Part 13

Alas! the pagan mountain-god, who when he speaks will fulminate in fire and ashes, has been dumb for more than a hundred years. He allows the preachers of an alien creed to fill their lungs with his life-giving air; he knows that their ingratitude will take the form of denying his divinity. “And yet God has not said a word.”

From Karuizawa, without breaking the journey at Ueda or Nagano, we advanced more quickly to lower ground, until the rapid torrent of Sekigawa, which divides the provinces of Shinshu and Echigo, arrested our attention and signified the nearness of our destination. Leaving the railway at the little station of Taguchi, we ascended in rickshaws the zigzag path which conducts the pious to the sacred summit of Myōkō-zan. This mountain, on which snowy patches still defied the August sun, is only one hundred feet lower than Asama-yama, if the alleged height, 8180 feet, may be considered accurate. On the north-eastern slope of this easily-climbed volcano lies the hamlet of Akakura, from which rich plains stretch smoothly to the sea. On clear days the island of Sado is dimly visible. Hither come the farmers and traders of the western villages and towns, bringing sometimes their own provisions and demanding only sleeping accommodation. The chief hotel, one-sixth of the size of Kindayu’s, possessed a bath of its own, in which a dozen persons could bathe, but in all the others the guests paid a small fee to use the public baths, which dignified the single street with all the glory of carven cornice and stained glass. No other Europeans invaded this unfashionable spa, whose boiling springs, pellucid and blue, are credited by the peasantry with marvellous curative virtue. Foreign food is not to be procured, but we supplemented the rice and millet with tinned meat and stewed fruit. Thus fortified, we found no great difficulty in renouncing the more highly civilised distractions of Ikao.

Geisha, dramatic reciters, jugglers, and itinerant musicians never reach such solitary heights. But, happily for us, the _Bon-Odori_, those antique dances, which should have been danced on All Souls’ Day by the modernised Ikao folk, began in this neighbourhood two nights after our arrival. The landlord requested a contribution of forty _sen_ (about fourpence), which we readily doubled, for the benefit of the performers. Then ensued a long wait, for, if Japanese city-people are dilatory, no adjective exists which could do justice to the country-people’s contempt for celerity. Always accurate, Murray very properly translates _tadaima_ (immediately) by “anytime between now and Christmas.” First one lantern entered the courtyard; after half-an-hour, another; one by one the young men and maidens assembled; forty minutes more elapsed before the musicians could be induced to appear: at last a flute-player and a drummer squatted on a mat in the centre, while the dancers circled slowly about them. Youths and girls wore a blue kerchief tied round the temples: they revolved, as in a game of “Follow my leader,” without ever touching hands; two steps forward, a half-turn, two steps back, and at irregular intervals a clapping of hands. Such was the simple measure. But the waving of arms and the graceful free gestures of these rustic _coryphées_ were only less effective than the strange chanting, which rose or sank in volume as the number of participants increased or fell away. And what do you suppose they sang? Something in the following vein, one might imagine:

“While we loudly dance and sing, Spirits of our dead return, Guided, where the lanterns burn; In the houses they will find Rice and water left behind; Then sail in boats of straw away, Until next _Bon-Odori_ day. Peasants, come and join the ring!”

Lines like these might emanate from an Arcadian singer of Fleet Street, but the daughters of Akakura must have lost all sense of the solemn festival they were affecting to celebrate. What they sang was this:

“My lad is handsome, My lad is comely; He has no money; Sad is my heart.”

And again:

“Only to meet thee Troubled my heart is; When the dance ends, I Ask to be thine.”

For custom in those parts has gradually established the right of Love to oust Death from his old prerogative. Dancing enables the lovers to find each other more easily than at other times. Courtship is the recognised sequel of the August revels so eagerly anticipated, so long remembered. The love-sick maiden is the first to avow her passion, as little girls choose their partners at a London party. Perhaps the gentle neglected ghosts bear no resentment, but are consoled by the hope that one day it will be their turn to live again as happily as these their descendants.

