August was nearly over and the time approached when I should have to go home. More and more I felt that before leaving, I must try to see something in the country that was whole and untouched. It would be wrong to describe this something as the 'real' Japan, for the spoiled and corrupted parts were just as real as it was. The westernized people with their badly fitting clothes, their cars, their factories and gadgets and their uneasy, part acceptance of the material and mechanistic view of life, were no less real, no less truly Japanese, than Tanizaki, or Kawai, or Hashimoto, the simple fishermen and woodcutters, the monk in his lonely mountain temple, or the girls dancing in honour of the dead in country places; they were merely less attractive. They were also more in evidence: they caught the eye whichever way it turned, while the others had to be carefully and patiently sought out.

I had been turning over in my mind the possibility of making some trip far away from the usual routes, and weighing up the difficulties of acquiring interpreters, provisions, transport, and black market yen in large enough quantities, when the post brought a letter from Dr. Okamura, the librarian of Waseda University, with an invitation to spend a few days with his family in the mountain village of Goka, not far from Iida, in the Nagano Prefecture. No foreigner had been there within living memory, except for a stray German who, for some reason, had bought a farm near by at the end of the last century and settled down to work it himself. 'You may like to see something of our rural life,' the professor wrote, 'the people in Goka live just as their forefathers did,' adding, with a true Japanese dislike of definite and unqualified statement, 'except that they have been somewhat modernized.' There followed instructions on how to reach the place, since the journey would take a whole day.

Once more I boarded the Dixie Limited at nine o'clock. The countryside along the line was growing familiar, the tiny blue bays fringed with dark pines where the train ran along by the sea, the flawless cone of Mount Fuji, appearing and reappearing as it twisted and turned through the hills, the neat thatched farms, the trim hayricks with huge, brilliant convolvulus twining about them, the patches of lotus with their great, rubbery, bluish leaves and stately flowers among the rice paddies and, always and everywhere, the small, bent figures of men toiling in the mud.

At Hamamatsu I got down and, avoiding the RTO, made for the Japanese stationmaster. He led me to his office where, as well as the usual piles of grubby paper and the small vases of perfectly arranged flowers, he had a reproduction from da Vinci pinned neatly upside down above his desk. We drank tea together, conversing in friendly but restricted manner; by good luck he was a graduate of Waseda himself and, after a discussion of Dr. Okamura and other notables, he hurried to the telephone to make a series of calls. The mysterious Japanese grapevine was at work, and there was no need for anxiety, or even thought, on my side. In no time at all everyone concerned along the line would know that a foreign woman would pass that way, that she must be removed from the train at Toyohashi, and put in the electric car for Iida, that at Tenryuko she must be removed once more and escorted to the hotel, from which, in the morning, she would be taken away by a Sensei. It was a curious thing that as long as one remained in the occupation zone, with its material resource, its know-how and its obsession with mechanical efficiency, one lived in a maze of papers and regulations, fretting one's heart out over jeeps that never came, telephones that did not work and people who were never in their offices: but that once among the Japanese, provided there was a single individual capable o£ roughly grasping the plan, all moved with a smooth and beautiful precision and one was spirited effortlessly about the country without so much as a wink passing from one man to another.

The stationmaster conducted me to a seat in the train, at the end of a long compartment, and stood, the picture of dignity and importance in his cap of red and gold, gravely saluting as we pulled out of the station. The compartment was stuffed with people as usual, for the Japanese seem to have a passion, perhaps natural in the inhabitants of a crowded country, for moving constantly from place to place. There were the housewives setting out in search of black market rice, old women with babies on their backs, farmers, plump schoolchildren in sailor suits, and a flock of holiday makers, dressed in white shorts and shirts, black socks pulled knee-high by leg-suspenders clearly displayed, and black or brown felt Trilby hats, an ensemble I do not remember to have seen anywhere else. It was disagreeable to sit in my comfortable corner while an old lady stood beside me, one fat baby tied to her back and another kicking under her arm; but had the seat been offered to her, she would either have refused it or, worse, taken it and immediately passed it on to a man. Everywhere, husbands were sitting, wives, with bundles, lunch-boxes and suitcases in their hands, were standing.

