The poetical names of country inns would make an interesting collection. I remember that it was at "the inn of cold spring water" that the waiting-maid had never seen cow's milk. She proved to be the daughter of the host and wore a gold ring by way of marking the fact. This girl told us that on the banks of the river there was only one house in 70 miles. The village was having the usual holiday to celebrate the end of the toilsome sericultural season.
On our way to the next village we met two far-travelled young women selling the dried seaweed which, in many varieties, figures in the Japanese dietary.[ [128]] (There are shops which sell nothing but prepared seaweeds.) A notice board there informed us that the road was maintained at the cost of the local young men's society. As we were on foot we felt grateful, for the road was well kept. We passed for miles over planking hung on the cliff side or on roadway carried on embankments. On the suspended pathways there was now and then a plank loose or broken, and there was no rail between the pedestrian and the torrent dashing below. Where there was embanked roadway it was almost always uphill and downhill and it frequently swung sharply round the corner of a cliff. As the river increased in volume we saw many rafts of timber shooting the rapids. At one place twenty-six raftsmen had been drowned. The remnants of two bridges showed the force of the floods.
In this region the kurumaya were hard put to it at times and once a kuruma broke down. Its owner cheerfully detached its broken axle and went off with it at a trot ten miles or so to a blacksmith. Later he traversed the ten miles once more to refit his kuruma, afterwards coming on fifteen more miles to our inn. The endurance and cheeriness of the kurumaya were surprising. It was usually in face of their protests that we got out to ease them while going uphill. Every morning they wanted to arrange to go farther than we thought reasonable. Each man had not only his passenger but his passenger's heavy bag. One day we did thirty-six miles over rough roads. The kurumaya proposed to cover fifty. They showed spirit, good nature and loyalty. The character of their conversation is worth mentioning. At one point they were discussing the plays we had witnessed, at other times the scenery, local legends, the best routes and the crops, material condition and disposition of the villagers. Our kurumaya compared very favourably indeed with men of an equal social class at home. Their manners were perfect. They stayed at the same inns as we did—once in the next room—and behaved admirably. Every evening the men washed their white cotton shorts and jackets—their whole costume except for a wide-brimmed sun hat and straw waraji. Tied to the axle of each kuruma were several pairs of waraji, for on the rough hill roads this simple form of footgear soon wears out. Discarded waraji are to be seen on every roadside in Japan.
The inscriptions on some of the wayside stones we passed had been written by priests so ignorant that the wording was either ridiculous or almost without meaning. But there was no difficulty in deciphering an inscription on a stone which declared that it had been erected by a company of Buddhists who claimed to have repeated the holy name of Amida 2,000,000 times. (The idea is that salvation may be obtained by the repetition of the phrase Namu Amida Butsu.) A small stone set up on a rock in the middle of paddy fields intimated that at that spot "people gathered to see the moon one night every month." A third stone was dedicated to the monkey as the messenger of a certain god, just as the fox is regarded as the messenger of Inari.
We saw during our journey large numbers of kiri (Paulownia) used for making geta and bride's chests. Some farmers seem to plant kiri trees at the birth of a daughter so as to have wood for her wedding chest or money for her outfit[ [129]]. Kiri seems to be increasingly grown. On the other hand in the same districts lacquer trees were now seldom planted. The farmers complained that they were cheated by the collectors of lacquer who come round to cut the trees. The age of cutting was given me as the eighth or ninth year, but poor farmers sometimes allowed a young tree to be cut. A tree may be cut once a year for three or four years. After that it is useless even for fuel, owing to the smell it gives off, and is often left standing. The old scarred trunks, sometimes headless, suggested the tattooed faces and bodies of Maori veterans. As lacquer is poisonous to the skin the wood calls for careful handling. I saw one of the itinerant lacquer collectors, his hands wrapped in cotton, operating on a tree.
During a particularly hot run we had the good fortune to come on a soda-water spring from which we all drank freely. A factory erected to tap the spring was in ruins. Evidently the cost of carriage was prohibitive.
In these hills the rice was planted farther apart than is usual so that the sun might warm the water. Here as elsewhere daikon were hung up to dry on walls and trees, and looked like giant tallow candles. Below a bridge, which marked the village boundary, flags had been flung down by way of keeping off epidemics. Evil spirits were warded off by special dances.
The porch of a little tea-house where we rested was covered with grapes. Soon after leaving it we reached our destination for the night, a small town of houses of several storeys which clustered on a hillside under the shadow of a Zen temple. Meat and eggs were forbidden to the town, but as the residents were all Zen Buddhists the restriction was no hardship. There was no cow in the place, but condensed milk was allowed. A man at the inn told me that he knew of ten Shinto shrines which forbade the use of chickens and eggs in their localities. The view from the temple, perched high on its rock above the wide riverway, was exceptionally fine. Parties of boys and girls of thirteen paid visits to this temple "because thirteen is known as a perilous age." The people of the vegetarian town, instead of feeding on the fish in the river, fed them. I saw a shoal of fish being given scraps at the water edge.
As we went on our way and spoke of the bad roads it was suggested that in the old days roads were purposely left uphill and downhill in order that the advance of enemies might be hindered. We came to a dilapidated tea-house kept by an ugly old woman who showed a touching fondness for a cat and a dog. From her shack we had a view of a volcano which had destroyed two villages a few years before. Our hostess, who made much of us, said that the catastrophe had been preceded by "horrible da-da-da-bang" sounds and lightnings, and that it was accompanied by "thunderbolts and heavy thick smoke." The old woman had beheld "soil boiling and cracking."
Along our route we had more evidences of "fire farming." The procedure was to sow buckwheat the first year and rape and millet the second year. In the cryptomeria forests there was a variety which, when cut, sprouts from the ground and makes a new growth like an elm. One crop we saw was ginseng, protected by low structures covered by matting.