“I long have wished for some
Excuse for this revulsion;
Now that excuse has come,
I do it on compulsion;”
but recent events show that though his ordinary life has become peaceful and bloodless, there has been no falling off in the pluck of a Japanese soldier.
Ieyasu was first buried at Kuno-zan, which I reached after about an hour’s ride by jinrikisha from Shizuoka. The first part of the way was over a rice-covered plain, from which gay-colored hills, striped with white buckwheat, dark green tea, and pale green daikon, gradually rose, narrowing down towards the sea, and finally leaving only a strip of sandy soil, mostly planted with sugar-cane, between the steep cliffs and the shore. The little villages were odorous with drying fish, slices of bonito hanging in festoons in front of every cottage, and the shore was dotted with evaporating-tubs for getting salt. The mortuary temples, which served as a model for those afterwards built at Nikko, stand on the top of the cliff, and are reached by a zigzag flight of steps cut out of the rock; they are not so elaborate as the Nikko temples or the Shiba shrines, but have a severer beauty of their own, which nature has helped by decorating every stone and tree-trunk with silvery gray lichen, lovely in color against the background of red-lacquered buildings. The interior of the oratory, which, with its surrounding fence, has a roof of bronze, is mostly black and gold, and there the very affable priests who had shown me round held a little service in honor of Ieyasu, presenting me afterwards with the sweet wine and cakes which had been used as offerings. It is commonly said that the body of the great Shogun still lies under the simple stone monument behind the oratory, and that only a few hairs were removed and buried at Nikko; certainly this is the more impressive spot for a warrior’s grave, with the wild hills behind, and the sea and coast spread out for miles below the towering cliff.
The road on to Okitsu, where I had to rejoin the railway, led me inland past Ryugeji, a temple where there are the finest specimens of the screw-palm (Cycas revoluta) to be seen in Japan, and then to the sea again at Shimizu, a nice little port, just opposite the sandy fir-clad spit of land called Mio-no-matsubara, enclosing a smaller bay in the great curve of Suruga, which often appears in Japanese pictures. This is the scene of a legend which has been dramatized, if you can call them dramas, for one of the classical No dances. It tells how a fisherman watching his nets saw a fairy alight on the sand and lay aside her robe of feathers; how he managed to steal the robe so that she could not fly away again, and only restored it to her when she consented to dance for him under the pine-trees one of the dances which are never seen by mortal eyes. Near the tea-house in Shimizu where I stopped to refresh there was a temple dedicated to Inari, the Shinto goddess of the rice-fields, whose shrines are guarded by foxes; the approach to it was under three avenues of small red wooden torii placed closely together, apparently votive offerings, for some of them were old and decayed and others quite bright and new.
At Numadzu, farther to the east on the Tokaido, but still on the shore of Suruga Bay, I again left the train and
A RUSTIC BRIDGE AT DOGASHIMA, NEAR MIYA-NO-SHITA