Chapter 1 of 20 · 3980 words · ~20 min read

Part 1

K A K E M O N O

JAPANESE SKETCHES

BY A. HERBAGE EDWARDS

_WITH FRONTISPIECE_

[Illustration: Printer’s Logo]

CHICAGO A. C. McCLURG & CO. LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN 1906

American Edition Published Sept. 15, 1906

_Printed in Great Britain_ _Bound by Lakeside Press, Chicago_

TO MY TEACHERS THE PEOPLE OF JAPAN

CONTENTS

THE FAITH OF JAPAN

PAGE

I. DAI BUTSU 3

II. THE SHRINES OF ISÉ 5

III. THE TEMPLE OF NIKKŌ 8

IV. KANNON, LADY OF MERCY 14

V. RINZAKI’S ALTAR 17

VI. TWO CREEDS 19

VII. THE LEGEND OF THE NOSELESS JIZŌ 22

VIII. THE TEMPLES OF SHIBA 27

IX. AMIDA BUTSU 31

X. ST. NICHIREN 34

XI. BETWEEN EARTH AND HEAVEN 36

XII. INARI, THE FOX-GOD 39

XIII. THE ALTAR OF FIRE 42

XIV. FORGOTTEN GODS 48

LORD FUJI

I. PROLOGUE 55

II. THE ASCENT 57

III. EPILOGUE 99

THE ART OF THE NATION

I. GRACE BEFORE MEAT 103

II. IN A CLOISONNÉ FACTORY 110

III. FLOWER ARRANGEMENT 114

IV. GOD’S MESSENGER 119

V. THE ART OF THE PEOPLE 122

SCENES IN RAIN AND SUNSHINE

I. THE MOAT 157

II. A RAINY DAY 159

III. MMÉ (PLUM BLOSSOMS) 161

IV. WET LEAVES 163

V. ASAMAYAMA 165

VI. CAMELLIAS 176

VII. RAIN 178

VIII. THE BLACK CANAL 181

IX. THE INLAND SEA 184

THE LAND OF THE GODS

I. ACROSS THE LAGOON 193

II. TO KIZUKI 199

III. IZUMO’S GREAT TEMPLE 204

IV. KIZUKI’S BAY 211

V. IN MATSUÉ 214

VI. THE TWO SPIRITS 235

THE HEART OF THE PEOPLE

I. TOKYO 243

II. EAST AND WEST 255

III. YONÉ’S BABY 257

IV. THE GRAVES OF THE RŌNIN 260

V. THE DOLLS’ FESTIVAL 263

VI. WITH DEATH BESIDE HER 266

VII. KYOTO’S SOIRÉE 269

VIII. NŌ 273

IX. A JAPANESE BANK-HOLIDAY 278

X. THE PALACE OF THE SON OF HEAVEN 282

XI. AND SHE WAS A WIDOW 285

GLOSSARY 293

THE FAITH OF JAPAN

“In my Father’s house are many mansions.” _John_ xiv.

Tenshi ni kuchi nashi hito o motte iwashimu. “Heaven has no mouth, it makes men speak for it.” _Japanese Proverb._

DAI BUTSU (GREAT BUDDHA)

The great God Buddha sits peaceful and still, a line of dark bronze against the blue sky, and the length of the garden is flooded with light. Two tall pink cherry-trees drop blushing snowflakes on to his broad shoulders, and the sound of running water is a liquid prayer. Under his heavy-lidded eyes he looks as one who saw not, or saw too well, and his slow smile is inscrutable and still. The mystery of it draws one nearer.

What is thy secret, Great Lord Buddha?

But the heavy-lidded eyes droop lower, and the slow smile is still. Only the cherry-trees send their pale pink petals floating downward into the bronzed lap. And the murmuring water runs more swiftly.

Immutable he sits, and still; enduring, unchanging, though the sea destroy his temples and the earthquakes rock about his feet. Buddha on his lotus-leaf is still.

And the generations of men rise up, and pass away, fretted with life’s fitful fever, and searching for his secret. Buddha is still, his slow smile unchanging, his heavy eyelids drooped.

Is that thy secret, Great Lord Buddha? The mystery we passion-swept, ever-changing mortals can never penetrate?

