"Then there is another seaweed, whose name is a pun on 'rejoicing.' There is the lucky bag that I made, for last year, of a square piece of paper into which we put chestnuts and the roe of a herring and dried persimmon fruit. Then I tied up the paper with red and white paper-string, that the sainted gods might know it was an offering."[1]
Yoshi-san and his little sister had now reached
"Bronze fishes sitting on their throats."
the great gate ornamented with huge bronze fishes [2] sitting on their throats and twisting aloft their forked tails, that was near their home. He told his sister she must wait to know more about the great festival till the time arrived. They shuffled off their shoes, bowed, till their foreheads touched the ground, to their parents, ate their evening bowl of rice and salt fish, said a prayer and burnt a stick of incense to many-armed Buddha at the
- ↑ The Queen and the Prince: See the story of " The Jewels of the Ebbing and the Flowing Tide" in the book of "Japanese Fairy Tales " in this series. Ojin, son of Jingu Kogo, was, much later, deified as the god of war, Hachiman. See "The Religions of Japan," p. 204.
- ↑ The bronze fishes, called shachi-hoko, are huge metal figures, like dolphins, from four to twelve feet high, which were set on the pinnacles of the old castle towers in the days of feudalism. That from Nagoya, exhibited at the Vienna Exposition, had scales of solid gold.