Presently, at the farther end of the compartment which was long and arranged like a bus with rows of seats each side of a gangway, a slight commotion arose; a gentle, polite struggle seemed to be in progress, screened from my view by the tightly packed travellers. A boyish voice could be heard, saying: chotto mate, kudesai!

Sumimasen! Chotto!

A movement passed over the serried ranks of the travellers; they surged this way and that, exclaiming softly, and parted to allow a young man dressed in the blue serge uniform and peaked cap of a student to pass through. He was panting and dishevelled; in one hand he carried a textbook, and he bore down upon me with an expression of mingled diffidence and resolution. He was a student of Nagoya, his name was Toshio Yamamoto, and word had passed to the end of the carriage that a foreigner was travelling in it. Like a good Japanese, he could not let an opportunity go by without seizing it.

'Prease!' he said. 'Excuse, prease, but I would know how Engrishmen speak. Our teacher is Japanese.'

He opened his book with a flourish, and laid it on my knee. It was the French Revolution, by Thomas Carlyle. I read half a dozen pages aloud, while the country folk round groaned quietly to themselves at the brilliance of it all and shrank away, effacing themselves in the presence of learning. At the end the boy drew a soft, hissing sigh. He had not, clearly, been aware that English might sound like that.

'Engrishmen,' he said wonderingly, 'speak so? It is necessary to say words rike you?'

I replied that it was usual. He sighed again, and bowed, the deep humble bow of a girl, hands on knees, and turning away, fought his passage back to the other end of the compartment. The train jogged quietly on. After a quarter of an hour, there were the same indications of disturbance as before, and Toshio reappeared, somewhat red in the face, his cap now tilted rakishly over an ear.

'Prease,' he said, treating me to another dazzling smile, 'your impression of Japan, maybe.'

Very nice.

'Japanese cherry brossom?' he suggested.

Beautiful.

"Japanese garu?'

Very charming.

'Charming, yes.' He giggled. 'Kimono of Japanese garu?'

Very nice indeed.

He frowned a little at this. 'Nice, but not practical,' he said. He thought for a minute, and went on: 'Japanese country? mountain? pine tree? vorrcano?'

'All very nice,' I said soothingly.

He made as if to go and then paused, irresolute. He hissed again, giggled, and scraped with his feet on the floor. I recognized the symptoms. Toshio had a question, to put which would cost him effort and even pain, but with which, for the sake of clarity, he felt bound to persevere.

'Prease!' he said, in a low voice. 'If I am with Engrishmen, am I very rittle?'

He was all of five feet. Truth was something, but so was the wistful appeal in Toshio's eyes.

'Englishmen would think you very strong and nicely built,' I said. 'They are much too big, themselves. It is not practical.'

Satisfied, he plunged into the melee again. Peace fell, and lasted several minutes. Then a new agitation broke out, but on a minor scale, and Toshio's visiting card was passed from hand to hand, with the English version of his name and address carefully written in pencil on the back. I produced one of my own, and this was reverently passed the length of the carriage to where Toshio sat. A silence followed, while he considered what measures should now be taken. After an interval, the familiar stirring and striving recommenced, and I was handed the somewhat dirty half of a green apple. I ate it slowly; it tasted of warm, boyish hand. Presently there were signs that something was afoot once more. A great sighing, as of wind in the pines, a plaintive murmur, as of many patient creatures in distress, arose in that stuffy carriage; tired bodies displaced themselves, weary but compliant, dizzy piles of luggage stacked and so often stacked fell heavily on the bowed figures below. It could only mean the approach of Toshio; and sure enough he was there, scarlet, his spectacles misting, his cap gone, his black, oily hair tumbling over his brow, but his countenance split in the same wide and ravishing grin.

'Prease!' Toshio said. 'Was Kierkegaard egoist?'

