"BON" SEASON SCENES
(NAGANO)
As moderns we have no direct affinity; as individuals we have a capacity
for personal sympathy.--MATTHEW ARNOLD
I had the good fortune to be in the village during the _Bon_ season.
The idea is that the spirits which are visiting their old homes remain
between the 11th and 14th of August. The 11th is called _mukae bon_
and the 14th _okuri bon_. (_Mukae_ means going to meet; _okuri_ to see
off.) On the 11th the villagers burned a piece of flax plant in front
of their houses. That night the priest said a special prayer in the
temple and used the cymbals in addition to the ordinary gong and drum.
The prayer seemed peculiarly sad. Before the shrines in their houses
the villagers placed offerings. One was a horse made out of a
cucumber, the legs being bits of flax twig and the tail and mane the
hair-like substance from maize cobs. There were also offerings of real
and artificial flowers and of grapes. In one house I visited I saw
_geta_, _waraji_, kimonos, pumpkins, caramels and pencils. Strings of
buck-wheat macaroni were laid over twigs of flax set in a vase. The
_ihai_ (name-plates of the dead) seemed to be displayed more
prominently than usual. (They are kept in a kind of small oratory
called _ihaido_, and after a time several names are collected on a
single plate.) _Mochi_ (rice-flour dumpling) is eaten at this time. On
the 12th and 14th the priest called at each house for two or three
minutes.
I asked if the villagers really believed that their dead returned at
the _Bon_ season. The answer was, "Only the old men and young children
believe that the dead actually come, but the young men and young
women, when they see the burning of the flax-plant and the other
things that are done, think of the dead; they remember them solemnly
at this time." And I think it was so. The stranger to a Japanese
house, in which there is not only a Shinto shelf but a Buddhist
shrine--where the name plates of the dead for several generations are
treasured--cannot but feel that, when all allowances are made for the
dulling influences of use and wont, the plan is a means of taking the
minds of the household beyond the daily round. The fact that there is
a certain familiarity with the things of the shrine and of the Shinto
shelf, just as there is a certain freedom at the public shrines and in
the temple, does not destroy the impression. When a man has taken me
to his little graveyard I have been struck by the lack of that
lugubriousness which Western people commonly associate with what is
sacred. The Japanese conception of reverence is somewhat different
from our own. As to sorrow, the idea is, as is well known, that it is
the height of bad manners to trouble strangers with a display of what
in many cases is largely a selfish grief. A manservant smiled when he
told me of his only son's death. On my offering sympathy the tears ran
down his face.
[Illustration: FARMER'S WIFE]
When the _Bon_ season ended on the fourteenth all the flowers and
decorations of the domestic shrines were taken early in the morning to
the bridge over the diminished river and flung down. The idea is
perhaps that they are carried away to the sea. (As a matter of fact
there was so little water that almost everything flung in from the
bridge remained in sight for weeks until there was a storm.) When the
flowers and decorations had been cast from the bridge the people went
off to worship at the graves. Many coloured streamers of paper,
written on by the priest, were flying there.
The _Bon_ dances took place five nights running in the open space
between the Shinto shrine and the old barn theatre. Nothing could have
been duller. The line from _Ruddigore_ came to mind, "This is one of
our blameless dances." The first night the performers were evidently
shy and the girls would hardly come forward. Things warmed up a little
more each night and on the last night of all there was a certain
animation; but even then the movement, the song and the whole scheme
of the dance seemed to be lacking in vigour. What happened was that a
number of lads gradually formed themselves into a ring, which got
larger or smaller as the girls joined it or waited outside. The girls
bunched together all the time. None of the dancers ever took hands.
The so-called dancing consisted of a raising of both arms--the girls
had fans in their hands--and a simple attitudinising. The lads all
clapped their hands together in time, but in a half-hearted kind of
way; the girls struck the palms of their left hands with their fans.
