At length we heard the distant sound of a locomotive whistle.  We were approaching the newly opened railway which was to take us the short run to the sea.  Soon we were in a rather unkempt village which had hardly recovered from its surprise at finding that it had a railway station.  We paid our kurumaya the sum contracted for and something over for their faithful service and for their long return run, and having exchanged bows and cordial greetings, we left for a time the glorified perambulators which a foreign missionary is supposed to have introduced half a century ago. (The Japanese claim the honour of “inventing” the jinrikisha.)

FOOTNOTES: 

[123] See Appendix XXXVII.

[124] See Appendix XXXVIII.

[125] In Tokyo one may sleep night after night in summer with no covering but the thinnest loose cotton kimono and have an electric fan going within the mosquito curtain, and still feel the heat.

[126] The kimono has no button, hook, tie, or fastening of any kind, and is kept in place by the waist string and obi.

[127] It is an illustration of the difficulty of using a foreign symbolism that it is unlikely that a single child in the school had ever seen a shepherd or a sheep.

[128] In 1918 the value of seaweed was returned at 13,600,000 yen.

[129] In fifteen years a kiri tree may be about 20 ft. high and 3 ft. in circumference and be worth 30 yen. Kiri trees to the value of 3 million yen were felled in 1918.

CHAPTER XIV

SHRINES AND POETRY

(NIIGATA AND TOYAMA)

Sir, I am talking of the mass of the people.—­JOHNSON

The railway made its way through snow stockades and through many tunnels which pierced cryptomeria-clad hills.  Eventually we descended to the wonderful Kambara plains, a sea of emerald rice.  Fourteen million bushels of rice are produced on the flats of Niigata prefecture, which grows more rice than any other.  The rice, grown under 800 different names, is officially graded into half a dozen qualities.  The problem of the high country we had come from was how to keep its paddy fields from drying up; the problem of Niigata is chiefly to keep the water in its fields at a sufficiently low level.  Almost every available square yard of the prefecture is paddy.

At Gosen there were depressing-looking weaving sheds, but the Black Country created by the oil fields farther on was in even more striking contrast with the beautiful region we had left.  The petroleum yield was 65 million gallons, and the smell of the oil went with us to the capital city.

Niigata has a dark reputation for exporting farmers’ daughters to other parts of Japan, but I have also heard that the percentage of attendance made by the children at the primary schools of the prefecture is higher than anywhere else.  Like Amsterdam, Niigata is a city of bridges.  There must be 200 of them.  The big timber bridge across the estuary is nearly half a mile long.  One finds in Niigata a Manchester-like spirit of business enterprise.  Our hotel was excellent.