In the central buildings, five feet above this noisy confluence of people, where the golden images of the Buddhas are enthroned, the mitred priests with their copes of gold-embroidered brown were performing the rituals of their order. To right and left of the high altar, the canons squatting at their red-lacquered praying-desks, were reciting the sutras in strophe and antistrophe. Clouds of incense rose.
In the adjoining building an earnest young preacher was exhorting a congregation of elderly and somnolent ladies to eschew the lusts of the flesh and to renounce the world and its gauds, marking each point in his discourse with raps of his fan. Foxy-faced satellites of the abbey were doing a roaring trade in charms against various accidents, and in sacred scrolls printed with prayers or figures of Nichiren.
The temple-yard was an immense fancy fair. The temple pigeons wheeled disconsolately in the air or perched upon the roofs, unable to find one square foot of the familiar flagstones, where they were used to strut and peck. Stalls lined the stone pathways and choked the spaces between the buildings. Merchants were peddling objects of piety, sacred images, charms and rosaries; and there were flowers for the women's hair, and toys for the children, and cakes and biscuits, biiru (beer) and ramuné (lemonade) and a distressing sickly drink called "champagne cider" and all manner of vanities. In one corner of the square a theatre was in full swing, the actors making up in public on a balcony above the crowd, so as to whet their curiosity and attract their custom. Beyond was a cinematograph, advertised by lurid paintings of murders and apparitions; and farther on there was a circus with a mangy zoo.
The crowd was astonishingly mixed. There were prosperous merchants of Tokyo with their wives, children, servants and apprentices. There were students with their blue and white spotted cloaks, their képis with the school badge, and their ungainly stride. There were modern young men in y[=o]fuku (European dress), with panama hats, swagger canes and side-spring shoes, supercilious in attitude and proud of their unbelief. There were troops of variegated children, dragging at their elders' hands or kimonos, or getting lost among the legs of the multitude like little leaves in an eddy. There were excursion parties from the country, with their kimonos caught up to the knees, and with baked earthen faces stupidly staring, sporting each a red flower or a coloured towel for identification purposes. There were labourers in tight trousers and tabard jackets, inscribed with the name and profession of their employer. There were geisha girls on their best behaviour, in charge of a professional auntie, and recognizable only by the smart cut of their cloaks and the deep space between the collar and the nape of the neck, where the black chignon lay.
Close to the tomb of Nichiren stood a Japanese Salvationist, a zealous pimply young man, wearing the red and blue uniform of General Booth with kaiseigun (World-saving Army) in Japanese letters round his staff cap. He stood in front of a screen, on which the first verse of "Onward, Christian Soldiers," was written in a Japanese translation. An assistant officiated at a wheezy harmonium. The tune was vaguely akin to its Western prototype; and the two evangelists were trying to induce a tolerant but uninterested crowd to join in the chorus.
Everywhere beggars were crawling over the compound in various states of filth. Some, however, were so ghastly that they were excluded from the temple enclosure. They had lined up among the trunks of the cryptomeria trees, among the little grey tombs with their fading inscriptions and the moss-covered statues of kindly Buddhas.
Asako gave a penny into the crooked hand of one poor sightless wretch.
"Oh, no!" cried cousin Sadako; "do not go near to them. Do not touch them. They are lepers."
Some of them had no arms, or had mere stumps ending abruptly in a red and sickening object like a bone which a dog has been chewing. Some had no legs, and were pulled along on little wheeled trolleys by their less dilapidated companions in misfortune. Some had no features. Their faces were mere glabrous disks, from which eyes and nose had completely vanished; only the mouth remained, a toothless gap fringed with straggling hairs. Some had faces abnormally bloated, with powerful foreheads and heavy jowls, which gave them an expression of stony immobility like Byzantine lions. All were fearfully dirty and covered with sores and lice.
The people passing by smiled at their grim unsightliness, and threw pennies to them, for which they scrambled and scratched like beasts.