Samurai Trails: A Chronicle of Wanderings on the Japanese High Road

by Lucian Swift Kirtland

“In the fourteenth year of my youth I took the vow that my life should be lived in honouring the holy images of Buddha, each and all as my steps might find them, from the shrines erected by the peasants to the bronze statues of the great temples. I took the very staff which you see and the clothes that were upon my back and bade my family good-bye. Through the kindness in the hearts of men, the lowly and the mighty, the gods have provided me with food and rest. I have travelled without illness and my spirit has known the joy of the Way.”

“IN THE FOURTEENTH YEAR OF MY YOUTH I TOOK THE VOW THAT MY LIFE SHOULD BE LIVED IN HONORING THE HOLY IMAGES OF BUDDHA”

In those years that his bowl had not gone empty of rice, never, it may be believed, did anyone give to him as a beggar asking. Japan is of the East, possessing the intuition that the spiritual is a mystic interflow.

His eyes were young; they were not clouded in contemplation of the abstract. They sparkled from a delight in life. It had not been demanded of him that his vicarious pilgrimage should be one of tragic sacrifice. He had given and he had received. While his theoretical faith might be that life is an illusion and only the Way is eternal, nevertheless he was born to love his fellowmen and he could not escape from the practical faith that was in him that this temporal life must be of some use and of some meaning. I remembered in strange comparison a sturdy British unemployed whom I had once come upon. He was lying under a hedge in Monmouthshire. He borrowed a pipeful of tobacco and then turned over onto his back to gaze into the blue sky. After a time he said: “Activity is a fever. Therefore it is a disease. Laziness is a promise. Rest and forgetfulness are divine.” He did not make the effort to add a good-bye when I left him.

A path of our pilgrim led over the road which we had just travelled. We parted, bowing many times. Hori unfolded his ravaged map and found a village named Narii a few miles farther along. The railroad down in the valley according to the map went somewhere near Narii. Hori’s nerves had been rasped by the temperamental vagaries of the bicycle on the steep slopes and he decided to await a train, promising to meet us.

After a time our path dropped down to the bed of the river. Across a bridge the road forked, one branch continuing along the valley and the other winding off into the hills. The hill trail, particularly as it led into the unknown regions off Hori’s map, tempted, and we shouted down an inquiry to some children playing in the water. They were successfully attempting to get as wet as possible while remaining as dirty as possible. There is a mystery which overhangs grimy Japanese children. When the little noses present a constant temptation to the seiyo-jin handkerchief that in itself is a caste sign that you will find the faces of their fathers and mothers unhappy, dull, and lustreless. When the children are brightly scoured and polished there is a general appearance of happiness and contentment in the community. It is not the simple equation that poverty equals dirt; one village is scrubbed and the next one is not—otherwise neither seems richer nor poorer except in happy looks.

When we called to the children in the Kiso they splashed out of the water like wild animals and scattered in all directions, but as two naked infants too small to run had been left on the shore, first the girls and then the boys began to edge back. They remained to stare. We pointed up the mountain path and asked if it led to Narii. Their gestures evinced a fierce encouragement to essay the ridges as if they had the contempt of the untamed for anything as conventional as a broad valley road. As a matter of fact they were undoubtedly saying that the valley road did not lead to Narii. We discovered this later when we could look down from the heights. Hori’s railroad tunnelled the hills.

According to local belief our path carried us over the “backbone” of the empire, and this crossing spot is considered sacred ground. Accordingly we should have paid special homage to the local deity whose shrine we passed, but as we were foreigners and in ignorance, the god perhaps forgave us. Furthermore, we unknowingly passed a particularly renowned view of very holy Mount Ontake. We probably did see the mountain, but being uninformed, as I said, of this special view, we did not hold ourselves in proper restraint until reaching the exact spot for appreciation. Instead we luxuriously and squanderously revelled in all four directions of the compass. It is always thus with the ignorant. Their indiscriminate enthusiasm is more irritating to the intellectuals than no appreciation at all. I was later most depressingly snubbed for having missed the sacred view by a scholar of things Japanese. He knew it from prints and sacred writings. He said that he himself would have journeyed to see the reality if it had not been for the probable annoyance of having to come in contact with so many natives on the journey. He appeared to be impatient that the British Museum does not commandeer all views, temples, and abiding places of art around the world and establish turnstiles which will keep the natives out and let the scholars in. When he actually grasped that our only reason for having arrived at that particular spot at all was that we had taken a turning to the right instead of to the left, he declared that our ideas of travelling evidence the same intelligence as might the tripping of tumbling beans and that our very presence at sacred places was a sacrilege.

We turned a corner that hung sharply over the precipice. Around the bend the shelf spread out into a miniature meadow. A peasant was lying on the grass and his straw-bonneted ox was leisurely nibbling. We sat down beside him and O-Owre-san began searching in his rucksack for a remaining cake of chocolate. During this hunt the peasant kept his eyes carefully and earnestly averted. I made the remark to him that the view was [kirei] and he replied by a nervous hei. O-Owre-san found the chocolate and broke it into three parts. He handed one of the squares to the peasant. The fingers that reached out for it were trembling.