Jinrikisha days in Japan

by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

The present high priest has a longer genealogy than the Emperor, and is the seventy-third of his family, in direct succession, to live in the same Kioto yashiki. Besides his ecclesiastical rank, he is a nobleman of the first order, and moves in the imperial circle, his modern brougham with liveried men being often seen driving in and out of the palace enclosures in the western end of the city. Besides his temple services, he directs the large college which the Hongwanji maintains for the education of young men for the priesthood and for advanced philosophical studies for lay students. In its library is a vast literature of Buddhism, the scrolls of silk and paper in boxes of priceless gold lacquer facing the neatly-bound volumes of Sinnett, Sir Edwin Arnold, and other foreign writers. The college employs teachers of all European languages, and intends to send missionary workers to European countries. One of the priestly instructors, Mr. Akamatsu, spent several years in England, and has made comparative religions his great study. This admirable scholar is an admirable talker as well, and every student of Buddhism in Japan is referred to his vast stores of information. The breadth and liberality of Mr. Akamatsu’s views are shown in his belief in the brotherhood of all religions, their likeness, and their convergence towards “that far-off, divine event, towards which the whole creation moves.” It was he who drew up and translated that new canon of his faith, which introduced passages from the Sermon on the Mount, and who explained that these contained exactly the Buddhist tenets. The Shin Buddhists are called the Protestants of that faith. The priests may marry, and are not required to fast, to do penance, make pilgrimages, or abstain from animal food. They believe in salvation by faith in Buddha, and in those ever-higher transmigrations of the soul which finally attain Nirvana. Their priests maintain that the presence of Christian missionaries has made no difference with their people, the scholarly and intelligent seeing that the two faiths differ only in a few articles and practices. For the lower orders, these spiritual shepherds declare Buddhism to be the better religion, its practice for centuries having made the masses the gentle, kindly, patient, and contented souls that they are. One priest, sent to Europe to study the effects of Christianity, reported that vice, crime, and misery were greater there than in Japan, and that the belief of the west seemed less able to repress those evils than the belief of the east. These Monto priests, too, express broad views about the reciprocity of nations and the fair exchange of missionaries. Now that English clergymen and thinkers study Buddhism in the monasteries of Ceylon, avowing their acceptance of the articles with much sacred ceremony, Monto apostles may yet preach to the people of England and America. However this may be, the priests do not fear the proselyting labors of the Doshisha teachers in Kioto, and speak warmly of its good works, and particularly of its hospital and training-school for nurses.

In 1885 the first American missionaries came to Kioto, and as the sacred city is beyond the treaty limits, the college and hospital are maintained under the name of the Doshisha company, and the foreigners engaged in the work are ostensibly in Japanese employ. Back of the Christian Japanese, who stands as president of this company, are the rich Mission Boards, which furnish the money, and direct its expenditure and the method of work. Each teacher in the Doshisha school is really a missionary, and outside the class-room carries on active evangelical work. School buildings, hospital, and residences for the foreign teachers all front on the high yellow walls of the imperial palace grounds, significant testimony to the changes that have come, the barriers and prejudices that have given way. The school is crowded to its furthest capacity, the hospital is besieged, and physicians overworked. The teachers claim that all the students are Christians, that the new religion is spreading, and that the people are most anxious to know about it. While they do not affirm that Buddhism and the old religions are dying, the success of their work sustains their conviction. They have erected substantial brick buildings and comfortable dwellings, and have a general air of permanency. The Doshisha was fortunate in its founders and first corps of instructors and the records they made, so that, when disasters overtook it, that prestige prevailed, and after unhappy dissensions the Doshisha returned to its original purposes and lines, and the schools and hospital continue their excellent work.

Of foreign missions in Japan there are the French Catholic, Russian-Greek, English and Canadian workers belonging to both Established Church and dissenting sects, while the Foreign Mission Boards of the United States have more than three hundred agents and teachers in Japan, nearly all of whom have families. Meanwhile, 191,968 Shinto temples, 101,085 Shinto priests, and the whole influence of the Government encourages this state religion, of which the Emperor is the visible head. There are 72,039 Buddhist temples, and 109,922 Buddhist priests and 13,922 students proclaim that faith, while pilgrims to the thirty-three famous Kwannons of the empire do not lessen in number. A large fraction of the people profess no religion whatever, among whom are many of the younger generation of nobles, who, having studied and lived abroad, have adopted materialism, atheism, or agnosticism, like other foreign fashions. When an American devotee of theosophy expounded his occult science in a round of temple addresses he aroused a polite interest, but caused no excitement and attracted no body of followers. A Unitarian agent enjoyed greatest favor among the highest circles of the capital, his system of higher philosophy appealing strongly to those cultivated thinkers and men of letters.

