Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan

L >> Lafcadio Hearn >> Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan

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'Tomorrow,' Akira says, 'she will decorate this, and make the offerings
of food to the little one.'

Hanging from the ceiling, on the opposite side of the room, and in front
of the shrine, is a wonderful, charming, funny, white-and-rosy mask--
the face of a laughing, chubby girl with two mysterious spots upon her
forehead, the face of Otafuku. [2] It twirls round and round in the
soft air-current coming through the open shoji; and every time those
funny black eyes, half shut with laughter, look at me, I cannot help
smiling. And hanging still higher, I see little Shinto emblems of paper
(gohei), a miniature mitre-shaped cap in likeness of those worn in the
sacred dances, a pasteboard emblem of the magic gem (Nio-i hojiu) which
the gods bear in their hands, a small Japanese doll, and a little wind-
wheel which will spin around with the least puff of air, and other
indescribable toys, mostly symbolic, such as are sold on festal days in
the courts of the temples--the playthings of the dead child.

'Komban!' exclaims a very gentle voice behind us. The mother is standing
there, smiling as if pleased at the stranger's interest in her butsuma--
a middle-aged woman of the poorest class, not comely, but with a most
kindly face. We return her evening greeting; and while I sit down upon
the little mat laid before the hibachi, Akira whispers something to her,
with the result that a small kettle is at once set to boil over a very
small charcoal furnace. We are probably going to have some tea.

As Akira takes his seat before me, on the other side of the hibachi, I
ask him:

'What was the name I saw on the tablet?'

'The name which you saw,' he answers, 'was not the real name. The real
name is written upon the other side. After death another name is given
by the priest. A dead boy is called Ryochi Doji; a dead girl, Mioyo
Donyo.'

While we are speaking, the woman approaches the little shrine, opens it,
arranges the objects in it, lights the tiny lamp, and with joined hands
and bowed head begins to pray. Totally unembarrassed by our presence and
our chatter she seems, as one accustomed to do what is right and
beautiful heedless of human opinion; praying with that brave, true
frankness which belongs to the poor only of this world--those simple
souls who never have any secret to hide, either from each other or from
heaven, and of whom Ruskin nobly said, 'These are our holiest.' I do
not know what words her heart is murmuring: I hear only at moments that
soft sibilant sound, made by gently drawing the breath through the lips,
which among this kind people is a token of humblest desire to please.

As I watch the tender little rite, I become aware of something dimly
astir in the mystery of my own life--vaguely, indefinably familiar,
like a memory ancestral, like the revival of a sensation forgotten two
thousand years. Blended in some strange way it seems to be with my faint
knowledge of an elder world, whose household gods were also the beloved
dead; and there is a weird sweetness in this place, like a shadowing of
Lares.

Then, her brief prayer over, she turns to her miniature furnace again.
She talks and laughs with Akira; she prepares the tea, pours it out in
tiny cups and serves it to us, kneeling in that graceful attitude--
picturesque, traditional--which for six hundred years has been the
attitude of the Japanese woman serving tea. Verily, no small part of the
life of the woman of Japan is spent thus in serving little cups of tea.
Even as a ghost, she appears in popular prints offering to somebody
spectral tea-cups of spectral tea. Of all Japanese ghost-pictures, I
know of none more pathetic than that in which the phantom of a woman
kneeling humbly offers to her haunted and remorseful murderer a little
cup of tea!

'Now let us go to the Bon-ichi,' says Akira, rising; 'she must go there
herself soon, and it is already getting dark. Sayonara!'

It is indeed almost dark as we leave the little house: stars are
pointing in the strip of sky above the street; but it is a beautiful
night for a walk, with a tepid breeze blowing at intervals, and sending
long flutterings through the miles of shop draperies. The market is in
the narrow street at the verge of the city, just below the hill where
the great Buddhist temple of Zoto-Kuin stands--in the Motomachi, only
ten squares away.

5

The curious narrow street is one long blaze of lights--lights of
lantern signs, lights of torches and lamps illuminating unfamiliar rows
of little stands and booths set out in the thoroughfare before all the
shop-fronts on each side; making two far-converging lines of multi-
coloured fire. Between these moves a dense throng, filling the night
with a clatter of geta that drowns even the tide-like murmuring of
voices and the cries of the merchant. But how gentle the movement!-
there is no jostling, no rudeness; everybody, even the weakest and
smallest, has a chance to see everything; and there are many things to
see.

'Hasu-no-hana!--hasu-no-hana!' Here are the venders of lotus-flowers
for the tombs and the altars, of lotus leaves in which to wrap the food
of the beloved ghosts. The leaves, folded into bundles, are heaped upon
tiny tables; the lotus-flowers, buds and blossoms intermingled, are
fixed upright in immense bunches, supported by light frames of bamboo.

