There was stuck on the roofs of many houses a rod with a piece of white paper attached, a charm against fire. One house so provided was next door to the fire station. Frequently we passed a children's jizō or Buddha, comically decked in the hat and miscellaneous garments of youngsters whose grateful mothers believed them to have been cured by the power of the deity.

Speaking of clothes, it was the hottest July weather and the natural garment was at most a loin cloth. The women wore a piece of red or coloured cotton from their waist to their knees. The backs of the men and women who were working in the open were protected by a flapping ricestraw mat or by an armful of green stuff. The boys under ten or so were naked and so were many little girls. But the influence of the Westernising period ideas of what was "decent" in the presence of foreigners survives. So, whenever a policeman was near, people of all ages were to be seen huddling on their kimonos. I was sorry for a merry group of boys and girls aged 12 or 13 who in that torrid weather^[125] were bathing at an ideal spot in the river and suddenly caught sight of a policeman. It is deplorable that a consciousness of nakedness should be cultivated when nakedness is natural, traditional and hygienic. (Even in the schools the girls are taught to make their kimonos meet at the neck—with a pin! ^[126]—much higher than they used to be worn.) It is only fair to bear in mind, however, that some hurrying on of clothes by villagers is done out of respect to the passing superior, before whom it is impolite to appear without permission half dressed or wearing other than the usual clothing.

At a hot spring we found many patrons because, as I was told, "Ox-day is very suitable for bathing." The old pre-Meiji days of the week were twelve: Rat-, Ox-, Tiger-, Hare-, Dragon-, Snake-, Horse-, Sheep-, Monkey-, Fowl-, Dog-and Boar-day. When the Western seven days of the week were adopted they were rendered into Japanese as: Sun, Moon, Fire, Water, Wood, Metal and Earth, followed by the word meaning star or planet and day. For instance, Sunday is Nichi (Sun) yo (star) bi (day), and Monday, Getsu (Moon) yo (planet) bi (day), or Nichi-yo-bi and Getsu-yo-bi. For brevity the bi is often dropped off.

The headman of a village we passed through told me that the occasion of my coming was the first on which English had been heard in those parts. Talking about the people of his village, he said that there had been four divorces in the year. Once in four or five years a child was born within a few months of marriage. In the whole county there had been among 310 young men examined for the army only four cases of "disgraceful disease." There was no immoral woman in the 75-miles-long valley. Elsewhere in the county many young men were in debt, but in the headman's village no youth was without a savings-bank book. And the local men-folk "did not use women's savings as in some places."

One shrine we passed seemed to be dedicated to the moon. Another was intended to propitiate the horsefly. Several villages had boxes fastened on posts for the reception of broken glass. As we approached one village I saw an inscription put up by the young men's association, "Good Crops and Prosperity to the Village." When we came to the next village the schoolmaster was responsible for an inscription, "Peace to the World and Safety to the State." In other places I found young men's society notice boards giving information about the area of land in a village, how it was cropped, the kind of crops, the area of forest, lists of famous places, etc.

In the gorges we rode over many suspension bridges and crossed the backbone of Japan in unforgettable scenes of romantic beauty. From the craggy paths of our highlands, amid a wealth not only of gorgeous flowers and greenery but of great velvety butterflies, we saw the far-off snow-clad Japanese Alps.

At one of the schools where we lunched I noticed that the large wall maps were of Siam and Malaya, Borneo, Australia and China (two). The portraits were of Florence Nightingale, Lincoln, Napoleon and Christ as the Good Shepherd, the last named being "a present from a believer friend of the schoolmaster." ^[127] This school closed at noon from July 10 to July 31, and had twenty days' vacation in August and another twenty days in the rice-planting and busy sericultural season. The sewing-room of the school was used in winter as a dormitory for boys who lived at a distance. Accommodation for girls was provided in the village. The children brought their rice with them. The products of the school farm were also eaten by the boarding pupils. It was estimated that the cost of maintaining the girls was 10 sen a day. Three-fourths of this expense was borne by the village. The regularity and strictness of the dormitory management were found to have an excellent effect. At the winter school, an adjunct of the day school, there was an attendance of a score of youths and sixty girls.

Speaking of a place where we stayed for the night, one who had a wide knowledge of rural Japan said that he did not think that there was a lonelier spot where farming was carried on. There was no market or fair for 80 or 90 miles and the little groups of houses were 2 or 3 miles apart. In this district, it was explained, "the rich are not so rich and the poor are not so poor."

