THE QUEER THINGS ABOUT JAPAN.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXVII, Issue 7913, 10 June 1902, Page 4

THE QUEER THINGS ABOUT JAPAN.

[Published dv Special Arrangement.]

Br Douglas Sladb.v. Author of ''The Japs at Home," "A Japanese Marriage," etc., etc [Copyright.] VII.—JAPANESE fairs and FESTIVALS.

The Japanese lives for festivals, and the poorer lie is tha more he gets. Not having Sumlavs, he can afford to take holidays.

Ho may take his pleasures badly, but. he catmotbe accused of taking tliem sadly—a Japanese at a festival is as happy as a child at a pantomime or a dog in a poultry vard. His gods do not wish to restrain his pleasures; like the old Greek »<mls, they inter into them. They don't ask him to refrain from doing anything except taking animal life, ana therefore his idea of a holiday is to go to a temple to .piay games and" look at peepshows—anything but worship. He can be practical about his holiday, too. The great holiday of the vear is the New Year festival. Bui iie holds it on the foreigners' New Year, not iiis own : and as the foreigners set so mu-jli stove on Christmas, usually puts up his decorations in time to do for that also, all except the white flags with the red sums on them, which ars crossed over every door on tihe holidays decreed by Government. It did not matter much altering his New Year's Day, but it involved having the chrysanthemum festival in September, when there were no chrysanthemums out, so he keeps that date old style. The fes;ivals which interest foreigners most are the two just mentioned, the Girls' Feast, the Boys' Feast, and the Feast of the Dead. There is no mistaking when any festival is going on, least, of all the Boys' Feast or Feast of Flazs, which is held on the fifth day of the fifth month. On it all houses which contain sons have a huge saily-colorid paper fish floating from tail tlag" posts, and bellying out with the wind. The fish represented are carp, which, according to Japanese ideas, can swim swiftly against, the current and leap over waterfails. They are therefore typical of young men. This is not what we expect of carp, and they look more like sea serpents. If a son has been born during the ,year they have extra large ones. The boys' are given presents of flags and toy armour and toy samurai swords and toy murata rifles, and have sham fights all over the streets. They used to play Genji and Heiki, but .since :h; decadent ideas of Europe have come in

a game in which children wore flower pots on their heads to be broken has gone out. There is nothing done to mark the birth of a girl at the Girls' Festival, or Feast of Dolis, which takes place on the third day of the third month. The birth of a girl is nothing to boast of. If they did anything the parents would so into white, which is the Japanese mourning. But tiey are very rood to their little girls; they will grow up into the best of servant-wives, and are also needed for producing sons. The Japanese really spend more on the Girls' Feast than on tlie Boys'. It takes the form of a gigantic doils' house, which teaches history. Japanese children never break their toys. When a little girl is born she is presented with two editions of Hina-dolis, anything up to a foot nigh, as carefully made as the waxworks in Westminster Abbey, to represent ancestors or historical characters. These the baity plays with till she is old enough to mam - , when she takes them with her to her new home—about the only tiling she does take except her clothes. Old families have splendid collections of these dolls and the proper furniture. Toys scent to be tie right collection for a Japanese. Tlie Japanese don't have much furniture, but their dinner services are very large orders, though tihey have no knives and forks, and don't provide guests with chopsticks. There is one advantage in not using forks ; you are not expected to give services of p'ate as wedding presents; trat it costs | just as much to give sets of lacquer bowls to take soup out of, if they are good ones—there is so much cold in them. There are houses which have dolls dressed up as every important personage in Japanese history, with the proper furnishings for them to go through every domestic and ceremonial function. The Hina are only brought out at the Feast of Girls, and only sold in the week preceding it (like the men in armour in Sicily). "They make splendid history lessons. Queen Victoria had an English edition of Hina. The prettiest festival is the Bon Matsnri, or Feast of the Dead in July. On the first night the tombs of all those who died in the past year are decorated with Japanese lanterns. * On the second night all the tombs of those who have any relations left are decorated, and they have a fireworks display; and it is the proper thing to get drunk. On the third night—or at two o'clock next morning—everyone -who has any dead he cares for

goes with a colored paper lantern to a river or bay and launches a little ship of plaited straw laden -with fruit and money (thsy have very cheap kinds of money in Japan), and Hie lantern lie has been using. They hoist matting sails on the little «flups, and the dend get on board and sail back to odlivion till next July. Their ships take fire on the way; the thousands of little fireships on the winding waters of Nagasaki Bay are reckoned the prettiest sight in Japan. At the Chrysanthemum Festival these intelligent flowers are made to grow into living pictures of historical scenes. The New Year Festival is the great holiday of the year. Every street becomes an arbor, though it is in the midde of the s£vere Japanese winter. Two Japanese flags are crossed over every door, while on each side of it are organ pipes, which are not really organ pipes, but cut bamboos. The chief foliage used are bamboo and fir. On the left hand of the door is the redtrunk ed fir, known as tlhe Mematsu; on the right hand the hlack-trunked fir, kLown as O-matsu. O means honorable; it is hardly necessary to say that this ds the masculine symbol and the other feminine. As fir trees are trees that don't have genders, there is no harm in. calling them -what you like. . Behind each fir rises a bamboo. - Its knots mean old age, which is popular in Japan because your descendants do your work-

