Much more interesting to me than the ofuda of the Miojinja are the yoraku, the pendent ex-votos in the Hojinji, a temple of the Zen sect which stands on the summit of the beautiful hill above the great Shinto shrine. Before an altar on which are ranged the images of the Thirty-three Kwannons, the thirty-three forms of that Goddess of Mercy who represents the ideal of all that is sweet and pure in the Japanese maiden, a strange, brightly coloured mass of curious things may be seen, suspended from the carven ceiling. There are hundreds of balls of worsted and balls of cotton thread of all colours; there are skeins of silk and patterns of silk weaving and of cotton weaving; there are broidered purses in the shape of sparrows and other living creatures; there are samples of bamboo plaiting and countless specimens of needlework. All these are the votive offerings of school children, little girls only, to the Maid-mother of all grace and sweetness and pity. So soon as a baby girl learns something in the way of woman's work—sewing, or weaving, or knitting, or broidering, she brings her first successful effort to the temple as an offering to the gentle divinity, 'whose eyes are beautiful,' she 'who looketh down above the sound of prayer.' Even the infants of the Japanese kindergarten bring their first work here—pretty paper-cuttings, scissored out and plaited into divers patterns by their own tiny flower-soft hands.
Sec. 7
Very sleepy and quiet by day is Mionoseki: only at long intervals one hears laughter of children, or the chant of oarsmen rowing the most extraordinary boats I ever saw outside of the tropics; boats heavy as barges, which require ten men to move them. These stand naked to the work, wielding oars with cross-handles (imagine a letter T with the lower end lengthened out into an oar-blade). And at every pull they push their feet against the gunwales to give more force to the stroke; intoning in every pause a strange refrain of which the soft melancholy calls back to me certain old Spanish Creole melodies heard in West Indian waters:
A-ra-ho-no-san-no-sa, Iya-ho-en-ya! Ghi! Ghi!
The chant begins with a long high note, and descends by fractional tones with almost every syllable, and faints away a last into an almost indistinguishable hum. Then comes the stroke, 'Ghi!—ghi!'
But at night Mionoseki is one of the noisiest and merriest little havens of Western Japan. From one horn of its crescent to the other the fires of the shokudai, which are the tall light of banquets, mirror themselves in the water; and the whole air palpitates with sounds of revelry. Everywhere one hears the booming of the tsudzumi, the little hand-drums of the geisha, and sweet plaintive chants of girls, and tinkling of samisen, and the measured clapping of hands in the dance, and the wild cries and laughter of the players at ken. And all these are but echoes of the diversions of sailors. Verily, the nature of sailors differs but little the world over. Every good ship which visits Mionoseki leaves there, so I am assured, from three hundred to five hundred yen for sake and for dancing-girls. Much do these mariners pray the Great Deity who hates eggs to make calm the waters and favourable the winds, so that Mionoseki may be reached in good time without harm. But having come hither over an unruffled sea with fair soft breezes all the way, small indeed is the gift which they give to the temple of the god, and marvellously large the sums which they pay unto geisha and keepers of taverns. But the god is patient and long-suffering—except in the matter of eggs.
However, these Japanese seamen are very gentle compared with our own Jack Tars, and not without a certain refinement and politeness of their own. I see them sitting naked to the waist at their banquets; for it is very hot, but they use their chopsticks as daintily and pledge each other in sake almost as graciously as men of a better class. Likewise they seem to treat their girls very kindly. It is quite pleasant to watch them feasting across the street. Perhaps their laughter is somewhat more boisterous and their gesticulation a little more vehement than those of the common citizens; but there is nothing resembling real roughness—much less rudeness. All become motionless and silent as statues—fifteen fine bronzes ranged along the wall of the zashiki, [2] —when some pretty geisha begins one of those histrionic dances which, to the Western stranger, seem at first mysterious as a performance of witchcraft—but which really are charming translations of legend and story into the language of living grace and the poetry of woman's smile. And as the wine flows, the more urbane becomes the merriment—until there falls upon all that pleasant sleepiness which sake brings, and the guests, one by one, smilingly depart. Nothing could be happier or gentler than their evening's joviality—yet sailors are considered in Japan an especially rough class. What would be thought of our own roughs in such a country?
Well, I have been fourteen months in Izumo; and I have not yet heard voices raised in anger, or witnessed a quarrel: never have I seen one man strike another, or a woman bullied, or a child slapped. Indeed I have never seen any real roughness anywhere that I have been in Japan, except at the open ports, where the poorer classes seem, through contact with Europeans, to lose their natural politeness, their native morals—even their capacity for simple happiness.
Sec. 8
Last night I saw the seamen of Old Japan: to-day I shall see those of New Japan. An apparition in the offing has filled all this little port with excitement—an Imperial man-of-war. Everybody is going out to look at her; and all the long boats that were lying in the alleys are already hastening, full of curious folk, to the steel colossus. A cruiser of the first class, with a crew of five hundred.