CHAPTER XVI
CHIUZENJI AND YUMOTO
The Inquisition should have been put in possession of the Japanese kago as a lesser punishment for heretics, so exquisite and insidious are its tortures. This kago is a shallow basket with a high back, slung from a pole carried on the shoulders of two men, and in the mountains and remote districts is the only means of travel, except by pack-horses. The Japanese double their knees and sit on their feet with great dignity and apparent comfort; but the greater size of the foreigner, his stiff joints and higher head, prevent his fitting into the kago; nor is he much better off when he gets astride, dangling his long legs over the edges. Moreover, he not only knows that he looks ridiculous, but suffers the pangs of conscience
FARM LABORERS AND PACK-HORSE
The pack-horse, a slow-moving beast, has a keeper who pulls him along by a cord, his extended head and reluctant gait making that seem the only motive power. Horse and leader wear straw shoes, and new pairs are strung around the high saddle for reshoeing the beast every few miles. Iron horseshoes are confined to the capital and the large ports, and the village blacksmith is unknown. Pack-horses wear a thick straw pad and a high saddle fashioned like a saw-horse, on which the rider sits aloft, so well forward that his feet hang over the creature’s neck. This saddle is merely balanced, not girded on, and the animals are so sleepy, slow-footed, and stumbling, with a lurching, swinging gait like a camel’s, that riding one is really a feat.
From Nikko to Chiuzenji you must travel eight miles by kago, pack-horse, or on foot, the road leading past rich fields of buckwheat, millet, rice, and potatoes, farm-houses with thatched roofs, wayside shrines and tea-houses. The ascent of the two thousand feet to the higher region of the lake is chiefly included in one three-mile stretch, climbing by easy slopes and broad staircases to the high pass. At every few feet a stone step was built, or a tree trunk fastened with a forked stick and set with small stones. This stair-building, done ages ago, has become a part of the mountain. At short distances the staircase enters a little clearing with a rustic tea-house, or the usual tateba, built of poles, a few planks, branches or mats, and affording sufficient shelter for summer pilgrims and travellers. The keepers immediately put out cushions for guests on the edge of the platform that constitutes the floor of the one room, and bring the tray with its tiny tea-pot, thimble cups, and dish of barley-sugar candies. For the refreshment one leaves a few coppers on the tray, and in mountain jaunts, where the traveller walks to escape the kago and spare the coolies, these tiny cups of pale yellow tea are very stimulating. Each tateba commands some particular view, and even the pilgrim who is tramping the provinces and living on a few cents a day, will be found inditing poems to the different water-falls and gorges he looks down upon.
The head of the pass affords a magnificent view of the valley two thousand feet below, and presently the woodland path is following the border of the lake and comes out into the open of Chiuzenji village. Chiuzenji Lake, three miles wide and eight miles long, is surrounded by steep and thickly-wooded mountains, the great Nantaisan grandly soaring nine thousand feet above the sea, tapering regularly as a pyramid and forested to the summit. Nantaisan is a sacred mountain, a temple at its foot, shrines all along the ascent, and at the top an altar on which repentant murderers offer up their swords. Each August come hosts of pilgrims in white clothes and huge straw hats, with pieces of straw matting for rain-coats bound across their shoulders—devout souls, who, after purification in the lake, pass under the torii, say a prayer in the temple, and painfully climb to the summit. Only at such fixed seasons may visitors ascend the mountain, each one paying twenty cents for the privilege of toiling up its endless flight of steps. With these fees the priests keep the underbrush trimmed and the path well cleared, and where the holy guardian unbars the gate and motions one upward, begins the flight of stone stairs that extend, with few breaks or zigzags, straight to the top. The whole way is strewn with the cast-off sandals of the season, and great heaps of the waraji of past years lie here and there.
The pilgrims sleep in Government barracks in the village, a few coppers securing a mat on the floor and the use of the common fireplace. Their vow to Nantaisan being accomplished, they make the half-circuit of the lake, to visit the hidden shrines and temples of the forest shores, and then trudge to Yumoto for its hot sulphur baths and scenery, or home to their ripening rice-fields.
