Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 6.djvu/41

 hanging under the eaves of the sacred building, and people come there to light a taper which, burning before the household altar, shall be the beacon of domestic prosperity. As the night wears on, the crowds gradually flow into the temple grounds, and there, at the "hour of the tiger", the "Festival of the Pine Shavings" take place. A Shintō priest reads a ritual. His colleagues obtain a spark by the friction of two pieces of wood, and set fire to a quantity of shavings packed into a large iron lamp. These charred fragments of pine wood the worshippers receive, and carry away as amulets to protect their possessors against plague and pestilence.

In provincial districts the religious festival sometimes presents very quaint features. On the first "day of the horse" in the month of April, there is performed, at the Tsukuma Matsuri in Omi province, a manner of worship intended to promote wifely fidelity. Wives and widows are marshalled in procession, each carrying upon her head as many earthenware pots as she has had husbands. In Japan a woman's glory is to marry once, and if her husband dies, to remain always faithful to his memory. It must be confessed that among the lower orders the ideal is seldom attained. Marriage, not being preceded in their case by courtship or by any opportunity of ascertaining mutual compatibility of disposition, is often followed by separation. Upon the woman rests the responsibility for such accidents, since the