Jinrikisha Days in Japan
dark-red lacquer tray, under whose transparent surface lay darker shadows of cherry blossoms. The eye of the connoisseur was quick to descry the tray, and when the woman said it had been bought in the town, we took jinrikishas and hurried to the address she gave. The guide explained minutely, the shopkeeper brought out a hundred other kinds and colors of lacquer, and children ran in from home workshops with hardly dried specimens to show us. All the afternoon we searched through lacquer and curio shops, and finally despatched a coolie to the temple to buy the old woman’s property. Hours afterwards he returned with a brand-new, bright red horror, and the message that “the mistress could not send the honorable foreigner such a poor old tray as that.”
The fine Shidzuoka baskets, which are so famed elsewhere, were not to be found in Shidzuoka; our tea-house was uninteresting, and so we set forth in the rain, unfurling big flat umbrellas of oil paper, and whirling away through a dripping landscape. Rice and wheat alternated with dark-green tea-bushes, and cart-loads of tea-chests were bearing the first season’s crop to market. The rain did not obscure the lovely landscape, as the plain we followed turned to a valley, the valley narrowed to a ravine, and we began climbing upward, while a mountain-torrent raced down beside us. One picturesque little village in a shady hollow gave us glimpses of silk-worm trays in the houses as we went whirling through it. The road, winding by zigzags up Utsonomiya pass, suddenly entered a tunnel six hundred feet in length, where the jinrikisha wheels rumbled noisily. On cloudy days the place is lighted by lamps, but on sunny days by the sun’s reflection from two black lacquer boards at the entrances. The device is an old one in Japan, but an American patent has recently been issued for the same thing, as a cheap means of lighting ships’ holds while handling cargo.
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