Acquaintances were not as easily made in Akakura as in Ikao. The Kogakurō, as our hotel was called, contained but few other guests, and we occupied the two bedrooms which formed a sort of annexe, apart from the rest of the building. In the public baths at certain hours one was sure of meeting from twenty to thirty bathers of all ages and either sex, but they were extremely timid, kept silence when we entered, and did not respond to friendly overtures, so that we ceased to intrude upon their privacy. One old man, however, was very fond of calling and cross-examining the strangers. He had been a _samurai_, and at the age of seventy-six retained full vigour of mind and body. I should have given him ten years less. The landlord expressed his opinion that this visitor was a Government spy, and cautioned us against talking too freely. But, as it happened, the caution was superfluous, for the dignified old fellow spoke in such queer dialect that I could understand very few of his remarks, and conversation soon lapsed into an interchange of bows and smiles. Only one other circumstance occurred in the Kogakurō during the fortnight we spent there, to excite interest. One morning we found the cheery little landlord very depressed because a fraudulent guest had decamped during the night without paying his bill. Of course, he had only to shoot aside the wooden shutters, and the further feat of “shooting the moon” presented no difficulty.

In this dearth of human subjects to study we acquired a habit of making daily expeditions to neighbouring localities, and were often repaid by beautiful sights. Within two hours’ walking distance lies the lake of Nogiri, which is larger than Lake Haruna, but not so prettily environed. On a densely wooded islet stands a temple of Benten, “the goddess of luck, eloquence, and fertility,” to which we were ferried across by an obliging schoolboy. Before it stand two immense cedars, of which one boasts a girth of twenty-seven feet. A long flight of steps leads from the shore of the island to the shrine, and, viewed from the summit of the steps, the belt of mountains which rim the horizon amply rewards the climber. Except for this view, however, Nogiri is in itself an ordinary unromantic piece of water.

Far more exceptional is the important town of Takata, several hundred feet below the level of Taguchi, from which the railway descends a steep valley between mountain walls precipitously grand. Thousands of feet above snow is surmised, waterfalls are conjectured, but between them and the crawling train push masses of impenetrable forest. Passing Arai, with its petroleum springs, we reach flatter ground and enter Takata, once the castle town of the Sakakibara family, which shared with three others the privilege of providing a regent during the minority of a Tokugawa Shōgun. Traces of its old magnificence and of the Tokugawa patronage exist in a whole suburb of Buddhist temples, adorned in many cases with the Shōgun’s crest. They are large, richly ornamented with good carving, and approached by avenues of cryptomeria. Since the Restoration and the Shintōist reaction the fame of the Takata temples has decreased, but their splendour is only to be eclipsed in that part of the country by the celebrated Zenkōji at Nagano. At the back of one row of these temples runs a stream, spanned by as many little bridges. I never expected to see the college “backs” of Cambridge so admirably parodied.

The railway line is here the dividing-line between sacred and profane. To the left of it the Buddhist monks traffic in holy wares; to the right cotton and cotton-cloth and a species of muslin peculiar to the place compose the stock-in-trade of half the shopkeepers. The latter reside in homogeneous batches, as in feudal times: all the mercers in one part, all the curio-dealers in another, and so on. But the most curious feature in the town is the wooden projecting roof conterminous with the street on either side, which enables the pedestrian to perambulate the main thoroughfare under shelter of an arcade. These are not found in the eastern or central provinces, and have been adopted on account of heavy snow-drifts, which in winter render the roads impassable. We had cause to be grateful for this Echigo custom, as it enabled us to explore the town without being drenched by a heavy, inopportune shower.

Our longest excursion was to Naoetsu, a rising sea-port at the mouth of the Sekigawa and the present terminus of the Tōkyō and Karuizawa line. Though it has long been a port of call for steamers which ply on the western coast, it presented the appearance of a new, unfinished town. Two months before a disastrous fire had consumed three-fourths of the houses, which were rising phœnix-like from the charred relics of their own _débris_. But fires are so common in these flimsy, inflammable habitations that one ends by regarding them as inevitable, as instruments of the universal law of reincarnation, which applies equally to men and to the works of men’s hands. Every twenty years the two great temples of Ise are demolished and reconstructed as antique ordinance requires. Humbler buildings cannot expect to escape the fiat of periodic resurrection. There is, however, little of interest at Naoetsu, unless it be the hardy fisher-folk and field-labourers. We drove to a fine temple of Kwannon and some tea-houses surrounded by tasteful gardens overlooking the sea. But we had seen their analogues before: never had we seen in Japan, except in the case of the wrestlers, such sturdy human frames as these men and women of Echigo display. Husband and wife, naked to the waist, strain beneath a common yoke and draw ponderous carts to market. Their bronzed busts and blue cotton _hakama_ make grateful patches of colour between the hot sky and dusty road. My photographic friend could not resist the chance of “taking” an Amazonian mother disdainfully recumbent on bent elbow and suckling her child. As she lay supine and heavy-featured, she resembled a Beaudelairian giantess in

“The deep division of prodigious breasts The solemn slope of mighty limbs asleep.”

