Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/217

Rh the "joly compagnie" of "fayerie" Chaucer tells us of than the joyless "lymytours" that displaced it.

The Japanese go upon pilgrimages because they thoroughly enjoy themselves in the process, the piety incident to the act simply relieving them from compunction at having so good a time. Sociability is the keynote of the affair from start to finish. To pool one's pleasure is always to increase it, and for a Japanese to pool his purse is matter of as much account. For a Japanese is not only poor, but impecunious. His personal property of impersonality is only matched by the impersonality of his personal property. For what a Japanese appears to possess is, ten to one, borrowed of a friend, and what he really owns pledged to a neighbor. He is, in short, but a transition stage in one long shift of loan. We talk of our far-reaching system of mercantile credits. It is financial self-sufficiency beside the every-day state of far-eastern affairs. Everybody there lives as a matter of course upon somebody else. To these states of mind and money are due the founding of the pilgrim clubs.

The pilgrim clubs (kōsha or kō) are great