The Days of a Man C1900 



by our little inn. As we took Ebisu for patron saint, 

 I shall here tell something about him. 

 Ehisu, the His name (spelled with a bow and arrow in Chinese 

 fisher god i(jeograph) is said to indicate an outlander, a bar- 

 barian perhaps, certainly an unsophisticate knowing 

 only outdoor things. In any event he was banished 

 by his father, the demigod Oanamuchi, to a lone, 

 mist-covered island — Oshima, no doubt — to die of 

 starvation. But instead he went a-fishing up and 

 down the sandy shore, and his mother whispered 

 through the soft warm wind of the Kuro Shio :^ " Catch 

 fish, my son; by fishing shalt thou be made a man." 

 The sea was rife, the catch boundless, and fishermen 

 then hailed Ebisu as their luck god. But soon he 

 hungered for rice, which even demigods crave with 

 raw fish. So, bearing a big red tai ^ or snapper under 

 his arm, he wandered far afield till he found Daikoku, 



lain. In this system most vowels are sounded as in Italian. however, as in 

 French, may be long or short but is usually long, as in Yokohama. long, 

 largely used as a prefix or honorific, means great; short o means small. Thus 

 oshima with short o is a small island; otaki, with long o, a great waterfall, otaki, 

 with short a small one. 



Short i and short u are inserted for the purpose of keeping two conso- 

 nants apart, or to prevent a word from ending in a consonant — n being the 

 only one which may terminate a word. These short letters are practically silent 

 like the first and the third e in the French bouleversement. Ai, the only diph- 

 thong, is sounded like the English i in pine. In ei, the vowels are always sounded 

 separately. Final e is never silent, having the value of ay in bay. / is zh, or 

 the French / in bijou. 



G, always hard, has rather the force of ng when followed by a vowel. Thus 

 Nagasaki is pronounced Na-ngasaki. This confusing arrangement, adopted 

 throughout the Pacific, was presumably intended to distinguish the Japanese 

 sound from the more guttural terminal ng so common in China. 



No is the sign of the genitive, and follows the noun to which it refers; e, 

 picture, shima, island, hence Enoshima. Words are compounded much as in 

 the Greek except that the first letter of the second word may be changed for 

 euphony; thus, kaiva, river, ogawa, great river; yu, hot water, taki, falls, yudaki, 

 falls of hot water. Syllabic accent or stress is practically wanting as in 

 French. 



1 " Black Current," the Gulf Stream of Japan. 



2 Pagrosomus major, the "national fish" of Japan. 



C i8 1 



