Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/139

 could be allowed to touch her. Countess Ito, the clever wife of the premier, and leader of foreign fashions at court, was finally chosen as lay figure, to be fitted until a model could be made. The Empress now wears European dress altogether, conduct little short of heroic for one accustomed only to the loose, simple, and comfortable garments of her country. Her gowns are made of Japanese fabrics, and a lace school under her patronage supplies her with flounces and trimmings. At indoor state ceremonies, low bodices and court trains are prescribed, and the Empress wears a tiara, riviere, and innumerable ornaments of diamonds. The court ladies, who formerly wore no ornaments but the single long hair-pin and the gold balls and trifles on the obi cord, have been seized by a truly American craze for diamonds, and greatly covet the new Order with cordon and jewelled star lately established by the Empress.

In adopting the expensive foreign dress court ladies ruthlessly sacrificed irreplaceable heirlooms of rich old brocades and embroideries. For a long time their countenances and mien betrayed the discomfort of the new dress, but they soon acquired ease with familiarity, and no Japanese woman, in her first Parisian gown, was ever such a burlesque and caricature as are the foreign visitors who essay the kimono, and, blind to the ridiculous, are photographed with its folds and fulness all awry. Only two foreign women have I ever seen who could wear Japanese dress gracefully in the Japanese way, with full regard to the meaning which each color, fold, pucker, and cord implies.

Asahiko, the Empress Dowager, one of the Kujo family of kuges, and of Fujiwara descent, has her separate palace and court, where old customs are followed. Born in 1834, she lives by the traditional code, and the use of a landau with liveried and cockaded men on the box is almost her only concession to the new order. She never 123