CHAPTER XIV
SHRINES AND POETRY
(NIIGATA AND TOYAMA)
Sir, I am talking of the mass of the people.—Johnson
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:
January: Future of the day determined in the morning.
February: The voice of one reading a farming book coming from the snow-covered window.
March: Grafting these young trees, thinking of the days of my grandchildren.
April: Digging the soil of the paddy field, sincerity concentrated on the edge of the mattock.
May: Returning home with the dim moonlight glinting on the edges of our mattocks.
June: Boundless wealth stored up by gracious heaven: dig it out with your mattock, take it away with your sickle.
July: Weeding the paddy field [[132]] in a happiness and contentment which townspeople do not know.
August: Standing peasant worthier than resting rich man.
September: Ears of rice bend their heads as they ripen. (An allusion to wisdom and meekness.)
October: White steam coming out of a manure house on an autumn morning.
November: Moon clear and bright above neatly divided paddy fields.
December: All the members of the family smiling and celebrating the year's end, piling up many bales of rice.
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."