My brain reeled, as it had so often reeled before in conversations with the young Japanese male. One minute they want to know the price of a camera in London, and the next, the meaning of the universe. I did not know if Kierkegaard was an egoist or not; it was not a subject to which I had ever given thought, and nothing suggested itself. But Toshio stood there, looking eager and trusting; he must not be disappointed. Leaning forward, I began to recite in earnest, rapid tones the fourteenth chapter of the Book of Job.

'Man that is born of a woman,' I said, accompanying the words with florid, Italian gestures, 'is of few days and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower and is cut down. He fleeth as a shadow and continueth not.

'And dost thou open thine eyes upon such a one?' I inquired, a little sternly, 'and bringest me into judgment with thee? Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one.'

Here I paused, in reflection. Toshio nodded brightly.

'For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again,' I resumed, `and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground. Do you understand?'

Toshio nodded again; he appeared to be deeply moved. `Thank you very much,' he murmured. He had received something, although it was hard to say what. He vanished, nor was he seen again. But then a most inconvenient thing happened, one which after so many years of inward struggle is still and frequently happening; my conscience assailed me. He had asked for bread and been given a stone; he had come searching, if not for enlightenment, as least for a little material to work into an essay and had been sent, to all intents, empty away. A representative of the rich, powerful, mysterious, conquering west had, once again, pulled a fast one on a meek Asiatic disciple. Seizing another of my visiting cards I wrote across it, boldly and plainly: Kierkegaard was egoist, hoping and assuming that this was the truth: and passed it along. But there was no reply, no further slice of apple. Perhaps the child was stunned by my august condescension; and perhaps I had gone too far.

At Toyohashi the stationmaster, alerted by Hamamatsu, was fussing up and down the platform like an agitated hen. In his own person he conducted me, with his own hands he carried my bags, to the electric train for Iida. Once more I was carefully placed in a corner seat. Something of the radiance of Dr. Okamura's great learning rested, in the eyes of these devoted officials, on my head. The foreign woman was connected in some way with a Senseh then make way, vacate that seat, open that window, or, if she prefers, close it! and once again, as the train set off, a magnificent salute combined, on this occasion, with a deep and ceremonious bow. A bubble of conceit took shape within me, waxed and glowed with rich and luminous colours: and collapsed. I was a mere foolish barbarian, red-haired as the devils are said to be, incapable of a move without the assistance of responsible men, and helpless as a baby.

For five hours we sat in the electric train, moving slowly into the mountainous interior. The air grew wonderfully fresh and cool: the houses had large, flat stones at each corner of the roof to prevent the wind from whipping it off. There were wide and beautiful streams and rapids, with fishermen standing in the shallows and the grey heron flapping ungainly overhead. Twilight fell, then darkness; the mountains became huge black masses shouldering the sky with here and there a dart of silver as a waterfall was touched by the light of the moon.

As we entered Tenryuko station, the keeper of the inn climbed into the car and carried me off to his establishment; he was, of course, fully informed as to everything. The room into which he led the way opened on to a stream sixty feet below, with the tops of two large fir trees on a level with the floor. From the river came a dean, sharp hissing as the current wrapped itself about the rocks standing in its way; and on one of the fir trees a giant cicada struck up his metallic song: mi mi mi mi!. Nothing else was to be heard; all was calm and still, slumbering in the moonlight. In another minute, however, the door slid back and two giggling little maids tripped in. They rushed to install the mosquito net, not the stifling drapery of Italy or Spain, which turns a bed into a sort of cradle, but a great roomy green tent nearly as large as the room. Downstairs, the landlord's daughter hurried to the piano and struck up an approximation of the Moonlight Sonata. I asked the landlord to bring me some Japanese beer, and he seemed to find something strange in the request, for he doubled up and hastened from the room with a hand pressed over his mouth. As soon as I had drunk the beer, I changed into yukata and made my way down the steep, slippery staircase to the bathroom. The landlady had sent a polite invitation to take my bath with her and she was already at work, crouching on the floor and methodically scrubbing herself with a flimsy Japanese cloth and a bar of soap made of fish-oil and grit.

