A dive through a wooden archway between two tea-houses, where a ticket-hole and a wooden barrier composed the station, and we were there. The trams stood under the archway; the lines were lost in the black cindery mud--and they were both Japanese--the tram-lines, just rows of knitting-needles and laid very close together, the trams diminished by the national taste for the national needs to a little oblong box like a stunted bathing-machine. Our tram stood from ground to roof perhaps some five feet high. By taking off our hats we could just manage to sit down, and by judiciously fitting our knees into one another like elaborate dovetailing we got in width-ways, and we only got in at all by entering the door sideways. Fat people do not travel in Japanese trams--not unless they have a ladder and sit on the roof. The only way to insinuate luggage is to coax it through the window-frames, which, as there were only two to a side, were almost once and a half times the width of the door, not more. In the Fuji tramways pilgrims’ hats are not admitted. This is no prohibition. It is an impossibility, for the diameter of the pilgrim hat, which is twice as large as the largest halo, is equal in size to the width of the entire tram. So the pilgrims hang their huge circles of straw hats, like scooped-out orange halves, outside; and our tram before it started became a new kind of armoured train. In this dumpy bathing-box we had room for four a side. We took five and thought it empty; smiled at six; submitted to seven; where an eighth would have disposed himself I do not know, he would certainly have got in, but the puzzle would have been to have found a vacant cubic foot of space for his occupation. Trams are never full in Japan. There is always room for more, if the more arrive. In this case the more got in at a small junction outside the back lanes of Gotemba. They got in, three of them, and with huge bundles too. Then the conductor looked round inquiringly and smiled, whereupon two polite pilgrims of lighter build than the newcomers gave up their seats and wedged themselves into the window-frames, while the bundles were deposited on the continuous strata of passenger. What happened to the third I do not know. He got in. Then we started, really started, for there was no other halting-place, no village or station between here and Subashiri. Nothing but a broad, bare sweep of upward-tending common, where multitudes of wild flowers grew out of the cindery soil.