Wirgman and I were by this time so accustomed to living on Japanese food that we resolved not to burden ourselves with stores of any kind, knives or forks, finger glasses or table napkins. Ponies were not procurable, so we bought a couple of secondhand palanquins, called hikido kago, such as were used by public officials, and had them repaired. They cost the small price of 32 ichibus each, or not £4. The pole was a long piece of deal, called by euphemism paulownia wood. A cushion of silk damask, thickly stuffed with raw cotton, was spread on the bottom, and there was then just room enough to sit in it cross-legged without discomfort. In front was a small shelf above the window, and underneath a small flap which served as a table. The sliding doors also had windows, furnished with a paper slide to exclude cold, and another covered with gauze to keep out the dust while letting in the air. If it rained, blinds made of slender strips of bamboo were let down over the windows. The body of the palanquin could also be enveloped in a covering of black oiled paper, in which a small aperture was left for the occupant to peep out of, a blind of the same material being propped up outside; this arrangement was, however, only resorted to on days of persistent rain. Each of us had a pair of oblong wicker-work baskets to hold our clothing, called riô-gaké, which were slung at opposite ends of a black pole and carried by one man over his shoulder. My bedding, which consisted of a couple of Japanese mattresses covered with white crape and edged with a broad border of common brocade known as yamato nishiki, and one of the huge stuffed bedgowns called yogi of figured crape with a velvet collar, with a couple of European pillows, was packed in a wicker box of the kind called akéni, and formed a burden for two men. To each package was fastened a small deal board on which my name and titles were inscribed with Indian ink in large Chinese characters. As escort we had ten picked men belonging to the native legation guard (betté gumi), and a couple of officials belonging to the Japanese Foreign Department (gai-koku-gata) were attached to us, who were instructed to make arrangements for our accommodation along the road. Last of all, a list was made out of the places at which we were to take our mid-day meals and sleep at night, the journey of 320 miles from Fushimi being calculated to occupy sixteen days.
On the 18th May, having exchanged farewell calls with the commissioners of foreign affairs, we got away from our temple lodging at nine o'clock in the morning. Willis, who was to join Sir Harry Parkes' party at Fushimi, accompanied us. We embarked at the Hachikenya wharf on the river side in a houseboat, the escort and gai-koku-gata in another, two open boats following with the luggage of the whole party. The stream was very strong, and our progress was correspondingly slow, but we felt that we were travelling in a dignified manner, and therefore repressed our natural impatience. Where the stream was deep enough close in shore, the boatmen landed, and towed us by a line attached to the top of a mast fixed in the front of the boat, while the steersman remained at his post to prevent us from running into the bank. When the towing path changed to the opposite side, the boatmen came on board and poled across to resume their labour as before. The river, which winds a good deal, is enclosed between lofty dykes, so that we had no prospect but the broad surface of the river itself and the tops of ranges of mountains peering over the bank. It was a fine day, and we were full of eager anticipations about the novel scenes we were about to pass through, every inch of the way being entirely new to us as far as Hakoné, and for myself the prospect of a fortnight's holiday was especially exhilarating after the hard work of the past five weeks.
By one o'clock we reached Suido mura, a small village on the right bank about five miles above Ozaka, and landed to take our lunch. There was nothing to be had but rice and bean-curd, which did not constitute a very palatable meal. But à la guerre comme à la guerre. We passed a large number of crowded passenger boats descending the river, and ten barges laden with bales of rice. At half-past six we stopped at Hirakata, a somewhat more important place than Suido mura. Here we landed to dine off soup, fish and rice, the ordinary constituents of a traveller's meal. The charge for our three selves and three servants was less than an ichibu, and a second ichibu was given as cha-dai or "tea-money." Noguchi was paymaster, and gave whatever he thought right under this heading. The charge seemed extraordinarily cheap, which was explained by a regulation binding innkeepers to supply persons travelling in an official capacity at one quarter of the rates charged to ordinary people. We started again by moonlight, and as the night advanced, a thin mist rose and covered the surface of the broad river, imparting to the landscape that mysterious, sketchy indistinctness which is so characteristic of Japan, that none but native artists whose eyes have been educated to it from their childhood have ever been able to seize and represent.
