The civilized Japanese, having passed far beyond the Aino’s stage of religion, still show their fetichistic instincts in the veneration accorded to priestly inventions for raising revenue.[19] This instinct lingers in the faith accorded to medicine in the form of decoction, pill, bolus or poultice made from the sacred writing and piously swallowed; in the reverence paid to the idol for its own sake, and in the charm or amulet worn by the soldier in his cap or by the gentleman in his pill-box, tobacco-pouch or purse.

As the will of the worshipper who selects the fetich makes it what it is, so also, by the exercise of that will he imagines he can in a certain measure be the equal or superior of his god.  Like the Italian peasant who beats or scolds his bambino when his prayers are not answered or his wishes gratified, so the fetich is punished or not allowed to know what is going on, by being covered up or hidden away.  Instances of such rough handling of their fetiches by the people are far from unknown in the Land of Great Peace.  At such childishness we may wonder and imagine that fetich-worship is the very antipodes of religion; and yet it requires but little study of the lower orders of mind and conduct in Christendom to see how fetich-worship still lingers among people called Christians, whether the fetich be the image of a saint or the Virgin, or a verse of the Bible found at random and used much as is a penny-toss to decide minor actions.  Or, to look farther south, what means the rabbit’s foot carried in the pocket or the various articles of faith now hanging in the limbo between religion and folk-lore in various parts of our own country?

Phallicism.

Further illustrations of far Eastern Animism and Fetichism are seen in forms once vastly more prevalent in Japan than now.  Indeed, so far improved off the face of the earth are they, that some are already matters of memory or archaeology, and their very existence even in former days is nearly or wholly incredible to the generation born since 1868—­when Old Japan began to vanish in dissolving views and New Japan to emerge.  What the author has seen with his own eyes, would amaze many Japanese born since 1868 and the readers of the rhapsodies of tourists who study Japan from the jin-riki-sha.  Phases of tree and serpent worship are still quite common, and will be probably for generations to come; but the phallic shrines and emblems abolished by the government in 1872 have been so far invisible to most living travellers and natives, that their once general existence and use are now scarcely suspected.  Even profound scholars of the Japanese language and literature whose work dates from after the year 1872 have scarcely suspected the universality of phallic worship.  Yet what we could say of this cult and its emblems, especially in treating of Shint[=o], the special ethnic faith of Japan, would be from sight of our own eyes besides the testimony of many witnesses.[20]