about a thousand steps belonging to the shrine.  A thousand granite steps may be tiring after a hot day’s travel in a kuruma.  All the way up to the shrine there were granite pillars almost brand new, first short ones, then taller, then taller still, and after these a few which topped the tallest.  They were conspicuously inscribed with the names of donors to the shrine.  A small pillar was priced at 10 yen.  What the big, bigger and biggest cost I do not know.  I turned from the pillars to the stone lanterns.  “They burn cedar wood, I believe,” said my companion.  But soon afterwards I saw a man working at them with a length of electric-light wire.

The great shrine was impressive in the twilight.  There was a platform near, and from it we looked down from the tree-covered heights through the growing darkness.  Where the lights of the town twinkled there was a subsidiary shrine.  A bare-headed, kimono-clad sailor stepped forward near us and bowed his head to some semblance of deity down there.  Various fishermen had brought the anchors of their ships and the oars of their boats to show forth their thankfulness for safety at sea.  In the murkiness I was just able to pick out the outlines of a bronze horse which stands at the shrine, “as a sort of scape-goat,” my companion explained.  “It is probably Buddhist,” he said; “but you can never be sure; these priests embellish the history of their temples so.”

It was at the inn in the evening that someone told me that in the town which is dependent on the shrine there were “a hundred prostitutes, thirty geisha and some waitresses.”  Late at night I had a visit from a man in a position of great responsibility in the prefecture.  He was at a loss to know what could be done for morality.  “Religion is not powerful,” he said, “the schools do not reach grown-up people, the young men’s societies are weak, many sects and new moralities are attacking our people, and there are many cheap books of a low class.”

Next day I laid this view before a group of landlords.  They did not reply for a little and my skilful interpreter said, “they are thinking deeply.”  At length one of them delivered himself to this effect:  “Landowners hereabouts are mostly of a base sort.  They always consider things from a material and personal point of view.  But if they are attacked and made to act more for the public good it may have an effect on rural conditions which are now low.”

I enquired about the new sects of Buddhism and Shintoism, for there had been pointed out to me in some villages “houses of new religions.”  “New religions in many varieties are coming into the villages,” I was told, “and extravagant though they may be are influencing people.  The adherents seem to be moral and modest, and they pay their taxes promptly.  There is a so-called Shinto sect which was started twenty years ago by an ignorant woman.  It has believers in every part of Japan.  It is rather communistic."[176] None of the landlords who talked with me believed in the possibility of a “revival of Buddhism.”  One of them noted that “people educated in the early part of Meiji are most materialistic.  It is a sorrowful circumstance that the officials ask only materialistic questions of the villagers.”