3-078-015 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Street sketches in Tokio, Japan: Shinto priest in full costume, 1890. 'The city of Tokio, formerly called Yedo,...has three quarters of a million inhabitants...Our Illustrations, furnished by an amateur photographer, Mr. Chas. J. S. Makin, show street life, the figures and costumes of different industrial classes, who are met everywhere in the throng of city folk...Buddhism and Shintoism, the two religions followed by the nation...have, in reality, become very much intermingled, and the actual number of believers in the one faith or the other, in all its purity, is very few. The outward distinctive signs between the two faiths are very pronounced. The Shinto worship is that of the mythical ancestors, princes, heroes, saints, and sages of the nation, associated with the deification of heaven and earth, the sun and moon, the air, water, and fire, but its temples have no idols, and its precepts are those of Confucian morality. The Shinto priests neither shave their heads nor wear a special dress, except when going to perform their rites in the temple; and they are not celibate monks. Their office is hereditary in certain Japanese families'. From "Illustrated London News", 1890.