The boys were in clean working dress. Some had towels wound round
their heads, some wore caps and others hats. The girls were got up in
all their best clothes with fine _obi_ and white aprons. The music was
dirge-like. It was not at all what Western people understand to be
singing. The performers emitted notes in a kind of falsetto, and these
five or six notes were repeated over and over and over again. The only
word I can think of which approximately describes what I heard, but it
seems harsh, is the Northern word, yowling. First the lads yowled and
then the girls responded with a slightly more musical repetition of
the same sounds. For all the notice the boys appeared to take of the
girls they might not have been present. The lads and lasses were no
doubt fully conscious, however, of each other's presence. The dancing
took place on the nights of the full moon. But it was cloudy, and,
owing to the big surrounding trees, the performance was often dimly
lit.
To me the dancing was depressing, but that is not to say that the
dancers found it so. Dancing began at eight o'clock and went on till
midnight. "They would not be fit for their work next day if they
danced later," a sober-minded adult explained. This was only one
suggestion among many that the dance has been devitalised under the
respectabilising influence of the policeman and village elders who had
forgotten their youth. To the onlooker it did not seem to matter very
much whether the dance, as it is now, continues or not. Occasionally
one had an impression that it had once been a folk dance of vigour and
significance. But the present-day performance might have been
conceived and presented by a P.S.A. All this is true when the dance is
contrasted with an English West-country dance or a dance in Scotland
at Hallowe'en. But it must be remembered that the _Bon_ dance during
the first nights is in the nature of a lament for the dead. There is
something haunting in the strange little refrain, though it is
difficult to hum or whistle it. Perhaps the whole festival is too
intimately racial to be fully understood by a stranger. By the end of
the festival, on the night of merrymaking in honour of the village
guardian spirit, things were livelier. Some of the lads had evidently
had _saké_ and even the girls had lost their demureness.
[Illustration: MOTHER AND CHILD]
After the Buddhist _Bon_ season was over it was the turn of Shinto,
and the village children were paraded before the shrine. A number of
Shinto priests in the neighbourhood took a leading part in making the
customary offerings and the local priest read a longish address to the
guardian spirit of the village. Respectful correctness rather than
devoutness is the phrase which one would ordinarily be disposed to
apply to the ceremonies at a Shinto shrine, but the local priest was
reverential. The ceremonies of the day evidently meant a great deal to
him. The children paid a well-drilled attention. They also sang the
national anthem and a special song for the day under the leadership of
the school teacher, who played on a portable harmonium which sounded
as portable harmoniums usually sound. The whole proceedings wore a
semi-official look.
Happily there was nothing semi-official about the wrestling to which
we were invited later in the day. A special little platform had been
put up for us. The ring was made on rice chaff and earth. The
wrestlers squatted in two parties at opposite sides of the ring. They
did not wear the straw girdles of the professionals. Each man had a
wisp of cotton cloth tied round his waist and between his legs. One of
the best things about the wrestling was the formal introduction of the
competitors. A weazened little man with a tucked-up cotton kimono and
bare legs, but with the address and dignity of a "Nō" player,
proclaimed the names and styles--it seems that the wrestlers have a
fancy to be known by the names of mountains and rivers--in a fashion
which recalled the tournament. There was also another personage, with
a Dan Leno-like face and an extraordinary gift of contorting his legs,
who played the buffoon, and gyrated round the dignified M.C., who
remained unmoved while the audience laughed. It was evidently the
right thing for the prizes--they were awarded at the end of each
bout--to be presented as comically as possible; and some of the
Shakespearean humours which appealed so powerfully to the groundlings
at the Globe were enacted as if neither space nor time intervened
between us and the Elizabethans.
The bouts were not so fast as professional wrestlers are accustomed
to, but they were none the less exciting. The result was invariably in
some doubt and often entirely unexpected. The usual rule was that he
who threw his man twice was the winner. In some events, immediately a
wrestler had been thrown, a succession of other contestants rushed at
the victor, one after the other, without allowing him time even to
straighten his back. Some of the competitors were poorly developed but
the lankiest and skinniest were often excellent wrestlers. At an
interval in the wrestling the committee flung hard peaches to
wrestlers and spectators. I wanted to make some little acknowledgment
of the kindness of the young men's association in providing us with
our little platform, and it was suggested that autographed fans at
about a penny three-farthings apiece for about forty wrestlers would
be acceptable. This gift was announced on a long streamer. The funny
man of the ring also made a speech of welcome. I may add that the
young men's association had fitted up on the way to the scene of the
wrestling a number of special lanterns which bore efforts in English
by a student home for the holidays.
