The Suburbs of Tokio
On the days of the matsuri the village street is impassable, and the whole broad walk of the temple grounds leading from the pagoda is lined with booths, jugglers, acrobats, side shows, and catch-penny tricksters. The “sand-man,” with bags of different colored sands, makes beautiful pictures on a cleared space of ground, rattling and gabbling without cessation while he works. First he dredges the surface with a sieve full of clean white sand, and then sifts a little thin stream of black or red sand through his closed hand, painting warriors, maidens, dragons, flowers, and landscapes in the swiftest, easiest way. It is a fine example of the trained hand and eye, and of excellent free-hand drawing. A juggler tosses rings, balls, and knives in the air, and spins plates on top of a twenty-foot pole. His colleague balances a big bamboo on one shoulder, and a small boy climbs it and goes through wonderful feats on the cross-piece at the top. A ring of gaping admirers surrounds a master of the black art, who swallows a lighted pipe, drinks, whistles, produces the pipe for a puff or two, swallows it again, and complacently emits fanciful rings and wreaths of smoke. Hair-pins, rosaries, toys, and sweets are everywhere for sale.
A huge, towering, heavy-roofed red gate-way admits streams of people to the great court-yard, surrounded on three sides by temples large and small, where the priests chant and pound and the faithful pray, rubbing their rosaries and tossing in their coins. At one shrine greasy locks of hair tied to the lattices are votive offerings from those who have appealed to the deity within. There is a little temple to the North Star, where seamen and fisher-folk pray, and one to Daikoku, the god of riches and abundance, the latter a fat little man sitting on bags of rice, and always beset by applicants.
In the great temple pyramids of candles burn, incense rises, bells sound, and money rains into the big cash-box
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