THE QUEER THING ABOUT JAPAN.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 7436, 24 June 1902, Page 1

THE QUEER THING ABOUT JAPAN.

(By DOUGLAS SLADEN.) Author of " The Japs at Home," " A Japanese Marriage," etc., etc. No VII.

JAPANESE FAIRS AND FESTIVALS.

[All Rights Reserved.] The Japanese lives for festivals, and the poorer he is, the more he gets. Not having Sundays, he can afford to take, holidays. He may take his pleasures badly, but he cannot- be accused of taking them sadly— v Japanese at a festival is as happy r as a child at a pantomime, or a dog in a poultry yard. His gods do not Avish to restrain his pleasure ; like the old Greek gods, they enter into thenu They don't ask him to refrain from doing anything except taking animal life, and therefore his idea 'of a holiday is to go to a temple to play games £ur.d look at peep-shows — anything but worship. He can be practical [ about his holidays, too. The great holiday of the^-ear is the New Year festival. But he holds it on the foreigners' New Year, not his own ; and as the foreigners set so much store on Christmas, usually puts up his decorations in time to do for that also, all except the white flags with the red suns on them, which are crossed over every door on the' holidays decreed by Gov.ernm.ent. 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 festivals which -interest foreigners most are the two just mentioned, the Girls' j 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 Flags, which is held on , the fifth day of the fifth month. On it all houses which contain sons have a huge gaily-coloured paper fish floating from tail flag 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 waterfalls. They are, therefore, typical of young men. This is not what we expect of carp, and they look more like sea-eerpentS; 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 the decadent ideas of Europe have come in a game in which children wore flower-pots on, iheir heads to be broken has gone out. j There is nothing done to mark the birth of a girl at the Girls' Festival, or Feast of | Dolls, 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 go into white, which is the Japanese mourning. .But they are very good 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 the Boys'.- It takes the form of a gigantic doHs'-housej .which! teaches historyJapanese children never break their toy©. When- a little girl is born she is presented! with two editions of Hina-dolls, anything up to, a foot high, its carefully madte as the waxworks in Westminster Abbey, to represent ancestors or historical characters. These the baby plays with till she is old enoughs to marry, when she takes them with, hen to 'her new home— about the only thing she does take except her clothes. Old families have splendid collections of tihese. dolls and the proper*furaiture. Toys seem to be tibe) right collection' for a Japanese. The Japanese don't have much furniture^: but their dinner services are very large orders, libough •they bare no knives and forks, 'abd don't provide guests with chopsticks. There is one advantage in not using forks j you are not expected to give services of piate as wedding presents ; but it costs just as much to give set® of lacquer bowls to take soup out of, if they are good) onesthere is so much gold in them. Therefore houses which have dolls dressed up as every important personage in Japanese his.tory> with the proper furnishings for J tibeml to go through, every domestic and ceremo!nia! function. TneHina are only brought) out at the Feast of Girls, and only soldi in the week preceding it (like tfhe men. 1 in, ! aranour in Sicily). They make splendid, history lessons. Queen Victoria ihadi ani English edition, of Hina>. The prettiest festival is the Boa Mat^ori, or Feast of the Dead, in Jufly. > : I ,On the first night the tombs- of all those who died in the past year are diecoratedl with Japanese lanterns; On the second nigiat all the tombs of those who have any i relations left axe, decorated, and tihey !have a fireworks display ; and it is the proper' thin-g 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 coloured' paper lanteffin! to a river or bay and launches a little ship of plaited straw lad&n with fruit and money (they have very olieap kinds of money im Japan), and the lantern 'he has been, using. They hoist matting sails on the, little ships, and the dead get on board and sail back -to oblivion till next July. Their ships take fire on the way ; the thousands of little fireships on tihe winding waters of Nagasaki Bay are reckoned the prettiest eight in Japan. At the Obaysaniihemum Festival. thtese 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. arbour, though it is in. the middle of th« severe Japanese winter. Two Japanese! flaigs 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 tihe left hand of the door is th» redtnrnked fir, known as the Mematsu; on] the right band the 'black-trunked fir, known as 0-anatsu. 0 means honourable ; it is hardly necessary to say tih'at this is the masculine symbol and the other feminine. : As fir trees are trees that don't have gen- ! ders, there is no harm in calling them, what j you like. Behind eaoh 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 dharooail, which means horne — the nearest approach to a hearth in Japan. All these are hung in a big grass tassel, wherever the grass rope, which runs from house to house the whole ler.gth of the street, crosses a door. The rope is to keep out evil spirits who wouldn't do half as much harm as the good rice-

spirit 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 kite means that the thing is a present, and has not to be paid for. The Japanese don't give you a present you 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 giye «ach 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 shuttkeoek. On the fourth day of the fete the firemen 'do acrobiitic feats on their ladders. ' They are always good acrobats, though they are ineffective Is 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- liistory— records fifes which have burnt a mile or a hundred thousand people. One in particular destroyed the whole Asausa quairter, 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 live aa Shintoists, because their priests don't bother, and. die 'Buddhists because they don't wish to run the risk of having another life. The real use of,, priests, they think, is to say prayers for the dead. The priests like them to think this, because the prayers have to b& paid i or. But when that wholesale fire took place everybody was kilkd, 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 Tokugawa 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 aibout 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 favourite 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 remiiids me that I have to write about fairs. Moat Japanese fairs are like German fairs — cheap rubbish for the young and foolish. The Japanese a-fairing always buys his girl or : his baby some trifling present, so the sellers of paper< flowers and windmills, 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 fascinating. Fairs do not live' by stalls alone, but 'by tea-houses and shows, from 'Nodancing to the woman -with x the flexible jaw, wiho can swallow her face up to the eyes, the woman who wipes the floor -with ber tongue, 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, conjurers, posturers, charadeactors, qujack medicine sellers and dentists. At niglht'the tea-houses and theatres get the patronage, and the discord goes tip to heaven of the cracked voices of the geisha gills, the ping-pong of the samisen, and the shriek 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 fair in the Ginza of Tokio on the last night of the old year. The Japanese must .pay tfheir debts (to Japanese) on the first day of the year or they lose their credit. The poor Tokyoite packs everything in this house m boxes slung on a bamboo, and goes off to the great fair which stretches for ' a, oo\iple of miles in the Oinza with a double avenue of stalls lib 'by oil flares. Among the more saleable articles are old 'beer bottles, -which fetch tJuree-Jialf-pence 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 T?air is the paradise of the net-suke-hunter, and it was there that I bought the little 'bronze temples and .padogas and bell towers and bridges and daimio lanterns for my toy Japanese garden, the only set I ever saw f oil sale except in a landscape all complete in «, dish a couple of feet square. Almost the only things in the fair which were not fiftieth (band, and going at what you liked to give for them were the gardener's stalls ; they -were there for the fortunate to provide themselves with

the flowering- plants without which r.c Japanese house is considered decent on New Year's Day. The chief of these is the dwarf plum tree, blossoming at Christmastime in pink, red. purple or white, whose little gnarled boughs arc curled round like the tendrils of <a rambler rcsc. They are only a foot or two hig r h, and grown in blue and white pots. Their closest riva;s at the Ginza fair were the dwarf fir trees, which had no special significance at 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 there — the only people who had come to buy—and were offered many curious wares, including one box in which I carried round my purchases all night before I discovered that it had held the ashes oi some human Demg. and must Jiave been lost, stolen, or strayed from a graveyard. That is the only cuko I bought in 'Japan which I did not send home.