[=O]tsuka is a stony, large, primitive-looking village,--full of rude energy and, I am sorry to say, of bad manners,--a terrible thing to say about any Japanese town. But I have been in about 50 Japanese villages, where I loved all the people, and always made a few of them love me, and [=O]tsuka is the first exception I found to the general rule about the relation between foreigners and _hyakush[=o]-no-jin_. At [=O]tsuka the people left their dance to pelt the foreigner with little pellets of sand and mud,--crying out: "Bikki!--bikki!" What that means I do not know. So both I and the whole of the Yabase people turned back. The pelting was not very savage--it was just like the work of naughty children: a foreign mob would have thrown stones, which these folk were very careful not to do--in spite of the fact that there were no police. I passed through this village twice since, and found the attitude of its people peculiarly rough--bordering upon hostility. Compared with the roughness of--say a Barbadoes mob--it was a very gentle thing, but it gave me the first decidedly unpleasant sense of being an alien that I have ever had in Japan.
I have just returned from Togo-ike,--a place described in your Guide.
Frankly, I detest Togo-ike. But it is extremely popular with travelling Japanese--especially the _sh[=o]bai_. Imagine a valley of rice-fields, ringed in by low jagged wooded hills, with a lakelet in the middle of it about a mile and a quarter long (at most) by half a mile broad, and hotels built out into the water. The coldest place I have yet been in Japan. The hotels are supplied with hot water from the volcanic springs through bamboo pipes, but the baths do not compare with those of the much humbler Izumo resort--Tama-tsukuri. The cold air to me was penetrating, sickly, but this may be idiosyncrasy. To one who has lived in the tropics the chill of rice-fields means fever and death; and some of my old tropical fears came up. Then the hotel has only _mishido_, no _karakami_,--so that one is never alone. One hour of Yabase is worth a season at Togo-ike--free of expense--to one who loves quiet and simple ways. So I shall spend a couple more days there before going to Mionoseki.