Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (17 page)

The clapping of hands has ceased; the toil of the day begins;
continually louder and louder the pattering of geta over the bridge. It
is a sound never to be forgotten, this pattering of geta over the Ohashi
-rapid, merry, musical, like the sound of an enormous dance; and a
dance it veritably is. The whole population is moving on tiptoe, and the
multitudinous twinkling of feet over the verge of the sunlit roadway is
an astonishment. All those feet are small, symmetrical—light as the
feet of figures painted on Greek vases—and the step is always taken
toes first; indeed, with geta it could be taken no other way, for the
heel touches neither the geta nor the ground, and the foot is tilted
forward by the wedge-shaped wooden sole. Merely to stand upon a pair of
geta is difficult for one unaccustomed to their use, yet you see
Japanese children running at full speed in geta with soles at least
three inches high, held to the foot only by a forestrap fastened between
the great toe and the other toes, and they never trip and the geta never
falls off. Still more curious is the spectacle of men walking in bokkuri
or takageta, a wooden sole with wooden supports at least five inches
high fitted underneath it so as to make the whole structure seem the
lacquered model of a wooden bench. But the wearers stride as freely as
if they had nothing upon their feet.

Now children begin to appear, hurrying to school. The undulation of the
wide sleeves of their pretty speckled robes, as they run, looks
precisely like a fluttering of extraordinary butterflies. The junks
spread their great white or yellow wings, and the funnels of the little
steamers which have been slumbering all night by the wharves begin to
smoke.

One of the tiny lake steamers lying at the opposite wharf has just
opened its steam-throat to utter the most unimaginable, piercing,
desperate, furious howl. When that cry is heard everybody laughs. The
other little steamboats utter only plaintive mooings, but unto this
particular vessel—newly built and launched by a rival company—there
has been given a voice expressive to the most amazing degree of reckless
hostility and savage defiance. The good people of Matsue, upon hearing
its voice for the first time, gave it forthwith a new and just name—
Okami-Maru. 'Maru' signifies a steamship. 'Okami' signifies a wolf.

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.
[33]
(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.'

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
[34]
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.

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.

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,
[35]
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.

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.

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.