CHAPTER XXVIII
MEN, DOGS AND SWEET POTATOES
(SHIMANE)
Nothing but omniscience could suffice to answer all the questions implicitly raised.—J.G. Frazer
When we descended from the hills we were in Shimane, a long, narrow, coastwise prefecture through which one travels over a succession of heights to the capital, Matsue, situated at the far end. Two-thirds of the journey must be made on foot and by kuruma.[[186]] Some talk by the way was about the farmers going five or six miles daily to the hills to cut grass for their "cattle," the average number of cattle per farmer being 1.3 hereabouts. It seemed strange to see buckwheat at the flowering stage reached by the crops seen in Fukushima several months before. The explanation was that buckwheat is sown both in spring and autumn.
In the old days notable samurai, fugitives from Tokyo, had kept themselves secluded in the rooms we occupied at Yamaguchi. In Shimane we had small plain low-ceiled rooms in which daimyos had been accommodated. Not here alone had I evidences of the simplicity of the life of Old Japan.
I was wakened in the morning by the voice of a woman earnestly praying. She stood in the yard of the house opposite and faced first in one direction and then in another. A friend of mine once stayed overnight at an inn on the river at Kyoto. In the morning he saw several men and a considerable number of women praying by the waterside. They were the keepers and inmates of houses of ill-fame. The old Shinto idea was that prayers might be made anywhere at other times than festivals, for the god was at the shrine at festivals only. Nowadays some old men go to the shrine every morning, just as many old women are seen at the Buddhist temples daily. Half the visitors to a Shinto shrine, an educated man assured me, may pray, but in the case of the other half the "worship" is "no more than a motion of respect." My friend told me that when he prayed at a shrine his prayer was for his children's or his parents' health.
At a county town I found a library of 4,000 volumes, largely an inheritance from the feudal regime. Wherever I went I could not but note the cluster of readers at the open fronts of bookshops. [[187]]
On our second day's journey in Shimane I had a kuruma with wooden wheels, and in the hills the day after we passed a man kneeling in a kago, the old-fashioned litter. When we took to a basha we discovered that, owing to the roughness of the road, we had a driver for each of our two horses. We had also an agile lad who hung on first to one part and then another of the vehicle and seemed to be essential in some way to its successful management. The head of the hatless chief driver was shaved absolutely smooth.
It was a rare thing for a foreigner to pass this way. My companion frequently told me that he had difficulty in understanding what people said.