Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 6.djvu/49

 multitude of devotees. No supernatural tradition attaches to these amulets. They have their origin in a simple exercise of benevolence. In the middle era of the temple's existence (the beginning of the sixteenth century) the priests made a practice of presenting gifts to such of their parishioners as had shown special zeal during the New Year's devotional exercises, which lasted from the 1st to the 14th of the first month. By degrees the number of worshippers eligible for such distinction grew so large that some method of special selection became necessary, and recourse was had to lots. The exciting element of chance thus introduced helped, of course, to swell the concourse of devotees, and finally a clever abbot, probably borrowing the idea from the "jewel-grasping festival" of Hakozaki, devised the plan of leaving the people to settle their own eligibility by an athletic contest. The little town lying at the temple's feet contains only two thousand inhabitants in ordinary times, but at the festival season the population grows to fifty or sixty thousand, and a moralist might find food for reflection in the fact that the services of steamships and railways are borrowed to convey this stream of worshippers and sightseers to an observance so suggestive of the rudest ages. At ten o'clock on the night of the 14th of the first month (8th of February according to the present calendar) the Saidai-ji drum beats the signal, and the first band of intending competitors run at full