IN THE PACIFIC.

Otago Witness, Issue 2849, 21 October 1908, Page 13

IN THE PACIFIC.

y.— A FLASHLIGHT VIEW OF * JAPAN. OFF THE TOURIST TRACK. <(Bt Pbofessob J. Macmillan Bbown.) (Specially Written for the Otago Daily Times.) YOKOHAMA, July 4. These last three weeks I have been in all the odd corners of Japan, travelling with speed from one to the other. Train and steamer have covered most space, but jinricksha and my own leather-shod nags have taken me over the most picturesque and interesting parts, and the parte eeldom or never visited by Europeans. In fact, most of the two thou- „ Band- miles and more that I have done\ lies^out of . the track of the European tourist,- for" the speakers of the European languages that I- have come across in the • tour can be counted ' on the fingere of one hand, and most of them were Englishmen in Hokkaido to "whom I had cards of introduction." An<| our party, though it included a Japanese student who could speak English, was the "cynosure of every eye" wherever he went. In many of the out-of-the-way ' towns and villages we j gathered as grieat a crowd as we moved along the street as if we had been a circus procession with a brass band. The shops in Japan, outside of the great cities, are all open to v the streets on evefy side, andT whenever we made any little purchases, the audience we had often filled the whole breadth of the street, their mouths, eyes, and ears wide open. It was evidently a free show that they did not often enjoy and we had just to endure our embarrassing popularity. As a rule we divided the "honours, but at times a young Australian, a fellow-passenger, who asked leave to accompany me ; a tall, slender "cornstalk." was most embarrassed by the curiosity of the crowd ; they almost tumbled over him in their' anxiety to see everything he did and hear everything .he said. . Even at the Tailway stations, and in the streets of the larger towns, where the passing European traveller cannot have been, so rarea wonder, thene was intense, if mot microscopic, curiosity. At the beginning and at the close of oar trip we visited two of the three great scenic sights of Japan {what are called san.kei, or the three sights of the Japanese), Mateushima and Amanohashidate, and there we fully expected to meet parties of Europeans, or. at least the übiquitous Americans. But either it was not .the season for them, or they ,were busy doing the stock tourist sights of Japan, its show windows, so to speak, j JNikko, Miyano&hita, and Miajima. We ! met none ; only in the last place, just as .we were leaving our hotel at Miyazu, ,we heard from our maid of the arrival of an Englishman ; she told us the fact .with 'bated breath, and eyes as wide • open as the oblique slits would allow. I ■In another place we were told of a party \ of three Europeans having passed through ! three months before. ! The first place we rested at on leaving Tokoi was the large and rather handsome city of Senndai^ on the east coast. It lies at the northern extremity of the great rice-plain that stretches from the south of the capital between .the mountains and the Pacific Ocean. 'Just north and east of it begins that coastal range of mountains which makes the north-east coast scenic, full of deep bays and fiords that are difficult of approach on the landward side. It is this very coastal range that stretches its feet into the sea to the east of Sendai, and produces one of the favourite oceanic reeorts of the Japanese — the Jiundred6 of islands of Mateushima. The violence of the Pacific has carved its formed peninsulas into this fantastic archipelago. And even on the* calm day on which we visited it, we could see how even the slow surge was eating into the soft sedimentary rock. Had it been volcanic tufa, as Murray's " Guide to Japan " describes it r there would have been bolder scenery ; the oceanic sculptor would not have found it such easy work to chisel his way through the former promontories and capes ; there would not have been so many groups of islets, and these would not have been so ' low or so rounded, or so poor in ve^eta- \ iion. In 6pite of the name (Matsushima, ■ or Pine Islands), there are not very many . pines on even the largest, and those that j do grow are stunted and bent before the j Pacific 6torm ; bald patches, where not j even a wild flower gro\V6, are not infre- ', quent on them, andt the bamboo grass has j none of the luxuriance it has on the hillsides of Japan. Meadow-sweet and the beautiful white wild rose that grows all over the Japanese archipelago were the only flowers that flourished on those on which we landed. The sedimentary 6oil •was too poor. But the waves cut into the -rocks like cheese ; some of the islets were in the human form, others in fantastic shapes that might be anything according to the imagination of the spectator. There was one arch as symmetrical as if hewn by the hand of man, and the variety of form was bewildering, as we sailed and changed our position, opening up vista, after vista into the far distance. Every generation must have seen these little archipelagoes change like clouds, €O soft is the rock and so violent are the winter "storms of the Pacific. MATSUSHIMA. We had come down by railway to the quaint little sea-smelling harbour of Shiozama, where we hired a boat for the day; j all we had to pay for it was the regulation price — one yen eight sen, equal to about > 2s 2d. We were away eight hours, and the old fisherman rowed quite half the time — or, rather, sculled. For all the boat propulsion ?J1 over Japan, except in

