Chapter XIII

It was by mere lucky chance that I happened down to Yamada-Isé on the very day her great celebration began. In theory, as I understand it, Shinto shrines are rebuilt every seven years; in practice, at least in this most venerated center of the cult, as sacred to millions of Japanese as Jerusalem, Mecca, or Benares to men of other faiths, some of the holy edifices are actually reconstructed, and new ones added, every twenty-first year. In the springtime, when sap and pilgrims are on the move, one may expect to find many of the trains of Japan crowded, but I had certainly not looked forward to fighting my way amid such throngs as poured with me down to this chosen terrestrial abode of the gods that watch over the island empire. There had been no warning, so far as I was concerned, that another twenty-one years had passed and that the generation-separated festivities were again on the point of beginning.

The multitude which disgorged through the station exits was a mere handful compared to the endless welter of humanity that already surged along the few streets of the little city, a city as far removed in some respects from westernized Kobe or Yokohama as the moon. Yet every train that arrived as long as I remained was packed beyond anything we of the Occident would believe possible. Pilgrims, devout and otherwise, nearly all in strange, fantastic garb, eddied back and forth through the town, while the keepers and employees of inns, of eating- and drinking-places, of shops crammed with displays of the myriad queer trinkets sold to the pious in holy places, raced up and down along the edges of the human stream frantically shouting the merits of their establishments or their wares. It was not difficult to believe the naïve assertion of the home-made local guide-book that “the occupation of the people of Yamada is to feed peacefully upon pilgrims.”

Some of the latter sat on the polished floors of the wide-open anterooms of inns, tending their dusty and weary feet; the overwhelming majority, however, had confined the physical exertions of their pilgrimage to the purchase of a railway ticket. In the overcrowded, paper-walled hostelries, in some cases on the train itself, they changed their every-day garb for curious costumes supposed to fit the occasion, until one might have fancied a mammoth outdoor fancy-dress ball was under way. Many of the townspeople were already similarly decked out, with a certain uniformity that still did not preclude individual touches. There was, too, a quaint and apparently unwitting mixture of the ancient and the modern,—caps of to-day topping off bizarre kimonos of _samurai_ times, the familiar Japanese imitation of a thermos bottle riding on the hips of youths garbed in a way that might not have been out of place here a thousand years ago.

In the midst of all this maelstrom of incongruity, a bare two minutes from the station I came upon what I took to be the nucleus of the festivities, but which proved later to be but a small detail of them. From a narrow side street there suddenly emerged upon the principal artery of the town, to the accompaniment of an uproar of strange music and a babel of orders and warnings, the ends of two mammoth ropes, grasped, first by two men in strange attire, then by two rows of little girls, crowded as closely together as they could walk, dressed in combinations of flowers and brilliant clothing quite beyond the power of mere man to describe, and singing a chorus of un-Occidental rhythm. Behind them came scores of little boys, then larger girls, youths of ever-increasing size, and finally, the ropes seeming to have no end, two long lines of men, all in wondrous garb, all chanting weirdly as they advanced tugging at the big rolls of hemp. At last, when the head of the procession was already out of hearing, there came creaking and grinding around the corner, with the assistance of sturdy young men excitedly applying great wooden levers, a very Juggernaut of a car, its two mammoth wheels some two feet thick and so weighty that they crushed like eggs the stones from the sea that had been strewn along the way, the body so ponderous that it suggested a moving house. High up on this was a float, a fantastic scene taken from Japanese legend, with several living figures posing as motionlessly as the jolting and swaying of the cart permitted, and with as many mechanical assistants, in incongruous working clothes, performing unknown labors in half-concealed corners of it.

But it is time to explain. The holy city of Yamada and its environs, location of the two great shrines of Isé, are divided into twenty-one wards or sections. At the time of the rare rebuilding festival each of these must, by ancient custom, furnish a cart to bring up from the two near-by rivers the timbers to be used in the reconstruction. These are specially selected _hinoki_, a sturdy cousin of the pine or spruce, felled in the mikado’s private forests amid elaborate religious ceremonies, in order that they may be properly consecrated, then floated down the rivers with similar formalities. So great is the reverence for this sanctified wood that the mammoth logs are commonly wrapped in reed mats to prevent the slightest injury, and arrive in Yamada thus protected. The shrines themselves, dedicated to the divine ancestors of the mikado, principal gods of the Japanese people, are so sacred that carpenters engaged upon them are said to be required to bathe and put on spotless white garments before coming to work, and to discard either wood or clothing on which falls a drop of blood or other stain incident to their labor.

But custom and century-old tradition have made the wheeled contrivances furnished by the wards much more than mere timber-hauling carts. The different sections vie with one another in constructing mighty vehicles, in surmounting them with elaborate tableaux, in providing music and the like to accompany them. Long before it is time actually to go down to the rivers for the logs the twenty-one processions set out for a round of the little city, some invisible master of ceremonies preventing collisions. The wards are small; the vehicles must be drawn entirely by man-power; hence every family is required to send at least one member to assist in the pulling. Many a household reports intact, decked out in the requisite costumes, and prepared to spend the day and the night, if necessary, in tugging at the ropes with Japanese patience.

