10 Field Museum of Natural History 



are chopped and eaten. On the seventh, the seven 

 spring grasses (nanakusa) , which have been gathered 

 by the young girls, are chopped to a certain incantation 

 and then cooked together. On the fourteenth day, the 

 pine and bamboo sprouts placed at either side of the 

 doorway are burned, and thus closes the celebration of 

 a festival of which this is merely a brief outline. 



Two prominent features of the New Year's celebra- 

 tion are the many-formed and elaborate kites which 

 are flown the first half of the first month by the boys, 

 and the battledore and shuttlecock sets which are the 

 pride of the girls. The battle boards, often of excellent 

 workmanship, are made of fine kiri wood and padded 

 on one side with bright silks into a raised portrait of a 

 famous actor or hero in history. The shuttlecock is 

 made of the seed of the soapberry (mukuroji) plumed 

 with five feathers at one end. The penalty for letting 

 the shuttlecock touch the ground is a black smudge on 

 the face. 



Dolls, stilts, balls, and ropes are used much as in 

 our own country, though boys do the rope jumping, 

 and girls play with the hand ball and show great dex- 

 terity in catching it, as they pirouette between strik- 

 ing it downward to the ground. Ropes are used in 

 different tests of strength, waist pulling or neck pull- 

 ing with a loop of rope as the medium. The games 

 represented in this series of surimono are as fol- 

 lows : — 



Go, the most popular game of the Japanese, played 

 upon a board with nineteen straight lines crossing one 

 another, at right angles, making 361 crosses on which 

 the game is played. There are 180 white and 181 black 

 stones used in the playing. 



Sugo-roku ("double-sixes") is backgammon played 



[10] 



