Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan Read Free Page A

picture. But on the first
day, at least, the Old alone is new for the stranger, and suffices to
absorb his attention. It then appears to him that everything Japanese is
delicate, exquisite, admirable—even a pair of common wooden chopsticks
in a paper bag with a little drawing upon it; even a package of
toothpicks of cherry-wood, bound with a paper wrapper wonderfully
lettered in three different colours; even the little sky-blue towel,
with designs of flying sparrows upon it, which the jinricksha man uses
to wipe his face. The bank bills, the commonest copper coins, are things
of beauty. Even the piece of plaited coloured string used by the
shopkeeper in tying up your last purchase is a pretty curiosity.
Curiosities and dainty objects bewilder you by their very multitude: on
either side of you, wherever you turn your eyes, are countless wonderful
things as yet incomprehensible.
    But it is perilous to look at them. Every time you dare to look,
something obliges you to buy it—unless, as may often happen, the
smiling vendor invites your inspection of so many varieties of one
article, each specially and all unspeakably desirable, that you flee
away out of mere terror at your own impulses. The shopkeeper never asks
you to buy; but his wares are enchanted, and if you once begin buying
you are lost. Cheapness means only a temptation to commit bankruptcy;
for the resources of irresistible artistic cheapness are inexhaustible.
The largest steamer that crosses the Pacific could not contain what you
wish to purchase. For, although you may not, perhaps, confess the fact
to yourself, what you really want to buy is not the contents of a shop;
you want the shop and the shopkeeper, and streets of shops with their
draperies and their inhabitants, the whole city and the bay and the
mountains begirdling it, and Fujiyama's white witchery overhanging it in
the speckless sky, all Japan, in very truth, with its magical trees and
luminous atmosphere, with all its cities and towns and temples, and
forty millions of the most lovable people in the universe.
    Now there comes to my mind something I once heard said by a practical
American on hearing of a great fire in Japan: 'Oh! those people can
afford fires; their houses are so cheaply built.' It is true that the
frail wooden houses of the common people can be cheaply and quickly
replaced; but that which was within them to make them beautiful cannot—
and every fire is an art tragedy. For this is the land of infinite hand-
made variety; machinery has not yet been able to introduce sameness and
utilitarian ugliness in cheap production (except in response to foreign
demand for bad taste to suit vulgar markets), and each object made by
the artist or artisan differs still from all others, even of his own
making. And each time something beautiful perishes by fire, it is a
something representing an individual idea.
    Happily the art impulse itself, in this country of conflagrations, has a
vitality which survives each generation of artists, and defies the flame
that changes their labour to ashes or melts it to shapelessness. The
idea whose symbol has perished will reappear again in other creations—
perhaps after the passing of a century—modified, indeed, yet
recognisably of kin to the thought of the past. And every artist is a
ghostly worker. Not by years of groping and sacrifice does he find his
highest expression; the sacrificial past is within 'him; his art is an
inheritance; his fingers are guided by the dead in the delineation of a
flying bird, of the vapours of mountains, of the colours of the morning
and the evening, of the shape of branches and the spring burst of
flowers: generations of skilled workmen have given him their cunning,
and revive in the wonder of his drawing. What was conscious effort in
the beginning became unconscious in later centuries—becomes almost
automatic in the living man,—becomes the art instinctive. Wherefore,
one coloured print by a Hokusai or Hiroshige, originally