A Tea Reader (21 page)

1
Ningpo is a seaport in China's Zhejiang province.

2
[Certain British spellings and archaic terms have been amended. Ed.]

The Tokaido

BY
E
LIZA
R
UHAMAH
S
CIDMORE

Excerpted from
Jinrikisha Days in Japan
,
1891.
¹

Great once was Shidzuoka, which now is only a busy commercial town of an agricultural province. The old castle has been razed, its martial quadrangle is a wheat field; and the massive walls, the creeping and overhanging pine-trees and deep moats are the only feudal relics. Keiki, the last of the Tokugawa Shoguns, lived in a black-walled enclosure beyond the outer moat, but the modern spirit paid no heed to his existence, and his death, in 1883, was hardly an incident in the routine of its commercial progress.

The great Shinto temple at the edge of the town is famous for the dragons in its ceiling. The old priest welcomed us with smiles, led us in, shoeless, over the mats, and bade us look up, first at the Dragon of the Four Quarters, and then at the Dragon of the Eight Quarters, the eyes of the monster strangely meeting ours, as we changed our various points of view.

At the archery range behind the temple our
danna san
²
proved himself a new William Tell with the bow and arrows. The attendant idlers cheered his shots, and a wrinkled old woman brought us dragon candies on a dark-red lacquer tray, under whose transparent surface lay darker shadows of cherry blossoms. The eye of the connoisseur was quick to descry the tray, and when the woman said it had been bought in the town, we took
jinrikishas
and hurried to the address she gave. The guide explained minutely, the shopkeeper brought out a hundred other kinds and colors of lacquer, and children ran in from home workshops with hardly dried specimens to show us. All the afternoon we searched through lacquer and curio shops, and finally despatched a coolie to the temple to buy the old woman's property. Hours afterwards he returned with a brand-new, bright red horror, and the message that “the mistress could not send the honorable foreigner such a poor old tray as that.”

The fine Shidzuoka baskets, which are so famed elsewhere, were not to be found in Shidzuoka; our teahouse was uninteresting, and so we set forth in the rain, unfurling big flat umbrellas of oil-paper, and whirling away through a dripping landscape. Rice and wheat alternated with dark-green tea bushes, and cart-loads of tea-chests were bearing the first season's crop to market. The rain did not obscure the lovely landscape, as the plain we followed turned to a valley, the valley narrowed to a ravine, and we began climbing upward, while a mountain-torrent raced down beside us. One picturesque little village in a shady hollow gave us glimpses of silk-worm trays in the houses as we went whirling through it. The road, winding by zigzags up Utsonomiya pass, suddenly entered a tunnel six hundred feet in length, where the
jinrikisha
wheels rumbled noisily. On cloudy days the place is lighted by lamps, but on sunny days by the sun's reflection from two black lacquer boards at the entrances. The device is an old one in Japan, but an American patent has recently been issued for the same thing, as a cheap means of lighting ships' holds while handling cargo.

On the other side of Utsonomiya Pass the road winds down by steep zigzags to the village of Okabe, noted for its trays and boxes made of the polished brown stem of a coarse fern. We bought our specimens from an oracular woman, who delivered her remarks like the lines of a part, her husband meekly echoing what she said in the same dramatic tones, and the whole scene being as stagey as if it had been well rehearsed beforehand.

From the mountains the road drops to a rich tea country, where every hill-side is green with the thick-set little bushes. At harvest-time cart-loads of basket-fired, or country-dried, tea fill the road to the ports, to be toasted finally in iron pans, and coated with indigo and gypsum to satisfy the taste of American tea drinkers. In every town farmers may be seen dickering with the merchants over the tough paper sacks of tea that they bring in, and within the houses groups sitting at low tables sort the leaves into grades with swift fingers.

At Fujiyeda, where we took refuge from the increasing rain, the splashing in the large bathroom of the teahouse was kept up from afternoon to midnight by the guests, and continued by the family and teahouse maids until four o'clock, when the early risers began their ablutions. A coughing priest on the other side of our thin paper walls had a talkative massagist about midnight and refreshments later, and we were glad to resume the ride between tea fields at the earliest possible hour.