The air now became as cold as it had been hot during the day time. We had blankets fetched from one of the baggage boats, and lay down to sleep in opposite corners of the boat. At two in the morning I woke and found that we were lying off the guardhouse on the right bank opposite to Hashimoto, which was held by troops of Matsudaira Hôki no Kami, a member of the Tycoon's Council, the other bank being in the charge of Tôdô, the daimiô of Isé. We had been as far as Yodo, where they turned us back because our pass had not been viséd here, and we did not reach Yodo again till four o'clock. It was still dark, the moon having set during the night. The river is here joined by the Kidzu kawa, and is divided into several channels by islands lying in its course. We kept along the right bank, and arrived at Fushimi about six, where we found Sir Harry on the point of starting for Tsuruga. Here a generous member of his party gave us a last cigar. Our stock had been completely exhausted during the long stay in Ozaka, and for the rest of the journey we had to content ourselves with Japanese tobacco, smoked in tiny whiffs out of the diminutive native pipes, all inadequate to satisfy a craving nourished on something stronger. The worst of the Japanese pipe, with its metal bowl and mouthpiece united by a hard bamboo stem, is the rapidity with which it gets foul, necessitating cleaning at least once a day with a slender spill twisted out of tough mulberry-bark paper. Willis left us here, and joined the chief. Special precautions had been taken by the government to prevent Sir Harry turning aside to Kiôto, which it was thought his adventurous disposition might tempt him to visit.
After breakfast we started in our kagos for the journey overland. A crowd of machi-kata, who were a sort of municipal officers of all grades, dressed in their Sunday best, escorted us out of the town. Our road lay for a mile or so between the banks of the Uji-kawa and the low, fir-clad hills masked by clumps of graceful bamboo, and then leaving the tea plantations of Uji to the right, we journeyed along a level road winding through the hills to Oiwaké, where we joined the Tôkaidô. A kind of stone tramway ran from Kiôto all the way to Otsu, our next resting-place, for the heavy, broad-wheeled bullock carts, of which we passed a couple of score laden with rice for the use of the Tycoon's garrison at the capital. Oiwaké was famous for pipes, counting boards (abacus), and a species of comic prints called toba-yé, and lies at the foot of the hills separating the province of Yamashiro from the beautiful Biwa Lake. By the roadside we had an opportunity of inspecting some tea-firing establishments on a small scale, like every other manufacturing enterprise in those days. The fresh tea leaves were damped, then spread out on a flat table heated from beneath by fuel enclosed in a plastered chamber, and twisted by hand. This new tea forms a delicious and refreshing drink when infused after the Japanese method for the finer qualities, with lukewarm water. At each establishment there were not more than two persons at work.
At one o'clock we got to Otsu, and after lunch went to a monastery called Riô-zen-ji to enjoy the celebrated prospect of the lake, but the mid-day heat had covered its surface with a dull grey haze, and hid it entirely from view. We found everything nicely arranged for us at Takajima-ya, where we rested for the mid-day meal, while the escort and foreign office men in our train vied in accommodating themselves to our wishes. From Otsu a level road skirted the lake, and, soon after passing through Zézé, the "castle town" of Honda Oki no Kami, we got out to walk. In crossing the great double bridge of Séta we saw a couple of men in a boat spinning for carp; the shallows here are crowded with traps, irregular shaped enclosures of reeds planted in the mud, into which the fish enter when stormy winds agitate the surface of the water and deprive them of their equanimity. But before reaching Kusatsu, where we were to put up for the night, we retreated into our kagos, in order not to be overwhelmed by the crowd, and for the better preservation of our dignity, which required that we should not be seen on foot. At the confines of the town we were met by a deputation of the municipal officers and by the host of the official inn, who escorted us in with great pomp, keeping back the inquisitive multitude. Our bearers quickened their pace, not indeed to our satisfaction, for the kago, which is uncomfortable at all times, becomes almost uninhabitable when the men get out of a walk.
