Sec. 8 KITZUKI, July 25th. At the Oho-yashiro it is the annual festival of the God of Scholarship, the God of Calligraphy--Tenjin. Here in Kitzuki, the festival of the Divine Scribe, the Tenjin-Matsuri, is still observed according to the beautiful old custom which is being forgotten elsewhere. Long ranges of temporary booths have been erected within the outer court of the temple; and in these are suspended hundreds of long white tablets, bearing specimens of calligraphy. Every schoolboy in Kitzuki has a sample of his best writing on exhibition. The texts are written only in Chinese characters--not in hirakana or katakana--and are mostly drawn from the works of Confucius or Mencius.
To me this display of ideographs seems a marvellous thing of beauty--almost a miracle, indeed, since it is all the work of very, very young boys. Rightly enough, the word 'to write' (kaku) in Japanese signifies also to 'paint' in the best artistic sense. I once had an opportunity of studying the result of an attempt to teach English children the art of writing Japanese. These children were instructed by a Japanese writing-master; they sat upon the same bench with Japanese pupils of their own age, beginners likewise. But they could never learn like the Japanese children. The ancestral tendencies within them rendered vain the efforts of the instructor to teach them the secret of a shapely stroke with the brush. It is not the Japanese boy alone who writes; the fingers of the dead move his brush, guide his strokes.
Beautiful, however, as this writing seems to me, it is far from winning the commendation of my Japanese companion, himself a much experienced teacher. 'The greater part of this work,' he declares, 'is very bad.' While I am still bewildered by this sweeping criticism, he points out to me one tablet inscribed with rather small characters, adding: 'Only that is tolerably good.'
'Why,' I venture to observe, 'that one would seem to have cost much less trouble; the characters are so small.'
'Oh, the size of the characters has nothing to do with the matter,' interrupts the master, 'it is a question of form.'
'Then I cannot understand. What you call very bad seems to me exquisitely beautiful.'