regattas, which, as introduced from) "Europe, have races in European boats, rowed in European style, is done by » long spliced oar that works from side to side in a peg fixed on the gunwale, generally at the stern, often on either bow, and that is circumscribed in its range by a rope about 3ft long, tied* to the side of the boat. This method of propulsion evidently came from China, for it is the method of all the sampans from Tientsin to Canton. But there is a relic of the pre-Chinese method used at the bow, especially in laTger boats ; it is a short oar like a paddle, with a foot-long crosspiece at the upper or handle end. It is worked like & European oar in a loop of rope that serves as rowlock. This is the same as the Ainu oar, and it 6 use is undoubtedly one of the arts acquired from the people that the Japanese took 1200 or 1500 years ago to subdue and absorb. Again and again we saw" it U6ed in boats that easily passed us by means of the additional force applied. In its blade it shows the lance-like, leaf-like paddle of the Polynesian and British Columbian. The paddling and the canoe I saw at Nagasaki are undoubtedly from the pre-Ainu, purely palaeolithic; population of the archipelago whose coastal shell-mounds have evidently all vanished into the sea in the perpetual seismic remoulding of Japan that has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years. In all the strata, even the lowest, j of the existing shell-mounds pottery is found, proving their comparatively recent neolithic origin. No archipelago so close to a continent- couldi have remained uninhabited till that late period. AMANOHASHIDATE. When we reached, towards the close of our trip, the second famous 6cenic asset of Japan, Amanohashidate, away on the west coast, we found that it had somewhat the same' type of beauty as Matsushima. Although there were fiords or bays instead of hundreds of islands, the scenery in both cases was rather pretty than grand. It is a long promontory of sand covered with pines run out from a basis of low well-treed hills, between the open fiord and a subsidiary bay. In Great Britain there are dozens of pieces of scenery as pretty and far more striking, especially on the West Coast of Scotland and Ireland and on the Devonshire and Cornwall coast, whilst the islands of Matsushima, though they have a sea charm of their own, are paralleled by the Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence, and the villaed and treed islands of Lake George, away to the couth of it. In our own country the islands and fiords of Cook Strait and of the district to the north of Auckland supply scenery as beautiful and of a similar type. The third great scenic aeeet of Japan, Miajima, on the Inland Sea, I have seen only from a" distance, having reserved it ! for my journey when I am on my way to Korea. But it is evidently of the same • — quiet archipelago scenery, varied j by old temples strikingly placed. I IMPRESSIVE SCENERY. On our journey along the coasts and through the mountains of Japan there were scents far more impressive to the "European mind. Up in Yezo, there were pieces of sylvan river-landscape that were i intensely beautiful in their far vistas of shade, their rocky rapid* and gorges, and their verdant hillsides. In the north of the.mai island, Hondo, the valley of the Mapeohi will compare with the most beautiful river scenery of Europe for the i happy blend of the work of Nature and i man. The snowsheds and tunnels on the : railway line tantalise us with their fre- ; quency, producing the effect of an in- ! termittent kinematograph. Now we get a glimpse into a far-reaching valley ; then we look down on a village with it 6 beehive thatched roofs nestling amidst I'.o j terraced rioelielde far below us ; again we | cross the river brawling over its angry j rapids. Above us in the distance tower ; the volcanic cones that are so frequent all over Japan ; nearer us rise timbered ridges rich with the yellow bloom of the kiri or edible chestnut; here and I there we see the windings of the old j ; daimyo road to the north, with its delight- ] ful shade and its frequent lacquer trees, j Still more striking pieces of mountain i and glen scenery occur on the railway ! line that runs southward from Aomori, for a time along the coast of the Japanese Sea, and finally right into the tumbled mass of mountains that fill the centre of Japan. There is not a railway line in the archipelago that has not its scenic asset won by feats of engineering. The three finest I have seen are a piece on the line from Nara "to Kameyama Junction, wlvere the pilgrim railway to Ise begins, the piece between Kamo Junction and Tsuze