First, he carries the tourist to Shiba, the old monastery grounds that are now a public park. Under the shadow of century-old pines and cryptomeria stand the mortuary temples of the later Shoguns, superb edifices ablaze with red and gold lacquer, and set with panels of carved wood, splendid in color and gilding, the gold trefoil of the Tokugawas shining on every ridge-pole and gable. These temples and tombs are lesser copies of the magnificent shrines at Nikko, and but for those originals would be unique. On a rainy day, the green shadow and gloom, the cawing of the ravens that live in the old pine-trees, and their slow flight, are solemn as death itself; and the solitude of the dripping avenues and court-yards, broken only by the droning priests at prayer, and the musical vibrations of some bell or sweet-voiced gong, invite a gentle melancholy. On such a day, the priests, interrupted in their statuesque repose, or their pensive occupation of sipping tea and whiffing tiny pipes in silent groups around a brazier, display to visitors the altars and ceilings and jewelled walls with painstaking minuteness, glad of one ripple of excitement and one legitimate fee. Led by a lean, one-toothed priest, you follow, stocking-footed, over lacquer floors to behold gold and bronze, lacquer and inlaying, carving and color, golden images sitting in golden shadows, enshrined among golden lotus flowers, and sacred emblems. In one temple the clear, soft tones of the bronze gong, a bowl eighteen inches in diameter and a little less in depth, vibrate on the air for three full minutes before they die away.
Up mossy stair-ways, between massive embankments, and through a shady grove, the priest’s clogs scrape noisily to the hexagonal temple, where the ashes of Hidetada, the Ni Dai Shogun, Iyeyasu’s son, lie in a great gold lacquer cylinder, the finest existing specimen of the lacquer of that great art age. The quiet of Shiba, the solemn background of giant trees, the deep shadows and green twilight of the groves, the hundreds of stone lanterns, the ponds of sacred lotus, the succession of dragon-guarded gate-ways, and carved and gorgeously-colored walls, crowd the memory with lovely pictures. Near a hill-top pagoda commanding views of the Bay and of Fuji, stands the tateba of a cheerful family, who bring the visitor a telescope and cups of cherry-blossom tea.
A colony of florists show gardens full of wonderful plants and dwarf-trees, and then Sanjiro minces, “I think more better we go see more temples;” and we go, spinning past the giant Shiba gate and up the road to Atago Yama, a tiny temple on the edge of a precipitous hill-top, approached by men’s stairs, an air-line flight of broad steps, and women’s stairs, curving by broken flights of easier slope. A leper, with scaly, white skin and hideous ulcers, extends his miserable hand for alms, and picturesque, white-clad pilgrims, with staff and bell, go up and down those breathless flights. The tateba, with their rows of lanterns, where the nesans offer tea of salted cherry blossoms, that unfold again into perfect flowers in the bottom of the cup, overhang the precipice wall, and look down upon the Shiba quarter as upon a relief map.
A breathless rush of two miles or more straight across the city, past flying shops, beside the tooting tram-way and over bridges, and Sanjiro runs into Uyéno Park, with its wide avenues, enormous trees, and half-hidden temple roofs. The ground slopes away steeply at the left, and at the foot of the hill lies a lotus lake of many acres that is a pool of blossoms in midsummer. A temple and a tiny tea-house are on an island in the centre, and around the lake the race-course is overarched with cherry-trees. Great torii mark the paths and stairs leading from the shore to the temples above.
At Uyéno are more tombs and more sanctuaries, avenues of lanterns, bells, and drinking-fountains, and a black, bullet-marked gate-way, where the Yeddo troops made their last stand before the Restoration. Near this gate-way is the sturdy young tree planted by General Grant. Far back in the park stand the mortuary temples, splendid monuments of Tokugawa riches and power, though the most splendid, here as at Shiba, have been destroyed by fire.
