JAPAN
carried off impurities; mats, rushes, or skins were spread for a bed, and furs, cloth, or silk served for coverlets. The floor was of timber, but whether of logs or of boards is not known. A religious service of consecration for propitiating the deities of timber and rice was held when the first emperor built his palace at Kashibara after he had conquered Yamato, and it became customary thenceforth to repeat the service at coronations and after harvest fêtes. Common people, when they built a residence, invited their friends to a "house-warming," but the Emperor invoked the gods against the entry of snakes that bit the inmates, or of birds that polluted the food; against groaning timbers, loosening ties, unevenness of thatch, and creaking floors.
All this indicates a comparatively low type of civilisation. And yet, as has been shown in a previous chapter, objects found in the tombs of these early Japanese show that they possessed much skill in the casting and chiselling of metals, that their arms and the trappings of their horses were highly ornamented, and that their costume had many elements of refinement.
Perhaps the most special feature of their habits was cleanliness. It distinguishes them from all other Oriental nations. Whether this propensity grew out of their religious observances or was merely reflected in them, there is no means of determining. Knowledge is limited to the facts that they held every form of pollution to be
64