From across the water Chiuzenji village looks a small, yellow patch, lying between the unbroken green slope of Nantaisan and the great lake. Its five tea-houses rise straight from the water’s edge, each with a triple row of outer galleries overlooking it. The way of life at the Tsutaya, Idzumiya, Nakamarya, and the rest is much more Japanese than in the frequented inns of Nikko. Chairs and tables are conceded to foreigners, but everybody must sleep on the floor, wash face and hands in the common wash-basin in the open court, and go about the house stocking-footed, or wear the stiff, heelless, monkey-skin slippers furnished by the inn. To call a servant one claps his palms, and a long-drawn “Hei!” announces that the rosy-cheeked mountain maid has heard, and the gentle swaying of the house proclaims that she is running up the stairs. The washing of rice, vegetables, fish, kitchen utensils, and family clothing goes on from the single plank of a pier running from the lowest floor of the house. Each inn has a similar pier, where sociable maidens chatter as they stir and wash the rice in bamboo baskets. The servants of the houses take the whole lake for wash-hand basin and tooth-brush cup, and the pier is a small stage, upon which these local companies play their unstudied parts.
As the finest country walk in England is agreed to be that from Stratford to Warwick, so is the way from Chiuzenji to Yumoto the finest country walk in Japan, for its eight miles of infinite variety. First, the broad foot-path wanders for two miles along the shores of Lake Chiuzenji, which, however, appears only in glimpses of placid blue through the dense forest, all stillness, coolness, and enchantment. Then it emerges at the head of the lake in a grove of pine-trees sheltering a rustic tea-house, which overlooks the bit of low beach known as the Iris Strand, and all the grand amphitheatre of mountains walling in Chiuzenji. Farther on are Hell's River and the Dragon Head cascade, where a mountain stream slides in many a separate ribbon down mossy ledges. Thence the foot-path climbs to a high plain covered with tall grasses and groves of lofty pines—the famous Red Plain, dyed once with the blood of a conquered army, and tinged with each autumn's frost to the same deep hue again. From the border of this plain rise sombre mountains, Nantaisan a giant among them, with green and purple veils of shadows and a crown of floating clouds. No sign of habitation or cultivation marks the high plain, which, with its loneliness and its scattered pines, is so much like the valleys of the high Sierras. Everywhere else in Japan the country is wooded and shaded and cultivated from water's edge to mountain-top; but in winter all the region above Nikko is deserted, and deep snows in the passes shut it off from the rest of the world. Tea-houses close, the people flee to the valley for warmth, and only the coming of spring and the tourist restores it again. Even those wizards, the Japanese farmers, do not attempt to subdue these solitudes, whose wild beauty delights the whole people.
Beyond this lonely plain the way climbs seven hundred feet along the face of a precipitous hill to the level of Yumoto Lake, which there narrows to a few feet and slips down the rocks, a mass of foam, spray, and steam. The lake—small, uneven, walled by perpendicular mountain-slopes and forests—is a still mirror of these superb heights, one of which, Shirane-san, is a slumbering volcano. Vaporous sulphur springs bubble through the hot crust of earth at the end of the lake, and boiling sulphur wells up, even in the bed of the lake itself, and clouds and heats the whole body of water so that no fish can live there. The two miles of winding forest-path, between the fall at one end of Yumoto Lake and the village of the same name at the opposite end, lead through an enchanted forest—a picturesque tangle of roots and rocks, covered with green moss, wound with vines, shaded with ferns, and overhung with evergreen branches.
Yumoto has two streets and a dozen tea-houses, whose galleries are hung with red lanterns, as if in perpetual fête, and an atmosphere nearly all sulphuretted hydrogen. One of the hot springs bubbles up at the entrance of the village, filling a tank about ten feet square, covered by a roof resting on four corner pillars. The sides are all open to the air, and an Arcadian simplicity of bathing arrangements prevails. Citizens and sojourners stroll hither, because the site commands a view of the thoroughfare, remove and fold up their garments, and sit down in the pool. When sufficiently boiled, they cool off occasionally on the edge of the tank, and then drop into the pool again. If the company prove agreeable, the bath occupies hours. More open-air pavilions are at the end of the village, where more bronze figures boil and cool themselves in the same exoteric fashion. The public bath-houses, that alternate with the tea-houses in the village streets, have roofs and sides of solid wood, except the street front, which is open and curtainless, and within which men, women, and children meet in the hot-water tanks, as at the market-place or street-corners in other countries. To a new-comer this extraordinary simplicity is startling, but it he stays long enough, he finds that the childlike innocence and unconcern of the people make a new code of the proprieties.
