The Buddhist priest told me that every year 150 or 160 men and women made a pilgrimage to a famous shrine some few miles off.  The custom was for every house to be represented in the pilgrimage.  Half a dozen people in the year might go on personal pilgrimages and fifty or so might visit a little shrine on a neighbouring mountain.

FOOTNOTES: 

[195] The village consists of about 270 houses.  It is joined administratively to another village, about two miles off, in order to form a mura (commune).  The village I am about to describe is an oaza (large hamlet), which is made up in its turn of two aza (small hamlets).  These aza are themselves divided into six kumi (companies), which are again sub-divided, in the case of the largest, into four.

[196] See Appendix LIV.

[197] The horses wear basket-work muzzles to prevent them nibbling the crops.  By way of compensation for these encumbrances they have head tassels and belly cloths to keep off the flies.

CHAPTER XXXI

“BON” SEASON SCENES

(NAGANO)

As moderns we have no direct affinity; as individuals we have a capacity for personal sympathy.—­MATTHEW ARNOLD

I had the good fortune to be in the village during the Bon season.  The idea is that the spirits which are visiting their old homes remain between the 11th and 14th of August.  The 11th is called mukae bon and the 14th okuri bon. (Mukae means going to meet; okuri to see off.) On the 11th the villagers burned a piece of flax plant in front of their houses.  That night the priest said a special prayer in the temple and used the cymbals in addition to the ordinary gong and drum.  The prayer seemed peculiarly sad.  Before the shrines in their houses the villagers placed offerings.  One was a horse made out of a cucumber, the legs being bits of flax twig and the tail and mane the hair-like substance from maize cobs.  There were also offerings of real and artificial flowers and of grapes.  In one house I visited I saw geta, waraji, kimonos, pumpkins, caramels and pencils.  Strings of buck-wheat macaroni were laid over twigs of flax set in a vase.  The ihai (name-plates of the dead) seemed to be displayed more prominently than usual. (They are kept in a kind of small oratory called ihaido, and after a time several names are collected on a single plate.) Mochi (rice-flour dumpling) is eaten at this time.  On the 12th and 14th the priest called at each house for two or three minutes.