Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan: First Series — Ch 7: The Chief City of the Province of the Gods, Part 2

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.

Sec.

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.

Sec.

11 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.

Sec.

12 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.

Sec.

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 all the 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.

Sec.

14 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.

Sec.

15 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-no-Kukedo 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.