"BON" SONGS AND THE SILENT PRIEST
(YAMAGATA, AKITA,[160] AOMORI, IWATE, MIYAGI, FUKUSHIMA
AND IBARAKI)
The worst of our education is that it looks askance, looks over its
shoulder at sex.--R.L.S.
A village headman, encountered in the train just as we were leaving
Yamagata prefecture, gave me some insight into the life of his little
community. The fathers of two-score families were shopkeepers and
tradesmen--- that is, tradesmen in the old meaning of the word. There
were also a few labourers. About two hundred and fifty families owned
land and some of them rented additional tracts. Another sixty were
simply tenants. The poorer farmers were also labourers or artisans.
Most of them were "comfortable enough." There were, however, half a
dozen people in the village who were helped from village funds. Of the
middle-grade farmers "it might be said that they do not become richer
or poorer."
The headman had formed a society which sent its members to visit
prefectures more developed agriculturally. This society had engaged an
instructor from without the prefecture and he had taught horse tillage
and the management of upland fields and had made model paddies. Five
stallions had been obtained and a simple adjustment of paddy-land had
been brought about. As a result the rice yield had risen.
This headman had also had addresses delivered in the village for the
first time. Further, after buying a number of books, he had visited
all the villagers in turn and shown them the books and had said to
each of them, "I wish you to buy a book and, after reading it, to give
it to the library." "And," he told me, "none of them objected." Soon a
valuable library came into existence.
This admirable functionary felt some satisfaction at having been able
to abate the custom according to which the young men, with the tacit
permission of their parents, had gone into the neighbouring town after
harvest "to visit the immoral women." "They used to spend as much as 5
yen," said our headman. He had started worthier forms of after-harvest
relaxation, and "the cost of the amusement days is now only 50 or 60
sen."
When we got on the main line again and pursued our way farther north,
it was through even stouter snow shelters and through many tunnels.
Not a few miserable dwellings were to be seen as we passed into Akita
prefecture. We broke our journey after some hours' travelling to stay
the night at a rather primitive hot spring inn four or five miles up
in the hills. A slight rain was falling. Four passengers at a time
made the ascent to the hotel, squatting on a mat in an old
contractor's wagon, pushed along roughly laid rails by two perspiring
youths in rain-cloaks of bark strips. At the inn, on going to the
bath, I found therein a miscellaneous collection of people of both
sexes from grandparents to grandchildren. One bather enlivened us by
performances on the flute, which, if a musical instrument must be
played in a bath, seems as suitable as any. In this rambling inn there
were many farmers who, by preparing their own food and doing for
themselves generally, were holiday-making at bedrock prices.
As it was the _Bon_ season, when the spirits of the dead are supposed
to return, I was a witness of the method adopted to help the ghosts to
find their old homes. At the top of a 30 or 40 ft. pole a lantern is
fixed with a pulley. Fastened up beside the lantern is a bunch of
green stuff, cryptomeria in many cases. The lantern is lighted each
evening for a week. Having heard a good deal about the suppression of
_Bon_ dances and songs I was interested when a fellow-guest began
talking about them. He had seen many _Bon_ dances and had heard many
_Bon_ songs. There can be no doubt that there has been some
unenlightened interference with the _Bon_ gathering. The country
people seem to be suffering from the determination of officialdom to
make an end of everything in country as well as town that may be
considered "uncivilised" by any foreigner, however ill instructed. In
towns the sexes are not accustomed to meet, but country people must
work together; therefore they find it natural to dance and sing
together. As to the _Bon_ songs, it is common sense that expressions
which may be regarded as outrageous and indecent in a drawing-room may
not be so terrible on a hilltop among rustics used to very plain
speech and to easy recognition of natural facts that are veiled from
townspeople. My chance acquaintance at the inn recited a number of
_Bon_ songs and next morning brought me some more that he had
remembered and had been kind enough to write down. They merely
established the fact that bucolic wit is as elemental in Japan as in
other lands. Most of the songs had a Rabelaisian touch, some were
nasty, but nearly all had wit. The following is an entirely harmless
example:
Mr. Potato of the Countryside
Got his new European suit.
But a potato is still a potato.
He took one and a half _rin_[161] out of his bag
And bought _amé_[162] and licked at it.
Here are three others:
Tip-toe, tip-toe,
Creaks the floor.
Girl made prayer,
Dreading ghost.
But 'twas her lover
Who stealthily came.
Dancer, dancer,
Do not laugh at me.
