For a week in June, jinrikishas spin up this leafy tunnel to the iris fêtes at Hori Kiri, where in ponds and trenches grow acres of such fleur-de-lis as no Bourbon ever knew. Compared with the cherry-blossom carnival, this festival is a quiet and decorous garden party, where summer-houses, hills, lakes, armies of royal flowers, and groups of visitors seem to be consciously arranging themselves for decorative effects.
After the season opens, flower festivals crowd one another, and the miracles of Japanese floriculture presently exhaust the capacity of wonder. One of the most superb of their productions is the botan, or tree peony, whose fringed and silken flowers, as large as dinner-plates, show all delicate rose and lilac shades, a red that is almost black, and cream, pale yellow, straw color, and salmon hues of marvellous beauty. At the Ikegami temples, the Nichiren priests display with pride their botan, now three hundred years old, whose solid trunk and wrinkled bark uphold a multitude of stately blossoms. Azaleas, fire-red, snow-white, salmon-pink, and lilac, crowd every garden, and the mountains and wild river-banks are all ablaze with them in May.
Then, also, the wistaria, the fuji, is in bloom, and at the Kameido temple makes an eighth wonder of the world. Every householder has his wistaria trellis, generally reaching out as a canopy over some inlet, or, as at Kameido, forming the roofs of the open-air tea-houses edging the lake. The mat of leaves and blossoms overhead casts thick, cool shadows, and the long, pendent purple and white flowers are reflected in the water. Blossoms two and even three feet long are common, and only a great swaying tassel four feet in length draws a “Naruhodo!” (wonderful) from the connoisseurs. Whole families come to spend the day on the borders of the little lake, sipping amber tea, tossing mochi to the lazy goldfish, or sitting in picturesque groups on the low platforms under the canopies of flowers fluttering with poems and lanterns. The temple is ancient, and the grounds are full of tiny shrines, stone lanterns, tablets, and images, and dwarfed and curiously trained pine trees, with a high, hump-backed little bridge, over which, in the old days, only priests and grandees might walk. Golden carp, venerable old fellows, three or four feet in length, show an orange nose now and then above the surface of the pond. The people call these pets by clapping their hands, and the golden gourmands swim from one horn of plenty, filled with mochi, or rice-cakes, with which they are fed, to another. At Kasukabe, on the Oshukaido, north-east of Tokio, is the most famous wistaria in the empire. The vine is five hundred years old, with pendent blossoms over fifty inches long, and trellises covering a space of four thousand feet, and thither poets and pilgrims reverently go.
In August occurs the one great lotus show now seen in Tokio, when the lake below Uyéno Park shows acres of bluish-green plates of leaves starred with pink and white blossoms, and the enchanted beholder looks down from the bridges and tea-houses of the little islands straight into the heart of the great flowers. The castle moats no longer show their acres of lotus, and the mimic salutes no longer ring around the citadel, as when those myriad blossoms of Buddha opened with a gentle noise under the first warm rays of the sun. There is a lovely lotus-pond back of the Shiba pagoda, just seen as the jinrikisha whirls along the shady avenue skirting it, but the lotus of the moats was the summer glory of Tokio. The flower was not alone to blame for malarial exhalations, as the contest still rages between the two sides of the city, as to whether the vapors from the moats, or those from the exposed mud flats and made ground of the Tsukiji section, are most pernicious.
AT KAMEIDO
The festival of the kiku, or chrysanthemum, in autumn, decks the whole empire with red, white, and yellow flowers. The sixteen-petalled chrysanthemum is the imperial or government crest; and the Emperor’s birthday, the third of November, coming in the height of the season, is made a gala-day in every province, and the occasion of gorgeous flower shows. The Western mind is filled with envy to discover that the wide-spreading, spicy flowers selling here for a few coppers each, cost as many dollars under new names across the water. Dango-zaka, dismissed with a line in the guide-book, is more picturesquely Japanese in autumn than any other suburb of Tokio. A community of florists tend, prune, dwarf, and cultivate their chrysanthemum plants in obscurity until the blossoming time makes Dango-zaka a gay fair. The unique productions of their gardens are set pieces of flowers on a gigantic scale. Under matted sheds, which are so many temporary stages without footlights, groups with life-sized figures are arranged, whose faces and hands are of wax or composition, but whose clothes, the accessories, and scenery are made of living flowers, trained so closely over a framework that the mechanism is not even suspected. The plants forming the flower-pieces are taken up with all their roots, wrapped in straw and cloths, propped up inside the skeleton framework, and watered every day. The flowers, drawn to the outside and woven into place, produce a solid surface of color, and are shaded with the most natural effects. The tableaux represent scenes from history and legend, and from the latest plays, or even illustrate the last emotional crime of the day. Here are seen whole mountain-sides of flowers, with water-falls of white blossoms spreading into floral streams; and chrysanthemum women leading chrysanthemum horses, ridden by chrysanthemum men across chrysanthemum bridges. Gigantic flowers, microscopic flowers, plants of a single blossom, and single plants of two hundred blossoms, have bamboo tents to themselves. Touters invite one to enter, proprietors chant the story of their pictures, and the side-show, the juggler, the fakir, and the peddler make the bannered and lanterned lanes a gay and innocent Babel. All classes visit Dango-zaka, and wander together up and down its one steep street, and in and out of the maze of gardens, paying a copper or two at each gate-way. Giants and saintly images forty and fifty feet high are enshrined in mat pavilions as lofty as temples, and to these marvellous chrysanthemum creatures the phonograph has lately added its wonders.
