seen in
forms once vastly more prevalent in Japan than now. Indeed, so far
improved off the face of the earth are they, that some are already
matters of memory or archaeology, and their very existence even in former
days is nearly or wholly incredible to the generation born since
1868--when Old Japan began to vanish in dissolving views and New Japan
to emerge. What the author has seen with his own eyes, would amaze many
Japanese born since 1868 and the readers of the rhapsodies of tourists
who study Japan from the _jin-riki-sha_. Phases of tree and serpent
worship are still quite common, and will be probably for generations to
come; but the phallic shrines and emblems abolished by the government in
1872 have been so far invisible to most living travellers and natives,
that their once general existence and use are now scarcely suspected.
Even profound scholars of the Japanese language and literature whose
work dates from after the year 1872 have scarcely suspected the
universality of phallic worship. Yet what we could say of this cult and
its emblems, especially in treating of Shint[=o], the special ethnic
faith of Japan, would be from sight of our own eyes besides the
testimony of many witnesses.[20]

The cultus has been known in the Japanese archipelago from Riu Kin to
Yezo. Despite official edicts of abolition it is still secretly
practised by the "heathen," the _inaka_ of Japan. "Government law lasts
three days," is an ancient proverb in Nippon. Sharp eyes have, within
three months of the writing of this line, unearthed a phallic shrine
within a stone's-throw of Shint[=o]'s most sacred temples at Ise.
Formerly, however, these implements of worship were seen numerously--in
the cornucopia distributed in the temples, in the _matsuris_ or
religious processions and in representation by various plastic
material--and all this until 1872, to an extent that is absolutely
incredible to all except the eye-witnesses, some of whose written
testimonies we possess. What seems to our mind shocking and revolting
was once a part of our own ancestors' faith, and until very recently was
the perfectly natural and innocent creed of many millions of Japanese
and is yet the same for tens of thousands of them.

We may easily see why and how that which to us is a degrading cult was
not only closely allied to Shint[=o], but directly fostered by and
properly a part of it, as soon as we read the account of the creation of
the world, an contai