Glimpses of Japan and Formosa

My impression that Japan is only a little country after all somewhat evaporated during a visit to its slightly known northern island. This was no doubt partly due to the almost Oriental leisureliness of Japanese trains, and it is perhaps as much the long day's ride from Tokyo to the northern end of the main island as the uninviting aspect of the steamers which set one across to Hokkaido that causes the overwhelming majority of visitors to confine themselves to the well-beaten track from Nikko to Nagasaki and miss a region amply worth while.

Beyond beautiful Volcano Bay with its smoking cones lies quite another Japan, inconspicuous on the world map yet of a surprising vastness. Hakodate, the chief landing-place, burdened with that silly Japanese rule forbidding photography within modern cannon-shot of fortifications which the most slow-witted of spies could easily find some other means of picturing, calls for nothing more than the unavoidable halt of an hour or two. But on the long day's journey northward from there to Sapporo one's coming is already rewarded. Though May will soon be half gone, it is cold enough for an overcoat, and the Imperial Government Railways are still heating their trains. Low huts, with heavily thatched or rusty-tin roofs, held down by scores of stones that testify to the occasional violence of storms, hug the ground closely, in a way unknown in the main island. Instead of rice-fields, the rich black soil is given over mainly to corn and potatoes, corn shocked as it is in the United States, as weatherbeaten cones of it that have stood through the long, arduous winter still testify. Now and again the train rumbles for an hour or more along the very edge of this or that magnificent bay, through collections of miserable huts, with thatched fishing-boats and millions of herring split in two and hung on lines to dry in the sun, and millions more in heaps and bales ready for shipment. There is a genuine Japanese atmosphere, not to say scent, about these clusters of toilsome poverty, though certainly there is little of that cleanliness which the mind habitually associates with the Japanese.