The Shogun's Daughter

by Robert Ames Bennet

“They move at a snail’s pace!”

“It will bring them into Shinagawa, the southern suburb of Yedo, about sunset. In Shinagawa I expect to find a friend with whom we can spend the night. Meantime we may as well wait here until the cortege has gone on four or five miles. I will take advantage of the opportunity to write a petition asking permission to present a memorial to the Shogun.”

He crept back around the corner of the temple. I stretched out in the balsamic shade of the pines, and watched the slow passing of the procession. When the last strutting samurai had marched on up the road, I gazed around at the landscape. Across the full width of the bay the mountains on the promontory of Awa loomed dimly through the haze, while the blue waters between, already stilled from their night’s turmoil, were dotted with the white sails of junks and fishing smacks.

Inland the golden sunlight streamed down out of the sapphire sky upon a scene no less peaceful and charming. About me and far to the northward the land lay in broad plain, for the most part cut up into a checkerboard of rice fields. Here and there rose knolls and hills, some terraced to the top for rice, others wooded, and the most eminent crowned with temples that reminded me of China. In the rice swamps naked peasants, knee-deep in the slush, were transplanting tufts of young rice, while about them waterfowl waded or paddled, untroubled by the presence of man. Above them soared numbers of eagles and hawks. Birds were to be seen or heard on every side, but I noticed a marked absence of animals from the landscape.

Some time after the rear of the procession had disappeared up the Tokaido, Yoritomo came back around the temple, and said that we must start. I pulled my hat brim low over my face, and swung after him down the hillside to the smooth road.

For a time we met no other traveller. The road had been swept clear by the procession. But we soon came to groups of odd little shops and inns, strung along the roadside in almost continuous rows. Within the open fronts of the shops cotton-robed tradesmen knelt on matted platforms in the midst of their cheap wares, while from under the shallow porticos of the inns quaint little maidens with powdered doll-like faces and narrow skirts smiled at us invitingly and bowed until we could see the great bows at the back of their sashes. But Yoritomo kept on up the road at a fast pace, unmoved by the alluring glances of these charming little waitresses.

Within the second mile we began to encounter a stream of travellers released from the post town of Kawasaki by the passage of the daimio’s train. We were the first to come up from the south in the wake of the daimio, but the people we met had no more than a casual glance for a pair of dirty-robed Yamabushi priests.

As we swung along through their midst I peeped out at them between the meshes of my loosely woven hat brim. My first observations were that they averaged far below the height of Americans, and that clothing was rather a minus quantity among all but the white-robed pilgrims and the silk-clad samurais. The brown skins of peasants and fishermen, porters, grooms, and beggars were either innocent of all covering except narrow loincloths or at most limited to a shirt-like kimono of blue-figured cotton, a straw hat, and sandals.

Aside from the aristocratic swordsmen, these people were the merriest I had ever met. When not smiling and chatting, they were laughing or singing. Among the peasants and groups of pilgrims were several women, the younger of whom possessed a buxom rural prettiness. The married women looked aged and withered, and pleasant as were their smiles, my Western eye was repulsed by their shaven brows and the gray-black teeth which showed between their rouged lips at every smile.

At Kawasaki we swung briskly down to the bank of the Rokugu River, where bronzed ferrymen, stripped to loincloths, stood waiting for passengers in their big flat-bottomed punts. A boat in which the party of a samurai horseman had embarked was being thrust off. Before Yoritomo could check me, I sprang forward to leap aboard. In a flash the samurai drew his two-handed sword and aimed a blow at me that would have split my head in two had I not dropped backwards beyond reach. Furious at the wanton attempt to murder me, I sprang up and fumbled for a revolver as the boat shot out from the bank.