“God is the same, for ever. The _same_, and _for ever_.”

And the murmuring water runs, the cherry-trees bloom and fade, the centuries pass away. Still the heavy-lidded eyes are drooped, the slow smile is inscrutable and still. Lord Buddha keeps his secret.

Or is it only we who cannot read.

THE SHRINES OF ISÉ

On every side the circle of the hills shuts out all sounds, and the vast forest stretches solemn, sombre.

The long two miles of white road from the village are forgotten, the crude sunshine of the public gardens fades away, the giant fir-trees stand as they stood two thousand years ago when the shrine of the great Sun-Goddess first was born.

The broad grey path of unhewn stone, unshadowed in the darkness of the trees, bends downward to the river’s brink, where a grey still pool lies silent on the edge of the rushing stream. It is the Pool of Purification where all who go up to the temple stay and wash. Even the _kurumaya_ who daily draws the pilgrim or the stranger to the shrine, stoops to plunge his hands and feet into the still grey waters. And as he does so a great shaft of sunshine hits the weltering circle of the hills beyond the stream, and they quiver, blue as a distant mirage in the blue sky; while the forest is the darker for that light.

The grey stone path is long and wide, the forest vast, unfathomable; primæval, untamed, and yet kept with a care that leaves no trace behind; the forest of a dream where Death is not, nor decay, nor any sign of man. From time to time the dark stern stems of the cryptomerias are broken with the glossy deep-green leaves of a camphor-tree; and each time my _kurumaya_ stays to pray, for camphor-trees are sacred, and their bark thrown into the sea has power to calm the waves.

And the forest stretches on and on.

In the distance the grey stone path broadens into a flight of shallow steps, and passes beneath an open gateway out of sight. A wooden wall, like the sloughed bark of forest trees, stretches right and left; and against it, rigid in his discipline, the white uniform of a modern soldier, bayonet fixed.

I stand on the threshold of the most sacred spot in all Japan.

Beyond the gateway is another gate, where a pure white curtain falls, fold on fold. It is the veil of the great Sun-Goddess. All through the ages since first the nation was, the shrine of the Sun-Goddess has stood behind that veil. Every twenty years night comes, her temple dies, and again is born, unchanged, unaltered to the last least detail. And her priests are the carpenters. So through all the ages, the body of the great Sun-Goddess glows, in youth eternal, and none save her far-off offspring, _Tenshisama_, the Son of Heaven, may pass behind the veil.

The Japanese soldier stays to guard, for did the stranger, sacrilegious in his foolish pride, so much as touch those long white folds, evil might befall him. Viscount Mori died beneath the sword of a _samurai_ for lifting but the edge of the curtain with his stick.

My _kurumaya_ is on his knees before these fluttering, mysterious folds, two claps, a bow, a little murmured prayer; another bow, two claps, and he rises.

Then he leads us along inside the wooden wall, and another grey-green wooden wall, built as it were of flattened tree-trunks, rises on the other side, leads us a few yards, and then he stops. The outer wooden wall runs round a huge imperfect square, then comes a broad band of space where we are standing, and then the inner wall rails out the world. Inside and opposite the curtained gateway, but with the whole distance of the sacred square between, stands the shrine itself, a grey-brown wooden building, unpainted, unadorned; a grey-brown roof of thatch, with the cross-beams of its roof-tree rising up through the thatch in two rough wooden anchors bound with gold. A building that is simple, with a simplicity more strange to modern man than the strangest complexity, archaic, primæval, a ghost from man’s dim past.

The silent sombre trees stand thickly round. Beyond the circle of blue hills shuts out all sounds. The folds of the white curtain fall straight and close.

My _kurumaya_ prays again.

And there behind her veil the great Sun-Goddess dwells, untouched by time, of an age with the hills, more primitive than the forest trees--and sacred still.

III

THE TEMPLE OF NIKKŌ

In all the pomp of splendour and of power they buried Iyeyasu at Nikkō, and the greatest artists of Old Japan came and built in his memory a temple more beautiful than any in all the length and breadth of the land. For more than forty years they worked, and brains and money and labour were poured out like mountain water, until the temple stood complete, the mausoleum of Iyeyasu and the eternal monument of this artistic race.

