e displayed more
prominently than usual. (They are kept in a kind of small oratory
called _ihaido_, and after a time several names are collected on a
single plate.) _Mochi_ (rice-flour dumpling) is eaten at this time. On
the 12th and 14th the priest called at each house for two or three
minutes.

I asked if the villagers really believed that their dead returned at
the _Bon_ season. The answer was, "Only the old men and young children
believe that the dead actually come, but the young men and young
women, when they see the burning of the flax-plant and the other
things that are done, think of the dead; they remember them solemnly
at this time." And I think it was so. The stranger to a Japanese
house, in which there is not only a Shinto shelf but a Buddhist
shrine--where the name plates of the dead for several generations are
treasured--cannot but feel that, when all allowances are made for the
dulling influences of use and wont, the plan is a means of taking the
minds of the household beyond the daily round. The fact that there is
a certain familiarity with the things of the shrine and of the Shinto
shelf, just as there is a certain freedom at the public shrines and in
the temple, does not destroy the impression. When a man has taken me
to his little graveyard I have been struck by the lack of that
lugubriousness which Western people commonly associate with what is
sacred. The Japanese conception of reverence is somewhat different
from our own. As to sorrow, the idea is, as is well known, that it is
the height of bad manners to trouble strangers with a display of what
in many cases is largely a selfish grief. A manservant smiled when he
told me of his only son's death. On my offering sympathy the tears ran
down his face.

[Illustration: FARMER'S WIFE]

When the _Bon_ season ended on the fourteenth all the flowers and
decorations of the domestic shrines were taken early in the morning to
the bridge over the diminished river and flung down. The idea is
perhaps that they are carried away to the sea. (As a matter of fact
there was so little water that almost everything flung in from the
bridge remained in sight for weeks until there was a storm.) When the
flowers and decorations had been cast from the bridge the people went
off to worship at the graves. Many coloured streamers of paper,
written on by the priest, were flying there.

The _Bon_ dances took place five nights running in the open space
between the Shinto shr