On the 6th of October I had finished my drawings among the pines and the sand hills, and a new passport had come, which gave me permission to wander for three months longer through the provinces near the Tokaido, so I bid farewell to my good friends and the comfortable club-house in Kōbe, and Matsuba once more left his wife and family to follow my fortunes.
Our destination was Maibara, a little town on Lake Biwa, not many miles from Hikone. As I passed it by rail I had noticed that the flooded fields on the margin of the lake were covered with a blue-flowered water-plant, a good foreground to the blue water and the distant mountains, and I hoped for blue skies to complete the picture, but they came only at rare intervals. On a piece of waste
ground near my tea-house a travelling theatre had been erected, a structure of bamboo poles with mats hung over them, which was not calculated to keep an audience dry, and not once during my stay were the company able to give a performance. The manager occupied the room next mine; he was an excellent performer on the samisen, and a pious man withal. Every morning from seven till half-past he said his prayers, repeating in a monotonous singsong voice a sentence which sounded to me like “Ya ya yura no,” and tapping two blocks of wood together to keep time. He belonged to the Shingon sect of Buddhists.
[Illustration: THE TRAVELLING THEATRE, MAIBARA]
The prayer formula of the Monto sect, one of the most popular and powerful, owning the great Hongwanji temples which are found in all large towns, is, “Namu Amida Butsu,” while the followers of Nichiren, as they beat their drums, murmur constantly, “Namu myōhō renge kyō.”
We soon became good friends, the manager and I, and he spent many hours in my room drinking tea, looking at my sketches, and in such conversation as my rudimentary knowledge of the language permitted, but unfortunately I never had an opportunity of seeing him act. When I left he presented me with a printed cotton towel in an ornamental wrapper, and I gave him a penny black-lead pencil, and we parted with mutual expressions of esteem. I had other visitors too: the station-master and the chief of police wanted to see my pictures, and Takaki, O Shige San, and little Kazu, with the brown velvet eyes, came over from Hikone to call on me, and arranged to meet me at the Nagahama matsuri. This annual festival takes place in the middle of October, and seems to be a gathering-ground for all the country-side. In many respects it was very like a country fair in England, but the main event on all the three days is the perambulation of large triumphal cars, called yama, on which companies of children give dramatic performances. I was fortunate in having a brilliantly fine day, and as I bowled along the five miles of level road from Maibara in a kuruma with two good runners, I passed troops of people in holiday attire, old peasants, gayly dressed young girls, and wandering friars with huge bamboo hats that looked like bushel baskets. The town was gayly decorated with flags and with lanterns bearing the device of the city, and crowds were pouring into it by road and rail and boat; for Nagahama is a busy port at the northern end of Lake Biwa, and a regular service of steamers runs between there and Otsu, at the southern end. This mixture of things ancient and modern in Japan always seems amusing, especially when, as in Nagahama, there is not much of the modern. The row-boats which came in with their loads of passengers were of unvarnished wood, decorated with black patterns on the bows, and, except the police and the railway officials, I saw very few men in European dress; there certainly were no women in anything but their own becoming costume, and I was the only foreigner in the town. My landlord had been thoughtful enough to engage a place for me in a tea-house opposite which the yama stopped and gave a performance: all the partitions had been removed, and the floor, divided into squares by low movable railings, was covered with family parties who had brought their own cushions and provisions.