Jinrikisha Days in Japan
and inviolateness of the bath-room. In a high-class Japanese house, or at the best tea-houses, this is an exquisitely artistic nook, with cement walls and floors, inlaid with fantastic stones and bits of porcelain. The oval tubs are of pine, bound with withes, and white with scouring. The doors are generally sliding paper screens without locks, and the wooden wall, or door, if there be one, is full of fantastic holes and tiny windows with no curtain. Often the bath-house is a detached pavilion, to which you are expected to walk in a special bath gown, or ukata, meeting, on the way, household and guests, who are always ready for a friendly chat. Europeans can hardly make a Japanese servant understand that in their order of arrangements, the bath and the bath-room are for the use of one person at a time. The Japanese wooden tub is vastly better than the zinc coffins and marble sarcophagi in which we bathe. The wood keeps the water hotter and is pleasanter to the touch. One kind of tub has a tiny stove with a long pipe in one end, and with a mere handful of charcoal such a tub is filled with boiling water in the briefest time. Many bathers have lost their lives by the carbonic acid gas sent off by this ingenious contrivance. A Japanese hot bath is only a point or two from boiling. The natives bear this temperature without wincing, and will step from this scalding caldron out-of-doors, smoking along the highway on a frosty day, like the man whom Dr. Griffis describes. Our grave and statuesque landlord at Yumoto, who sat like a Buddha behind his low table and held court with his minions, once appeared to us stalking home in the starlight with all his clothes on his arm. His stride was as stagey and majestic as ever, there being no reason, in his consciousness, why he should lay off his dignity with his garments, they representing to him the temporary and accidental, not the real envelope of the pompous old soul.
170