These infantile views of the Japanese as to bathing make even the great pay little attention to the seclusion and inviolateness of the bath-room. In a high-class Japanese house, or at the best tea-houses, this is an exquisitely artistic nook, with cement walls and floors, inlaid with fantastic stones and bits of porcelain. The oval tubs are of pine, bound with withes, and white with scouring. The doors are generally sliding paper screens without locks, and the wooden wall, or door, if there be one, is full of fantastic holes and tiny windows with no curtain. Often the bath-house is a detached pavilion, to which you are expected to walk in a special bath gown, or ukata, meeting, on the way, household and guests, who are always ready for a friendly chat. Europeans can hardly make a Japanese servant understand that in their order of arrangements, the bath and the bath-room are for the use of one person at a time. The Japanese wooden tub is vastly better than the zinc coffins and marble sarcophagi in which we bathe. The wood keeps the water hotter and is pleasanter to the touch. One kind of tub has a tiny stove with a long pipe in one end, and with a mere handful of charcoal such a tub is filled with boiling water in the briefest time. Many bathers have lost their lives by the carbonic acid gas sent off by this ingenious contrivance. A Japanese hot bath is only a point or two from boiling. The natives bear this temperature without wincing, and will step from this scalding caldron out-of-doors, smoking along the highway on a frosty day, like the man whom Dr. Griffis describes. Our grave and statuesque landlord at Yumoto, who sat like a Buddha behind his low table and held court with his minions, once appeared to us stalking home in the starlight with all his clothes on his arm. His stride was as stagey and majestic as ever, there being no reason, in his consciousness, why he should lay off his dignity with his garments, they representing to him the temporary and accidental, not the real envelope of the pompous old soul.
PUBLIC BATH-HOUSE AT YUMOTO
At all medicinal springs the baths are owned and managed by the Government and are free to the people. Here at Yumoto, men, women, and children walk into the one large room containing the pools, undress, lay their clothing in a little heap on the raised bench or platform running around the edge of the room, and step into the water; and, as has been said, no one sees any impropriety in this custom. Women sit or kneel on the edges of the pool, scouring themselves with bags of rice-bran, and chattering with their friends in or out of the water. People stop at the open doors, or breast-high windows, to talk to the bathers, and conduct is as decorous, as reserved, and as modest as in a drawing-room. The approach of a foreigner sends all the grown bathers deep into the water, simply out of respect to his artificial and incomprehensible way of looking at natural things. They know, though they cannot understand, that the European finds something objectionable, and even wrong, in so insignificant a trifle as being seen without clothes.
At our tea-house in Yumoto our three rooms in the upper story were thrown into one during the daytime, making an apartment open to the gallery on three sides. Hibachis, or braziers, with mounds of glowing charcoal, tempered the morning and evening air, and all day we could sit on piles of futons, and enjoy the superb picture of mountains and lake before us. We were poled over the placid water in a queer ark of a boat, and the mountain-paths were always alluring, the roughest trail often passing under torii, or leading past some shrine, just when it seemed that no foot had ever preceded ours. At night, when the chilling air presses the sulphur fumes closer to earth, Yumoto streets resound with the wailing whistle of the blind shampooer, or amah. These amah are found everywhere—in the largest cities and in the smallest mountain villages—and, whether men or women, are never young, or even middle-aged. Theirs is an indefinite, unscientific system of massage, and their manipulations often leave their charges with more lame and aching muscles than before. But the amah are an institution of the country, and Yumoto streets would ring with their dreary music, and our screens would be slipped aside by many an ill-favored crone, as soon as it was time for the usual evening baths to be prepared at the tea-houses.
Upon another visit to Nikko and Chiuzenji in late October there was a more splendid autumnal pageant than the most gorgeous hill sides of America had ever shown me. Frost had done its most wonderful work, and the air was exhilarating to intoxication. The clear and brilliant weather moved the coolies to frisk, play, and chant like children—even that dignified little man, Ito, relaxing his gravity to frolic like a boy, and to pry bowlders over the edges of precipices to hear them crash and fall far below. Chiuzenji looked a vast, flawless sapphire, and Nantaisan was a mosaic of richest Byzantine coloring. Kegon-no-taki, the fall of three hundred feet by which the waters of Chiuzenji drop to the valley in their race to the Daiyagawa, seemed a column of snow in its little amphitheatre hung with autumn vines and branches. But we dared not remain, for already Yumoto was closed and boarded up for the season, and on any day the first of the blockading snows of winter might shut the door of the one tea-house left open at Chiuzenji, and end the travel from the Ashiwo copper-mines.