XIII

It was by mere lucky chance that I happened down to Yamada-Isé on the

very day her great celebration began. In theory, as I understand it,

Shinto shrines are rebuilt every seven years; in practice, at least in

this most venerated center of the cult, as sacred to millions of

Japanese as Jerusalem, Mecca, or Benares to men of other faiths, some of

the holy edifices are actually reconstructed, and new ones added, every

twenty-first year. In the springtime, when sap and pilgrims are on the

move, one may expect to find many of the trains of Japan crowded, but I

had certainly not looked forward to fighting my way amid such throngs as

poured with me down to this chosen terrestrial abode of the gods that

watch over the island empire. There had been no warning, so far as I was

concerned, that another twenty-one years had passed and that the

generation-separated festivities were again on the point of beginning.

The multitude which disgorged through the station exits was a mere

handful compared to the endless welter of humanity that already surged

along the few streets of the little city, a city as far removed in some

respects from westernized Kobe or Yokohama as the moon. Yet every train

that arrived as long as I remained was packed beyond anything we of the

Occident would believe possible. Pilgrims, devout and otherwise, nearly

all in strange, fantastic garb, eddied back and forth through the town,

while the keepers and employees of inns, of eating- and drinking-places,

of shops crammed with displays of the myriad queer trinkets sold to the

pious in holy places, raced up and down along the edges of the human

stream frantically shouting the merits of their establishments or their

wares. It was not difficult to believe the naïve assertion of the

home-made local guide-book that “the occupation of the people of Yamada

is to feed peacefully upon pilgrims.”

Some of the latter sat on the polished floors of the wide-open anterooms

of inns, tending their dusty and weary feet; the overwhelming majority,

however, had confined the physical exertions of their pilgrimage to the

purchase of a railway ticket. In the overcrowded, paper-walled

hostelries, in some cases on the train itself, they changed their

every-day garb for curious costumes supposed to fit the occasion, until

one might have fancied a mammoth outdoor fancy-dress ball was under way.

Many of the townspeople were already similarly decked out, with a

certain uniformity that still did not preclude individual touches. There

was, too, a quaint and apparently unwitting mixture of the ancient and

the modern,—caps of to-day topping off bizarre kimonos of _samurai_

times, the familiar Japanese imitation of a thermos bottle riding on the

hips of youths garbed in a way that might not have been out of place

here a thousand years ago.

In the midst of all this maelstrom of incongruity, a bare two minutes

from the station I came upon what I took to be the nucleus of the

festivities, but which proved later to be but a small detail of them.

From a narrow side street there suddenly emerged upon the principal

artery of the town, to the accompaniment of an uproar of strange music

and a babel of orders and warnings, the ends of two mammoth ropes,

grasped, first by two men in strange attire, then by two rows of little

girls, crowded as closely together as they could walk, dressed in

combinations of flowers and brilliant clothing quite beyond the power of

mere man to describe, and singing a chorus of un-Occidental rhythm.

Behind them came scores of little boys, then larger girls, youths of

ever-increasing size, and finally, the ropes seeming to have no end, two

long lines of men, all in wondrous garb, all chanting weirdly as they

advanced tugging at the big rolls of hemp. At last, when the head of the

procession was already out of hearing, there came creaking and grinding

around the corner, with the assistance of sturdy young men excitedly

applying great wooden levers, a very Juggernaut of a car, its two

mammoth wheels some two feet thick and so weighty that they crushed like

eggs the stones from the sea that had been strewn along the way, the

body so ponderous that it suggested a moving house. High up on this was

a float, a fantastic scene taken from Japanese legend, with several

living figures posing as motionlessly as the jolting and swaying of the

cart permitted, and with as many mechanical assistants, in incongruous

working clothes, performing unknown labors in half-concealed corners of

it.