We passed somewhere a fine shrine for the welfare of horses. At a certain festival hundreds of horses are driven down there to gallop round and round the sacred buildings. Thousands of people attend this festival, but it was declared that no one was ever hurt by the horses.

The poetical names of country inns would make an interesting collection. I remember that it was at "the inn of cold spring water" that the waiting-maid had never seen cow's milk. She proved to be the daughter of the host and wore a gold ring by way of marking the fact. This girl told us that on the banks of the river there was only one house in 70 miles. The village was having the usual holiday to celebrate the end of the toilsome sericultural season.

On our way to the next village we met two far-travelled young women selling the dried seaweed which, in many varieties, figures in the Japanese dietary. ^[128] (There are shops which sell nothing but prepared seaweeds.) A notice board there informed us that the road was maintained at the cost of the local young men's society. As we were on foot we felt grateful, for the road was well kept. We passed for miles over planking hung on the cliff side or on roadway carried on embankments. On the suspended pathways there was now and then a plank loose or broken, and there was no rail between the pedestrian and the torrent dashing below. Where there was embanked roadway it was almost always uphill and downhill and it frequently swung sharply round the corner of a cliff. As the river increased in volume we saw many rafts of timber shooting the rapids. At one place twenty-six raftsmen had been drowned. The remnants of two bridges showed the force of the floods.

In this region the kurumaya were hard put to it at times and once a kuruma broke down. Its owner cheerfully detached its broken axle and went off with it at a trot ten miles or so to a blacksmith. Later he traversed the ten miles once more to refit his kuruma, afterwards coming on fifteen more miles to our inn. The endurance and cheeriness of the kurumaya were surprising. It was usually in face of their protests that we got out to ease them while going uphill. Every morning they wanted to arrange to go farther than we thought reasonable. Each man had not only his passenger but his passenger's heavy bag. One day we did thirty-six miles over rough roads. The kurumaya proposed to cover fifty. They showed spirit, good nature and loyalty. The character of their conversation is worth mentioning. At one point they were discussing the plays we had witnessed, at other times the scenery, local legends, the best routes and the crops, material condition and disposition of the villagers. Our kurumaya compared very favourably indeed with men of an equal social class at home. Their manners were perfect. They stayed at the same inns as we did—once in the next room—and behaved admirably. Every evening the men washed their white cotton shorts and jackets—their whole costume except for a wide-brimmed sun hat and straw waraji. Tied to the axle of each kuruma were several pairs of waraji, for on the rough hill roads this simple form of footgear soon wears out. Discarded waraji are to be seen on every roadside in Japan.

The inscriptions on some of the wayside stones we passed had been written by priests so ignorant that the wording was either ridiculous or almost without meaning. But there was no difficulty in deciphering an inscription on a stone which declared that it had been erected by a company of Buddhists who claimed to have repeated the holy name of Amida 2,000,000 times. (The idea is that salvation may be obtained by the repetition of the phrase Namu Amida Butsu.) A small stone set up on a rock in the middle of paddy fields intimated that at that spot "people gathered to see the moon one night every month." A third stone was dedicated to the monkey as the messenger of a certain god, just as the fox is regarded as the messenger of Inari.

We saw during our journey large numbers of kiri (Paulownia) used for making geta and bride's chests. Some farmers seem to plant kiri trees at the birth of a daughter so as to have wood for her wedding chest or money for her outfit ^[129]. Kiri seems to be increasingly grown. On the other hand in the same districts lacquer trees were now seldom planted. The farmers complained that they were cheated by the collectors of lacquer who come round to cut the trees. The age of cutting was given me as the eighth or ninth year, but poor farmers sometimes allowed a young tree to be cut. A tree may be cut once a year for three or four years. After that it is useless even for fuel, owing to the smell it gives off, and is often left standing. The old scarred trunks, sometimes headless, suggested the tattooed faces and bodies of Maori veterans. As lacquer is poisonous to the skin the wood calls for careful handling. I saw one of the itinerant lacquer collectors, his hands wrapped in cotton, operating on a tree.

During a particularly hot run we had the good fortune to come on a soda-water spring from which we all drank freely. A factory erected to tap the spring was in ruins. Evidently the cost of carriage was prohibitive.

