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The amusing feature of the thing is that the owners of these time-pieces seem to have the vaguest ideas of what they are for. One clock on the wall of my yadoya indicates eleven o'clock, another half-past nine, and a third seven-fifteen as I pull out in the morning. Other clocks through the village street vary in similar degree.
The inn at which we lodge is very small, but very clean and cosy; and there is a delightful bath of natural hot water; for the yadoya is situated close to a natural spring. This spring, so strangely close to the sea beach, also furnishes, I am told, the baths of all the houses in the village.
A mile or two farther and my day's ride of forty-six miles terminates at the village of Saka-no-shita. A comfortable yadoya awaits me here, no better nor worse, however, than almost every Jap village affords; but on the Tokaido the innkeepers are more accustomed to European guests than they are south of Kobe.
Passing through the main streets of Ushidzu in search of the best yadoya, I am accosted by a middle-aged woman with, "Hello! you wanchee room? wanchee chow-chow." Her mother keeps a yadoya, she tells me, and leads the way thither, chatting gayly in pidgeon English, all the way.
Thirty miles from Yomoto, and Totsuka provides me a comfortable yadoya, where the people quickly show their knowledge of the foreigner's requirements by cooking a beefsteak with onions, also in the morning by charging the first really exorbitant price I have been confronted with along the Tokaido. Totsuka is within the treaty limits of Yokohama.
Every summer many European and American tourists journey between Yokohama and Kobe by jinrikisha. At this yadoya I first become acquainted with that peculiar institution of Japan, the blind shampooer. Seated in my little room, my attention is attracted by a man who approaches on hands and knees, and butts his shaven pate accidentally against the corner of the open panel that forms my door.
The following morning opens with a white frost, the road is level and good, and the yadoya people see that I am provided with a substantial breakfast in good season. My boots, I find, have been cleaned even. They were cleaned with a rag, O-hanna apologizing for the absence of shoe-brushes and blacking in pidgeon English: "Brush no have got."
Here I obtain passage on a little ferry-boat across to Shimonoseki, arriving there about two o'clock in the afternoon. A twenty-four hours' halt is made at Shimonoseki in deference to rainy weather. The landlady of the yadoya understands enough about European cookery to prepare me a very decent beefsteak and a pot of coffee.
Fish are cheaper and more plentiful here than anything else, and the old dame at the yadoya of a fishing village cooks me a big skate for supper, which makes first-rate eating, in spite of the black, malodorous sauce she uses so liberally in the cooking. In this room is a wonderful brass-bound cabinet, suggestive of soul-satisfying household idols and comfortable private worship.
The yadoya here is simply spotless from top to bottom; however the Japanese hotel-keeper manages to transact business and preserve such immaculate apartments is more of a puzzle every day. The regulation custom at a yadoya is for the newly arrived guest to take a scalding hot bath, and then squat beside a little brazier of coals, and smoke and chat till supper-time.
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