V Fuji
It was raining when we reached Gotemba and took off our boots at the entrance of the inn. I had never before stayed at a Japanese inn, and this one, so my friend assured me, was a bad specimen of the class. Certainly it was disorderly and dirty. It was also overcrowded. But that was inevitable, for a thousand pilgrims in a day were landing at Gotemba station. Men and women, young and old, grandparents, parents, children come flocking in to climb the great mountain. The village street is lined with inns; and in front of each stood a boy with a lantern hailing the new arrivals. We were able, in spite of the crowd, to secure a room to ourselves, and even, with difficulty, some water to wash in—too many people had used and were using the one bath! A table and a chair were provided for the foreigner, and very uncouth they looked in the pretty Japanese room. But a bed was out of the question. One had to sleep on the floor among the fleas. Certainly it was not comfortable; but it was amusing. From my room in the upper storey I looked into the whole row of rooms in the inn opposite, thrown open to the street, with their screens drawn back. One saw families and parties, a dozen or more in a room, dressing and undressing, naked and clothed, sleeping, eating, talking; all, of course, squatting on the floor, with a low stool for a table, and red-lacquered bowls for plates and dishes. How people manage to eat rice with chopsticks will always be a mystery to me. For my own part, I cannot even—but I will not open that humiliating chapter.
Of the night, the less said the better. I rose with relief, but dressed with embarrassment; for the girl who waited on us selected the moment of my toilet to clean the room. It was still raining hard, and we had decided to abandon our expedition, for another night in that inn was unthinkable. But, about eleven, a gleam of sun encouraged us to proceed, and we started on horseback for the mountain. And here I must note that by the official tariff, approved by the police, a foreigner is charged twice as much for a horse as a Japanese. If one asks why, one is calmly informed that a foreigner, as a rule, is heavier! This is typical of travel in Japan; and there have been moments when I have sympathised with the Californians in their discrimination against the Japanese. Those moments, however, are rare and brief, and speedily repented of.
Naturally, as soon as we had started the weather clouded over again. We rode for three hours at a foot-pace, and by the time we left our horses and began the ascent on foot we were wrapped in thick, cold mist. There is no difficulty about climbing Fuji, except the fatigue. You simply walk for hours up a steep and ever-steeper heap of ashes. It was perhaps as well that we did not see what lay before us, or we might have been discouraged. We saw nothing but the white-grey mist and the purple-grey soil. Except that, looming out of the cloud just in front of us, there kept appearing and vanishing a long line of pilgrims, with peaked hats, capes, and sandals, all made of straw, winding along with their staffs, forty at least, keeping step, like figures in a frieze, like shadows on a sheet, like spirits on the mountain of Purgatory, like anything but solid men walking up a hill. So for hours we laboured on, the slope becoming steeper every step, till we could go no further, and stopped at a shelter to pass the night. Here we were lucky. The other climbers had halted below or above, and we had the long, roomy shed to ourselves. Blankets, a fire of wood, and a good meal restored us. We sat warming and congratulating ourselves, when suddenly our guide at the door gave a cry. We hurried to see. And what a sight it was! The clouds lay below us and a starlit sky above. At our feet the mountain fell away like a cliff, but it fell rather to a glacier than a sea—a glacier infinite as the ocean, yawning in crevasses, billowing in ridges; a glacier not of ice, but of vapour, changing form as one watched, opening here, closing there, rising, falling, shifting, while far away, at the uttermost verge, appeared a crimson crescent, then a red oval, then a yellow globe, swimming up above the clouds, touching their lights with gold, deepening their shadows, and spreading, where it rose, a lake of silver fire over the surface of the tossing plain.
