On the days of the matsuri the village street is impassable, and the whole broad walk of the temple grounds leading from the pagoda is lined with booths, jugglers, acrobats, side-shows, and catch-penny tricksters. The “sand-man,” with bags of different colored sands, makes beautiful pictures on a cleared space of ground, rattling and gabbling without cessation while he works. First he dredges the surface with a sieve full of clean white sand, and then sifts a little thin stream of black or red sand through his closed hand, painting warriors, maidens, dragons, flowers, and landscapes in the swiftest, easiest way. It is a fine example of the trained hand and eye, and of excellent free-hand drawing. A juggler tosses rings, balls, and knives in the air, and spins plates on top of a twenty-foot pole. His colleague balances a big bamboo on one shoulder, and a small boy climbs it and goes through wonderful feats on the cross-piece at the top. A ring of gaping admirers surrounds a master of the black art, who swallows a lighted pipe, drinks, whistles, produces the pipe for a puff or two, swallows it again, and complacently emits fanciful rings and wreaths of smoke. Hair-pins, rosaries, toys, and sweets are everywhere for sale.
A huge, towering, heavy-roofed red gate-way admits streams of people to the great court-yard, surrounded on three sides by temples large and small, where the priests chant and pound and the faithful pray, rubbing their rosaries and tossing in their coins. At one shrine greasy locks of hair tied to the lattices are votive offerings from those who have appealed to the deity within. There is a little temple to the North Star, where seamen and fisher-folk pray, and one to Daikoku, the god of riches and abundance, the latter a fat little man sitting on bags of rice, and always beset by applicants.
In the great temple pyramids of candles burn, incense rises, bells sound, and money rains into the big cash-box at the head of the steps. The splendid interior is a mass of lacquer, gilding, and color, the panelled ceiling has an immense filigree brass baldaquin hanging like a frosted canopy over the heads of the priests, and a superb altar, all images, lotus-leaves, lights, and gilded doors, dazzles the eye. Under the baldaquin sits the high-priest of the temple, who is a bishop of the largest diocese in Japan, while at either side of him more than two hundred celebrants face each other in rows. The priestly heads are shaven, the smooth faces wear the ecstatic, exalted expression of devotees purified by vigil and fasting, and over their white or yellow gauze kimonos are tied kesas, or cloaks of rich brocade. The lesser hierarchy appear in subdued colors—gray, purple, russet—but the head priest is arrayed in gorgeous scarlet and gold, and sits before a reading-desk, whose books are covered with squares of similar brocade. He leads the chanted service from a parchment roll spread before him, at certain places touching a silver-toned gong, when all the priests bow low and chant a response, sitting for hours immovable upon the mats, intoning and reading from the sacred books in concert. At intervals each raps the low lacquer table before him and bends low, while the big temple drum sounds, the high-priest touches his gong, and slowly, behind the lights and incense clouds of the altar, the gilded doors of the shrine swing open to disclose the precious image of sainted Nichiren. On all sides stand the faithful, extending their rosary-wrapped hands and muttering the Nichirene’s special form of prayer: “Namu mio ho ren ge kio” (Glory to the salvation-bringing book, the blossom of doctrine).
After seven hours of worship a last litany is uttered, and the procession of priests files through the grounds to the monastery, stopping to select from the two hundred and odd pairs of wooden clogs, waiting at the edge of the temple mats, each his proper pair. The high-priest walks near the middle of the line underneath an immense red umbrella. He carries an elaborate red lacquer staff, not unlike a crozier, and even his clogs are of red lacquered wood. The service in the temple suggests the forms of the Roman Church, and this Buddhist cardinal, in his red robes and umbrella, is much like his fellow-dignitary of the West.
To citizens of the United States Ikegami has a peculiar interest. When the American man-of-war Oneida was run down and sunk with her officers and crew by the P. and O. steamer Bombay, near the mouth of Yeddo Bay, January 23, 1870, our Government made no effort to raise the wreck or search it, and finally sold it to a Japanese wrecking company for fifteen hundred dollars. The wreckers found many bones of the lost men among the ship’s timbers, and when the work was entirely completed, with their voluntary contributions they erected a tablet in the Ikegami grounds to the memory of the dead, and celebrated there the impressive Buddhist segaki (feast of hungry souls), in May, 1889. The great temple was in ceremonial array; seventy-five priests in their richest robes assisted at the mass, and among the congregation were the American admiral and his officers, one hundred men from the fleet, and one survivor of the solitary boat’s crew that escaped from the Oneida.
The Scriptures were read, a service was chanted, the Sutra repeated, incense burned, the symbolic lotus-leaves cast before the altar, and after an address in English by Mr. Amenomori explaining the segaki, the procession of priests walked to the tablet in the grounds to chant prayers and burn incense again.
No other country, no other religion, offers a parallel to this experience; and Americans may well take to heart the example of piety, charity, magnanimity, and liberality that this company of hard-working Japanese fishermen and wreckers have set them.
CHAPTER XIV
A TRIP TO NIKKO
The Nikko mountains, one hundred miles north of Tokio, are the favorite summer resort of foreign residents and Tokio officials. The railway now reaches Nikko, and one no longer travels for the last twenty-five miles in jinrikisha over the most beautiful highway, leading through an unbroken avenue of over-arching trees to the village of Hachi-ishi, or Nikko.
On the very hottest day of the hottest week of August we packed our koris, the telescope baskets which constitute the Japanese trunk, and fled to the hills. Smoke and dust poured in at the car windows, the roof crackled in the sun, the green groves and luxuriant fields that we whirled through quivered with heat, and a chorus of grasshoppers and scissors-grinders deafened us at every halt. At Utsonomiya it was a felicity to sit in the upper room of a tea-house and dip our faces and hold our hands in basins of cool spring-water, held for us by the sympathetic nesans. They looked perfectly cool, fresh, and unruffled in their clean blue-and-white cotton kimonos, for the Japanese, like the creoles, appear never to feel the heat of summer, and, indeed, to be wholly indifferent to any weather. The same placid Utsonomiya babies, whose little shaved heads bobbed around helplessly in the blaze of that midsummer sun, I have seen equally serene with their bare skulls reddening, uncovered, on the frostiest winter mornings.