their hands together in time, but in a half-hearted kind of way; the girls struck the palms of their left hands with their fans.  The boys were in clean working dress.  Some had towels wound round their heads, some wore caps and others hats.  The girls were got up in all their best clothes with fine obi and white aprons.  The music was dirge-like.  It was not at all what Western people understand to be singing.  The performers emitted notes in a kind of falsetto, and these five or six notes were repeated over and over and over again.  The only word I can think of which approximately describes what I heard, but it seems harsh, is the Northern word, yowling.  First the lads yowled and then the girls responded with a slightly more musical repetition of the same sounds.  For all the notice the boys appeared to take of the girls they might not have been present.  The lads and lasses were no doubt fully conscious, however, of each other’s presence.  The dancing took place on the nights of the full moon.  But it was cloudy, and, owing to the big surrounding trees, the performance was often dimly lit.

To me the dancing was depressing, but that is not to say that the dancers found it so.  Dancing began at eight o’clock and went on till midnight.  “They would not be fit for their work next day if they danced later,” a sober-minded adult explained.  This was only one suggestion among many that the dance has been devitalised under the respectabilising influence of the policeman and village elders who had forgotten their youth.  To the onlooker it did not seem to matter very much whether the dance, as it is now, continues or not.  Occasionally one had an impression that it had once been a folk dance of vigour and significance.  But the present-day performance might have been conceived and presented by a P.S.A.  All this is true when the dance is contrasted with an English West-country dance or a dance in Scotland at Hallowe’en.  But it must be remembered that the Bon dance during the first nights is in the nature of a lament for the dead.  There is something haunting in the strange little refrain, though it is difficult to hum or whistle it.  Perhaps the whole festival is too intimately racial to be fully understood by a stranger.  By the end of the festival, on the night of merrymaking in honour of the village guardian spirit, things were livelier.  Some of the lads had evidently had sake and even the girls had lost their demureness.

[Illustration:  MOTHER AND CHILD]

After the Buddhist Bon season was over it was the turn of Shinto, and the village children were paraded before the shrine.  A number of Shinto priests in the neighbourhood took a leading part in making the customary offerings and the local priest read a longish address to the guardian spirit of the village.  Respectful correctness rather than devoutness is the phrase which one would ordinarily be disposed to apply to the ceremonies at a Shinto shrine, but the local priest was reverential.  The ceremonies of the day evidently meant a great deal to him.  The children paid a well-drilled attention.  They also sang the national anthem and a special song for the day under the leadership of the school teacher, who played on a portable harmonium which sounded as portable harmoniums usually sound.  The whole proceedings wore a semi-official look.