Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan Volume II Part 2

Hito koe wa.

Tsuki ga naitaka Hototogisu! [34]

And another has written:

Hototogisu Nakitsuru kata wo Nagamureba,-- Tada ariake no Tsuki zo nokoreru. [35]

The dweller in cities may pa.s.s a lifetime without hearing the hototogisu. Caged, the little creature will remain silent and die. Poets often wait vainly in the dew, from sunset till dawn, to hear the strange cry which has inspired so many exquisite verses. But those who have heard found it so mournful that they have likened it to the cry of one wounded suddenly to death.

Hototogisu Chi ni naku koe wa Ariake no Tsuki yori kokani Kiku hito mo nashi. [36]

Concerning Izumo owls, I shall content myself with citing a composition by one of my j.a.panese students:

'The Owl is a hateful bird that sees in the dark. Little children who cry are frightened by the threat that the Owl will come to take them away; for the Owl cries, "Ho! ho! sorotto koka! sorotto koka!" which means, "Thou! must I enter slowly?" It also cries "Noritsuke hose! ho!

ho!" which means, "Do thou make the starch to use in washing to-morrow"

And when the women hear that cry, they know that to-morrow will be a fine day. It also cries, "Tototo," "The man dies," and "Kotokokko," "The boy dies." So people hate it. And crows hate it so much that it is used to catch crows. The Farmer puts an Owl in the rice-field; and all the crows come to kill it, and they get caught fast in the snares. This should teach us not to give way to our dislikes for other people.'

The kites which hover over the city all day do not live in the neighbourhood. Their nests are far away upon the blue peaks; but they pa.s.s much of their time in catching fish, and in stealing from back- yards. They pay the wood and the garden swift and sudden piratical visits; and their sinister cry--pi-yoroyoro, pi-yoroyoro--sounds at intervals over the town from dawn till sundown. Most insolent of all feathered creatures they certainly are--more insolent than even their fellow-robbers, the crows. A kite will drop five miles to filch a tai out of a fish-seller's bucket, or a fried-cake out of a child's hand, and shoot back to the clouds before the victim of the theft has time to stoop for a stone. Hence the saying, 'to look as surprised as if one's aburage [37] had been s.n.a.t.c.hed from one's hand by a kite.' There is, moreover, no telling what a kite may think proper to steal. For example, my neighbour's servant-girl went to the river the other day, wearing in her hair a string of small scarlet beads made of rice-grains prepared and dyed in a certain ingenious way. A kite lighted upon her head, and tore away and swallowed the string of beads. But it is great fun to feed these birds with dead rats or mice which have been caught in traps overnight and subsequently drowned. The instant a dead rat is exposed to view a kite pounces from the sky to bear it away. Sometimes a crow may get the start of the kite, but the crow must be able to get to the woods very swiftly indeed in order to keep his prize. The children sing this song:

Tobi, tobi, maute mise!

As.h.i.ta no ha ni Karasu ni kakus.h.i.te Nezumi yaru. [38]

The mention of dancing refers to the beautiful balancing motion of the kite's wings in flight. By suggestion this motion is poetically compared to the graceful swaying of a maiko, or dancing-girl, extending her arms and waving the long wide sleeves of her silken robe.

Although there is a numerous sub-colony of crows in the wood behind my house, the headquarters of the corvine army are in the pine grove of the ancient castle grounds, visible from my front rooms. To see the crows all flying home at the same hour every evening is an interesting spectacle, and popular imagination has found an amusing comparison for it in the hurry-skurry of people running to a fire. This explains the meaning of a song which children sing to the crows returning to their nests:

Ato no karasu saki ine, Ware ga iye ga yakeru ken, Hayo inde midzu kake, Midzu ga nakya yarozo, Amattara ko ni yare, Ko ga nakya modose. [39]

Confucianism seems to have discovered virtue in the crow. There is a j.a.panese proverb, 'Karasu ni hampo no ko ari,' meaning that the crow performs the filial duty of hampo, or, more literally, 'the filial duty of hampo exists in the crow.' 'Hampo' means, literally, 'to return a feeding.' The young crow is said to requite its parents' care by feeding them when it becomes strong. Another example of filial piety has been furnished by the dove. 'Hato ni sanshi no rei ad'--the dove sits three branches below its parent; or, more literally, 'has the three-branch etiquette to perform.'