But it is time to explain. The holy city of Yamada and its environs,

location of the two great shrines of Isé, are divided into twenty-one

wards or sections. At the time of the rare rebuilding festival each of

these must, by ancient custom, furnish a cart to bring up from the two

near-by rivers the timbers to be used in the reconstruction. These are

specially selected _hinoki_, a sturdy cousin of the pine or spruce,

felled in the mikado’s private forests amid elaborate religious

ceremonies, in order that they may be properly consecrated, then floated

down the rivers with similar formalities. So great is the reverence for

this sanctified wood that the mammoth logs are commonly wrapped in reed

mats to prevent the slightest injury, and arrive in Yamada thus

protected. The shrines themselves, dedicated to the divine ancestors of

the mikado, principal gods of the Japanese people, are so sacred that

carpenters engaged upon them are said to be required to bathe and put on

spotless white garments before coming to work, and to discard either

wood or clothing on which falls a drop of blood or other stain incident

to their labor.

But custom and century-old tradition have made the wheeled contrivances

furnished by the wards much more than mere timber-hauling carts. The

different sections vie with one another in constructing mighty vehicles,

in surmounting them with elaborate tableaux, in providing music and the

like to accompany them. Long before it is time actually to go down to

the rivers for the logs the twenty-one processions set out for a round

of the little city, some invisible master of ceremonies preventing

collisions. The wards are small; the vehicles must be drawn entirely by

man-power; hence every family is required to send at least one member to

assist in the pulling. Many a household reports intact, decked out in

the requisite costumes, and prepared to spend the day and the night, if

necessary, in tugging at the ropes with Japanese patience.

[Illustration: Residents of Yamada Isé garbed for the cart-drawing

festival. Brilliant colors characterize the clothing; the torn paper

“duster” is a frequent Shinto motif]

[Illustration: Inside the grounds of the Naigu, most sacred of all the

Shinto temple groups of Japan, all pilgrims purify themselves by washing

in the sacred river before proceeding to their devotions; photography is

strictly forbidden]

[Illustration: A small section of the long line of rope-pullers

returning with a sacred timber from the river to the temple rebuilding]

[Illustration: At last the sacred timber itself, wrapped in grass mats

to prevent any injury, came creaking and grinding around the corner of a

narrow winding street]

The darkness which fell upon the long May day increased rather than

lessened the festivities. From my hilltop lodging the whole region

pulsated with weird music, groaned with the straining of mammoth wheels

over sea-stones, flickered far and wide with fantastic paper lanterns.

When I descended once more to the town almost every one of its narrow

streets was blocked by a cart and all that went with it. Directly behind

each vehicle now was a band or orchestra, if words so inaccurate to the

occasion be allowed. They consisted of rectangular, flower- and

silk-bedecked, canopied affairs on tiny wheels, in which the score of

musicians seemed to be sitting, but inside which they were really

walking. In some cases these were all women, in others all men;

sometimes the genders were mixed; a few venturesome wards even sought to

carry off the palm with more or less trained bands of shy and awkward

children.

Every ten yards or so each cart halted, the great tapering lines of

rope-holders fell into the position of “at rest,” and the musicians

struck up queer yet enlivening noises on their dull-toned drums,

metallic-voiced bars of wood, and misplaced fiddle-strings. During the

halts as well as the advances the living figures of the float-tableaux

strove to hold their poses, hour after hour. Not a few of these

groupings suggested real artistic ability. I was particularly taken with

a scene of olden times in which a woman, garbed and rice-powdered to the

exact likeness of a wax figure preserved from shogunal days, knelt on

the floor of the car, while two men decked out to perfection as

two-sword _samurai_ of the old swash-buckling era stood on either side

of her. It was some time before I realized that they were living

persons, so unblinking was their expression, so nearly motionless their

bodies even during the pitching and swaying of the ponderous cart. One

of the pseudo-_samurai_ in particular had been given a pose that seemed

physically impossible for any length of time—until I made out a loop of

fine wire with a padded bottom sustaining his outstretched right arm.

Even with that assistance he was displaying a patriotism or a civic

spirit quite beyond any I ever hope to attain.

