Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/46

 relations with a Japanese is to invite him to dinner. The Japanese cannot return the compliment. It is not his custom to invite friends to dinner, and he has no special arrangements for entertaining them otherwise. Thus there has grown up among foreigners residing in Japan a resentful conviction that access to Japanese family life is denied to them as a result of social prejudice, whereas the truth is that if they could adopt the customs of Japan, they would be welcome to enjoy her domestic hospitality. That is a matter apart, however. The point immediately interesting is that, whatever the sanitary defects of the Japanese style of building, to exchange it for the European or American style would involve a radical alteration in the life of its inmates. No signs of such a result are yet apparent. If a Japanese is sufficiently wealthy to build for himself a house of western form, he takes care that there shall be a Japanese annex which is his real home, the other serving merely for use on special occasions.

It was in the Tokugawa epoch that allegorical signboards for shops came into use. Thus a purveyor of bean-soup painted over his door a picture of the spoon used in mixing the soup; bath-houses indicate their trade by a bow and an arrow, because iru, to "shoot," is homonymous with iru, to "enter a bath," and bakers of sweet potatoes wrote up the ideographs hachi-ri-han (eight and a half Japanese miles), because kuri (nine miles) means also a "chestnut," and the