At Kanaya, at the foot of Kanaya Mountain, the teahouse adjoined a school-house. The school-room had desks and benches but no walls, the screens being all removed. The teacher called the pupils in by clapping two sticks together, as in a French theater. Spying the foreigners, the children stared, oblivious of teacher and blackboard, and the teacher, after one good look at the itinerants, bowed a courteous good-morning, and let the offenders go unpunished.

Up over Kanaya Pass we toiled slowly, reaching at last a little eyrie of a teahouse, where the landlord pointed with equal pride to the view and to several pairs of muddy shoes belonging, he said, to the honorable gentlemen who were about piercing the mountain under us with a railway tunnel. Under a shady arbor is a huge, round boulder, fenced in carefully and regarded reverently by humble travelers. According to the legend it used to cry at night like a child until Kobo Daishi, the inventor of the Japanese syllabary, wrote an inscription on it and quieted it forever. No less famous than Kobo Daishi's rock is the
midzu ame
³
of this Kanaya teahouse, and the dark brown sweet is put in dainty little boxes that are the souvenirs each pilgrim carries away with him.

Farther along the main road, with its arching shade-trees, the glossy dark tea bushes gave way to square miles of rice and wheat fields. Here and there a patch of intense green verdure showed the young blades of rice almost ready to be transplanted to the fields, whence the wheat had just been garnered, the rice giving way in turn to some other cereal, all farming land in this fertile region bearing three annual crops.

A few villages showed the projecting roofs peculiar to the province of Totomi, and then the pretty teahouse at Hamamatsu quite enchanted us after our experiences with the poor accommodations of some of the provincial towns. A rough curbed well in the court-yard, with an odd parasol of a roof high over the sweep, a pretty garden all cool, green shade, a stair-way, steep and high, and at the top a long, dim corridor, with a floor of shining, dark
keyaki
wood. This was the place that made us welcome; even stocking-footed we half feared to tread on those brilliantly-polished boards. Our balcony overlooked a third charming garden, and each little room had a distinctive beauty of wooden ceilings, recesses, screens, and fanciful windows.

The most enviable possession of Hamamatsu, however, was O'Tatsu, and on our arrival O'Tatsu helped to carry our traps upstairs, falling into raptures over our rings, pins, hair-pins, watches, and beaded trimmings. She clapped her hands in ecstasy, her bright eyes sparkled, and her smile displayed the most dazzling teeth. When we ate supper, sitting on the floor around an eight-inch high table, with little O'Tatsu presiding and waiting on us, not only her beauty but her charming frankness, simplicity, quickness, and grace made further conquest of us all. The maiden enjoyed our admiration immensely, arrayed herself in her freshest blue-and-white cotton kimono, and submitted her head to the best hair-dresser in town, returning with gorgeous bits of crape and gold cord tied in with the butterfly loops of her blue-black tresses. At her suggestion we sent for a small dancing-girl to entertain us, who, with a wand and masks, represented Suzume and other famous characters in legend and melodramas. When we left Hamamatsu, affectionate little O'Tatsu begged me to send her my photograph, and lest I should not have understood her excited flow of Japanese sentences, illuminated, however, by her great pleading eyes, she ran off, and, coming back, slipped up to me and held out a cheap, colored picture of some foreign beauty in the costume of 1865. When at last we rode away from the teahouse, O'Tatsu followed my
jinrikisha
for a long way, holding my hand, with tears in her lovely eyes, and her last
sayonara
broke in a sob.

A hard shell-road winds down to the shores of Hamana Lake and across its long viaduct. The
jinrikishas
run, as if on rubber tires, for nearly three miles over an embankment crossing the middle of the great lake, which at one side admits the curling breakers of the great Pacific. Until a few years ago this mountain-walled pool was protected from the ocean by a broad sand ridge, which an earthquake shook down, letting in the salt waters. The Tokaido railroad crosses the lake on a high embankment, which was sodded and covered with a lattice-work of straw bundles, while seed was sown in the crevices more than a year before the road could be used. The whole railroad, as we saw in passing its completed sections, is solidly built with stone foundations and stone ballast, and intended to last for centuries. The Japanese seldom hurry the making of public works, and even a railroad does not inspire them with any feverish activity. Not until the last detail and station-house was finished was the line opened for travel, and following so nearly the route of the old Tokaido, through the most fertile and picturesque part of Central Japan, it keeps always in sight Fujiyama or the ocean.

