Wherever there is a temple in a Japanese city there is also a toy-shop, and where there is a toy-shop there is, of course, a toy which one must surely buy. The children love to buy the toys and play with them in the temple gardens.
In the gardens of Asakusa Temple there are ponds filled with goldfish and silverfish and carp. These fish are tame and will eat from the children's fingers because children have fed them for years and years.
Just outside the gateway to the temple, old women sit beside little tables and sell saucers full of food for the fishes in the ponds and the doves that live in the temple eaves. And where one person sells anything many other people also sell something. They sell, the children buy, and the doves and fishes are fed.
"It is like the 'House that Jack Built,'" said the American lady. "This is the pond that held the fish, that ate the cakes, that lay in the dish and were sold in the booths with all kinds of toys, from dolls to kites, for girls and boys."
The Street of Shops and Asakusa Temple. Page 91.
It does not take the little street of shops a long time to reach the temple steps, in Asakusa; but it does take the little people a long time to get through the street.
Baby Yuki stopped to kotow to the first old woman she saw selling beans. In that moment the toy-peddler and all the children seemed to disappear. The baby looked around for them, and was frightened to find that she was all alone.
But before she had time to realize that she was lost, the foreign lady had bought beans from the old woman and poured them into the baby's hands, and the doves were flying down to pick up the beans as she scattered them in the street.