Could she really be of the same race as the fragile, geisha-fairies of the Myako-odori? Her photograph had better claim perhaps to the title of _miyage_ than the crystal and jade _kakemono_ weights, which we bought from a specious hawker on the cliffs. He who would conform to Japanese etiquette, with its charming code of trifling generosities, is sorely perturbed by this problem of _miyage_. The dictionary defines it clearly enough: “_A present made by one returning home from a journey, or by one coming from another place--generally of some rare or curious production of another place._” Now, I was perpetually “coming from another place,” and the search before I left it for “some rare or curious production,” which would serve as a present for Ashikaga or Tōkyō friends, baffled at times even my insatiable curiosity. The hawker’s streaked pebbles were pretty enough as pledges of transitory kindness, but the souvenirs most vividly stamped on the tablets of remembrance by the glaring sunlight of Naoetsu in August show a vision of brown sea-goddesses against a turquoise sea.

III

The last lotus had shed its stately coronal of broad petals before our short stay at Akakura came to an end: business detained us in the capital throughout the September rains; when we determined to take the waters of Dōgō October was well advanced, and the hills were already flushed with reddening maple-leaves. As we sat on “the bridge that is joined to heaven” and gazed into the maple-lined ravine, which is crossed and crowned by the monastery of Tōfukuji, we seemed to be watching the slow sepulture of that lingering summer beneath a pall of fiery foliage. Yet we knew that, though there on the hills around Kyōto autumn was mistress of the woods, there still reigned on the sheltered shores of the Inland Sea a summer of St. Martin, the diaphanous ghost of summer, mild and tender in heat and hue. There and then our trip was planned. We would skirt its northern coast from Kōbe to Hiroshima, spend a day in the holy island of Miyajima, and thence take boat to Mitsugahama, the nearest port to the Dōgō baths, whence a second boat would take us back to Kōbe. Thus the circuit of the eastern waters of the sea between Shikoku and the Main Island might be accomplished in a leisurely ten days. For the moment, however, we might as well fall in with the spirit of soft melancholy which all persons of sensibility were bound to assume in the presence of maple-leaves, unless centuries of minor poetry should be coarsely disregarded. What season could be fitter for making pilgrimage to Sen-yūji, the burial-place of the Emperors? It is true that a sinister sentence in the guide-book said, “As neither the tombs nor the various treasures of the temple are shown, there is little object in visiting it.” But for all we knew, the warning might be piously designed to save a sacred privacy from the more vulgar type of tourist, whose eyes are blind to immaterial things. At any rate, that was the time, if ever, to test the meaning of Murray’s discreet dissuasion.

It certainly required no slight effort of imaginative sympathy to appraise at its historic worth a most paltry wooden bridge, devoid of grace or ornament, which seemed a rustic plank in comparison with the Shōgun’s red-lacquer _Mi Hashi_ at Nikkō, so finely poised and firmly flung across the foaming Daiyagawa. But that was worthy of the military usurpers, who took the substance of sovereignty and left its shadow to their nominal sovereigns, while this is only _Yume no Uki-hashi_, the Floating Bridge of Dreams, aptly symbolic of the recluse _rois fainéants_, absorbed in sentiment and moonshine. Here, we are told, as the midnight mourners bore along their dead emperor to sleep with his fathers, they would throw down a little fruit, some libatory cakes, into the whispering rivulet. Then steep and dark before them rose the narrow road, which terminates in a large hollow hewn out of the hillside to be the cradle of the sceptred heirs of the sun-goddess. Like the palaces in which they lived, their houses of death are clean and august. The shrines are of plain white wood, of the sort else used only in Shintō temples; the paths, scrupulously kept, are strewn with small white pebbles and wind spirally up mound after mound into the shadow of thick pines. Six centuries of royalty are buried in that white city with no other token of their rank than strict seclusion and austere simplicity. Each group of tombs is enclosed by a high wall, and on every gate is the sixteen-petalled chrysanthemum. There is no glitter of marble or gold, as in so many burial-grounds of monarchy, no fulsome eulogy on staring tablet, but, shrouded in the same mysterious obscurity as had enveloped for the nation their half-monastic lives, the Tenshi, sons of heaven, seem fittingly interred in that precise maze of ordered tranquillity half-way between the sky and their dearly-loved Kyōto.

