The first surprise with which Kyoto greeted her visitors was the
beauty of her festival decorations. Every street had been prepared for
illumination. Before each house had been planted a new lantern-post of
unpainted wood, from which a lantern bearing some appropriate design
was suspended. There were also national flags and sprigs of pine above
each entrance. But the lanterns made the charm of the display. In each
section of street they were of the same form, and were fixed at exactly
the same height, and were protected from possible bad weather by the
same kind of covering. But in different streets the lanterns were
different. In some of the wide thoroughfares they were very large; and
while in some streets each was sheltered by a little wooden awning, in
others every lantern had a Japanese paper umbrella spread and fastened
above it.
There was no pageant on the morning of my arrival, and I spent a couple
of hours delightfully at the festival exhibition of kakemono in the
imperial summer palace called
Omuro Gosho. Unlike the professional art display which I had seen in
the spring, this represented chiefly the work of students; and
I found it incomparably more original and attractive. Nearly all the
pictures, thousands in number, were for sale, at prices ranging from
three to fifty yen; and it was impossible not to buy to the limit of
one's purse. There were studies of nature evidently made on the spot:
such as a glimpse of hazy autumn rice-fields, with dragonflies darting
over the drooping grain; maples crimsoning above a tremendous gorge;
ranges of peaks steeped in morning mist; and a peasant's cottage
perched on the verge of some dizzy mountain road. Also there were fine
bits of realism, such as a cat seizing a mouse in the act of stealing
the offerings placed in a Buddhist household shrine.
But I have no intention to try the reader's patience with a description
of pictures. I mention my visit to the display only because of
something I saw there more interesting than any picture. Near the
main entrance was a specimen of handwriting, intended to be mounted
as a kakemono later on, and temporarily fixed upon a board about
three feet long by eighteen inches wide,--a Japanese poem. It was a
wonder of calligraphy. Instead of the usual red stamp or seal with
which the Japanese calligrapher marks his masterpieces, I saw the red
imprint of a tiny, tiny hand,--a _living_ hand, which had been smeared
with crimson printing-ink and deftly pressed upon the paper. I could
distinguish those little finger-marks of which Mr. Galton has taught us
the characteristic importance.
That writing had been done in the presence of His Imperial Majesty by
a child of six years,--or of five, according to our Western method of
computing age from the date of birth. The prime minister, Marquis Ito,
saw the miracle, and adopted the little boy, whose present name is
therefore Ito Medzui.
Even Japanese observers could scarcely believe the testimony of their
own eyes. Few adult calligraphers could surpass that writing. Certainly
no Occidental artist, even after years of study, could repeat the feat
performed by the brush of that child before the Emperor. Of course
such a child can be born but once in a thousand years,--to realize,
or almost realize, the ancient Chinese legends of divinely inspired
writers.
Still, it was not the beauty of the thing in itself which impressed
me, but the weird, extraordinary, indubitable proof it afforded of an
inherited memory so vivid as to be almost equal to the recollection
of former births. Generations of dead calligraphers revived in
the fingers of that tiny hand. The thing was never the work of an
individual child five years old, but beyond all question the work of
ghosts,--the countless ghosts that make the compound ancestral soul.
It was proof visible and tangible of psychological and physiological
wonders justifying both the Shinto doctrine of ancestor worship and
the Buddhist doctrine of preëxistence.