of the Samurai class who have been permitted to become priests, and who lead a wandering life with their faces wholly concealed under immense basket-hats), pilgrims (who nowadays travel by excursion trains with tickets available for two months from date of issue), boy pilgrims to the shrines of Ise with all the precocious shrewdness of a gamin or a street arab, Tome-onna or female touts who beset the highway near their master's inn at sundown and wheedle or hustle the traveller into it, coolies with their degraded dialect (all Ikku's personages use the language and speak the dialect proper to them), thieves, jugglers, rustics, ferrymen, horse-boys, and many more. Most of these have disappeared for ever, but they still live in Ikku's pages to delight many a future generation of readers.
It has been said that there are no terms of vulgar abuse in the Japanese language. The compliments exchanged by the coolies and pack-horse men in the Hizakurige are a sufficient answer to this rash assertion. There is more truth in the statement that profane language is unknown in Japan. A European Yaji and Kida would certainly have been as richly supplied with terms of this kind as Ernulphus or our armies in Flanders, but the only oath uttered by the heroes of the Hizakurige is the very mild Namu San or Namu Sambō, that is to say, by the three holy things, namely, Buddha, the Law, and the Priesthood. Paradoxical though it may appear, this is probably owing to the want of any very deep-seated sentiment of piety in the Japanese nation. Their language is equally deficient in such phrases as "God bless you," "Thank God," and "Adieu."
