Books: Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan
P >>
Percival Lowell >> Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 *END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
Scanned and typed by Eric Hutton (bookman@rmplc.co.uk)
Noto, an unexplored corner of Japan
by Percival Lowell
From you, my dear Basil, the confidant of my hopes toward Noto, I
know I may look for sympathy now that my advances have met with such
happy issue, however incomplete be my account. And so I ask you to
be my best man in the matter before the world.
Ever yours,
Percival Lowell.
Basil Hall Chamberlain, Esq.
Contents.
I. An Unknown.
II. Off and On.
III. The Usui Pass.
IV. Zenkoji.
V. No.
VI. On a New Cornice Road.
VII. Oya Shiradzu, Ko Shiradzu.
VIII. Across the Etchiu Delta.
IX. Over the Arayama Pass.
X. An Inland Sea.
XI. Anamidzu.
XII. At Sea Again.
XIII. On the Noto Highway.
XIV. The Harinoki Toge.
XV. Toward the Pass.
XVI. Riuzanjita.
XVII. Over the Snow.
XVIII. A Genial Inkyo.
XIX. Our Passport and the Basha.
XX. Down the Tenriugawa.
XXI. To the Sea.
NOTO: an unexplored corner of Japan.
I. An Unknown.
The fancy took me to go to Noto.
It seemed a strange fancy to my friends.
Yet I make no apology for it; for it was a case of love at first sight.
Scanning, one evening, in Tokyo, the map of Japan, in a vague, itinerary
way, with the look one first gives to the crowd of faces in a ballroom,
my eye was caught by the pose of a province that stood out in graphic
mystery from the western coast. It made a striking figure there,
with its deep-bosomed bays and its bold headlands. Its name, it
appeared, was Noto; and the name too pleased me. I liked its vowel
color; I liked its consonant form, the liquid n and the decisive t.
Whimsically, if you please, it suggested both womanliness and will.
The more I looked the more I longed, until the desire carried me not
simply off my feet, but on to them.
Nobody seemed to know much about my inamorata. Indeed, those I asked
asked me, in their own want of information, why I went, and what
there was to see: of which questions, the second itself did for
answer to the first. Why not in fact have set my heart on going to
Noto just because it was not known! Not that it is well to believe
all the unseen to be much worth the seeing, but that I had an itching
sole to tread what others had not already effacingly betrodden.
Privately, I was delighted with the general lack of knowledge on the
subject. It served admirably to put me in conceit with my choice;
although I will own I was rather at a loss to account for it, and I
can only explain it now by the fact that the place was so out of the
way, and not very unlike others, after all. Being thus candid, I
ought perhaps to go a step farther and renounce the name. But, on
the two great principles that the pursuit is itself the prize and
that the means justifies the end, I prefer to keep it. For there was
much of interest to me by the way; and I cling to the name out of a
kind of loyalty to my own fancy. I like to think that Xenophon felt
as much in his Anabasis, though but one book out of seven deals with
the going up, the other six being occupied with the getting safely
away again. It is not told that Xenophon regretted his adventure.
Certainly I am not sorry I was wedded to my idea.
To most of my acquaintance Noto was scarcely so much as a name, and
its local habitation was purely cartographic. I found but one man
who had been there, and he had dropped down upon it, by way of harbor,
from a boat. Some sympathetic souls, however, went so far toward it
as to ask where it was.
To the westward of Tokyo, so far west that the setting sun no longer
seems to lose itself among the mountains, but plunges for good and
all straight into the shining Nirvana of the sea, a strangely shaped
promontory makes out from the land. It is the province of Noto,
standing alone in peninsular isolation.
It was partly in this position that the fascination lay. Withdrawn
from its fellows, with its back to the land, it faced the glory of
the western sky, as if in virginal vision gazing out upon the deep.
Doubly withdrawn is it, for that the coast from which it stands apart
is itself almost unvisited by Europeans,--an out-of-the-world state,
in marked contrast to the shore bordering the Pacific, which is now a
curbstone on the great waterway round the earth, and incidentally
makes a happy parenthesis of promenade for the hasty globe-trotter.
The form, too, of the peninsula came in for a share in its attraction.
