When we begged the lovely Oikoto for her photograph, she proudly brought us one which showed that exquisite creature transformed into a dowdy horror by a foreign gown and bonnet, which the Nagoya photographer keeps on hand for the use of his customers.
CHAPTER XXII
LAKE BIWA AND KIOTO
After the pace of the jinrikisha the slow train from Nagoya to Nagahama, on Lake Biwa, seemed to attain a dizzy speed. Rising continually, we reached a hilly region where the road-bed crossed a chain of tiny valleys, penetrated mountain-tunnels, and cut through pine forests and bamboo groves.
At Nagahama we rested in a lake-side tateba, content with the glorious view, and in no way eager to search for its famous kabe crapes. Lake Biwa, with long, wooded slopes running down to the shore, and mountains barring all the horizon, with smooth water and a blue sky, offers sixty miles of charming sail. Little thatched-roof villages, and the wide sweeping gables of temples show here and there in the solitude of pines, and the crest of one high promontory is girt with the white walls of Hikone castle. Many legends belong to this mediæval fortress, the scene of so many famous events, whose last daimio was murdered in Tokio by disaffected followers, soon after he negotiated, as prime-minister, the treaties of 1858.
At Otsu, at the lower end of the lake, the splendid old temple of Miidera and its monastery on the heights command the town and lake, and the soldiers’ memorial column overlooks the eight great sights of Lake Biwa which are painted on half the fans, kakemonos, and screens of Japan. One of these eight wonders is Miidera, with its long and lofty avenues, the green twilight of its primeval groves, its yellow, moated walls and frowning gate-ways that hide in the enchanted forest; its ancient shrines, its terraces, and lichen-covered bell-tower, home of the legend of Benkei and his bell. Benkei was a muscular priest who lived on Mount Hiyeizan overlooking the lake. The other priests coveted the splendid bell of Miidera, which had been presented by the ruler of the kingdom of women living at the bottom of Lake Biwa to Hidesato for valiantly slaying a giant centipede that had frightened these ladies of the lake by its forays. The priests induced Benkei to steal the bell by promising him as much soup as he could eat, and he threw it over his shoulder and carried it to the top of the mountain. But its silvery tongue kept crying “I want to return,” and the priests threw it down the mountain-side, over which it rolled, receiving many dents and scratches, to its old bell-tower. Near by it is the giant soup-kettle, in which the priests cooked Benkei’s mess of pottage, and touching both relics of course verifies the legends. At the end of the monastery groves are large barracks, and troops of the chubby-faced, boyish-looking soldiers are always strolling through the arching avenues of the still old forest.
The greatest sight of Biwa, and one of the wonders of Japan, is the old pine-tree of Karasaki, which has stood for three hundred years on a little headland a couple of miles above Otsu, with a tiny village and a Shinto temple all its own. Its trunk is over four feet in diameter, and, at a height of fifteen feet, its boughs are trained laterally and supported by posts, so that it looks like a banyan-tree. The branches, twisted, bent, and looped like writhing dragons, cover more than an acre of ground with their canopy. The tips of the boughs reach far out over the water, and the sensitive Japanese hear a peculiar music in the sifting of the rain-drops through the foliage into the lake. High up in the tree is a tiny shrine, and the pilgrims clap their hands and stand with clasped palms, turning their faces upward as they pray. A heavy stone wall protects this sylvan patriarch from the washing of storms and floods.
Under the branches a legion of small villagers, intimating by pantomime their desire to dive for pennies, untied their belts and dropped their solitary cotton garments as unconcernedly as one might take off hat or gloves. They frolicked and capered in the water as much at home as fishes and as loath to leave it. Fleeing from this body of too attached followers, we were whirled down the road to Otsu to eat the famous Biwa trout, passing on the way a woman, who sat at ease in her bath-tub by her own door-step, calmly scrubbing herself with a bag of rice bran, and contemplating her neighbors, the road, and the lake scenery the while.
On Mount Hiyeizan, by the ruined Buddhist temples and monasteries, the American missionaries of different denominations have a long-established summer camp, where they enjoy a sort of Japanese Chautauqua circle, their tents and buildings the only signs of habitation where once stood hundreds of temples with their thousands of priests.