A Japanese bath is one of the great pleasures of this world. The bathroom is built on a slope with a slatted floor, on which you stand pouring hot water over yourself and washing. When you are quite clean, and not before, you step into the bath, which in private houses is a deep wooden tub with a fire burning underneath, in hotels a tiled pit large enough to take half a dozen bathers at a time. It is a grave social mistake to leave any soap in the water of this bath. You lie and steam, in a temperature much hotter than we use at home, meditating lazily on the state of the world, or thinking of nothing at all. It is still better when there is company, as you can then scrub each other's back and gossip lightly on this and that while lying in the water. The landlady, as soon as the bows and salutations were over, at once helped me off with my robe and performed this service, although she was too modest to let me return the compliment; and she was too polite, also, to show any amusement or concern at my size and colouring. Three or four of the little maids who were also bathing were less restrained, however, and they crowded round, stroking my hair, and patting my shoulders with their little yellow paws, and sniffing at my scented American soap with innocent cries of amazement; and when they saw the rich pink colour I turned in the hot water, they broke down altogether and rolled on the floor. Their mistress laughed and apologized for them, explaining that they had never seen a foreigner before in their lives. Indeed, very few people in this village had. Only some of the older ones had caught a brief glimpse, many years before, of the Duke of Connaught as he whirled past them in a boat on his way to the Tenryu rapids, and they had never forgotten it.

After bathing, I went upstairs. The proprietor had laid out a supper on the balcony of eggs, trout, crayfish, octopus, and rice, with a few more bottles of beer; and while I ate he entertained me as best he could with stories of the country round and of his experiences as a business man in Korea, in very broken English. All the time, he seemed to be hugely tickled by some private joke. Presently I grew drowsy and said I should like to go to bed. The little maids ran to fetch the futon and arrange them on the floor under the mosquito net; they were wonderfully soft and covered in silk, and I soon fell asleep with the sound of the river as a lullaby. I awoke in the morning to find the sun streaming in, and the maids carrying tray after tray of breakfast out on to the balcony. When I asked for the bill, the landlord said it came to one hundred yen, which was much less than a single bottle of beer in Tokyo or Osaka. For a moment I thought I had strayed into some forgotten little corner whose economy had become divorced from that of the country, but it turned out that the landlord was just an amiable eccentric with a liking for foreigners. The next time I spent a night at his inn, he refused to charge at all.

Soon after breakfast Dr. Okamura arrived, flushed, hot, and out of breath, accompanied by a handsome boy, whom he introduced as his youngest son. They had started walking at five o'clock over the mountain from Goka, and it was now ten; but the boy immediately seized my luggage, weighed down with tins of provisions and bottles of liquor that I had brought for the family, and set out for home again with it. Taxis, said his father, were terribly expensive and apt to break down on the mountain roads; but for ourselves he had a plan.

Having said good-bye to the landlord and promised to come again, we took the train to Kanae, a few stations down the line, where there was a silk factory. It was a pleasant little concern, the hands being mostly the daughters of farmers in the neighbourhood, who produced the silkworms and were also the shareholders; and because of this family touch all ran very smoothly and everyone was contented. The directors entertained us with tea, bunches of tiny sweet grapes and pieces of apple, very juicy and cold, and impaled on sticks. They took us round the mill, explaining every step of the process as we went, and finally produced for our inspection length after length of silk, in garish colours, and of blatant check or stripe design. It was, they said, destined for the American PX, which provided the specification and fixed the price: the directors made no profit at all, and to recoup themselves they sold materials on the black market. I had often seen bales of this stuff in PXs up and down the country, together with good Fuji silk, strings of pearls from Mikimoto's fishery, porcelain, brocade, and lacquer, all at bazaar prices: as polite and democratic a way of looting a people as one could wish. I asked to see something which had been spun for the Japanese themselves, and they brought out a few good lengths, in quiet colours, of the rough silk used by farmers for their working clothes, and some very lovely and brilliant brocade for making obi. It was strange that craftsmen able to produce such fine things could also be persuaded to turn out the other and inferior ones. Where a European manufacturer of comparable standard might take a pride in his work and refuse to let anything leave the factory that he considered beneath it, the Japanese cheerfully supplied whatever people might ask for. It was not that they did not know, but that they did not care, not that they lacked either taste or integrity, but that they kept them in compartments separate from their commercial activities. If the foreigners wanted these shocking materials, by all means they should have them; they would never have used such things themselves, but they felt no shame in turning them out for others.