In the course of the afternoon plantations of mulberry-trees came in sight. Loads of mulberry branches and twigs were being hauled into the villages and sold by weight, the rearers of silk-worms buying the leaves and paper-makers the stems for the sake of the inside bark. Climbing to one high plateau, we rested at a little rustic shed of a teahouse, commanding a superb view down a great ragged ravine to the line of foam breaking at its boulder-strewn entrance, and so on to the limitless ocean. One of the
jinrikisha
coolies preceded us to the benches on the overhanging balcony, and, kindly pointing out the special beauties of the scene, took off his garments and spread them out on the rail in the matter-of-fact, unconscious way of true Japanese innocence and simplicity of mind.

The guidebook calls the stretch of country beyond that high-perched teahouse “a waste region,” but nothing could be more beautiful than the long ride through pine forest and belts of scrub-pine on that uncultivated plateau, always overlooking the ocean. At one point a temple to the goddess Kwannon
⁴
is niched among towering rocks at the base of a narrow cliff, on whose summit a colossal statue of the deity stands high against the sky. For more than a century this bronze goddess of Mercy has been the object of pious pilgrimages, the pilgrims clapping their hands and bowing in prayer to all the thirty-three Kwannons cut in the face of the solid rock-base on which our lady of pity stands.

We reached the long, dull town of Toyohashi at dusk, to find the large teahouse crowded with travelers. Two rooms looking out upon a sultry high-walled garden were given us, and for dining room a tiny alcove of a place on one of the middle courts. This room was so small and close that we had to leave the screens open, though the corridor led to the large bathroom, where half a dozen people splashed and chattered noisily and gentlemen with their clothes on their arms went back and forth before our door as if before the life class of an art school. The noise of the bathers was kept up cheerfully, until long after midnight, and no one in the teahouse seemed to be sleeping. By four o'clock in the morning such a coughing, blowing, and sputtering began in the court beside my room that I finally slid the screens and looked out. At least a dozen lodgers were brushing their teeth in the picturesque little quadrangle of rocks, bamboos, and palms, and bathing face and hands in the large stone and bronze urns that we had supposed to be ornamental only. Later, the gravel was covered with scores of the wooden sticks of tooth-brushes, beaten out into a tassel of fibers at one end, and with many boxes emptied of the coarse, gritty tooth-powder which the Japanese use so freely.

The last day of our long
jinrikisha
ride was warm, the sun glared on a white, dusty road, and the country was flat and uninteresting. Each little town and village seemed duller than the other. Wheat and rape were being harvested and spread to dry, and in the farm-yards men and women were combing, beating out the grain with flails, and winnowing it in the primitive way by pouring it down from a flat scoop-basket held high overhead. Nobody wore any clothes to speak of, and the whole population turned out to watch the amazing spectacle of foreigners standing spell-bound until our
jinrikishas
had gone by.

At Arimatsu village we passed through a street of shops where the curiously-dyed cotton goods peculiar to the place are sold. For several hundred years all Arimatsu has been tying knots down the lengths of cotton, twisting it in skeins, and wrapping it regularly with a double-dyed indigo thread, and then, by immersion in boiling water, dyeing the fabric in curious lines and star-spotted patterns. A more clumsy and primitive way of dyeing could not be imagined in this day of steam-looms and roller-printing, but Arimatsu keeps it up and prospers.

At sunset we saw the towers of Nagoya castle in the distance, and after crossing the broad plain of ripening rape and wheat, the coolies sped through the town at a fearful pace and deposited us, dazed, dusted, and weary, at the door of the Shiurokindo, to enjoy the beautiful rooms just kindly vacated by Prince Bernard, of Saxe-Weimar.