Glimpses of Japan and Formosa

But things are progressing, if slowly, in the general direction of official desires. Asahigawa, for example, north of the geographical center of the island, in what was at the beginning of the present century an unpeopled wilderness, is already a "whale of a town," spreading for miles across the floor of a splendid valley, with a great row of snow-clads all along its far eastern horizon. There is scarcely a typical Japanese building in it, only a Shinto shrine or two, hardly a _shoji_ or a tiled roof. Yet the spirit of Japan has in no way been lost in the transplanting. That courteous yet subtle something which tells the foreigner that he is welcome as a visitor but as nothing more, that seldom spoken yet ever-sensed insistence on "Japan for the Japanese," are as evident here as in the most crowded portions of the main island.

Surely, too, the public ceremonies I chanced upon were strictly national. It seemed to be dedication day for new buildings, a propitious phase of the moon perhaps; and at least half a dozen unfinished structures scattered about the town, still in their two-by-four skeleton form, were preparing to receive the blessings of the gods. The gangs of carpenters simultaneously left off toward five in the afternoon the work of erecting and took to raising instead, with a plethora of amateur assistance, various symbolic contrivances at the tops of the structures. First to be placed were five big upright banners, respectively red, saffron, white, green, and purple in color. Then there arose a central support bearing a small mirror-unfailing symbol of Shintoism-and a fantastically misshapen doll god in a red bib. A rude platform having been laid across the joist high up under this improvised chapel, and various other minor preparations being concluded, there gingerly ascended the sagging ladder a Shinto-priest, I suppose we must call him, for want of a more exact term. His shaven head, topped by a sort of mitered cap from which undulated what seemed to be the old Tokugawa head-dress, its projecting tail-like afterpiece apparently made of window-screening, his brilliant green robe and purple sash, and variegated minor decorative paraphernalia, gave him an appearance strikingly out of keeping with the generally matter-of-fact Asahigawa style of architecture and costume. It was much as if an actor in a Shakspere rôle had suddenly emerged in full costume among a Broadway crowd.