Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/328

 Behind the Buddha is a museum of antiquities connected in some way with the temple and its founders and patrons. Here are kept the carpenters’ tools with which the first temple was built, and prehistoric-looking fragments of bronze and iron to which the stranger finds no clew. A door of the palace whereon Kusunoki, the Chevalier Bayard of Japan, wrote a farewell message with his arrow when he went away to his last battle, images, carvings, old armor, weapons, and trappings, afford the Japanese visitor much delight. But the real treasures of Dai Butsu are the relics left to it by one of the Nara Emperors, who built a substantial log storehouse in the enclosure, and bequeathed to the temple everything his palace contained. Palaces were small in those days, and their furnishings scanty; but the clothing, household effects, and ornaments of the dead benefactor were brought to this storehouse and carefully sealed up. Every summer, after the rainy season ends, the treasures are aired, the inventory verified, and the place sealed up again. Three of the greatest nobles of the empire are associated with the high-priest in the care of these Nara relics, and the storehouse can only be opened by an imperial order transmitted in the handwriting of the emperor. Only royal or greatly distinguished visitors may ask this privilege, as it is a great trouble and expense to get the guardians together. Its value as a collection and as a picture of the life of the eighth century is hardly appreciated by the Japanese, who chiefly reverence its sacredness as connected with the person of an early Emperor. An imperial commission, made up of officers of the imperial household and of art connoisseurs, examined, classified, and catalogued the treasures of the Nara and Kioto temples in 1888. Mr. Kuki, late Japanese minister to the United States, and president of this commission, had even this imperial treasure-house opened and the precious relics 312