The pipe, I regret to say, is in vulgar circles used as a domestic rod. The wife or child who is very naughty may receive a severe blow with the kiseru, or even many. However, it is not so bad as the instruments of punishment in vogue elsewhere.
I am not sure if I have been able to say anything worth your while to read about the pipe, but I think the Japanese pipe is really worth more consideration than is usually given it.
Note. Women’s pipes have a special, delicate form—and are made very small and dainty—also their tabako-ire.
TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN
Yura, August, 1891.
Dear Professor Chamberlain,—If you are not frightfully busy, which I suppose nobody is at this time of the year, perhaps some of my adventures will interest you.
I found that the Bon-odori is different, not only in every village, but even in every commune. So I was very anxious to see all the varieties of this curious dance that I could. I heard that at Ōtsuka, near Yabase, there was a very remarkable kind of dance danced; and I went, in Japanese costume, with a dozen citizens of Yabase, to see it. It turned out to be not worth seeing at all: the people had no more knowledge of dancing—or rather, much less, than Sioux or Comanches.
Ōtsuka is a stony, large, primitive-looking village,—full of rude energy and, I am sorry to say, of bad manners,—a terrible thing to say about any Japanese town. But I have been in about 50 Japanese villages, where I loved all the people, and always made a few of them love me, and Ōtsuka is the first exception I found to the general rule about the relation between foreigners and hyakushō-no-jin. At Ōtsuka the people left their dance to pelt the foreigner with little pellets of sand and mud,—crying out: “Bikki!—bikki!” What that means I do not know. So both I and the whole of the Yabase people turned back. The pelting was not very savage—it was just like the work of naughty children: a foreign mob would have thrown stones, which these folk were very careful not to do—in spite of the fact that there were no police. I passed through this village twice since, and found the attitude of its people peculiarly rough—bordering upon hostility. Compared with the roughness of—say a Barbadoes mob—it was a very gentle thing, but it gave me the first decidedly unpleasant sense of being an alien that I have ever had in Japan.
I have just returned from Togo-ike,—a place described in your Guide.