How far into the night this rivalry continued I cannot say, for I am one

of those unfortunates who require a certain amount of sleep even on

extraordinary, twenty-one-yearly occasions. Certainly, unless dreams

deceived me, Yamada did not once during the night fall wholly silent,

and with dawn the festivities again steadily increased in volume. The

carts had gone down to the rivers, but the ever-growing throngs of

pilgrims were taxing the capacity of the town and completely swamping

its transportation facilities. Tram-cars, automobiles, horse-drawn

_bashas_, rickshaws raced back and forth along or beside the wide new

gravel-strewn highway between the inner and outer shrine, four miles

apart, and still the overwhelming majority were forced to stump out or

back in their curious and clumsy footwear.

The distant Naiku shrine was best worth the visiting, in its great

mountain-base park amid immense trees considerably resembling redwoods,

the more accessible of which were protected by split-bamboo jackets to

prevent the aggressively pious from stripping them of the bark that is

reputed to be a protection against evil spirits. The unpainted shrines

of _hinoki_ wood, set back within inclosures shut off from the general

public, were of a primitive, undecorated style said to represent the

purest and oldest form of Shinto architecture. Here and there gleaming

new shrines, and inclosures of the same white wood, had already been

erected, and a few matting-wrapped logs from the imperial forest lay

awaiting similar use. Every one of the swarming pilgrims, of high or low

degree, who crossed the sacred bridge into the shaded grounds paused to

kneel at the edge of a clear little river and purify himself before

proceeding farther into the holy precincts. Such is the absence of

fanaticism, or at least of intolerance, in the faiths of Japan that the

foreigner may mingle freely with believers, getting physically as near

the gods as they, without once catching a hint of resentment. Neither my

own ablutions at the sacred river, though from a somewhat different

motive than theirs, nor my purchase of a copper’s worth of beans for the

sacred horse—which closely resembled the rather overfed and underworked

buggy-steed of a Kansas farmer—aroused more than a slight, fleeting

attention from my fellow-pilgrims.

When I returned from island-studded Toba by a stroll through

Futami-no-Ura, with its far-famed sacred rocks connected by a rope

bridge, the last act of the timber-hauling was reaching its height. Up

the long, sloping road from the river, where they had been loaded with

religious rites, came the carts. Their now dust-covered and perspiring

rope-clutchers strained toilsomely through the narrow Yamada streets,

the girls and many of the younger boys fallen out along the way. There

was grim determination in the faces of the sturdy youths, who were

mainly left now, to finish the task, that their wards might not be

discredited. When at last the carts themselves appeared they had been

stripped of all the fanciful decorations of the night before—tableaux,

floats, silken drapery, the following clusters of musicians were all

gone; the mere vehicles, bare as a wrestler girded for the contest,

ground crushingly over the loose stones, each laden with one massive

_hinoki_ log. Clouds of dust half hid them and the struggling pullers,

even in the blazing sunshine; scores of the solemn little sword-bearing

policemen of Japan lined the way along which they were to pass, to hold

back the multitudes from pressing too closely upon the sacred timbers,

to prevent, as far as possible, irreverent foreigners from photographing

them, so sacrosanct are they and the shrines that are built from them.

As each cart groaned into the hallowed precincts—this time the Geku, or

outer shrine, on the edge of Yamada town itself—the entrance was barred

from behind it even to the reverent throngs, and none but Shinto

functionaries and local or visiting notables were permitted to follow it

to its final goal.

[Illustration: Though cremation is much more common than burial, a

Japanese cemetery bears no small resemblance to one of our own]

[Illustration: Within the grounds of the finest of Kyoto’s temples]

[Illustration: Hundreds of semi-sacred deer roam at will about Nara and

vicinity, recalling the sacred bulls of India]

[Illustration: The entrance to the ever-higher temples of Nara]

For a full week the same scenes were to be enacted daily, and it is

small wonder if the inhabitants of holy Yamada-Isé surreptitiously heave

a sigh of relief when their strenuous labors are over and the town has

settled down again to feed peacefully upon the pious, who will arrive

constantly but in less overwhelming multitudes during the coming

twenty-one years.