Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/258

 surrounding Japanese houses, he will see that the northeasterly quarter is always thickly planted and left without ornamental rockery or pathway. Such evidences of practical demonology afford, however, but a slight glimpse of the importance attached by the middle and lower classes, and even by many members of the upper, to the question of celestial quarter. Oshima Sekibun, the chief professor of the science of "aspect divination," is unable, even with the aid of a large band of disciples, to furnish oracles for the multitudes that come daily to consult him. There are numbers of sober business men and educated gentlemen in Tōkyō — to say nothing of the softer sex and the uneducated — who deem it absolutely essential to preface every important act by recourse to this kind of augury. Before building a house, before selecting a site, before changing from one residence to another, before opening a store, before applying for an official post, before engaging in any industrial or commercial enterprise, before betrothing a son or daughter, before fixing the date of a marriage, before despatching a cargo, before setting out on a journey, before preparing for an accouchement, — before any of these things, and, in the case of the more superstitious, before any act that lies outside the most ordinary routine of every-day existence, the advice of the aspect diviner has to be sought.

A Tōkyō newspaper recently published a statement illustrating the uses to which diviners are