Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/11



aim of this small book is to present, in outline sketches only, something of the Japan of to-day, as it appeared to a tourist who was a foreign resident as well. No one person can see it all, nor comprehend it, as the jinrikisha speeds through city streets and country roads, nor do any two people enjoy just the same experiences or draw the same conclusions as to this remarkable people.

The scientists, scholars, and specialists who have written so fully of Japan, have necessarily omitted many of those less important phases of life which yet leave the pleasantest impressions on less serious minds. The books of ten or twenty years ago hardly describe the country that a visitor now finds, and in another decade the present aspect will have greatly changed. Bewildered by its novelty and strangeness, too many tourists come and go with little knowledge of the Japan of the Japanese, and, beholding only the modernized sea-ports and the capital, miss the unique and distinctively national sights and experiences that lie close at hand.

This unassuming chronicle is the outcome of two v