In these hills the rice was planted farther apart than is usual so that the sun might warm the water. Here as elsewhere daikon were hung up to dry on walls and trees, and looked like giant tallow candles. Below a bridge, which marked the village boundary, flags had been flung down by way of keeping off epidemics. Evil spirits were warded off by special dances.

The porch of a little tea-house where we rested was covered with grapes. Soon after leaving it we reached our destination for the night, a small town of houses of several storeys which clustered on a hillside under the shadow of a Zen temple. Meat and eggs were forbidden to the town, but as the residents were all Zen Buddhists the restriction was no hardship. There was no cow in the place, but condensed milk was allowed. A man at the inn told me that he knew of ten Shinto shrines which forbade the use of chickens and eggs in their localities. The view from the temple, perched high on its rock above the wide riverway, was exceptionally fine. Parties of boys and girls of thirteen paid visits to this temple "because thirteen is known as a perilous age." The people of the vegetarian town, instead of feeding on the fish in the river, fed them. I saw a shoal of fish being given scraps at the water edge.

As we went on our way and spoke of the bad roads it was suggested that in the old days roads were purposely left uphill and downhill in order that the advance of enemies might be hindered. We came to a dilapidated tea-house kept by an ugly old woman who showed a touching fondness for a cat and a dog. From her shack we had a view of a volcano which had destroyed two villages a few years before. Our hostess, who made much of us, said that the catastrophe had been preceded by "horrible da-da-da-bang" sounds and lightnings, and that it was accompanied by "thunderbolts and heavy thick smoke." The old woman had beheld "soil boiling and cracking."

Along our route we had more evidences of "fire farming." The procedure was to sow buckwheat the first year and rape and millet the second year. In the cryptomeria forests there was a variety which, when cut, sprouts from the ground and makes a new growth like an elm. One crop we saw was ginseng, protected by low structures covered by matting.

At length we heard the distant sound of a locomotive whistle. We were approaching the newly opened railway which was to take us the short run to the sea. Soon we were in a rather unkempt village which had hardly recovered from its surprise at finding that it had a railway station. We paid our kurumaya the sum contracted for and something over for their faithful service and for their long return run, and having exchanged bows and cordial greetings, we left for a time the glorified perambulators which a foreign missionary is supposed to have introduced half a century ago. (The Japanese claim the honour of "inventing" the jinrikisha.)

CHAPTER XIV

SHRINES AND POETRY

(NIIGATA AND TOYAMA)

The railway made its way through snow stockades and through many tunnels which pierced cryptomeria-clad hills. Eventually we descended to the wonderful Kambara plains, a sea of emerald rice. Fourteen million bushels of rice are produced on the flats of Niigata prefecture, which grows more rice than any other. The rice, grown under 800 different names, is officially graded into half a dozen qualities. The problem of the high country we had come from was how to keep its paddy fields from drying up; the problem of Niigata is chiefly to keep the water in its fields at a sufficiently low level. Almost every available square yard of the prefecture is paddy.

At Gosen there were depressing-looking weaving sheds, but the Black Country created by the oil fields farther on was in even more striking contrast with the beautiful region we had left. The petroleum yield was 65 million gallons, and the smell of the oil went with us to the capital city.

Niigata has a dark reputation for exporting farmers' daughters to other parts of Japan, but I have also heard that the percentage of attendance made by the children at the primary schools of the prefecture is higher than anywhere else. Like Amsterdam, Niigata is a city of bridges. There must be 200 of them. The big timber bridge across the estuary is nearly half a mile long. One finds in Niigata a Manchester-like spirit of business enterprise. Our hotel was excellent.

Because they speak with all sorts of people and hear a great deal of conversation the blind amma are full of interesting gossip. A clever amma who ran his knuckles up and down my back said that farm land a good way from Niigata was sold at from 200 yen to 300 yen and sometimes at 400 yen per quarter acre. ^[130] Prefectural officials who called on me explained that drainage operations on a large scale were being completed. The water of which the low land was relieved would be used to extend farming in the hills. An effort was also being made to develop stock-keeping in the uplands. It was proposed "to supply every farmer with a scheme for increasing his live stock." The optimistic authorities were particularly attracted by the notion of keeping sheep. The plan was to arrange for co-operation in hill pasturing and in wool and meat production. Mutton was as yet unknown, however, in Niigata. (The mutton eaten by foreigners in Japan usually comes from Shanghai.)

I went into the country to a little place where the natural gas from the soil was used by the farmers for lighting and cooking. I heard talk in this village and in others of the influence of the local army reservists' society. "Young men on returning from their army service are always influential. They are much respected by the youths and are talkative indeed in the village assembly."