My dance is very bad,
But I only began last year.
How thin a thin-legged man may be
If he does not take his _miso_ soup.[163]
The quality of these dramatic songs will be entirely missed if the
reader does not bear in mind the mimetic skill of the amateur Japanese
dancer and his power as a contortionist. Clever dancers often use
their powers in a humorous pretence of clumsiness. Of the freer sort
of songs I may quote two:
Never buy vegetables in Third Street,[164]
You'll lose 30 sen and your nose.
Onions from a basket hanging in the _benjo_[165]
Were cooked in _miso_[166] and given to a blind man,
But that chap was greatly delighted.
Some of the other songs may be described, I suppose, as obscene, if
obscene be, as the dictionary says, "something which delicacy, purity
and decency forbid to be exposed"; but "delicacy, purity and decency"
must be considered in relation to climate, work and social usage. What
one feels about some critics of _Bon_ songs and dances is that they
need a course of _The Golden Bough_. Such an illustration as _Bon_
songs furnish of the moral and mental conditions from which country
folk must raise themselves is of value if rural sociology is a real
thing. There is far too much theorising about the countryman and the
countrywoman, far too much idealising of them and far too much rating
of them as clods. If country people of all lands are free-spoken let
us be neither hypercritical nor hypocritical. A big gap seems to yawn
between the paddy-field peasant in his breech clout and the immaculate
clubman, but what difference is there between the savour of the
average _Bon_ song and of many a smoking-room jest which is not to the
credit of the peasant? At an inn in Naganoken a Japanese artist on
holiday showed me his sketch book. Among his drawings was a
representation of a shrine festival which he had witnessed in a remote
village. A festival car was being pushed by a knot of youths and by
about an equal number of young women and all of them were nude. But no
enlightened person believes that either decency or morals depends on
clothing, or would expect to find more essential indecency and
immorality in that village than in a modern city. What one would
expect to find would be marriages between physically well-developed
men and women.
How the race moves on is shown in the famous tale of a saintly Zen
priest which I first heard in that little hill inn but was afterwards
to see in dramatic form on the stage of a Tokyo theatre. An unmarried
girl in the village in which the priest's temple was situated was
about to have a child. She would not confess to her angry father the
name of her lover. At last she attributed her condition to the greatly
honoured priest. Her father was astonished but he was also glad that
his daughter was in the favour of so eminent a man. So he went to the
priest and said that he brought him good tidings: the girl whom he had
deigned to notice was about to have a child. The father went on to
express at length his sense of obligation to the priest for the honour
done to his family. All the priest said in reply was, _So desuka_? (Is
that so?) Soon after the birth of the child the girl besought her
father to marry her to a certain young farmer. The father, proud of
the association with the priest, refused. Finally the girl told her
parent that it was not the priest but the young farmer who was the
father of her child. The parent was aghast and chagrined as he
recalled the terms in which he had addressed the saintly man. He
betook himself at once to the temple and expressed in many words his
feelings of shame and deep contrition. The priest heard him out, but
all he said was, _So desuka_?
Yamagata signifies "shape of a mountain" and Akita means "autumn rice
field." Although Akita prefecture is mountainous there is a greater
proportion of level land in it than in Yamagata. I find "Rice, rice,
rice" written in my notebook. An agricultural expert gave me to
understand that fifteen per cent. of the farmers were probably living
on rents or on the dividends of silk factories, that 55 or 60 per
cent. were of the middle grade with an annual income of 300 yen, that
25 or 30 per cent. had about 150 yen--the lowest sum on which a family
could be supported--and that there were 3 or 4 per cent. of farm
labourers who earned less than 150 yen. There had been much paddy
adjustment and the prefecture was spending 300,000 yen a year for the
encouragement of adjustment and the opening of new paddies. In the
case of newly opened fields, tenants had contracts, but ordinary
tenancies were by word of mouth generation after generation. A great
deal of agricultural instruction was given by the prefecture, the
counties and the villages, and in 30 years the rice crop had been
doubled although the area had remained about the same. In order to
secure help in the work of rural amelioration a gathering of Buddhist
priests and another of Shinto priests had been lectured to at the
prefectural office. Nearly 300,000 yen had been spent in twelve months
on afforestation. The following year a special effort was to be made
to spend 500,000 yen. A society raised young trees and sold them at
cheap rates to farmers. Every young men's association in the
prefecture had land and had planted trees. It was in Akita that I
first saw peat in Japan. There are said to be 7,000 acres of it in the
country.
