Afterwards we lunched in Oyeno Park, and then I went a round of calls on my bicycle, then home to have two friends to tea, and a view of copies of old Japanese prints: half a chapter I forced myself to write in the evening sent me to sleep.
July 20–24.—An uneventful week of work, all the Institute seems asleep, and Professor F—— only came an hour or two for some of the days till Friday, when we worked very hard.
July 25.—The cycads in Tokio won’t flower, and it is a long way to go to the places they are reported to grow, so that when I heard they were to be found in Yokohama, I went off at once by an early train to visit the various gardens where they are said to be found. There were two female trees and a male, but they were not very healthy; still, as the Tokio ones refuse to bloom, and as I need them, they will be visited by my pilgrimages.
What a hideous influence is the “foreign” style at Yokohama, where red brick warehouses and treeless streets covered with a pall of smoke remind one of the “advance” made by modern Japan. Fortunately the plague spots are not very extensive, one needs to go but a very little way to find beauty again, but I shudder for the future when moss-grown walls and green hedges shall have been ousted from the cities, as they are from ours.
July 26.—I got up at 6 to go to Boshu after more cycads, as the temple, Awajinja, is reported to have fine ones. The sail down the coast in the little steamer was very pleasant. It took seven and a half hours, but we passed very pretty scenery, and for some time seemed out of sight of land in a sea dotted with innumerable white-sailed fishing-boats. In the middle of the day many of the fishers were taking a siesta, the square sail lowered so as to lie along the boat and form an awning, under whose shade they slept.
When we neared the coast, it required but the smallest imagination to picture myself in a savage country, for over the rocks ran and scrambled dark brown men, stark naked, not even the proverbial string of beads to adorn them. They had long bamboo poles in their hands, which they waved like savage spears, and gave them a truly wild aspect.
After landing I bicycled about 8 miles to the temple, and found splendid male flowers on the cycads, but no female. Last year there were lots of female. It is too bad, this year seems to be so unfavourable for the seeds.
I put up at a little hotel near the sea, and after six went down for a bathe. The coast was perfect, shelving rocks sloping out to sea, with little bathing coves and sheltering rocks, and, as I imagined, perfect solitude. But, of course, in this out of the way place I had been noticed, and before I was in the water a minute a crowd of women and children had collected. Nothing I could do or say would drive them away, and so I had to get out and dress under the fire of their eyes and criticisms. In their long-drawn country tones they kept up a running commentary, “Ooā—how white she is!” “Is she married?” “Why does she wear a dress in the sea?” “How old can she be?” “Perhaps twenty years.” There was no escape from nearly fifty people forming a cordon but 3 feet away from me; if I had fled they would have followed; so I dressed as leisurely and as unconcernedly as if I were at home, and gravely buttoned the little buttons of my bodice and put on my stockings while I returned the compliment and made a searching examination of them.
The boy children were naked, with smooth glowing copper limbs like sun-burned clay—as indeed they were. The girl children had usually some floating robe of a dressing-gown nature, open to show the whole body, or caught at the waist and turned down to leave the upper part free. Bright-eyed they were and muddy-cheeked, but neither pretty nor attractive. The women were naked to below the waist, the kimono being turned down over the girdle to form a kind of double skirt. No one wore any ornament of any kind, save a few coloured beads to tie their hair, but few of them had even that. The men wore 3 inches of cloth round their waists and sometimes a band round their heads made of a small Japanese towel. All were perfectly quiet, and the remarks were made one at a time by the older women; the children stood open-mouthed. I know that the blue of the sea-water makes one gleam like white ivory, and as all my clothes were white, I suppose the effect must have seemed novel to them. The deep colour of the Japanese is chiefly due to sunburn, but as they are exposed to it from their earliest days it gets so ingrained that they may not realise it is an attempt at clothing on the part of a body otherwise so unprotected.
July 27.—I rode back again to the starting-point of the steamer, and got there twenty minutes too soon, and so went along the shore and had a bathe. The steamer was very crowded and hot—I wonder who it was that started the fiction that a Japanese crowd does not possess an odour? Why, the detestable smell of the rancid oil in the women’s hair is enough for one alone, without any of the other items, which include a peculiarly virulent pickle, daikon, and an odour of decayed fish that hangs over a good many in a poor crowd.