I was told that the people of the village were "honest, independent
and earnest," and I am disposed to think that this may be true of most
of them. As to honesty, we had the satisfaction of living without any
thought of _dorobo_ (robbers). It is a great comfort to be able at
night to leave open most of the _shoji_ and not to have to pull out
the _amado_ (wooden shutters) from their case. The nature of our
possessions was well known not only in the village but throughout the
district, for there was seldom a day on which a knot of grown-ups or
children did not come to peer into our rooms. The inspection was
accompanied by many polite bows and friendly smiles. On a festival day
the crowd occasionally reached about fifty.
There were formerly several teahouses in the village, but under the
influence of the young men's association all houses of entertainment
but two had been closed. These two had become "inns." In one of these
the girl attendant was the proprietor's daughter; in the other there
was a solitary waitress. One of the abolished teahouses had taken
itself two miles away, where possibly it still had visitors. There
seemed to be two public baths in the village, both belonging to
private persons. The charge was 1 sen for adults and 5 _rin_ for
children. At one of the baths I noticed separate doors for men and
women; in the bath itself the division between the sexes was about two
feet high.
The smallest subdivision of the village is called _kumi_ or company.
Each of these has a kind of manager who is elected on a limited
suffrage. The managers of the _kumi_, it was explained, are "like
diplomatists if something is wanted against another village." The
_kumi_ also seems to have some corporate life. There is once a month a
semi-social, semi-religious meeting at each member's house in turn.
The persons who attend lay before the house shrine 3 or 5 sen each or
a small quantity of rice for the feast. The master of the house
provides the sauce or pickles. I heard also of a kind of _kō_ called
_mujin_, a word which has also the meaning of "inexhaustible." By such
agencies as these money is collected for people who are poor or for
men who want help in their business or who need to go on a journey.
We have seen that the village is by every token well off. What are its
troubles? Undoubtedly the people work hard. I imagine, however, that
there are very many districts where the people work much harder. The
foreigner is too apt to confuse working hard with working
continuously. Whether outdoors or indoors, whether at a handicraft or
at business, an Oriental gives the impression of having no notion of
getting his work done and being finished with it. The working day
lasts all day and part of the night. Whether much more is done in the
time than in the shorter Western day may be doubted. During the brief
silk-worm season many of the women of the village in which I stayed
are afoot for a long day and for part of the night, but the winter
brings relief from the strain of all sorts of work. Owing to the snow
it is practically impossible to do any work out of doors in January,
February and March. The snow may stop work even in December. Here,
then, is a natural holiday. Whether with their men indoors the women
have much of a holiday is uncertain. But indoors should not be taken
too exactly. There is some hunting in the winter. Deer come within two
miles and hares are easily got.
Well-off though the village is, there is a strong desire to increase
incomes. The people are working harder than they have done in the past
because the cost of living has risen. An attempt is to be made to
increase secondary employments. Corporately, the village is said to
possess 10,000 yen in cash in addition to its land. It is said that
this money is lent out to some of the more influential people. What
the security is and how safe the monetary resources of a village
loaned out in this way may be I do not know, but there is obviously
some risk and I gathered that some anxiety existed.
The people of the village, like a large proportion of the population
of the prefecture, are distinctly progressive. Nagano is full of what
someone called "a new rural type" of men who read and delight in going
to lectures. Lectures are a great institution in Nagano. For these
lectures country people tramp into a county town in their _waraji_
carrying their _bento_. To these rustics a lecture is a lecture. A
friend of mine who is given to lecturing spoke on one occasion for
seven hours. It is true that he divided the lecture between two days
and allowed himself a half hour's rest in the middle of each three and
a half hours' section. He started with an audience of 500. On the
first day at the end of the second part of the lecture it was noticed
that the audience had decreased by about 70. On the second day about
100 people in all wearied in well-doing. But it was the townsfolk, not
the country people, who left.
[Illustration: A CRADLE]
I found upon enquiry that in the village in which I had been living
there had been one arrest only during the previous year. The charge
was one of theft. Half a dozen other people had got into trouble but
their arrests had been "postponed." Two of these six delinquents had
"caused fire accidentally," two had been guilty of petty theft, and
the remaining two had sold things of small value which did not belong
to them. During the twelve months there had been no charges of
immorality and no gambling. Perhaps, however, there may have been
police admonitions. It seemed to have been a long time since there had
been a case of what we should call illegitimacy or of a child being
born in the first months of a young couple's marriage. Someone
mentioned, however, that the girls who went to the silk factories
were, as a consequence of their life there, "debased morally and
physically."