The principal'decorations are-a lobster, meaning bent old age; an orange, which means generation; and a piece of charcoal, which means home —the nearest approach to a hearth in Japan. All tliese are hung in a big grass tassel, wherever the ■grass rope, which runs from house .to house the whole length of the-street, crosses a door. The rope is to keep out evil spirits who wouldn't I do half as much harm as the good ricespirit laid in in such goodly store. Most people you meet at the New_ Year are carrying a squashed salmon with a piece of paper tied round its waist in a paper ! string which holds a little gold paper kite.; that kibe means that the thing is a present, | and has not to fee paid for. The Japanese don't give yon a present vou are sure to keep, but one you are sure to be able to give away, for which these dried salmon come in handy. Everybody eats them, and they will keep. The very poor cive each other head-towels. It is much "more disappointing to get a present from the rich. They send a grand gold lacquer box containing something you don't want, and you don't keep the box. Those who are not carrying crushed salmon or taking up the street with giving correct New Year salutations are playing battledore and shuttlecock. On the fourth dav of the fete the firemen do acrobatic feats on their ladders. They are always good acrobats, though they are ineffective as firemen. The motto of Japan, the. smaller the better, does not apply to fires or liars. The Japanese firemen wear cotton dresses and carry paper lanterns; each band of them has a hollow paper banner painted with its crest, which it .takes to the fires. History—Japanese (history—records fires which have burnt a mile or a hundred thousand people. One in particular destroyed the whole Asausa quarter, and it would be a good thing for the morals of Japan if it did it again, for life there is a little more than gay—what with the ladies of the Yoshiwara and the wrestling matches at the Ekkoin Temple, which, had their origin in that same fire. Though most Japanese belong to two religions they could not be called a religious, people. They Jive as Shintoists because their priests don't bother, and die Buddhists because they don't wish to run the risk of having another life. Thereat use of priests they think is to say pravers for the dead. The priests like them to think this, because the prayers have to be paid for. But when that wholesale fir« took place everybody was killed, so that there was no one to pay and pray for the dead. This was an intolerable state of things, and it was determined to raise money for the Temple of the Helpless, Ekkoin, by organising visits from the popular gods—the images are accustomed to it; those of Inari, the Rice-Goddess, at Kyoto, and the Toshogu, the deified founder of the Toku-rawa Shoguns at Nikko, have their regular jaunts every year. It was a great success; such vast crowds came (and paid their Peter's pence) that the wrestlers thought it would be a good occasion for their annual championship matches. Most of the people who go to Ekkoin nowadays have forgotten all about the fire and the gods. They go to see the wrestling, and because the "Japanese love anything in the nature of a fair. Wrestling matches are the football of Japan in the matter of drawing crowds. When a popular favorite wins, the crowd throw their hats to him instead of bouquets. He prefers hats, because he can take them back like lost dogs and claim the reward. Which reminds me that I have to write about fairs. Most Japanese fairs are like German fairs—cheap rubbish for the young and foolish. The Japanese a-fairing always buvs his girl or his baby some trifling present, so the sellers of paper flowers and wind-mills, plaster white mice and dough Cupids, battledore bats and lacquer articles that make you weep that such things should be seen in Japan, flourish. The cheap leather cases, whether to contain tobacco or looking glasses, are really rather faseinatins. Fairs do not live by stalls alone, but by" tea houses and shows, from No-dancing to the woman with the flexible jaw, who can swallow her face up to her eyes, the woman who wipes the floor with her tonguP ; , and the woman who can stretch her neck the length of her arm, and the sea-serpent (of the seal tribe), in booths; while the streets and piazzas in the Temple are full of dragon-dancing troupes, fire-eaters, conjureis,. posturers, charade-eaters, quack medicine sellers, and dentists. At night th-b teahouses and theatres get the patronage, and the discord goes up to heaven of the cracked voices of the geisha girls, the ping-pong of the samisen, and the shrkk of the Japanese fiddle, which sounds as if its strings were still in the guts of the cat. The most distinctive fair in Japan is the tair in the Ginza of Tokio on the last night of the old year. The Japanese must pay their debts" (to Japanese) on the first day of the year or they lose their credit. The poor Tokyoite packs everything in his house in boxes slung on a bamboo, and goes off to the great fair which stretches for a couple of miles in the Ginza with a double avenue of stalls lit by oil flares. Among the more saleable articles are old beer bottles, which fetch three halfpence each, and worn-out sham European shoes, the hall-mark of curiosity shops. I always suspected the genuineness of a shop that was without mementoes of the down-trodden. The Ginza Fair is the paradise of the net-suke-hunter, and it was there that I bought . the little bronze temples and pagodas and bill towers and bridges and daimio lanterns for my toy Japanese garden, the only set I evex saw for sale except in a landscape all complete in a dish a couple of feet square. Almost the only things in <the fair which were not fiftieth hand, and going at what you liked to give for tihem were the gardener's stalls ; they were there for the fortunate to provide themselves with the flowering plants without which, no Japanese house is considered decent on New

Year's Day. The chief of these is the dwarf plum tree, .blossoming at Christmas time in pink, red, purple, or white, whose little gnarled boughs are curled round lite the tendrils of a rambler rose. They are only a foot or two high, and grown in blue and white pots. Their closest rivals at the Ginza fair were the dwarf fir trees, which had no special significance a£ that season, and Japanese lilies growing in water in flat china dishes, which were in full blossom. The fair closed at midnight. We were the only foreigners tlhere —the only people who had come to buy, and were offered many curious wares, including one bos in which I carried round my purchases all night before I discovered that it had he! 3 the ashes of some human being, and must have been lost, stolen, or strayed JErom a graveyard. That is the only curio I 'bought in Japan which I did not send home.