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Updated: June 2, 2025
In the blurred, purple hour of dusk when paints must be laid aside, and the heart given over to dreaming, the little room became her very earthly entity, the soft, smoke-tinted walls her breathing, the elastic matted floor but the remembered echoes of her feet, the sliding sliver fusuma her sleeves, the butsudan, with its small, clear lamp, its white wood, and its flowers, her face.
The Buddhist family worship coexists in the vast majority of Izumo homes with the Shinto family worship; and whether the dead be honoured in the mitamaya or before the butsudan altogether depends upon the religious traditions of the household.
At that time the household butsudan is always exposed to view, and often moved from its usual place in order to obtain room for the offerings to be set before it. To place any holy object on the floor is considered by the Japanese very disrespectful. As for Shinto objects, to place even a mamori on the floor is deemed a sin. 15 Two ihai are always made for each Buddhist dead.
Suddenly she shivered and hid her face. What was the tumult of that ignorant young breast? The old man rose and went to an inner room where hung the Butsudan, the shrine. He stood gazing upon the ihai of his wife. His lips moved, but the breath so lightly issued that the flame on the altar did not stir.
Hastily girding up his robes, he slipped noiselessly from under the paper curtain, crept to the edge of the screen, and peeped. What he saw astonished him extremely. Before her illuminated butsudan the young woman, magnificently attired, was dancing all alone. Her costume he recognised as that of a shirabyoshi, though much richer than any he had ever seen worn by a professional dancer.
At one side of the apartment stood a kind of low altar, supporting a butsudan, whose tiny lacquered doors, left open, showed a mortuary tablet within, before which a lamp was burning between offerings of wild flowers. And above this household shrine hung a picture of more than common merit, representing the Goddess of Mercy, wearing the moon for her aureole.
It had caused her much pain to lose her home; but it grieved her still more that, in becoming weak and old, she could no longer dance each evening before the butsudan, to please the spirit of the dead whom she had loved. Therefore she wanted to have a picture of herself painted, in the costume and the attitude of the dance, that she might suspend it before the butsudan.
The form of the butsudan or butsuma, the character of its holy images, its ofuda, or its pictures, and even the prayers said before it, differ according to the fifteen different shu, or sects; and a very large volume would have to be written in order to treat the subject of the butsuma exhaustively.
The butsudan of a very poor household may be worth a few cents, but the rich devotee might purchase in Kyoto a shrine worth as many thousands of yen as he could pay. There are some much more elaborate shapes, costly and rare, and simpler shapes of the cheapest and plainest descriptions; but the form thus illustrated is the common one in Izumo and the whole San-indo country.
The number of mortuary tablets in a household shrine does not generally exceed five or six, only grandparents and parents and the recently dead being thus represented; but the name of remoter ancestors are inscribed upon scrolls, which are kept in the Butsudan or the mitamaya. Whatever be the family rite, prayers are repeated and offerings are placed before the ancestral tablets every day.
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