Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (13 page)

Early on the morning of the 13th, new mats of purest rice straw, woven
expressly for the festival, are spread upon all Buddhist altars and
within each butsuma or butsudan—the little shrine before which the
morning and evening prayers are offered up in every believing home.
Shrines and altars are likewise decorated with beautiful embellishments
of coloured paper, and with flowers and sprigs of certain hallowed
plants—always real lotus-flowers when obtainable, otherwise lotus-
flowers of paper, and fresh branches of shikimi (anise) and of misohagi
(lespedeza). Then a tiny lacquered table—a zen-such as Japanese meals
are usually served upon, is placed upon the altar, and the food
offerings are laid on it. But in the smaller shrines of Japanese homes
the offerings are more often simply laid upon the rice matting, wrapped
in fresh lotus-leaves.

These offerings consist of the foods called somen, resembling our
vermicelli, gozen, which is boiled rice, dango, a sort of tiny dumpling,
eggplant, and fruits according to season—frequently uri and saikwa,
slices of melon and watermelon, and plums and peaches. Often sweet cakes
and dainties are added. Sometimes the offering is only O-sho-jin-gu
(honourable uncooked food); more usually it is O-rio-gu (honourable
boiled food); but it never includes, of course, fish, meats, or wine.
Clear water is given to the shadowy guest, and is sprinkled from time to
time upon the altar or within the shrine with a branch of misohagi; tea
is poured out every hour for the viewless visitors, and everything is
daintily served up in little plates and cups and bowls, as for living
guests, with hashi (chopsticks) laid beside the offering. So for three
days the dead are feasted.

At sunset, pine torches, fixed in the ground before each home, are
kindled to guide the spirit-visitors. Sometimes, also, on the first
evening of the Bommatsuri, welcome-fires (mukaebi) are lighted along the
shore of the sea or lake or river by which the village or city is
situated—neither more nor less than one hundred and eight fires; this
number having some mystic signification in the philosophy of Buddhism.
And charming lanterns are suspended each night at the entrances of homes
-the Lanterns of the Festival of the Dead—lanterns of special forms
and colours, beautifully painted with suggestions of landscape and
shapes of flowers, and always decorated with a peculiar fringe of paper
streamers.

Also, on the same night, those who have dead friends go to the
cemeteries and make offerings there, and pray, and burn incense, and
pour out water for the ghosts. Flowers are placed there in the bamboo
vases set beside each haka, and lanterns are lighted and hung up before
the tombs, but these lanterns have no designs upon them.

At sunset on the evening of the 15th only the offerings called Segaki
are made in the temples. Then are fed the ghosts of the Circle of
Penance, called Gakido, the place of hungry spirits; and then also are
fed by the priests those ghosts having no other friends among the living
to care for them. Very, very small these offerings are—like the
offerings to the gods.

Now this, Akira tells me, is the origin of the Segaki, as the same is
related in the holy book Busetsuuran-bongyo:

Dai-Mokenren, the great disciple of Buddha, obtained by merit the Six
Supernatural Powers. And by virtue of them it was given him to see the
soul of his mother in the Gakido—the world of spirits doomed to suffer
hunger in expiation of faults committed in a previous life. Mokenren saw
that his mother suffered much; he grieved exceedingly because of her
pain, and he filled a bowl with choicest food and sent it to her. He saw
her try to eat; but each time that she tried to lift the food to her
lips it would change into fire and burning embers, so that she could not
eat. Then Mokenren asked the Teacher what he could do to relieve his
mother from pain. And the Teacher made answer: 'On the fifteenth day of
the seventh month, feed the ghosts of the great priests of all
countries.' And Mokenren, having done so, saw that his mother was freed
from the state of gaki, and that she was dancing for joy.
[23]
This is
the origin also of the dances called Bono-dori, which are danced on the
third night of the Festival of the Dead throughout Japan.

Upon the third and last night there is a weirdly beautiful ceremony,
more touching than that of the Segaki, stranger than the Bon-odori—the
ceremony of farewell. All that the living may do to please the dead has
been done; the time allotted by the powers of the unseen worlds unto the
ghostly visitants is well nigh past, and their friends must send them
all back again.

