Chapter XIV

It was fitting that a pilgrimage to Koya-san should follow my unexpectedly well-chosen visit to Yamada-Isé. As the latter is the holy of holies of Shintoism, so is the sacred mountain-top of Koya, also situated on the southernmost peninsula of the main island, perhaps the most venerated center of Buddhism in Japan. This time there was no special occasion to swell the pilgrim ranks, but the less accessible sanctuary enjoys a constant popularity, and almost as great a one as its rival over the mountain range to the east. I was, therefore, far from alone at any time during the journey, even though I had abandoned the less mobile two thirds of my family in delightful Nara.

For those moderately accustomed to walking uphill it is three hours’ steady climb from the railway to the hallowed summit of Koya-san. Before long the flat, dusty, rice-growing plain gives way to rugged foot-hills, then to real, if not especially lofty, mountains, up which clambers a more than well-worn trail that is almost a highway. Along this lower stretch those who grew weary of their burdens could pick up a porter at will, and to suit any load, for they range from eager boys of eight to powerfully legged men who have made carrying a life’s work. The carriers are of both sexes, too, and the frequent sight of a haughty man of wealth, easily recognizable for all his pilgrim garb, burdened only with a fan and a towel, and followed by a sun-browned woman bowed half double beneath his baggage, kept one reminded that this was Japan. Here also those who can climb only by the exertions of others engage their _kagos_, a cross between a traveling-chair and a hammock swung on a single bamboo pole. But the gods are evidently not kindly disposed toward those who thus ease their pilgrimage without just and sufficient cause, and I passed many—the ailing, the lame, the blind, tottering old women—who were taking no chances of thus jeopardizing celestial favor.

The typical pilgrim garb of knee-length kimono, inner sleeves ending in a kind of fingerless glove, brilliant sash, white drawer-stockings and straw sandals, a huge woven-reed hat, on the chest a wooden alms-box inscribed with Chinese characters, with a sack to hold donations of food below it, a formally folded pack on the back, a bell, a kind of scepter, and a rosary in one hand and a long staff topped by jingling rings in the other, was frequently seen in its entirety, and did not always cover one who actually lived on alms, though the genuine pilgrim is expected in theory to do so. But modifications of this get-up, ranging all the way from slight variations to full European attire, were to be seen in the almost unbroken lines of climbing and descending Japanese. Here a pilgrim’s smock and a coolie’s straw head-shade—one or both of them stamped with intricate characters indicating each temple visited—disguised a merchant or a dentist from near-by Osaka, a doctor of Tokyo, the principal of one of Japan’s important higher schools. Women in full Japanese dress, their skirts drawn high about their bare legs in the frank and natural manner of the country, their faces still waxen with rice-powder in spite of their flushing exertions, more likely than not disfigured with the clumsy gold teeth so general in Japan as to be almost the rule, strained their way upward with a difficulty that would have evoked laughter from their laborious country sisters, did not the barriers of caste and an inexpressive temperament prevent it. A short-haired widow, a plump and comely nun, who, in her black garb and closely clipped head, might easily have been mistaken for a man, an aged peasant with a deep sorrow in his eyes, a man and woman of wealth fulfilling some vow made in time of stress—the wife, of course, plodding in the rear, as the social standing of the sex requires—city youths and school-boys making the pilgrimage a combination of lark, duty, and mountain excursion—there is no class or age or condition in Japan that was not represented. Descending, satisfied pilgrims sometimes suggested yeomen suddenly stepping forth from the days of King Arthur; now and again a _kago_ came down bearing an inert, white-faced man for whom the exertion of the climb had been too much.

The entire ascent was well-, indeed over-supplied with the indispensable requirements of travelers,—food, drink, and even lodgings. Sometimes the open-front shops lined unbrokenly both sides of the way, until it seemed a city street; there was not a single projecting point, not a solitary place of vantage along it, that did not have its tea-house with an ever-spreading view of the world below. This was splendidly wooded in the steeper portions, fantastic with patchwork rice- and wheat-fields wherever cultivation was possible. A river serpentined through the middle distance; a rugged and in places bare range of hills formed the horizon. Here and there lay a compact little town, but a Japanese village pitched on a mountain-side is disappointing, because, while an almost unbroken green usually surrounds it, there are no red, or maroon, or old-rose tile roofs to contrast with this, but only dull-gray ones, which with time blend almost imperceptibly into the landscape.

For several miles, more than half-way up, and so distinct in limits as to suggest that they were forbidden elsewhere, the pleasure of the climb and the view were ruined by scores of horribly diseased beggars along the roadside, creatures as dreadful as any to be seen in China or India, and many times more conspicuous, for they were the first I remembered meeting anywhere in the country. It is the Japanese way to thrust infirmity out of sight; in Japan, unlike the rest of the Orient, begging is not only frowned upon but is neither customary nor often necessary; but here foreign visitors are few and piety quite ready to assist in the support of the helpless. Leprous women with babies already rotting from the same disease, men plainly far beyond the assistance of medicine, children with hairless scalps and great suppurating sores where skin should have been, horrors that one would avoid any effort to recall, writhed and gurgled appeals in the sun-scorched dust, or trailed whiningly after each passer-by.

