Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/21



APAN'S victorious war with the neighbouring Empire in 1894-1895 showed the world that she was something more than a kind of pretty toy country, where the trivial tourist might enjoy the sight of people using paper pocket-handkerchiefs, feeding themselves with two sticks instead of a knife and fork, and living in houses without windows; and where the dilettante might find art treasures as charming as they were novel. Up to the eve of that war, the average European or American bestowed upon her no more attention than he accorded to some new phenomenon in the world of physics. A sentiment of curiosity, perhaps academical, perhaps ethnographical, but certainly languid, was awakened in his breast by the intelligence that an Oriental nation had undertaken not merely to discard its Oriental garments, but also to prove that they had always been a misfit. He watched the result much as he would have watched the experiments of a horticulturist seeking