Jinrikisha Days in Japan
the visitor wanders through a labyrinth of little rooms, each exquisite, simple, and charming, with its golden screens and gold-flecked ceilings. The irregularly shelved recesses, the chigai dana of each room, the ramma, the lattices and windows, are perfect models of Japanese taste and art; and the Taiko’s crest is wrought in silver, gold, and bronze on all the mountings, and is painted and carved everywhere. The open rooms look upon a lovely garden, and paths of flat-topped stones lead through the tiny wilderness of lake, forest, thicket, and stream; over old stone bridges, stained and lichen-covered, to picturesque tea-houses and pavilions, overhanging the lake. Stone Buddhas and stone pagodas stand in shadowy places, and stone lanterns under dwarf pine-trees are reflected in the curve of every tiny bay. It is an ideal Japanese garden, with the dew of a midsummer morning on all the spider webs, and only the low note of the grasshoppers to break the stillness.
Although all tourists spend a day in shooting the rapids of the Oigawa, it seems to me a waste of precious Kioto time and a performance out of harmony with the spirit of the place, although in May the blooming azaleas cause that wild and narrow canon to blaze with color. The flat-bottomed boats dart through the seven-mile gorge and dash from one peril of shipwreck to another, just saved by a dextrous touch of the boatmen’s poles, which fit into holes in the rocks that they themselves have worn. The flooring of the boats is so thin as to rise and fall with the pressure of the water, in a way that seems at first most alarming. The passage ends at Arashiyama, a steep hill clothed with pine, maple, and cherry-trees, which in cherry-blossom time, or in autumn, is the great resort of all Kioto, whose pleasurings there form the theme of half the geisha’s songs and the accompanying dances. From the tea-house on the opposite bank the abrupt mountain-side shows a mat of densest foliage. A torii at the
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