2o6 CHALLENGER 



naval base; the wrecked shipyards and the giant graving docks, 

 then fouled with wreckage, bore witness to the former great- 

 ness of this port where Japan's largest battleships were once 

 built. 



Tom Gaskell, the inveterate sight-seer, was soon active in 

 Japan and he and the Captain crossed the Inland Sea in a local 

 ferry boat for a few days' holiday at the watering spa of Dogo, 

 near Matsuyama, the capital of the Island of Shikoku. Here they 

 lived in the luxury of a small Japanese hotel, being truly waited 

 upon hand and foot. The duty of one small girl was simply to turn 

 their slippers, discarded at the bedroom door, in a direction 

 suitable for stepping into when moving off again on leaving the 

 room. Each morning was spent in the hot sulphur bath, where 

 fellow bathers carried out their daily ablutions around the edges 

 of the tank which fell away so that the soapy water drained clear 

 of the bath and a fresh pannikin was taken from the bath itself, 

 and wherein a number of patrons were wallowing in the well- 

 nigh boiling water, constantly added to from a pipe jutting from 

 the side of the bath. Rest rooms were provided in the vicinity 

 of the baths where the bather could relax in a kimono, sipping 

 the small cups of tea and watching the coming and going in the 

 busy little shopping street which ran beneath the windows. 



Their evenings were enlivened by the company of geishas, sum- 

 moned as a matter of course from the local geisha house by the 

 hotel manager. The geisha's duty is to look attractive, tell stories, 

 play parlour games and assist her temporary employer to raise 

 his rice and sake to his mouth. How well established is the com- 

 fort of the male in Japan ! It would be pleasant indeed if, benighted 

 at the Railway Hotel in one of Britain's drearier Midland towns, 

 the traveller could summon a decorative companion and pay her 

 some trifling sum per hour to amuse him while he took his high 

 tea in the Commercial Room. 



The Emperor has a private bath at Dogo and this empty tank 

 the visitors were shown with considerable reverence by a tooth- 

 less old man who was in charge of it, guarding it and cleaning it 

 in readiness for the infrequent visits of his Emperor. 



One day Tom took a party with him to Hiroshima, where, from 

 the roof garden of a seven-storied departmental store which had 



