[ Page 31.]
The keeping of a feast on the third day of the third month is a custom that has come down from very ancient times. At first the day was set apart for the purification of the people, and a part of the ceremony was the rubbing of the body with bits of white paper, roughly cut into the semblance of a white-robed priest. These paper dolls were believed to take away the sins of the year. When they had been used for purification, they were inscribed with the sex and birth-year of the user and thrown into the river. The third month was also, in early times, the season for cock-fighting among the men, and for doll-playing among the women. The special name by which the dolls of the Doll Feast are called is O Hina Sama. Now hina in modern Japanese means a chicken or other young bird, and is never used to mean anything else except the dolls; thus the dolls are shown to be associated with the ancient cock-fighting, an amusement which has now almost gone out, except in the province of Tosa on the island of Shikoku.
The oldest dolls did not represent the Emperor and Empress, but simply a man and a woman, and were modeled closely after the old white paper dolls of the religious ceremony. When the Tokugawa Shōguns had firmly established their splendid court at Yedo, a decree was issued designating the five feast days upon which the daimiōs were to present themselves at the Shōgun's palace and offer their congratulations. One of the days thus appointed was the third day of the third month. It is believed that the giving of the chief place at the feast to effigies of the Emperor and Empress was a part of the policy of the Shōgunate,—a policy which aimed to keep alive the spirit of loyalty to the throne, while at the same time the occupant of the throne remained a puppet in the hands of his vice-gerent.
Each girl born into a family has a pair of O Hina Sama placed for her upon the red-covered shelf, on the first Feast of Dolls that comes after her birth. When, as a bride, she goes to her husband's house, she carries the dolls with her, and the first feast after her marriage she observes with special ceremonies. Until she has a daughter old enough to carry out the observance, she must keep up the ceremony. The feast, as it exists to-day, is said by the Japanese to serve three purposes: it makes the children of both sexes loyal to the imperial family, it interests the girls in housekeeping, and it trains them in ceremonial etiquette.
[ Page 40.]
Because of the complexity of the Chinese language and the time needed for its mastery, there has been a movement to lessen the study of pure Chinese in the government schools, or abolish it altogether, and with this to simplify the use of the ideographs in the Sinico-Japanese. The educational department is requiring that text-books be limited in their use of ideographs; that those used be written in only one way and that the simplest, and that the kana (the Japanese syllabary) be substituted wherever possible. Several plans for reform in this matter are being agitated, one of which is to limit the use of ideographs to nouns and verbs only.
[ Page 41.]
No one who has been in Japan can have failed to notice the peculiarly strident quality of the Japanese voice in singing, a quality that is gained by professional singers through much labor and actual physical suffering. That this is not a natural characteristic of the Japanese voice is shown by the fact that in speaking, the voices, both of children and adults, are low and sweet. It seems to me to be brought about by the pursuit of a wrong musical ideal, or at least, of a musical ideal quite distinct from that of the Western world. In Japan one seldom finds singing birds kept in cages, but instead crickets, grasshoppers, katydids, and other noisy members of the insect family may be seen exposed for sale in the daintiest of cages any summer night in the Tōkyō streets. These insects delight the ears of the Japanese with their melody, and it seems to me that the voices of singers throughout the empire are modeled after the shrill, rattling chirp of the insect, rather than after the fuller notes of the bird's song.
The introduction of European music by the schools and churches has already begun to show in the songs of the children in the streets, and where ten years ago one might live in Tōkyō for a year, and never hear a note of music except the semi-musical cries of the workmen, when they are pulling or striking in concert, now there are few days when some strain of song from some passing school-child does not come in at the window of one's house in any quarter of the city. The progress made in catching foreign ideas of time and tune is quite surprising, but the singing will never be acceptable to the foreign ear until the voice is modulated according to the foreign standards.