Some of the other songs may be described, I suppose, as obscene, if obscene be, as the dictionary says, “something which delicacy, purity and decency forbid to be exposed”; but “delicacy, purity and decency” must be considered in relation to climate, work and social usage.  What one feels about some critics of Bon songs and dances is that they need a course of The Golden Bough.  Such an illustration as Bon songs furnish of the moral and mental conditions from which country folk must raise themselves is of value if rural sociology is a real thing.  There is far too much theorising about the countryman and the countrywoman, far too much idealising of them and far too much rating of them as clods.  If country people of all lands are free-spoken let us be neither hypercritical nor hypocritical.  A big gap seems to yawn between the paddy-field peasant in his breech clout and the immaculate clubman, but what difference is there between the savour of the average Bon song and of many a smoking-room jest which is not to the credit of the peasant?  At an inn in Naganoken a Japanese artist on holiday showed me his sketch book.  Among his drawings was a representation of a shrine festival which he had witnessed in a remote village.  A festival car was being pushed by a knot of youths and by about an equal number of young women and all of them were nude.  But no enlightened person believes that either decency or morals depends on clothing, or would expect to find more essential indecency and immorality in that village than in a modern city.  What one would expect to find would be marriages between physically well-developed men and women.

How the race moves on is shown in the famous tale of a saintly Zen priest which I first heard in that little hill inn but was afterwards to see in dramatic form on the stage of a Tokyo theatre.  An unmarried girl in the village in which the priest’s temple was situated was about to have a child.  She would not confess to her angry father the name of her lover.  At last she attributed her condition to the greatly honoured priest.  Her father was astonished but he was also glad that his daughter was in the favour of so eminent a man.  So he went to the priest and said that he brought him good tidings:  the girl whom he had deigned to notice was about to have a child.  The father went on to express at length his sense of obligation to the priest for the honour done to his family.  All the priest said in reply was, So desuka? (Is that so?) Soon after the birth of the child the girl besought her father to marry her to a certain young farmer.  The father, proud of the association with the priest, refused.  Finally the girl told her parent that it was not the priest but the young farmer who was the father of her child.  The parent was aghast and chagrined as he recalled the terms in which he had addressed the saintly man.  He betook himself at once to the temple and expressed in many words his feelings of shame and deep contrition.  The priest heard him out, but all he said was, So desuka?