With Buddhist rites was the great _Shōgun_ buried, and for many hundred years daily remembered in a ritual as solemn as it is effective, but Buddha himself has not anywhere a temple so splendid.

They buried Iyeyasu at Nikkō, not in the town of his birth or of his death, not in the city over which he ruled, but four days’ journey from Yedo in the midst of the mountains; and they did it that Japan’s greatest ruler might lie amid the nation’s best in nature as in art, that to the splendour of the temple the Land herself might add the glories of her mountains and her trees.

At Nikkō is the great _Shōgun_ buried, and for twenty miles before his shrine a stately avenue of trees leads up to the temple, and up this avenue prince and pilgrim yearly come; prince and pilgrim, priest and peasant they still come, up the great avenue of dark thick-set cryptomerias, the giant pine-trees of Japan.

At the temple’s foot a mountain stream rushes in a deep green gorge, and two bridges cross the stream: one bright red, the bridge of the Son of Heaven, one painted green, for the rest of this world’s humankind.

And the reason is that when the Buddhist saint Shōdō Shōnin pursued the vision that had been sent to him, he journeyed into the mountains many days until the grey torrent of Nikkō rushing tumultuously across his path barred the way; but the vision abode with him, and Shōdō Shōnin knew that he must cross the stream, yet was there neither bridge, nor boat, nor crossing-place. So the saint kneeled down and prayed. Then there appeared to him an angel, clothed in black robes and blue, wearing a string of skulls around his neck, and holding in his hand two serpents, these he threw across the stream, and they became a bridge firm and strong. So Shōdō Shōnin passed over the torrent in safety, but when he looked back, snakes, bridge, and angel had vanished and only the rushing river remained. Then for a memory the two bridges were built in the very place of the crossing.

Of all the marriages of Art and Nature the Sacred Red Bridge of Nikkō is the most beautiful. Scattered among hills and trees and river, beauty lay; but this people coming through the mountains saw the one bond that had power to bind the pale blue hills, the dark green gorge, the stone-grey stream together in an ordered whole of deep-thought artistic loveliness, planned, perfect, yet supremely natural.

Then the avenue goes on, up the foot of the hill, till it widens and broadens into a great gravel circle before the entrance-gate of the temple. Here the great trees of the mountains spread out and up on either hand, with the temple in their midst surrounded but not overwhelmed by the grace of the wood. Under the granite _torī_, the first gateway is guarded by two figures, the mythical lions gilded and lacquered; while above, the mysterious _baku_, with his four ears and his nine tails, who has power to eat all bad dreams that pass before sleeping eyes, crouches alert.

A flight of granite steps leads to the first courtyard, set at right angles to the gateway, and paved with rounded grey pebbles from the stream. Here are all the minor buildings of the temple, the stable for the sacred white horse, the library for the two thousand _sutra_ of the Buddhist scriptures, the tank-house for the purification, the store-houses for the temple furniture; and stable and library, tank-house and store-houses are jewelled gems of carving and design, so rich, so splendid in the ordered magnificence of their colouring that western senses stand amazed. A blood-red lacquered fence aglow with coloured carvings divides the temple from the sombre majesty of the giant cryptomerias.

Then the pebbled space contracts into a flight of granite stairs, and mounts between stone walls that end in painted friezes of carved wood to a second courtyard. This is almost square, and standing on the wide grey sweep of rounded pebbles are three bronze lanterns from the three tributary kingdoms of Old Japan--from Korea, Luchu, and _Holland_; and there in serried rows and ranged against the blood-red lacquered fence aglow with gilded carvings, stand multitudes of bronze lanterns, which the dead _daimyō_ of Old Japan sent as offerings to the temple. Beyond the lacquered fence the dark still stems of the pine-trees range out of sight.

Then the pebbled space contracts again, and a flight of granite steps leads between granite walls set with coloured friezes of carved wood to the third courtyard; and the colourless pause of the second court, with its bronze lanterns on grey stones, gains a new meaning as one mounts, for in the third courtyard, between the blood-red friezes with their riotous coloured carvings, is the pure perfection of the Yōmei-mon, a double gateway, of white lacquer, cream-white and supported by four pillars of carved wood. And when they put the fourth pillar in its place they planted it upside down fearing if the beauty of the temple were all-perfect, evil might befall the house of Tokugawa through the jealousy of high heaven.

