"Oh yes, always. We shall be loved and worshiped by all the people."
He said "we" quite naturally, like one already destined. After a little pause he resinned:—
"The last year that I was at school we had a military excursion. We marched to a shrine in the district of In, where the spirits of heroes are worshiped. It is a beautiful and lonesome place, among hills; and the temple is shadowed by very high trees. It is always dim and cool and silent there. We drew up before the shrine in military order; nobody spoke. Then the bugle sounded through the holy grove, like a call to battle; and we all presented arms; and the tears came to my eyes,—I do not know why. I looked at my comrades, and I saw they felt as I did. Perhaps, because you are a foreigner, you will not understand. But there is a little poem, that every Japanese knows, which expresses the feeling very well. It was written long ago by the great priest Saigyo Hōshi, who had been a warrior before becoming a priest, and whose real name was Sato Norikyo:—
"'Nani go to no
Owashimasu ka wa
Shirane domo
Arigata sa ni zo
Namida kobururu.'"[2]
It was not the first time that I had heard such a confession. Many of my students had not hesitated to speak of sentiments evoked by the sacred traditions and the dim solemnity of the ancient shrines. Really the experience of Asakichi was no more individual than might be a single ripple in a fathomless sea. He had only uttered the ancestral feeling of a race,—the vague but immeasurable emotion of Shintō.
We talked on till the soft summer darkness fell. Stars and the electric lights of the citadel twinkled out together; bugles sang; and from Kiyomasa's fortress rolled into the night a sound deep as a thunder-peal, the chant of ten thousand men:—
Nishi mo higashi mo
Mina teki zo,
Minami mo kita mo
Mina teki zo:
Yose-kura teki wa
Shiranuhi no
Tsukushi no hate no
Satsuma gata.[3]
"You have learned that song, have you not?" I asked.
"Oh yes," said Asakichi. "Every soldier knows it."
It was the Kumamoto Rōjō, the Song of the Siege. We listened, and could even catch some words in that mighty volume of sound:—