A traveler gets the impression that most of their shops, or "stores," as we say in America, are for selling bric-a-brac, toys, lacquer ware, bronzes, or ornamental things of one kind or another; but perhaps this is largely because they give an artistic or ornamental appearance to a thousand utensils and household articles which in America would be raw and plain in their obvious practicality. The room in which I write is a fine illustration of this: finished in natural, unpainted woods, entirely without "fussiness" or show, and yet with certain touches and bits of wood carving that make it a work of art. Upon this point I must again quote Lafcadio Hearn, whose {49} books, although often more poetic and laudatory than accurate, are nevertheless too valuable to be neglected by any student of Japan:
"It has been said that in a Greek city of the fourth century before Christ every household utensil, even the most trifling object, was in respect of design an object of art; and the same fact is true, though in another and stranger way, of all things in a Japanese home; even such articles of common use as a bronze candlestick, a brass lamp, an iron kettle, a paper lantern, a bamboo curtain, a wooden tray, will reveal to educated eyes a sense of beauty and fitness entirely unknown to Western cheap production."
Like most old Japanese cities, Kyoto is proud of its temples, Buddhist and Shinto. And perhaps I should explain just here the difference between these two faiths that were long merged into one, but have been dissociated since the restoration of the Emperor to his old-time powers forty years ago. Shinto is the ancient Japanese system of ancestor-worship, with its doctrine of the divine descent of the Mikado from the Sun-goddess and its requirement that every faithful adherent make daily offerings to the spirits of the family's ancestors. With the future life or with moral precepts for this life it does not concern itself. "Obey the Emperor and follow your own instincts," is the gist of the Shinto religion, in so far as it may be called a religion at all: the tendency is to consider it only a form of patriotism and not a religion.
Buddhism, on the other hand, is an elaborate system of theology comprising a great variety of creeds, and insisting upon much ecclesiastical form and ceremony, however little it may have to do with practical morals. "The fact is, we Japanese have never gotten our morals from our religion," said one quasi-Buddhist newspaper man to me in Tokyo. "What moral ideas we have came neither from Shintoism nor Buddhism, but largely from Confucius and the Chinese classics."
Buddhism as it left India may have been a rather exalted religious theory, but if so, then in Japan it has certainly {50} degenerated into a shameless mockery of its former self. To read Sir Edwin Arnold's glorification of theoretical Buddhism in his "Light of Asia," and then see practical Buddhism in Japan with all its superstitions and idolatries, is very much like hearing bewitched Titania's praise of her lover's beauty and then turning to see the long ears and hairy features of the ass that he has become.
Nor is it without significance that Sir Edwin Arnold himself coming to Buddhist Japan dropped into open and flagrant immoralities such as a Christian community would never have tolerated, while the foremost American-bred apologists for Buddhism here have been but little better. One of the greatest and wealthiest temples in Kyoto is more notorious right now for the vices of its sacred (?) officials than for any virtues in its creed, and one of the high priests, like the Emperor himself, has a dozen or more women in his household. Some Buddhists are making an earnest effort to bring about at least an outward reformation of their organization, but the difficulties are such as to make the success of the undertaking very improbable. With the usual Japanese quality of imitativeness they have started "Young Men's Buddhist Associations," "Sunday schools," etc., and are also beginning to follow the example set by the Christians of participating in philanthropic and charitable work. In the Buddhist service I attended last Sunday the gorgeously robed priest sat on a raised altar in the centre of the room, with other priests ranged about him, and the general service, as usual, was much as if they had copied the Catholic ritual.
After the Buddhist ceremonies, I went to the Christian service at the Congregational School, or Doshisha, where the sound of the American-born minister's voice was punctuated by the street sounds of whirring rickshaw wheels and the noisy getas of passing Buddhists, while outside the window I could see the bamboo trees and the now familiar red disk and white border of the Mikado's flag. Prayer was offered for {51} "the President of the United States, the King of Great Britain, the Emperor of Germany, and the Emperor of Japan."
At night I was even more interested, even though I could not understand a word, in a native Japanese service I attended for half an hour. Although there was a downpour of rain the chapel was comfortably filled and the faces of the worshippers, I thought, were of more than ordinary intelligence and promise, while their sincerity is illustrated by the fact that numbers of the women Christians are actually depriving themselves of suitable food in order to give money for erecting a larger church building.
The next evening I took tea with a missionary who has in his home one of the public notices (dated March, 1868,) and common throughout the empire forty odd years ago, prohibiting Christianity, the ancient penalty being nothing less than death itself. The explanation of this notice is found in a bit of history. Three hundred and sixty years ago the Catholics came here, started missions, and made many converts among the lords or daimyios, who ordered their followers also to become Catholics, with the result that by the time of the first English settlement at Jamestown, in 1607, there were from 600,000 to 1,000,000 Christians, nominal and actual, away over here in Japan. Seven years later, however, government persecution began, Christianity was put under the ban, and so remained until eight years after our Civil War ended. Many Christians suffered martyrdom for their faith in this long period; and a few who escaped detection even secretly handed their faith down from father to son through all the long generations until tolerance came again.
Dr. A. D. Hail, of Osaka, tells me that even as late as 1885 an old man from the "backwoods," as we should say, came to a village where Dr. Hail's brother was a missionary, discovered for the first time that a man might be a Christian without being punished, and then confessed that each day he had worshipped secretly at a little Catholic shrine hidden in {52} his wall, as his father and his father's father had done before him.