On the 12th of December we had to leave for Hiōgo in order to see what preparations were being made there for the great event. We found that the people were in high spirits at the prospect of the opening of the port. In Kōbé, where the foreign settlement was to be, there had been seven days of feasting and merry-making, and there had been processions of people dressed in red crape with carts which were supposed to carry earth for the site of the new settlement. Similar fêtes were in prospect in the town of Hiōgo itself. The people obviously saw that foreign trade would spell prosperity for them. When we got back to Ōsaka on the 13th, we found the city in an uproar of joy and excitement. It appeared that all this was in honour of a miraculous shower which had recently taken place of slips of paper bearing the titles of the Gods of Isé—the ancestral shrine of Old Japan and the chief place of the Shintō cult. Thousands and thousands of happy fanatics were dancing along the streets dressed in holiday garb of red and blue crape and carrying red lanterns on their heads, shouting till they must have been hoarse, “I ja nai ka, i ja nai ka!” “How delightful, how delightful!” The houses were decorated with many-coloured cakes, oranges, silken bags, emblematic ropes of straw such as are hung before the Shintō shrines, and a profusion of flowers. It was a weird and wonderful sight, such as, maybe, will never be seen again; and yet folk-lore and old reverences die hard. Even though all this should be _mukashi_, as much so as the mysteries of Stonehenge are to us, one may hope that it may yet have some life in it. “Le respect du passé est la piété filiale des peuples,” was a fine saying of the Duc de Broglie; one which, in these degenerate days, I never weary of quoting, and we foreigners must not forget what the Japanese owe to the Yamato Damashii, the spirit of old Japan. It is upon the legends of the Shintō that it is founded. Then let the simple folk, “the hundred names,” dance like David before the Ark, in honour of showers of paper, for to them they mean the sacred traditions of a glorious past, and upon these is based a heroism before which the world has bowed its head in admiration. No sooner were we back in Ōsaka than the old political conversations began again. Satsuma, Chōshiu, Tosa, Uwajima and Geishiu were solid for a change; other Daimios inclined to join, but vacillating. One thing we were clearly given to understand: if the intrigues now going on at Kiōto failed, the Daimios would revert to the old game of murderous attacks upon foreigners, not from any dislike of foreign intercourse, of which they were indeed in favour, but simply in order to embroil the Tycoon with the Treaty Powers. The obvious answer to this was that whatever might happen in that way, the Tycoon could not be held responsible for the action of persons over whom he, as they admitted, had no control!