I have been to Big Hell—a climb of some three thousand feet past rice squares and barley fields and little forests of bamboo trees, where on a God-forsaken mountain top sulphurous smoke belches into the clouds that drift about it. Now smoke suggests human habitation, human food, and human comfort, and that smoke swirling up there gave the spot a loneliness unspeakable. Under you the gray earth was hot, here and there were springs of boiling water, and the ashy crust crackled under your feet. Around the crest we went, and down through a forest of big trees left standing because the place was a royal preserve. The absence of animals, tame or wild, has constantly depressed me ever since I have been in Japan. Even up there in the hills I had seen nothing hopping, crawling, or climbing by the roadside or in the woods, and I could see nothing now.
"Is there nothing wild up here?" I said.
"Oh, yes," said the guide, "there are deer and monkeys." If he had said there were dodos I could have been no more surprised; but to this day I have seen nothing in freedom except a few birds in the air.
By and by a thatched roof came in view. The path led sharply around one corner of the house and I was brought up with a gasp. I had read and heard much about bathing customs in Japan. The government has tried, I believe, to legislate into the people Occidental ideas of modesty. One regulation provided that the sexes should be separated. They were separated—by a bamboo rod floating on the water. Another time it was announced that bathing trunks must be worn at a certain place by the sea. One old chap issued leisurely from his house on the hill-side and stalked down without clothes, swinging his trunks in his hand. After he got into the water he put the trunks on, and as soon as he came out he took them off again and stalked home swinging them as before.
Well, there they were, old and young and of both sexes, and it was apparent that the regulations of the bamboo rod and the bathing trunks had not reached that high. It was a natural Turkish bath-house, and it seems that the farmers around Big Hell furnish a certain amount of produce each year to the proprietor for the privilege of hot baths, and when work is slack they go up there—husbands and wives, sons and daughters—and stay for days. Apparently work was slack just then. The bath, some ten feet square, and sunk in the floor, was screened from the gaze of the passing pedestrian and the coldness of the outer air merely by slender bamboo rods, some eighteen inches apart. It was full to the brim.
That night an Englishman seemed greatly taken with Big Hell.
"Most extraordinary!" he said. "Do you know, they never minded us at all—not at all. A chap had a camera, and one dear old lady actually stood upright when he was taking a picture. They asked me to come in, and I really think I would, but—gad, you know, there wasn't any room."
The key-note of this symphony of ills will not be sounded here.
She could play the koto (the harp), and the piano a little—could the Maid of Miyanoshita. She would play neither for me, but that afternoon she would take me, she said, to hear a friend play the koto—an elderly friend, whom she called, she said, her aunt. Later, she said she had asked another gentleman also. Now when I spoke once of the musical click of the getas, the Happy Exile had told me that the wearers often chose them, taking only such pairs as pleased the individual ear. The statement has since been much laughed at, so I asked the Maid of Miyanoshita for confirmation. She at least did not choose her getas for their sound.