Dr. Okamura then said we must leave, as a long tiring walk lay ahead of us, and at this the directors went into hasty, muttered consultation. A battered vehicle, propelled by a charcoal-burning device, was summoned and we climbed into it, Dr. Okamura remarking with satisfaction: 'This is what I expected.' The visit to the factory had been planned in the hope that such would be its outcome, and as the gasping machine bore us up the steep winding roads to Goka, in a cloud of thick white dust, I felt that things had been very nicely arranged.

The house where Dr. Okamura spent his holidays belonged to Mr. Shiba, a cousin by marriage, who was a farmer. It was a large, roomy, comfortable dwelling with a beautifully curved roof and porch, standing on a slope about fifteen minutes walk from the village. The family had lived in it for four hundred years. An outlying wing connected by a winding passage to the main building had been given up to me, and into another was squeezed the professor and his wife, three sons and, temporarily; a married daughter and her little girl. Because this young woman spoke a little English, her father had sent for her, and she had made the long overnight journey with her small child in a crowded train from Nagoya, in order to explain certain small points of household geography and attend to small personal wants which might, he conceived, be a cause of embarrassment to me if dealt with by him: such is Japanese delicacy. And she had left her husband to manage for himself and had made, uncomplaining, this trying journey, because her parents wished it, such being the Japanese sense of filial obligations.

As soon as we had rested a little, and had some lunch, we walked down the fields to the little grassy plot where Mr. Shiba's ancestors were buried. The garden round the house was full of trees and flowers, grape myrtle, whose blossoms are redder and more vivid than the Japanese plum, hollyhocks, and gladioli, and the air was gay with huge, velvety butterflies, as in Karuizawa; and all round the garden lay the small fields and orchards of Mr. Shiba's farm. Before the war he had owned six ebo of land, which made him into quite a considerable farmer by Japanese standards; but, under the Land Reform, three ebo had been taken away and distributed among his tenants. In exchange the Government had given, or rather promised, him a sum of money amounting to a tenth or so of its value and less than would buy a cow. Of course, he said, cheerfully, as he showed us round, he was ruined. He still, however, kept a fine trim orchard of apple and pear trees, on which every fruit had been carefully tied in a separate bag of paper as a precaution against insects, some fields, and a cow. Each field gave him, with intensive manuring, four crops a year, two of rice, one of wheat, and one of vegetables. He was up two hours before the sun every morning and worked until after dusk. Now and again he would have to take ten minutes' rest, because he was suffering with appendicitis.

He said that at first the tenants had been in high feather over the Land Reform, especially as they could pay the nominal purchase price in tiny instalments over a number of years. When the first time they brought in a harvest which was all theirs, there was feasting and mirth for days on end. But they had not understood that in future they would be responsible for paying the rates and taxes. When the gatherers came, there was nothing for them, and the people ran to Mr. Shiba, as they always had done in times of perplexity, and begged him to take care of them. They became very indignant when he explained that he no longer had any responsibility in their affairs, and the murmur ran round the village that he was undemocratic.

'I am afraid there are Communists among these people,' said Dr. Okamura, shaking his head; and he told me how, a week or two earlier, two party members from the town of Iida had climbed the mountain-side and held a meeting in the village square. It had been poorly attended, but such a thing had never happened before, and the village elders had been very seriously put out.

'Do you not think Communism a terrible thing?' Mr. Shiba asked, addressing me.

I said its philosophy seemed trivial and its methods disgusting, but that I had nothing against its economic system as such.

