The next day (February 17), after passing, in the afternoon, some coal-mines, whence the neighborhood was supplied with fuel, they reached Kokura, capital of the province of Buzen, once a large town, but now much decayed. It had a large castle of freestone, with a few cannon and a tower of six stories, the usual sign of princely residences. A river passed through the town, crossed by a bridge near two hundred yards long, but it was too shallow to admit vessels of any size. At least one hundred small boats were drawn up on the banks. On leaving their inn where they had stopped to dine, the Dutch found the square in front of it, as well as the bridge, crowded with upwards of a thousand spectators, chiefly ordinary people, who had collected to see them, and who knelt in profound silence, without motion or noise. The distance of this place from Nagasaki was reckoned at fifty-five Japanese miles, and had consumed five days. [Illustration: IMAGE OF JIZŌ] Embarking in boats, the Dutch travellers crossed the strait which separates Shimo from Nippon, narrower here than anywhere else, less than three miles wide, though the town of Shimonoseki, which gives its name to the strait, being situated at the bottom of an inlet, is near twelve miles from Kokura. This town, in the province of Nagato, consisted of four or five hundred houses, built chiefly on both sides of one long street, with a few smaller ones terminating in it. It is full of shops for selling provisions and stores to the ships, which daily put in for shelter or supplies, and of which not less than two hundred were seen at anchor. It also had a temple to Amida, built to appease the ghost of a young prince of the family of Heishi, so celebrated in the legendary annals of the Japanese, whose nurse, with the boy in her arms, is said to have thrown herself headlong into the strait to avoid capture by his father’s enemies, at the time of the ruin of that family. The voyage from Shimonoseki to Ōsaka was reckoned at one hundred and thirty-four Japanese water-miles, and was made in six days, the vessel coming to anchor every night in good harbors, with which the coast abounds. This voyage lay first through the strait between Shimo and Nippon, and then through the strait or sea between Nippon and Shikoku, which was full of islands, some cultivated, others mere rocks. On the main land on either side snow-covered mountains were visible. The barge could proceed no further than Hyōgo, a city of the province Settsu, nearly as large as Nagasaki. Here the company embarked in small boats for Ōsaka. As they passed along they saw at a distance the imperial city of Sakai, three or four Japanese miles south from Ōsaka. The description of Ōsaka, and of the journey thence to Miyako, is thus given by Kämpfer: