Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/238

 hostlery. Yaami, proprietor of this picturesque hotel, is a personage indeed. He and his brother were professional guides until they made their fortunes. Their shrewd eyes saw further fortunes in a Kioto inn, where foreigners might find beds, chairs, tables, knives, forks, and foreign food, and they secured the old Ichiriki tea-house, midway on the slope of Maruyama, the mountain walling in Kioto on the east. The Ichiriki tea-house was the place where Oishi Kura no Suke, the leader of the Forty-seven Ronins, played the drunkard during the two years that he lived near Kioto, before he avenged the death of his lord. With it was bought an adjoining monastery, belonging to one of the temples on Mount Hiyeizan, and these two original buildings have expanded and risen story upon story, with detached wings here and there, until the group of tall white buildings, with the white flag floating high up in the midst of Maruyama’s foliage, is quite castle-like. While the obnoxious foreign treaties are in force, no foreigners except those in Japanese employ are allowed to live in Kioto, or even to visit it without a passport, and this secures Yaami in his monopoly. As a matter of fact, Yaami is not the family name of the two pleasant and prosperous-looking men who walk about in silk kimonos, with heavy gold watch-chains wound about their broad silk belts, and who have the innocent faces of young children, save for the shrewdness of their eyes. Yaami is the corruption of Yama Amida (Hill of Buddha), which is the name of the hotel, and the two men belong to the Inowye family, a clan not less numerous in Japan than the Smiths of English-speaking countries. In parts of the house one finds relics of monastery days in dim old screens of fine workmanship, and there is a stone-floored kitchen, vast as a temple, with cooks serious as priests, wielding strange sacrificial knives, and who, in midsummer, wear an apron only, apparently as a professional 222