A notable thing in the village was four fires, two the month before we
arrived and two while we were there. They were suspected to have been
the work of a person of weak intellect. (As in our own villages half a
century ago, there is in every community at least one "natural.") On
the night of the first fire we were awakened about 3 a.m. by shouting,
by the clanging of the fire bell and by the booming of the great bell
in the temple yard. The fire was about four houses away. It was a
still night and the flames and sparks went straight up. As the
possibility of the wind shifting and the fire spreading could not be
entirely excluded we quickly got our more important possessions on the
_engawa_--at least a young maidservant did so. The continual
experience which the Japanese have of fires makes them self-possessed
on these occasions, and this girl had _futon_, bags, etc., neatly tied
in big _furoshiki_ (wrapping cloths) in the shortest possible time. It
was only when she was satisfied that our belongings were in readiness
for easy removal that she went to look after her own. The
matter-of-fact, fore-sighted, neat way in which she got to work was
admirable. With great kindness one of the elders of the village came
hurriedly to the temple, evidently thinking we should feel alarmed,
and cried out, "_Yoroshii, Yoroshii_" ("All right").
[Illustration: FIRE ALARM AND OBSERVATION POST]
As I stood before the blaze what struck me most was the orderliness
and quiet of the crowd and the way in which whatever help was needed
was at once forthcoming without fuss. The fire brigades were working
in an orderly way and everything was so well managed that the scene
seemed almost as if it were being rehearsed for a cinema. One
difference between what I saw and what would be seen at home at a fire
was that the scene was well lighted from the front, for the members of
the fire brigades carried huge lanterns on high poles. From the mass
of old wet reed in the roadway I judged that the first act of the
firemen had been to use their long hooks to denude the roof of the
burning house of its thatch, which in the lightest wind is so
dangerous to surrounding dwellings. Nobody in the village is insured,
but the neighbours seem to meet about a third of the loss caused by a
fire. It is an illustration of local values that a larger subscription
than 2 yen would not be accepted from me. In connection with this fire
someone mentioned to me that incendiarism is specially prevalent in
some prefectures, while in others the use of the knife is the usual
means of wiping out scores. The phrase used by a person who threatens
arson is, "I will make the red worm creep into your roof."
During the winter there is too much drinking--"generally by poor
men"--but there is said to be less of this than formerly. Some people
stop their newspaper in the summer and resume taking it during the
greater leisure of the winter. It has been noted, among other small
matters, that the local vocabulary has expanded during the past
fifteen years. During our stay the young midwife, who was going to
America to join her husband, was eager to give her service in the
kitchen for the chance of improving her English. We also gave help in
the evenings thrice a week to one of the school teachers who had
managed to obtain a fair reading knowledge of English. The earnestness
with which these two people studied was touching. While I was in the
village the young men's association began the issue of a magazine.
Lithographic ink was brought to me so that I might contribute in
autograph as well as in translation. The association, which receives
10 yen a year from the village, cultivates several plots of paddy and
dry land. The bigger schoolboys drilled with imitation rifles,
imitation bayonets and imitation cartridges. I felt that I should know
more about the villagers if I could learn, like Synge, their topics of
conversation when no stranger was present. One day while strolling
with a friend I asked him what was being said by two girls who were
working among the mulberries and were hidden from us by a hedge
(hedges only occur round mulberry plots). He told me that one was
enhancing to her companion the tremendous dignity of the Crown Prince
by exaggerating grotesquely the size of the house he lived in, which
reminded me of the servant who told her friend that "Queen Victoria
was so rich that she had a piano in her kitchen." Generally the
conversational topics of the villagers seemed to be people and prices.
Undoubtedly, I was told, the subjects which were most popular,
"because they provoked hilarity," were family discords and sexual
questions. One man with whom I spoke about the morality of the village
said cautiously, "They say there are some moneylenders here."
IN AND OUT OF THE TEA PREFECTURE