The prefecture of Aomori forms the northern tip of the mainland. Apart
from its enormous forest area and the railroad stacks of sawn lumber,
what caught my eye were the apple orchards and the number of farmers
on horseback or seated in wagons. Who that has been in Japan has not a
memory of narrow winding roads along which men and women and young
people are pulling and pushing carts? Here many farming folk rode. I
was told that Akita produced apples and potatoes to the value of a
million yen each and that there were ten co-operative apple societies.
Much of the fruit went to Russia.
Having passed through the city of Aomori we started to come down the
east coast. An agricultural authority said that the net profit of a
dry farm, that is a farm without any paddy, was almost negligible.
Because of low prices, cattle keeping had decreased to half what it
used to be. (The only cattle I saw from the train were on the road
with harness on their backs.) Only 18 yen could be got for a
two-year-old; the Aomori cattle were indeed the cheapest in Japan. The
expert added, "There are no buyers; only robbers."
But the dealers were not the only robbers. Boats came from Hokkaido
and stole cattle from the prefecture to the number of a hundred a
year. Sometimes horses were taken too, but horse thefts were rare
"because you cannot kill a horse and sell it for meat." The average
price of a two-year-old not thus illicitly vended was 70 yen. (It was
a little less in the next prefecture of Iwate and in Hokkaido.) Half
of the stallions belonging to the "Bureau of Horse Politics" of the
Ministry of Agriculture were bought in Aomori.
The farmers by the lake that we passed on our way south were described
as "very poor," for their soil was barren and their climate bad. Their
crops were only a third of what could be raised in another part of the
prefecture. The agriculture of all the prefectures through which I now
journeyed south to Tokyo suffer from the cold temperature of the sea.
The east-coast temperature drops in winter to 7 degrees below
freezing.[167] "Living is more and more difficult," said someone to
me. "The number of tenants increases because farmers get into debt and
have to sell their land. Millet and buckwheat are much eaten. Although
the temperature is 5 per cent. colder in Hokkaido, the people do worse
here because our soil is barren and there is no profitable winter
occupation like lumbering. Only 10 per cent. of the rural population
save anything. In bad times 65 per cent. of the families get into
debt."
At Morioka in Iwate prefecture I visited the excellent higher
agricultural college, where there were 300 students. The competition
for places, as at every educational institution in Japan, was keen.
The number who sat at the last entrance examinations--the average age
was twenty--was 317, of whom only 80 got in. There were 15 professors
and 10 assistants. The charge to students was 300 yen for a year of
ten months. The annual cost of the college to the Government was
70,000 yen. Of the foreign volumes among the 20,000 books in the
library 50 per cent. were German, 30 per cent. English and 20 per
cent. American.
An apiary of a single skep in a roped-off enclosure was an
illustration of unfamiliarity with bees. It seemed strange to find
that in this up-to-date and efficient institution the biggest
implement for cutting grass which was in use, a sickle of course, had
a blade no longer than 8 inches. Hung up at the back of a shed I
noticed a rusty scythe. When I tried to show what it could do it was
suggested that the implement was "too heavy, too difficult and too
dangerous."
Iwate is the poorest of the northern prefectures, for bad weather so
often comes when the rice is in flower. As many as 40 per cent. of the
people were just making ends meet. Another 40 per cent. were always
dogged by poverty. Millet was the food of 10 per cent. of the farmers;
millet, salted vegetables and bean soup were the meagre diet of 5 per
cent; the staple food of the remainder was barley and rice. There are
few temples in Iwate compared with the rest of Japan. "Education is
more backward than in other prefectures," someone said. "The farmers
are not able. Too much _saké_ is drunk." Farmers come in to Morioka to
sell charcoal and wood and I saw some of them turning into the _saké_
shops.
There was talk in praise of millet. Though low socially in the dietary
of Japan, it has merits. It withstands cold and even salt spray. It
ripens earlier than rice and so may sometimes be harvested before a
spell of bad weather. It yields well, it will store for some time, its
taste is "little inferior to rice and better than that of barley" and
it contains more protein than rice. It is cooked after slight
polishing and the straw provides fodder. "In the north-east, where
millet is most eaten," I was told, "there are people who are 5 ft. 10
ins. to 6 ft. and there are many wrestlers." The seeds in the handsome
heavy ears of millet are about the size of the letter O in the
footnote type of this book.