'Ogara!--ogara-ya! White sheaves of long peeled rods. These are hemp-
sticks. The thinner ends can be broken up into hashi for the use of the
ghosts; the rest must be consumed in the mukaebi. Rightly all these
sticks should be made of pine; but pine is too scarce and dear for the
poor folk of this district, so the ogara are substituted.

'Kawarake!--kawarake-ya!' The dishes of the ghosts: small red shallow
platters of unglazed earthenware; primeval pottery suku-makemasu!' Eh!
what is all this? A little booth shaped like a sentry-box, all made of
laths, covered with a red-and-white chess pattern of paper; and out of
this frail structure issues a shrilling keen as the sound of leaking
steam. 'Oh, that is only insects,' says Akira, laughing; 'nothing to do
with the Bonku.' Insects, yes!--in cages! The shrilling is made by
scores of huge green crickets, each prisoned in a tiny bamboo cage by
itself. 'They are fed with eggplant and melon rind,' continues Akira,
'and sold to children to play with.' And there are also beautiful little
cages full of fireflies--cages covered with brown mosquito-netting,
upon each of which some simple but very pretty design in bright colours
has been dashed by a Japanese brush. One cricket and cage, two cents.
Fifteen fireflies and cage, five cents.

Here on a street corner squats a blue-robed boy behind a low wooden
table, selling wooden boxes about as big as match-boxes, with red paper
hinges. Beside the piles of these little boxes on the table are shallow
dishes filled with clear water, in which extraordinary thin flat shapes
are floating--shapes of flowers, trees, birds, boats, men, and women.
Open a box; it costs only two cents. Inside, wrapped in tissue paper,
are bundles of little pale sticks, like round match-sticks, with pink
ends. Drop one into the water, it instantly unrolls and expands into the
likeness of a lotus-flower. Another transforms itself into a fish. A
third becomes a boat. A fourth changes to an owl. A fifth becomes a tea-
plant, covered with leaves and blossoms. . . . So delicate are these
things that, once immersed, you cannot handle them without breaking
them. They are made of seaweed.

'Tsukuri hana!--tsukuri-hana-wa-irimasenka?' The sellers of artificial
flowers, marvellous chrysanthemums and lotus-plants of paper, imitations
of bud and leaf and flower so cunningly wrought that the eye alone
cannot detect the beautiful trickery. It is only right that these should
cost much more than their living counterparts.

6

High above the thronging and the clamour and the myriad fires of the
merchants, the great Shingon temple at the end of the radiant street
towers upon its hill against the starry night, weirdly, like a dream--
strangely illuminated by rows of paper lanterns hung all along its
curving eaves; and the flowing of the crowd bears me thither. Out of the
broad entrance, over a dark gliding mass which I know to be heads and
shoulders of crowding worshippers, beams a broad band of yellow light;
and before reaching the lion-guarded steps I hear the continuous
clanging of the temple gong, each clang the signal of an offering and a
prayer. Doubtless a cataract of cash is pouring into the great alms-
chest; for to-night is the Festival of Yakushi-Nyorai, the Physician of
Souls. Borne to the steps at last, I find myself able to halt a moment,
despite the pressure of the throng, before the stand of a lantern-seller
selling the most beautiful lanterns that I have ever seen. Each is a
gigantic lotus-flower of paper, so perfectly made in every detail as to
seem a great living blossom freshly plucked; the petals are crimson at
their bases, paling to white at their tips; the calyx is a faultless
mimicry of nature, and beneath it hangs a beautiful fringe of paper
cuttings, coloured with the colours of the flower, green below the
calyx, white in the middle, crimson at the ends. In the heart of the
blossom is set a microscopic oil-lamp of baked clay; and this being
lighted, all the flower becomes luminous, diaphanous--a lotus of white
and crimson fire. There is a slender gilded wooden hoop by which to hang
it up, and the price is four cents! How can people afford to make such
things for four cents, even in this country of astounding cheapness?

Akira is trying to tell me something about the hyaku-hachino-mukaebi,
the Hundred and Eight Fires, to be lighted to-morrow evening, which bear
some figurative relation unto the Hundred and Eight Foolish Desires; but
I cannot hear him for the clatter of the geta and the komageta, the
wooden clogs and wooden sandals of the worshippers ascending to the
shrine of Yakushi-Nyorai. The light straw sandals of the poorer men, the
zori and the waraji, are silent; the great clatter is really made by the
delicate feet of women and girls, balancing themselves carefully upon
their noisy geta. And most of these little feet are clad with spotless
tabi, white as a white lotus. White feet of little blue-robed mothers
they mostly are--mothers climbing patiently and smilingly, with pretty
placid babies at their backs, up the hill to Buddha.