Most of the pilgrims, no doubt with a certain amount of the self-seeking which distinguishes almsgiving by the pious the world over, took care to toss something to every one who asked, for which purpose every shop along the way offered, for slightly more than their value in modern money, stacks of old copper coins, worth a fourth or an eighth of a cent. Only a man of wealth could have afforded any real relief to the scores after scores of unfortunates, and I made the error of trying to pick out a few of the more deserving cases. For no sooner had I dropped ten _sen_, equal to an American nickel, into the hand of a mother of three leprous children than the word of the extraordinary benefaction spread from end to end of beggars’ row. Every mendicant thereafter who was still able to walk, even on hands and knees, stuck to my heels long after his precinct had been left far behind, and I quickly became known all over the mountain-side as the eccentric and wealthy foreigner who gave _ju sen_ at a throw.

Japan seems to have no tramps in the American sense, but her pilgrims take the place of them. The youth—and even the unyouthful—who suddenly feels the call of the road has only to slip into some fantastic garb, clutch a handful of jingling bells, and set off for some famous shrine or temple. If he is more than a “gay cat” by nature and the wandering life proves the one above all others he prefers, he may remain perpetually on a pilgrimage. He who openly “panhandled” or halted at houses to demand, tramp fashion, a “hand-out” or a “set-down” would quickly catch the unwelcome attention of the omnipresent Japanese police. But let him grasp a tinkling staff at his waist, and he may safely and permanently appeal to charity anywhere without even the exertion of opening his mouth. Far be it from me to assert that this ruse is widely practised, but few people are more persistent travelers within their own land than the Japanese, and by no means all of them are financially in traveling circumstances.

Not far from the end of the climb I fell in with a group of professional and business men from Osaka—though it would have been hard to recognize them as such under their pilgrims’ disguise—led by a young Buddhist novice who had come a little way down the mountain to meet them. The latter, for all his priestly garb and manner, was something in the nature of a hotel runner, and at sight of me he bowed low, rubbing his thighs Japanese fashion, and asked, with an ingenuous smile, whether I had chosen a stopping-place. When I answered in the negative, he replied in his chipped English, as if that fully settled the matter, “Then you will stay in my temple.”

All Koya-san is a Buddhist sanctuary, without layman inns to minister to the wants of visitors, and any who spend the night there must put up in one of the score of monasteries, technically as invited guests. While these make no actual charges, it is the custom, rarely overlooked, to leave as a donation to the adjoining temple an amount at least equal to what one would pay in a first-class inn—hence the competition of novice runners. Japanese are usually assigned to this or that group of priests, according to the part of the country from which they hail, but foreigners are fair game for any of them, and the first to establish contact with such a windfall becomes henceforth his undisputed host. I had no choice, therefore, as well as no other desire, than to accept the proffered hospitality.

Would that all hotel-runners were as solicitous for the welfare of the guests they capture as was this girl-faced priest-to-be. From the moment of laying claim to me until he handed me back my knapsack and bade me farewell at the beginning of the descent next morning, he never for a moment relaxed his efforts to anticipate my slightest want. There may have been a touch of selfishness in his attention, for the Japanese who longs to learn English is diligent in the pursuit of travelers on whom to practise; but there was nothing to suggest that his hospitality would not have been as sincere had I turned out to be one of those rare visitors to Japan who are neither Orientals nor yet speak what no small number of Nipponese consider the universal tongue of the West.

From the curious old back gate, main entrance to Koya-san since the coming of the railway, the ground sloped gently down into a shallow dish-shaped mountain-top filled with more temples, monasteries, royal tombs, and similar religious edifices than one could have counted in a day. Until half a century ago no woman was allowed to pass the first shrine within the gate, where she must say her prayers and return. Contact with the modern world has softened much that is still essentially Japanese, however, and the numerous female pilgrims are now housed by the priests quite as freely as are male visitors. Shopkeepers, too, have gradually invaded the once wholly non-secular residence, lining the broad central street with all the odds and ends that find sale among pilgrims, and some of them have brought their families with them, so that the once strictly monasterial aspect of the town has largely disappeared. I was surprised to learn, also, though perhaps I should have known it, that during the last few years the Buddhist priests of Japan have been permitted to marry. My informants all added, however, that few do so, because there is a conviction that a man with family cares cannot give his full energies to priestly duties, and those with ambitions for high place refuse to handicap themselves. As I have a passing acquaintance with the sternly celibate Buddhist votaries of other parts of the Orient, it was hard to picture this essential change, until I recalled that even the Roman Catholic clergy has been deprived of legitimate family joys, and worries, only since the days of Pope Gregory VII.