And the stranger as he draws near pauses in sheer amazement; the wild untamable beauty of the mighty temple set in its giant framework of dark green trees is strange beyond believing.

On either hand stretches the tropical splendour of the blood-red lacquered fence, set with coloured carvings as with shining jewels. Behind is the pale glory of the Yōmei-mon. All around the darkness of the forest lies like a still quiet tomb. And in front, rising in lines of sheer perfection, is the white beauty of the Chinese gate, cream-white, adorned with glittering yellow brass, brass in rounded sunken medallions on the lintel and the gate-posts, brass in quaint designs and shining points of yellow light, which break about the whiteness as sunshine through a mist.

The carvings and the pattern, the picture-panels, the decorated eaves, the chiselled heads and sculptured birds and beasts, the growing, glowing flowers, the hanging lotus-bells that tinkle at the corners of the tent-curved roof, and all perfect, are more than a man’s mind can perceive though he look for many years. Brains and money and labour were poured out here like mountain water, and like the rushing stream of Nikkō the drops go unperceived in the beauty of the whole.

In the short space of forty years were the temple and its fences, the gateways and the carvings, completed and set up; but forty short years from first to last, and the carving of one gateway is more than a lifetime’s work.

Then the splendour culminates. Beyond the Chinese gateway is the actual shrine itself, its cream-white gateway studded too with brass, while superb in the utter beauty of their carving, two writhing dragons stretch on either hand between the door-post and the pillar. Inside is the temple of the memorial tablets, where with daily rites the Buddhist priests prayed for the soul of Iyeyasu. To-day the Buddhist emblems are all gone, the shrine is bare. A _shintō_ rope of rice-straw stretches from post to post, the mirror of the Sun-Goddess shines above the altar for her son, the “Son of Heaven” _Tenshi_, the Mikado, has come back to his own.

All the magnificence of the temple now is in its walls, walls of panel carvings where the springing phœnix and the crouching lion rise like pale shadows from the pale unstained wood, so little are they raised above the surface. And yet the artist’s hand that carved them was without a rival in the world. They are real and living, delicate and true, and so entirely beautiful that the heart cries out with joy as at a long-lost good. Here is no colour, the sweep of pale yellow matting, the panelled walls of pale dust-coloured wood, are more light than colour. Here the rich joy of sense is laid aside: the temple stands a beauty immaterial.

Through three hundred years they prayed for Iyeyasu daily with long rites, but his tomb is not here.

It lies beyond the temple and above it. One climbs to it by a long, steep stair of grey-green granite, set in the sombre hill. A stairway built of granite in long slabs, so broad and thick that the balustrade with its coping, base, and sculptured columns is all cut from one solid block, with each block fourteen feet long. And the stairway took thirteen years to quarry and set up.

The hillside is steep, the stairs are many, and the tall dark pines, the flame-red maples gather, gather till the temple’s roof, the sound of praying bell or chanted hymn is lost. The little space which Art stole from Nature is completely hidden, even the forest has forgotten.

And the grey stair climbs, climbs among the dark-green trees, then stops.

On the top of the hill is a rounded curve of stately pines. Alone, solitary between sky and trees, stands the tomb of Iyeyasu, a domed pillar-box of bronze glinting golden through the trees. A low stone wall surrounds the tomb, a bronze door solid but uncarved is its gateway, and that is all. Here among the quiet trees, in the stillness of the forest, above the splendour of the temple, lie the ashes of the great Iyeyasu.

All the days of his rule he dwelt among men, but his soul climbed the steep stair of Life, casting off its splendours and its glories, climbed above them, climbed back into the eternal simplicity of Nature, and there he laid him down to rest.

KANNON, LADY OF MERCY

It was the _fête_ of Kannon of Asak’sa, whose votaries are many. They thronged the narrow paved pathway set between the two long rows of red brick stalls, and overflowed into the temple grounds behind, where the juggler and the wax-works, the two-headed porpoise, and the headless man, and all the long scale of attractions in between shouted and drummed. All the fun of the fair was here, with the advantage of a _petit bout de messe_, to save the soul, over the way.