In the train a farmer who knew the prefecture spoke of _Bon_ songs
and dances: "The result of the action against them was not good. The
meeting of young men and women at the _Bon_ gatherings was in their
minds half the year in prospect and half in retrospect. Bearing in
mind the condition of the people, even the worst _Bon_ songs are not
objectionable. But when the people become educated some songs will be
objectionable."
Visitors to a poor prefecture like Miyagi must be surprised to see so
much adjusted paddy. There is more adjusted paddy in Miyagi than in
any other prefecture. Some 90,000 acres have been taken in hand and a
large amount of money has been spent. The work has been carried out
largely by way of giving wages to farmers during famine. A new tunnel
brought water to 6,000 acres. "The bad climate of Miyagi cannot be
mended," I was told; "all that can be done is to seek for the earliest
varieties of rice, to sow early, to work as diligently as possible and
to deal with floods by embanking the rivers and by tree planting." As
many as 7,000 people go from Miyagi to Hokkaido in a year. It seems to
point to a certain amount of fecklessness that 15 per cent. of them
return.
One man I spoke with during my journey south gave a vivid impression
of the influence of young men's associations. "Before they started,"
said he, "the young men spent their time in singing indecent songs, in
gambling, in talking foolishly, and twice or thrice a year in
immorality. A young widow has sometimes been at fault; the
parents-in-law need her help and village sentiment is against her
remarriage. The suppression of _Bon_ dances has done more harm than
good by keeping out of sight what used to be said and done
openly[168]. Two or three priests are active in this prefecture. Where
the Shinshu sect is strong you will find little divorce. But the
influence of Buddhism has been stationary in recent years. There is
some action by missionaries of the Japanese Christian church, but the
number of Christians among real rustics is very small."
At Sendai it was pleasant to see a prefectural office--or most of
it--housed in a Japanese building instead of a dreadful edifice "in
Western style." In feudal times the building was a school. Portraits
of daimyos and famous scholars of the Sendai clan surround the
Governor's room, and adjoining it is the _tatami_-covered apartment in
which the daimyo used to sit when he was present at the examinations.
Among the portraits is one of a retainer which was painted in Rome,
where he had been sent on a mission of inquiry.
[Illustration: A SCARECROW.--A SKETCH BY PROFESSOR NASU.]
In his scarecrow-making the Japanese farmer seems to have great faith
in the Western-style cap, felt hat, or even umbrella, if he can get
hold of one. Ordinarily, the bogey man has a bow with the arrow
strung. Occasionally a farmer seeks to scare birds by means of
clappers which he places in the hands of a child or an old man who
sits in a rough shelter raised high enough to overtop the rice. Now
and then there is a clapper connected with a string to the farm-house.
I have also seen a row of bamboos carried across a paddy field with a
square piece of wood hanging loosely against each one. A rope
connecting all the bamboos with one another was carried to the
roadway, and now and then a passer-by of a benevolent disposition, or
with nothing better to do, or, it may be, standing in some degree of
relationship to the paddy-field proprietor, gave the rope a tug. Then
all the bamboos bent, and as they smartly straightened themselves
caused the clappers to give forth a sound sufficiently agitating to
sparrow pillagers in several paddies.
On leaving Miyagi we were once more in Fukushima, with notes on which
this account of a trip to the north of Japan and back again began.
This time, instead of journeying by routes through the centre of the
prefecture, as in coming north, or as in the visit paid to Fukushima
in the Tokyo-to-Niigata journey, I travelled along the sea coast. When
we had passed through Fukushima we were in Ibaraki, a characteristic
feature of which is swamps. Drainage operations have been going on
since the time of the Shogunate. There is in this prefecture the
biggest production of beans in Japan, and we have come far enough
south to see tea frequently. In the lower half of the prefecture we
are in the great Kwanto plain, the prefectures in which are most
conveniently surveyed from Tokyo.
FOOTNOTES:
[160] Some Yamagata notes and those relating to Akita are conveniently
included in this Chapter, but these two prefectures are on the west
coast.
[161] A _rin_ is the tenth part of a sen, which in its turn is a
farthing.
[162] A kind of barley sugar.
[163] Bean soup.
[164] A street in Akita in which many prostitutes live.
[165] Closet.
[166] Bean paste.
[167] The warm black current from the south flows up the east and west
coasts. Some distance north of Tokyo, the east-coast current meets the
cold Oyashiro current from Kamchatka, and is turned off towards
America.
[168] See _A Free Farmer in a Free State_, pp. 173-4, for an account
of the custom in Zeeland by which peasants preserved themselves from
the calamity of childless marriage.