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The songs of the Honen-odori, or harvest dances, with their curious choruses; the chants of the Bon-odori, which differ in every district; the strange snatches of song, often sweet and weird, that one hears from the rice-fields or the mountain slopes in remote provinces, have qualities totally different from those we are accustomed to associate with the idea of Japanese music, a charm indisputable even for Western ears, because not less in harmony with the nature inspiring it than the song of a bird or the shrilling of cicadae.
But what especially helped the new ancestor-cult to popular favour, was the fact that it included many beautiful and touching customs not known to the old. Then too were instituted the Bon-odori, or Dances of the Festival of the Dead, and the custom of suspending white lanterns at graves, and coloured lanterns at house-gates, to light the coining and the going of the visiting dead.
I am surprised to hear that it belongs to a poor widow and her son, both of whom are employed by the hotel. I was hoping to see the Bon-odori at Hamamura, but I am disappointed. At all the villages the police have prohibited the dance. Fear of cholera has resulted in stringent sanitary regulations.
Sometimes men of noble birth took part in this pastime, but it was usually confined to the lower middle classes. The great festival of bon-odori, which will be spoken of by and by, is said to be an outgrowth of the uta-gaki. The most characteristic feature of the time was a belief in the supernatural power of reptiles and animals. This credulity was not limited to the uneducated masses.
And at still longer intervals there comes to us a heavy muffled booming, the tap of a great drum, a temple drum. 'Oh! we must go to see it, cries Akira; 'it is the Bon-odori, the Dance of the Festival of the Dead. And you will see the Bon-odori danced here as it is never danced in cities the Bon-odori of ancient days. For customs have not changed here; but in the cities all is changed.
No person who has not witnessed a Bon-odori can form the least idea of what Japanese dancing means: it is something utterly different from what usually goes by the name, something indescribably archaic, weird, and nevertheless fascinating. I have repeatedly sat up all night to watch the peasants dancing. Japanese dancing girls, be it observed, do not dance: they pose.
And the voices of all the dancers in unison roll out the chorus: Ya-ha-to-nai! Ya-ha-to-nail Utterly different this whirling joyous Honen-odori from the Bon-odori which I witnessed last year at Shimo-Ichi, and which seemed to me a very dance of ghosts. But it is also much more difficult to describe.
Upon the third and last night there is a weirdly beautiful ceremony, more touching than that of the Segaki, stranger than the Bon-odori the ceremony of farewell. All that the living may do to please the dead has been done; the time allotted by the powers of the unseen worlds unto the ghostly visitants is well nigh past, and their friends must send them all back again.
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