THE SUBURBS OF TOKIO
The suburbs of Tokio are full of holiday resorts for the people and the
beautiful villas of nobles. To the north-east, in Oji, are the Government
chemical works and paper mills, where rough bits of mulberry-wood are
turned into papers of a dozen kinds, the silkiest tissue-paper, smooth,
creamy writing-paper, thick parchment, bristol-board, and the thin paper
for artists and etchers. On a sheet of the heaviest parchment paper I
once stood and was lifted from the floor, the fabric showing no mark of
rent or strain, and it is wellnigh impossible to tear even a transparent
Oji letter sheet. The Oji tea-house has a famous garden, and in autumn
Oji’s hill-sides blaze with colored maples, and then the holiday makers
mark the place for their own.
Waseda, the northern suburb, contains an old temple, a vast, gloomy
bamboo-grove, and the villa of Countess Okuma, to whose genius for
landscape-gardening is also due the French Legation’s paradise of a
garden, in the heart of the city, that place having been Count Okuma’s
town residence before he sold it to the French Government. From Waseda’s
rice fields a greater marvel grew.
Meguro, south of Tokio, is a place of sentimental pilgrimage to the
lovers of Gompachi and Komurasaki, the Abelard and Heloise of the East,
around whose tomb the trees flutter with paper poems, and prayers. In
the temple grounds are falling streams of water, beneath which, summer
and winter, praying pilgrims stand, to be thus pumped on for their sins.
Similar penitents may be seen at a little temple niched in the bluff of
Mississippi Bay. Meguro has an annual azalea fête and a celebration of
the maple-leaf, and its resident nobles, among whom is General Saigo,
give feasts in honor of the season’s blooms.
The Sengakuji temple, near Shinagawa, is a sacred spot and shrine of
chivalry, the burial-place of the Forty-seven Ronins; and here come pious
pilgrims to say a prayer and leave a stick of burning incense, and view
the images and relics in the little temple.
Near Omori, half-way between Yokohama and Tokio, Professor Morse
discovered the shell-heaps of prehistoric man. The neighborhood is
made beautiful by old groves, old temples and shrines, tiny villages,
picturesque farm-houses, and hedge-lined roads, while Ikegami’s temples
shine upon the hill that stands an evergreen island in the lake of
greener rice fields or golden stubble. Here died Nichiren, founder of the
Buddhist sect bearing his name. For six centuries these splendid temples
have resounded with the chantings of his priesthood, who still expound
his teachings to the letter. The Nichiren sect is the largest, richest,
most influential, and aggressive in Japan. They are the Protestants and
Presbyterians of the Buddhist religion; firm, hard, and unrelenting
in their faith, rejecting all other creeds as false, and zealously
proselyting. Nichiren was a great scholar, who, poring over Chinese
and Sanscrit sutras, believed himself to have discovered the true and
hidden meaning of the sacred books. His labors were colossal, and though
exiled, imprisoned, tortured, and condemned to death, he lived to see
his followers increasing to a great body of true believers, and himself
established as high-priest over the temples of Ikegami. In the popular
play “Nichiren,” one has thrilling evidence of what the pious founder and
his disciples endured.
On the twelfth and thirteenth of each October special services are held
in memory of Nichiren, which thousands of people attend. On the first
day of this matsuri the railway is crowded with passengers. Bonfires
and strings of lanterns mark the Omori station by night, and by day
the neighboring matsuri is announced by tall bamboo poles, from which
spring whorls of reeds covered with huge paper flowers. These giant
flower-stalks are the conventional sign for festivities, and when a row
of them is planted by the road-side, or paraded up and down with an
accompaniment of gongs, the holiday spirit responds at once. The quiet
country road is blockaded with hundreds of jinrikishas going to and
returning from Ikegami’s terraced gate-ways. Men, women, and children,
priests, beggars, and peddlers pack the highway. The crowd is amazing—as
though these thousands of people had been suddenly conjured from the
ground, or grown from some magician’s powder—for nothing could be quieter
than Omori lanes on all the other days of the year.
Along the foot-paths of the fields women in tightly-wrapped kimonos with
big umbrellas over their beautifully-dressed heads; young girls with the
scarlet petticoats and gay hair-pins indicative of maidenhood; little
girls and boys with smaller brothers and sisters strapped on their backs,
trudge along in single files, high above the stubble patches, to the
great matsuri. In farm-house yards persimmon-trees hang full of mellow,
golden fruit, and the road is literally lined with these apples of the
Hesperides. Peddlers sit on their heels behind their heaped persimmons
and busily tie straw to the short stems of the fruit, that the buyer may
carry his purchase like a bunch of giant golden grapes. Fries, stews,
bakes, and grills scent the air with savors, and all sorts of little
balls and cubes, pats and cakes, lumps and rolls of eatables are set out
along the country road. A queer sort of sea-weed scales, stained bright
red, is the chewing-gum of the East, and finds a ready market.
On the days of the matsuri the village street is impassable, and the
whole broad walk of the temple grounds leading from the pagoda is lined
with booths, jugglers, acrobats, side-shows, and catch-penny tricksters.
