Jinrikisha days in Japan

by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

FARM LABORERS AND PACK-HORSE

The pack-horse, a slow-moving beast, has a keeper who pulls him along by a cord, his extended head and reluctant gait making that seem the only motive power. Horse and leader wear straw shoes, and new pairs are strung around the high saddle for reshoeing the beast every few miles. Iron horseshoes are confined to the capital and the large ports, and the village blacksmith is unknown. Pack-horses wear a thick straw pad and a high saddle fashioned like a saw-horse, on which the rider sits aloft, so well forward that his feet hang over the creature’s neck. This saddle is merely balanced, not girded on, and the animals are so sleepy, slow-footed, and stumbling, with a lurching, swinging gait like a camel’s, that riding one is really a feat.

From Nikko to Chiuzenji you must travel eight miles by kago, pack-horse, or jinrikisha, the road leading past rich fields of buckwheat, millet, rice, and potatoes, farm-houses with thatched roofs, wayside shrines and tea-houses. The ascent of the two thousand feet to the higher region of the lake is chiefly included in one three-mile stretch, climbing by easy slopes and broad staircases to the high pass. At every few feet a stone step was built, or a tree-trunk fastened with a forked stick and set with small stones. This stair-building, done ages ago, has become a part of the mountain. At short distances the staircase enters a little clearing with a rustic tea-house, or the usual tateba, built of poles, a few planks, branches or mats, and affording sufficient shelter for summer pilgrims and travellers. The keepers immediately put out cushions for guests on the edge of the platform that constitutes the floor of the one room, and bring the tray with its tiny teapot, thimble cups, and dish of barley-sugar candies. For the refreshment one leaves a few coppers on the tray, and in mountain jaunts, where the traveller walks to escape the kago and spare the coolies, these tiny cups of pale yellow tea are very stimulating. Each tateba commands some particular view, and even the pilgrim who is tramping the provinces and living on a few cents a day, will be found inditing poems to the different water-falls and gorges he looks down upon.

The head of the pass affords a magnificent view of the valley two thousand feet below, and presently the woodland path is following the border of the lake and comes out into the open of Chiuzenji village. Chiuzenji Lake, three miles wide and eight miles long, is surrounded by steep and thickly-wooded mountains, the great Nantaisan grandly soaring nine thousand feet above the sea, tapering regularly as a pyramid and forested to the summit. Nantaisan is a sacred mountain, a temple at its foot, shrines all along the ascent, and at the top an altar on which repentant murderers offer up their swords. Each August come hosts of pilgrims in white clothes and huge straw hats, with pieces of straw matting for rain-coats bound across their shoulders—devout souls, who, after purification in the lake, pass under the torii, say a prayer in the temple, and painfully climb to the summit. Only at such fixed seasons may visitors ascend the mountain, each one paying twenty cents for the privilege of toiling up its endless flight of steps. With these fees the priests keep the underbrush trimmed and the path well cleared, and where the holy guardian unbars the gate and motions one upward, begins the flight of stone stairs that extend, with few breaks or zigzags, straight to the top. The whole way is strewn with the cast-off sandals of the season, and great heaps of the waraji of past years lie here and there.

The pilgrims sleep in Government barracks in the village, a few coppers securing a mat on the floor and the use of the common fireplace. Their vow to Nantaisan being accomplished, they make the half-circuit of the lake, to visit the hidden shrines and temples of the forest shores, and then trudge to Yumoto for its hot sulphur baths and scenery, or home to their ripening rice-fields.

From across the water Chiuzenji village looks a small, yellow patch, lying between the unbroken green slope of Nantaisan and the great lake. Its five tea-houses rise straight from the water’s edge, each with a triple row of outer galleries overlooking it. The way of life at the Tsutaya, Idzumiya, Nakamarya, and the rest is much more Japanese than in the frequented inns of Nikko. Chairs and tables are conceded to foreigners, but everybody must sleep on the floor, wash face and hands in the common wash-basin in the open court, and go about the house stocking-footed, or wear the stiff, heelless, monkey-skin slippers furnished by the inn. To call a servant one claps his palms, and a long-drawn “Hei!” announces that the rosy-cheeked mountain maid has heard, and the gentle swaying of the house proclaims that she is running up the stairs. The washing of rice, vegetables, fish, kitchen utensils, and family clothing goes on from the single plank of a pier running from the lowest floor of the house. Each inn has a similar pier, where sociable maidens chatter as they stir and wash the rice in bamboo baskets. The servants of the houses take the whole lake for wash-hand basin and tooth-brush cup, and the pier is a small stage, upon which these local companies play their unstudied parts.

As the finest country walk in England is agreed to be that from Stratford to Warwick, so is the way from Chiuzenji to Yumoto the finest country walk in Japan, for its eight miles of infinite variety. First, the broad foot-path wanders for two miles along the shores of Lake Chiuzenji, which, however, appears only in glimpses of placid blue through the dense forest, all stillness, coolness, and enchantment. Then it emerges at the head of the lake in a grove of pine-trees sheltering a rustic tea-house, which overlooks the bit of low beach known as the Iris Strand, and all the grand amphitheatre of mountains walling in Chiuzenji. Farther on are Hell’s River and the Dragon Head cascade, where a mountain stream slides in many a separate ribbon down mossy ledges. Thence the foot-path climbs to a high plain covered with tall grasses and groves of lofty pines—the famous Red Plain, dyed once with the blood of a conquered army, and tinged with each autumn’s frost to the same deep hue again. From the border of this plain rise sombre mountains, Nantaisan a giant among them, with green and purple veils of shadows and a crown of floating clouds. No sign of habitation or cultivation marks the high plain, which, with its loneliness and its scattered pines, is so much like the valleys of the high Sierras. Everywhere else in Japan the country is wooded and shaded and cultivated from water’s edge to mountain-top; but in winter all the region above Nikko is deserted, and deep snows in the passes shut it off from the rest of the world. Tea-houses close, the people flee to the valley for warmth, and only the coming of spring and the tourist restores it again. Even those wizards, the Japanese farmers, do not attempt to subdue these solitudes, whose wild beauty delights the whole people.

Beyond this lonely plain the way climbs seven hundred feet along the face of a precipitous hill to the level of Yumoto Lake, which there narrows to a few feet and slips down the rocks, a mass of foam, spray, and steam. The lake—small, uneven, walled by perpendicular mountain-slopes and forests—is a still mirror of these superb heights, one of which, Shirane-san, is a slumbering volcano. Vaporous sulphur springs bubble through the hot crust of earth at the end of the lake, and boiling sulphur wells up, even in the bed of the lake itself, and clouds and heats the whole body of water so that no fish can live there. The two miles of winding forest-path, between the fall at one end of Yumoto Lake and the village of the same name at the opposite end, lead through an enchanted forest—a picturesque tangle of roots and rocks, covered with green moss, wound with vines, shaded with ferns, and overhung with evergreen branches.