Chapter VI

But things are progressing, if slowly, in the general direction of official desires. Asahigawa, for example, north of the geographical center of the island, in what was at the beginning of the present century an unpeopled wilderness, is already a “whale of a town,” spreading for miles across the floor of a splendid valley, with a great row of snow-clads all along its far eastern horizon. There is scarcely a typical Japanese building in it, only a Shinto shrine or two, hardly a _shoji_ or a tiled roof. Yet the spirit of Japan has in no way been lost in the transplanting. That courteous yet subtle something which tells the foreigner that he is welcome as a visitor but as nothing more, that seldom spoken yet ever-sensed insistence on “Japan for the Japanese,” are as evident here as in the most crowded portions of the main island.

Surely, too, the public ceremonies I chanced upon were strictly national. It seemed to be dedication day for new buildings, a propitious phase of the moon perhaps; and at least half a dozen unfinished structures scattered about the town, still in their two-by-four skeleton form, were preparing to receive the blessings of the gods. The gangs of carpenters simultaneously left off toward five in the afternoon the work of erecting and took to raising instead, with a plethora of amateur assistance, various symbolic contrivances at the tops of the structures. First to be placed were five big upright banners, respectively red, saffron, white, green, and purple in color. Then there arose a central support bearing a small mirror—unfailing symbol of Shintoism—and a fantastically misshapen doll god in a red bib. A rude platform having been laid across the joist high up under this improvised chapel, and various other minor preparations being concluded, there gingerly ascended the sagging ladder a Shinto—priest, I suppose we must call him, for want of a more exact term. His shaven head, topped by a sort of mitered cap from which undulated what seemed to be the old Tokugawa head-dress, its projecting tail-like afterpiece apparently made of window-screening, his brilliant green robe and purple sash, and variegated minor decorative paraphernalia, gave him an appearance strikingly out of keeping with the generally matter-of-fact Asahigawa style of architecture and costume. It was much as if an actor in a Shakspere rôle had suddenly emerged in full costume among a Broadway crowd.

While the owner of the new structure and a dozen of his assistants or male relatives sat down on their heels along the improvised platform, high above the increasing throng in the street below, the Shinto functionary set up beneath the banners several little conventionalized houses or shrines of baked clay. Of the numerous antics in which he indulged during the succeeding half-hour the most conspicuous was the frenzied shaking of one of those bundles of white paper strips on a handle, like a feather-duster or fly-dislodger, that abound in Shinto shrines, apparently for the purpose of driving off the host of evil spirits which might menace the new building. Finally he sprinkled everything and every one within reach with a sprig of pine branch dipped in a bowl of what may have been mere water, but which more probably was _sake_, the rice wine of Japan. With that his fee seemed to be earned, though he remained long enough to grace the beginning of the last act of the ceremony before speeding away in a rickshaw to the next skeleton structure in need of his administrations.

The now large and jostling throng in the street below was plainly, and quite naturally, most interested in the final formality. From his point of vantage high above, the now broadly smiling proprietor held up a wooden ticket, made a speech which the crowd applauded with increasing evidence of pleasure and approval, then flung the token to the multitude. My subsequent discovery that it was exchangeable for a silk kimono accounted for the applause and the wild scramble for its possession that forthwith took place in the dust-deep street. Various less valuable and more perishable gifts followed, after which came a deluge of presents for every one. All the men on the platform began tearing open veritable bales of bonbons, those heavy white dough-balls inclosing a sort of jam, which take the place of candy in Japan, and took to flinging them in great handfuls in all directions. Fully a quarter of an hour the bombardment lasted, the several hundred townsmen of both sexes, of every age and social standing, engaging in a good-natured but riotous battle for possession of the tidbits. The purpose evidently was to make sure that every person within sight received a present, that he might vouchsafe the new building his blessing or good will, for when I showed no eagerness to engage in the scramble, one of the flingers made it his special task to throw bonbons at me until I had accepted one. The “housing crisis” is as acute in Japan as in the rest of the civilized world. If the country has no grafting contractors and labor-leaders—and rumor says it has—there seems to be at least the appreciable obstacle of dispensing in religious fees and community gifts a sum about equal to the cost of each unboarded building.