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This object is made of the same hinoki wood as the drill; and two long slender sticks are laid beside it. I at first suppose it to be another fire-drill. But no human being could guess what it really is. It is called the koto-ita, and is one of the most primitive of musical instruments; the little sticks are used to strike it.
And uncomely withal: a neutral-tinted mite, almost lost in his immense box-cage of hinoki wood, darkened with paper screens over its little wire-grated windows, for he loves the gloom. Delicate he is and exacting even to tyranny. All his diet must be laboriously triturated and weighed in scales, and measured out to him at precisely the same hour each day.
I will plant a thousand hinoki, a thousand sugi, a thousand karamatsu. "But if Shuntoku should not be healed by reason of this vow, then he and I will drown ourselves together in yonder lotos-pond. "And after our death, taking the form of two great serpents, we will torment all who come to worship at this temple, and bar the way against pilgrims."
At the wedding of his daughter the gift-girdle was not to exceed 50 sen in value; and it was forbidden to serve more than one kind of soup at the wedding-feast.... A farmer with a property assessed at 20 koku was not allowed to build a house more than 36 feet long, or to use in building it such superior qualities of wood as keyaki or hinoki.
Image carvers had now plenty to do in making, out of camphor or hinoki wood, effigies of such of the eight million or so of kamis as were given places in the new and enlarged pantheon. The multiplication was always on the side of Buddhism.
A very fine one can be purchased for about two yen; but those little shrines one sees in the houses of the common people cost, as a rule, considerably less than half a yen. And elaborate or costly household shrines are contrary to the spirit of pure Shinto The true miya should be made of spotless white hinoki wood, and be put together without nails.
But the pride of the collection were the conifers and evergreens trees which have Japanese and Latin names only, the hinoki, the enoki, the sasaki, the keyaki, the maki, the surgi and the kusunoki all trees of the dark funereal families of fir and laurel, which the birds avoid, and whose deep winter green in the summer turns to rust.
Carved hinoki wood framed the panels, and the roof was supported by columns in the old Japanese style, the whole being a compromise between the very simple and quiet and the polychromatic. The dark woods, the lanterns, the floor tiles of dark red, and the cushions of rich gold and yellow were most alluring. It had the genuine fascination of the Orient. "Will the gentlemen drink a little sake?"
There is also a long row of very large stone lanterns, presented as a tribute to the memory of the Shogun, Ieyasu. While in Ueno Park the attendant pointed out, in a small enclosure, two diminutive trees, a hinoki, planted by General Grant, and a magnolia by Mrs. Grant during their visit to Tokio. The Ueno Museum proved interesting, particularly in the historical and archæological departments.
Many of these still remain even after the national purgation of 1870, just as the Christian inscriptions survive in the marble palimpsests of Mahometan mosques, converted from basilicas, at Damascus or Constantinople. The torii was no longer raised in plain hinoki wood, but was now constructed of hewn stone, rounded or polished.
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