Jinrikisha Days in Japan
The greatest sight of Biwa, and one of the wonders of Japan, is the old pine-tree of Karasaki, which has stood for three hundred years on a little headland a couple of miles above Otsu, with a tiny village and a Shinto temple all its own. Its trunk is over four feet in diameter, and, at a height of fifteen feet, its boughs are trained laterally and supported by posts, so that it looks like a banyan-tree. The branches, twisted, bent, and looped like writhing dragons, cover more than an acre of ground with their canopy. The tips of the boughs reach far out over the water, and the sensitive Japanese hear a peculiar music in the sifting of the rain-drops through the foliage into the lake. High up in the tree is a tiny shrine, and the pilgrims clap, their hands and stand with clasped palms, turning their faces upward as they pray. A heavy stone wall protects this sylvan patriarch from the washing of storms and floods.
Under the branches a legion of small villagers, intimating by pantomime their desire to dive for pennies, untied their belts and dropped their solitary cotton garments as unconcernedly as one might take off hat or gloves. They frolicked and capered in the water as much at home as fishes and as loath to leave it. Fleeing from this body of too attached followers, we were whirled down the road to Otsu to eat the famous Biwa trout, passing on the way a woman, who sat at ease in her bath-tub by her own door-step, calmly scrubbing herself with a bag of rice bran, and contemplating her neighbors, the road, and the lake scenery the while.
On Mount Hiyeizan, by the ruined Buddhist temples and monasteries, the American missionaries of different denominations have a long-established summer camp, where they enjoy a sort of Japanese Chautauqua circle, their tents and buildings the only signs of habitation where once stood hundreds of temples with their thousands of priests.
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