A line of tea-houses bands the brow of the hill; innumerable Shinto shrines lost among the pine-trees show their long lines of torii at the edges of the groves; and at another point the schools and homes of the large American missionary colony make a settlement quite to themselves.
Kobé is almost entirely given up to the trade in cheap goods for the foreign market. The streets are lined and the shops filled with such porcelain, bronze, paper, and lacquer monstrosities; such burlesques of embroidery and nightmares of color as crowd the Japanese stores in the cities of America, chief customers of this trade. One Chicago importing house takes more of such goods annually than the whole kingdom of Belgium, one of the oldest, richest, and most densely populated countries of Europe. The curio-shops proper have diminished in numbers as the rage for foreign trade increased, until there remains almost alone the establishment of an old samurai, who still retains the shaved crown and gun-hammer cue of his class. Despising modern ways and business signs, this one simply hung a huge sword over his gate-way and left his customers to stumble upon him accidentally, push their way through a rubbish and lumber-room, and pursue their unguided path across the garden. Of recent years even this old conservative has relented a little and made his entrance more plainly alluring; but formerly each comer felt the excitement of discovering some jealously hidden treasure-house. Within, there is still a room full of old saddles, state kagos, military trappings, and banners; a place crowded with spears, lances, and color standards; a chamber piled high with brocade gowns, uniforms and temple hangings; hundreds of carved and gilded Buddhas, divine Kwannons more or less battered and worn, and hoards of old porcelain, lacquer, bronze, and carvings. The last room looks upon a little garden with its inevitable miniature pond crossed by a stone bridge with stone lanterns, and stunted pines on the slope of a small mountain. Beyond this garden are more stores of armor, coins, and ancient things, and a second story doubles the whole lower labyrinth of the place. An army might be equipped from this magazine of military stores, or a pantheon fitted out with Buddhas, Kwannons, Nios, lesser gods, and gilded images. All these deities are certified to have come from the Nara or Mount Hiyeizan temples, which are the miraculous sources of supply of everything sacerdotal in this part of Japan. One fortunate tourist, who bought a Buddha of Hari Shin, found that the jewel in the forehead was a diamond instead of a crystal, which, when cut in facets, proved to be worth several hundred dollars. Of this incident the old samurai prefers not to talk, and to change the subject his agile son refills the tea-cups, unrolls more kakemonos, or displays the swords and helmets “of my father’s young time.”
Through Kobé the colored straw mosaics of Tajima province on the west coast find their market, as well as the basket wares of Arima, a village lying fifteen miles inland. One goes from Kobé to Arima by jinrikisha, and starting in the dew and freshness of a summer morning at six o’clock, we reached the grateful shade of the Taiko’s maple in the tea-house garden soon after nine. As we rose by degrees through the suburbs of Kobé, and drew nearer its glorious green hill-wall, we had a superb view of the opaline bay, set with the black hulls of great merchant ships, the white ones of foreign men-of-war, and dotted with the square white sails of hundreds of junks and fishing-boats. A sudden turn in the road took us behind the sharp spur of a hill, and a narrow cañon lay before us with the road clinging to one side wall. All the way we followed watercourses—the road now in some wild ravine, and again running up some emerald rice valley. All the way we met primitive ox-carts carrying their loads down to Kobé, each driver bearing an equally heavy load hanging from the ends of a pole across his shoulders. The oxen’s horns were bound with fantastic bits of red cloth, their feet shod with straw sandals; and the cart was braked on the slopes by the main force and strength of the driver exerted against a long tongue or pole that also served to guide it. These placid, easy-going oxen, with their hard-working drivers walking beside them, afford some of the best pictures of the old road-side scenes. Small boys trudged at their fathers’ heels with bundles of baskets or firewood over their shoulders, and women carried their share of the family load.
When the bamboo groves and rice fields of Arima’s neighborhood appeared, the paddy fields, lying terrace below terrace on a rounding hill-side in waving, irregular lines, easily suggested the terraced basins around the Yellowstone hot springs; the Japanese farmer unconsciously repeating, in larger outlines of vivid green, what the overflowing waters have built up in snowy deposits in the Montana Park. Arima, which lines the sides of a steep gorge through which a wild mountain-stream dashes, is as picturesque as a mountain village in Switzerland. The houses are built almost one on top of another, with narrow, winding streets, where the heavy projecting roofs almost meet. Stone steps ease the steep slopes for the villagers, and the clatter of clogs and the sight of the peasants going up and down the stair-ways, half-hidden by the loads of grass or straw on their backs, recall similar pictures in the crooked little mountain hamlets of Northern Italy. At the tea-house we wandered through an intricate garden before reaching the steps of the detached pavilion, on whose balcony were chairs and hammocks, and before which loomed a perpendicular green mountain-wall with its base sunk in the feathery, spray-like tops of bamboo groves. To us came peddlers and packs with samples of everything the town could offer, and the rooms were soon a bazaar of bamboo wares.
FARM LABORERS
All the afternoon we roamed about Arima, climbing its steep streets and threading its narrow by-ways. In the glaring white sunlight the shops were caves of cool shadow, and we found them filled with everything that bamboo will make, from clothes-baskets to toothpicks, and all selling for a song. Their weight is almost nothing, but, with the most ingenious packing, the space they consume makes the cost of shipment to America equal that of production. Except the necessaries of life, nothing seems to be sold in Arima save bamboo baskets and straw work; and every house is a basket-factory, where father, mother, children, and almost babes, weave baskets or prepare the bamboo. Heredity asserts itself again, and these descendants of generations of basket-makers work with a dexterity equalling sleight-of-hand tricksters. Arima’s industrial life is a fine study in political economy.
The hill-side is musical with the boom of Buddhist bells and echoing clang of Shinto gongs; but more strangers toil upward for a drink from the sparkling, ice-cold soda spring beside one temple, than to pray at its door-way. For centuries Arima’s hot-springs have wrought their cures, and sufferers from rheumatism and skin diseases have flocked to its pools. The Government has charge of the springs, and the waters are conducted to a large bath-house in the heart of the village, where free baths in the common pool are open to every one, and where private baths may be obtained at a trifling charge.