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Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan

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




º6

A very curious little object now comes slowly floating down the river,
and I do not think that you could possibly guess what it is.

The Hotoke, or Buddhas, and the beneficent Kami are not the only
divinities worshipped by the Japanese of the poorer classes. The deities
of evil, or at least some of them, are duly propitiated upon certain
occasions, and requited by offerings whenever they graciously vouchsafe
to inflict a temporary ill instead of an irremediable misfortune. [4]
(After all, this is no more irrational than the thanksgiving prayer at
the close of the hurricane season in the West Indies, after the
destruction by storm of twenty-two thousand lives.) So men sometimes
pray to Ekibiogami, the God of Pestilence, and to Kaze-no-Kami, the God
of Wind and of Bad Colds, and to Hoso-no-Kami, the God of Smallpox, and
to divers evil genii.

Now when a person is certainly going to get well of smallpox a feast is
given to the Hoso-no-Kami, much as a feast is given to the Fox-God when
a possessing fox has promised to allow himself to be cast out. Upon a
sando-wara, or small straw mat, such as is used to close the end of a
rice-bale, one or more kawarake, or small earthenware vessels, are
placed. These are filled with a preparation of rice and red beans,
called adzukimeshi, whereof both Inari-Sama and Hoso-no-Kami are
supposed to be very fond. Little bamboo wands with gohei (paper
cuttings) fastened to them are then planted either in the mat or in the
adzukimeshi, and the colour of these gohei must be red. (Be it observed
that the gohei of other Kami are always white.) This offering is then
either suspended to a tree, or set afloat in some running stream at a
considerable distance from the home of the convalescent. This is called
'seeing the God off.'

º7

The long white bridge with its pillars of iron is recognisably modern.
It was, in fact, opened to the public only last spring with great
ceremony. According to some most ancient custom, when a new bridge has
been built the first persons to pass over it must be the happiest of the
community. So the authorities of Matsue sought for the happiest folk,
and selected two aged men who had both been married for more than half a
century, and who had had not less than twelve children, and had never
lost any of them. These good patriarchs first crossed the bridge,
accompanied by their venerable wives, and followed by their grown-up
children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, amidst a great clamour
of rejoicing, the showering of fireworks, and the firing of cannon.

But the ancient bridge so recently replaced by this structure was much
more picturesque, curving across the flood and supported upon
multitudinous feet, like a long-legged centipede of the innocuous kind.
For three hundred years it had stood over the stream firmly and well,
and it had its particular tradition.

When Horio Yoshiharu, the great general who became daimyo of Izumo in
the Keicho era, first undertook to put a bridge over the mouth of this
river, the builders laboured in vain; for there appeared to be no solid
bottom for the pillars of the bridge to rest upon. Millions of great
stones were cast into the river to no purpose, for the work constructed
by day was swept away or swallowed up by night. Nevertheless, at last
the bridge was built, but the pillars began to sink soon after it was
finished; then a flood carried half of it away and as often as it was
repaired so often it was wrecked. Then a human sacrifice was made to
appease the vexed spirits of the flood. A man was buried alive in the
river-bed below the place of the middle pillar, where the current is
most treacherous, and thereafter the bridge remained immovable for three
hundred years.

This victim was one Gensuke, who had lived in the street Saikamachi; for
it had been determined that the first man who should cross the bridge
wearing hakama without a machi [5] should be put under the bridge; and
Gensuke sought to pass over not having a machi in his hakama, so they
sacrificed him Wherefore the midmost pillar of the bridge was for three
hundred years called by his name--Gensuke-bashira. It is averred that
upon moonless nights a ghostly fire flitted about that pillar--always
in the dead watch hour between two and three; and the colour of the
light was red, though I am assured that in Japan, as in other lands, the
fires of the dead are most often blue.

