Ordinarily the boy and girl of the hotel dressed exactly like their playmates and no sooner turned their backs on their father than they lapsed at once into the native tongue. But on this American day the boy wore a knickerbocker suit and leather shoes; his sister had laid aside her kimona and wooden sandals to don a short frock and long stockings. Instead of the intricate coiffure of the day before, her jet-black hair hung in two braids over her shoulders; and not once during all that festal day did a word of Japanese pass between them.
Two days later, garbed in an American khaki uniform chosen from the stock of a pawnbroker popular with soldiers returning from the Philippines, I sought out the railway station and took third-class passage for Hiroshima. Two policemen blocked my entrance to the platform, and, in spite of my protest that my history was recorded in full on the hotel register, they filled several pages of their notebooks with an account of my doings. For the war with Russia was at its height and a strict watch was kept on all white men within the empire.
The train wound off through a rolling, sylvan country, here circling the base of a thickly-wooded hill, there clinging close to the shore of a sparkling bay. Not an acre capable of production was untilled. Peasants toiled in every valley, on every hillside; their neat cottages dotted the landscape as far as the eye could see. Populous, wide-awake villages succeeded each other rapidly. The stations were well-equipped buildings bearing both in Japanese and English the name of the town they served. In his eagerness to imitate the western world the Jap has adopted one custom which might better have been passed over. The gorgeous landscape was half hidden at times by huge unsightly signboards bellowing forth the alleged virtues of every conceivable ware.
The coaches were built on the American plan, and every carriage was a smoking-car; for the use of tobacco is well-nigh universal in Japan among both sexes. Barely had a lady folded her legs under her on a bench across the aisle than she drew out a pipe in appearance like a long lead pencil, the bowl of which held much less than the smallest thimble, and a leather pouch containing tobacco as fine as the hair of the head. The pipe lighted, she took one long pull at it, knocked out the residue on the back of the seat before her, refilled the bowl, exhaled from her lungs the first puff, and, turning the pipe upside down, lighted it again from the glowing embers of the first filling. The pipe held only enough for one puff; the smoker filled it a score of times before she was satisfied, always keeping the smoke in her lungs until the bowl was refilled, and using a match only for the first lighting. Dining-cars were there none. At nearly every station boxes containing a goodly supply of rice, several boiled and pickled vegetables, one baked fish, and a pair of chopsticks only half split in two, were sold on the platform. The contents were always the same; the price fixed and surprisingly low.
A swimming-school of Japan, teachers on the bank, novices near the shore, and advanced students in white head-dress, well out in the pool
Women do most of the work in the rice-fields of Japan
I had not taken care to choose a through-train to Hiroshima. Not long after nightfall the one on which I was traveling reached its terminal, a town named Hakata, and left me to spend the night in the waiting-room. Before I had fallen asleep a band of youths employed about the station began a series of tricks that kept me wide-awake until morning. They threw vegetables and rotten fruit at me through the windows; they pushed open the door to roll tin cans across the floor; if I fell into a doze they sneaked inside to deluge me with water or drag me off my wooden couch. Much we hear of the annoyances to which the kindly Japanese residents on our Pacific slope are subjected; yet no band of San Francisco hoodlums could have outdone these youths in concocting schemes to make life miserable for a foreigner in their midst.
Two hours’ ride from Hakata brought me to Moji and the ferry that connects the southern island with the largest of the kingdom. Policemen halted me on both sides of the strait and twice I was compelled to dictate the history of my past. From Shimonesaki the railway skirted the shore of the Inland Sea, passing the military hospital of Itsukaishi, where hundreds of convalescing soldiers, attired in flowing white kimonas with a great red cross on their breasts, strolled and lolled in the surrounding groves.