Junction, a piece on the line j from Maizuru on the Japan Sea and j Osaka, and the section of the TokrUO'. j line that crosses the western spurs of Fujiyama. These are equaJ to some of the best on the Black Forest scenic line, the Swiss Tyrol, and North Italian lines, without the glaciers, snow-capped mountains, and lakes of the last three, 'ihere are plenty of plantations and low wood and scrub ; but no primeval forest ; for that one lias to go into Kyuship ( the southernmost island, and into Yezo, the northernmost. * But, naturally, the most magnificent 6Cenery is to be found off the railway routes* in parts of the country so wild as ' to have no large centres of population. "The most unique piece I ww was a little Rotorua away in the mountains of Yezo, to the north of Murorau. We left the I railway line at NoboribeLsu. andi drove for several hours up through a splendid gorge that reminded me greatly of oui West Coast road through Otira, only that the i trees were finer, the foliage deeper, the ; climbers more rampant, and the floweis of j tree and under-scrub more luxuriant. Our destination was an hotel right in the middle of a not very ancient crater — it had its own hot springs for rheumatic invalids ; and there were beside it cas-

[ cades of hot mineralised waters, under , which we found" both men' and women ' standing naked. In the evening and next : day we climbed over into a more recent- ! crater, belonging, I fancy, to last century ; j the Ainu remember the explosion. For I geysers, fumaroles, blowholes, mud boilers, 1 sulphur cliffs, hot lakes, and hot streams lit is a miniature Rotorua. But whatmakes it most distinctive is that all these phenomena lie in a deep cup set amid splendid red cljffs that are crowned with Japan's usual verdancy. It combines the beauty of the Otira Gorge and the wonders of Waiotapu and Wairakei. Here we [ saw in the undergrowth thousands of daphnes in bloom, myriads of azalea i bushes and lilies of the valley that had just finished blooming, and the whole ground carpeted with funkias that had still to bloom. But there was a drawback, 6uch as we have no fear of in New Zealand — the bush, swarmed with snakes ; we came across a full half-dozen that were [ out basking in the sun. Most of them were about 3ft long, and some of them we hoped we finally disposed of. , Far more impressive were two pieces of ! road-making we came across in the west of Hondo. The first ran -across three high [ passes from Wakamatsu, a large town in the mountains, to Nugata, a still larger town, with a canal in almost every street, on the Japan Sea. Extensive zig-zags climbed each pass on each side, finding their way through villages that clung to the foot of the mountains, and- past solitary tea-houses on their torjs, tea-houses that peddled bean-fluid for tea and shochu, or coarse potato spirit, as the only intoxicant. We walked up all the passes, though we noticed that up the steepest pieces of the road the Japanese, whether man or woman, stuck to thejr jinrickisha, r and compelled their human beast of burden to haul it up. It was the same on a still more difficult piece of road that climbed again and again from sCoft to 1000 ft above the sea along the face of the cliff between Naoyetsu and Toya-ma, on the Sea of Japan. That was as fine a piece of road-making as I have seen. For a dozen or more miles it is hewn out of -the sheer precipice, only once having to pass through a long tunnel ; and through the flowering boscage and treesvthat seemed to get footing on all but the smoothest perpendicular we could look into the clear depths of the sea below. The old daimyo road for 1 the Echigo people was along the 6ea beach, and there was one corner where a 6beer precipice of several thousand) feet pushes it« way right into the sea ; and here, when the "winter storms blow from the north-west, life w"as not cafe from the beat of the surf. It was called, according to my student companion, who had read the story in his earlier school books, Oyashiradzu, or " everyone for himself and" devil take the hindmost " j^ parent abandoned child and husband wife in the passion of fear that overtook them as they tried to get past this wild Charybdis. Almost a 6 difficult a piece* of engineering we found Maizru and Amanohashidate ; * but it evaded the worst gradients by three tunnels, one of them about a mile long ; and by miscalculation, we had to do it in the dark, seeing the sea shimmer far below us, and hearing the eound of the sculls and the boatman's call echo up the cliffs. JAPANESE ENGINEERING. The Japanese engineers have done wonders in roading and railroading their mountainous islands, and their labours still continue. Again and again we came across immense embankments and cuttings and huge new bridges preparatory to carrying the high roade or steam roads farther into difficult country. And they have' problems to solve that the engineers of few other lands have to face. Not only are their islands a tumbled mass of moun- ! tainous confusion, but the forces of Nature are ranged against them. The earthquake is constantly undoing their work ; some new volcanic outburst ie ever burying it. j But these are not annual like the storms and floods that sweep away their bridges and embankments or cover up their roads with landslips. It was not uncommon to find our way getting cleared of some block, and yet this was not an especially rainy July, though in June and the early ' part" of the following month it rained all day once every two days. And all over the north there were innumerable expedients for guarding against the storms and snows of winter ; . there were miles of fencing and embankment and plantation on the western side of the railways, and we passed through dozens of miles of snow sheds. Railway traffic would have to be very lucrative in Japan to meet all , these incidental expenditures. » It i 6 extremely doubtful whether the Government has made a profitable purchase in taking over the railways, when all theee exceptional circumstances are tcken into consideration. Nor can they increafe t,he fares without reducing the traffic, although they are extremely moderate, being Id a mile for first class and £d a mile for third, j They doubtless trust to the increase of population and tiade in the future ; for the Japanese are migratory by nature, and their industry is increasing. Night trains are as crowded in their third claws as day trains, and from dawn to du&k you nevei' see anyone idle in the country. It Ls the higher classes that travel least ; theie is generally only half '». carriage devoted to first class passengers, and in most of my train journeys that Mere not express I had the carriage to myself. W'Lat these immense crowds of third ddes passengers are ' moving for by niyht it is difficult to conjecture, for the traffic v. as local. The greatest crowds occuned where the train stopped at every station. J All the easy loutes and those between | largo towns have been railroaded. What j 1 as to be done yet will be extremely ex- j pensive, and though they will be scenic, i the tomist traffic will never make them i pay. The only chance of theee being j profitably built Is the harnessing of the ; immense water power in the mountains | for industrial purposes, a process already ' be^un. To judge by the djoice of Matsu- '

shima, Amanohashidate. and Miajima, as three traditional scenic assets of Japan, the Japanese tourist traffic into the wilder scenery will never make such railways profitable. The Japanese mind is evidently drawn to what is pretty and sylvan and maritime, seldom or never to what is majestic or overawing. They climb mountains, but it is as pilgrims and- not as admirers of 6cenery : they are mountainworshippers, rather than mountain-in-spired. Their wilder scenery i 6 left to the labour-abeoibed mountaineers or fishermen who live amidst it and remain uncoßacious of it. PILGRIMAGES IN JAPAN It is true that there is a pilgrim railway that runs thirty miles to the great Shinto shrines of lee. but it is through J easy country, an-d half a million travel to these temples every year, whilst one> large town, Yamada. subsists on nothing else but pilgrims. It is, like 6o many pilgrim resorts in Jarjan, mainly a caterer for the amusement of the pilgrims^; it is full of small theatres and peep shows, and stalls and .^hops for the- 6ale of relics and toys, and odds and ends ; there are dozens of so-called hotels, many of them artistically built and richly furnished, that are no better than brothels. I joined a party o£ American gentlemen and ladies whom our I'ctel manager had organised to see the Ishi Ondo, a mere posturing and arm-waving dance, done in one of these gorgeous institutions, and one could ccc in the eyes of the elderly harridans who managed the affair that they objected to the presence of ladies, and that they considered the dance as a mere advertisement of their wares. Tt ie not the first time in history that holiness and lust have gone axm in arm. But the frequency of the combination of pilgrimage and prostitution in Japan takes us back to the Middle A gee in Europe. In fact, one may eny without hesitation that all Japan, outside of the great tourist resorts, is still largely mediaeval, and no better picture of mediaeval ways of life can be found in , the world than in the country district of Japan. j Again and again we came across bands of pilgrims making for one or other of ' the gre.it shrines ; they often had rosary and bells, and they were begging their way. Pilgrimage is, in short, as in the . European Middle Ages, a- cloak for vagabondage and beggery*. Those we meet in the mountains and on the west coast had as their goal the ancient Shinto shrine of Idzuma, that has never been appropriated by Buddhism. I meant to reacS it ; but it was several, days' travel by jinrickisha or one day's rough travel by sea- beyond Amanohashidate. I went to the more easily approachable shrines of lee «n the east coast instead. And here thf» ancient form of worship and the ancient form of temple have been preaefned rigidly from time immemorial. Every twenty years a new temple is built of wood, a facsimile of the old, and then the old is burnt down. , (To be continued.)