º8

Now some say that Gensuke was not the name of a man, but the name of an
era, corrupted by local dialect into the semblance of a personal
appellation. Yet so profoundly is the legend believed, that when the new
bridge was being built thousands of country folk were afraid to come to
town; for a rumour arose that a new victim was needed, who was to be
chosen from among them, and that it had been determined to make the
choice from those who still wore their hair in queues after the ancient
manner. Wherefore hundreds of aged men cut off their queues. Then
another rumour was circulated to the effect that the police had been
secretly instructed to seize the one-thousandth person of those who
crossed the new bridge the first day, and to treat him after the manner
of Gensuke. And at the time of the great festival of the Rice-God, when
the city is usually thronged by farmers coming to worship at the many
shrines of Inari this year there came but few; and the loss to local
commerce was estimated at several thousand yen.

The vapours have vanished, sharply revealing a beautiful little islet in
the lake, lying scarcely half a mile away--a low, narrow strip of land
with a Shinto shrine upon it, shadowed by giant pines; not pines like
ours, but huge, gnarled, shaggy, tortuous shapes, vast-reaching like
ancient oaks. Through a glass one can easily discern a torii, and before
it two symbolic lions of stone (Kara-shishi), one with its head broken
off, doubtless by its having been overturned and dashed about by heavy
waves during some great storm. This islet is sacred to Benten, the
Goddess of Eloquence and Beauty, wherefore it is called Benten-no-shima.
But it is more commonly called Yomega-shima, or 'The Island of the Young
Wife,' by reason of a legend. It is said that it arose in one night,
noiselessly as a dream, bearing up from the depths of the lake the body
of a drowned woman who had been very lovely, very pious, and very
unhappy. The people, deeming this a sign from heaven, consecrated the
islet to Benten, and thereon built a shrine unto her, planted trees
about it, set a torii before it, and made a rampart about it with great
curiously-shaped stones; and there they buried the drowned woman.

Now the sky is blue down to the horizon, the air is a caress of spring.
I go forth to wander through the queer old city.

º 10

I perceive that upon the sliding doors, or immediately above the
principal entrance of nearly every house, are pasted oblong white papers
bearing ideographic inscriptions; and overhanging every threshold I see
the sacred emblem of Shinto, the little rice-straw rope with its long
fringe of pendent stalks. The white papers at once interest me; for they
are ofuda, or holy texts and charms, of which I am a devout collector.
Nearly all are from temples in Matsue or its vicinity; and the Buddhist
ones indicate by the sacred words upon them to what particular shu or
sect, the family belong--for nearly every soul in this community
professes some form of Buddhism as well as the all-dominant and more
ancient faith of Shinto. And even one quite ignorant of Japanese
ideographs can nearly always distinguish at a glance the formula of the
great Nichiren sect from the peculiar appearance of the column of
characters composing it, all bristling with long sharp points and
banneret zigzags, like an army; the famous text Namu-myo-ho-ren-gekyo
inscribed of old upon the flag of the great captain Kato Kiyomasa, the
extirpator of Spanish Christianity, the glorious vir ter execrandus of
the Jesuits. Any pilgrim belonging to this sect has the right to call at
whatever door bears the above formula and ask for alms or food.

But by far the greater number of the ofuda are Shinto Upon almost every
door there is one ofuda especially likely to attract the attention of a
stranger, because at the foot of the column of ideographs composing its
text there are two small figures of foxes, a black and a white fox,
facing each other in a sitting posture, each with a little bunch of
rice-straw in its mouth, instead of the more usual emblematic key. These
ofuda are from the great Inari temple of Oshiroyama, [6] within the
castle grounds, and are charms against fire. They represent, indeed, the
only form of assurance against fire yet known in Matsue, so far, at
least, as wooden dwellings are concerned. And although a single spark
and a high wind are sufficient in combination to obliterate a larger
city in one day, great fires are unknown in Matsue, and small ones are
of rare occurrence.

