As it was the Bon season, when the spirits of the dead are supposed to return, I was a witness of the method adopted to help the ghosts to find their old homes.  At the top of a 30 or 40 ft. pole a lantern is fixed with a pulley.  Fastened up beside the lantern is a bunch of green stuff, cryptomeria in many cases.  The lantern is lighted each evening for a week.  Having heard a good deal about the suppression of Bon dances and songs I was interested when a fellow-guest began talking about them.  He had seen many Bon dances and had heard many Bon songs.  There can be no doubt that there has been some unenlightened interference with the Bon gathering.  The country people seem to be suffering from the determination of officialdom to make an end of everything in country as well as town that may be considered “uncivilised” by any foreigner, however ill instructed.  In towns the sexes are not accustomed to meet, but country people must work together; therefore they find it natural to dance and sing together.  As to the Bon songs, it is common sense that expressions which may be regarded as outrageous and indecent in a drawing-room may not be so terrible on a hilltop among rustics used to very plain speech and to easy recognition of natural facts that are veiled from townspeople.  My chance acquaintance at the inn recited a number of Bon songs and next morning brought me some more that he had remembered and had been kind enough to write down.  They merely established the fact that bucolic wit is as elemental in Japan as in other lands.  Most of the songs had a Rabelaisian touch, some were nasty, but nearly all had wit.  The following is an entirely harmless example: 

        Mr. Potato of the Countryside
        Got his new European suit. 
        But a potato is still a potato. 
        He took one and a half rin[161] out of his bag
        And bought ame[162] and licked at it.

Here are three others: 

        Tip-toe, tip-toe,
        Creaks the floor. 
        Girl made prayer,
        Dreading ghost. 
        But ’twas her lover
        Who stealthily came.

        Dancer, dancer,
        Do not laugh at me. 
        My dance is very bad,
        But I only began last year.

        How thin a thin-legged man may be
        If he does not take his miso soup.[163]

The quality of these dramatic songs will be entirely missed if the reader does not bear in mind the mimetic skill of the amateur Japanese dancer and his power as a contortionist.  Clever dancers often use their powers in a humorous pretence of clumsiness.  Of the freer sort of songs I may quote two: 

        Never buy vegetables in Third Street,[164]
        You’ll lose 30 sen and your nose.

        Onions from a basket hanging in the benjo[165]
        Were cooked in miso[166] and given to a blind man,
        But that chap was greatly delighted.