BOOKS.
MISS BIRD'S JAPAN.*
[SECOND NOTICE.]
Fnon Kanaya's house, Miss Bird made her plunge into the practically untravelled regions of Japan. Her earliest im- pressions of Japanese scenery had not been very favourable; it seemed to lack accent and variety, and the climate was moist and relaxing ; but as she went on, lovely sub-tropical scenes occasionally presented themselves. The villages, though in many respects charming, were all, more or less, under the dominion of dirt. " Fujihara has forty-six farm-houses and a yadoya, all dark, damp, dirty, and draughty ; a combination of dwelling-house, barn, and stable. The yadoya consists of an open kitchen and stable below, and a loft above. Myriads of fleas hopped out of the mats; there were two outer walls of hairy mud, with living creatures crawling in the cracks ; cob- webs hung from the uncovered rafters. The mats were brown with age and dirt, the rice and tea were musty and only partially 'cleaned, and the eggs had seen better days. The road, at this time a quagmire, is intersected by a rapid stream, which is at once a lavatory and a drinking fountain. People come back from their work, sit on the planks, take off their muddy clothes and wring them out, and bathe their feet in the current. The persons, cloth- ing, and houses are alive with vermin; beetles, spiders, wood-lice, and horseflies held a carnival in my room after dark. Torrents of rain fell, obliging me to move my bed from place to place to get out of the drip." The uncleanliness of the people causes cuta- neous diseases of considerable virulence; their clothes, such as are worn at all, are worn night and day, as long as they will hold together, and never washed ; their houses are sealed up hermetically at night; and their bathing even is not for puri- fication, but for the enjoyment of a sensuous luxury ; no soap is used, and a general dabbing with a soft and dirty towel takes the place of friction. The floors of houses are laid down care- lessly with gaps between the boards, and emanations of all kinds pass into the rooms from the damp ground eighteen inches below. The drinking-water is contaminated either from the insanitary arrangements within the houses, or with percolations into the soil from the gutters outside, choked with decomposing organic matter. Sewage is kept in large tubs, sunk into the earth at the house-door. Exercise is seldom taken from choice ; for five months in the year the women hang over charcoal fumes the whole day, engaged either in cooking or in attempt- ing to get warm. The food of the peasantry is raw, or half- raw, salt fish, and vegetables rendered indigestible by being coarsely pickled, all bolted with the most marvellous rapidity. All this is "most tolerable, and not to be endured," and calls loudly for the interference of some local Dr. Richardson.
But Miss Bird makes her notes, and goes on undismayed. Most of the journey was now performed on horseback, and much embarrassment was experienced from the fact that the roads were, for the most part, villanous tracks, consisting of lateral corrugations about a foot broad, with depressions between them more than a foot deep, formed by the invariable treading of the pack-horses in each other's footsteps. Each hole was a quagmire of tenacious mad, the ascents were very
• Usbeaten Tracts in Japan. By Isabella Bird. 2 vols. London: John Hurray.
steep; and worst of all, the animals were unshod, and were pro- vided with a species of straw slippers, which were continually coming off, and which wore out every two miles. Falls, delays, and general discomfort were the result. The population, more- over, became less and less personally savoury, and more and more given up to curiosity ; whole villages turned out to stare at the traveller, mildly protesting, in answer to requests to dis- perse, that such a sight had never been vouchsafed them before, and probably never would be again ; and the noise of their shuffling clogs was like the clatter of a hailstorm. Fowls, dogs, hares, and people herded together in sheds black with wood- smoke, and manure-heaps drained into the wells. Nobody wore any clothing above the waist, and only the women, below it. The adults were covered with inflamed bites of insects, and the children with skin diseases. They were, however, courteous, kindly, industrious, and free from gross crimes; but their standard of morality appeared to be very low, and their life was neither truthful nor pure ; while as to religion, all that remains to them is a few superstitions, and futurity is a blank, about which they hardly trouble themselves. Under these circumstances, it is not altogether surprisiug that suicides should be very common; unlucky lovers often bind themselves together and drown themselves ; the women are less tolerant of life than the men, and are in the habit of going out at night, and, after filling their capacious sleeves with stones, jumping into a river or well. It is elsewhere stated, by the way, that there are in Japan about half a million more men than women.
