The great Shinto temple at the edge of the town is famous for the dragons in its ceiling. The old priest welcomed us with smiles, led us in, shoeless, over the mats, and bade us look up, first at the Dragon of the Four Quarters, and then at the Dragon of the Eight Quarters, the eyes of the monster strangely meeting ours, as we changed our various points of view.
At the archery range behind the temple our danna san proved himself a new William Tell with the bow and arrows. The attendant idlers cheered his shots, and a wrinkled old woman brought us dragon candies on a dark-red lacquer tray, under whose transparent surface lay darker shadows of cherry blossoms. The eye of the connoisseur was quick to descry the tray, and when the woman said it had been bought in the town, we took jinrikishas and hurried to the address she gave. The guide explained minutely, the shopkeeper brought out a hundred other kinds and colors of lacquer, and children ran in from home workshops with hardly dried specimens to show us. All the afternoon we searched through lacquer and curio shops, and finally despatched a coolie to the temple to buy the old woman’s property. Hours afterwards he returned with a brand-new, bright red horror, and the message that “the mistress could not send the honorable foreigner such a poor old tray as that.”
The fine Shidzuoka baskets, which are so famed elsewhere, were not to be found in Shidzuoka; our tea-house was uninteresting, and so we set forth in the rain, unfurling big flat umbrellas of oil-paper, and whirling away through a dripping landscape. Rice and wheat alternated with dark-green tea-bushes, and cart-loads of tea-chests were bearing the first season’s crop to market. The rain did not obscure the lovely landscape, as the plain we followed turned to a valley, the valley narrowed to a ravine, and we began climbing upward, while a mountain-torrent raced down beside us. One picturesque little village in a shady hollow gave us glimpses of silk-worm trays in the houses as we went whirling through it. The road, winding by zigzags up Utsonomiya pass, suddenly entered a tunnel six hundred feet in length, where the jinrikisha wheels rumbled noisily. On cloudy days the place is lighted by lamps, but on sunny days by the sun’s reflection from two black lacquer boards at the entrances. The device is an old one in Japan, but an American patent has recently been issued for the same thing, as a cheap means of lighting ships’ holds while handling cargo.
On the other side of Utsonomiya pass the road winds down by steep zigzags to the village of Okabe, noted for its trays and boxes made of the polished brown stem of a coarse fern. We bought our specimens from an oracular woman, who delivered her remarks like the lines of a part, her husband meekly echoing what she said in the same dramatic tones, and the whole scene being as stagey as if it had been well rehearsed beforehand.
From the mountains the road drops to a rich tea country, where every hill-side is green with the thick-set little bushes. At harvest-time cart-loads of basket-fired, or country-dried, tea fill the road to the ports, to be toasted finally in iron pans, and coated with indigo and gypsum to satisfy the taste of American tea-drinkers. In every town farmers may be seen dickering with the merchants over the tough paper sacks of tea that they bring in, and within the houses groups sitting at low tables sort the leaves into grades with swift fingers.
At Fujiyeda, where we took refuge from the increasing rain, the splashing in the large bath-room of the tea-house was kept up from afternoon to midnight by the guests, and continued by the family and tea-house maids until four o’clock, when the early risers began their ablutions. A consumptive priest on the other side of our thin paper walls had a garrulous shampooer about midnight and a refection later, and we were glad to resume the ride between tea fields at the earliest possible hour.
At Kanaya, at the foot of Kanaya mountain, the tea-house adjoined a school-house. The school-room had desks and benches but no walls, the screens being all removed. The teacher called the pupils in by clapping two sticks together, as in a French theatre. Spying the foreigners, the children stared, oblivious of teacher and blackboard, and the teacher, after one good look at the itinerants, bowed a courteous good-morning, and let the offenders go unpunished.
Up over Kanaya pass we toiled slowly, reaching at last a little eyrie of a tea-house, where the landlord pointed with equal pride to the view and to several pairs of muddy shoes belonging, he said, to the honorable gentlemen who were about piercing the mountain under us with a railway tunnel. Under a shady arbor is a huge, round bowlder, fenced in carefully and regarded reverently by humble travellers. According to the legend it used to cry at night like a child until Kobo Daishi, the inventor of the Japanese syllabary, wrote an inscription on it and quieted it forever. No less famous than Kobo Daishi’s rock is the midzu ame of this Kanaya tea-house, and the dark brown sweet is put in dainty little boxes that are the souvenirs each pilgrim carries away with him.