From the theatre we went to the travelling shows.  They charged 2 sen.  We were shown a mermaid, peepshows, a snake, an unhappy bear, three doleful monkeys and some stuffed animals which may or may not have had in life an uncommon number of legs.  There was a barefaced imposture by a young and pretty show-woman who insisted that two marmots in her lap were the offspring of a girl.  “Look,” she cried, “at two sisters, the daughters of one mother.  See their hands!” And she held up their paws.  She rounded off the fraud by feeding the creatures with condensed milk.

As I returned to the inn from these Elizabethan scenes I noticed that I was preceded in the crowd by a spectacled policeman who carried a paper lantern.  Although, as I have explained, the stage plays given in the street were continued all night, only one arrest was made.  The prisoner was a drunkard who proved to be a medicine seller but described himself as a journalist.  I went to see the clean wooden cell where topers are confined until they are sober.  It had a very low door, so that culprits might be compelled to enter and leave humbly on their knees.

We had begun our festival day at six in the morning by attending a celebration at the Shinto shrine.  “Although it is no longer necessary, perhaps, to attend the ceremony in a special kind of geta,” said our landlady, “it would be as well if you observed the old rule not to attend without taking a bath in the early morning."[119]

At the ancient shrine the townspeople whose turn it was to attend the annual function had assembled in ceremonial costumes.  One man wore his hair tied up in the fashion of the old prints.  The plaintive strains of old instruments made the strange appeal of all folk music.  A decorous procession was headed by the piebald pony of the shrine.  Youths and maidens carried aloft tubs of rice, vegetables, fish and sake.  These were received by the chief priest.  He carefully placed a strip of cloth before his mouth and nose[120] and addressed the chief deity, all heads being bowed.  Then the priest placed the offerings in the darkened interior of the shrine.  There was a cheery naturalness in all the proceedings.  A few small children in gay holiday dress ran freely among the worshippers and encountered indulgent smiles.  When an end had been made of offering food and drink the priest within the shrine read a second message to the deity.  Again all heads were bowed.  His thin voice was heard in the morning quiet, interrupted only by a child’s cry, the twittering of birds and the wind rustling the cryptomeria, dark against the blue of the hills.

After the ceremony the food and drink which had been brought by the people were consumed by the priests and the country folk in a large room of the chief priest’s house.  We were given ceremonial sake to which rice had been added and as mementoes little cakes and dried fish.  Not so long ago the presence of a foreigner would have been unwelcome at such a ceremony as we had witnessed:  the fear of “contagion of foreigners” extended even to people from another prefecture.  To-day the amiable priest placed in our hands for a few moments a small Buddha supposed to be six centuries old.