The charm is peculiar to the city; and of the Inari in question this
tradition exists:

When Naomasu, the grandson of Iyeyasu, first came to Matsue to rule the
province, there entered into his presence a beautiful boy, who said: 'I
came hither from the home of your august father in Echizen, to protect
you from all harm. But I have no dwelling-place, and am staying
therefore at the Buddhist temple of Fu-mon-in. Now if you will make for
me a dwelling within the castle grounds, I will protect from fire the
buildings there and the houses of the city, and your other residence
likewise which is in the capital. For I am Inari Shinyemon.' With these
words he vanished from sight. Therefore Naomasu dedicated to him the
great temple which still stands in the castle grounds, surrounded by one
thousand foxes of stone.

º11

I now turn into a narrow little street, which, although so ancient that
its dwarfed two-story houses have the look of things grown up from the
ground, is called the Street of the New Timber. New the timber may have
been one hundred and fifty years ago; but the tints of the structures
would ravish an artist--the sombre ashen tones of the woodwork, the
furry browns of old thatch, ribbed and patched and edged with the warm
soft green of those velvety herbs and mosses which flourish upon
Japanesese roofs.

However, the perspective of the street frames in a vision more
surprising than any details of its mouldering homes. Between very lofty
bamboo poles, higher than any of the dwellings, and planted on both
sides of the street in lines, extraordinary black nets are stretched,
like prodigious cobwebs against the sky, evoking sudden memories of
those monster spiders which figure in Japanese mythology and in the
picture-books of the old artists. But these are only fishing-nets of
silken thread; and this is the street of the fishermen. I take my way to
the great bridge.

º12

A stupendous ghost!

Looking eastward from the great bridge over those sharply beautiful
mountains, green and blue, which tooth the horizon, I see a glorious
spectre towering to the sky. Its base is effaced by far mists: out of
the air the thing would seem to have shaped itself--a phantom cone,
diaphanously grey below, vaporously white above, with a dream of
perpetual snow--the mighty mountain of Daisen.

At the first approach of winter it will in one night become all blanched
from foot to crest; and then its snowy pyramid so much resembles that
Sacred Mountain, often compared by poets to a white inverted fan, half
opened, hanging in the sky, that it is called Izumo-Fuji, 'the Fuji of
Izumo.' But it is really in Hoki, not in Izumo, though it cannot be seen
from any part of Hoki to such advantage as from here. It is the one
sublime spectacle of this charming land; but it is visible only when the
air is very pure. Many are the marvellous legends related concerning it,
and somewhere upon its mysterious summit the Tengu are believed to
dwell.

º 13

At the farther end of the bridge, close to the wharf where the little
steamboats are, is a very small Jizo temple (Jizo-do). Here are kept
many bronze drags; and whenever anyone has been drowned and the body not
recovered, these are borrowed from the little temple and the river is
dragged. If the body be thus found, a new drag must be presented to the
temple.

From here, half a mile southward to the great Shinto temple of Tenjin,
deity of scholarship and calligraphy, broadly stretches Tenjinmachi, the
Street of the Rich Merchants, all draped on either side with dark blue
hangings, over which undulate with every windy palpitation from the lake
white wondrous ideographs, which are names and signs, while down the
wide way, in white perspective, diminishes a long line of telegraph
poles.

Beyond the temple of Tenjin the city is again divided by a river, the
Shindotegawa, over which arches the bridge Tenjin-bashi. Again beyond
this other large quarters extend to the hills and curve along the lake
shore. But in the space between the two rivers is the richest and
busiest life of the city, and also the vast and curious quarter of the
temples. In this islanded district are likewise the theatres, and the
place where wrestling-matches are held, and most of the resorts of
pleasure.

Parallel with Tenjinmachi runs the great street of the Buddhist temples,
or Teramachi, of which the eastern side is one unbroken succession of
temples--a solid front of court walls tile-capped, with imposing
gateways at regular intervals. Above this long stretch of tile-capped
wall rise the beautiful tilted massive lines of grey-blue temple roofs
against the sky. Here all the sects dwell side by side in harmony--
Nichirenshu, Shingon-shu, Zen-shu, Tendai-shu, even that Shin-shu,
unpopular in Izumo because those who follow its teaching strictly must
not worship the Kami. Behind each temple court there is a cemetery, or
hakaba; and eastward beyond these are other temples, and beyond them yet
others--masses of Buddhist architecture mixed with shreds of gardens
and miniature homesteads, a huge labyrinth of mouldering courts and
fragments of streets.

