Just As The Track Touches The Bay There Is A
Road-Post, With A Prayer-Wheel In It, And By
The shore an upright
stone of very large size, inscribed with Sanskrit characters, near
to a stone staircase and a
Gateway in a massive stone-faced
embankment, which looked much out of keeping with the general
wildness of the place. On a rocky promontory in a wooded cove
there is a large, rambling house, greatly out of repair, inhabited
by a Japanese man and his son, who are placed there to look after
Government interests, exiles among 500 Ainos. From among the
number of rat-haunted, rambling rooms which had once been handsome,
I chose one opening on a yard or garden with some distorted yews in
it, but found that the great gateway and the amado had no bolts,
and that anything might be appropriated by any one with dishonest
intentions; but the house-master and his son, who have lived for
ten years among the Ainos, and speak their language, say that
nothing is ever taken, and that the Ainos are thoroughly honest and
harmless. Without this assurance I should have been distrustful of
the number of wide-mouthed youths who hung about, in the
listlessness and vacuity of savagery, if not of the bearded men who
sat or stood about the gateway with children in their arms.
Usu is a dream of beauty and peace. There is not much difference
between the height of high and low water on this coast, and the
lake-like illusion would have been perfect had it not been that the
rocks were tinged with gold for a foot or so above the sea by a
delicate species of fucus. In the exquisite inlet where I spent
the night, trees and trailers drooped into the water and were
mirrored in it, their green, heavy shadows lying sharp against the
sunset gold and pink of the rest of the bay; log canoes, with
planks laced upon their gunwales to heighten them, were drawn upon
a tiny beach of golden sand, and in the shadiest cove, moored to a
tree, an antique and much-carved junk was "floating double."
Wooded, rocky knolls, with Aino huts, the vermilion peaks of the
volcano of Usu-taki redder than ever in the sinking sun, a few
Ainos mending their nets, a few more spreading edible seaweed out
to dry, a single canoe breaking the golden mirror of the cove by
its noiseless motion, a few Aino loungers, with their "mild-eyed,
melancholy" faces and quiet ways suiting the quiet evening scene,
the unearthly sweetness of a temple bell - this was all, and yet it
was the loveliest picture I have seen in Japan.
In spite of Ito's remonstrances and his protestations that an
exceptionally good supper would be spoiled, I left my rat-haunted
room, with its tarnished gilding and precarious fusuma, to get the
last of the pink and lemon-coloured glory, going up the staircase
in the stone-faced embankment, and up a broad, well-paved avenue,
to a large temple, within whose open door I sat for some time
absolutely alone, and in a wonderful stillness; for the sweet-toned
bell which vainly chimes for vespers amidst this bear-worshipping
population had ceased. This temple was the first symptom of
Japanese religion that I remember to have seen since leaving
Hakodate, and worshippers have long since ebbed away from its shady
and moss-grown courts. Yet it stands there to protest for the
teaching of the great Hindu; and generations of Aino heathen pass
away one after another; and still its bronze bell tolls, and its
altar lamps are lit, and incense burns for ever before Buddha. The
characters on the great bell of this temple are said to be the same
lines which are often graven on temple bells, and to possess the
dignity of twenty-four centuries:
"All things are transient;
They being born must die,
And being born are dead;
And being dead are glad
To be at rest."
The temple is very handsome, the baldachino is superb, and the
bronzes and brasses on the altar are specially fine. A broad ray
of sunlight streamed in, crossed the matted floor, and fell full
upon the figure of Sakya-muni in his golden shrine; and just at
that moment a shaven priest, in silk-brocaded vestments of faded
green, silently passed down the stream of light, and lit the
candles on the altar, and fresh incense filled the temple with a
drowsy fragrance. It was a most impressive picture. His curiosity
evidently shortened his devotions, and he came and asked me where I
had been and where I was going, to which, of course, I replied in
excellent Japanese, and then stuck fast.
Along the paved avenue, besides the usual stone trough for holy
water, there are on one side the thousand-armed Kwan-non, a very
fine relief, and on the other a Buddha, throned on the eternal
lotus blossom, with an iron staff, much resembling a crozier, in
his hand, and that eternal apathy on his face which is the highest
hope of those who hope at all. I went through a wood, where there
are some mournful groups of graves on the hillside, and from the
temple came the sweet sound of the great bronze bell and the beat
of the big drum, and then, more faintly, the sound of the little
bell and drum, with which the priest accompanies his ceaseless
repetition of a phrase in the dead tongue of a distant land. There
is an infinite pathos about the lonely temple in its splendour, the
absence of even possible worshippers, and the large population of
Ainos, sunk in yet deeper superstitions than those which go to make
up popular Buddhism. I sat on a rock by the bay till the last pink
glow faded from Usu-taki and the last lemon stain from the still
water; and a beautiful crescent, which hung over the wooded hill,
had set, and the heavens blazed with stars:
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