Frankly, I detest Togo-ike. But it is extremely popular with travelling Japanese—especially the shōbai. Imagine a valley of rice-fields, ringed in by low jagged wooded hills, with a lakelet in the middle of it about a mile and a quarter long (at most) by half a mile broad, and hotels built out into the water. The coldest place I have yet been in Japan. The hotels are supplied with hot water from the volcanic springs through bamboo pipes, but the baths do not compare with those of the much humbler Izumo resort—Tama-tsukuri. The cold air to me was penetrating, sickly, but this may be idiosyncrasy. To one who has lived in the tropics the chill of rice-fields means fever and death; and some of my old tropical fears came up. Then the hotel has only mishido, no karakami,—so that one is never alone. One hour of Yabase is worth a season at Togo-ike—free of expense—to one who loves quiet and simple ways. So I shall spend a couple more days there before going to Mionoseki.
I have given up Oki, until winter. The health and strength I get from seawater bathing have made me delay too long. But I will get to Oki later.
Ever yours,
Lafcadio Hearn.
TO SENTARŌ NISHIDA
Yabase, August, 1891.
Dear Mr. Nishida,—I have had a pleasant time in different little drowsy sea-villages,—sleeping, eating, drinking sake, and bathing. Yabase is about the most pleasant place I ever stopped at here.
But, alas!—I saw no Bon-odori at all at Shimo-ichi. I seemed to have gone too soon;—at Yabase, there is no Bon-odori; and at Ōtsuka, where I next travelled, on foot, to see the Bon-odori, I had an adventure of a peculiar kind.
Ōtsuka seems to be a rough sort of place. Its folk are big hustling noisy countrymen; and when they are full of sake inclined to be mischievous. They stopped dancing to see the foreigner. The foreigner took refuge from the pressure of the crowd in a house, where he sat upon the floor, and smoked. The crowd came into the house and round the house, and uttered curious observations and threw sand and water at the foreigner. Therefore the people of Yabase, who had accompanied the foreigner to Ōtsuka, arose and made vigorous protests; and we all returned to Yabase together. At Yabase, the police and some of the principal people more than made up to me for the rudeness of the Ōtsuka folk,— they apologized for the Ōtsuka folk until I was really ashamed of being so kindly looked after; and I was entertained very generously; and the police told me that anything in the world I wished their advice or help about, only to send them word. (The hostility of the Ōtsuka folk was really a very childish sort of thing, not worth making a fuss about;—a Western crowd would have thrown stones or rotten eggs. Indeed I am not sure whether the crowd was really hostile at all. I rather think that they wanted to see the foreigner move,—so they tried to make him stir about,—like a kedamono in a cage.)
To-morrow I return to Matsue, by way of Mionoseki;—I really regret leaving Yabase: the people are the kindest, most honest, straightforward folk imaginable. And I have made several friends;—at the temple of Nichiren here, I got some beautiful o fuda.