Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan | Page 8

a bale of undesirable merchandise with the duties still due.
But now, what a change! The innkeeper not only received us, but led
the way at once to the best room,--a room in the second story of the
fireproof storehouse at the back, which he hoped would be comfortable.
Comfortable! The room actually proffered us a table and chairs. No one
who has not, after a long day's tramp, sought in vain to rest his weary
body propped up against a side beam in a Japanese inn can enter into
the feeling a chair inspires, even long afterward, by recollection.
I cannot say I loved Takasaki in former days. Was it my reception or
was it sentiment that made me see it all now through a mist of glamour?
Unsuspected by us, that atmosphere of time tints everything. Few
things but look lovelier seen down the vista of the years. Indeed,

sentiment is a kind of religion; or is it religion that is a kind of
sentiment? Both are so subtly busy canonizing the past, and crowning
with aureoles very every-day things as well as very ordinary people.
Not men alone take on a sanctity when they are no more.

III.
The Usui Pass.
The first object to catch my eye, when the shoji were pushed apart, the
next morning, was a string of the ubiquitous paper fish, dangling limp
in the motionless May air from a pole in a neighboring yard; highly
suggestive of having just been caught for breakfast. The sight would
have been painfully prophetic but for the food we had brought with us;
for, of all meals, a Japanese breakfast is the most cold, the most watery,
and the most generally fishy in the world. As it was, breakfast consisted
of pathetic copies of consecrated originals. It might have been excellent
but for the canned milk.
No doubt there are persons who are fond of canned milk; but, for my
part, I loathe it. The effect of the sweetish glue upon my inner man is
singularly nauseating. I have even been driven to drink my matutinal
coffee in all its after-dinner strength rather than adulterate it with the
mixture. You have, it is true, the choice of using the stuff as a dubious
paste, or of mixing it with water into a non-committal wash; and,
whichever plan you adopt, you wish you had adopted the other. Why it
need be so unpalatably cloying is not clear to my mind. They tell me
the sugar is needed to preserve the milk. I never could make out that it
preserved anything but the sugar. Simply to see the stuff ooze out of the
hole in the can is deterrent. It is enough to make one think seriously at
times of adding a good milch cow to his already ample trip
encumberment, at the certain cost of delaying the march, and the not
improbable chance of being taken for an escaped lunatic. Indeed, to the
Japanese mind, to be seen solemnly preceding a caravan of cattle for
purposes of diet would certainly suggest insanity. For cows in Japan are
never milked. Dairy products, consequently, are not to be had on the
road, and the man who fancies milk, butter, or cheese must take them
with him.
It used to be the same in Tokyo, but in these latter days a dairy has
been started at Hakone, which supplies fresh butter to such Tokyoites

as like it. One of my friends, who had been many years from home, was
much taken with the new privilege, and called my attention to it with
some pride. The result was a colorless lardy substance that looked like
poor oleomargarine (not like good oleomargarine, for that looks like
butter), but which was held in high esteem, nevertheless. My friend,
indeed, seriously maintained to me once that such was the usual color
of fresh butter, and insisted that the yellow hue common elsewhere
must be the result of dyes. He was so positive on the point that he
almost persuaded me, until I had left him and reason returned. It took
me some time to recover from the pathos of the thing: a man so long
deprived of that simple luxury that he had quite forgotten how it looked,
and a set of cows utterly incapable, from desuetude, of producing it
properly.
After I had duly swallowed as much as I could of the doubtful dose
supposed to be cafe au lait, the cans were packed up again, and we
issued from the inn to walk a stone's throw to the train.
Takasaki stands well toward the upper end of the plain, just below
where the main body of it thrusts its arms out into the hills. Up one of
these we were soon wending. Every