narrow streets; they are built on solid wooden wheels, and are dragged about by strings of coolies, the young men of the guild dancing and shouting in front of them, waving fans by day and lanterns after dark to direct the coolies’ movements, while the older members follow in white-curtained carts. The wood-work around the stage is lacquered, gold and black and red, with elaborate brass ornaments, and the pagoda-like roof which covers it is of burnished gold, surmounted with a dragon or phœnix or other mythical animal. The part behind the stage is enclosed with hangings, Chinese embroideries, Persian rugs, or silk brocades, and two of them had fine pieces of Flemish tapestry, which must have come over with the Dutch centuries ago; the buxom ladies and knights in armor looked odd, and yet pleasantly familiar, and my heart went out to the expatriated strangers, so lonely amid that Eastern crowd. In front of each stage hung a bunch of “gohei,” the twisted strips of white paper which are the universal emblem of the Shinto religion, the only simple things among the masses of gorgeous color, and they seemed to give the key-note to the whole; for Shinto is, above everything else, an ancestor-worship, a religious respect for the country and for the men whose heroic deeds still inspire its people, and the short dramas which the children acted were all founded on old stories—how Yoritomo’s son sacrificed his life to save the young Mikado, and other well-known motives from Japanese history. The boys were admirably trained and beautifully dressed; they rolled their eyes and grimaced in exactly the same way as their elders of the profession, and the crowd vigorously applauded their facial contortions. In one company there was a little mite of two years old; he had not to speak at all, only to cry out once or twice, but he knew his part as well as the rest, and always looked up at his boy father at the right moment. During the afternoon I walked round the town, first to the Buddhist temple, the great hall of which was crowded with people sleeping, eating, and praying, and then up the long avenue leading to the Shinto temple of Hachiman. It was lined with stalls and booths for refreshments of all kinds, with conjurers, purse-trick men, lucky wheels, quack-medicine vendors, and so on, and near the big granite torii and lanterns were the market-gardeners with dwarf pines, oranges laden with fruit, camellias, and other trees. One had nothing but orchid-plants, none of them, unfortunately, in flower. I joined a large circle of spectators who were watching a scriever, which is, I believe, the professional name for the artists who draw on the flag-stones; this one had no pavement, so he prepared an even ground by sprinkling some light gray sand over the dusty road; his colors were bags of black, white, red, and blue sand; from one of these he took a handful, and drew his design by letting the powder run from his closed fist in a line which varied in thickness as he tightened or loosened his grasp. He wrote or drew in this way with wonderful rapidity as he squatted on the ground, and he talked all the time, obliterating each drawing as soon as he had finished it. I watched him draw a figure of a girl, and he began by putting down the spots of the pattern on her kimono with blue, then added the shadow lines of the dress, relieved it here and there with white, sketched the face and hands in red, and finally added a bold outline in black, which completed the picture, thus working in that reverse way to our natural instincts which you so often notice in this land of Topsy-turvydom.
As evening approached, all the yama began to collect in the square in front of another Shinto temple, where the great Hachiman car with colossal swords, and the Mikoshi, a shrine carried about on men’s shoulders, were already placed. In the river on one side of this square many boats were moored, spread with rush mats and with the red blankets which have become so common in Japan, and in them people were picknicking; over the bridge which crossed it the unwieldy structures were dragged from the town by shouting crowds; each in turn gave a final performance in front of the temple, and was then drawn aside to make room for the next. This began at half-past five, and it was eleven o’clock before the last of
ONE OF THE “YAMA” AT THE NAGAHAMA MATSURI
From a printed programme sold on the street
them had been ranged with the others to the right of the temple steps. As night came on they were covered with big lanterns, the stages were lighted by lamps in glass shades, and attendants with candles on long sticks illuminated the face of each little actor while he was speaking. When the six gorgeous yama with their attendants and gayly dressed performers were all drawn up in line against
