I stayed at Kami-no-suwa in a delightful tea-house, with clean polished wood-work, and quilts covered with a soft thin silk called kaiki, very pleasant and cooling to a mosquito-tortured skin. Cleanliness is the great luxury of the Japanese; their foot-gear is always removed before entering the house, so that the mats may not be soiled; the wood-work is never painted, stained, or varnished, but left with a well-planed surface, which shows its natural color; the ceilings are thin planks, slightly overlapping each other, the grain of each being carefully selected to combine with the lines in those next it; there are no hangings or fixed pieces of furniture to collect the dust, and no carpets to be taken up and shaken, so that spring cleaning, that terror of the Western house-keeper, is unnecessary; the whole room can be swept out every morning, the walls and ceiling rubbed with a duster, and there it is, all as neat as a
[Illustration: NIEGAWA, ON THE NAKASENDO]
new pin. At Shimo-no-suwa, about three miles on, the Koshu-kaido, along which I had been travelling from Kofu, joins the Nakasendo, the central mountain road, one of the main routes between Kyoto and Tōkyō. A new road has been made most of the way, admirably engineered, with gentle gradients, but so badly executed that it had already fallen to pieces in some places, and it was covered with loose road-metal which made jinrikisha travelling very laborious. My men usually preferred the old steep road, which cuts off corners, and is solid though very rough, and after a couple of days I sent back all the jinrikishas except the one which carried my baggage, finding my own legs the best means of conveyance. From the Shiojiri Pass I looked back over Suwa, saw Fuji through the blue haze of a lovely autumn morning, a long way off, but still towering above all the other hills, and then dropped down into a new set of mountains, rivers, and valleys. The scenery of the Nakasendo gets more and more picturesque, until it reaches a climax in the valley of the Kisogawa, on which I first looked from the summit of the Torii Pass, four thousand and odd feet above the sea. Each village on the road had its own peculiarities of costume, architecture, and manufacture--cheap lacquer-ware, combs, pickles, and so on, and of all these Matsuba bought a stock, for it is the habit of every Japanese on his travels to take back with him “meibutsu,” the characteristic productions of the places he has visited, as presents for those he has left at home.