Some of the other songs may be described, I suppose, as obscene, if
obscene be, as the dictionary says, "something which delicacy, purity
and decency forbid to be exposed"; but "delicacy, purity and decency"
must be considered in relation to climate, work and social usage. What
one feels about some critics of _Bon_ songs and dances is that they
need a course of _The Golden Bough_. Such an illustration as _Bon_
songs furnish of the moral and mental conditions from which country
folk must raise themselves is of value if rural sociology is a real
thing. There is far too much theorising about the countryman and the
countrywoman, far too much idealising of them and far too much rating
of them as clods. If country people of all lands are free-spoken let
us be neither hypercritical nor hypocritical. A big gap seems to yawn
between the paddy-field peasant in his breech clout and the immaculate
clubman, but what difference is there between the savour of the
average _Bon_ song and of many a smoking-room jest which is not to the
credit of the peasant? At an inn in Naganoken a Japanese artist on
holiday showed me his sketch book. Among his drawings was a
representation of a shrine festival which he had witnessed in a remote
village. A festival car was being pushed by a knot of youths and by
about an equal number of young women and all of them were nude. But no
enlightened person believes that either decency or morals depends on
clothing, or would expect to find more essential indecency and
immorality in that village than in a modern city. What one would
expect to find would be marriages between physically well-developed
men and women.

How the race moves on is shown in the famous tale of a saintly Zen
priest which I first heard in that little hill inn but was afterwards
to see in dramatic form on the stage of a Tokyo theatre. An unmarried