172 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



and as for blue eyes — if a Japanese, having never seen them, could 

 imagine them at all it would only be with horror. 



The people of Tanegashima are rather easy-going, and along the 

 coast are often poor and dirty, rather from indolence than lack of 

 opportunity. When not lounging idly they are at their fishing or sea- 

 weed gathering, or the women in their sweet-potato patches. All down 

 the rocky coast one sees ragged children playing, and naked men with 

 well-formed bodies of the color of bronze, working at their boats and 

 nets or swimming in the sea with baskets gathering edible sea-weed. 

 In the fields, too, the peasants work almost naked during the warm 

 days. The coast is one of rocks and pools and waves, of fish-nets spread 

 out to dry, of dirty fishing shanties, of coral walls surrounding the 

 yards, of salt-making paddies, and long reaches where nothing grows 

 but grass and shrubs and pines. 



Our wanderings took us along the coasts, across the island and 

 down its center, and afforded us many experiences and views that are 

 memorable. Toward the southern end we stayed one night at Kumano 

 Bay on the eastern coast, the place to which the foreign ship of Mendez 

 Pinto came first, and where lived the blacksmith Kiyosada who first 

 learned to manufacture firearms. Here there is a large inlet among the 

 hills that is filled with water only when the tide is in, where one 

 sees " now- horseback riders and now the white sails of boats " as one 

 Japanese writer quaintly puts it. We walked across the dry, flat floor 

 of the bay one evening on our way out to the seacoast to examine some 

 caves. Eeturning after dark we started across it and found it full of 

 water up to our waists. At every step we took, the disturbed bay 

 gleamed with phosphorescence in a circle all about us and made a fine 

 picture here in the valley of water between pine-crowned hills that stood 

 out even blacker than the night. Here where the landscape changes 

 with the tide is the holiest place in the island, and we had the pleasure 

 of spending the night with the priest of the Shinto shrine in an 

 exquisitely beautiful Japanese house that had just been built for him. 

 He lived alone, but called in a charming lady and her perfect little 

 daughter from the neighboring hamlet to prepare our food. The meals 

 were very simple, but neatly and daintily served, after the general plan 

 of the meal before described. The priest did not eat with us, but we 

 sat with him and talked for some time by the open fire that was burning 

 in a basin in the floor. The custom of having fires differs among the 

 Japanese. Usually in the hotels and private houses there is a wood fire 

 on the dirt floor or in a rough stove in the kitchen, and nothing but 

 braziers in the living rooms. But often also, in the country homes 

 especially, open flres burn in a round hearth in the center of the house. 

 There is never a chimney, and in the present case the rich new wood- 

 work of panel and ceiling was fast becoming blackened with smoke from 

 the tarry pine wood. 