As our host was the village headman he kindly brought the assembly together to meet me. I asked the assembled fathers about two stones erected in the village. Somebody had kindled a fire of rice screenings near one of them and it had been scorched. On the other stone a kimono had been hung to dry. The explanation was that the stones were monuments not shrines, and that the people who had set them up had left the district. The stones were no doubt respected while the donors lived. It was not uncommon for a pilgrim to a shrine to erect a memorial on his return home.

In this village fifty Shinto shrines of the fifth class had been closed under the influence of the Home Office. They were shrines which had no offering from the village to support them. They had only a few worshippers. All the remaining shrines were of the fifth class but one, and it was of the fourth class. In the county there was a second-class shrine and in the whole prefecture there were two or three first-class shrines. The villagers had agreed among themselves which of their own shrines should be made an end of. A shrine which was dispensed with was burnt. The stone steps approaching it were also removed. Burning was not sacrilege but purification. On the closing of a shrine there might be complaints on the part of some old man or woman, but the majority of people approved. One Shinto shrine guardian lived at the fourth-class shrine and conducted a ceremony at the sixteen fifth-class shrines. Of the twenty Buddhist temples in the village (300 families cultivating an average of a chō apiece), twelve were Hokke, five Shingon, two Shinshu and one Zen. All the priests were married. ^[131]

I have used the phrase "Buddhist temple" loosely and may do so again, for it conveys an idea which "Buddhist church" does not. A temple (dō) is properly an edifice in which a Buddha is enshrined. This building is not for services or burial ceremonies or anniversary offerings for departed souls. It may or may not have a guardian (domori). He is never a priest with a shaven head. A Buddhist church (tera) is a place where adherents go as anniversaries come round or for sermons. It possesses a priest. There is a considerable difference in the style of Buddhist edifices according to their denomination—Zen buildings are particularly plain—but all are more elaborate than Shinto shrines.

A large Shinto shrine is called yashiro (house of god); a small one hokora. A hokora is transportable. Originally it was and in some places it still is a perishable wooden shrine thatched with reed or grass straw which is renewed at the spring and autumn festivals. It may be less than two feet high and may be made of stone or wood. But it cannot be regarded as a building. Inside there are gohei (upright sticks with paper streamers). In a rich man's house a hokora may be seven or eight feet high or bigger than the smallest yashiro, and may be embellished with colour and metal.

Returning to Buddhism, if a priest has a son he may be succeeded by him. But many Buddhist priests marry late and have no children. Or their children do not want to be priests. So the priest adopts a successor. Sometimes he maintains an orphan as acolyte or coadjutor. During the day this assistant goes to school. In the evenings and during holidays he is taught to become a priest. When the primary-school education is finished the lad may be sent by his patron, if he is well enough off, to a school of his sect at Kyoto or Tokyo.

My travelling companion spoke of the infiltration of new ideas in town and country. "A mixing is taking place in the heart and head of everybody who is not a bigot. But I don't know that some kinds of Christianity are to do much for us. I heard the other day of a Japanese Presbyterian who was preaching with zest about hell fire. Generally speaking, our old men are looking to the past and our young men are aspiring, but not all. Some are content if they can live uncriticised by their neighbours. When they become old they may begin to think of a future life and visit temples. But as young men their thoughts are fully occupied by things of this world."

In the office of the headman whom I mentioned a page or so back, there was behind his chair a kakemono which read, "Reflecting and Examining One's Inner Spirit." We passed a night in the old house of this headman, who was a poet and a country gentleman of a delightful type. Being an eldest son he had married young, and his relations with his eldest boy, a frank and clever lad, were pleasant to see. The garden, instead of being shut in by a wall with a tiled coping or by a palisade of bamboo stems in the ordinary way, was open towards the rice fields, a scene of restful beauty. As our kuruma drew near the house, the steward appeared, a broom in his hand. Running for a short distance before us until we entered the courtyard, he symbolically swept the ground according to old custom. After a delightful hot bath and an elaborate supper, which my fellow traveller afterwards assured me had meant a week's work for the women of the household—snapping turtle and choice bamboo shoots were among the honourable dishes—we gathered at the open side of the room overlooking the garden. Fireflies glowed in the paddies and in the garden two stone lanterns had been lighted. One of them, which had a crescent-shaped opening cut in it, gleamed like the moon; the other, which had a small serrated opening, represented a star.