Kannon of Asak’sa is a popular lady, and her doors stand wide open. You may go in with your boots on. It is true that the goddess herself, on her gilded altar, is railed off from public touch by a wire netting--like the animals in the menagerie outside. But that is all the privacy she enjoys, and the rest of her temple is as public as a railway station, and just about as sacred. The people pour in up the steps on all sides, the scraping of their _gheta_ on the dirty wooden floor adding its quota of noise to the chink of money and the buzz of voices, the ringing of bells, and the hurry and bustle of a surging railway crowd. There is the same wide-open, doorless feel, the same discomforting, amphibious sensation of neither open air nor closed house. A large bookstall in the corner, selling the latest illustrated numbers of the goddess, and the whole stock of Kannon literature adds to the illusion. Between two pillars a temple clerk issues tickets at a substantial booking-office. A shaven official appears and rings a bell at intervals, reciting a prayer in the voice of a railway porter proclaiming stations. There is the same reasonless flux and reflux of the crowd, the same rush and bustle, with its inseparable accompaniment of underlying roar that rises and falls, sometimes absorbing all the other sounds into itself, sometimes leaving them distinct and clear, but never for a moment ceasing.

A huge lacquered case like a square coffin, its lid replaced by thick metal bars, stands between the bookstall and the booking-office, right against the wire netting. Into this each comer throws his coin before reciting his prayer, and the chinking of the money as it falls is as unceasing as the roar of the crowd.

Away in a corner behind the booking-office a worn-out black statue sits huddled in rags. Around it, bands of invalids await their turn to rub the featureless figure with their hands, and transfer the charm by rubbing themselves in the corresponding spot. As a method of propagating disease, this treatment for curing it can have few equals. But the coffers of the temple profit greatly.

Business, indeed, is brisk to-day. The shaven-headed booking-clerk is issuing tickets at a bank-holiday rate, and the bookstall is besieged. Up from all sides comes the tumult of the fair. Kannon must be a paying investment.

As I stand on the steps with the din of the temple behind me, a man in the crowd below buys a cage of little birds at a stall, and, opening the door, throws them up into the air. The startled flutter of their wings as they soar up over the heads of the crowd into the blue carries me back to Ober-Ammergau, to the memory of the overturned tables of the money-changers, and the overthrown cages of those who sold doves.

“My house shall be called the house of prayer, but ye have made it a den of thieves.”

Is human nature the same all the world over? Are priests? Or is the fate of all religions alike?

O Kannon of Asak’sa! Kannon, Lady of Mercy! how long must thou wait for thy deliverer? O Lord Buddha, how long?

RINZAKI’S ALTAR

On the edge of the dark hills is the temple of Rinzaki, and the green sea of the rice-fields washes up to its open doors. Overhead the grey sky of a sunless summer’s evening dims all the colours in the land, and leaves them shadows. It is fresh and still, and the wide, green bay sweeps in smooth curves to the foot of the dark hills. On the pathway the hosts of little green frogs hop like hailstones, and the startled splash as they fall back into the rice-fields is sharp and clear.

Rinzaki stands alone, its _shōji_ walls pushed back, and the slender, square pillars at each corner are dark against the greyness. The open matted spaces of the temple are deserted, and the stillness is pure and clear as freshly running water. In the sunless evening light the sombre colours of the temple are but light and shadow, a sweep of pale matting under a dark roof framed in grey. And the stillness grows purer, clearer, and more still.

Beyond the open spaces of the matting, between altar wall and altar wall, the garden of the temple hangs, a living picture on the wall. Two kneeling-cushions on the matting mark the purpose of the garden, and I stay to look.

A faintly running stream, stone-grey, a shaven slope of green, and on it three clipped azalea-bushes pink with blossom. So still, so clear, I stretch my hand to feel.

It is a garden--a garden painted by an artist who worked in earth and flowers. And the dim greyness of the temple, the pale spaces of the matting, frame the garden as a shell its pearl. I could but look. The pale pink of the azalea-bushes, the soft curve of the slope, the stone-grey of the running stream, were painted with the loving care, the certain touch of a master’s hand. There was no fault. Between altar wall and altar wall the living picture hung--perfect.