Page:Sketches of Tokyo Life (1895).djvu/96

68 is that in which the omen was read from the number and directions of the cracks made on a stag’s shoulder-blade when held over a fire of birch-bark. This was superseded in the third century after Christ by the tortoise-shell divination which was primarily introduced from China. The augur, after fasting for seven days, and praying to the gods of divination on the seventh day to give the true sign, took a burning piece of birch-bark and put it under a tortoise-shell, the cracks on which were read. There was a hereditary family of augurs whose duty it was to forecast in this manner twice a year the welfare of the Imperial family for the ensuing six months.

Among other methods of vaticination, we find the tossing of coins. There is an apocryphal story of Ota Nobunaga, the Taiko’s master, who was, in 1560, at the threshold of his career, hard-beset by a neighbouring daimyo and sought shelter with his army in a shrine. One day, he called his captains and proposed that they should decide on their course by appealing to the god of the shrine to aid them. He then tossed a number of coins in a dark room of the shrine on the understanding that they should, if a majority exposed obverse faces, attack the enemy. When the room was relighted, only obverse sides were to be seen; and the troops, encouraged by what they believed to be an expression of the god’s will, attacked the enemy that night and utterly routed them. It is, however, hinted that the wily general had specially prepared coins with obverse faces on both sides. Other methods were formerly practised, such as weighing a pebble picked at random in a temple-ground, augury under a consecrated bridge, and throwing combs on mats, the actual processes of which are now forgotten. A popular book of odes, containing a hundred pieces by as many authors, was opened at random and a passage read and interpreted much in the same manner as the sortes Virgilianæ of mediæval Europe. Still another form was called tsujiura, or the cross-road divination. The person who