When other entertainment fails, there is always a matsuri. This is a great holiday institution among the lower and middle classes—a fair held in the streets or in the open spaces about a temple—for, like the drama, the matsuri traces its origin to a religious rite. The most popular of these fairs is held near the great Buddhist temple known as Asakusa Kwannon. The long street leading to this temple is very gay with the shops on either side filled with wonderful toys. In various booths in and about the temple there are many entertainments in full swing—tea-houses and theatres and "movies," fortune-tellers and jugglers—all jumbled up together. It is a strange mixture of things sacred and secular. Murray says that even many years ago this temple was so popular that they had notices prohibiting smoking, and warning people not to take their afternoon naps there.
Every matsuri has its fortune-teller. I found one sitting in a little booth—an aged, bald-headed old man with horn spectacles which did not in the least conceal his piercing eyes. He asked my age, and muttering continually, lifted the divining-rod to his forehead. After looking at me through a magnifying-glass he proceeded to separate the packets of rods and finally, by means of an interpreter, he said:
"You will be married in two years, and have three children by the time you are thirty!"
I bowed gravely and thanked him, telling him that he was a wonderful soothsayer—a verdict with which he seemed to agree perfectly. It may be mentioned, however, that I am over thirty, and have been married many years, with no children.
Great reliance is placed on fortune-telling by the Japanese of the lower classes. I have seen a mother with a sick child shake the curiously lacquered box of sticks which the priest of a temple has in his charge, hoping to get help. She exchanged the numbered stick that fell out for a slip of paper which had a prescription printed on it, and then went out to buy the medicine with a sublime faith that it was just what her baby needed for its recovery.
Fortune-telling is not confined to matsuris or to temples. One hears the calls of the prognosticator in the streets at night. There is also a very elaborate system of foretelling the future, based on the colouring and formation of the head and features, which a few men of a higher class practise with quite wonderful results.
To these amusements, which any one may enjoy, I add two other forms of a more serious nature which are of great interest, although the foreigner rarely has time or opportunity to see them during a hurried visit. They are the No dance and the cha-no-yu, or tea-ceremony.
The Japanese nobility rarely attend the public theatres, but they do attend—and even take part in—the No dances, which are not really dances, but high-class theatrical performances. Why a play should be called a dance is hard to explain, unless one remembers that this is Japan, where they begin a book at the wrong end, wipe with wet towels, saw and plane toward themselves, shoe their horses with straw, and even have their compass-needles pointing to the south! The Japanese world is "topside down" to us, but I suppose ours is just as much so to them.
