When we got out to sea again the newest Japanese battleship doing her trials was pointed out to me, but I was more interested in a large fishing boat running before the wind.  A sturdy woman was at the helm and her naked young family was sprawling about the craft.

Someone spoke of villagers of the mainland “failing to realise that they now possessed the privilege of self-government.”  I was reminded of the pleasant way of the headman of a village assembly in the Loochoos, Japan’s oldest outlying possession.  He assembles or used to assemble his colleagues in his courtyard and appear there with a draft of proposed legislation.  They bowed and departed and the Bill had become an Act.

Although we were already within the territorial waters of Hiroshima prefecture, we determined not to make the mainland at once but to stay the night at the famous island which is called both Miyajima (shrine island) and Itsukushima (taboo island), and is considered to be one of the three most noteworthy sights in Japan.  Photographs and drawings of the shrine with its red colonnades on piles by the shore and its big red torii standing in the sea are as familiar as representations of Fuji.  It used to be the custom to prevent as far as possible births and deaths occurring on the island.  Even now, funerals, dogs and kuruma are prohibited.  The iron lanterns of the shrine and galleries and a hundred more in the pine tree-studded approaches are undoubtedly “a most magnificent spectacle at full tide on a moonless night”; but what of the subservience to the profitable foreign tourist seen in this shrine notice?—­

Zori (straw sandals), geta (wooden pattens) and all footgear except shoes and boots are forbidden.

One is attracted by the idea of listening to music and watching dances which came from afar in the seventh or eighth centuries, but the business-like tariff,

  Ordinary music, 12 sen to 5 yen,
  Special music and dance, 10 yen and upwards,
  Lighting all lanterns, 9 yen,

is calculated to take one out of the atmosphere of Hearn’s dreams.  The deities of the shrine get along as best they can with the raucous sirens of the tourist steamers, the din of the motor boats and the boom of the big guns which are hidden at the back of the island and make of Miyajima and its vicinity “a strategic zone” in which photography, sketching or the too assiduous use of a notebook is forbidden.  Alas, I had myself arrived in a steamer which blew its siren loudly, and in the morning I crossed from the holy isle to the mainland in a motor launch.

The name of Yamaguchi prefecture, which is at the extreme end of the mainland and has the sea to the south, the east and the north, is not so familiar as the name of its port, Shimoneseki.  It was mentioned to me that the farmers of Yamaguchi worked a smaller number of days than in Ehime, possibly only a hundred in the year.  The comment of my companion, who had visited a great deal of rural Japan, was that 150 full days’ work was the average for the whole country.[185]