Jinrikisha days in Japan

by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

IN THE KASUGA TEMPLE GROUNDS

One may have as many sacred dancers and as long a dance as he will pay for, and as soon as the money is received the two priests get into their ceremonial white gowns and high black hats, and, sitting before the ancient drums, chant, pound, and blow on doleful pipes an accompaniment for the little dancers. The sacred dance is solemn enough, and each dancer has a fan and a bunch of bells, from which hang long strips of bright-colored silks. They advance, retreat, glide to right and left, raise their fans, shake their sacred baby-rattles, and, with few changes in the measure, repeat the same figures and movements for a certain length of time. If one pays more money they repeat the same thing, and the priests can wail the endless accompaniment by the hour. To us the dance was simply a curious custom; but the devout old pilgrims, who have hoarded up their money for the journey for months and often years, feel it to be a solemn and sanctified service. It is pathetic to see their faces glowing and their eyes filled with tears at the fine spectacle that is so rare an event in their lives, and which crowns their summer pilgrimage to the old shrines of their faith.

CHAPTER XXXII
NARA

In the last week of June, the proprietor of the tea-field beneath our veranda conducted a second picking of his stumpy little bushes. From sunrise until dusk rose a chorus of children’s voices beyond the hedge. The first and best crop having been gathered weeks earlier with the first fire-flies, this hubbub accompanied only the gleaning after the harvesters. It was a pretty picture in the foreground of the magnificent view—these little blue and white figures in huge wash-bowl hats, with touches of bright red here and there in their costumes. The headman sat comfortably under a fig-tree, with no clothing to speak of, smoked his pipe, and watched the youngsters at work. When they toiled up to him with full baskets, he weighed the load with a rude steelyard and sent them back, so that some of the tea-pickers were always moving up and down the paths between the compact rows of bushes, and grouped about the patriarch under the fig-tree. The leaves were spread in the sun all day and carried off at night in large sacks and baskets. Walking out through the woods one day, with two little red-gowned priestesses from the Kasuga temple, we came upon a tiny village, and there found the same tea-leaves being toasted in shallow paper-lined baskets over charcoal fires. The attendants rubbed and tossed the fragrant leaves, that were soon dried enough to suffice for the home market.

Although secular occupations prosper, and Nara cutlery and ink rank high in public favor, the temple life of Nara is its real existence. Every day pilgrims and tourists passed before us in processions whose variety of people and costumes was endless. Yet in all the weeks the European coat and trousers only once appeared in those sacred aisles. Every morning two or more of the little red-robed priestesses came, hand in hand, to spend an hour or two beside my friend’s easel. The old priests, in their white gowns and purple skirts, were very courteous and hospitable, and as our stay lengthened we grew to feel ourselves a part of the sacred community. The little priestesses carried us to their homes to drink tea, and the priests brought their friends to watch the methods of the foreign artist. Among the sightseers and visitors to the Shinto shrines and their guardians were many Buddhist priests, whose shaved heads and black or yellow gauze gowns made them conspicuous. The priests of the two faiths seemed to fraternize and to treat each other with the greatest consideration. Their speech, as we heard it, was always so formal, so gentle, and so loaded with honorifics and the set phrases of politeness that there could never have been any theological controversies. A few Buddhist nuns, also, made pilgrimage to Kasuga’s ancient groves; creatures unfeminine and unbeautiful enough in appearance to be saintly in the extreme. They wear white kimonos under gauze coats, with a skirt plaited to the edge of them—the same costume that priests wear—and they shave their heads with the same remorseless zeal. These bald-headed women give one a strange sensation, for in the absence of their dusky tresses their eyes appear too prominent, and it is easy to perceive an unnatural, snaky glitter in them. There are several nunneries near Nara and one in Kioto, but all the inmates assume the same priests’ dress and shave their heads, and we inferred that all the six hundred Buddhist nuns in the empire were equally ugly.

