It Is Extremely Interesting To Live
In A Private House And To See The Externalities, At Least, Of
Domestic Life In A Japanese Middle-Class Home.
I. L. B.
LETTER VIII
The Beauties of Nikko - The Burial of Iyeyasu - The Approach to the
Great Shrines - The Yomei Gate - Gorgeous Decorations - Simplicity of
the Mausoleum - The Shrine of Iyemitsu - Religious Art of Japan and
India - An Earthquake - Beauties of Wood-carving.
KANAYA'S, NIKKO, June 21.
I have been at Nikko for nine days, and am therefore entitled to
use the word "Kek'ko!"
Nikko means "sunny splendour," and its beauties are celebrated in
poetry and art all over Japan. Mountains for a great part of the
year clothed or patched with snow, piled in great ranges round
Nantaizan, their monarch, worshipped as a god; forests of
magnificent timber; ravines and passes scarcely explored; dark
green lakes sleeping in endless serenity; the deep abyss of Kegon,
into which the waters of Chiuzenjii plunge from a height of 250
feet; the bright beauty of the falls of Kiri Furi, the loveliness
of the gardens of Dainichido; the sombre grandeur of the passes
through which the Daiyagawa forces its way from the upper regions;
a gorgeousness of azaleas and magnolias; and a luxuriousness of
vegetation perhaps unequalled in Japan, are only a few of the
attractions which surround the shrines of the two greatest Shoguns.
To a glorious resting-place on the hill-slope of Hotoke Iwa, sacred
since 767, when a Buddhist saint, called Shodo Shonin, visited it,
and declared the old Shinto deity of the mountain to be only a
manifestation of Buddha, Hidetada, the second Shogun of the
Tokugawa dynasty, conveyed the corpse of his father, Iyeyasu, in
1617. It was a splendid burial. An Imperial envoy, a priest of
the Mikado's family, court nobles from Kivoto, and hundreds of
daimiyos, captains, and nobles of inferior rank, took part in the
ceremony. An army of priests in rich robes during three days
intoned a sacred classic 10,000 times, and Iyeyasu was deified by a
decree of the Mikado under a name signifying "light of the east,
great incarnation of Buddha." The less important Shoguns of the
line of Tokugawa are buried in Uyeno and Shiba, in Yedo. Since the
restoration, and what may be called the disestablishment of
Buddhism, the shrine of Iyeyasu has been shorn of all its glories
of ritual and its magnificent Buddhist paraphernalia; the 200
priests who gave it splendour are scattered, and six Shinto priests
alternately attend upon it as much for the purpose of selling
tickets of admission as for any priestly duties.
All roads, bridges, and avenues here lead to these shrines, but the
grand approach is by the Red Bridge, and up a broad road with steps
at intervals and stone-faced embankments at each side, on the top
of which are belts of cryptomeria. At the summit of this ascent is
a fine granite torii, 27 feet 6 inches high, with columns 3 feet 6
inches in diameter, offered by the daimiyo of Chikuzen in 1618 from
his own quarries.
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