Its coast line was so coquettishly irregular. If it turned its back
on the land, it stretched its hands out to the sea, only to withdraw
them again the next moment,--a double invitation. Indeed, there is
no happier linking of land to water. The navigator in such parts
becomes himself a delightfully amphibious creature, at home in both
elements. Should he tire of the one, he can always take to the other.
Besides, such features in a coast suggest a certain clean-cut
character of profile,--a promise, in Japan at least, rarely unkept.
To reach this topographically charming province, the main island had
to be crossed at its widest, and, owing to lofty mountain chains,
much tacking to be done to boot. Atmospherically the distance is
even greater than afoot. Indeed, the change in climate is like a
change in zone; for the trend of the main island at this point,
being nearly east and west, gives to the one coast a southerly
exposure, and to the other a northerly one, while the highest wall of
peaks in Japan, the Hida-Shinshiu range, shuts off most meteorological
communication. Long after Tokyo is basking in spring, the west coast
still lies buried in deep drifts of snow.
It was my misfortune to go to this out-of-the-way spot alone. I was
duly sensible of my commiserable state at times. Indeed, in those
strange flashes of dual consciousness when a man sees his own
condition as if it were another's, I pitied myself right heartily;
for I hold that travel is like life in this, at least, that a
congenial companion divides the troubles and doubles the joys.
To please one's self is so much harder than to be pleased by another;
and when it comes to doubt and difficulty, there are drawbacks to
being one's own guide, philosopher, and friend. The treatment is too
homoeopathic by half.
An excuse for a companion existed in the person of my Japanese boy,
or cook. He had been boy to me years before; and on this return of
his former master to the land of the enlightened, he had come back to
his allegiance, promoting himself to the post of cook. During the
journey he acted in both capacities indifferently,--in one sense,
not in the other. In addition to being capable he was willing and of
great endurance. Besides, he was passionately fond of travel.
He knew no more about Noto than I, and at times, on the road, he could
not make out what the country folk said, for the difference in dialect;
which lack of special qualification much increased his charm as a
fellow-traveler. He neither spoke nor understood English, of course,
and surprised me, after surprising himself, on the last day but one
of our trip, by coming out with the words "all right." His surname,
appropriately enough, meant mountain-rice-field, and his last name
--which we should call his first name--was Yejiro, or
lucky-younger-son. Besides cooking excellently well, he made paper
plum blossoms beautifully, and once constructed a string telephone
out of his own head. I mention these samples of accomplishment to
show that he was no mere dabbler in pots and pans.
In addition to his various culinary contrivances we took a large and
motley stock of canned food, some of his own home-made bread, and a
bottle of whiskey. We laid in but a small supply of beer; not that
I purposed to forego that agreeable beverage, but because, in this
Europeanized age, it can be got in all the larger towns. Indeed,
the beer brewed in Yokohama to-day ranks with the best in the world.
It is in great demand in Tokyo, while its imported, or professedly
imported, rivals have freely percolated into the interior, so popular
with the upper and upper middle classes have malt liquors become.
Nowadays, when a Japanese thinks to go in for Capuan dissipation
regardless of expense, he treats himself to a bottle of beer.
These larder-like details are not meant to imply that I made a god of
my palate, but that otherwise my digestion would have played the
devil with me. In Japan, to attempt to live off the country in the
country is a piece of amateur acting the average European bitterly
regrets after the play, if not during its performance. We are not
inwardly contrived to thrive solely on rice and pickles.
It is best, too, for a journey into the interior, to take with you
your own bedding; sheets, that is, and blankets. The bed itself
Yejiro easily improvised out of innumerable futons, as the quilts
used at night by the Japanese are called. A single one is enough for
a native, but Yejiro, with praiseworthy zeal, made a practice of
asking for half-a-dozen, which he piled one upon the other in the
middle of the room. Each had a perceptible thickness and a rounded
loglike edge; and when the time came for turning in on top of the
lot, I was always reminded of the latter end of a Grecian hero,
the structure looked so like a funeral pyre. When to the above
indispensables were added clothes, camera, dry plates, books,
and sundries, it made a collection of household gods quite appalling
to consider on the march. I had no idea I owned half so much in the
world from which it would pain me to be parted. As my property lay
spread out for packing, I stared at it aghast.
To transport all these belongings, native ingenuity suggested a thing
called a yanagigori; several of them, in fact. Now the construction
of a kori is elementally ingenious. It consists simply of two wicker
baskets, of the same shape, but of slightly different size, fitting
into each other upside down. The two are then tied together with cord.
