modest soldier refused to accept this honor, lest it should seem a desecration to the humble believers in the sanctity of the red bridge.
Shaded avenues, broad staircases, and climbing slopes lead to the gate-ways of the two great sanctuaries—the mortuary temples and tombs of the Shogun Iyeyasu and his worthy grandson, the Shogun Iyemitsu. The hill-side is shaded by magnificent old cryptomerias; and these sacred groves, with the soft cathedral light under the high canopy of leaves, are as wonderful as the sacred buildings. Each splendid gate-way, as well as the soaring pagoda, can be seen in fine perspective at the end of long avenues of trees, and bronze or stone torii form lofty portals to the holy places. The torii is a distinctively national structure, and these grand skeleton gates of two columns and an upward curving cross-piece are impressive and characteristic features of every Japanese landscape, standing before even the tiniest shrines in the Liliputian gardens of Japanese homes, as well as forming the approach to every temple. The stone torii and the rows of stone lanterns are mossy and lichen-covered, and every foot of terrace or embankment is spread with fine velvety moss of the freshest green. Although two hundred years old, the temples themselves are in as perfect condition and color as when built; and nothing is finer, perhaps, than the five-storied pagoda with its red lacquered walls, the brass trimmings of roofs and rails, the discolored bells pendent from every angle, and a queer, corkscrew spiral atop, the whole showing like a great piece of jeweller’s work in a deep, green grove.
Iyeyasu, founder of Yeddo, successor of the Taiko, and military ruler in the golden age of the arts in Japan, was the first Shogun buried on Nikko’s sacred hill-side, and it was intended to make the mortuary temple before his tomb as splendid as the crafts of the day permitted. His grandson, Iyemitsu, was the next and only other Shogun interred at Nikko, and his temple fairly rivals that of his ancestor.
At each shrine rise broad stone steps leading to the first and outer court-yards, where stand the magnificent gates, exquisitely carved, set with superb metal plates, and all ablaze with color and gilding. The eye is confused in the infinite detail of structure and ornament, and the intricacy of beams and brackets upholding the heavy roofs of these gate-ways. Walls of red lacquer and gold, with carved and colored panels topped with black tiles, surround each enclosure, and through inner and outer courts and gate-ways, growing ever more and more splendid, the visitor approaches the temples proper, their soaring roofs, curved gables, and ridge-poles set with the Tokugawa crest in gold, sharp cut against the forest background. At the lowest step his shoes are taken off, and he is permitted to wander slowly through the magnificent buildings on the soft, silk-bordered mats. Richly panelled ceilings, lacquered pillars, carved walls, and curtains of the finest split bamboo belong to both alike, and in the gloom of inner rooms are marvels of carving and decoration, only half visible.