Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 6.djvu/76

 honour of plum flowers, and suspended from the branches of favourite trees in the groves to which all classes of the people flock at this season.

Battle-board and shuttlecock, kite-flying and archery, have been spoken of here as sports con- sidered specially appropriate to the New Year; but there are other games which, though not limited to any particular period, are naturally played with exceptional zest at that time. Football used to be one of them; but the old-fashioned ke-mari, imported from China a dozen centuries ago, has now been completely ousted by its Occidental representative. The essence of the sport, as practised in China and Japan, was to kick the ball as high as possible and to keep it always in flight. There were no goals, no organised systems of assault and defence, and the pastime was essentially aristocratic. Hand-ball (te-mari) is the corresponding amusement of the gentle sex. The reader must not imagine anything in the nature of English "fives." Hand-ball, as the Japanese girl plays it, is a combination of refined dexterity and graceful movement. The ball is struck perpendicularly on the ground, and the player performs a complete pirouette in time to strike it again as it rebounds. Sometimes she meets it at the summit of its bound and arrests it for a second on the back of her fingers before reversing her hand and striking the ball downward again preparatory to a new pirouette; sometimes she makes it leap so high that she can