THE GREAT PINE-TREE AT KARASAKI
From the old temple of Ishiyama, east of Otsu, is seen the famous Seta bridge and Awatsu, where the lake takes on a wondrous silvery sheen when the sun shines and the wind blows, these being three more of the famous sights of Biwa. The grounds of Ishiyama contain what is known as a dry garden, where blackened rocks and rocks free from every green thing are piled fantastically with strange landscape resemblances. In the temple is a prayer-wheel, which is turned by thousands of pilgrims every summer, and in a small room off the temple a priest showed us the writing-box and ink-stone of Murusaki Shikibu, a poetess and novelist of the tenth century, whose work, the Genji Monogatari, is the great classic of its age. The remaining wonders of Lake Biwa are the flights of the wild geese, the return of the fishing-boats to Yabashi, and Mount Hira with the winter snows on its summit.
From Otsu over to the Kioto side of the mountains we went by train, rushing down the long grade and through tunnels to the great plain, where sits the sacred city, the capital and heart of old Japan, incomparable Kioto, Saikio, or Miako. We saw it in the sunset light, the western hills throwing purple shadows on their own slopes, and the long stretch of wheat-fields at their base turned to a lake of pure gold. The white walls of the Shogun’s castle, the broad roof of the old palace, and the ridges of temples rose above the low, gray plain of house roofs and held the sun’s last level beams.
After the imitations and tawdriness of modern Tokio, the unchanged aspect of the old capital is full of dignity. After many long stays in spring-time, midsummer, and midwinter, Kioto has always remained to me foremost of Japanese cities. Yaami’s, the foreigner’s Kioto home, with its steep terraced garden, its dwarf-pine and blooming monkey-tree, its many buildings at different levels, its flitting figures on the outer galleries, is like no other hostelry. Yaami, proprietor of this picturesque hotel, is a personage indeed. He and his brother were professional guides until they made their fortunes. Their shrewd eyes saw further fortunes in a Kioto inn, where foreigners might find beds, chairs, tables, knives, forks, and foreign food, and they secured the old Ichiriki tea-house, midway on the slope of Maruyama, the mountain walling in Kioto on the east. The Ichiriki tea-house was the place where Oishi Kura no Suke, the leader of the Forty-seven Ronins, played the drunkard during the two years that he lived near Kioto, before he avenged the death of his lord. With it was bought an adjoining monastery, belonging to one of the temples on Mount Hiyeizan, and these two original buildings have expanded and risen story upon story, with detached wings here and there, until the group of tall white buildings, with the white flag floating high up in the midst of Maruyama’s foliage, is quite castle-like. While the obnoxious foreign treaties were in force, no foreigners except those in Japanese employ were allowed to live in Kioto, or even to visit it without a passport, and this secured Yaami in his monopoly. As a matter of fact, Yaami is not the family name of the two pleasant and prosperous-looking men who walk about in silk kimonos, with heavy gold watch-chains wound about their broad silk belts, and who have the innocent faces of young children, save for the shrewdness of their eyes. Yaami is the corruption of Yama Amida (Hill of Buddha), which is the name of the hotel, and the two men belong to the Inowye family, a clan not less numerous in Japan than the Smiths of English-speaking countries. In parts of the house one finds relics of monastery days in dim old screens of fine workmanship, and there is a stone-floored kitchen, vast as a temple, with cooks serious as priests, wielding strange sacrificial knives, and who, in midsummer, wear an apron only, apparently as a professional badge rather than as a garment. The momban, or gate-keeper, sits, spider-like, in a web of his own, a mere doll’s house by the gate-way. In olden times, and even to-day, in large establishments, the momban announces an arrival with strokes upon his gong, but this particular functionary corresponds more nearly to the Parisian octroi. All who enter the gates answer for themselves and pay tribute, or they are forever barred out. Even coolies disgorge their black-mail to the colony of fleet-footed brethren who hold a valuable monopoly at Yaami’s gate, and in guilds and labor organizations the Orient is ages older and wiser than the Occident.
All of Maruyama’s slope is holy ground and pleasure-ground. Tea-houses and bath-houses are scattered in between the great temples, and prayer-gongs and pious hand-clapping are heard in unison with samisens and revellers’ songs. Praying and pleasuring go together, and the court-yard of the Gion temple at the foot of the hill is lined with monkey-shows and archery ranges, and in the riding-schools the adventurous may, for a few coppers, mount a jerky horse and be jolted around a shady ring. There, too, are many rows of images of fierce, red-cloaked Daruma, the Buddhist saint, who sailed across from Korea on a rush-leaf. He sat facing a wall for nine years, and wore off his lower limbs, and now his image, weighted with lead, is the target for merry ball-throwers, and is seen in every quarter of the empire.
From the airy galleries on Maruyama the city lies below one like a relief map. The river, the Kamogawa, crossed at intervals by long bridges, cuts the city in two. From each bridge a street runs straight on to the westward. By day these thoroughfares look like furrows ploughed through the solid plain of gray-tiled roofs; but at night they shine with thousands of lamps and lanterns, and their narrow, wavering lines of fire look like so many torchlight processions, and the river is one broad belt of light.
I first saw Kioto on the last day of the Gion matsuri, a festival which lasts for a month and brings all the population out-of-doors into one quarter during the evening. By dusk a babel of music and voices had arisen, which finally drew us down the steep and shady road, and through the great stone torii, to the Gion’s precincts. The court-yard was almost deserted, and looking through the great gate-way to Shijo Street the view was dazzling and the shouts and chatter deafening. The narrow street was lined with rows of large white paper lanterns hanging above the house doors, and rows hanging from the eaves. Lanterned booths lined the curb, while humbler venders spread their wares on the ground in the light of flaring torches. Crowds surged up and down, every man carrying a paper lantern on the end of a short bamboo stick—the literal lamp for the feet—women bearing smaller lanterns, and children delighting themselves with gayly-colored paper shells for tiny candles. Boys marched and ran in long single files, shouting a measured chant as they cut their way through the crowd and whirled giant lanterns and blazing torches at the end of long poles.