I paid a visit to the local agricultural co-operative store which did business under the motto, "Faith is the Mother of all Virtue." More than half the money taken at the store was for artificial manures. Next came purchases of imported rice, for, like the Danish peasants who export their butter and eat margarine, the local peasants sold their own rice and bought the Saigon variety. The society sold in a year a considerable quantity of saké. Stretched over the doorway of the building in which the goods of the society were stored were the rope and paper streamers which are seen before Shinto shrines and consecrated places. The society had a large flag post for weather signals, a white flag for a fine day, a red one for cloudy weather and a blue one for rain.

I brought away from this village a calendar of agricultural operations with poems or mottoes for each month, in the collection of which I suspect the poet had a hand:

In this district I first noticed cotton. It is sown in June and is picked from time to time between early September and early November. Cotton has been grown for centuries in Japan, but nowadays it is produced for household weaving only, the needs of the factories being met by foreign imports. The plant has a beautiful yellow flower with a dark brown eye.

In one village I asked how many people smoked. The answer was 60 per cent. of the men and 10 per cent. of the women. In the same village, which did not seem particularly well off, I was told that 200 daily papers might be taken among 1,300 families. Eighty per cent. of the local papers were dailies and cost 35 sen a month. Tokyo papers cost 45 or 50 sen a month.

I visited a school, half of which was in a building adjoining a temple and half in the temple itself. In the same county there were two other schools housed in temples. The small Shinto shrine in this temple held the Imperial Rescript on education. On one side of it was an ugly American clock and on the other a thermometer. In the temple (Zen) two Tokyo University students were staying in ideal conditions for vacation study.

I saw at one place a very tired, unslept-looking peasant with a small closed tub carried over his shoulder by means of a pole. On the tub was tied a white streamer, such as is supplied at a Shinto shrine, and a branch of sakaki (Eurya ochnacea, the sacred tree). The traveller was the delegate of his village. He had been to a mountain shrine in the next prefecture and the tub held the water he had got there. The idea is that if he succeeds in making the journey home without stopping anywhere his efforts will result in rain coming down at his village. If he should stop at any place to rest or sleep, and there should be the slightest drip from his tub there, then the rain will be procured not for his own village but for the community in which he has tarried. So our voyager had walked not only for a whole day but through the night. I heard of a rain delegate who had stamina enough to keep walking for three or four days without sleeping.

Another way of obtaining rain has principally to do with tugging at a rock with a straw rope. Then there is the plan already referred to of tying straw ropes to a stone image and flinging it into the river, saying, "If you don't give us rain you will stay there; if you do give us rain you shall come out." There is also the method of paying someone liberally to throw the split open head of an ox into the deep pool of a waterfall. "Then the water god being much angry," said my informant, "he send his dragon to that village, so storm and rain come necessarily." Yet another plan is for the villagers simply to ascend to a particular mountain top crying, "Give us rain! Give us rain!" While dealing with these magic arts I may reproduce the following rendering of a printed "fortune" which I received from a rural shrine: "Wish to agree but now somewhat difficult. Wait patiently for a while. Do nothing wrong. Wait for the spring to come. Everything will be completed and will become better. Endeavouring to accomplish it soon will be fruitless."

It was a student of agricultural conditions, in Toyama who gossiped to me of the large expenditure by farmers of that prefecture on the marriage of their daughters. "It is not so costly as the boys' education and it procures a good reception for the girl from father-and mother-in-law. The pinch comes when there is a second and third daughter, for the average balance in hand of a peasant proprietor in this prefecture at the end of the year is only 48 yen. Borrowing is necessary and I heard of one bankruptcy. The Governor tried to stop the custom but it is too old. They say Toyama people spend more proportionately than the people in other prefectures. In general they do not keep a horse or ox. I heard of young farmers stealing each other's crops. Parents are very severe upon a daughter who becomes ill-famed, for when they seek a husband for her they must spend more. So mostly daughters keep their purity before marriage. But I know parts of Japan where a large number of the girls have ceased to be virtuous. Concerning the priests, those of Toyama are the worst. A peasant proprietor with seven of a family and a balance at the end of the year of 100 yen must pay 30 to 40 yen to the temple. Some priests threaten the farmer, saying that if he does not pay as much as is imposed on him by the collector an inferior Buddha will go past his door. Priests want to keep farmers foolish as long as they can."

