Outside the curtain,
Many mosquitoes
Often have stung,
Till the Bell Seven
Clanged from the temple:
Such things a good wife
Heeds not at all.”
It was explained that a wife would be showing disrespect to her husband by taking rest under the mosquito-net in his absence. If, therefore, he happened to stop out all night, she must still wait for him, outside the net, until the bell for matins sounded the retreat of her winged persecutors. “The Bell Seven” is named in accordance with old reckoning: the time represented is really four in the morning, when the Japanese day begins. That was the last I saw of O Mitsu, for etiquette forbade her taking supper at my hotel in company with her husband and father-in-law.
We spent the evening with the Tanaka family. There, too, I observed the reticence imposed on women in their own homes. Tanaka Okusama, who at Ikao had discoursed so brightly on every possible subject from ethics to Epaminondas, crept quietly from one to another of her guests, offering tea and cakes, but never joining in the conversation. Her husband, who had a most genial, refined face, made an excellent host: the four boys sat silently in a corner. Many questions were put about European houses and habits, for the Ashikaga of to-day, being a great centre of the trade in cotton goods made from foreign yarn, is accustomed to the sight of foreign commercial travellers.
The antiquities of the place were disappointing. The Academy of Chinese Learning, founded, if tradition may be believed, in 852, after attaining its zenith of prosperity under Yoshemitsu, has since gradually declined. The great library of Chinese works is broken up; only a few books remain. Of Confucian relics there rests only an impressive bronze tablet, with full-length figure of the sage, from which “rubbings” are sold to the pious. A sinister black impression of the gaunt, long-nailed philosopher, whose teaching still broods like a shadow over the majority of Japanese households, recalls to me, in the shape of a colossal kakemono, that dusty, dilapidated school, whose students are deserting it for Western lore. The vast temple, however, standing in a grove of cryptomeria, is still thronged by worshippers, and forms a worthy link with the historic glories of Ashikaga. In a side-chapel stand wooden effigies of all the Shōguns, wearing the tall black court-cap and the moustache with small pointed beard, fashionable from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. It is related that three similar figures, preserved in the Tōjiin Temple at Kyōto, were subjected to the indignity of decapitation in 1863, when the Restoration party wished to insult the memory of the Shōgunate, but did not dare to outrage the still powerful Tokugawa. The heads were pilloried in the dry bed of the Kamogawa, where it was customary to expose the heads of criminals. But Kyōto was at once the scene of their rise and their decline. In Ashikaga itself their memory lives as changeless and as free from insult as the tutelary mountain rampart of Akagisan.