The beauty of the idea lies in its extension; for in proportion as
the two covers are pulled out or pushed home will the pair hold from
a maximum capacity of both to a minimum capacity of one. It is
possible even to start with more than a maximum, if the contents be
such as are not given to falling out by the way. The contrivance is
simply invaluable when it comes to transporting food; for then, as
you eat your way down, the obliging covers shrink to meet the vacuum.
If more than one kori be necessary, an easy step in devices leads to
a series of graded sizes. Then all your baskets eventually collapse
into one.
The last but most important article of all was my passport, which
carefully described my proposed route, and which Yejiro at once took
charge of and carried about with him for immediate service; for a
wise paternal government insisted upon knowing my intentions before
permitting me to visit the object of my choice.
II.
Off and On.
It was on the day but one before the festival of the fifth moon that
we set out, or, in English, the third of May; and those emblems of
good luck, the festival fishes, were already swimming in the air
above the house eaves, as we scurried through the streets in
jinrikisha toward the Uyeno railway station. We had been a little
behindhand in starting, but by extra exertions on the part of the
runners we succeeded in reaching the station just in time to be shut
out by the gatekeeper. Time having been the one thing worthless in
old Japan, it was truly sarcastic of fate that we should reach our
first goal too late. As if to point chagrin, the train still stood
in waiting. Remonstrances with the wicket man about the imported
five-minute regulation, or whatever it was, proved of no avail.
Not one jot or tittle of the rule would he yield, which perhaps was
natural, inasmuch as, however we might have managed alone, our
companions the baskets never could have boarded the train without
offical help. The intrinsic merits of the baggage failed, alas,
to affect its mobility. Then the train slowly drew out.
To be stopped on the road is the common lot of travelers; but to be
stopped before one has fairly started is nothing less than to be
mocked at. It is best, however, to take such gibes in good part.
Viewing the situation in this light, the ludicrousness of the
disconnection struck me so forcibly as very nearly to console me for
my loss, which was not trifling, since the next train did not leave
for above three hours; too late to push on beyond Takasaki that night,
a thing I had most firmly purposed to do. Here I was, the miserable
victim of a punctuality my own people had foisted on a land only too
happy without it! There was poetic justice in the situation, after all.
Besides, the course of one's true love should not run too smooth.
Judicious difficulty whets desire.
There was nothing to turn to on the spot, and I was ashamed to go home.
Then I opportunely remembered something.
I have always thought we limited our pharmacopoeia. We prescribe
pills enough for the body, while we leave the mind to look after itself.
Why should not the spirit also have its draughts and mixtures,
properly labeled and dispensed! For example, angling appears to be a
strong mental opiate. I have seen otherwise normal people stupefied
beyond expression when at the butt of a rod and line. Happening to
recall this effect, I instantly prescribed for my perturbed state of
mind a good dose of fishing, to be taken as suited the day. So I
betook me down a by-street, where the aerial carp promised the
thickest, and, selecting a house well placed for a view, asked
permission to mount upon the roof. It chanced to be a cast-off
clothing shop, along whose front some fine, if aged, garments were
hung to catch the public eye. The camera and I were inducted up the
ascent by the owner, while my boots, of course, waited dog-like in
the porch below.
The city made a spectacle from above. On all sides superb paper carp
floated to the breeze, tugging at the strings that held them to the
poles quite after the manner of the real fish. One felt as though,
by accident, he had stepped into some mammoth globe of goldfish.
The whole sky was alive with them. Eighty square miles of finny folk
inside the city, and an untold company without. The counterfeit
presentments were from five to ten feet long, and painted to mimic
life. The breeze entered at the mouth and passed out somewhat less
freely at the tail, thus keeping them well bellied and constantly in
motion. The way they rose and dove and turned and wriggled was
worthy of free will. Indeed, they had every look of spontaneity,
and lacked only the thing itself to turn the sky into an ocean,
and Tokyo into a sea bottom with a rockery of roof. Each fish
commemorates the birth of a boy during the year. It would thus be
possible to take a census of the increase of the male population
yearly, at the trifling cost of scaling a housetop,--a set of
statistics not without an eventual value.
