"Then do the dead cease to care for remembrance in a hundred years? Or do they fade out at last? Is there a dying of souls?"
"No, but after one hundred years they are no longer with us. Some say they are born again; others say they become kami, and do reverence to them as kami, and on certain days make offerings to them in the toko."
(Such were, I knew, the commonly accepted explanations, but I had heard of beliefs strangely at variance with these. There are traditions that, in families of exceeding virtue, the souls of ancestors took material form, and remained sometimes visible through hundreds of years. A sengaji pilgrim[1] of old days has left an account of two whom he said he had seen in some remote part of the interior. They were small, dim shapes, "dark like old bronze." They could not speak, but made little moaning sounds, and they did not eat, but only inhaled the warm vapor of the food daily set before them. Every year, their descendants said, they became smaller and vaguer.)
"Do you think it is very strange that we should love the dead?" Asakichi asked.
"No," I replied, "I think it is beautiful. But to me, as a Western stranger, the custom seems not of to-day, but of a more ancient world. The thoughts of the old Greeks about the dead must have been much like those of the modern Japanese. The feelings of an Athenian soldier in the age of Pericles were perhaps the same as yours in this era of Meiji. And you have read at school how the Greeks sacrificed to the dead, and how they paid honor to the spirits of brave men and patriots?"
"Yes. Some of their customs were very like our own. Those of us who fall in battle against China will also be honored. They will be revered as kami. Even our Emperor will honor them."
"But," I said, "to die so far away from the graves of one's fathers, in a foreign land, would seem, even to Western people, a very sad thing."
"Oh no. There will be monuments set up to honor our dead in their own native villages and towns, and the bodies of our soldiers will be burned, and the ashes sent home to Japan. At least that will be done whenever possible. It might be difficult after a great battle."
(A sudden memory of Homer surged back to me, with, a vision of that antique plain where "the pyres of the dead burnt continually in multitude.")
"And the spirits of the soldiers slain in this war," I asked,—"will they not always be prayed to help the country in time of national danger?"