In this region the kurumaya were hard put to it at times and once a kuruma broke down.  Its owner cheerfully detached its broken axle and went off with it at a trot ten miles or so to a blacksmith.  Later he traversed the ten miles once more to refit his kuruma, afterwards coming on fifteen more miles to our inn.  The endurance and cheeriness of the kurumaya were surprising.  It was usually in face of their protests that we got out to ease them while going uphill.  Every morning they wanted to arrange to go farther than we thought reasonable.  Each man had not only his passenger but his passenger’s heavy bag.  One day we did thirty-six miles over rough roads.  The kurumaya proposed to cover fifty.  They showed spirit, good nature and loyalty.  The character of their conversation is worth mentioning.  At one point they were discussing the plays we had witnessed, at other times the scenery, local legends, the best routes and the crops, material condition and disposition of the villagers.  Our kurumaya compared very favourably indeed with men of an equal social class at home.  Their manners were perfect.  They stayed at the same inns as we did—­once in the next room—­and behaved admirably.  Every evening the men washed their white cotton shorts and jackets—­their whole costume except for a wide-brimmed sun hat and straw waraji.  Tied to the axle of each kuruma were several pairs of waraji, for on the rough hill roads this simple form of footgear soon wears out.  Discarded waraji are to be seen on every roadside in Japan.

The inscriptions on some of the wayside stones we passed had been written by priests so ignorant that the wording was either ridiculous or almost without meaning.  But there was no difficulty in deciphering an inscription on a stone which declared that it had been erected by a company of Buddhists who claimed to have repeated the holy name of Amida 2,000,000 times. (The idea is that salvation may be obtained by the repetition of the phrase Namu Amida Butsu.) A small stone set up on a rock in the middle of paddy fields intimated that at that spot “people gathered to see the moon one night every month.”  A third stone was dedicated to the monkey as the messenger of a certain god, just as the fox is regarded as the messenger of Inari.

We saw during our journey large numbers of kiri (Paulownia) used for making geta and bride’s chests.  Some farmers seem to plant kiri trees at the birth of a daughter so as to have wood for her wedding chest or money for her outfit[129]. Kiri seems to be increasingly grown.  On the other hand in the same districts lacquer trees were now seldom planted.  The farmers complained that they were cheated by the collectors of lacquer who come round to cut the trees.  The age of cutting was given me as the eighth or ninth year, but poor farmers sometimes allowed a young tree to be cut.