Farther along the main road, with its arching shade-trees, the glossy dark tea-bushes gave way to square miles of rice and wheat fields. Here and there a patch of intense green verdure showed the young blades of rice almost ready to be transplanted to the fields, whence the wheat had just been garnered, the rice giving way in turn to some other cereal, all farming land in this fertile region bearing three annual crops.
A few villages showed the projecting roofs peculiar to the province of Totomi, and then the pretty tea-house at Hamamatsu quite enchanted us after our experiences with the poor accommodations of some of the provincial towns. A rough curbed well in the court-yard, with a queer parasol of a roof high over the sweep, a pretty garden all cool, green shade, a stair-way, steep and high, and at the top a long, dim corridor, with a floor of shining, dark keyaki wood. This was the place that made us welcome; even stocking-footed we half feared to tread on those brilliantly-polished boards. Our balcony overlooked a third charming garden, and each little room had a distinctive beauty of wooden ceilings, recesses, screens, and fanciful windows.
The most enviable possession of Hamamatsu, however, was O’Tatsu, and on our arrival O’Tatsu helped to carry our traps up-stairs, falling into raptures over our rings, pins, hair-pins, watches, and beaded trimmings. She clapped her hands in ecstasy, her bright eyes sparkled, and her smile displayed the most dazzling teeth. When we ate supper, sitting on the floor around an eight-inch high table, with little O’Tatsu presiding and waiting on us, not only her beauty but her charming frankness, simplicity, quickness, and grace made further conquest of us all. The maiden enjoyed our admiration immensely, arrayed herself in her freshest blue-and-white cotton kimono, and submitted her head to the best hair-dresser in town, returning with gorgeous bits of crape and gold cord tied in with the butterfly loops of her blue-black tresses. At her suggestion we sent for a small dancing-girl to entertain us, who, with a wand and masks, represented Suzume and other famous characters in legend and melodramas. When we left Hamamatsu, affectionate little O’Tatsu begged me to send her my photograph, and lest I should not have understood her excited flow of Japanese sentences, illuminated, however, by her great pleading eyes, she ran off, and, coming back, slipped up to me and held out a cheap, colored picture of some foreign beauty in the costume of 1865. When at last we rode away from the tea-house, O’Tatsu followed my jinrikisha for a long way, holding my hand, with tears in her lovely eyes, and her last sayonara broke in a sob.
A hard shell-road winds down to the shores of Hamana Lake and across its long viaduct. The jinrikishas run, as if on rubber tires, for nearly three miles over an embankment crossing the middle of the great lake, which at one side admits the curling breakers of the great Pacific. Until a few years ago this mountain-walled pool was protected from the ocean by a broad sand ridge, which an earthquake shook down, letting in the salt-waters. The Tokaido railroad crosses the lake on a high embankment, which was sodded and covered with a lattice-work of straw bundles, while seed was sown in the crevices more than a year before the road could be used. The whole railroad, as we saw in passing its completed sections, is solidly built with stone foundations and stone ballast, and intended to last for centuries. The Japanese seldom hurry the making of public works, and even a railroad does not inspire them with any feverish activity. Not until the last detail and station-house was finished was the line opened for travel, and following so nearly the route of the old Tokaido, through the most fertile and picturesque part of Central Japan, it keeps always in sight Fujiyama or the ocean.
In the course of the afternoon plantations of mulberry-trees came in sight. Loads of mulberry branches and twigs were being hauled into the villages and sold by weight, the rearers of silk-worms buying the leaves and paper-makers the stems for the sake of the inside bark. Climbing to one high plateau, we rested at a little rustic shed of a tea-house, commanding a superb view down a great ragged ravine to the line of foam breaking at its bowlder strewn entrance, and so on to the limitless ocean. One of the jinrikisha coolies preceded us to the benches on the overhanging balcony, and, kindly pointing out the special beauties of the scene, took off his garments and spread them out on the rail in the matter-of-fact, unconscious way of true Japanese innocence and simplicity of mind.
The guide-book calls the stretch of country beyond that high-perched tea-house “a waste region,” but nothing could be more beautiful than the long ride through pine forest and belts of scrub-pine on that uncultivated plateau, always overlooking the ocean. At one point a temple to the goddess Kwannon is niched among towering rocks at the base of a narrow cliff, on whose summit a colossal statue of the deity stands high against the sky. For more than a century this bronze goddess of Mercy has been the object of pious pilgrimages, the pilgrims clapping their hands and bowing in prayer to all the thirty-three Kwannons cut in the face of the solid rock-base on which our lady of pity stands.
We reached the long, dull town of Toyohashi at dusk, to find the large tea-house crowded with travellers. Two rooms looking out upon a sultry high-walled garden were given us, and for dining-room a tiny alcove of a place on one of the middle courts. This room was so small and close that we had to leave the screens open, though the corridor led to the large bath-room, where half a dozen people splashed and chattered noisily and gentlemen with their clothes on their arms went back and forth before our door as if before the life class of an art school. The noise of the bathers was kept up gayly, until long after midnight, and no one in the tea-house seemed to be sleeping. By four o’clock in the morning such a coughing, blowing, and sputtering began in the court beside my room that I finally slid the screens and looked out. At least a dozen lodgers were brushing their teeth in the picturesque little quadrangle of rocks, bamboos, and palms, and bathing face and hands in the large stone and bronze urns that we had supposed to be ornamental only. Later, the gravel was covered with scores of the wooden sticks of tooth-brushes, beaten out into a tassel of fibres at one end, and with many boxes emptied of the coarse, gritty tooth-powder which the Japanese use so freely.
The last day of our long jinrikisha ride was warm, the sun glared on a white, dusty road, and the country was flat and uninteresting. Each little town and village seemed duller than the other. Wheat and rape were being harvested and spread to dry, and in the farm-yards men and women were hatchelling, beating out the grain with flails, and winnowing it in the primitive way by pouring it down from a flat scoop-basket held high overhead. Nobody wore any clothes to speak of, and the whole population turned out to watch the amazing spectacle of foreigners standing spell-bound until our jinrikishas had gone by.
At Arimatsu village we passed through a street of shops where the curiously dyed cotton goods peculiar to the place are sold. For several hundred years all Arimatsu has been tying knots down the lengths of cotton, twisting it in skeins, and wrapping it regularly with a double-dyed indigo thread, and then, by immersion in boiling water, dyeing the fabric in curious lines and star-spotted patterns. A more clumsy and primitive way of dyeing could not be imagined in this day of steam-looms and roller-printing, but Arimatsu keeps it up and prospers.