Lafcadio Hearn

1 The names Dozen or Tozen, and Dogo or Toga, signify 'the Before-Islands' and 'the Behind-Islands.'

2 'Dokoe, dokoel' 'This is only a woman's baby' (a very small package). 'Dokoe, dokoel' 'This is the daddy, this is the daddy' (a big package). 'Dokoe, dokoel' ''Tis very small, very small!' 'Dokoe, dokoel' 'This is for Matsue, this is for Matsue!' 'Dokoe, dokoel' 'This is for Koetsumo of Yonago,' etc.

3 These words seem to have no more meaning than our 'yo-heaveho.' Yan- yui is a cry used by all Izumo and Hoki sailors.

1 Afterwards I found that the old man had expressed to me only one popular form of a belief which would require a large book to fully explain - a belief founded upon Chinese astrology, but possibly modified by Buddhist and by Shinto ideas. This notion of compound Souls cannot be explained at all without a prior knowledge of the astrological relation between the Chinese Zodiacal Signs and the Ten Celestial Stems. Some understanding of these may be obtained from the curious article 'Time,' in Professor Chamberlain's admirable little book, Things Japanese.

1 In other parts of Japan I have heard the Yuki-Onna described as a very beautiful phantom who lures young men to lonesome places for the purpose of sucking their blood.

2 In Izumo the Dai-Kan, or Period of Greatest Cold, falls in February.

3 'It is excellent: I pray you give me a little more.'

4 Kwashi: Japanese confectionery

1 The reader will find it well worth his while to consult the chapter entitled 'Domestic Service,' in Miss Bacon's Japanese Girls and Women, for an interesting and just presentation of the practical side of the subject, as relating to servants of both sexes. The poetical side, however, is not treated of - perhaps because intimately connected with religious beliefs which one writing from the Christian standpoint could not be expected to consider sympathetically.

1 Fourteenth of August.

2 In the pretty little seaside hotel Inaba-ya, where I lived during my stay in Kitzuki, the kind old hostess begged her guests with almost tearful earnestness not to leave the house during the Minige.

3 There are ten rin to one sen, and ten mon to one rin, on one hundred to one sen. The majority of the cheap toys sold at the matsuri cost from two to nine rin. The rin is a circular copper coin with a square hole in the middle for stringing purposes.

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KITZUKI, July 20, 1891.

AKIRA is no longer with me. He has gone to Kyoto, the holy Buddhist city, to edit a Buddhist magazine; and I already feel without him like one who has lost his way - despite his reiterated assurances that he could never be of much service to me in Izumo, as he knew nothing about Shinto.

1 This deity is seldom called by his full name, which has been shortened by common usage from Susano-o-no-mikoto.

2 A kichinyado is an inn at which the traveller is charged only the price of the wood used for fuel in cooking his rice.

3 The thick fine straw mats, fitted upon the floor of every Japanese room, are always six feet long by three feet broad. The largest room in the ordinary middle-class house is a room of eight mats. A room of one hundred mats is something worth seeing.

KITZUKI, August 10, 1891.

1 Yama-no-mono ('mountain-folk,' - so called from their settlement on the hills above Tokoji), - a pariah-class whose special calling is the washing of the dead and the making of graves. 2 Joro: a courtesan. 3 Illicium religiosum 4 Literally: 'without shadow' or 'shadowless.' 5 Umi-yama-no-on. 6 Kusaba-no-kage 7 Or 'him.' This is a free rendering. The word 'nushi' simply refers to the owner of the house.

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