CHAPTER XV

THE NUN'S CELL

(NAGANO)

Eighty per cent. of Nagano is slope. Hence its dependence on sericulture. The low stone-strewn roofs of the houses, the railway snow shelters and the zig-zag track which the train takes, hint at the climatic conditions in winter time. Despite the snow—ski-ing has been practised for some years—the summer climate of Nagano has been compared with that of Champagne and there is one vineyard of 60,000 vines.

I was invited to join a circle of administrators who were discussing rural morality and religion. One man said that there was not 20 per cent. of the villages in which the priests were "active for social development." Another speaker of experience declared that "the four pillars of an agricultural village" were "the sonchō (headman), the schoolmaster, the policeman and the most influential villager." He went on: "In Europe religion does many things for the support and development of morality, but we look to education, for it aims not at only developing intelligence and giving knowledge, but at teaching virtue and honesty. But there is something beyond that. Thousands of our soldiers died willingly in the Russian war. There must have been something at the bottom of their hearts. That something is a certain sentiment which penetrates deeply the characters of our countrymen. Our morality and customs have it in their foundations. This spirit is Yamato damashii (Japanese spirit). It appeared among our warriors as bushido (the way of the soldier), but it is not the monopoly of soldiers. Every Japanese has some of this spirit. It is the moral backbone of Japan."

"I should like to say," another speaker declared, "that I read many European and American books, but I remain Japanese. Mr. Uchimura sees the darkest side of Buddhism and Mr. Lafcadio Hearn expected too much from it. 'So mysterious,' Hearn said, but it is not so mysterious to us. We must be grateful to him for seeing something of the essence of our life. Sometimes, however, we may be ashamed of his beautifying sentences. I am a modern man, but I am not ashamed when my wife is with child to pray that it may be healthy and wise. It is possible for us Japanese to worship some god somewhere without knowing why. The poet says, 'I do not know the reason of it, but tears fall down from my eyes in reverence and gratitude.' I suppose this is natural theology. The proverb says, 'Even the head of a sardine is something if believed in.' I attach more importance to a man's attitude to something higher than himself than to the thing which is revered by him. Whether a man goes to Nara and Kyoto or to a Roman Catholic or a Methodist church he can come home very purified in heart."

"Some foreigners have thought well to call us 'half civilised,'" the speaker went on. "Can it be that uncivilised is something distasteful to or not understood by Europeans and Americans? We have the ambition to erect some system of Eastern civilisation. It is possible that we may have it in our minds to call some things in Europe 'half civilised.' Surely the barbarians are usually the people other than ourselves. When the townsman goes to the country he says the people are savages. But the countryman finds his fellow-savages quite decent people."

"Some time ago," broke in a professor, "I read a novel by René Bazin and I could not but think how much alike were our peasants and the peasants of the West."

The previous speaker resumed: "The other day a foreigner laughed in my presence at our old art of incense burning and actually said that we were deficient in the sense of smell. I told him that fifty years ago our samurai class, in excusing their anti-foreign manifestations, said they could not endure the smell of foreigners, and that to this day our peasants may be heard to say of Western people, 'They smell; they smell of butter and fat.'"

In the city of Nagano early in the morning I went to a large Buddhist temple where the authorities had kindly given me special facilities to see the treasures—alas! all in a wooden structure. A strange thing was the preservation untouched of the room in which the Emperor Meiji rested thirty years ago. May oblivion be one day granted to that awful chenille table cover and those appalling chairs which outrage the beautiful woodwork and the golden tatami of a great building! At the entrance of the temple priests in a kind of open office were reading the newspaper, playing gō or smoking. More pleasing was the sight of matting spread right round the temple below its eaves, in order that weary pilgrims might sleep there, and the spectacle of travel-stained women tranquilly sleeping or suckling their infants before the shrine itself. There is a pitch dark underground passage below the floor round the foundations of the great Buddha, and if the circuit be made and the lock communicating with the entrance door to the sacred figure be fortunately touched on the way, paradise, peasants believe, is assured. I made the circuit a few moments after an old woman and found the lock, and on returning to the temple with the rustic dame knelt with her before the shrine as the curtain which veils the big Buddha was withdrawn. The face of one wooden figure in the temple had been worn, like that of many another in Japan, with the stroking that it had received from the ailing faithful.