At Niigata, a treaty port of 50,000 inhabitants, Miss Bird spent upwards of a week, and gives an interesting description of the town, the climate of which seems to be the least agreeable part of it, varying as it does between 92° in summer to 15° in winter, with snow three or four feet deep, and strong north-east winds, and this in a latitude three degrees south of Naples. From Niigata the traveller started on a land journey of four hundred and fifty miles, through unknown territory, to Yezo, in the north. The weather was rainy and depressing, and the people more unconventional than ever, and drunk into the bar- gain. Horses were difficult to procure, and more than once Miss Bird mounted a cow. But amidst the most unpromising circum- stance she is always on the look-out for a redeeming feature ; and she finds it here in the fact that the people are strictly honest, and that a beggar is nowhere to be seen. Not only so, but their squalor and filth do not prevent them from being fastidious in their owu way ; they will not be induced to milk their cows, and consider it "most disgusting" in foreigners to put anything into their tea with such a strong smell and taste as milk. All the cows had cotton clothes, printed with blue dragons, suspended under their bodies, to keep them from the mud and insects, and they wear straw shoes, and cords through their noses. They seem to be used exclusively as beasts of burden.
Silk is the main product of this region ; the place swarms with caterpillars, moths, and cocoons, and, in addition to the silk itself, three million dollars' worth of silkworms' eggs are exported annually. Still pressing on, Miss Bird, we are happy to say, entered a more pleasant land,—the great'plain of Yone- zawa, " a perfect Garden of Eden, growing in rich profusion rice, cotton, maize, tobacco, hemp, indigo, beans, egg-plants, wal- nuts, melons, cucumbers, persimmons, apricots, pomegranates,— a smiling and prosperous land, all its bounteous acres belonging to those who cultivate them,—a remarkable spectacle, under an Asiatic despotism. Everywhere are prosperous and beautiful farming villages, with large houses, with carved beams and pon- derous, tiled roofs, each standing in its own grounds, buried among persimmons and pomegranates, with flower-gardens under trellised vines, and privacy secured by high, close-clipped.
screens of pomegranates and cryptomeria. In every village there are two poles, over thirty feet high, for white bannerets inscribed with the name of the village god." Prosperity, however, has not rendered the inhabitants idle ; on the contrary, every man and woman work with their own hands, and among the adults semi-nudity was as common as in the mountain villages, "though the children, especially the girls, were elaborately dressed in silk fabrics, and wore a good deal of scarlet." The cultivation, alike in the poor districts and in the rich, was per- fect: the field of the sluggard, as Miss Bird remarks, has no existence in Japan.
