Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/231

Rh depths of the sea. At all times the torii, or wooden archway, which stands before this Shinto temple is partially submerged, and Hiroshigi in his fifty-four meisho, or views of Japan, gives such prominence to it, that the long galleries and avenue of stone lanterns, as well as the central hall, from which the colonnades diverge like wooden arms, bent to embrace the incoming tide, are barely suggested. Daimyō, Shōgun, and Emperor have vied with one another in decorating this temple, and the successive chapels are hung with paintings by famous artists from the sixteenth century to the present time. Many quaint customs, formerly regarded as conducive to the purity of a holy place, are still observed. Neither death nor birth is allowed to sully its eternal immunity from change. When either is anticipated, the patient is ferried across to the mainland. Dogs are forbidden, but deer roam the streets and feed fearlessly from the hands of tourist or pilgrim. All day the temple-courts are thronged with worshippers, and sometimes at night, when a pious noble or rich American affords himself the sight, the lit lanterns of stone or bronze, which line the approaches to the temple, define the interlacing courts and bridges in traceries of fire. But this illumination we had not the good fortune to see.

Another temple on a neighbouring hill, though less beautiful, is equally unique. It consists of a vast platform, from which spring twenty-four massive columns to support the roof, whose only ornamentation on the interior, if ornamentation it can be called, is a frieze of wooden spoons, some small, others enormous: they are nailed there, or on the columns, as the donor's caprice dictates, and confer comparative immortality at trifling cost, for each is inscribed with an autograph.