CHAPTER XIII
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.