The cry of the wild dove (yamabato), which I hear almost daily from the wood, is the most sweetly plaintive sound that ever reached my ears. The Izumo peasantry say that the bird utters these words, which it certainly seems to do if one listen to it after having learned the alleged syllables:

Tete poppo, Kaka poppo Tete poppo, Kaka poppo, tete. . . (sudden pause).

'Tete' is the baby word for 'father,' and 'kaka' for 'mother'; and 'poppo' signifies, in infantile speech, 'the bosom.' [40]

Wild uguisu also frequently sweeten my summer with their song, and sometimes come very near the house, being attracted, apparently, by the chant of my caged pet. The uguisu is very common in this province. It haunts all the woods and the sacred groves in the neighbourhood of the city, and I never made a journey in Izumo during the warm season without hearing its note from some shadowy place. But there are uguisu and uguisu. There are uguisu to be had for one or two yen, but the finely trained, cage-bred singer may command not less than a hundred.

It was at a little village temple that I first heard one curious belief about this delicate creature. In j.a.pan, the coffin in which a corpse is borne to burial is totally unlike an Occidental coffin. It is a surprisingly small square box, wherein the dead is placed in a sitting posture. How any adult corpse can be put into so small a s.p.a.ce may well be an enigma to foreigners. In cases of p.r.o.nounced rigor mortis the work of getting the body into the coffin is difficult even for the professional doshin-bozu. But the devout followers of Nichiren claim that after death their bodies will remain perfectly flexible; and the dead body of an uguisu, they affirm, likewise never stiffens, for this little bird is of their faith, and pa.s.ses its life in singing praises unto the Sutra of the Lotus of the Good Law.

Sec. 14

I have already become a little too fond of my dwelling-place. Each day, after returning from my college duties, and exchanging my teacher's uniform for the infinitely more comfortable j.a.panese robe, I find more than compensation for the weariness of five cla.s.s-hours in the simple pleasure of squatting on the shaded veranda overlooking the gardens.

Those antique garden walls, high-mossed below their ruined coping of tiles, seem to shut out even the murmur of the city's life. There are no sounds but the voices of birds, the shrilling of semi, or, at long, lazy intervals, the solitary plash of a diving frog. Nay, those walls seclude me from much more than city streets. Outside them hums the changed j.a.pan of telegraphs and newspapers and steamships; within dwell the all- reposing peace of nature and the dreams of the sixteenth century. There is a charm of quaintness in the very air, a faint sense of something viewless and sweet all about one; perhaps the gentle haunting of dead ladies who looked like the ladies of the old picture-books, and who lived here when all this was new. Even in the summer light--touching the grey strange shapes of stone, thrilling through the foliage of the long- loved trees--there is the tenderness of a phantom caress. These are the gardens of the past. The future will know them only as dreams, creations of a forgotten art, whose charm no genius may reproduce.

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 mult.i.tude of gardens, more s.p.a.cious 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 pa.s.s away. For impermanency is the nature of things, more particularly in j.a.pan; 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 j.a.pan 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 G.o.ds believed to be the fathers of the j.a.panese race, but likewise to a host of deified sovereigns, heroes, princes, and ill.u.s.trious 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 h.e.l.las 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 const.i.tute 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 j.a.pan.

And here I may presume, though no Sinologue, to say something about that State Religion of j.a.pan--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 j.a.pan--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 mult.i.tudinous 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 j.a.panese thought and feeling--the thought and sentiment, not of a special cla.s.s, 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 j.a.panese 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

Those far-seeing rulers of the Meiji era, who disestablished Buddhism to strengthen Shinto, doubtless knew they were giving new force not only to a faith in perfect harmony with their own state policy, but likewise to one possessing in itself a far more profound vitality than the alien creed, which although omnipotent as an art-influence, had never found deep root in the intellectual soil of j.a.pan. Buddhism was already in decrepitude, though transplanted from China scarcely more than thirteen centuries before; while Shinto, though doubtless older by many a thousand years, seems rather to have gained than to have lost force through all the periods of change. Eclectic like the genius of the race, it had appropriated and a.s.similated all forms of foreign thought which could aid its material manifestation or fortify its ethics. Buddhism had attempted to absorb its G.o.ds, even as it had adopted previously the ancient deities of Brahmanism; but Shinto, while seeming to yield, was really only borrowing strength from its rival. And this marvellous vitality of Shinto is due to the fact that in the course of its long development out of unrecorded beginnings, it became at a very ancient epoch, and below the surface still remains, a religion of the heart.

