[152] Within historic times at least, divination would not seem to have been much used in warfare,--certainly not to the extent that it was used by the Greek and Roman armies. The greatest Japanese captains,--such as Hideyoshi and Nobunaga--were decidedly irreverent as to omens. Probably the Japanese, at an early period of their long military history, learned by experience that the general who conducts his campaign according to omens must always be at a hopeless disadvantage in dealing with a skilful enemy who cares nothing about omens. Among the ancient popular forms of divination which still survive, the most commonly practised in households is divination by dry rice. For the public, Chinese divination is still in great favour; but it is interesting to observe that the Japanese fortune-teller invariably invokes the Shinto gods before consulting his Chinese books, and maintains a Shinto shrine in his reception-room. [153] We have seen that the developments of ancestor-worship in Japan present remarkable analogies with the developments of ancestor-worship in ancient Europe,--especially in regard to the public cult, with its obligatory rites of purification. But Shinto seems nevertheless to represent conditions of ancestor-worship less developed than those which we are accustomed to associate with early Greek and Roman life; and the coercion which it exercised appears to have been proportionally more rigid. The existence of the individual worshipper was ordered not merely in relation to the family and the community, but even in relation to inanimate things. Whatever his occupation might be, some god presided over it; whatever tools he might use, they had to be used in such manner as tradition prescribed for all admitted to the craft-cult. It was necessary that the carpenter should so perform his work as to honour the deity of carpenters,--that the smith should fulfil his daily task so as to honour the god of the bellows,--that the farmer should never fail in respect to the earth-god, and the food-god, and the scare-crow god, and the spirits of the trees--about his habitation. Even the domestic utensils were sacred: the servant could not dare to forget the presence of the deities of the cooking-range, the hearth, the cauldron, the brazier,--or the supreme necessity of keeping the fire pure. The professions, not less [154] than the trades, were under divine patronage: the physician, the teacher, the artist--each had his religious duties to observe, his special traditions to obey. The scholar, for example, could not dare to treat his writing-implements with disrespect, or put written paper to vulgar uses: such conduct would offend the god of calligraphy. Nor were women ruled less religiously than men in their various occupations: the spinners and weaving-maidens were bound to revere the Weaving-goddess and the Goddess of Silkworms; the sewing-girl was taught to respect her needles; and in all homes there was observed a