Under writings, you will find essays and poems that reveal aspects of straw sandals in the past and in the present:

1.  “Fuji-no-Yama” by Lafcadio Hearn.  This essay was originally published in a collection titled Exotics and Retrospectives. I read the Cosimo Classics version, which the publisher categorized under Philosophy.  For me this essay is fine travel writing that describes Hearn’s climb up Mount Fuji at the turn of the 19th century.  Many of the climbers were Shinto monks on pilgrimage.  They wore traditional Japanese straw sandals known as waraji.  Hearn tells about a hiker who made the climb wearing heavy wooden clogs called geta in Japan.  Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) has been described as a bohemian and a writer. He was a newpaper reporter in the United States prior to moving to Japan.

2.  “The Bright Red Bindings” is a piece that I wrote after returning from a trip to China and Japan in the fall of 2009.  It describes my encounter with a porter in the Wudangshan (Wudang mountains) in Hubei Province, PR China.  The porter was wearing straw sandals.  Instead of photographing the porter, I observed as much about the porter and his surroundings as a could in the brief moments during which my fellow travelers and I passed by him on the crowded steps leading down the mountain.  Later I wrote this essay and based on my description of the porter and his footwear, a very talented illustrator, Zanna Aristarhova, created the pencil drawing shown below.  She was able to re-create in remarkable detail my mental image of the porter’s sandals:

3.  “The Man with the Bast Shoes” is in a collection of legends and sagas entitled The Hero of Esthonia by W.F. Kirby, London, 1895, volume 2.  This version was copied from a website titled “Internet Sacred Text Archive”.

4.  I found this poem titled Affection of Children by Jicaishang on the Qingdao Haiyi Company website.  It accompanied an image of slippers virtually identical to C6 in the collection.