Arrived at the temple, the child is presented to the priest. This dignitary, with shaven head and clad in a purple gown, reads very solemnly a special prayer to the god whose image, enshrined in gilt and ebony, rests within the deep shadows of the temple. He asks his care and protection for the helpless little creature that lies before him. At the end of the reading the priest shakes a gohei to and fro over the child. A gohei resembles nothing so much as a paper feather duster. Its fluffy whiteness is supposed to represent the pure spirit of the god, and through some mysterious agency a part of this spirit is transferred to the child by the vigorous shaking.
For a few more coins, further protection can be purchased for the little wayfarer. The guaranty of his success and happiness comes in two small paper amulets on which the priest has drawn curious characters decipherable only to the priest and the god. Both amulets are given to the mother, who, with the baby on her back, trots home on her high wooden geta, or clogs, her face aglow with the contentment possible only to one whose faith in prayer and priest is sublime. One amulet, carefully wrapped with the cuttings of the first hair and with the name, is laid away safely in the house shrine, that the god may not forget. The other is carried in a gay little bag of colored crape, which is tied to the sash of the child; for it is believed that it will ward off sickness and hold all evil spirits at bay.
It must be with a sigh of relief that the baby comes to this stage of his existence. The numerous rites necessary to a fair start on life’s highway have been conscientiously performed, the watchful care of the spirits invoked. Now it is his sole business to kick and grow and feed like any small healthy animal, to be served as a young prince and to be adored as a young god. He is the pivot on which the whole household turns. Often, in the soft shadows of evening, on the paper doors of a Japanese house is silhouetted a picture where the child is the center about which the family is grouped in the great act of adoration. It is a bit of inner life that finds a tender response in the heart of any beholder.
“SEEKING SOME OBJECT ON WHICH TO BESTOW HIS ADORABLE SMILE”
FERTILE SOIL FOR MISCHIEF
The attitude of the usual family is that obedience is not to be expected of one so young, consequently nobody is disappointed, and the effect on the child is telling. He quickly learns his power, and becomes in turn the trainer and the ruler of the household. In fact, he is a small king, with only a soft ring of dark hair for a crown, and a chop-stick in his chubby fist for a scepter. His lightest frown or smile is a command to all the house, from the poodle with the ingrown nose to the bent old grandmother. But more willing subjects never bent before a king of maturer growth. Father and mother, with a train of relatives, yield glad obedience and stand ever ready for action at the merest suggestion of a wish.
Alas! for the tried and true theories on early training that have held for generations in other countries! Alas! for the scores of learned volumes on child culture! Useless the work of the greatest psychologists, who sound grave warning as to the direful results should one fail to observe certain hard-and-fast rules in the training of mind and body. Grant a few months to a fat, well-fed Japanese baby, and with one wave of his pink heels he will kick into thin air every tested theory that scholarly men have grown gray in proving. He snaps in twain the old saw, “As the twig is bent,” and sends to eternal oblivion that oft-repeated legend, “Give me a child till its seventh year, and neither friend nor foe can change his tendencies.” Even the promise of old, “Children, obey your parents,” loses its value as a recipe for long life when applied to the baby citizen of old Nippon. It is a rare exception if he obeys. He lives neither by rule nor regulation, eats when, where, and what he pleases, then cuddles down to sleep in peace.