I didn't visit this place in the hope of seeing fine prospects—my study is man.—Borrow
Before I left the town I had a chat with a landowner who turned his tenants' rent rice into saké. He was of the fifth generation of brewers. He said that in his childhood drunken men often lay about the street; now, he said, drunken men were only to be seen on festival days.
There had been a remarkable development in the trade in flavoured aerated waters, "lemonade" and "cider champagne" chiefly. I found these beverages on sale in the remotest places, for the Japanese have the knack of tying a number of bottles together with rope, which makes them easily transportable. The new lager beers, which are advertised everywhere, have also affected the consumption of saké. [[123]] Saké is usually compared with sherry. It is drunk mulled. At a banquet, lasting five or six hours or longer, a man "strong in saké" may conceivably drink ten go (a go is about one-third of a pint) before achieving drunkenness, but most people would be affected by three go. Some of the topers who boast of the quantity of saké they can consume—I have heard of men declaring that they could drink twenty go—are cheated late in the evening by the waiting-maids. The little saké bottles are opaque, and it is easy to remove them for refilling before they are quite empty.
The brewer, who was a firm adherent of the Jishu sect of Buddhists, was accustomed to burn incense with his family at the domestic shrine every morning. But this was not the habit of all the adherents of his denomination. As to the moral advancement of the neighbourhood, his grandfather "tried very earnestly to improve the district by means of religion, but without result." He himself attached most value to education and after that to young men's associations.
As we left the town we passed a "woman priest" who was walking to Nikko, eighty miles away. Portraits of dead people, entrusted to her by their relatives for conveyance to distant shrines, were hung round her body.
As the route became more and more hilly I realised how accurate is that representation of hills in Japanese art which seems odd before one has been in Japan: the landscape stands out as if seen in a flash of lightning.
Three things by the way were arresting: the number of shrines, mostly dedicated to the fox god; the rice suspended round the farm buildings or drying on racks; and the masses of evening primroses, called in Japan "moon-seeing flowers."
A feature of every village was one or more barred wooden sheds containing fire-extinguishing apparatus, often provided and worked by the young men's association. Sometimes a piece of ground was described to me as "the training ground of the fire defenders." The night patrols of the village were young fellows chosen in turn by the constable from the fire-prevention parties, made up by the youths of the village. There stood up in every village a high perpendicular ladder with a bell or wooden clapper at the top to give the alarm. The emblem of the fire brigade, a pole with white paper streamers attached, was sometimes distinguished by a yellow paper streamer awarded by the prefecture.
On a sweltering July day it was difficult to realise that the villages we passed through, now half hidden in foliage, might be under 7 ft. of snow in winter. In travelling in this hillier region one has an extra kurumaya, who pushes behind or acts as brakeman.
At the "place of the seven peaks" we found a stone dedicated to the worship of the stars which form the Plough. Again and again I noticed shrines which had before them two tall trees, one larger than the other, called "man and wife." It was explained to me that "there cannot be a more sacred place than where husband and wife stand together." A small tract of cryptomeria on the lower slopes of a hill belonged to the school. The children had planted it in honour of the marriage of the Emperor when he was Crown Prince.