I had the privilege of visiting the adjoining nunnery. As I was specially favoured by a general admission, I asked to be permitted to see some nuns' cells. They showed a Buddhist advance on Western ideas. The word "cells" was a misnomer for beautiful little flower-adorned rooms of a cheerful Japanese house. The fragile, wistful nun who was so kind as to speak with me had a consecrated expression. Her dress was white, and over it was brocade in a perfect combination of green and cream. Her head was shaven; her hands, which continually told her beads, were hidden. Religious services are conducted and sermons are delivered here and in other nunneries by the nuns themselves. I could not but be sorry for some girl children who had become nuns on their relatives' or guardians' decision. Adult newcomers are given a month in which, if they wish, they may repent them of their vows; but what of the children? The head of this nunnery was a member of the Imperial family. The institution, like the temple from which I had just come, stores thousands of wooden tablets to the memory of the dead. There are many little receptacles in which the hair, the teeth or the photographs of believers are preserved. I found that both at the nunnery and the temple a practical interest was being shown in the reformation of ex-criminals.

While in the highlands of Nagano I spent a night at Karuizawa, a hill resort at which tired missionaries and their families, not only from all parts of Japan but from China, gather in the summer months beyond the reach of the mosquito. ^[133] I stayed in the summer cottage of my travelling companion's brother-in-law. The family consisted of a reserved, cultivated man with a pretty wife of what I have heard a foreigner call "the maternal, domestic type." In their owlishness newcomers to the country are inclined to commiserate all Japanese housewives as the "slaves of their husbands." They would have been sadly wrong in such thoughts about this happy wife and mother. The eldest boy, a wholesome-looking lad, had just passed through the middle school on his way to the university, and spoke to me in simple English with that air of responsibility which the eldest son so soon acquires in Japan. His brothers and sisters enjoyed a happy relation with him and with each other. The whole family was merry, unselfish and, in the best sense of the word, educated. As we knelt on our zabuton we refreshed ourselves with tea and the fine view of the active volcano, Asama, and chatted on schools, holidays, books, the country and religion. After a while, a little to my surprise, the mother in her sweet voice gravely said that if I would not mind at all she would like very much to ask me two questions. The first was, "Are the people who go to the Christian church here all Christians?" and the second, "Are Christians as affectionate as Japanese?"

Karuizawa, which is full of ill-nourished, scabby-headed, "bubbly-nosed" ^[134] Japanese children, is an impoverished place on one of the ancient highways. We took ourselves along the road until we reached at a slightly higher altitude the decayed village of Oiwaké. When the railway came near it finished the work of desolation which the cessation of the daimyos' progresses to Yedo (now Tokyo) had begun half a century ago. In the days of the Shogun three-quarters of the 300 houses were inns. Now two-thirds of the houses have become uninhabitable, or have been sold, taken down and rebuilt elsewhere. The Shinto shrines are neglected and some are unroofed, the Zen temple is impoverished, the school is comfortless and a thousand tombstones in the ancient burying ground among the trees are half hidden in moss and undergrowth.

The farm rents now charged in Oiwaké had not been changed for thirty, forty or fifty years. In the old inn there was a Shinto shrine, about 12 ft. long by nearly 2 ft. deep, with latticed sliding doors. It contained a dusty collection of charms and memorials dating back for generations. Outside in the garden at the spring I found an irregular row of half a dozen rather dejected-looking little stone hokora about a foot high. Some had faded gohei thrust into them, but from the others the clipped paper strips had blown away. At the foot of the garden I discovered a somewhat elaborate wooden shrine in a dilapidated state. "Few country people," someone said to me, "know who is enshrined at such a place." It is generally thought that these shrines are dedicated to the fox. But the foxes are merely the messengers of the shrine, as is shown by the figures of crouching or squatting foxes at either side. A well-known professor lately arrived at the conviction that the god worshipped at such shrines is the god of agriculture. He went so far as to recommend the faculty of agriculture at Tokyo university to have a shrine erected within its walls to this divinity, but the suggestion was not adopted.

In the course of another chat with the old host of the inn he referred to the time, close on half a century ago, when 3,000 hungry peasants marched through the district demanding rice. They did no harm. "They were satisfied when they were given food; the peasants at that time were heavily oppressed." To-day the people round about look as if they were oppressed by the ghosts of old-time tyrants. But there is "something that doth linger" of self-respect. When we left on our way to Tokyo I gave the man who brought our bags a mile in a barrow to the station 40 sen. He returned 10 sen, saying that 30 sen was enough.