And while through the tinted lantern light I wander on with the gentle
noisy people, up the great steps of stone, between other displays of
lotus-blossoms, between other high hedgerows of paper flowers, my
thought suddenly goes back to the little broken shrine in the poor
woman's room, with the humble playthings hanging before it, and the
laughing, twirling mask of Otafuku. I see the happy, funny little eyes,
oblique and silky-shadowed like Otafuku's own, which used to look at
those toys,--toys in which the fresh child-senses found a charm that I
can but faintly divine, a delight hereditary, ancestral. I see the
tender little creature being borne, as it was doubtless borne many
times, through just such a peaceful throng as this, in just such a
lukewarm, luminous night, peeping over the mother's shoulder, softly
clinging at her neck with tiny hands.

Somewhere among this multitude she is--the mother. She will feel again
to-night the faint touch of little hands, yet will not turn her head to
look and laugh, as in other days.

Chapter Six
Bon-odori

1

Over the mountains to Izumo, the land of the Kamiyo, [1] the land of the
Ancient Gods. A journey of four days by kuruma, with strong runners,
from the Pacific to the Sea of Japan; for we have taken the longest and
least frequented route.

Through valleys most of this long route lies, valleys always open to
higher valleys, while the road ascends, valleys between mountains with
rice-fields ascending their slopes by successions of diked terraces
which look like enormous green flights of steps. Above them are
shadowing sombre forests of cedar and pine; and above these wooded
summits loom indigo shapes of farther hills overtopped by peaked
silhouettes of vapoury grey. The air is lukewarm and windless; and
distances are gauzed by delicate mists; and in this tenderest of blue
skies, this Japanese sky which always seems to me loftier than any other
sky which I ever saw, there are only, day after day, some few filmy,
spectral, diaphanous white wandering things: like ghosts of clouds,
riding on the wind.

But sometimes, as the road ascends, the rice-.fields disappear a while:
fields of barley and of indigo, and of rye and of cotton, fringe the
route for a little space; and then it plunges into forest shadows. Above
all else, the forests of cedar sometimes bordering the way are
astonishments; never outside of the tropics did I see any growths
comparable for density and perpendicularity with these. Every trunk is
straight and bare as a pillar: the whole front presents the spectacle of
an immeasurable massing of pallid columns towering up into a cloud of
sombre foliage so dense that one can distinguish nothing overhead but
branchings lost in shadow. And the profundities beyond the rare gaps in
the palisade of blanched trunks are night-black, as in Dore's pictures
of fir woods.

No more great towns; only thatched villages nestling in the folds of the
hills, each with its Buddhist temple, lifting a tilted roof of blue-grey
tiles above the congregation of thatched homesteads, and its miya, or
Shinto shrine, with a torii before it like a great ideograph shaped in
stone or wood. But Buddhism still dominates; every hilltop has its tera;
and the statues of Buddhas or of Bodhisattvas appear by the roadside, as
we travel on, with the regularity of milestones. Often a village tera is
so large that the cottages of the rustic folk about it seem like little
out-houses; and the traveller wonders how so costly an edifice of prayer
can be supported by a community so humble. And everywhere the signs of
the gentle faith appear: its ideographs and symbols are chiselled upon
the faces of the rocks; its icons smile upon you from every shadowy
recess by the way; even the very landscape betimes would seem to have
been moulded by the soul of it, where hills rise softly as a prayer. And
the summits of some are domed like the head of Shaka, and the dark bossy
frondage that clothes them might seem the clustering of his curls.

But gradually, with the passing of the days, as we journey into the
loftier west, I see fewer and fewer tera. Such Buddhist temples as we
pass appear small and poor; and the wayside images become rarer and
rarer. But the symbols of Shinto are more numerous, and the structure of
its miya larger and loftier. And the torii are visible everywhere, and
tower higher, before the approaches to villages, before the entrances of
courts guarded by strangely grotesque lions and foxes of stone, and
before stairways of old mossed rock, upsloping, between dense growths of
ancient cedar and pine, to shrines that moulder in the twilight of holy
groves.

At one little village I see, just beyond, the torii leading to a great
Shinto temple, a particularly odd small shrine, and feel impelled by
curiosity to examine it. Leaning against its closed doors are many short
gnarled sticks in a row, miniature clubs. Irreverently removing these,
and opening the little doors, Akira bids me look within. I see only a
mask--the mask of a goblin, a Tengu, grotesque beyond description,
with an enormous nose--so grotesque that I feel remorse for having
looked at it.

