A tree may be cut once a year for three or four years.  After that it is useless even for fuel, owing to the smell it gives off, and is often left standing.  The old scarred trunks, sometimes headless, suggested the tattooed faces and bodies of Maori veterans.  As lacquer is poisonous to the skin the wood calls for careful handling.  I saw one of the itinerant lacquer collectors, his hands wrapped in cotton, operating on a tree.

During a particularly hot run we had the good fortune to come on a soda-water spring from which we all drank freely.  A factory erected to tap the spring was in ruins.  Evidently the cost of carriage was prohibitive.

In these hills the rice was planted farther apart than is usual so that the sun might warm the water.  Here as elsewhere daikon were hung up to dry on walls and trees, and looked like giant tallow candles.  Below a bridge, which marked the village boundary, flags had been flung down by way of keeping off epidemics.  Evil spirits were warded off by special dances.

The porch of a little tea-house where we rested was covered with grapes.  Soon after leaving it we reached our destination for the night, a small town of houses of several storeys which clustered on a hillside under the shadow of a Zen temple.  Meat and eggs were forbidden to the town, but as the residents were all Zen Buddhists the restriction was no hardship.  There was no cow in the place, but condensed milk was allowed.  A man at the inn told me that he knew of ten Shinto shrines which forbade the use of chickens and eggs in their localities.  The view from the temple, perched high on its rock above the wide riverway, was exceptionally fine.  Parties of boys and girls of thirteen paid visits to this temple “because thirteen is known as a perilous age.”  The people of the vegetarian town, instead of feeding on the fish in the river, fed them.  I saw a shoal of fish being given scraps at the water edge.

As we went on our way and spoke of the bad roads it was suggested that in the old days roads were purposely left uphill and downhill in order that the advance of enemies might be hindered.  We came to a dilapidated tea-house kept by an ugly old woman who showed a touching fondness for a cat and a dog.  From her shack we had a view of a volcano which had destroyed two villages a few years before.  Our hostess, who made much of us, said that the catastrophe had been preceded by “horrible da-da-da-bang” sounds and lightnings, and that it was accompanied by “thunderbolts and heavy thick smoke.”  The old woman had beheld “soil boiling and cracking.”

Along our route we had more evidences of “fire farming.”  The procedure was to sow buckwheat the first year and rape and millet the second year.  In the cryptomeria forests there was a variety which, when cut, sprouts from the ground and makes a new growth like an elm.  One crop we saw was ginseng, protected by low structures covered by matting.