The “sand-man,” with bags of different colored sands, makes beautiful
pictures on a cleared space of ground, rattling and gabbling without
cessation while he works. First he dredges the surface with a sieve full
of clean white sand, and then sifts a little thin stream of black or
red sand through his closed hand, painting warriors, maidens, dragons,
flowers, and landscapes in the swiftest, easiest way. It is a fine
example of the trained hand and eye, and of excellent free-hand drawing.
A juggler tosses rings, balls, and knives in the air, and spins plates
on top of a twenty-foot pole. His colleague balances a big bamboo on one
shoulder, and a small boy climbs it and goes through wonderful feats
on the cross-piece at the top. A ring of gaping admirers surrounds a
master of the black art, who swallows a lighted pipe, drinks, whistles,
produces the pipe for a puff or two, swallows it again, and complacently
emits fanciful rings and wreaths of smoke. Hair-pins, rosaries, toys, and
sweets are everywhere for sale.
A huge, towering, heavy-roofed red gate-way admits streams of people to
the great court-yard, surrounded on three sides by temples large and
small, where the priests chant and pound and the faithful pray, rubbing
their rosaries and tossing in their coins. At one shrine greasy locks
of hair tied to the lattices are votive offerings from those who have
appealed to the deity within. There is a little temple to the North Star,
where seamen and fisher-folk pray, and one to Daikoku, the god of riches
and abundance, the latter a fat little man sitting on bags of rice, and
always beset by applicants.
In the great temple pyramids of candles burn, incense rises, bells
sound, and money rains into the big cash-box at the head of the steps.
The splendid interior is a mass of lacquer, gilding, and color, the
panelled ceiling has an immense filigree brass baldaquin hanging like a
frosted canopy over the heads of the priests, and a superb altar, all
images, lotus-leaves, lights, and gilded doors, dazzles the eye. Under
the baldaquin sits the high-priest of the temple, who is a bishop of
the largest diocese in Japan, while at either side of him more than
two hundred celebrants face each other in rows. The priestly heads
are shaven, the smooth faces wear the ecstatic, exalted expression of
devotees purified by vigil and fasting, and over their white or yellow
gauze kimonos are tied _kesas_, or cloaks of rich brocade. The lesser
hierarchy appear in subdued colors—gray, purple, russet—but the head
priest is arrayed in gorgeous scarlet and gold, and sits before a
reading-desk, whose books are covered with squares of similar brocade.
He leads the chanted service from a parchment roll spread before him, at
certain places touching a silver-toned gong, when all the priests bow low
and chant a response, sitting for hours immovable upon the mats, intoning
and reading from the sacred books in concert. At intervals each raps the
low lacquer table before him and bends low, while the big temple drum
sounds, the high-priest touches his gong, and slowly, behind the lights
and incense clouds of the altar, the gilded doors of the shrine swing
open to disclose the precious image of sainted Nichiren. On all sides
stand the faithful, extending their rosary-wrapped hands and muttering
the Nichirene’s special form of prayer: “_Namu mio ho ren ge kio_” (Glory
to the salvation-bringing book, the blossom of doctrine).
After seven hours of worship a last litany is uttered, and the procession
of priests files through the grounds to the monastery, stopping to select
from the two hundred and odd pairs of wooden clogs, waiting at the edge
of the temple mats, each his proper pair. The high-priest walks near the
middle of the line underneath an immense red umbrella. He carries an
elaborate red lacquer staff, not unlike a crozier, and even his clogs
are of red lacquered wood. The service in the temple suggests the forms
of the Roman Church, and this Buddhist cardinal, in his red robes and
umbrella, is much like his fellow-dignitary of the West.
To citizens of the United States Ikegami has a peculiar interest. When
the American man-of-war _Oneida_ was run down and sunk with her officers
and crew by the P. and O. steamer _Bombay_, near the mouth of Yeddo Bay,
January 23, 1870, our Government made no effort to raise the wreck or
search it, and finally sold it to a Japanese wrecking company for fifteen
hundred dollars. The wreckers found many bones of the lost men among the
ship’s timbers, and when the work was entirely completed, with their
voluntary contributions they erected a tablet in the Ikegami grounds to
the memory of the dead, and celebrated there the impressive Buddhist
_segaki_ (feast of hungry souls), in May, 1889. The great temple was in
ceremonial array; seventy-five priests in their richest robes assisted
at the mass, and among the congregation were the American admiral and
his officers, one hundred men from the fleet, and one survivor of the
solitary boat’s crew that escaped from the _Oneida_.
The Scriptures were read, a service was chanted, the Sutra repeated,
incense burned, the symbolic lotus-leaves cast before the altar, and
after an address in English by Mr. Amenomori explaining the segaki,
the procession of priests walked to the tablet in the grounds to chant
prayers and burn incense again.
No other country, no other religion, offers a parallel to this
experience; and Americans may well take to heart the example of piety,
charity, magnanimity, and liberality that this company of hard-working
Japanese fishermen and wreckers have set them.