While we were strolling back, Yejiro and I, we came, in the way,
upon another species of fish. The bait, which was well designed to
captivate, bade for the moment to exceed even the angler's
anticipations. It was a sort of un-Christmas tree with fishing-pole
branches, from which dangled articulated figures, bodied like men,
but with heads of foxes, tortoises, and other less likelybeasts,
--bewitching objects in impossible evolution to a bald-pated
urchin who stood gazing at it with all his soul. The peddler sat with
his eyes riveted on the boy, visions of a possible catch chasing
themselves through his brain. I watched him, while the crowd behind
stared at me. We made quite a tail of curiosity. The opiate was
having its effect; I began to feel soporifically calm. Then I went
up to the restaurant in the park and had lunch as quietly as
possible, in fear of friendly discovery.
Sufficiently punctual passengers being now permitted to board the
next train, I ensconced myself in a kind of parlor compartment, which,
fortunately, I continued to have all to myself, and was soon being
rolled westward across the great Musashi plain, ruminating. My chief
quarrel with railway rules is, I am inclined to think, that they
preach to the public what they fail to practice themselves. After
having denied me a paltry five minutes' grace at the station, the
officials proceeded to lose half an hour on the road in a most
exasperating manner. Of course the delay was quite exceptional.
Such a thing had never happened before, and would not happen
again--till the next time. But the phenomenal character of the
occurrence failed to console me, as it should no doubt have done.
My delay, too, was exceptional--on this line. Nor was I properly
mollified by repeated offers of hard-boiled eggs, cakes, and oranges,
which certain enterprising peddlers hawked up and down the platforms,
when we stopped, to a rhythmic chant of their own invention.
The only consolation lay in the memory of what travel over the
Musashi plain used to be before trains hurried one, or otherwise,
into the heart of the land. In those days the journey was done in
jinrikisha, and a question of days, not hours, it was in the doing,
--two days' worth of baby carriage, of which the tediousness lay
neither in the vehicles nor in the way, but in the amount of both.
Or, if one put comparative speed above comparative comfort, he rose
before the lark, to be tortured through a summer's day in a basha,
or horse vehicle, suitable only for disembodied spirits. My joints
ached again at the thought. Clearly, to grumble now was to sin
against proportion.
Besides, the weather was perfect: argosies of fleecy cloud sailing
slowly across a deep blue sky; a broad plain in all its spring
freshness of color, picked out here and there with fruit trees
smothered in blossom, and bearing on its bosom the passing shadows of
the clouds above; in the distance the gradually growing forms of the
mountains, each at first starting into life only as a faint wash of
color, barely to be parted from the sky itself, pricking up from out
the horizon of field. Then, slowly, timed to our advance, the tint
gathered substance, grew into contrasts that, deepening minute by
minute, resolved into detail, until at last the whole stood revealed
in all its majesty, foothill, shoulder, peak, one grand chromatic
rise from green to blue.
One after the other the points came out thus along the southern sky:
first the summits behind Ome; then Bukosan, like some sentinel,
half-way up the plain's long side; and then range beyond range
stretching toward the west. Behind Bukosan peeped Cloud's Rest, the
very same outline in fainter tint, so like the double reflection
from a pane of glass that I had to shift to an open window to make
sure it was no illusion. Then the Nikko group began to show on the
right, and the Haruna mass took form in front; and as they rose
higher and the sunbeams slanted more, gilding the motes in the heavy
afternoon air, they rimmed the plain in front into one great bowl
of fairy eau de vie de Dantzic. Slowly above them the sun dipped to
his setting, straight ahead, burnishing our path as we pursued in
two long lines of flashing rail into the west-northwest. Lower he
sank, luring us on, and lower yet, and then suddenly disappeared
beyond the barrier of peaks.
The train drew up, panting. It was Takasaki, now steeped in saffron
afterglow. The guards passed along, calling out the name and
unfastening the doors. Everybody got out and shuffled off on their
clogs. The baskets, Yejiro, and I followed, after a little, through
the gloaming.
It was not far to the inn. It was just far enough, at that hour, to
put us in heart for a housing. Indeed, twilight is the time of
times to arrive anywhere. Any spot, be it ever so homely, seems
homelike then. The dusk has snatched from you the silent
companionship of nature, to leave you poignantly alone. It is the
hour when a man draws closer to the one he loves, and the hour when
most he shrinks from himself, though he want another near. It is
then the rays of the house lights wander abroad and appear to beckon
the houseless in; and that must be, in truth, a sorry hostelry to
seem such to him.
