ABSTRACT
A huge drum, six feet tall, beats time, now missing a syllable, now beating with the measure of the lines. As they repeat this chant twenty-one times, familiarity distorting the true pronunciation of the words, the four hundred Tenri faithful move their hands in supple wristy circles. Shoeless, they kneel and rest back on their heels on the vast floor of bamboo matting, its odour of musty hay hanging pleasantly on the air even though the wide shutters that line the walls of the shrine have all been drawn back. Only one in ten does not wear the distinctive happi coat of the Tenri faith; the happi reaches to the waist and is made of a coarse cotton material, as black as an academic gown; like the gown, the older it gets the greener and soupier it becomes. On the back are three characters in bold white—Ten-ri-kyō—‘Religion of Divine Wisdom’, and characters on the lapel indicate the believer's branch church. The bamboo matting may well constitute the largest such floor in Yamato; if it does not, some other floor among the vast buildings of Tenri's headquarters no doubt does, for the Japanese gape gullibly at anything described as ‘the oldest wooden gateway’ or the ‘tallest concrete torii in the world’, and Tenri's authorities are not unaware of the pull of such rarities and lavishness. Over the floor rises a broad tiled roof, the sweep of its slope matching that of the thatch of the villages farther up in the hills at the base of which Tenri nestles. The style of Japan's roofs varies considerably by locality and those of Yamato are known for the steepness of their slope which may sometimes be as acute as seventy-five degrees.
