Explore "Jinrikisha Days in Japan" by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Great once was Shidzuoka, which now is only a busy commercial town of an agricultural province. The old castle has been razed, its martial quadrangle is a wheat field; and the massive walls, the creeping and overhanging pine-trees and deep moats are the only feudal relics. Keiki, the last of the Tokugawa Shoguns, lived in a black walled enclosure beyond the outer moat, but the modern spirit paid no heed to his existence, and his death, in 1883, was hardly an incident in the routine of its commercial progress.
The great Shinto temple at the edge of the town is famous for the dragons in its ceiling. The old priest welcomed us with smiles, led us in, shoeless, over the mats, and bade us look up, first at the Dragon of the Four Quarters, and then at the Dragon of the Eight Quarters, the eyes of the monster strangely meeting ours, as we changed our various points of view.