A familiar sight on a country road is the itinerant medicine vendor. He or his employer believes in pushing business by means of an impressive outfit. One typical cure-all seller, who had his medicines in a shiny bag slung over his shoulders, wore yellow shoes, cotton drawers, a frock coat, a peaked cap with three gold stripes, and a mysterious badge. On his hands he had white cotton gloves and as he walked he played a concertina. A common practice is to leave with housewives a bag of medicines without charge. Next year another call is made, when the pills and what not which have been used are paid for and a new bag is exchanged for the old one.
The use of dogs to help to draw kuruma is forbidden in some prefectures, but in three stages of our journey in Shimane we had the aid of robust dogs. During this period, however, I saw, attached to kuruma we passed, three dogs which did not seem up to their work. Dogs suffer when used for draught purposes because their chests are not adapted for pulling and because the pads of their feet get tender. The animals we had were treated well. Each kuruma had a cord, with a hook at the end, attached to it; and this hook was slipped into a ring on the dog's harness. The dogs were released when we went downhill and usually on the level. Several times during each run, when we came to a stream or a pond or even a ditch, the dogs were released for a bathe. They invariably leapt into the water, drank moderately, and then, if the water was too shallow for swimming, sat down in it and then lay down. Sometimes a dog temporarily at liberty would find on his own account a small water hole, and it was comical to see him taking a sitz bath in it. When the sun was hot a dog would sometimes be retained on his cord when not pulling in order that he might trot along in the shade below the kuruma. The dog of the kuruma following mine usually managed when pulling to take advantage of the shade thrown by my vehicle. A kurumaya told me that he had given 8 yen for his dog. Dogs were sometimes sold for from 10 to 15 yen. The difficulty was to get a dog that had good feet and would pull. The dogs I saw were all mongrels with sometimes a retriever, bloodhound or Great Dane strain.
I made enquiries about another county town library. There were 18,000 volumes of which 300 consisted of European books and 600 of bound magazines. The annual expenditure on books, and I presume magazines, was 600 yen.
We passed a "special tribe" hamlet. Here the Eta were devoting themselves to tanning and bamboo work. I was told of other "peculiar people" called Hachia, also of a hawker-beggar class which sells small things of brass or bamboo or travels with performing monkeys.
Water from hot springs is piped long distances in water pipes made of bamboo trunks, the ends of which are pushed into one another. A turn is secured by running two pipes at the angle required into a block of wood which has been bored to fit.
When we got down to the sand dunes there were windbreaks, 10 or 15 ft. high, made of closely planted pines cut flat at the top. Elsewhere I saw such windbreaks 30 ft. high. On the telegraph wires there were big spiders' webs about 4 ft. in diameter.
As we sped through a village my attention was attracted by a funeral feast. The pushed-back shoji showed about a dozen men sitting in a circle eating and drinking. Women were waiting on them. At the back of the room, making part of the circle, was the square coffin covered by a white canopy.
While passing a Buddhist temple I heard the sound of preaching. It might have been a voice from a church or chapel at home.
Shortly afterwards I came on a memorial to the man who introduced the sweet potato into the locality 150 years before. This was the first of many sweet-potato memorials which I encountered in the prefecture and elsewhere. Sometimes there were offerings before the monuments. Occasionally the memorial took the form of a stone cut in the shape of a potato. There is a great exportation of sweet potatoes—sliced and dried until they are brittle—to the north of Japan where the tuber cannot be cultivated.[ [189]]
While we rested at the house of a friend of my companion we spoke of emigration. There are four or five emigration companies, and it is an interesting question just how much emigration is due to the initiative of the emigrants themselves and how much to the activity of the companies. The chief reason which induces emigrants to go to South America is that, under the contract system, they get twice as much money as they would obtain, say, in Formosa. [[190]]