'But would not Communism mean the end of progress for all mankind?' inquired Mr. Shiba magnificently. He was an engaging figure, with his kind, sensitive face, topped with a straw boater to keep the sun from his eyes, and his white kimono tucked up about his knees to save it from the mud in the paddy. I wondered a little what progress signified to him, whose life was spent in tilling the land in precisely the same way with the same tools as generation upon generation of his fathers had done before him; it was one of his favourite words.

'Communism is very bad,' the professor agreed, nodding. He was afraid of it, he told me, because its hierarchy and discipline would appeal more to the ignorant Japanese masses than would western democracy with the demands it made on the individual's intelligence. They had a passion for being governed: they loved to carry out, to the letter, orders received from above. In connection with this, he told a story of his grandfather, the chief retainer of a great daimyo. The daimyo had come to him one morning to say that there was a wolf in the castle grounds, and that he was to shoot it. His grandfather went at once to fetch a gun and, as he crossed the courtyard, there sat the wolf. He could have dispatched it then and there with his sword, but the daimyo had said it was to be shot; he proceeded, therefore, steadily on his way, and by the time he returned with the gun the wolf had disappeared, never to be seen again. Such was the attitude to authority in those days, and it had changed, and would change, very little.

The retainer's point of view struck me as very wholesome, and the fate of the wolf a small enough matter compared with the proper and decent feeling he had shown; but, when I explained this, my friend only shook his head and wearily sighed again. It was playing into the hands of the Communists, he seemed to think.

Every day we made excursions to the villages round. We would hear, by the grapevine, of a horse fair to be held here, a festival there, and we would start early in the morning and walk over the little terraced rice-fields and the winding mountain paths to the place where it was. The people would have learned of our approach by the same means, and would hurry out to spread tea and milk, pickled cherries and sliced tomatoes before us; and when it was time to leave, somehow or other they always managed to find a car to bring us home. The faces of these mountain peasants were interesting and full of character, very different from the smooth little dollies of the towns, and seemed to belong to another, more highly evolved and profounder race. They treated Dr. Okamura with great deference, and showed a frank and lively curiosity in me, pointing me out to each other, or creeping up and softly patting my arm or feeling the stuff of my dress.

Once we climbed up to where some repatriates from Manchuria were building a settlement. They had come from great wide farms, with rich earth that did not need the constant dunging that, if there are to be crops at all, has to be practised in Japan; they had been prosperous and content until the Russians invaded the country. Then they had all been herded into prison camps, their possessions taken from them and their houses looted by the Chinese. When at last they had reached home again, there was no land for them, since every available scrap was already under cultivation. The best the Government could do was to allow them to settle high up in the mountains and clear new fields for themselves in the forest as well as they might. They had built little wooden shacks and had begun clearing and tilling and now, in the second year, they were being rewarded by a few thin blades of wheat or stunted roots of sweet potato, struggling up through the stumps of trees, the mountain scrub and fern. In spite of the squalor in which they lived, and the discomforts of the weather, which baked them in summer and in winter pierced them to the marrow with freezing mountain winds, they were a gay little band; and there was nothing they liked better at any time than callers, whom they fed with slices of pink water-melon, while tenderly waving the flies from their heads with paper fans and entertaining them with stories of Manchuria and the Russians.

On one pretext or another, the village people would often drop in after the evening meal and chat for a while, stealthily observing the foreign guest so that they could carry back a good detailed description to their families. One old lady of ninety hobbled for a distance of seven miles to bring me a present of fermented bean paste. This paste is used in the preparation of the nauseous miso, or soup with slices of vegetable floating in it, with which every Japanese likes to begin his day. The smell alone destroys the appetite of anyone not brought up to it. Only that morning, Mrs. Okamura had shamefacedly announced that her store of the paste was at an end, and that in future we should have to manage without our morning bowl; and my heart had grown light within me. The old lady now explained, between bows, that the paste she had brought for us was particularly rich, having been left to ferment in the cask for three whole years. It is hard to do good in this world. I thanked her, and gave her a bar of soap, which she pressed fervently to her forehead before hobbling away into the darkness again.