To-day, as usual, I find I can pass a few hours very profitably in
visiting the temples; in looking at the ancient images seated within the
cups of golden lotus-flowers under their aureoles of gold; in buying
curious mamori; in examining the sculptures of the cemeteries, where I
can nearly always find some dreaming Kwannon or smiling Jizo well worth
the visit.

The great courts of Buddhist temples are places of rare interest for one
who loves to watch the life of the people; for these have been for
unremembered centuries the playing-places of the children. Generations
of happy infants have been amused in them. All the nurses, and little
girls who carry tiny brothers or sisters upon their backs, go thither
every morning that the sun shines; hundreds of children join them; and
they play at strange, funny games--'Onigokko,' or the game of Devil,
'Kage-Oni,' which signifies the Shadow and the Demon, and
'Mekusangokko,' which is a sort of 'blindman's buff.'

Also, during the long summer evenings, these temples are wrestling-
grounds, free to all who love wrestling; and in many of them there is a
dohyo-ba, or wrestling-ring. Robust young labourers and sinewy artisans
come to these courts to test their strength after the day's tasks are
done, and here the fame of more than one now noted wrestler was first
made. When a youth has shown himself able to overmatch at wrestling all
others in his own district, he is challenged by champions of other
districts; and if he can overcome these also, he may hope eventually to
become a skilled and popular professional wrestler.

It is also in the temple courts that the sacred dances are performed and
that public speeches are made. It is in the temple courts, too, that the
most curious toys are sold, on the occasion of the great holidays--toys
most of which have a religious signification. There are grand old trees,
and ponds full of tame fish, which put up their heads to beg for food
when your shadow falls upon the water. The holy lotus is cultivated
therein.

'Though growing in the foulest slime, the flower remains pure and
undefiled.

'And the soul of him who remains ever pure in the midst of temptation is
likened unto the lotus.

'Therefore is the lotus carven or painted upon the furniture of temples;
therefore also does it appear in allthe representations of our Lord
Buddha.

'In Paradise the blessed shall sit at ease enthroned upon the cups of
golden lotus-flowers.' [7]

A bugle-call rings through the quaint street; and round the corner of
the last temple come marching a troop of handsome young riflemen,
uniformed somewhat like French light infantry, marching by fours so
perfectly that all the gaitered legs move as if belonging to a single
body, and every sword-bayonet catches the sun at exactly the same angle,
as the column wheels into view. These are the students of the Shihan-
Gakko, the College of Teachers, performing their daily military
exercises. Their professors give them lectures upon the microscopic
study of cellular tissues, upon the segregation of developing nerve
structure, upon spectrum analysis, upon the evolution of the colour
sense, and upon the cultivation of bacteria in glycerine infusions. And
they are none the less modest and knightly in manner for all their
modern knowledge, nor the less reverentially devoted to their dear old
fathers and mothers whose ideas were shaped in the era of feudalism.

º14

Here come a band of pilgrims, with yellow straw overcoats, 'rain-coats'
(mino), and enormous yellow straw hats, mushroom-shaped, of which the
down-curving rim partly hides the face. All carry staffs, and wear their
robes well girded up so as to leave free the lower limbs, which are
inclosed in white cotton leggings of a peculiar and indescribable kind.
Precisely the same sort of costume was worn by the same class of
travellers many centuries ago; and just as you now see them trooping by
-whole families wandering together, the pilgrim child clinging to the
father's hands--so may you see them pass in quaint procession across
the faded pages of Japanese picture-books a hundred years old.

