Asako was taken to the October festival, because her father too was buried in the temple grounds—­one small bone of him, that is to say, an ikotsu or legacy bone, posted home from Paris before the rest of his mortality found alien sepulture at Pere Lachaise.  Masses were said for the dead; and Asako was introduced to the tablet.  But she did not feel the same emotion as when she first visited the Fujinami house.  Now, she had heard her father’s authentic voice.  She knew his scorn for pretentiousness of all kinds, for false conventions, for false emotions, his hatred of priestcraft, his condemnation of the family wealth, and his contempt for the little respectabilities of Japanese life.

* * * * *

A temple in Japan is not merely a building; it is a site.  These sites were most carefully chosen with the same genius which guided our Benedictines and Carthusians.  The site of Ikegami is a long-abrupt hill, half-way between Tokyo and Yokohama.  It is clothed with cryptomeria trees.  These dark conifers, like immense cypresses, give to the spot that grave, silent, irrevocable atmosphere, with which Boecklin has invested his picture of the Island of the Dead.  These majestic trees are essentially a part of the temple.  They correspond to the pillars of our Gothic cathedrals.  The roof is the blue vault of heaven; and the actual buildings are but altars, chantries and monuments.

A steep flight of steps is suspended like a cascade from the crest of the hill.  Up and down these steps, the wooden clogs of the Japanese people patter incessantly like water-drops.  At the top of the steps stands the towered gateway, painted with red ochre, which leads to the precincts.  The guardians of the gate, Ni-O, the two gigantic Deva kings, who have passed from India into Japanese mythology, are encaged in the gateway building.  Their cage and their persons are littered with nasty morsels of chewed paper, wherever their worshippers have literally spat their prayers at them.

Within the enclosure are the various temple buildings, the bell-tower, the library, the washing-trough, the hall of votive offerings, the sacred bath-house, the stone lanterns and the lodgings for the pilgrims; also the two main halls for the temple services, which are raised on low piles and are linked together by a covered bridge, so that they look like twin arks of safety, floating just five feet above the troubles of this life.  These buildings are most of them painted red; and there is fine carving on panels, friezes and pediments, and also much tawdry gaudiness.  Behind these two sanctuaries is the mortuary chapel where repose the memories of many of the greatest in the land.  Behind this again are the priests’ dormitories, with a lovely hidden garden hanging on the slopes of a sudden ravine; its presiding genius is an old pine-tree, beneath which Nichiren himself, a contemporary and a counterpart of Saint Dominic, used to meditate on his project for a Universal Church, founded on the life of Buddha, and led by the apostolate of Japan.