Another and a charming visitor was a grizzled old farmer, nearly as broad as he was long, who came frequently and held the family spellbound with his racy anecdotes and village gossip. Dr. Okamura, an impressive figure as he knelt in the centre of the family circle in his dark grey kimono, merely shook in silent amusement, as the dignity of his position required, but the women clapped their hands over their mouths and the boys rolled about on the floor. It was this old man who somehow was always in a position to reveal how one farmer had got the better of another, or how the whole lot of them had got the better of the tax gatherers, or how the horse that had died the week before, allegedly from inflammation of the brain, had in fact been privily slaughtered because the owners were pining for a dish of meat. Once he broke into a grave discussion of trout fishing and the flies appropriate to the local streams with a jolly peal of laughter and the information that, as for him, when he wanted fish, he simply poisoned the river. In spite of his natural, easy manners, he was a modest old fellow, and would never venture to sit in the room among these cultured city people, but perched instead on the wooden step leading out into the garden; and it was only on the last evening of my visit that he could bring himself to ask a question, in the most delicate way, that had been teasing him ever since he had first set eyes on me. Was the foreign lady, he at last brought out, considered to be of average size in her own country? I told him that I was, and he groaned aloud, for the sheer wonder of it. Then he fell silent; his face became troubled and pensive. Finally, he said something in a low voice to the boys; he asked them to let me know that, although he was not big, he was very strong and could carry 40 kan on his back and walk all day.

One long, delightful summer evening passed another in this way. When the visitors had gone, the professor would show me his kakemono and scrolls, his fans and ivories; or he would talk about the world, China and her troubled state, the growing militarism of the Americans, the Russian advance in Asia, with the serene detachment of a scholar. He had a gentle, mellow wisdom that is not often encountered among the Japanese; they are sensitive and highly civilized and beautifully at one with the natural world, but they have an immaturity somewhere deep down, which prevents them from often achieving the inner calm and poise of, for instance, so many Chinese. Often he would ask about Europe, and I would describe to him places and people I had seen on a tour the year before. Once, in a discussion of Poland, I made a reference to the millions who had died in the German gas-ovens. He had never heard of them, nor of Belsen, nor Buchenwald, and he pressed me for details. How did they look? how did they work? and I told him as much as I knew, with shame and confusion, for while in Europe as a European one can look on the Germans as something separate and apart, out here in this little Japanese village, I knew, we were all lumped together as whites, as westerners. He was too polite to make any comment, but there was an uneasiness between us, and I could not help for a moment seeing our world through his eyes.

At the end of the evening, as the guest, I would have the privilege of using the bath before the others. It was a fat old wooden tub set up in a little cabin near the kitchen, beside a stall where lodged the family cow. She was a strangely placid animal, since she was never allowed to leave her quarters, even to go for a country walk, but lay there quietly all the year round, and stayed in milk for ten months at a time. As I steamed in the hot bath, the sound of her gentle, satisfied breathing came through the partition, and in time I grew very fond of her: she was a truly Japanese cow, giving all of her strength and being to duty and obligation. And after the bath I lay on the futon in the guest-chamber, watching the stars sparkle above the mountain-top and listening to the cuckoo, which sings by night in Japan just as the nightingale sings by day, or to the queer high notes, from some running stream near by, of a singing frog.

Sometimes we would go out to the houses of well-to-do farmers in the neighbourhood, who were friends of Mr. Shiba. He was at present basking in the double glory of having both a learned man and a foreign woman in his house; enjoying it greatly, he arranged parties all over the place. Across the valley there was a family living in a farmstead as ancient and as comfortable as his own: his younger brother had married the daughter and, because there were no sons, had taken her name in the Japanese way: and one afternoon we put on our best clothes and went to drink tea with them. It was hard to believe that we were in the house of a man who had spent his life working in the fields and had never left the village for more than a few weeks at a time. Everything in it, the low table round which we sat, the painted screens, the tea kettles, and the cups from which we drank, was chosen with care and arranged with the utmost simplicity and elegance. In no other country in the world would one find a farmhouse like it. The wife and daughter knelt to make and serve the tea according to the prescribed forms, the elder wearing pale colours and heavy, brocaded obi, the younger dressed in a robe the colour of the sky with all the flowers of the valley over it. The lowest place at table was occupied by the daughter's husband, formerly Shiba and now Hara, who seemed shy and awkward in his position, speaking little and waiting on everyone else; to be an adopted son, it was afterwards explained to me, is really a very disagreeable thing.