The sticks are votive offerings. By dedicating one to the shrine, it is
believed that the Tengu may be induced to drive one's enemies away.
Goblin-shaped though they appear in all Japanese paintings and carvings
of them, the Tengu-Sama are divinities, lesser divinities, lords of the
art of fencing and the use of all weapons.

And other changes gradually become manifest. Akira complains that he can
no longer understand the language of the people. We are traversing
regions of dialects. The houses are also architecturally different from
those of the country-folk of the north-east; their high thatched roofs
are curiously decorated with bundles of straw fastened to a pole of
bamboo parallel with the roof-ridge, and elevated about a foot above it.
The complexion of the peasantry is darker than in the north-east; and I
see no more of those charming rosy faces one observes among the women of
the Tokyo districts. And the peasants wear different hats, hats pointed
like the straw roofs of those little wayside temples curiously enough
called an (which means a straw hat).

The weather is more than warm, rendering clothing oppressive; and as we
pass through the little villages along the road, I see much healthy
cleanly nudity: pretty naked children; brown men and boys with only a
soft narrow white cloth about their loins, asleep on the matted floors,
all the paper screens of the houses having been removed to admit the
breeze. The men seem to be lightly and supply built; but I see no
saliency of muscles; the lines of the figure are always smooth. Before
almost every dwelling, indigo, spread out upon little mats of rice
straw, may be seen drying in the sun.

The country-folk gaze wonderingly at the foreigner. At various places
where we halt, old men approach to touch my clothes, apologising with
humble bows and winning smiles for their very natural curiosity, and
asking my interpreter all sorts of odd questions. Gentler and kindlier
faces I never beheld; and they reflect the souls behind them; never yet
have I heard a voice raised in anger, nor observed an unkindly act.

And each day, as we travel, the country becomes more beautiful--
beautiful with that fantasticality of landscape only to be found in
volcanic lands. But for the dark forests of cedar and pine, and this far
faint dreamy sky, and the soft whiteness of the light, there are moments
of our journey when I could fancy myself again in the West Indies,
ascending some winding way over the mornes of Dominica or of Martinique.
And, indeed, I find myself sometimes looking against the horizon glow
for shapes of palms and ceibas. But the brighter green of the valleys
and of the mountain-slopes beneath the woods is not the green of young
cane, but of rice-fields--thousands upon thousands of tiny rice-fields
no larger than cottage gardens, separated from each other by narrow
serpentine dikes.

2

In the very heart of a mountain range, while rolling along the verge of
a precipice above rice-fields, I catch sight of a little shrine in a
cavity of the cliff overhanging the way, and halt to examine it. The
sides and sloping roof of the shrine are formed by slabs of unhewn rock.
Within smiles a rudely chiselled image of Bato-Kwannon--Kwannon-with-
the-Horse's-Head--and before it bunches of wild flowers have been
placed, and an earthen incense-cup, and scattered offerings of dry rice.
Contrary to the idea suggested by the strange name, this form of Kwannon
is not horse-headed; but the head of a horse is sculptured upon the
tiara worn by the divinity. And the symbolism is fully explained by a
large wooden sotoba planted beside the shrine, and bearing, among other
inscriptions, the words, 'Bato Kwan-ze-on Bosatsu, giu ba bodai han ye.'
For Bato-Kwannon protects the horses and the cattle of the peasant; and
he prays her not only that his dumb servants may be preserved from
sickness, but also that their spirits may enter after death, into a
happier state of existence. Near the sotoba there has been erected a
wooden framework about four feet square, filled with little tablets of
pine set edge to edge so as to form one smooth surface; and on these are
written, in rows of hundreds, the names of all who subscribed for the
statue and its shrine. The number announced is ten thousand. But the
whole cost could not have exceeded ten Japanese dollars (yen); wherefore
I surmise that each subscriber gave not more than one rin--one tenth
of one sen, or cent. For the hyakusho are unspeakably poor. [2]

In the midst of these mountain solitudes, the discovery of that little
shrine creates a delightful sense of security. Surely nothing save
goodness can be expected from a people gentle-hearted enough to pray for
the souls of their horses and cows. [3]

As we proceed rapidly down a slope, my kurumaya swerves to one side with
a suddenness that gives me a violent start, for the road overlooks a
sheer depth of several hundred feet. It is merely to avoid hurting a
harmless snake making its way across the path. The snake is so little
afraid that on reaching the edge of the road it turns its head to look
after us.