Whatever be the origin of its rites and traditions, its ethical spirit has become identified with all the deepest and best emotions of the race. Hence, in Izumo especially, the attempt to create a Buddhist Shintoism resulted only in the formation of a Shinto-Buddhism.

And the secret living force of Shinto to-day--that force which repels missionary efforts at proselytising--means something much more profound than tradition or worship or ceremonialism. Shinto may yet, without loss of real power, survive all these. Certainly the expansion of the popular mind through education, the influences of modern science, must compel modification or abandonment of many ancient Shinto conceptions; but the ethics of Shinto will surely endure. For Shinto signifies character in the higher sense--courage, courtesy, honour, and above all things, loyalty. The spirit of Shinto is the spirit of filial piety, the zest of duty, the readiness to surrender life for a principle without a thought of wherefore. It is the docility of the child; it is the sweetness of the j.a.panese woman. It is conservatism likewise; the wholesome check upon the national tendency to cast away the worth of the entire past in rash eagerness to a.s.similate too much of the foreign present. It is religion--but religion transformed into hereditary moral impulse-- religion trans.m.u.ted into ethical instinct. It is the whole emotional life of the race--the Soul of j.a.pan.

The child is born Shinto. Home teaching and school training only give expression to what is innate: they do not plant new seed; they do but quicken the ethical sense transmitted as a trait ancestral. Even as a j.a.panese infant inherits such ability to handle a writing-brush as never can be acquired by Western fingers, so does it inherit ethical sympathies totally different from our own. Ask a cla.s.s of j.a.panese students--young students of fourteen to sixteen--to tell their dearest wishes; and if they have confidence in the questioner, perhaps nine out of ten will answer: 'To die for His Majesty Our Emperor.' And the wish soars from the heart pure as any wish for martyrdom ever born. How much this sense of loyalty may or may not have been weakened in such great centres as Tokyo by the new agnosticism and by the rapid growth of other nineteenth-century ideas among the student cla.s.s, I do not know; but in the country it remains as natural to boyhood as joy. Unreasoning it also is--unlike those loyal sentiments with us, the results of maturer knowledge and settled conviction. Never does the j.a.panese youth ask himself why; the beauty of self-sacrifice alone is the all-sufficing motive. Such ecstatic loyalty is a part of the national life; it is in the blood--inherent as the impulse of the ant to perish for its little republic--unconscious as the loyalty of bees to their queen. It is Shinto.

That readiness to sacrifice one's own life for loyalty's sake, for the sake of a superior, for the sake of honour, which has distinguished the race in modern times, would seem also to have been a national characteristic from the earliest period of its independent existence.

Long before the epoch of established feudalism, when honourable suicide became a matter of rigid etiquette, not for warriors only, but even for women and little children, the giving one's life for one's prince, even when the sacrifice could avail nothing, was held a sacred duty. Among various instances which might be cited from the ancient Kojiki, the following is not the least impressive:

Prince Mayowa, at the age of only seven years, having killed his father's slayer, fled into the house of the Grandee (Omi) Tsubura. 'Then Prince Oho-hatsuse raised an army, and besieged that house. And the arrows that were shot were for mult.i.tude like the ears of the reeds. And the Grandee Tsubura came forth himself, and having taken off the weapons with which he was girded, did obeisance eight times, and said: "The maiden-princess Kara, my daughter whom thou deignedst anon to woo, is at thy service. Again I will present to thee five granaries. Though a vile slave of a Grandee exerting his utmost strength in the fight can scarcely hope to conquer, yet must he die rather than desert a prince who, trusting in him, has entered into his house." Having thus spoken, he again took his weapons, and went in once more to fight. Then, their strength being exhausted, and their arrows finished, he said to the Prince: "My hands are wounded, and our arrows are finished. We cannot now fight: what shall be done?" The Prince replied, saying: "There is nothing more to do. Do thou now slay me." So the Grandee Tsubura thrust the Prince to death with his sword, and forthwith killed himself by cutting off his own head.'

