Japan and the Japanese

802 JAPAN. A. D. 1C90 1092.
bundles of straw, or cut white paper, tied to a long string, in form
of fringes, as a mark of the purity and sanctity of the place. The
most magnificent gates stand Wore the temples of Tcnsiodai '//, of
Fatzman, and of that Kami, or god, whom particular places choose
to worship as their tutelar deity, who takes a more particular care
to protect and defend them.*
" Other religious objects travellers meet with along the roads,
are the Fotoge, or foreign idols, chiefly those of A HI Ida and Ditisoo,
as also other monstrous images and idols, which we found upon the
highways in several places, at the turning in of sideways, near
bridges, convents, temples, and other buildings. They arc set
i.p
partly as an ornament to the place, partly to remind travellers of
the devotion and worship due to the gods. For this same purpose,
drawings of the.-e idols, printed upon entire or half sheets of paper,
sire pasted upon the gates of cities and villages, upon wooden posts,
near bridges, upon the proclamation-cases above described, and in
several other places upon the highway, which stand the most ex-
posed to the traveller's view. Travellers, however, are not obliged
to fall down before them, or to pay them any other mark of wor-
ship and respect than they are otherwise willing to do.
" On the doors and houses of ordinary people (for men of quality
peldom suffer to have theirs thus
disfigured)
there is commonly
pasted a sorry picture of one of their Lares, or house gods, printed
upon a half sheet of paper. The most common is the black-horned
Giicon, otherwise called Grjd-su Ten Oo that is, according to
the literal signification of the Chinese characters for this name,
t)ie ox-hfd'h'd prince of heaven whom they believe to have the
power of keeping the family from distempers, and other unlucky
* According to a memorandum annexed to the Japanese, map already
mentioned, there were in .Japan twenty-seven thousand seven hundred
Kami temples, one hundred and twenty-two thousand five hundred and
eighty Buddhist temple*, in all forty-nine thousand two hundred and eighty.
By the census of 1X.">0, there were in the United States thirty-eight thousand
one hundred and eighty-three buildings used for religious worship.
It would appear tint though the Sinto temples did not want worshippers
who freely contributed alms to the support of the priests, yet that since the
abolition ot the Catholic worship, and as a sort of security against it, every
Japanese was required to enroll himself as or observance.
belonging to some Buddhist sect