After tea we went on to the village school, where it had been decided I should give a talk, the thing above all others that I most dislike doing. The Japanese dearly love to be talked to; it is a little weakness of theirs, and there was no getting out of it without giving offence and dealing a blow to Mr. Shiba's prestige. Assembled in the hall were about thirty teachers, the mayor, the doctor, the silk expert, and other notables, and a number of the elder children, all sitting perfectly quiet and still, with wooden faces. Dr. Okamura rose up, and made an introductory speech in which I was paid a number of undeserved compliments and Mr. Shiba, to judge from the complacency of his expression, was not forgotten. I had written out a short address, and Dr. Okamura's daughter had been brooding over it, with knitted brows, for most of the day: she was to interpret a few sentences at a time as we went along, and she did very well, in spite of a nervousness caused by the occasion's solemnity and a sense of her own temerity, as a young woman, in opening her mouth before all these men. The only fault I could find with her performance was that she translated Austria as Australia throughout, giving rise, perhaps, to a momentary confusion in the minds of any who were closely following the speech. Our words were received in deep silence, and followed at the end by a rapid volley of questions, such as `What is Freedom?', `Criticize MacArthur', `Describe the land reform in Hungary', `Has Gide a great influence?' and this from the doctor, a Chekovian character with wild, dishevelled hair and an appalling squint `What would be best for mankind, on the whole and in the long run?'; and when at last we left the hall and the door closed behind us, a mighty roar of laughter went up from the entire gathering. Dr. Okamura maintained that it had all been a great success.

In this pleasant and diverting manner, the days flew swiftly by. I had taken the precaution of leaving no address with the Club, so that no cables asking urgently for news of Japan's cotton industry, or her plans in regard to shipping, could arrive to ruffle my calm and distract me from the contemplation of a little society at peace. The newspapers came several days late, and by us were never read: anything we wished to know, we found in ourselves. But it was too sane and happy a state of affairs to continue. Down below, far away, Tokyo waited. My pigeon-hole must be bursting with correspondence, hand-outs, invitations to parties, the Stars and Stripes and free, complimentary copies of The Reader's Digest. It scarcely bore thinking about. I saw in my mind's eye the long patient crocodiles of students and schoolchildren, lined up outside Radio Tokyo for their daily indoctrination; and thought of the busy gentle people up here in the mountains, where the earnest voice of the Education Officers was never heard, where the Japanese version of The Reader's Digest never penetrated, where all about one proclaimed its fee-yoodle nature and where, nevertheless, they seemed to be managing nicely. Sorrowfully, I packed up one afternoon and took leave of the family. The women stood under the trees under the porch, bowing and waving until we were out of sight, and the boys walked with me over the mountain to where the bus for Tenryuko was waiting. Away on the horizon were the towering blue peaks of the Japanese alps and, against their shadowy darkness, three bamboos stood out on a little hillock, bright yellow green in the evening sun. For the last time I passed the temple, the waterfall with the rock dedicated to the water god, the flat stones with the pious, heartfelt inscriptions—Amida is with us, the Lord Buddha is helping us—by the side of the narrow little path or halfhidden away in thickets and groves. Everything in the valley was quiet, breathing out the lovely tranquillity of the Buddhist spirit. I had had my wish, and seen a little corner of Japan that the west had never come to disturb; and, as the bus drove off, and the long journey back to the confused, tormented capital began, I hoped it never would.

Tracy, Honor. "Delectable Mountains." Ch. 16, Kakemono: A Sketch Book of Post-War Japan. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1950, 188-205.