How surprised I was when I awoke in the morning! It was broad daylight. The sun was streaming in across the balcony, and the constant scraping of wooden clogs sounded from the street below. But the room in which I had gone to bed had entirely disappeared! I sat up with bulging eyes. Under me was the stack of quilts, but all else was changed. The net was gone, and I sat alone and deserted in the center of a large hall, the front of which for its entire length opened on to the public street. The change was no magician’s trick, though it was several moments before I was sufficiently wide awake to understand what had happened. The servant-girls had merely pushed together the screens that made the walls.
Japanese children playing in the streets of Kioto.
Later I managed to find the highway that led out of Hiroshima. It led the way between bright green hedgerows, through village after village, past many farm-houses and rice-fields. The air was fresh and cheering, and I was often within sight of the bright blue arm of old ocean that wound in and out along the coast. Now and then an ocean liner, awakening memories of far-off lands, glided by. In shallow bays unclad fishermen, too brown to sunburn, disentangled their nets and heaped high their catches in wicker baskets.
It needed a very few hours on the road to teach me that the country people of Japan are very curious—even more so than the Arab. I had only to pass through a village to cause all business to stop. Workmen dropped their tools, children forgot their games, girls left their pitchers at the fountain, even gossips ceased their chatter—all to stare wide-eyed if I passed on, to crowd around me if I paused.
Women do most of the work in the rice-fields of Japan.
Wherever I stopped for a drink of water, the town rose in a mass to watch my strange action. When I set the cup down they passed it wonderingly from hand to hand. To stop for a lunch was almost dangerous, for the crowd that collected at the door of the shop threatened to do me to death under their trampling clogs. In the smaller villages the whole population, men, women, and children, followed me out along the highway, leaving the place as utterly deserted as if the dogs of war had been loosed upon it. Once I passed a school at the recess hour. Its two hundred children trailed behind me for a long mile, paying no attention to the jangling bell and the shouts of their excited masters.
Partly by foot and partly by rail, I finally reached Kyoto, where I spent a day. At the station next morning four yen were more than enough for a ticket to Tokyo, with stopovers anywhere I chose. At Maibara a squad of Russian prisoners, clothed in arctic cloaks and fur caps, huddled in a sweltering group on the station platform. As long as the train stood there not a sound of mockery rose from the crowd, and the towns-people came in a continual procession to offer the silent fellows baskets of fruit, packets of tobacco, and all manner of delicacies.
From Nagoya the railway turned southward, following the coast, so that again I caught frequent glimpses of the ocean as we sped along, passing through a country filled with rice-fields, where peasant women wallowed in the water, clawing with bare hands the mud about the roots of the rice plants. On slopes too steep to be flooded, long rows of tea bushes stretched from the railway to the wooded tops of the hills.