At last we turned round a corner, and passing through a black gate, before the posts of which were two neatly piled-up heaps of sand, flanked by buckets of water, were set down in the wide porch of the official inn. It was one of the most beautifully decorated buildings of its kind that I have ever seen. That implies woodwork of the finest grain, plaster of the least obtrusive shades of colour, sliding doors papered with an artistic pattern touched up with gold leaf and framed with shining black lacquered wood, and hard thick mats of the palest straw edged with stencilled cotton cloth. In the principal room, only twelve feet square, raised six inches above the rest of the house, lay two thick mats forming a sort of bed-place, where the distinguished traveller was expected to squat without moving. The baggage was deposited in the corridor which ran round two sides of the apartment. There was no view from the windows, which looked out on a small courtyard enclosed by a sulky-looking, black wooden fence. Etiquette prescribed that a great man should neither see nor be seen. Our host came in with a small present, and bowed his forehead to the sill. After a few minutes he returned to give thanks in the same humble manner for the gift of two ichibus which he had received as cha-dai. We went in turn to the hot bath, where a modest, not to say prim, young damsel asked whether she might have the honour of washing our "august" back, but not being trained from our youth up to be waited on by lovely females during our ablutions, we declined her assistance.
At dinner time we ordered a dish of fish and a bottle of saké, which had to be several times replenished before the artist had had enough. The people of the inn were astonished to find that we could eat rice, having been taught to believe that the food of Europeans consisted exclusively of beef and pork. When we went to bed, soft silk mattresses in plenty were spread on the floor, and the chambermaid placed within the mosquito net a fire-box with a bit of red-hot charcoal neatly embedded in white ashes for a last smoke, and a pot of freshly-infused tea. O yasumi nasai, be pleased to take your august rest, was the end of the first day.
In Japan travellers are in the habit of making an early start. A native usually rises before day, makes a hasty toilet by scrubbing his teeth with a handful of salt from a basket hanging over the kitchen sink, washes his hands and face without soap, swallows a hasty breakfast, and is on the road as soon as the sun is up, or even earlier. His principal object is to arrive at the town where he is going to pass the night at as early an hour as possible, in order to secure a good room and the first turn at the hot bath, there being only one tub and one water for the whole of the guests. In some out of the way places this is not even changed every day, and I remember on one occasion to have found the bath absolutely green with age and odorous in proportion. We were not expected to do as the vulgar herd, and did not get away much before half-past seven. Our average rate of going was about three miles an hour, and the day's journey not over twenty miles, but there were so many interruptions that we rarely reached our evening's destination before six o'clock.
First and foremost there was the mid-day meal (o hiru yasumi), which consumed at least an hour, and then our exalted rank required that we should stop to rest (o ko-yasumi) at least once in the morning and once again in the afternoon. Then we stopped again at every point of view to drink tea, and to taste every dish of cakes or other comestibles of which centuries of wayfarers had been in the habit of partaking before us. Thus on the third day we stopped at Mmé-no-ki to take tea at a house commanding a fine view of the legendary mountain Mukadé yama (Centipede's Mount), and again for half-an-hour at Ishibé, where a big board was stuck up outside inscribed with "the little resting-place of the interpreter (the officer) of England." We lunched sumptuously at Minakuchi on fish, soup and rice, and so got through an hour and a quarter. At Ono, celebrated for pheasants' meat preserved in miso paste, we again drank tea, which was served out by pretty girls who made a great pretence of bashfulness. Wirgman's costume, consisting of wide blue cotton trousers, a loose yellow pongee jacket, no collar, and a conical hat of grey felt, gave rise to a grave discussion as to whether he was really an European, or only a Chinaman after all. At Mayéno, a centre of tea production, we stopped for another half-hour to taste several sorts of leaf at a tea-dealer's shop. This was a great act of condescension on the part of such distinguished personages, but we made up for this derogation from our dignity by having our purchases paid for by Noguchi, the real Japanese swell being supposed to know nothing about money, not even theoretically. The dealer declared that unless the leaf is picked and fired by virgins, it will not be drinkable, but I fear he was humbugging the innocent foreigner.