Even Takasaki bore a look of welcome alike to the foreign and the
native stranger, which was certainly wonderful for Takasaki. The
place used not to fancy foreigners, and its inns bandied the European
traveler about like a bale of undesirable merchandise with the duties
still due. But now, what a change! The innkeeper not only received
us, but led the way at once to the best room,--a room in the second
story of the fireproof storehouse at the back, which he hoped would
be comfortable. Comfortable! The room actually proffered us a table
and chairs. No one who has not, after a long day's tramp, sought in
vain to rest his weary body propped up against a side beam in a
Japanese inn can enter into the feeling a chair inspires, even long
afterward, by recollection.
I cannot say I loved Takasaki in former days. Was it my reception or
was it sentiment that made me see it all now through a mist of glamour?
Unsuspected by us, that atmosphere of time tints everything. Few
things but look lovelier seen down the vista of the years. Indeed,
sentiment is a kind of religion; or is it religion that is a kind of
sentiment? Both are so subtly busy canonizing the past, and crowning
with aureoles very every-day things as well as very ordinary people.
Not men alone take on a sanctity when they are no more.
III.
The Usui Pass.
The first object to catch my eye, when the shoji were pushed apart,
the next morning, was a string of the ubiquitous paper fish, dangling
limp in the motionless May air from a pole in a neighboring yard;
highly suggestive of having just been caught for breakfast. The
sight would have been painfully prophetic but for the food we had
brought with us; for, of all meals, a Japanese breakfast is the most
cold, the most watery, and the most generally fishy in the world.
As it was, breakfast consisted of pathetic copies of consecrated
originals. It might have been excellent but for the canned milk.
No doubt there are persons who are fond of canned milk; but, for my
part, I loathe it. The effect of the sweetish glue upon my inner man
is singularly nauseating. I have even been driven to drink my
matutinal coffee in all its after-dinner strength rather than
adulterate it with the mixture. You have, it is true, the choice of
using the stuff as a dubious paste, or of mixing it with water into a
non-committal wash; and, whichever plan you adopt, you wish you had
adopted the other. Why it need be so unpalatably cloying is not
clear to my mind. They tell me the sugar is needed to preserve the
milk. I never could make out that it preserved anything but the
sugar. Simply to see the stuff ooze out of the hole in the can is
deterrent. It is enough to make one think seriously at times of
adding a good milch cow to his already ample trip encumberment, at
the certain cost of delaying the march, and the not improbable chance
of being taken for an escaped lunatic. Indeed, to the Japanese mind,
to be seen solemnly preceding a caravan of cattle for purposes of
diet would certainly suggest insanity. For cows in Japan are never
milked. Dairy products, consequently, are not to be had on the road,
and the man who fancies milk, butter, or cheese must take them with
him.
It used to be the same in Tokyo, but in these latter days a dairy has
been started at Hakone, which supplies fresh butter to such Tokyoites
as like it. One of my friends, who had been many years from home,
was much taken with the new privilege, and called my attention to it
with some pride. The result was a colorless lardy substance that
looked like poor oleomargarine (not like good oleomargarine, for that
looks like butter), but which was held in high esteem, nevertheless.
My friend, indeed, seriously maintained to me once that such was the
usual color of fresh butter, and insisted that the yellow hue common
elsewhere must be the result of dyes. He was so positive on the
point that he almost persuaded me, until I had left him and reason
returned. It took me some time to recover from the pathos of the
thing: a man so long deprived of that simple luxury that he had quite
forgotten how it looked, and a set of cows utterly incapable, from
desuetude, of producing it properly.
After I had duly swallowed as much as I could of the doubtful dose
supposed to be cafe au lait, the cans were packed up again, and we
issued from the inn to walk a stone's throw to the train.
Takasaki stands well toward the upper end of the plain, just below
where the main body of it thrusts its arms out into the hills.
Up one of these we were soon wending. Every minute the peaks came
nearer, frowning at us from their crumbling volcanic crags. At last
they closed in completely, standing round about in threatening
pinnacles, and barring the way in front. At this, the train,
contrary to the usual practice of trains in such seemingly impassable
places, timidly drew up.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10