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

by Lucian Swift Kirtland

The next morning O-Owre-san and I were off at an early hour, leaving Hori to follow on the bicycle. The heavy dew had clotted the dust and the cobwebs were glistening. It was so cold that we fell into our fastest gait, but perversely the town kept creating some new and picturesque allurement to slow our stride at almost every pace. Many of the most important houses had the dignity of villas. I suppose the owners of those houses look upon the town’s activity as a railway junction not as a crowning glory but as a deplorable disturbance. Before the railroad was dreamed of, Japan’s aristocracy had cherished that particular hillside overlooking the view of the valley with the snow ridges beyond. The prosperous shopkeeping streets were busy even at our early hour; boys and girls were flushing the pavements, fanning out the water from wooden dippers; the fathers were taking down the shutters; and the mothers were giving indiscriminate directions while they rubbed their eyes and pulled their kimonos straight. Many greeted us with a cheery “O-hayo.”

At the edge of the town a temple gate stood invitingly open and we entered the garden and crossed a diminutive bridge to an island. We sat down to listen to the birds, admire the butterflies, and watch the gold and silver fish bob out of the water. The silent temple, hidden in the shadows of the trees, was built after the noble lines of the Kyoto tradition and may have been contemporary with that era. We were waiting for Hori. We knew that we had several intricate turnings before we should come to our mountain road to Kama-Suwa, and we were indulging ourselves that morning in unwonted conservatism over the possibility of a mistake. We sat for some time waiting to hear the jangling of the bicycle bell, but as no such sound came from the distance and as the sun had not warmed the air, we decided to take the most attractive turns that came, right or wrong. The street that intrigued our fancy wound delightfully between large country houses. While there was nothing except the trees and a certain pervading atmosphere to suggest the English country, nevertheless there was the instinctive feeling that within those screened, luxurious houses the sleeping families were quality folk, a class never forgetting that their position carries responsibilities, duties, and privileges. To meet a panting coolie dragging a ’ricksha along an English lane would strike one not only as strange but ridiculous. To have seen a gate open that morning in the outskirts of Shiogiri and to have had a shining British dogcart swing out into the road atop the heels of a cob would have seemed neither incongruous nor absurd. That’s the reward the English achieve from their devout worship of the correct. In any corner of the globe when the beholder finds people getting serious about form, his mind immediately institutes a comparison with the British standard.

WE DECIDED TO TAKE THE MOST ATTRACTIVE TURN, RIGHT OR WRONG

We walked on into a maze of hills. In the age of chaos the mountain range had tried to turn to the south but, meeting some powerful opposition, had been rolled back over on itself. When we came to the meeting of a half-dozen crooked paths there was no possible guess for our direction. We sat down in the sun for a few minutes, allowing that much time to good fortune to send us help, if the god of luck should so wish to aid, before attempting anything on our own initiative. We were sent two farmers whom we almost lost through their sudden surprise upon seeing us spring up out of the bowels of the earth. However, they had only been startled, and they did not think we were transformed demons. They entered into an energetic discussion of our route, insisting that we take the trail which was the faintest of all and which seemingly wandered off in the most irresponsible way. It first crossed a footbridge over the stream. One of the men dug a map in the dust with his toe. We finally parted with bows and protestations of gratitude and they stood in the valley and directed us on our climb as long as we could see them. Then they waved a final adieu and started on their own path.

