Jinrikisha Days in Japan
CHAPTER XIII
THE SUBURBS OF TOKIO
The suburbs of Tokio are full of holiday resorts for the people and the beautiful villas of nobles. To the north-east, in Oji, are the Government chemical works and paper mills, where rough bits of mulberry-wood are turned into papers of a dozen kinds, the silkiest tissue-paper, smooth, creamy writing-paper, thick parchment, bristol-board, and the thin paper for artists and etchers. On a sheet of the heaviest parchment paper I once stood and was lifted from the floor, the fabric showing no mark of rent or strain, and it is wellnigh impossible to tear even a transparent Oji letter sheet. The Oji tea-house has a famous garden, and in autumn Oji’s hill-sides blaze with colored maples, and then the holiday makers mark the place for their own.
Waseda, the northern suburb, contains an old temple, a vast, gloomy bamboo-grove, and the villa of Countess Okuma, to whose genius for landscape-gardening is also due the French Legation’s paradise of a garden, in the heart of the city, that place having been Count Okuma’s town residence before he sold it to the French Government. From Waseda’s rice fields a greater marvel grew.
Meguro, south of Tokio, is a place of sentimental pilgrimage to the lovers of Gompachi and Komurasaki, the Abelard and Heloise of the East, around whose tomb the trees flutter with paper poems, and prayers. In the temple grounds are falling streams of water, beneath which, summer and winter, praying pilgrims stand, to be thus pumped on for their sins. Similar penitents may be seen
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