Thousands of equally strong examples could easily be quoted from later j.a.panese history, including many which occurred even within the memory of the living. Nor was it for persons alone that to die might become a sacred duty: in certain contingencies conscience held it scarcely less a duty to die for a purely personal conviction; and he who held any opinion which he believed of paramount importance would, when other means failed, write his views in a letter of farewell, and then take his own life, in order to call attention to his beliefs and to prove their sincerity. Such an instance occurred only last year in Tokyo, [1] when the young lieutenant of militia, Ohara Takeyoshi, killed himself by harakiri in the cemetery of Saitokuji, leaving a letter stating as the reason for his act, his hope to force public recognition of the danger to j.a.panese independence from the growth of Russian power in the North Pacific. But a much more touching sacrifice in May of the same year--a sacrifice conceived in the purest and most innocent spirit of loyalty-- was that of the young girl Yoko Hatakeyama, who, after the attempt to a.s.sa.s.sinate the Czarevitch, travelled from Tokyo to Kyoto and there killed herself before the gate of the Kencho, merely as a vicarious atonement for the incident which had caused shame to j.a.pan and grief to the Father of the people--His Sacred Majesty the Emperor.

Sec. 3

As to its exterior forms, modern Shinto is indeed difficult to a.n.a.lyse; but through all the intricate texture of extraneous beliefs so thickly interwoven about it, indications of its earliest character are still easily discerned. In certain of its primitive rites, in its archaic prayers and texts and symbols, in the history of its shrines, and even in many of the artless ideas of its poorest worshippers, it is plainly revealed as the most ancient of all forms of worship--that which Herbert Spencer terms 'the root of all religions'--devotion to the dead. Indeed, it has been frequently so expounded by its own greatest scholars and theologians. Its divinities are ghosts; all the dead become deities. In the Tama-no-mihashira the great commentator Hirata says 'the spirits of the dead continue to exist in the unseen world which is everywhere about us, and they all become G.o.ds of varying character and degrees of influence. Some reside in temples built in their honour; others hover near their tombs; and they continue to render services to their prince, parents, wife, and children, as when in the body.' And they do more than this, for they control the lives and the doings of men. 'Every human action,' says Hirata, 'is the work of a G.o.d.' [3] And Motowori, scarcely less famous an exponent of pure Shinto doctrine, writes: 'All the moral ideas which a man requires are implanted in his bosom by the G.o.ds, and are of the same nature with those instincts which impel him to eat when he is hungry or to drink when he is thirsty.' [4] With this doctrine of Intuition no Decalogue is required, no fixed code of ethics; and the human conscience is declared to be the only necessary guide. Though every action be 'the work of a Kami.' yet each man has within him the power to discern the righteous impulse from the unrighteous, the influence of the good deity from that of the evil. No moral teacher is so infallible as one's own heart. 'To have learned that there is no way (michi),'[5] says Motowori, 'to be learned and practiced, is really to have learned the Way of the G.o.ds.' [6] And Hirata writes: 'If you desire to practise true virtue, learn to stand in awe of the Unseen; and that will prevent you from doing wrong. Make a vow to the G.o.ds who rule over the Unseen, and cultivate the conscience (ma-gokoro) implanted in you; and then you will never wander from the way.' How this spiritual self- culture may best be obtained, the same great expounder has stated with almost equal brevity: 'Devotion to the memory of ancestors is the mainspring of all virtues. No one who discharges his duty to them will ever be disrespectful to the G.o.ds or to his living parents. Such a man will be faithful to his prince, loyal to his friends, and kind and gentle with his wife and children.' [7]

How far are these antique beliefs removed from the ideas of the nineteenth century? Certainly not so far that we can afford to smile at them. The faith of the primitive man and the knowledge of the most profound psychologist may meet in strange harmony upon the threshold of the same ultimate truth, and the thought of a child may repeat the conclusions of a Spencer or a Schopenhauer. Are not our ancestors in very truth our Kami? Is not every action indeed the work of the Dead who dwell within us? Have not our impulses and tendencies, our capacities and weaknesses, our heroisms and timidities, been created by those vanished myriads from whom we received the all-mysterious bequest of Life? Do we still think of that infinitely complex Something which is each one of us, and which we call EGO, as 'I' or as 'They'? What is our pride or shame but the pride or shame of the Unseen in that which They have made?--and what our Conscience but the inherited sum of countless dead experiences with varying good and evil? Nor can we hastily reject the Shinto thought that all the dead become G.o.ds, while we respect the convictions of those strong souls of to-day who proclaim the divinity of man.

