Kanaya and his sister often pay me an evening visit, and, with Brunton’s map on the floor, we project astonishing routes to Niigata, which are usually abruptly abandoned on finding a mountain-chain in the way with never a road over it. The life of these people seems to pass easily enough, but Kanaya deplores the want of money; he would like to be rich, and intends to build a hotel for foreigners.
The only vestige of religion in his house is the _kamidana_, or god-shelf, on which stands a wooden shrine like a Shintô temple, which contains the memorial tablets to deceased relations. Each morning a sprig of evergreen and a little rice and _saké_ are placed before it, and every evening a lighted lamp.
Darkness visible—Nikkô Shops—Girls and Matrons—Night and Sleep—Parental Love—Childish Docility—Hair-dressing—Skin Diseases.
I DON’T wonder that the Japanese rise early, for their evenings are cheerless, owing to the dismal illumination. In this and other houses the lamp consists of a square or circular lacquer stand, with four uprights, 2½ feet high, and panes of white paper. A flatted iron dish is suspended in this full of oil, with the pith of a rush with a weight in the centre laid across it, and one of the projecting ends is lighted. This wretched apparatus is called an _andon_, and round its wretched “darkness visible” the family huddles—the children to play games and learn lessons, and the women to sew; for the Japanese daylight is short and the houses are dark. Almost more deplorable is a candlestick of the same height as the _andon_, with a spike at the top which fits into a hole at the bottom of a “farthing candle” of vegetable wax, with a thick wick made of rolled paper, which requires constant snuffing, and, after giving for a short time a dim and jerky light, expires with a bad smell. Lamps, burning mineral oils, native and imported, are being manufactured on a large scale, but, apart from the peril connected with them, the carriage of oil into country districts is very expensive. No Japanese would think of sleeping without having an _andon_ burning all night in his room.
These villages are full of shops. There is scarcely a house which does not sell something. Where the buyers come from, and how a profit can be made, is a mystery. Many of the things are eatables, such as dried fishes, 1½ inch long, impaled on sticks; cakes, sweetmeats composed of rice, flour, and very little sugar; circular lumps of rice dough, called _mochi_; roots boiled in brine; a white jelly made from beans; and ropes, straw shoes for men and horses, straw cloaks, paper umbrellas, paper waterproofs, hair-pins, tooth-picks, tobacco pipes, paper _mouchoirs_, and numbers of other trifles made of bamboo, straw, grass, and wood. These goods are on stands, and in the room behind, open to the street, all the domestic avocations are going on, and the housewife is usually to be seen boiling water or sewing with a baby tucked into the back of her dress. A lucifer factory has recently been put up, and in many house fronts men are cutting up wood into lengths for matches. In others they are husking rice, a very laborious process, in which the grain is pounded in a mortar sunk in the floor by a flat-ended wooden pestle attached to a long horizontal lever, which is worked by the feet of a man, invariably naked, who stands at the other extremity.