Everything has been prepared for them. In each home small boats made of
barley straw closely woven have been freighted with supplies of choice
food, with tiny lanterns, and written messages of faith and love. Seldom
more than two feet in length are these boats; but the dead require
little room. And the frail craft are launched on canal, lake, sea, or
river—each with a miniature lantern glowing at the prow, and incense
burning at the stern. And if the night be fair, they voyage long. Down
all the creeks and rivers and canals the phantom fleets go glimmering to
the sea; and all the sea sparkles to the horizon with the lights of the
dead, and the sea wind is fragrant with incense.

But alas! it is now forbidden in the great seaports to launch the
shoryobune, 'the boats of the blessed ghosts.'

It is so narrow, the Street of the Aged Men, that by stretching out
one's arms one can touch the figured sign-draperies before its tiny
shops on both sides at once. And these little ark-shaped houses really
seem toy-houses; that in which Akira lives is even smaller than the
rest, having no shop in it, and no miniature second story. It is all
closed up. Akira slides back the wooden amado which forms the door, and
then the paper-paned screens behind it; and the tiny structure, thus
opened, with its light unpainted woodwork and painted paper partitions,
looks something like a great bird-cage. But the rush matting of the
elevated floor is fresh, sweet-smelling, spotless; and as we take off
our footgear to mount upon it I see that all within is neat, curious,
and pretty.

'The woman has gone out,' says Akira, setting the smoking-box (hibachi)
in the middle of the floor, and spreading beside it a little mat for me
to squat upon.

'But what is this, Akira?' I ask, pointing to a thin board suspended by
a ribbon on the wall—a board so cut from the middle of a branch as to
leave the bark along its edges. There are two columns of mysterious
signs exquisitely painted upon it.

'Oh, that is a calendar,' answers Akira. 'On the right side are the
names of the months having thirty-one days; on the left, the names of
those having less. Now here is a household shrine.'

Occupying the alcove, which is an indispensable part of the structure of
Japanese guest-rooms, is a native cabinet painted with figures of flying
birds; and on this cabinet stands the butsuma. It is a small lacquered
and gilded shrine, with little doors modelled after those of a temple
gate—a shrine very quaint, very much dilapidated (one door has lost
its hinges), but still a dainty thing despite its crackled lacquer and
faded gilding. Akira opens it with a sort of compassionate smile; and I
look inside for the image. There is none; only a wooden tablet with a
band of white paper attached to it, bearing Japanese characters—the
name of a dead baby girl—and a vase of expiring flowers, a tiny print
of Kwannon, the Goddess of Mercy, and a cup filled with ashes of
incense.

'Tomorrow,' Akira says, 'she will decorate this, and make the offerings
of food to the little one.'

Hanging from the ceiling, on the opposite side of the room, and in front
of the shrine, is a wonderful, charming, funny, white-and-rosy mask—
the face of a laughing, chubby girl with two mysterious spots upon her
forehead, the face of Otafuku.
[24]
It twirls round and round in the
soft air-current coming through the open shoji; and every time those
funny black eyes, half shut with laughter, look at me, I cannot help
smiling. And hanging still higher, I see little Shinto emblems of paper
(gohei), a miniature mitre-shaped cap in likeness of those worn in the
sacred dances, a pasteboard emblem of the magic gem (Nio-i hojiu) which
the gods bear in their hands, a small Japanese doll, and a little wind-
wheel which will spin around with the least puff of air, and other
indescribable toys, mostly symbolic, such as are sold on festal days in
the courts of the temples—the playthings of the dead child.

'Komban!' exclaims a very gentle voice behind us. The mother is standing
there, smiling as if pleased at the stranger's interest in her butsuma—
a middle-aged woman of the poorest class, not comely, but with a most
kindly face. We return her evening greeting; and while I sit down upon
the little mat laid before the hibachi, Akira whispers something to her,
with the result that a small kettle is at once set to boil over a very
small charcoal furnace. We are probably going to have some tea.

As Akira takes his seat before me, on the other side of the hibachi, I
ask him:

'What was the name I saw on the tablet?'

'The name which you saw,' he answers, 'was not the real name. The real
name is written upon the other side. After death another name is given
by the priest. A dead boy is called Ryochi Doji; a dead girl, Mioyo
Donyo.'

