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Lafcadio Hearn - Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan, 1
I wonder if I can buy a picture of Koshin. In most Japanese temples little pictures of the tutelar deity are
sold to pilgrims, cheap prints on thin paper. But the temple guardian here tells me, with a gesture of
despair, that there are no pictures of Koshin for sale; there is only an old kakemono on which the god is
represented. If I would like to see it he will go home and get it for me. I beg him to do me the favour; and
he hurries into the street.
While awaiting his return, I continue to examine the queer old statues, with a feeling of mingled
melancholy and pleasure. To have studied and loved an ancient faith only through the labours of
palaeographers and archaeologists, and as a something astronomically remote from one's own existence,
and then suddenly in after years to find the same faith a part of one's human environment, - to feel that its
mythology, though senescent, is alive all around you - is almost to realise the dream of the Romantics, to
have the sensation of returning through twenty centuries into the life of a happier world. For these quaint
Gods of Roads and Gods. of Earth are really living still, though so worn and mossed and feebly
worshipped. In this brief moment, at least, I am really in the Elder World - perhaps just at that epoch of it
when the primal faith is growing a little old-fashioned, crumbling slowly before the corrosive influence
of a new philosophy; and I know myself a pagan still, loving these simple old gods, these gods of a
people's childhood.
And they need some human love, these naive, innocent, ugly gods. The beautiful divinities will live for
ever by that sweetness of womanhood idealised in the Buddhist art of them: eternal are Kwannon and
Benten; they need no help of man; they will compel reverence when the great temples shall all have
become voiceless and priestless as this shrine of Koshin is. But these kind, queer, artless, mouldering
gods, who have given ease to so many troubled minds, who have gladdened so many simple hearts, who
have heard so many innocent prayers - how gladly would I prolong their beneficent lives in spite of the
so-called 'laws of progress' and the irrefutable philosophy of evolution!
The guardian returns, bringing with him a kakemono, very small, very dusty, and so yellow-stained by
time that it might be a thousand years old. But I am disappointed as I unroll it; there is only a very
common print of the god within - all outline. And while I am looking at it, I become for the first time
conscious that a crowd has gathered about me, - tanned kindly-faced labourers from the fields, and
mothers with their babies on their backs, and school children, and jinricksha men, all wondering that a
stranger should be thus interested in their gods. And although the pressure about me is very, very gentle,
like a pressure of tepid water for gentleness, I feel a little embarrassed. I give back the old kakemono to
the guardian, make my offering to the god, and take my leave of Koshin and his good servant.
All the kind oblique eyes follow me as I go. And something like a feeling of remorse seizes me at thus
abruptly abandoning the void, dusty, crumbling temple, with its mirrorless altar and its colourless
lanterns, and the decaying sculptures of its neglected court, and its kindly guardian whom I see still
watching my retreating steps, with the yellow kakemono in his hand. The whistle of a locomotive warns
me that I shall just have time to catch the train. For Western civilisation has invaded all this primitive
peace, with its webs of steel, with its ways of iron. This is not of thy roads, O Koshin! - the old gods are
dying along its ash-strewn verge!
Chapter Five At the Market of the Dead
1
IT is just past five o'clock in the afternoon. Through the open door of my little study the rising breeze of
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