Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, page 59 by Isabella L. Bird
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forages for me, and can occasionally get chickens at 10d. each, and a dish of trout for 6d., and eggs are always to be had for 1d. each. It is extremely interesting to live in a private house and to see the externalities, at least, of domestic life in a Japanese middle-class home. I. L. B.
LETTER VIII
The Beauties of Nikko--The Burial of Iyeyasu--The Approach to the Great Shrines--The Yomei Gate--Gorgeous Decorations--Simplicity of the Mausoleum--The Shrine of Iyemitsu--Religious Art of Japan and India--An Earthquake--Beauties of Wood-carving.
KANAYA'S, NIKKO, June 21.
I have been at Nikko for nine days, and am therefore entitled to use the word "Kek'ko!"
Nikko means "sunny splendour," and its beauties are celebrated in poetry and art all over Japan. Mountains for a great part of the year clothed or patched with snow, piled in great ranges round Nantaizan, their monarch, worshipped as a god; forests of magnificent timber; ravines and passes scarcely explored; dark green lakes sleeping in endless serenity; the deep abyss of Kegon, into which the waters of Chiuzenjii plunge from a height of 250 feet; the bright beauty of the falls of Kiri Furi, the loveliness of the gardens of Dainichido; the sombre grandeur of the passes through which the Daiyagawa forces its way from the upper regions; a gorgeousness of azaleas and magnolias; and a luxuriousness of vegetation perhaps unequalled in Japan, are only a few of the attractions which surround the shrines of the two greatest Shoguns.
To a glorious resting-place on the hill-slope of Hotoke Iwa, sacred since 767, when a Buddhist saint, called Shodo Shonin, visited it, and declared the old Shinto deity of the mountain to be only a manifestation of Buddha, Hidetada, the second Shogun of the Tokugawa dynasty, conveyed the corpse of his father, Iyeyasu, in 1617. It was a splendid burial. An Imperial envoy, a priest of the Mikado's family, court nobles from Kivoto, and hundreds of daimiyos, captains, and nobles of inferior ra