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Updated: June 10, 2025
There is also no fixed limit to the number of singers in either band: these may be very many or very few. I think that the curious Izumo way of singing the burden so that the vowel sounds in the word iya uttered by one band, and in the word sorei uttered by the other, are made to blend together might be worth the attention of some one interested in Japanese folk-music.
They have long green or grey eyes of crystal quartz or some other diaphanous substance; and they create a strong impression as mythological conceptions. But throughout the interior, fox-images are much less artistically fashioned. In Izumo, particularly, such stone-carving has a decidedly primitive appearance.
Princess Forward has no children, a fact which doubtless augments her jealousy of her husband's amours; jealousy expressed in verses that show no mean poetic skill. Thus, the Great-Name Possessor on the eve of a journey from Izumo to Yamato, sings as he stands with one hand on his saddle and one foot in the stirrup:
Above these are the gentile gods or Ujigami, ghosts of old rulers now worshipped as tutelar gods. All Ujigami, Hirata tells us, are under the control of the Great God of Izumo, Oho-kuni-nushi-no-Kami, and, "acting as his agents, they rule the fortunes of human beings before their birth, during their life, and after their death."
But his name is here also, in Ninomaru, graven on the monument to the men of Izumo who fell in the good fight for loyalty and honour in our emperor's holy cause; and when I see his name there, my heart laughs, and I speak to him, and then it seems as if he were walking beside me again, under the great pines. . . But all that is another matter. 'I sorrowed for my wife.
It is still possible to see in Matsue a few katahajishi coiffures. The family kamiyui, O-Koto-San, the most skilful of her craft in Izumo, is a little woman of about thirty, still quite attractive. About her neck there are three soft pretty lines, forming what connoisseurs of beauty term 'the necklace of Venus. This is a rare charm; but it once nearly proved the ruin of Koto.
And here I may presume, though no Sinologue, to say something about that State Religion of Japan that ancient faith of Izumo which, although even more deeply rooted in national life than Buddhism, is far less known to the Western world.
A priest leads it, ringing a little bell; a boy bears the ihai of the newly dead. The van of the procession is wholly composed of men relatives and friends. Some carry hata, white symbolic bannerets; some bear flowers; all carry paper lanterns for in Izumo the adult dead are buried after dark: only children are buried by day.
The much more credible supposition is that the Yamato Court, confronted by a formidable rebellion having its centre in Izumo, retired to Tsukushi, and there, in the course of years, mustered all its followers for an expedition ultimately led by the grandson of the fugitive monarch to restore the sway of his house.
Oki-no-Kuni, or the Land of Oki, consists of two groups of small islands in the Sea of Japan, about one hundred miles from the coast of Izumo. Much larger than any of these is the principal island, Dogo, which together with various islets, mostly uninhabited, form the remaining group. It is sometimes called Oki though the name Oki is more generally used for the whole archipelago.
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