Unbeaten Tracks in Japan | Page 8

but carry very few passengers, and the comfortable seats, covered with
fine matting, of the 2d class are very scantily occupied; but the 3d class
vans are crowded with Japanese, who have taken to railroads as readily
as to kurumas. This line earns about $8,000,000 a year.
The Japanese look most diminutive in European dress. Each garment is
a misfit, and exaggerates the miserable physique and the national
defects of concave chests and bow legs. The lack of "complexion" and
of hair upon the face makes it nearly impossible to judge of the ages of
men. I supposed that all the railroad officials were striplings of 17 or 18,
but they are men from 25 to 40 years old.
It was a beautiful day, like an English June day, but hotter, and though
the Sakura (wild cherry) and its kin, which are the glory of the Japanese
spring, are over, everything is a young, fresh green yet, and in all the
beauty of growth and luxuriance. The immediate neighbourhood of
Yokohama is beautiful, with abrupt wooded hills, and small
picturesque valleys; but after passing Kanagawa the railroad enters
upon the immense plain of Yedo, said to be 90 miles from north to
south, on whose northern and western boundaries faint blue mountains
of great height hovered dreamily in the blue haze, and on whose eastern
shore for many miles the clear blue wavelets of the Gulf of Yedo ripple,
always as then, brightened by the white sails of innumerable

fishing-boats. On this fertile and fruitful plain stand not only the capital,
with its million of inhabitants, but a number of populous cities, and
several hundred thriving agricultural villages. Every foot of land which
can be seen from the railroad is cultivated by the most careful spade
husbandry, and much of it is irrigated for rice. Streams abound, and
villages of grey wooden houses with grey thatch, and grey temples with
strangely curved roofs, are scattered thickly over the landscape. It is all
homelike, liveable, and pretty, the country of an industrious people, for
not a weed is to be seen, but no very striking features or peculiarities
arrest one at first sight, unless it be the crowds everywhere.
You don't take your ticket for Tokiyo, but for Shinagawa or Shinbashi,
two of the many villages which have grown together into the capital.
Yedo is hardly seen before Shinagawa is reached, for it has no smoke
and no long chimneys; its temples and public buildings are seldom
lofty; the former are often concealed among thick trees, and its ordinary
houses seldom reach a height of 20 feet. On the right a blue sea with
fortified islands upon it, wooded gardens with massive retaining walls,
hundreds of fishing- boats lying in creeks or drawn up on the beach; on
the left a broad road on which kurumas are hurrying both ways, rows of
low, grey houses, mostly tea-houses and shops; and as I was asking
"Where is Yedo?" the train came to rest in the terminus, the Shinbashi
railroad station, and disgorged its 200 Japanese passengers with a
combined clatter of 400 clogs--a new sound to me. These clogs add
three inches to their height, but even with them few of the men attained
5 feet 7 inches, and few of the women 5 feet 2 inches; but they look far
broader in the national costume, which also conceals the defects of
their figures. So lean, so yellow, so ugly, yet so pleasant-looking, so
wanting in colour and effectiveness; the women so very small and
tottering in their walk; the children so formal- looking and such
dignified burlesques on the adults, I feel as if I had seen them all before,
so like are they to their pictures on trays, fans, and tea-pots. The hair of
the women is all drawn away from their faces, and is worn in chignons,
and the men, when they don't shave the front of their heads and gather
their back hair into a quaint queue drawn forward over the shaven patch,
wear their coarse hair about three inches long in a refractory undivided
mop.

Davies, an orderly from the Legation, met me,--one of the escort cut
down and severely wounded when Sir H. Parkes was attacked in the
street of Kiyoto in March 1868 on his way to his first audience of the
Mikado. Hundreds of kurumas, and covered carts with four wheels
drawn by one miserable horse, which are the omnibuses of certain
districts of Tokiyo, were waiting outside the station, and an English
brougham for me, with a running betto. The Legation stands in
Kojimachi on very elevated ground above the inner moat of the historic
"Castle of Yedo," but I cannot tell you anything of what I saw on my
way thither, except that there