CHAPTER XXXV 



THE GAME FISHES OF JAPAN, CHINA AND 

 THE PHILIPPINES 



' You strange, astonished-looking, angle-faced. 

 Dreary-mouthed, gaping wretches of the sea. 

 Gulping salt water everlastingly. 



Cold-blooded, though with red your blood be graced. 

 And mute, though dwellers in the roaring waste.' 



Leigh Huml. 



I!N" the garden of a great Prince of Japan, poised on a wooden 

 base over a beautiful miniature lake, is a gigantic and 

 grotesque fist, wMcb must weigh a ton, possibly several. As to its 

 significance, or what it means, I do not know, but there it is ; 

 and of all peoples the Japanese are the only ones who seem to 

 have thought the fishes of enough importance to enshrine a 

 statue of a fish as the central point of a most beautiful estate. 



I fancy this fish was caught by Ebisu himself and placed here 

 in his honour, as it is just about the sort of fish one would imagine 

 Ebisu would land, if he landed anything. My reason for so 

 thinking, is that Ebisu was the very oldest fisherman of whom 

 we know anything. He told fish stories twenty-five hundred 

 or more years ago. 



We can go farther back even than Ebisu to his father, who 

 was one Oanamuchi, who lived by the seashore off which there 

 was a large island, hke the Isle of Wight or the Isle of Man ; only 

 this particular island had tall mountains whose crests were hidden 

 in the clouds most of the time. For something, possibly exagger- 

 ation on the high seas, Ebisu was sent or banished to Oshima, 

 where he was expected to die of starvation ; but he went fishing 

 instead, and became so wonderful an angler that he even refused 



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