NOTES IN JAPAN

NOTES IN JAPAN

BY

ALFRED PARSONS


WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR





NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1896



Copyright, 1895, by Harper & Brothers.
All rights reserved.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE JAPANESE SPRING

THE JAPANESE SPRING

WE had left Hong-Kong enveloped in its usual spring fog, and for five long, weary days had steamed across the China Sea in regular monsoon weather, gray and wet and miserable, but during the fifth some rocky islands, outlying sentinels of the three thousand which compose the Mikado’s realm, and occasional square-sailed, high-sterned boats, showed that we were near Japan, the Far East, the Land of Flowers and of the Rising Sun, the country which for years it had been my dream to see and paint; and by six o’clock in the evening, on the 9th of March, we were at anchor in Nagasaki Bay. The aspect of that port on a wet day was not inviting, nor were the little grimy girls, who in a chattering, laughing line carried their baskets of coal on board; so, difficult as it was to decline the hospitable invitations of the English residents, I decided to go on with the ship to Kōbe. Early in the morning of the 11th we passed through the Strait of Shimonoseki—the sun shining brightly on the snowy hills and on the crowd of fishing-boats which had been sheltering there from the bad weather—and entered the Inland Sea. After so many days of monotonous gray ocean it was delightful to steam along in sight of land, and wind about among the islets and rocks, so near to many of them that we could see the little villages, the mists of white plum blossoms, the rows of beans and barley growing wherever a level patch could be made on the steep slopes, the people at work in their

fields, and always in the distance the ranges of snow-covered mountains in Kiushiu and Shikoku, the islands which enclose this lovely sea on the south. I longed to land and begin work at once, with a nervous dread in my heart that I should find nothing so good elsewhere, and, indeed, though there is plenty of material to be found everywhere in Japan, I saw nothing finer than these islands of the Inland Sea; to cruise about among them in a comfortable boat would be an ideal way to spend a summer, and would probably not be devoid of adventure, for our captain told me many tales of treacherous currents and sudden squalls and sunken reefs.