Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/262

 to and fro of ancient officials, much restamping and recording, before he is led through the precinct by an attendant. Even with this guarantee, the severe and stately old guardians, in their ancient dress and tonsure, seem to look on the intruder with suspicion.

The Japanese gosho is not exactly translated by the word “palace,” and is merely a greater yashiki, or spread-out house, constituting the sovereign’s residence. This gosho consists of so many separate roofed, one-story wooden buildings as to make a small village. Each room, or suite of rooms, occupies a distinct building, its outside gallery or veranda forming the corridor, and its sliding screens the inner walls. Each building has the great sweeping roof of a temple, the belief in the divinity of the Emperor, and his headship of the Shinto faith, requiring that his actual dwelling should be a temple, rigidly simple as a Shinto shrine, with thatched roof and unpainted woods. These clustered houses are the survival of the old nomad camps of Asia, as the upward curving gables of the roof are a permanent form of their sagging tent-tops. The palace has suffered from many fires, the last occurring in 1854, but each rebuilding has followed the original models, and the gosho looks just as it did centuries ago. The same straw mats, open charcoal braziers, and loose saucers of oil in paper lamp-frames, inviting a conflagration there as in the humblest Japanese home.

The walk around the outer galleries and connecting corridors takes half an hour, and one must go stocking-footed, or in the curious slippers furnished by the guardians. In summer the recessed and sunless apartments are cool and dim, but winter makes them bitterly cold and forlorn. Except for two thrones, there is nothing to be called furniture in the palace. The silk-bordered mats of the floor, the paintings on the sliding screens, the fine metal plates on all the wood-work, the 246