It was decidedly a short cut they had disclosed. When we were on a summit we discovered Hori far below wheeling over the long valley road and undoubtedly wondering why he did not overtake us. Probably a ’ricksha could get through those hills by keeping to the lower paths, but neither our generation nor that of our children’s children will find those narrow trails made over into motor highways. For generations the tramper will have his “unspoiled” Japan. It is true that east to west the mountains have been pierced by two lines of railway and the foot trails sometimes cross the steel, but now that the railroads have been built the trains running through the valleys and plunging into the tunnels seem to be as alien to, as outside the lives of the mountain folk, and as little considered in their existence as the invisible messages hastening along the telegraph wires. Japan has been opened to the world and science has brought an infinite change to the Japan that we think of, but over those mountain paths long lines of coolies stagger with their loads of merchandise as did they in the days before wheels were invented. Many of the coolies are women and girls. Over the steep miles the backs of the little girls are bent under chests which, thrown to the ground, would be large enough for playhouses. I know nowhere else in the world where faces do not grow stolid and stupid under such strain, but these women and little girls often turn upon you faces not only pretty but even strangely beautiful as they raise their heads for a quick glance. Their wistful eyes ask unanswerable questions. You feel as if they were eternally pondering the why.

I do not mean that such glimpses can bring more than a merest intuition of a people’s attitude toward life. Such a gossamer web of intuition is a personal speculation, but it may be not too presumptuous for foreign eyes to make a diagnostic examination of physical characteristics and to believe that some truth may be reached from accumulated observations. While the Japanese nation is old in history and civilization, and while time’s hammer has made the people as nearly homogeneous as is synthetically possible, nevertheless their predominant physical characteristic is that as a race they are youthful in vitality. The coolie bends his shoulders to as heavy a load as he can carry, but also does the coolie of Southern India. Existence seems to offer not much more in prizes to one than the other beyond the promise of the opportunity to labour day after day until death, but in the Indian’s face one reads that the draught of unquestioning acceptance of fate was drunk by his fathers ages ago. That strong arch of the Japanese jaw means future. The struggle among nations for dictatorship may end in competition’s giving the award to the people having the best teeth.

We passed two or three lonely, terraced farms where the earth was being coaxed and coddled not to run away, but through most of the hours of the climb the mountain sides were a forest reservation serving as a reservoir to save the water of the streams for the lower valleys. When we came to a spring gushing from the hill we drank, an action which is sternly warned against, and probably with absolute justification. However, with a four-mile-an-hour pace under the July sun thirst becomes positive. We mixed into the clear water, against any lurking germs, the antidote of deciding to consider ourselves immune. After a time our trail brought us down again into the valley, and it was not until then that Hori caught up with us although he had been circling around the base of the hills at full speed. He found us locked in a bargaining struggle with a gooseberry peddler. The man was carrying his produce in a bucket swung at one end of a yoke across his shoulders, and his pensive little daughter was balancing the load by sitting in the other bucket. Our first advances had unutterably confused his wits, beginning with the logical wonderment why two pedestrians miles from any town should wish to buy green gooseberries. As the bargaining continued his puzzlement was relieved by a sudden lightning suspicion. We were not buying gooseberries, we were trying to buy his daughter! It seemed so discourteous to rob him of his hard thought out solution that I urged O-Owre-san strongly to adopt the child and carry her off in his rucksack. It was just then that Hori arrived. He jerked the demon bicycle to a stop and vaulted to the ground. At first he was as uncomprehending of why we wished to load up with green gooseberries as had been the peddler, but that night he fully acknowledged the value of our whim when the berries, stewed in sugar, stood before him.

I had taken the camera out of my pack but the man was most suspicious of it. We compromised that I should stand up and show just what taking a picture was. As soon as I made the demonstration his quick refusal against such devil’s work followed. Quite by chance the camera had clicked during the demonstration.

April-like showers had been tumbling upon us now and again without disturbing the sunshine. We had one more long climb and then found ourselves with Lake Suwa far below. The town of Kama-suwa rested on the farther shore of the lake in a narrow line of houses. Despite the rain flurries the day seemed very clear, but we did not have the famous first view of O-Fuji-san which sometimes gloriously greets the traveller when he stands, as did we, suddenly on the heights above the lake. On those rare days the mountain rises against the blue sky, the vista coming through a sharp gap in the granite hills, and casts its image on the grey-blue waters. This is the view from the north. The conventional view is from the south, but the sacred mountain lessens never in beauty as the worshipper circles the paths about its base, north, south, east, or west. Like a glorious and beautiful soul, its moods change while it changes not.