At intervals they halt before some shop-front to look at the many
curious things which they greatly enjoy seeing, but which they have no
money to buy.

I myself have become so accustomed to surprises, to interesting or
extraordinary sights, that when a day happens to pass during which
nothing remarkable has been heard or seen I feel vaguely discontented.
But such blank days are rare: they occur in my own case only when the
weather is too detestable to permit of going out-of-doors. For with ever
so little money one can always obtain the pleasure of looking at curious
things. And this has been one of the chief pleasures of the people in
Japan for centuries and centuries, for the nation has passed its
generations of lives in making or seeking such things. To divert one's
self seems, indeed, the main purpose of Japanese existence, beginning
with the opening of the baby's wondering eyes. The faces of the people
have an indescribable look of patient expectancy--the air of waiting
for something interesting to make its appearance. If it fail to appear,
they will travel to find it: they are astonishing pedestrians and
tireless pilgrims, and I think they make pilgrimages not more for the
sake of pleasing the gods than of pleasing themselves by the sight of
rare and pretty things. For every temple is a museum, and every hill and
valley throughout the land has its temple and its wonders.

Even the poorest farmer, one so poor that he cannot afford to eat a
grain of his own rice, can afford to make a pilgrimage of a month's
duration; and during that season when the growing rice needs least
attention hundreds of thousands of the poorest go on pilgrimages. This
is possible, because from ancient times it has been the custom for
everybody to help pilgrims a little; and they can always find rest and
shelter at particular inns (kichinyado) which receive pilgrims only, and
where they are charged merely the cost of the wood used to cook their
food.

But multitudes of the poor undertake pilgrimages requiring much more
than a month to perform, such as the pilgrimage to the thirty-three
great temples of Kwannon, or that to the eighty-eight temples of
Kobodaishi; and these, though years be needed to accomplish them, are as
nothing compared to the enormous Sengaji, the pilgrimage to the thousand
temples of the Nichiren sect. The time of a generation may pass ere this
can be made. One may begin it in early youth, and complete it only when
youth is long past. Yet there are several in Matsue, men and women, who
have made this tremendous pilgrimage, seeing all Japan, and supporting
themselves not merely by begging, but by some kinds of itinerant
peddling.

The pilgrim who desires to perform this pilgrimage carries on his
shoulders a small box, shaped like a Buddhist shrine, in which he keeps
his spare clothes and food. He also carries a little brazen gong, which
he constantly sounds while passing through a city or village, at the
same time chanting the Namu-myo-ho-ren-ge-kyo; and he always bears with
him a little blank book, in which the priest of every temple visited
stamps the temple seal in red ink. The pilgrimage over, this book with
its one thousand seal impressions becomes an heirloom in the family of
the pilgrim.

º15

I too must make divers pilgrimages, for all about the city, beyond the
waters or beyond the hills, lie holy places immemorially old.

Kitzuki, founded by the ancient gods, who 'made stout the pillars upon
the nethermost rock bottom, and made high the cross-beams to the Plain
of High Heaven'--Kitzuki, the Holy of Holies, whose high-priest claims
descent from the Goddess of the Sun; and Ichibata, famed shrine of
Yakushi-Nyorai, who giveth sight to the blind--Ichibata-no-Yakushi,
whose lofty temple is approached by six hundred and forty steps of
stone; and Kiomidzu, shrine of Kwannon of the Eleven Faces, before whose
altar the sacred fire has burned without ceasing for a thousand years;
and Sada, where the Sacred Snake lies coiled for ever on the sambo of
the gods; and Oba, with its temples of Izanami and Izanagi, parents of
gods and men, the makers of the world; and Yaegaki, whither lovers go to
pray for unions with the beloved; and Kaka, Kaka-ura, Kaka-noKukedo San
-all these I hope to see.

