Indeed, so far improved off the face of the earth are they, that some are already matters of memory or archaeology, and their very existence even in former days is nearly or wholly incredible to the generation born since 1868--when Old Japan began to vanish in dissolving views and New Japan to emerge.

What the author has seen with his own eyes, would amaze many Japanese born since 1868 and the readers of the rhapsodies of tourists who study Japan from the _jin-riki-sha_.

Phases of tree and serpent worship are still quite common, and will be probably for generations to come; but the phallic shrines and emblems abolished by the government in 1872 have been so far invisible to most living travellers and natives, that their once general existence and use are now scarcely suspected.
Even profound scholars of the Japanese language and literature whose work dates from after the year 1872 have scarcely suspected the universality of phallic worship.

Yet what we could say of this cult and its emblems, especially in treating of Shint[=o], the special ethnic faith of Japan, would be from sight of our own eyes besides the testimony of many witnesses.[20] The cultus has been known in the Japanese archipelago from Riu Kin to Yezo.

Despite official edicts of abolition it is still secretly practised by the "heathen," the _inaka_ of Japan.