The long white bridge with its pillars of iron is recognisably modern.
It was, in fact, opened to the public only last spring with great
ceremony. According to some most ancient custom, when a new bridge has
been built the first persons to pass over it must be the happiest of the
community. So the authorities of Matsue sought for the happiest folk,
and selected two aged men who had both been married for more than half
a century, and who had had not less than twelve children, and had
never lost any of them. These good patriarchs first crossed the bridge,
accompanied by their venerable wives, and followed by their grown-up
children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, amidst a great clamour
of rejoicing, the showering of fireworks, and the firing of cannon.
But the ancient bridge so recently replaced by this structure was
much more picturesque, curving across the flood and supported upon
multitudinous feet, like a long-legged centipede of the innocuous kind.
For three hundred years it had stood over the stream firmly and well,
and it had its particular tradition.
When Horio Yoshiharu, the great general who became daimyo of Izumo in
the Keicho era, first undertook to put a bridge over the mouth of this
river, the builders laboured in vain; for there appeared to be no solid
bottom for the pillars of the bridge to rest upon. Millions of great
stones were cast into the river to no purpose, for the work constructed
by day was swept away or swallowed up by night. Nevertheless, at last
the bridge was built, but the pillars began to sink soon after it was
finished; then a flood carried half of it away and as often as it was
repaired so often it was wrecked. Then a human sacrifice was made to
appease the vexed spirits of the flood. A man was buried alive in the
river-bed below the place of the middle pillar, where the current is
most treacherous, and thereafter the bridge remained immovable for three
hundred years.
This victim was one Gensuke, who had lived in the street Saikamachi; for
it had been determined that the first man who should cross the bridge
wearing hakama without a machi [5] should be put under the bridge; and
Gensuke sought to pass over not having a machi in his hakama, so they
sacrificed him Wherefore the midmost pillar of the bridge was for three
hundred years called by his name--Gensuke-bashira. It is averred that
upon moonless nights a ghostly fire flitted about that pillar--always in
the dead watch hour between two and three; and the colour of the light
was red, though I am assured that in Japan, as in other lands, the fires
of the dead are most often blue.