Page:TASJ-1-1-2.djvu/292

 the children’s playings, and the theatre of many of their sports. Besides sliding on the ice, coasting with sleds, building snow-forts and fighting mimic battles with snow-balls, they make many kinds of images and imitations of what they see and know. In America the boy’s snowman is a Paddy with a damaged hat, clay pipe in mouth, and the shillelah in his hand. In Japan the snowman is an image of Daruma. Daruma was one of the followers of Shaka (Buddha) who by long meditation in a squatting position, lost his legs from paralysis and sheer decay. The images of Daruma are found by the hundreds in toy-shops, as tobacconists’ signs and as the snowmen of the boys. Occasionally the figure of Geiho, the sage, with a forehead and skull so high that a ladder was required to reach his pate, or huge cats and the peculiar-shaped dogs seen in the toy-shops, take the place of Daruma. Many of the amusements of the children indoors are mere imitations of the serious affairs of adult life. Boys who have been to the theatre come home to imitate the celebrated actors, and to extemporize mimic theatricals for themselves. Feigned sickness and “playing the doctor,” imitating with ludiciousludicrous [sic] exactness the pomp and solemnity of the real man of pills and powders, and the misery of the patient, are the diversions of very young children. Dinners, tea-parties, and even weddings and funerals, are imitated in Japanese children’s plays. Among the ghostly games intended to test the courage of, or perhaps to frighten, children, are two plays called respectively Hiyaku Monogatari and Kon dameshi or the “One Hundred Stories” and “Soul-examination.” In the former play a company of boys and girls assemble round the hibachi, while they, or an adult, an aged person or a servant usually, relate ghost stories, or tales calculated to straighten the hair and make the blood crawl. In a distant dark room, a lamp, (the usual dish of oil,) with a wick of one hundred strands or piths, is set. At the conclusion of each story, the children in turn must go to the dark room and remove a strand of the wick. As the lamp burns down low the room becomes gloomy