The temple-yard was an immense fancy fair.  The temple pigeons wheeled disconsolately in the air or perched upon the roofs, unable to find one square foot of the familiar flagstones, where they were used to strut and peck.  Stalls lined the stone pathways and choked the spaces between the buildings.  Merchants were peddling objects of piety, sacred images, charms and rosaries; and there were flowers for the women’s hair, and toys for the children, and cakes and biscuits, biiru (beer) and ramune (lemonade) and a distressing sickly drink called “champagne cider” and all manner of vanities.  In one corner of the square a theatre was in full swing, the actors making up in public on a balcony above the crowd, so as to whet their curiosity and attract their custom.  Beyond was a cinematograph, advertised by lurid paintings of murders and apparitions; and farther on there was a circus with a mangy zoo.

The crowd was astonishingly mixed.  There were prosperous merchants of Tokyo with their wives, children, servants and apprentices.  There were students with their blue and white spotted cloaks, their kepis with the school badge, and their ungainly stride.  There were modern young men in y[=o]fuku (European dress), with panama hats, swagger canes and side-spring shoes, supercilious in attitude and proud of their unbelief.  There were troops of variegated children, dragging at their elders’ hands or kimonos, or getting lost among the legs of the multitude like little leaves in an eddy.  There were excursion parties from the country, with their kimonos caught up to the knees, and with baked earthen faces stupidly staring, sporting each a red flower or a coloured towel for identification purposes.  There were labourers in tight trousers and tabard jackets, inscribed with the name and profession of their employer.  There were geisha girls on their best behaviour, in charge of a professional auntie, and recognizable only by the smart cut of their cloaks and the deep space between the collar and the nape of the neck, where the black chignon lay.

Close to the tomb of Nichiren stood a Japanese Salvationist, a zealous pimply young man, wearing the red and blue uniform of General Booth with kaiseigun (World-saving Army) in Japanese letters round his staff cap.  He stood in front of a screen, on which the first verse of “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” was written in a Japanese translation.  An assistant officiated at a wheezy harmonium.  The tune was vaguely akin to its Western prototype; and the two evangelists were trying to induce a tolerant but uninterested crowd to join in the chorus.

Everywhere beggars were crawling over the compound in various states of filth.  Some, however, were so ghastly that they were excluded from the temple enclosure.  They had lined up among the trunks of the cryptomeria trees, among the little grey tombs with their fading inscriptions and the moss-covered statues of kindly Buddhas.