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As we proceed rapidly down a slope, my kurumaya swerves to one side with a suddenness that gives me a violent start, for the road overlooks a sheer depth of several hundred feet. It is merely to avoid hurting a harmless snake making its way across the path. The snake is so little afraid that on reaching the edge of the road it turns its head to look after us.
There is no hotel; but I find hospitality in a fisherman's dwelling, while my kurumaya goes somewhere to hire a boat for Kaka-ura. In less than ten minutes there is a crowd of several hundred people about the house, half-clad adults and perfectly naked boys. They blockade the building; they obscure the light by filling up the doorways and climbing into the windows to look at the foreigner.
My kurumaya calls himself 'Cha. He has a white hat which looks like the top of an enormous mushroom; a short blue wide-sleeved jacket; blue drawers, close-fitting as 'tights, and reaching to his ankles; and light straw sandals bound upon his bare feet with cords of palmetto- fibre. Doubtless he typifies all the patience, endurance, and insidious coaxing powers of his class.
The beautiful miniature temples in some rich homes may justly excite admiration by their artistic structure and decoration; but the ten or thirteen cent miya, in the house of a labourer or a kurumaya, of plain white wood, truly represents that spirit of simplicity characterising the primitive religion.
But as the eyes grow accustomed to the gloaming it becomes manifest that these were never haka; they are only little towers of stone and pebbles deftly piled up by long and patient labour. 'Shinda kodomo no shigoto, my kurumaya murmurs with a compassionate smile; 'all this is the work of the dead children. And we disembark.
But no more familiar and forcible illustration of the fact can be cited than that which is furnished by the code of the kurumaya or jinrikisha-men. According to its terms, one runner must not attempt to pass by another going in the same direction.
But quite a number of the foreign residents of the open ports are pure Philistines, and never try to look below the surface of the life around them, except as hostile critics. My Yokohama friend who told me the story about the kurumaya was quite differently disposed: he recognised the error of judging by appearances.
In feudal times there were no kurumaya; but all craftsmen and all labourers formed guilds or companies; and the discipline maintained by those guilds or companies prohibited competition as undertaken for merely personal advantage.
Under no conceivable circumstances could any of them obtain employment as servants. Their prettiest girls in old times often became joro; but at no time could they enter a joroya in any neighboring city, much less in their own, so they were sold to establishments in remote places. A yama-no-mono to-day could not even become a kurumaya.
And within it, as one's eyes become accustomed to the gloom, a still larger vision of stone towers is disclosed; and beyond them, in a nook of the grotto, three other statues of Jizo smile, each one with a torii before it. Here I have the misfortune to upset first one stone- pile and then another, while trying to proceed. My kurumaya, almost simultaneously, ruins a third.
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