Of the human tenants here no creature seems to be afraid. The little frogs resting upon the lotus-leaves scarcely shrink from my touch; the lizards sun themselves within easy reach of my hand; the water-snakes glide across my shadow without fear; bands of semi establish their deafening orchestra on a plum branch just above my head, and a praying mantis insolently poses on my knee. Swallows and sparrows not only build their nests on my roof, but even enter my rooms without concern—one swallow has actually built its nest in the ceiling of the bathroom—and the weasel purloins fish under my very eyes without any scruples of conscience. A wild uguisu perches on a cedar by the window, and in a burst of savage sweetness challenges my caged pet to a contest in song; and always though the golden air, from the green twilight of the mountain pines, there purls to me the plaintive, caressing, delicious call of the yamabato:
Tete poppo,
Kaka poppo
Tete poppo,
Kaka poppo,
tete.
No European dove has such a cry. He who can hear, for the first time, the voice of the yamabato without feeling a new sensation at his heart little deserves to dwell in this happy world.
Yet all this—the old katchiu-yashiki and its gardens—will doubtless have vanished for ever before many years. Already a multitude of gardens, more spacious and more beautiful than mine, have been converted into rice-fields or bamboo groves; and the quaint Izumo city, touched at last by some long-projected railway line—perhaps even within the present decade—will swell, and change, and grow commonplace, and demand these grounds for the building of factories and mills. Not from here alone, but from all the land the ancient peace and the ancient charm seem doomed to pass away. For impermanency is the nature of things, more particularly in Japan; and the changes and the changers shall also be changed until there is found no place for them—and regret is vanity. The dead art that made the beauty of this place was the art, also, of that faith to which belongs the all-consoling text, 'Verily, even plants and trees, rocks and stones, all shall enter into Nirvana.'
Chapter Two The Household Shrine
Sec. 1
IN Japan there are two forms of the Religion of the Dead—that which belongs to Shinto; and that which belongs to Buddhism. The first is the primitive cult, commonly called ancestor-worship. But the term ancestor- worship seems to me much too confined for the religion which pays reverence not only to those ancient gods believed to be the fathers of the Japanese race, but likewise to a host of deified sovereigns, heroes, princes, and illustrious men. Within comparatively recent times, the great Daimyo of Izumo, for example, were apotheosised; and the peasants of Shimane still pray before the shrines of the Matsudaira. Moreover Shinto, like the faiths of Hellas and of Rome, has its deities of the elements and special deities who preside over all the various affairs of life. Therefore ancestor-worship, though still a striking feature of Shinto, does not alone constitute the State Religion: neither does the term fully describe the Shinto cult of the dead—a cult which in Izumo retains its primitive character more than in other parts of Japan.
And here I may presume, though no Sinologue, to say something about that State Religion of Japan—that ancient faith of Izumo—which, although even more deeply rooted in national life than Buddhism, is far less known to the Western world. Except in special works by such men of erudition as Chamberlain and Satow—works with which the Occidental reader, unless himself a specialist, is not likely to become familiar outside of Japan—little has been written in English about Shinto which gives the least idea of what Shinto is. Of its ancient traditions and rites much of rarest interest may be learned from the works of the philologists just mentioned; but, as Mr. Satow himself acknowledges, a definite answer to the question, 'What is the nature of Shinto?' is still difficult to give. How define the common element in the six kinds of Shinto which are known to exist, and some of which no foreign scholar has yet been able to examine for lack of time or of authorities or of opportunity? Even in its modern external forms, Shinto is sufficiently complex to task the united powers of the historian, philologist, and anthropologist, merely to trace out the multitudinous lines of its evolution, and to determine the sources of its various elements: primeval polytheisms and fetishisms, traditions of dubious origin, philosophical concepts from China, Korea, and elsewhere—all mingled with Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. The so-called 'Revival of Pure Shinto'—an effort, aided by Government, to restore the cult to its archaic simplicity, by divesting it of foreign characteristics, and especially of every sign or token of Buddhist origin—resulted only, so far as the avowed purpose was concerned, in the destruction of priceless art, and in leaving the enigma of origins as complicated as before. Shinto had been too profoundly modified in the course of fifteen centuries of change to be thus remodelled by a fiat. For the like reason scholarly efforts to define its relation to national ethics by mere historical and philological analysis must fail: as well seek to define the ultimate secret of Life by the elements of the body which it animates. Yet when the result of such efforts shall have been closely combined with a deep knowledge of Japanese thought and feeling—the thought and sentiment, not of a special class, but of the people at large—then indeed all that Shinto was and is may be fully comprehended. And this may be accomplished, I fancy, through the united labour of European and Japanese scholars.
Yet something of what Shinto signifies—in the simple poetry of its beliefs—in the home training of the child—in the worship of filial piety before the tablets of the ancestors—may be learned during a residence of some years among the people, by one who lives their life and adopts their manners and customs. With such experience he can at least claim the right to express his own conception of Shinto.
Sec. 2