But we must pass over several interesting chapters, in, which Miss Bird completes her journey to Tsugarn Strait, and inci- dentally describes many curious customs of the people, in order to have space to say a few words about the inhabitants of the great island of Yezo, the strange, savage, and little-known Ainos. These people, supposed to be the aborigines of Japan, but who are now to be found only in Yezo, are a physically vigorous and striking-looking race, in marked contrast with the yellow skins, the stiff hair, the feeble eyelids, elongated eyes, sloping eyebrows, flat noses, sunken chests, Mongolian features, puny physique, shaky gait, and general appearance of degene- racy of their Japanese conquerors. The Ainos are, at first- sight, of a most ferocious aspect, owing to the profusion of their thick, soft, black hair and beards, and to the singular fact that their bodies are commonly covered with a vigorous growth of black hair or fur, upwards of an inch in length. But this savage look is mitigated by the softness in the dreamy brown eyes, and is altogether obliterated by the exceeding sweetness of the smile, and by the low, musical tones of the voice. The men are of the middle height, deep-chested, broad-shouldered, thick-set, very strongly built, the arms and legs short, thick, and muscular, the hands and feet large. The heads and faces are very striking, the foreheads being high, broad,' and prominent, the ears small, noses straight but short and broad at the nostrils, mouths well formed and not full, eyebrows thick, eyes large and deep-set, eye-lashes long and silky, teeth small, regular, and very white, the skin an Italian olive, but thin enough to show the changes of colour in the cheek ; the lower part of the face small, as compared with the upper, and the features, expression, and aspect are European rather than Asiatic. According to their own tradition, they are descended from dogs. In spite of their ample brains, they are the reverse of intellectually brilliant, though invariably kind, courteous, and gentle. They practise tattooing, and dress in robes which the women weave out of fibres of bark. Their children are pretty and attractive, and are much loved by their parents, and they are not weaned until they are at least three years old. Their religion is a kind of rude nature-worship ; but the bear is their chief deity, and their main religions observance consists in the copious consumption of sakg, so that the holiest man is he who can drink the most. The women are modest, and faithful to their husbands ; they are beautifully formed, straight, lithe, and well developed, with small feet and hands, well-arched insteps, rounded limbs, full busts, and a firm, elastic gait. Bathing is unknown to this people, and they are encrusted with dirt. Their food is "a stew of abominable things," consisting of fish, seaweed, slugs, vegetables, roots, and berries, venison and bear, mushrooms, and, in short, any- thing non-poisonous that they can get, mixed together with a wooden spoon and eaten with chopsticks. They also have a thick soup made of a putty-like clay, which is boiled with the bulb of a wild lily. The men, during the autumn, winter, and spring hunt deer and bears, their implements of the chase con- sisting of bows and poisoned arrows, arrow-traps, and pitfalls. Their houses are well made and ventilated; they have the appearance of a small house built on to the end of a larger one. The former is the vestibule or ante-room, and is entered by a low doorway, screened by a heavy mat of reeds. Through the ante-room the main room is entered, which is from twenty to fifty feet long, and somewhat less in breadth. The roof is very high, altogether out of proportion to the height of the walls. The wall is double, the outer part being formed of reeds tied very neatly to the framework in small, regular bundles; the inner layer or wall is made of reeds, attached singly. At one end of the roof, under the ridge-beam, there is a large, irregular aperture for the exit of smoke ; the fireplace is near the centre of the floor. Round the walls are broad shelves for the beds and the " curios," to which last they attach a high value ; and their household gods, generally in the shape of white wands with shavings depending from the upper ends, are stuck in the wall near the entrance, or project from the window. The villages are ruled by chiefs, whose authority is a sort of ex- pansion of the paternal relation. His office is nominally for life, but he may appoint a successor, if he finds himself unequal to his duties. The Ainos are honest, truthful, and generous ; infanticide is unknown, and aged parents are treated with reverential kindness ; they are in many ways a charming race, but they have no definite or pleasing ideas concerning a future state, they have an unconquerable dread of corpses and fear of ghosts, they are unintelligent, apathetic, and hopeless ; they are, in short, irreclaimable savages, whose life seems to be not much raised above the necessities of animal existence, timid, monotonous, barren of good, dark and dull, though, as Miss
Bird adds, " at its lowest and worst considerably higher and better than that of many other aboriginal races, and,—must I say it P—than that of thousands of the lapsed masses of our own great cities, who are baptised into Christ's name, and are- laid at last in holy ground."
Among this picturesque people, Miss Bird lived and travelled for several weeks, before returning to Tokiyo and the southern regions of Japan; and her account of her Aino adventures is perhaps the most interesting part of an exceptionally interest- ing and delightful book. But we have already exceeded the reasonable limits of a review, and must leave our readers to the- pleasant task of perusing the author's volumes for themselves.
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