Sec. 4

Shino ancestor-worship, no doubt, like all ancestor-worship, was developed out of funeral rites, according to that general law of religious evolution traced so fully by Herbert Spencer. And there is reason to believe that the early forms of Shinto public worship may have been evolved out of a yet older family worship--much after the manner in which M. Fustel de Coulanges, in his wonderful book, La Cite Antique, has shown the religious public inst.i.tutions among the Greeks and Romans to have been developed from the religion of the hearth. Indeed, the word ujigami, now used to signify a Shinto parish temple, and also its deity, means 'family G.o.d,' and in its present form is a corruption or contraction of uchi-no-Kami, meaning the 'G.o.d of the interior' or 'the G.o.d of the house.' Shinto expounders have, it is true, attempted to interpret the term otherwise; and Hirata, as quoted by Mr. Ernest Satow, declared the name should be applied only to the common ancestor, or ancestors, or to one so ent.i.tled to the grat.i.tude of a community as to merit equal honours. Such, undoubtedly, was the just use of the term in his time, and long before it; but the etymology of the word would certainly seem to indicate its origin in family worship, and to confirm modern scientific beliefs in regard to the evolution of religious inst.i.tutions.

Now just as among the Greeks and Latins the family cult always continued to exist through all the development and expansion of the public religion, so the Shinto family worship has continued concomitantly with the communal worship at the countless ujigami, with popular worship at the famed Ohoya-shiro of various provinces or districts, and with national worship at the great shrines of Ise and Kitzuki. Many objects connected with the family cult are certainly of alien or modern origin; but its simple rites and its unconscious poetry retain their archaic charm. And, to the student of j.a.panese life, by far the most interesting aspect of Shinto is offered in this home worship, which, like the home worship of the antique Occident, exists in a dual form.

Sec. 5

In nearly all Izumo dwellings there is a kamidana, [8] or 'Shelf of the G.o.ds.' On this is usually placed a small Shinto shrine (miya) containing tablets bearing the names of G.o.ds (one at least of which tablets is furnished by the neighbouring Shinto parish temple), and various ofuda, holy texts or charms which most often are written promises in the name of some Kami to protect his worshipper. If there be no miya, the tablets or ofuda are simply placed upon the shelf in a certain order, the most sacred having the middle place. Very rarely are images to be seen upon a kamidana: for primitive Shintoism excluded images rigidly as Jewish or Mohammedan law; and all Shinto iconography belongs to a comparatively modern era--especially to the period of Ryobu-Shinto--and must be considered of Buddhist origin. If there be any images, they will probably be such as have been made only within recent years at Kitauki: those small twin figures of Oho-kuni-nushi-no-Kami and of Koto-shiro- nushi-no-Kami, described in a former paper upon the Kitzuki-no-oho- yashiro. Shinto kakemono, which are also of latter-day origin, representing incidents from the Kojiki, are much more common than Shinto icons: these usually occupy the toko, or alcove, in the same room in which the kamidana is placed; but they will not be seen in the houses of the more cultivated cla.s.ses. Ordinarily there will be found upon the kamidana nothing but the simple miya containing some ofuda: very, very seldom will a mirror [9] be seen, or gohei--except the gohei attached to the small shimenawa either hung just above the kamidana or suspended to the box-like frame in which the miya sometimes is placed. The shimenawa and the paper gohei are the true emblems of Shinto: even the ofuda and the mamori are quite modern. Not only before the household shrine, but also above the house-door of almost every home in Izumo, the shimenawa is suspended. It is ordinarily a thin rope of rice straw; but before the dwellings of high Shinto officials, such as the Taisha-Guji of Kitzuki, its size and weight are enormous. One of the first curious facts that the traveller in Izumo cannot fail to be impressed by is the universal presence of this symbolic rope of straw, which may sometimes even be seen round a rice-field. But the grand displays of the sacred symbol are upon the great festivals of the new year, the accession of Jimmu Tenno to the throne of j.a.pan, and the Emperor's birthday. Then all the miles of streets are festooned with shimenawa thick as ship-cables.