While we are speaking, the woman approaches the little shrine, opens it,
arranges the objects in it, lights the tiny lamp, and with joined hands
and bowed head begins to pray. Totally unembarrassed by our presence and
our chatter she seems, as one accustomed to do what is right and
beautiful heedless of human opinion; praying with that brave, true
frankness which belongs to the poor only of this world—those simple
souls who never have any secret to hide, either from each other or from
heaven, and of whom Ruskin nobly said, 'These are our holiest.' I do
not know what words her heart is murmuring: I hear only at moments that
soft sibilant sound, made by gently drawing the breath through the lips,
which among this kind people is a token of humblest desire to please.

As I watch the tender little rite, I become aware of something dimly
astir in the mystery of my own life—vaguely, indefinably familiar,
like a memory ancestral, like the revival of a sensation forgotten two
thousand years. Blended in some strange way it seems to be with my faint
knowledge of an elder world, whose household gods were also the beloved
dead; and there is a weird sweetness in this place, like a shadowing of
Lares.

Then, her brief prayer over, she turns to her miniature furnace again.
She talks and laughs with Akira; she prepares the tea, pours it out in
tiny cups and serves it to us, kneeling in that graceful attitude—
picturesque, traditional—which for six hundred years has been the
attitude of the Japanese woman serving tea. Verily, no small part of the
life of the woman of Japan is spent thus in serving little cups of tea.
Even as a ghost, she appears in popular prints offering to somebody
spectral tea-cups of spectral tea. Of all Japanese ghost-pictures, I
know of none more pathetic than that in which the phantom of a woman
kneeling humbly offers to her haunted and remorseful murderer a little
cup of tea!

'Now let us go to the Bon-ichi,' says Akira, rising; 'she must go there
herself soon, and it is already getting dark. Sayonara!'

It is indeed almost dark as we leave the little house: stars are
pointing in the strip of sky above the street; but it is a beautiful
night for a walk, with a tepid breeze blowing at intervals, and sending
long flutterings through the miles of shop draperies. The market is in
the narrow street at the verge of the city, just below the hill where
the great Buddhist temple of Zoto-Kuin stands—in the Motomachi, only
ten squares away.

The curious narrow street is one long blaze of lights—lights of
lantern signs, lights of torches and lamps illuminating unfamiliar rows
of little stands and booths set out in the thoroughfare before all the
shop-fronts on each side; making two far-converging lines of multi-
coloured fire. Between these moves a dense throng, filling the night
with a clatter of geta that drowns even the tide-like murmuring of
voices and the cries of the merchant. But how gentle the movement!-
there is no jostling, no rudeness; everybody, even the weakest and
smallest, has a chance to see everything; and there are many things to
see.

'Hasu-no-hana!—hasu-no-hana!' Here are the venders of lotus-flowers
for the tombs and the altars, of lotus leaves in which to wrap the food
of the beloved ghosts. The leaves, folded into bundles, are heaped upon
tiny tables; the lotus-flowers, buds and blossoms intermingled, are
fixed upright in immense bunches, supported by light frames of bamboo.

'Ogara!—ogara-ya! White sheaves of long peeled rods. These are hemp-
sticks. The thinner ends can be broken up into hashi for the use of the
ghosts; the rest must be consumed in the mukaebi. Rightly all these
sticks should be made of pine; but pine is too scarce and dear for the
poor folk of this district, so the ogara are substituted.

'Kawarake!—kawarake-ya!' The dishes of the ghosts: small red shallow
platters of unglazed earthenware; primeval pottery suku-makemasu!' Eh!
what is all this? A little booth shaped like a sentry-box, all made of
laths, covered with a red-and-white chess pattern of paper; and out of
this frail structure issues a shrilling keen as the sound of leaking
steam. 'Oh, that is only insects,' says Akira, laughing; 'nothing to do
with the Bonku.' Insects, yes!—in cages! The shrilling is made by
scores of huge green crickets, each prisoned in a tiny bamboo cage by
itself. 'They are fed with eggplant and melon rind,' continues Akira,
'and sold to children to play with.' And there are also beautiful little
cages full of fireflies—cages covered with brown mosquito-netting,
upon each of which some simple but very pretty design in bright colours
has been dashed by a Japanese brush. One cricket and cage, two cents.
Fifteen fireflies and cage, five cents.