When the Tokio Fine Arts Club holds one of its loan exhibitions in its Uyéno Park house, Sanjiro is inexorable, deposits his fare at the door-way, shows the way to the ticket-office, and insists upon his seeing the best work of the great artists. The noble club-men contribute specimens from their collections of lacquer, porcelain, ivories, bronzes, and kakemonos. Behind glass doors hang kakemonos by the great artists, and Japanese visitors gaze with reverence on the masterpieces of the Kano and Tosa schools. The great art treasures of the empire are sequestrated in private houses and godowns, and to acquire familiarity with them, to undertake an art education in semiannual instalments by grace of the Fine Arts Club, is a discouraging endeavor. It would be more hopeful to seek the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the British Museum, or Mr. Walters’s Baltimore galleries, which contain an epitome of all Japanese art. At the Tokio Club, however, works of Sosen and Hokusai, the two masters of the last century, are often exhibited. Sosen painted inimitable monkeys, and connoisseurs of to-day award him the tardy fame which his contemporaries failed to give. As a rule, foreigners prefer Hokusai to all other masters, and they search old book-shops in the hope of stumbling upon one of the innumerable books illustrated and sometimes engraved by this prolific genius. His genius never lacked recognition, and a century ago all feudal Yeddo went wild over his New-year’s cards, each one a characteristic and unique bit of landscape, caricature, or fantasy. His fourteen volumes of Mangwa, or rough sketches, and his One Hundred Views of Fuji are most celebrated; but wonderfully clever are his jokes, his giants, dwarfs, demons, goblins, and ghosts; and when he died, at the age of ninety, he sighed that he could not live long enough to paint something which he should himself esteem. After the visit to the club Sanjiro takes his patron to the tomb of Hokusai, in a near-by temple yard, and shows the brushes hung up by despairing and prayerful artists, who would follow his immortal methods.
East of Uyéno stands the great Asakusa temple, shrine of one of the most famous of the thirty-three famous Kwannons of the empire, the great place of worship for the masses, and the centre of a Vanity Fair unequalled elsewhere. Every street leading to the temple grounds is a bazaar and merry fair, and theatres, side shows, booths, and tents, and all the devices to entrap the idle and the pleasure-seeking, beset the pilgrim on his way to the sanctuary. In florists’ gardens are shown marvels of floriculture, in their ponds swim goldfish with wonderfully fluted tails, and in tall bamboo cages perch Tosa chickens with tail feathers ten and twelve feet long. Menageries draw the wondering rustics, and they pay their coppers for the privilege of toiling up a wood, canvas, and pasteboard Fujiyama to view the vast plain of the city lying all around it, and on timbered slopes enjoy tobogganing in midsummer. Penetrating to the real gate-way, it is found guarded by giant Nio, whose gratings are spotted with the paper prayers that the worshipful have chewed into balls and reverently thrown there. If the paper wad sticks to the grating, it is a favorable omen, and the believer may then turn the venerable old prayer-wheel, and farther on put his shoulder to the bar, and by one full turn of the revolving library of Buddhist scriptures endow himself with all its intellectual treasure.
The soaring roof of the great temple is fitly shadowed by camphor-trees and cryptomeria that look their centuries of age, and up the broad flagging there passes the ceaseless train of believers. One buys corn and feeds the hundreds of pigeons, messengers of the gods, who live secure and petted by all the crowds in the great enclosure, or pays his penny to secure the release of a captive swallow, that flies back every night to its owner. At the foot of the steps the pilgrim begins to pray, and, ascending, mumbles his way to the altar. The colossal money-box, which is said to gather in over a thousand dollars on great holidays, rings and echoes well to the fall of the smallest coin. The sides of the temple are open to the air, and the visitor may retain shoes and clogs, so that the clatter of these wooden soles, the pilgrims’ clapping and mumbling, mingle in one distracting roar.
Tame pigeons fly in and out through the open walls, and children chase each other across the floor; but behind the grating candles burn, bells tinkle, priests chant, and rows of absorbed worshippers clap, toss their coppers, and pray, oblivious of all their surroundings.