Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 6.djvu/47

 Hakozaki is celebrated in Japanese history. Supplications offered there at the time when the great Mongol armada swept down upon Japan in the thirteenth century, are supposed to have produced the storm that shattered the enemy's fleet and strewed the coast of Kiushiu with his dead. It is a place of miracles. A crystal ball is one of the three sacred insignia of Japan. It also symbolises the pearl of great price, held in the claws of the sea god's dragon. Hence two perfect spheres of finely grained wood cast upon the beach at Hakozaki necessarily suggested supernatural agency. Their finder carried them to the Hakozaki shrine, and reverentially entrusted them to the custody of the priests, having first washed them carefully in holy water taken from the granite cistern at the adjacent fane of Ebisu. From that time the young apprentice seemed to become the favourite of fortune. Ebisu, the jovial-faced fisher deity, who provides for men's daily sustenance, had evidently taken the youth under his protection. Whenever the third day of the first month came round,—the anniversary of the finding of the balls,—the apprentice, soon a thriving merchant, did not fail to repair to the temple. Taking the sacred spheres thence, he would carry them to the shrine of Ebisu, wash them in the holy water, anoint them with clove-oil, and bear them back to their place in the temple. When and how this custom was elevated to the rank of a religious rite, there is no