In this village fifty Shinto shrines of the fifth class had been closed under the influence of the Home Office. They were shrines which had no offering from the village to support them. They had only a few worshippers. All the remaining shrines were of the fifth class but one, and it was of the fourth class. In the county there was a second-class shrine and in the whole prefecture there were two or three first-class shrines. The villagers had agreed among themselves which of their own shrines should be made an end of. A shrine which was dispensed with was burnt. The stone steps approaching it were also removed. Burning was not sacrilege but purification. On the closing of a shrine there might be complaints on the part of some old man or woman, but the majority of people approved. One Shinto shrine guardian lived at the fourth-class shrine and conducted a ceremony at the sixteen fifth-class shrines. Of the twenty Buddhist temples in the village (300 families cultivating an average of a chō apiece), twelve were Hokke, five Shingon, two Shinshu and one Zen. All the priests were married.[ [131]]
I have used the phrase "Buddhist temple" loosely and may do so again, for it conveys an idea which "Buddhist church" does not. A temple (dō) is properly an edifice in which a Buddha is enshrined. This building is not for services or burial ceremonies or anniversary offerings for departed souls. It may or may not have a guardian (domori). He is never a priest with a shaven head. A Buddhist church (tera) is a place where adherents go as anniversaries come round or for sermons. It possesses a priest. There is a considerable difference in the style of Buddhist edifices according to their denomination—Zen buildings are particularly plain—but all are more elaborate than Shinto shrines.
A large Shinto shrine is called yashiro (house of god); a small one hokora. A hokora is transportable. Originally it was and in some places it still is a perishable wooden shrine thatched with reed or grass straw which is renewed at the spring and autumn festivals. It may be less than two feet high and may be made of stone or wood. But it cannot be regarded as a building. Inside there are gohei (upright sticks with paper streamers). In a rich man's house a hokora may be seven or eight feet high or bigger than the smallest yashiro, and may be embellished with colour and metal.
Returning to Buddhism, if a priest has a son he may be succeeded by him. But many Buddhist priests marry late and have no children. Or their children do not want to be priests. So the priest adopts a successor. Sometimes he maintains an orphan as acolyte or coadjutor. During the day this assistant goes to school. In the evenings and during holidays he is taught to become a priest. When the primary-school education is finished the lad may be sent by his patron, if he is well enough off, to a school of his sect at Kyoto or Tokyo.
My travelling companion spoke of the infiltration of new ideas in town and country. "A mixing is taking place in the heart and head of everybody who is not a bigot. But I don't know that some kinds of Christianity are to do much for us. I heard the other day of a Japanese Presbyterian who was preaching with zest about hell fire. Generally speaking, our old men are looking to the past and our young men are aspiring, but not all. Some are content if they can live uncriticised by their neighbours. When they become old they may begin to think of a future life and visit temples. But as young men their thoughts are fully occupied by things of this world."
In the office of the headman whom I mentioned a page or so back, there was behind his chair a kakemono which read, "Reflecting and Examining One's Inner Spirit." We passed a night in the old house of this headman, who was a poet and a country gentleman of a delightful type. Being an eldest son he had married young, and his relations with his eldest boy, a frank and clever lad, were pleasant to see. The garden, instead of being shut in by a wall with a tiled coping or by a palisade of bamboo stems in the ordinary way, was open towards the rice fields, a scene of restful beauty. As our kuruma drew near the house, the steward appeared, a broom in his hand. Running for a short distance before us until we entered the courtyard, he symbolically swept the ground according to old custom. After a delightful hot bath and an elaborate supper, which my fellow traveller afterwards assured me had meant a week's work for the women of the household—snapping turtle and choice bamboo shoots were among the honourable dishes—we gathered at the open side of the room overlooking the garden. Fireflies glowed in the paddies and in the garden two stone lanterns had been lighted. One of them, which had a crescent-shaped opening cut in it, gleamed like the moon; the other, which had a small serrated opening, represented a star.
I paid a visit to the local agricultural co-operative store which did business under the motto, "Faith is the Mother of all Virtue." More than half the money taken at the store was for artificial manures. Next came purchases of imported rice, for, like the Danish peasants who export their butter and eat margarine, the local peasants sold their own rice and bought the Saigon variety. The society sold in a year a considerable quantity of saké. Stretched over the doorway of the building in which the goods of the society were stored were the rope and paper streamers which are seen before Shinto shrines and consecrated places. The society had a large flag post for weather signals, a white flag for a fine day, a red one for cloudy weather and a blue one for rain.
I brought away from this village a calendar of agricultural operations with poems or mottoes for each month, in the collection of which I suspect the poet had a hand:
January: Future of the day determined in the morning.
February: The voice of one reading a farming book coming from the snow-covered window.