We looked till it was too cold to look longer, then wrapped ourselves in quilts and went to sleep. At midnight I woke. Outside there was a strange moaning. The wind had risen; and the sound of it in that lonely place gave me a shock of fear. The mountain, then, was more than a heap of dead ashes. Presences haunted it; powers indifferent to human fate. That wind had blown before man came into being, and would blow when he had ceased to exist. It moaned and roared. Then it was still. But I could not sleep again, and lay watching the flicker of the lamp on the long wooden roof, and the streaks of moonlight through the chinks, till the coolie lit a fire and called us to get up. We started at four. The clouds were still below, and the moon above; but she had moved across to the west, Orion had appeared, and a new planet blazed in the east. The last climb was very steep and our breath very scant. But we had other things than that to think of. Through a rift in a cloud to the eastward dawned a salmon-coloured glow; it brightened to fire; lit up the clouds above and the clouds below; blazed more and intolerably, till, as we reached the summit, the sun leapt into view and sent a long line of light down the tumultuous sea of rolling cloud.
How cold it was! And what an atmosphere inside the highest shelter, where sleepers had been packed like sardines and the newly kindled fire filled the fetid air with acrid smoke! What there was to be seen we saw—the crater, neither wide nor deep; the Shinto temple, where a priest was intoning prayers; and the Post Office, where an enterprising Government sells picture-postcards for triumphant pilgrims to despatch to their friends. My friend must have written at least a dozen, while I waited and shivered with numbed feet and hands. But after an hour we began the descent, and quickly reached the shelter where we were to breakfast. Thence we had to plunge again into the clouds. But before doing so we took a long look at the marvellous scene—more marvellous than any view of earth; icebergs tossing in a sea, mountains exhaling and vanishing, magic castles and palaces towering across infinite space. A step, and once more the white-grey mist and the purple-grey soil. But the clouds had moved higher; and it was not long before we saw, to the south, cliffs and the sea, to the east, the gleam of green fields, running up, under cloud-shadows, to mountain ridges and peaks. And so back to Gotemba, and our now odious inn.
We would not stop there. So we parted, my friend for Tokyo, I for Kyoto. But time-tables had been fallacious, and I found myself landed at Numatsa, with four hours to wait for the night train, no comfort in the waiting-room, and no Japanese words at my command. I understood then a little better why foreigners are so offensive in the East. They do not know the language; they find themselves impotent where their instinct is to domineer; and they visit on the Oriental the ill-temper which is really produced by their own incompetence. Yes, I must confess that I had to remind myself severely that it was I, and not the Japanese, who was stupid. At last the station-master came to my rescue—the station-master always speaks English. He endured my petulance with the unfailing courtesy and patience of his race, and sent me off at last in a rickshaw to the beach and a Japanese hotel. But my troubles were not ended. I reached the hotel; I bowed and smiled to the group of kow-towing girls; but how to tell them that I wanted a bathe and a meal? Signs were unavailing. We looked at one another and laughed, but that did not help. At last they sent for a student who knew a little English. I could have hugged him. “It is a great pity,” he said, “that these people do not know English.” The pity, I replied, was that I did not know Japanese, but his courtesy repudiated the suggestion. Could I have a bathing costume? Of course! And in a quarter of an hour he brought me a wet one. Where could I change? He showed me a room; and presently I was swimming in the sea, with such delight as he only can know who has ascended and descended Fuji without the chance of a bath. Returning to the inn, I wandered about in my wet costume seeking vainly the room in which I had changed. Laughing girls pushed me here, and pulled me there, uncomprehending of my pantomime, till one at last, quicker than the rest, pulled back a slide, and revealed the room I was seeking. Then came dinner—soup, fried fish, and rice; and—for my weakness—a spoon and fork to eat them with. The whole house seemed to be open, and one looked into every room, watching the ways of these gay and charming people. At last I paid—to accomplish that by pantomime was easy,—and said good-bye to my hostess and her maids, who bowed their heads to the ground and smiled as though I had been the most honoured of guests instead of a clumsy foreigner, fit food for mirth. A walk in a twilight pine wood, and then back to the station, where I boarded the night train, and slept fitfully until five, when we reached Kyoto, and my wanderings were over. How I enjoyed the comfort of the best hotel in the East! But also how I regretted that I had not long ago learnt to find comfort in the far more beautiful manner of life of Japan!