The Old Look

Beneath the twin rows of cypresses that lead up to Tokyo's Meiji Shrine, an old Japanese farmer paused last week to explain his year-end pilgrimage. "The people's feelings are settling down," the farmer said. "From now on it will be best for us to be what we really are--Japanese." In Tokyo a Japanese editorial writer echoed the sentiment more formally: "The whole nation is searching for its lost pride." Last week the search was in full swing.

All Japan pulled wooden shutters over store fronts and quit offices to celebrate Osho Gatsu, the Japanese New Year. For five days virtually all work stopped while millions of Japanese slipped back into kimonos, and women spent painful hours at their beauty shops getting their hair pulled and greased in the old-fashioned style, now worn mostly by geisha girls. Although Japanese have celebrated Osho Gatsu for centuries, never since the war have so many poured out to the ancient Shinto shrines.

More than 2,700,000 Japanese visited the shrine of the Emperor Meiji (Hirohito's grandfather). Five hundred thousand padded to the Yasukuni Shrine, above which the souls of Japan's war dead are said to hover, and clapped hands respectfully to get the souls' attention. Amid the wooded hills of Ise, southwest of Tokyo, 360,000 worshiped at the Grand Shrines of Shintoism.

Among the worshipers at Ise, in striped trousers and cutaway, was Japan's new Premier Ichiro Hatoyama, full of the knowledge that his nationalist pronouncements had done much to stimulate Japan's search for its old look. Hatoyama is the first Prime Minister to make the pilgrimage since the Japanese surrender; he did so in defiance of Article 20 of the MacArthur constitution, which lays down that "the state and its organs shall refrain from . . . religious activity." And although Hatoyama himself is a Christian, fond of caroling hymns like The Old Rugged Cross, he solemnly reported his appointment to Amaterasu O-mikami, the sun goddess who, Shintoists believe, passed the divine right of succession to the present imperial family.

The partially crippled Hatoyama hobbled painfully up to a white pine altar at the entrance to the shrine, closed his eyes, bowed his head and paid silent attention to the sun goddess--and, in doing so, paid heed also to the votes of Japanese nationalists in the forthcoming general elections.

As Hatoyama clambered back into his black Cadillac, a reporter asked him why he had come to Ise. Answered Hatoyama without hesitation: "As a renovation of popular sentiment."

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