Jinrikisha Days in Japan
closer to earth, Yumoto streets resound with the wailing whistle of the blind shampooer, or amah. These amah are found everywhere—in the largest cities and in the smallest mountain villages—and, whether men or women, are never young, or even middle-aged. Theirs is an indefinite, unscientific system of massage, and their manipulations often leave their charges with more lame and aching muscles than before. But the amah are an institution of the country, and Yumoto streets would ring with their dreary music, and our screens would be slipped aside by many an ill-favored crone, as soon as it was time for the usual evening baths to be prepared at the tea-houses.
Upon another visit to Nikko and Chiuzenji in late October there was a more splendid autumnal pageant than the most gorgeous hill sides of America had ever shown me. Frost had done its most wonderful work, and the air was exhilarating to intoxication. The clear and brilliant weather moved the coolies to frisk, play, and chant like children—even that dignified little man, Ito, relaxing his gravity to frolic like a boy, and to pry bowlders over the edges of precipices to hear them crash and fall far below. Chiuzenji looked a vast, flawless sapphire, and Nantaisan was a mosaic of richest Byzantine coloring. Kegon-no-taki, the fall of three hundred feet by which the waters of Chiuzenji drop to the valley in their race to the Daiyagawa, seemed a column of snow in its little amphitheatre hung with autumn vines and branches. But we dared not remain, for already Yumoto was closed and boarded up for the season, and on any day the first of the blockading snows of winter might shut the door of the one tea-house left open at Chiuzenji, and end the travel from the Ashiwo copper-mines.
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