Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan Read Free

calligraphy relating how words written by
holy experts became incarnate, and descended from their tablets to hold.
converse with mankind.
Sec. 3
    My kurumaya calls himself 'Cha.' He has a white hat which looks like the
top of an enormous mushroom; a short blue wide-sleeved jacket; blue
drawers, close-fitting as 'tights,' and reaching to his ankles; and
light straw sandals bound upon his bare feet with cords of palmetto-
fibre. Doubtless he typifies all the patience, endurance, and insidious
coaxing powers of his class. He has already manifested his power to make
me give him more than the law allows; and I have been warned against him
in vain. For the first sensation of having a human being for a horse,
trotting between shafts, unwearyingly bobbing up and down before you for
hours, is alone enough to evoke a feeling of compassion. And when this
human being, thus trotting between shafts, with all his hopes, memories,
sentiments, and comprehensions, happens to have the gentlest smile, and
the power to return the least favour by an apparent display of infinite
gratitude, this compassion becomes sympathy, and provokes unreasoning
impulses to self-sacrifice. I think the sight of the profuse
perspiration has also something to do with the feeling, for it makes one
think of the cost of heart-beats and muscle-contractions, likewise of
chills, congestions, and pleurisy. Cha's clothing is drenched; and he
mops his face with a small sky-blue towel, with figures of bamboo-sprays
and sparrows in white upon it, which towel he carries wrapped about his
wrist as he runs.
    That, however, which attracts me in Cha—Cha considered not as a motive
power at all, but as a personality—I am rapidly learning to discern in
the multitudes of faces turned toward us as we roll through these
miniature streets. And perhaps the supremely pleasurable impression of
this morning is that produced by the singular gentleness of popular
scrutiny. Everybody looks at you curiously; but there is never anything
disagreeable, much less hostile in the gaze: most commonly it is
accompanied by a smile or half smile. And the ultimate consequence of
all these kindly curious looks and smiles is that the stranger finds
himself thinking of fairy-land. Hackneyed to the degree of provocation
this statement no doubt is: everybody describing the sensations of his
first Japanese day talks of the land as fairyland, and of its people as
fairy-folk. Yet there is a natural reason for this unanimity in choice
of terms to describe what is almost impossible to describe more
accurately at the first essay. To find one's self suddenly in a world
where everything is upon a smaller and daintier scale than with us—a
world of lesser and seemingly kindlier beings, all smiling at you as if
to wish you well—a world where all movement is slow and soft, and
voices are hushed—a world where land, life, and sky are unlike all
that one has known elsewhere—this is surely the realisation, for
imaginations nourished with English folklore, of the old dream of a
World of Elves.
Sec. 4
    The traveller who enters suddenly into a period of social change—
especially change from a feudal past to a democratic present—is likely
to regret the decay of things beautiful and the ugliness of things new.
What of both I may yet discover in Japan I know not; but to-day, in
these exotic streets, the old and the new mingle so well that one seems
to set off the other. The line of tiny white telegraph poles carrying
the world's news to papers printed in a mixture of Chinese and Japanese
characters; an electric bell in some tea-house with an Oriental riddle
of text pasted beside the ivory button, a shop of American sewing-
machines next to the shop of a maker of Buddhist images; the
establishment of a photographer beside the establishment of a
manufacturer of straw sandals: all these present no striking
incongruities, for each sample of Occidental innovation is set into an
Oriental frame that seems adaptable to any