The common people, like the ignorant of other races, do not at all comprehend the religion they do profess, observing its forms as a habit or a matter of blind convention, and celebrating its events with ceremonies and decorations, festivals and anniversaries, whose significance they cannot explain. Japanese streets suddenly blossom out with flags and lanterns at every door-way and along miles of eaves, and if you ask a shopkeeper what this rejoicing means, he will reply, “Wakarimasen,” or “Shirimasen” (I do not know). Then some learned man tells you that it is the anniversary of the death of Jimmu Tenno, or the autumn festival, when the first rice of the garnered crop is offered to the gods by the Emperor in the palace chapel, by the priests at every Shinto shrine, and at every household altar in pious homes, or some other traditional occasion kept as a Government holiday. Closing the Government offices on Sunday, and making that a day of rest, was a matter of practical convenience merely, and the result of the adoption of a uniform calendar with the rest of the world, and a modern military establishment on foreign models.

One of the festivals of a religious character which is understood by the people, and is, perhaps, the most remarkable of all Kioto’s great summer illuminations, is that of the Daimonji, at the end of the Bon Matsuri, or Festival of the Dead. According to Buddhist belief, the spirits of the departed return to earth for three days in mid-August, visiting their families and earthly haunts, and flitting back to their graves on the night of the third day. During the continuance of the Bon Matsuri, lanterns and paper strips are hung in front of those houses in which a death has occurred during the year, and burning tapers and bowls of food are set before the little household shrines. Alike in the backs of shops, in the humblest abodes, and in villas and noble yashikis, lights, offerings, and fragrant incense welcome back the dead. In the cemeteries the bamboo sticks at each gravestone are daily filled with fresh flowers, and on the night of their return the spirits are guided to their resting-places by the light of lanterns and oil-tapers burning throughout these cities of their silent habitation. This beautiful custom, sanctified by the observance of many centuries, is tinged with little sadness, and the last night of the Festival of the Dead is the great Festival of Lanterns, the most brilliant of the long, gay, fantastic Kioto summer.

We were kindly invited by a Japanese gentleman to witness the illumination from the upper story of a pagoda-like school-house, that rose high above all the roofs in the heart of the city. Two hundred children were chirping and chattering in the open-sided class-rooms of the lower floors, all eager to see the Daimonji, the great signal-fires on the hills. All sat on their heels in orderly rows, and silently bobbed to the mats at sight of us, going on afterwards with their merry babble, which all through the summer evening floated up to us in happy chorus.

As dusk gave way to dark, we beheld a glimmer of light like a waving torch on the side of the mountain that stands like a tower beyond Maruyama. Another and another flash shone out against the dark face of Daimonji-yama’s long slope, until the flames joined and lines of fire ran upward, touched, crossed, and finally blazed out in the gigantic written character Dai, in outline not unlike a capital A. Next a junk appeared in fiery outlines on the slope north of the city; another mystic character glowed on the next hill; and to the north-west a smaller Dai showed, like the reflection of the first huge symbol. Full in the west gleamed a torii, a pillared gate-way of fire. From every house-top and from the bridges came the shouts of enthusiastic spectators, and the children in the rooms below us twittered like a box full of sparrows. For centuries the priests of mountain temples have taught their simple parishioners to lay their gathered firewood in the proper lines, and regular trenches mark the course of each device. The longer lines of the big Dai are each a half-mile in length, and the five miles’ distance of our point of view dwarfed them to perfect proportions. These fiery symbols burned for half an hour before they began to waver, and long after their images still danced and burned in our vision against the succeeding blackness.

Down in the city the crowds surged through the lanterned streets, each adding the illumination of his hand-lantern to the scene. The river-bed was all recrossing lines and arches of lights, and myriad points of uncovered flames were reflected in the waters. The hill-sides twinkled and glowed with the innumerable torches in the cemeteries, and thus, lighted back to their tombs by all the city and the hill-side, the Buddhist spirits rest until the next midsummer season recalls them to their joyous Kioto.

CHAPTER XXV
THE PALACES AND CASTLE

Kioto remains faithful to its traditions, and yields but slowly to the foreign fashions which absorb Tokio. Tokio has nineteenth-century political troubles, even demagogues and hare-brained students, that unruly young element, the soshi, keep it in a state of agitation, and sometimes appeal to the old two-handed sword, the dagger, and the cowardly bomb. But Kioto, devoted to its old order, maintains the reign of peace, while the arts flourish.