y has its
special food and its special festival duty. For the first three days the
very best clothes in the wardrobe are worn by everybody, then till the
seventh the second best, and from the seventh to the end of the month
new clothes, though not the very best, must be worn. Within the first
seven days every man in Japan is expected to call on all his friends and
acquaintances, but the women, probably out of consideration for the many
duties that the festival season puts upon them, are given until March to
finish up their New Year's calls.

The streets of the cities, and even of the small villages, are full of
life and interest for a week or two. _Kurumayas_ in their new winter
liveries trundle around fathers and mothers and happy children. All
manner of mummers, musicians, and dancers go from house to house in
search of custom. The _manzai_, who, with dances and songs and strange
grimaces, undertake to drive out from your house for the new year all
the devils who may have been residing there hitherto, are a special
feature of this season. In every garden and in the public streets little
girls, their faces freshly covered with white paint, their shining black
hair newly dressed, their wing-sleeved kimonos gorgeous with many
colors, play battledore and shuttlecock, toss small bags half filled
with rice, or pat balls wound with shining silk to the accompaniment of
a weird little chant. For the boys there are kites of many shapes and
colors, or tops that they spin under every one's feet, well knowing that
no one in Japan is too busy to turn aside for a child's pleasure. The
very horses--small, shock-headed, evil-tempered beasts, who drag
tremendous loads with many snorts and snaps at their masters--are decked
out with gay streamers that reach nearly to the ground, at the ends of
which are tinkling bells. The festival season closes on the fifteenth
and sixteenth with a visit to the temple of Yemma, the god of hell, and
with a holiday for all the apprentices.

Next to the New Year's holiday, perhaps the most important festival of
the Japanese year is _O Bon_, the Feast of the Dead. This is, in its
present form, a Buddhist institution, but in spirit it fitted so exactly
into the ancient Japanese ideas of the tastes and habits of departed
spirits that it merely supplanted the old Shint[=o] feasts of the dead,
and it is a little difficult to-day to determine whether its observance
is more Buddhist or Shint[=o] in its characte