The Tokaido
On the other side of Utsonomiya pass the road winds down by steep zigzags to the village of Okabe, noted for its trays and boxes made of the polished brown stem of a coarse fern. We bought our specimens from an oracular woman, who delivered her remarks like the lines of a part, her husband meekly echoing what she said in the same dramatic tones, and the whole scene being as stagey as if it had been well rehearsed beforehand.
From the mountains the road drops to a rich tea country, where every hill-side is green with the thick-set little bushes. At harvest-time cart-loads of basket-fired, or country-dried, tea fill the road to the ports, to be toasted finally in iron pans, and coated with indigo and gypsum to satisfy the taste of American tea-drinkers. In every town farmers may be seen dickering with the merchants over the tough paper sacks of tea that they bring in, and within the houses groups sitting at low tables sort the leaves into grades with swift fingers.
At Fujiyeda, where we took refuge from the increasing rain, the splashing in the large bath-room of the tea-house was kept up from afternoon to midnight by the guests, and continued by the family and tea-house maids until four o’clock, when the early risers began their ablutions. A consumptive priest on the other side of our thin paper walls had a garrulous shampooer about midnight and a refection later, and we were glad to resume the ride between tea fields at the earliest possible hour.
At Kanaya, at the foot of Kanaya mountain, the tea-house adjoined a school-house. The school-room had desks and benches but no walls, the screens being all removed. The teacher called the pupils in by clapping two sticks together, as in a French theatre. Spying the foreigners, the children stared, oblivious of teacher and blackboard, and the teacher, after one good look at the itinerants, bowed a courteous good-morning, and let the offenders go unpunished.
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