A Chronicle of Wanderings on the Japanese High Road BY LUCIAN SWIFT KIRTLAND ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY...

It was spring and it was Spain. Sunset brought the white-haired custodian of the Court of the Lions to the balcony overhanging my fountain. His blue coat bespoke officialdom but his Andalusian lisp veiled this suggestion of compulsion. His wishes for my evening’s happiness, nevertheless, were to be interpreted as a request for my going. The Alhambra had to be locked up for the night. I was lying outstretched on the stones of Lindaroxa’s Court with my head against a pillar. The last light of the

After our melodramatic toast of the night before it would have been only orthodox to have said good-bye to our Occidental inn at sunrise and to have sought the road. But we had a call to make. The fulfilling of the obligation proved to be momentous. There is one never-to-be-broken rule for the foreigner in the Orient: He must consider himself always to be of extreme magnitude in the perspective, and that any action which concerns himself is momentous. If Asia had possessed this supreme self-conc

It was the morning of our last sleep in seiyo-jin beds. I dreamed that I was still dreaming in Lindaroxa’s Court. O-Owre-san shook my four-poster and begged me to consider the matter-of-factness of rolling out from my mosquito netting and taking a bite of cold breakfast. The sensuous breeze of the East, which comes for a brief hour with the first light of the sun, was blowing the curtains back from the window. I was willing to consider the getting up and the eating of the breakfast and I was wil

Vol. I, Sect. IX. The “Ko-Ji-Ki” A very famous book in Japan is named the “Ko-Ji-Ki,” and the word means “A Record of Ancient Matters.” We thought on our second morning as we walked through the hills that if there should happen to be a modern chronologist recording a present-time Ko-Ji-Ki those hours of the sun’s approaching meridian would be entered without dispute as The-Forever-Famous-Never-To-Be-Equalled-Day-Of-Fire. In the valleys there was no breeze; on the summits there was no shade; and

The experiences of the second of our Japanese Nights’ Entertainments were as impersonal, as far as the inn’s paying special attention to us was concerned, as the first evening’s had not been. The police record was brought to us with an English translation of the questions and we wrote the answers without complication. The incidents which may develop in one inn quite naturally have a wide variation from the happenings which may arise in another, but the general machinery of hospitality differs bu

We had an hour to kill before dinner and we were irritably moody against the foreign windows which gave us no breeze. “It’s housely hot,” said O-Owre-san, and he sighed pathetically for the cool mats of an inn floor where there would be a pot of freshly brewed tea at his elbow and a green garden to look out upon. I was studying a map of Japan, tracing out its rivers and mountains. I have an inordinate passion for maps. Surely Stevenson had some such passion. I venture that he first thought of th

In the morning Hori discovered that his military survey map somehow had been mistaken for a sheet of wrapping paper the day before. The torn-off section had served to carry rice cakes in my pocket. The tearing had strangely traversed mountains, valleys, and rivers along almost the line we purposed following. As Hori was still unemancipated from the idea that not to know where one is is to be lost, he was rather in a maze for the next few days, as we continually wandered off the edge of the map i

In the morning we found great brass basins of water waiting for us in the sunny iris garden. One of the super-errors that a foreigner can make in a native inn is to ask to have the basins brought to his room. Such a request can be understood only as a perversion, or a barbarity. One reason why the houses and inns seem so clean is that they eliminate so many of the chances for their being otherwise; and this defence might be added into the weighing when criticizing Japanese nudity at ablutions. B

In abrupt change as we neared Shiogiri the people grew more prosperous and more smiling. One housewife along the way was busy with a gigantic baking in the sun. I have forgotten just what she said the small cakes were which she was patting out so expeditiously by the hundred. Her hands coquettishly fell into error in her routine when we wished her good-day. She had an adventurous spirit behind the work-a-day masque of her face. Inordinate questioners as we could generally prove ourselves, it was

The railway train with its sly befuddling through the luxury of speed has picked the traveller’s wallet. Cooped behind a smudged window, how can he sense the personality of the town he enters? One should stand in isolation on the heights above a city, and then follow down some path until within the streets one is absorbed by the throbbing life. (Hobo Jack, ipse dixit . And is this not true?) To appreciate Kama-Suwa’s surcharge of culture, prosperity, and importance, the reader should think of a

Our tower wing of the inn at Kama-Suwa had required no architectural ingenuity in its design, but I do not remember ever having seen a Japanese building planned in the same way. The walls were open on the four sides and there was no takemono corner. The only approach was by a flight of stairs which belonged to it exclusively. We thus had an isolation most unusual. It mattered not the length and breadth of the space given us, our few possessions were always scattered over all the space available.

For many days we had been passing through villages which yielded no good hunting among the antique and second-hand shops. It should be known that the lure of the curio carries poison. Two friends who have lived blithely in affection, confident that no brutal nor subtle assault could ever avail against the harmony of their intimate understanding, perchance step through the doorway of a shop. Presto! A candlestick, a vase, a box, a tumbledown chair, whatever it may be—the desire for the thing magi

In the same town of Kama-Suwa where the barracks-like high school for girls spreads its wings there also rises the tiled roof of a geisha house. Under its protection other daughters of the Empire are also being rigorously trained to duties—the life of amusing and entertaining. The position of the geisha cannot be illuminated by comparisons. There are the “sing-song girls” of Peking and the nautch dancers of India, and there were in the days of the fruition of Greek civilization the sisters of As

It was dark and threatening the next morning but we decided to be on our way. We bought a couple of paper umbrellas. We soon found that when we needed them at all that day we needed a roof much more. Hori was off on his bicycle and we arranged to overtake him at the village of Fujimi. We were hardly out of Kama-Suwa before we had to make our first dash for shelter to escape drowning in the open road. The thatched house which we besieged for shelter would probably have been most picturesque on a

The native inn is such an interweaving of privacy with no privacy at all that if the traveller has a sympathetic liking for the hospitality it should be put down to his temperament rather than to his reasonableness or unreasonableness. Calling upon all his reasonableness, the foreigner may still be miserable amid Japanese customs if he were born to a different crystallization. Hori considered the inn at Nirasaki to be rather superior to the average, meaning, I judged, not the luxury of the furni

Whether or no the Bosen-ka inn of Kofu does possess a wide reputation for comfort, it should deservedly have it. O-Shio-san was the name of the maid. This means O-Salt-san, but we renamed her “O-Sato-san,” which means Miss Sugar. She said that she had been at the inn for fifteen years, but until the day before there had never come a foreigner, and now there were two besides ourselves. I do not understand how such immunity could have been possible in a city the size of Kofu. However, the fact tha

On the morning that the boat was to sail from Yokohama we were up as soon as the sun first came through the bamboo shades. We exchanged presents with everyone in the inn and then walked away to the station, and everyone from the aristocratic mistress to the messenger boy stood waving to us as long as we could turn back to see them. Our packages and presents half filled the car. Hori had had a telegram to hurry home. The train was a through express to Kyoto and we said “ sayonara ” to him from th