Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/241

 Yoshitsune received fencing-lessons from a tengu near the monastery where his boyhood was passed; and sometimes the strange creature enters into frail girls and endows them with miraculous martial prowess. This possession by a tengu is called tengu-gakari. Dr. Inouye Enryo, an eminent Japanese philosopher of the present era, recently delivered a lecture on demonology, in connection with which he referred to a case of tengu-possession, affirmed by the fencing-master of the Tōkyō Police School. The learned professor declared that a girl who had lost the use of her left hand sprang from her bed one night crying that the tengu was coming, and that a youth with a halberd and a fencing-sword would arrive the next day. The following morning she had no recollection of what had happened, but the youth arriving, as she had predicted, the fit overtook her again, and with closed eyes, using her one sound hand, she exhibited extraordinary skill of fence with halberd and sword alike.

The tengu has faded, for the most part, out of the vista of adult observation, and now figures chiefly in children's tales and old women's stories, but at a date not more remote than the Ansei era (1854-1860) the officials of the Yedo Government showed that their faith in such supernatural beings was practical. On the occasion of a projected visit of the Shōgun to Nikko, they directed that the following notice