Japanese Villages Are Dark

1905

"Without having actually seen them, you cannot imagine how dark some Japanese country villages remain, even in the brightest and hottest weather. In the neighborhood of Tokyo itself there are many villages of the kind. At a short distance from such a settlement you see no houses; nothing is visible but a dense grove of evergreen trees.

The grove, which is usually composed of young cedars and bamboos, serves to shelter the village from storms, and also to supply timber for various purposes. So closely are the trees planted that there is no room to pass between the trunks of them; they stand straight as masts and mingle their crests so as to form a roof that excludes the sun. Each thatched cottage occupies a clear space in the plantation, the trees forming a fence about it, double the height of the building. Under the trees it is always twilight, even at high noon; and the houses, morning or evening, are half in shadow. What makes the first impression of such a village almost disquieting is not the transparent gloom, which has a certain weird charm of its own, but the stillness.

There may be fifty or a hundred dwellings; but you see nobody; and hear no sound but the twitter of invisible birds, the occasional crowing of cocks and the shrilling cicadae. Even the cicadae find these groves too dim and sing faintly; being sun lovers, they prefer the trees outside the village. I forgot to say that you may sometimes hear a viewless shuttle — chaka-ton, chaka-ton — but that familiar sound, in the great green silence, seems an elfish happening. The reason of the hush is simply that the people are not at home. All the adults have gone to the neighboring fields, the women carrying their babies on their backs; and most of the children have gone to the nearest school, perhaps not less than a mile away. — Atlantic Monthly.