Autumn succeeds. Momiji-Yama, or Maple Mountain, deeply mantled in myriads of reddening leaves, gives the cue to the now melancholy, almost stationary languor of gliding figures: no longer dragon-flies or humming-birds, they drift slowly, one by one, into the crimson gorge, and are lost among the maple-leaves. At this point the floral march of the seasons is abruptly broken, as if to forbid too hasty interpretation, by the fall of tricolour curtains, richly embroidered in scarlet, blue, and gold with Hideyoshi’s crest, the large fan-like leaf of the _Pawlonia Imperialis_.
The five-storeyed pagoda of Omuro Gosho, outlined in snow against the wintry landscape, signalises an ascent from temporal to eternal beauty. To this monastic palace ex-mikados came after abdication; it had no abbots but those of imperial blood. And the next scene, presenting the Daibutsu, or great Buddha of Hideyoshi, is elegantly illustrative of the Buddhist teaching of permanence in transition. The first wooden image, 160 feet high, erected by the Taiko in 1588, was destroyed by earthquake in 1596. After his death his widow constructed a second in bronze, which was almost completed save for the casting of the head when fire devoured it in 1603. Lastly, his son, Hideyori, persuaded by perfidious Ieyaysu to waste his substance in rearing a yet more colossal figure, was forbidden to consecrate it by a message from the Shōgun, who chose to discover in the Chinese inscription on the bell (“On the east I welcome the bright moon, on the west I bid farewell to the setting sun”) a prophecy of his own waning and Hideyoshi’s waxing radiance. A second earthquake in 1662, corrosive lightnings in 1775 and 1798, consumed successive Buddhas in the same shrine, but the present god, whose gilded head and shoulders alone are visible, scaling fifty-eight feet from ground to ceiling, has defied the strokes of fate for ninety-nine years, and recalls to pious beholders the original builder’s piety, triumphant at last through the irresistible resurrection of deity.
Resurrection--the recurrence of spring and the renovation of fame--crowns the final movement of this transcendental ballet. The Hideyoshi monument, as it partly is and wholly shall be, rises tier above tier on heaven-scaling stairs, approached by temples and groves which will one day vie in splendour with the carven gateways, the gigantic cryptomerias of Nikkō. In a joyous finale the dancers pose, wreathed about the central summit of the monument, while cascades of red and green fire play on them from the wings; then, strewing the steps with cherry-blossom and waving provocative clusters in the faces of the spectators as they pass, the double stream of geisha flows back with graceful whirls and eddies between banks of deafening minstrelsy; the curtains rustle down, the fires flicker out; the Miyako-odori is no more.