At the edge of the little town of Nara is a large pond, wherein a court romance of the eighth century declares a lovelorn maiden to have drowned herself for sake of a fickle Emperor. Above this historic pond stands a fine old five-story pagoda, and the scattered buildings remaining from what was once a great Buddhist establishment. This Kobukuji temple dates back to the year 710, but has been burned and rebuilt again and again. After the downfall of the Shoguns, who were Buddhists, the restoration of the Emperor to power made Shinto the established faith. In the zeal attending the revival of Shinto, Buddhism was almost laid under a ban. Buddhist priests hid themselves, and Buddhist pictures, statues, and books were concealed. Moreover, the craze for foreign fashions induced a contempt for the old temples and pagodas. Two of the buildings of Kobukuji were torn down and the statues in them destroyed. Ropes were even placed about the beautiful old pagoda, which would have met the fate of the Column Vendome had not the saner citizens leagued together to preserve it. In this calmer day, the Japanese of whatever faith look upon this ancient pagoda, the old bell, and the venerable buildings of the Buddhist establishments as the pride of Nara.

The town of Nara is a well-kept little provincial settlement, but with nothing especially characteristic or interesting in its clean streets. One goes to see the black gnomes at work, kneading their dough of rapeseed-oil, soot, and glue, pressing it into moulds, baking it, and supplying the country with its best writing ink. While the Japanese india-ink is not equal to the Chinese ink, some of it is very expensive. It requires a connoisseur to tell why a stick the size of one’s little finger should cost one or two dollars at the manufacturer’s shop, while a cake three or four times as large, and apparently of the same substance, should be only a tenth of that price. The few curio-shops offer almost nothing to the most diligent searcher, and the town itself makes small claim upon the average visitors, who come to see the temples and enjoy the surroundings and the view from the sacred groves on the heights. In the little row of tea-houses along the brow of Mikasayama, one is in the midst of Nara’s real life and atmosphere, and in the detached pavilions and houses scattered through their gardens the visitor is confronted with the most attractive phases of a Japanese traveller’s existence. The exquisite simplicity and beauty of these tiny houses, with their encircling galleries, all the four sides open to the air and view, the silence of the garden, broken only by the trickling water as it falls from bamboo pipe to bronze basin or tiny lakelet, render it an Arcadia. For a small sum one may have one of these tiny houses to himself, a dainty box for cha no yu, and a doll’s kitchen accompanying each pavilion. On sunny days the garden is a small paradise, with the moving figures of guests and attendants always giving a human interest to the picturesque bits of landscape. On rainy days the pictures are as many, but done in soberer tones. On those rainy June days, when there were few smart showers, but a steady, persistent, fine drizzle that left everything soaked with moisture, the domestics pattered about our garden from house to house, perched on their high wooden clogs, with their skirts tucked high above their bare feet, twirling huge oil-paper umbrellas above their heads. At night they came to close our amados noisily, and to hang up the mosquito-nets of coarsely-woven green cotton—nets the size of the room itself, fastened by cords at the four corners of the ceiling, and exhaling the musty, mildewed odor that belongs to so many things Japanese, and is so inevitable in the rainy season. From all the foliage mosquitoes swarmed by myriads, and a candle-flame attracted winged things that only an entomologist could name; insects so small and light that one breathed them; gorgeous golden-green beetles, rivalling their Brazilian congeners; and huge black stag-horn beetles that dealt one a sharp blow with the force of their coming. At night, too, the domestic rat asserted itself, and this pest and disturber of tea-house life ran riot in the empty chamber between the beautiful wooden ceilings and the real roof. The thin wood acted as a sounding-board, and their scampering and racing, and the thud of the pursuing weasels, was an all-night and every-night affair. The Japanese themselves seem to feel no hostility towards rats and mice, and at Yaami’s and at Nara the proprietor and staff sit quietly in the great office and kitchen-room, which are so nearly one, and allow these followers of Daikoku to scamper over their ledgers, between the groups on the mats, and to perform feats of racing and balancing on the rafters overhead.

PRIESTESSES AT NARA