Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 6.djvu/26

 which the procession winds its leisurely way on every alternate 15th of June (old calendar). The tutelary deities of the Sano district, when not taking part in these periodical picnics, inhabit a shrine on the summit of a profusely wooded hill approached by an avenue of cherry-trees and tended by Buddhist and Shintō priests in coöperation. But the effigies that ride on the dashi, and the dashi themselves are kept in the houses of leading citizens. Each car, each figure, each symbol, has its history, and every properly educated parishioner knows that history. He can tell how the finely modelled kan-ko-dori (cock on drum), kept in Odemma-cho, has five-hued plumage, whereas the Kanda cock is pure white; how the monkey, which ought to take precedence of the cock if the order of the terrestrial and celestial cycles were strictly observed, was obliged, by edict of the Shōgun, to cede the pas to its bright-feathered companion; how two lifelike monkeys, a male and a female, emerge alternately from their retreat in Koji-machi to take their places in the procession, but how neither can compare with the wonderful monkey of Minamitemma-cho, modelled in the old days by that peer of puppet-makers, Hyoshi Washihei, of which, alas! only the nose and eyes now remain, but which has a not greatly inferior successor, the work of Kakumuro Eiga; how in Koji-machi there is also preserved a monster elephant, fashioned three and a half centuries