But of all places, Kaka-ura! Assuredly I must go to Kaka. Few pilgrims
go thither by sea, and boatmen are forbidden to go there if there be
even wind enough 'to move three hairs.' So that whosoever wishes to
visit Kaka must either wait for a period of dead calm--very rare upon
the coast of the Japanese Sea--or journey thereunto by land; and by
land the way is difficult and wearisome. But I must see Kaka. For at
Kaka, in a great cavern by the sea, there is a famous Jizo of stone; and
each night, it is said, the ghosts of little children climb to the high
cavern and pile up before the statue small heaps of pebbles; and every
morning, in the soft sand, there may be seen the fresh prints of tiny
naked feet, the feet of the infant ghosts. It is also said that in the
cavern there is a rock out of which comes a stream of milk, as from a
woman's breast; and the white stream flows for ever, and the phantom
children drink of it. Pilgrims bring with them gifts of small straw
sandals--the zori that children wear--and leave them before the
cavern, that the feet of the little ghosts may not be wounded by the
sharp rocks. And the pilgrim treads with caution, lest he should
overturn any of the many heaps of stones; for if this be done the
children cry.

º16

The city proper is as level as a table, but is bounded on two sides by
low demilunes of charming hills shadowed with evergreen foliage and
crowned with temples or shrines. There are thirty-five thousand souls
dwelling in ten thousand houses forming thirty-three principal and many
smaller streets; and from each end of almost every street, beyond the
hills, the lake, or the eastern rice-fields, a mountain summit is always
visible--green, blue, or grey according to distance. One may ride,
walk, or go by boat to any quarter of the town; for it is not only
divided by two rivers, but is also intersected by numbers of canals
crossed by queer little bridges curved like a well-bent bow.
Architecturally (despite such constructions in European style as the
College of Teachers, the great public school, the Kencho, the new post-
office), it is much like other quaint Japanese towns; the structure of
its temples, taverns, shops, and private dwellings is the same as in
other cities of the western coast. But doubtless owing to the fact that
Matsue remained a feudal stronghold until a time within the memory of
thousands still living, those feudal distinctions of caste so sharply
drawn in ancient times are yet indicated with singular exactness by the
varying architecture of different districts. The city can be definitely
divided into three architectural quarters: the district of the merchants
and shop-keepers, forming the heart of the settlement, where all the
houses are two stories high; the district of the temples, including
nearly the whole south-eastern part of the town; and the district or
districts of the shizoku (formerly called samurai), comprising a vast
number of large, roomy, garden-girt, one-story dwellings. From these
elegant homes, in feudal days, could be summoned at a moment's notice
five thousand 'two-sworded men' with their armed retainers, making a
fighting total for the city alone of probably not less than thirteen
thousand warriors. More than one-third of all the city buildings were
then samurai homes; for Matsue was the military centre of the most
ancient province of Japan. At both ends of the town, which curves in a
crescent along the lake shore, were the two main settlements of samurai;
but just as some of the most important temples are situated outside of
the temple district, so were many of the finest homesteads of this
knightly caste situated in other quarters. They mustered most thickly,
however, about the castle, which stands to-day on the summit of its
citadel hill--the Oshiroyama--solid as when first built long centuries
ago, a vast and sinister shape, all iron-grey, rising against the sky
from a cyclopean foundation of stone. Fantastically grim the thing is,
and grotesquely complex in detail; looking somewhat like a huge pagoda,
of which the second, third, and fourth stories have been squeezed down
and telescoped into one another by their own weight. Crested at its
summit, like a feudal helmet, with two colossal fishes of bronze lifting
their curved bodies skyward from either angle of the roof, and bristling
with horned gables and gargoyled eaves and tilted puzzles of tiled
roofing at every story, the creation is a veritable architectural
dragon, made up of magnificent monstrosities--a dragon, moreover, full
of eyes set at all conceivable angles, above below, and on every side.
From under the black scowl of the loftiest eaves, looking east and
south, the whole city can be seen at a single glance, as in the vision
of a soaring hawk; and from the northern angle the view plunges down
three hundred feet to the castle road, where walking figures of men
appear no larger than flies.

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