Tete poppo,
Kaka poppo,
tete.

No European dove has such a cry. He who can hear, for the first time,
the voice of the yamabato without feeling a new sensation at his heart
little deserves to dwell in this happy world.

Yet all this--the old katchiu-yashiki and its gardens--will doubtless
have vanished for ever before many years. Already a multitude of
gardens, more spacious and more beautiful than mine, have been converted
into rice-fields or bamboo groves; and the quaint Izumo city, touched at
last by some long-projected railway line--perhaps even within the
present decade--will swell, and change, and grow commonplace, and demand
these grounds for the building of factories and mills. Not from here
alone, but from all the land the ancient peace and the ancient charm
seem doomed to pass away. For impermanency is the nature of things, more
particularly in Japan; and the changes and the changers shall also be
changed until there is found no place for them--and regret is vanity.
The dead art that made the beauty of this place was the art, also, of
that faith to which belongs the all-consoling text, 'Verily, even plants
and trees, rocks and stones, all shall enter into Nirvana.'


Chapter Two The Household Shrine

1

IN Japan there are two forms of the Religion of the Dead--that which
belongs to Shinto; and that which belongs to Buddhism. The first is the