Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/211

 In old Tokaido days the home bath-tub was often set beside the door-step, that bathers might lose nothing that was going on. Government regulations and stern policemen have interfered with this primitive innocency, except in the most remote districts, and these Oriental Arcadians are obliged to wear certain prescribed fig-leaves, although they curtail them as much as possible in warm weather, and dispense with them when beating out wheat ears in their own farm-yards, and treading the rice-mill in-doors. Privacy is unknown to the lower classes, and in warm weather their whole life is lived out-of-doors. With their open-fronted houses, they are hardly in-doors even when under their own roofs. On pleasant mornings women wash and cook, mend, spin, reel, and set up the threads for the loom on the open road-side, and often bring the clumsy wooden loom out-of-doors, throwing the bobbins back and forth, while keeping an eye on their neighbors’ doings and the travelling public. One runs past miles of such groups along the Tokaido, and the human interest is never wanting in any landscape picture.

From Mishima southward the country is most beautiful, Fujiyama standing at the end of the broad valley with the spurs of its foot-hills running down to the sea. This Yoshiwara plain is one wide wheat-field, golden in May-time with its first crop, and the Tokaido’s line marked with rows of picturesque pine-trees rising from low embankments brilliant with blooming bushes. In the villages each little thatched house is fenced with braided reeds, enclosing a few peonies, iris-beds, and inevitable chrysanthemum plants. The children, with smaller children on their backs, chase, tumble, and play, cage tire-flies, and braid cylinders and hexagonal puzzles of wheat straws; and in sunshine or in rain, indifferently stroll along the road in the aimless, uncertain way of chickens. 195