3

And now strange signs begin to appear in all these rice-fields: I see
everywhere, sticking up above the ripening grain, objects like white-
feathered arrows. Arrows of prayer! I take one up to examine it. The
shaft is a thin bamboo, split down for about one-third of its length;
into the slit a strip of strong white paper with ideographs upon it--an
ofuda, a Shinto charm--is inserted; and the separated ends of the cane
are then rejoined and tied together just above it. The whole, at a
little distance, has exactly the appearance of a long, light, well-
feathered arrow. That which I first examine bears the words, 'Yu-Asaki-
]inja-kozen-son-chu-an-zen' (From the God whose shrine is before the
Village of Peace). Another reads, 'Mihojinja-sho-gwan-jo-ju-go-kito-
shugo,' signifying that the Deity of the temple Miho-jinja granteth
fully every supplication made unto him. Everywhere, as we proceed, I see
the white arrows of prayer glimmering above the green level of the
grain; and always they become more numerous. Far as the eye can reach
the fields are sprinkled with them, so that they make upon the verdant
surface a white speckling as of flowers.

Sometimes, also, around a little rice-field, I see a sort of magical
fence, formed by little bamboo rods supporting a long cord from which
long straws hang down, like a fringe, and paper cuttings, which are
symbols (gohei) are suspended at regular intervals. This is the
shimenawa, sacred emblem of Shinto. Within the consecrated space
inclosed by it no blight may enter--no scorching sun wither the young
shoots. And where the white arrows glimmer the locust shall not prevail,
nor shall hungry birds do evil.

But now I look in vain for the Buddhas. No more great tera, no Shaka, no
Amida, no Dai-Nichi-Nyorai; even the Bosatsu have been left behind.
Kwannon and her holy kin have disappeared; Koshin, Lord of Roads, is
indeed yet with us; but he has changed his name and become a Shinto
deity: he is now Saruda-hiko-no-mikoto; and his presence is revealed
only by the statues of the Three Mystic Apes which are his servants-

Mizaru, who sees no evil, covering his eyes with his hands, Kikazaru,
who hears no evil, covering his ears with his hands. Iwazaru, who speaks
no evil, covering his mouth with his hands.

Yet no! one Bosatsu survives in this atmosphere of magical Shinto: still
by the roadside I see at long intervals the image of Jizo-Sama, the
charming playfellow of dead children. But Jizo also is a little changed;
even in his sextuple representation, [4] the Roku-Jizo, he appears not
standing, but seated upon his lotus-flower, and I see no stones piled up
before him, as in the eastern provinces.

4

At last, from the verge of an enormous ridge, the roadway suddenly
slopes down into a vista of high peaked roofs of thatch and green-mossed
eaves--into a village like a coloured print out of old Hiroshige's
picture-books, a village with all its tints and colours precisely like
the tints and colours of the landscape in which it lies. This is Kami-
Ichi, in the land of Hoki.

We halt before a quiet, dingy little inn, whose host, a very aged man,
comes forth to salute me; while a silent, gentle crowd of villagers,
mostly children and women, gather about the kuruma to see the stranger,
to wonder at him, even to touch his clothes with timid smiling
curiosity. One glance at the face of the old innkeeper decides me to
accept his invitation. I must remain here until to-morrow: my runners
are too wearied to go farther to-night.

Weather-worn as the little inn seemed without, it is delightful within.
Its polished stairway and balconies are speckless, reflecting like
mirror-surfaces the bare feet of the maid-servants; its luminous rooms
are fresh and sweet-smelling as when their soft mattings were first laid
down. The carven pillars of the alcove (toko) in my chamber, leaves and
flowers chiselled in some black rich wood, are wonders; and the kakemono
or scroll-picture hanging there is an idyll, Hotei, God of Happiness,
drifting in a bark down some shadowy stream into evening mysteries of
vapoury purple. Far as this hamlet is from all art-centres, there is no
object visible in the house which does not reveal the Japanese sense of
beauty in form. The old gold-flowered lacquer-ware, the astonishing box
in which sweetmeats (kwashi) are kept, the diaphanous porcelain wine-
cups dashed with a single tiny gold figure of a leaping shrimp, the tea-
cup holders which are curled lotus-leaves of bronze, even the iron
kettle with its figurings of dragons and clouds, and the brazen hibachi
whose handles are heads of Buddhist lions, delight the eye and surprise
the fancy. Indeed, wherever to-day in Japan one sees something totally
uninteresting in porcelain or metal, something commonplace and ugly, one
may be almost sure that detestable something has been shaped under
foreign influence. But here I am in ancient Japan; probably no European
eyes ever looked upon these things before.

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