I could not bring myself to pass Ōsaka on the way to Kōbe without visiting the temple of Tennōji, where Mr. Lafcadio Hearn gathered some of his happiest “Gleanings in Buddhist Fields.” Though the children’s chapel has been so touchingly described by him that any other writer may well shrink from following in his footsteps, a rapid impression of a fugitive glimpse will be pardoned and more than justified if it should induce the reader to re-read his more elaborate account. An enormous temple, Tennōji lies on the very outskirts of the town, and, after traversing innumerable canals, one is still a little puzzled to locate the _indo-no-kane_ among wide courts grouped about the central colonnade. After some searching we discerned a man and woman kneeling on the threshold of a shrine, in which a wrinkled priest in shabby brown vestments was reciting a prayer. Drawing nearer, we noticed that the man was weeping and the woman held in her hands a baby’s _kimono_ of brightly coloured material, which soon after she handed to the priest with a few copper coins. He took the garment, folded it carefully, and placed it on a shelf. Then, raising our eyes from the personages in this pathetic scene, we observed for the first time the chapel itself. The altar bore no image of Buddha flanked by gilt lotus or vases of natural flowers, but from cloth to ceiling it was covered with a bewildering pyramid of dead toys. Almond-eyed mannikins and stiff-jointed maidens, dolls of all classes, richly or penuriously dressed, seemed to stretch imploring arms and to fix hallucinating eyes on the beholder; drums and trumpets, paper ships and indiarubber balls, masks and picture-books and rattles--all the motley companions of vanished children were huddled together like contorted imps in a chaotic pantomime. Massed and motionless in the twilight of their recess, they had the air of dead things--the shells and figments of faithful toys, whose spirits had followed the babies’ souls to paradise, that the little hands which had clasped them night and day in “this miserable, fleeting world” might not be quite comfortless in their strange new nursery. The lesson would not be lost on heartbroken mothers who parted here from their own most cherished hopes more fragile than these brittle playthings. The roof was hung, the side shelves were piled, with tiny dresses, pendent or folded; and, most curious of all, the bell-rope, that summoned Shotoku Taishi, the saintly prince, to conduct the dead infants to God was strung with overlapping woollen bibs--yellow and red and green--the clumsy counterparts, these, of aureoles. But while we had been enthralled by this canonisation of dolldom the priest had been writing, and now handed to the mother a slip of paper attached to a thin wand of bamboo. Bowing low, she took the paper, pressed it to her forehead, and crossed the enclosure to the stone chamber known as the Tortoise Tower, for there those who look down over the circular balustrade into a central cavity will perceive clear water running from the mouth of a stone tortoise. Into that sacred stream which flows from earth to heaven the paper drops, being inscribed with the new name which is bestowed on every believer after death; and the poor woman goes away not a little comforted, for now at least her child is sure of an orthodox introduction to paradise. Thus neither babe nor emperor is exempt from etiquette, whether life or death be the master of ceremonies. Inequalities persist in the very funeral rites, though in their hearts the celebrants must feel that the geisha’s flower-song is of universal application:

“Peonies, roses, Faded, are equal; Only while life blooms Differ the flowers.”

The beauties of the Inland Sea have been so often and so graphically described, that detailed praise is superfluous. Every one has heard of the thousands of islets, on which are perched villages, villas, and pines innumerable; of the hillsides, geometrically subdivided into rice-fields; of the junks with pleated and divided sails, which dart like white birds through the exquisite blue plain; of the strange mirage, which throws upon the sky at certain hours, when the heaven above and the waters beneath melt into a vast silver-grey mirror, the shapes of phantom archipelagoes suspended in mid-air. To those who have seen it and are familiar with the fans, the _netsukes_, and the tea-cups, which reproduce favourite designs of pictorial art, only one adjective, vague yet precise, will occur: this pocket-Mediterranean is essentially Japanese. It is an ornamental piece of prettiness, designed by the Celestial Painter in one of his most Japanese moods, for in it you will find the cardinal characteristic of the national taste, its subordination of the sublime to the dainty, of big effect to graceful detail, its inevitable preference for miniature and vignette. One critic has said that such art “is small in great things, great in small things”; another, that the Japanese “admire scenes, but not scenery.” Both these dicta could be applied to the Inland Sea, were it not that Europeans admire it more than the natives, but the charm which it exerts is undeniably akin to the spell of those workers in silk or clay or ivory who achieve a maximum of beauty in a minimum of space. The Norwegian fiords, the Italian lakes, the Ægean and Adriatic Seas, all present at some point or other some grandiose aspect, but the channels which lie between Shikoku, Kyūshu, and the Main Island never threaten or impose; they are simply a soft fluid setting for precious stones of varying size and colour.