The darkness which fell upon the long May day increased rather than lessened the festivities. From my hilltop lodging the whole region pulsated with weird music, groaned with the straining of mammoth wheels over sea-stones, flickered far and wide with fantastic paper lanterns. When I descended once more to the town almost every one of its narrow streets was blocked by a cart and all that went with it. Directly behind each vehicle now was a band or orchestra, if words so inaccurate to the occasion be allowed. They consisted of rectangular, flower- and silk-bedecked, canopied affairs on tiny wheels, in which the score of musicians seemed to be sitting, but inside which they were really walking. In some cases these were all women, in others all men; sometimes the genders were mixed; a few venturesome wards even sought to carry off the palm with more or less trained bands of shy and awkward children.

Every ten yards or so each cart halted, the great tapering lines of rope-holders fell into the position of “at rest,” and the musicians struck up queer yet enlivening noises on their dull-toned drums, metallic-voiced bars of wood, and misplaced fiddle-strings. During the halts as well as the advances the living figures of the float-tableaux strove to hold their poses, hour after hour. Not a few of these groupings suggested real artistic ability. I was particularly taken with a scene of olden times in which a woman, garbed and rice-powdered to the exact likeness of a wax figure preserved from shogunal days, knelt on the floor of the car, while two men decked out to perfection as two-sword _samurai_ of the old swash-buckling era stood on either side of her. It was some time before I realized that they were living persons, so unblinking was their expression, so nearly motionless their bodies even during the pitching and swaying of the ponderous cart. One of the pseudo-_samurai_ in particular had been given a pose that seemed physically impossible for any length of time—until I made out a loop of fine wire with a padded bottom sustaining his outstretched right arm. Even with that assistance he was displaying a patriotism or a civic spirit quite beyond any I ever hope to attain.

How far into the night this rivalry continued I cannot say, for I am one of those unfortunates who require a certain amount of sleep even on extraordinary, twenty-one-yearly occasions. Certainly, unless dreams deceived me, Yamada did not once during the night fall wholly silent, and with dawn the festivities again steadily increased in volume. The carts had gone down to the rivers, but the ever-growing throngs of pilgrims were taxing the capacity of the town and completely swamping its transportation facilities. Tram-cars, automobiles, horse-drawn _bashas_, rickshaws raced back and forth along or beside the wide new gravel-strewn highway between the inner and outer shrine, four miles apart, and still the overwhelming majority were forced to stump out or back in their curious and clumsy footwear.

The distant Naiku shrine was best worth the visiting, in its great mountain-base park amid immense trees considerably resembling redwoods, the more accessible of which were protected by split-bamboo jackets to prevent the aggressively pious from stripping them of the bark that is reputed to be a protection against evil spirits. The unpainted shrines of _hinoki_ wood, set back within inclosures shut off from the general public, were of a primitive, undecorated style said to represent the purest and oldest form of Shinto architecture. Here and there gleaming new shrines, and inclosures of the same white wood, had already been erected, and a few matting-wrapped logs from the imperial forest lay awaiting similar use. Every one of the swarming pilgrims, of high or low degree, who crossed the sacred bridge into the shaded grounds paused to kneel at the edge of a clear little river and purify himself before proceeding farther into the holy precincts. Such is the absence of fanaticism, or at least of intolerance, in the faiths of Japan that the foreigner may mingle freely with believers, getting physically as near the gods as they, without once catching a hint of resentment. Neither my own ablutions at the sacred river, though from a somewhat different motive than theirs, nor my purchase of a copper’s worth of beans for the sacred horse—which closely resembled the rather overfed and underworked buggy-steed of a Kansas farmer—aroused more than a slight, fleeting attention from my fellow-pilgrims.

When I returned from island-studded Toba by a stroll through Futami-no-Ura, with its far-famed sacred rocks connected by a rope bridge, the last act of the timber-hauling was reaching its height. Up the long, sloping road from the river, where they had been loaded with religious rites, came the carts. Their now dust-covered and perspiring rope-clutchers strained toilsomely through the narrow Yamada streets, the girls and many of the younger boys fallen out along the way. There was grim determination in the faces of the sturdy youths, who were mainly left now, to finish the task, that their wards might not be discredited. When at last the carts themselves appeared they had been stripped of all the fanciful decorations of the night before—tableaux, floats, silken drapery, the following clusters of musicians were all gone; the mere vehicles, bare as a wrestler girded for the contest, ground crushingly over the loose stones, each laden with one massive _hinoki_ log. Clouds of dust half hid them and the struggling pullers, even in the blazing sunshine; scores of the solemn little sword-bearing policemen of Japan lined the way along which they were to pass, to hold back the multitudes from pressing too closely upon the sacred timbers, to prevent, as far as possible, irreverent foreigners from photographing them, so sacrosanct are they and the shrines that are built from them. As each cart groaned into the hallowed precincts—this time the Geku, or outer shrine, on the edge of Yamada town itself—the entrance was barred from behind it even to the reverent throngs, and none but Shinto functionaries and local or visiting notables were permitted to follow it to its final goal.

For a full week the same scenes were to be enacted daily, and it is small wonder if the inhabitants of holy Yamada-Isé surreptitiously heave a sigh of relief when their strenuous labors are over and the town has settled down again to feed peacefully upon the pious, who will arrive constantly but in less overwhelming multitudes during the coming twenty-one years.