A cold drizzle ushers in the commencement of my next day’s journey.  One is loath to exchange the neat yadoya, with everything within so spotless and so pleasant, the tiny garden, not over ten yards square, but containing a miniature lake, grottos, quaint stone lanterns, bronze storks, flowers, and stunted trees, for the road.  Disagreeable weather has followed me, however, from Nagasaki like an avenging Fate, bent on preventing the consummation of my tour from being too agreeable.  Even with rain and mud and consequent delays my first few days in Japan have seemed a very paradise after my Chinese experiences; what, then, would have been my impressions of country and people amid sunshine and favorable conditions of weather and road, when the novelty of it all first burst upon my Chinese-disgusted senses?

The country round about is mountainous, snow lying upon the summits of a few of the higher peaks.  The road, though hilly at times, manages to twist and wind its way along from one little valley to another without any very long hills.  Peasants from the mountains are met with, leading ponies loaded with firewood and rice.  Their old Japanese aboriginal costumes of wistaria raincoats, broad bamboo-hats, and rude straw-sandals make a conspicuous contrast to their countrymen of “New Japan,” in Derby hats or jockey suits.  Notwithstanding the rapid Europeanizing of the city-bred Japs, the government’s progressive policy, the blue-coated gendarmerie, and the general revolutionizing of the country at large, many a day will come and go ere these mountaineers forsake the ways and methods and grotesque costumes of their ancestors.  For decades Japan will present an interesting study of mountaineer conservatism and ultra-liberal city life.  One party will be wearing foreign clothes, aping foreign manners, adopting foreign ways of doing everything; the other will be clinging tenaciously to the wistaria garments, bamboo sieve-hats, straw-sandals, and the traditions of “Old Japan.”

Most farm-houses are now thatched with straw; one need hardly add that they are prettily and neatly thatched, and that they are embellished by various unique contrivances.  Some of them, I notice, are surrounded by a broad, thick hedge of dark-green shrubbery.  The hedge is trimmed so that the upper edge appears to be a continuation of the brown thatch, which merely changes its color and slopes at the same steep gradient to the ground.  This device produces a very charming effect, particularly when a few neatly trimmed young pines soar above the hedge like green sentinels about the dwelling.  One inimitable piece of “botanical architecture” observed to-day is a thick shrub trimmed into an imitation of a mountain, with trees growing on the slopes, and a temple standing in a grove.  Before many of the houses one sees curious tree-roots or rocks, that have been brought many a mile down from the mountains, and preserved on account of some fanciful resemblance to bird, reptile, or animal.