Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/17



the Orient is a surprise to the Occidental. Everything is strange, with a certain unreality that makes one doubt half his sensations. To appreciate Japan one should come to it from the main-land of Asia. From Suez to Nagasaki the Asiatic sits dumb and contented in his dirt, rags, ignorance, and wretchedness. After the muddy rivers, dreary flats, and brown hills of China, after the desolate shores of Korea, with their unlovely and unwashed peoples, Japan is a dream of Paradise, beautiful from the first green island off the coast to the last picturesque hill-top. The houses seem toys, their inhabitants dolls, whose manner of life is clean, pretty, artistic, and distinctive.

There is a greater difference between the people of these idyllic islands and of the two countries to westward, than between the physical characteristics of the three kingdoms; and one recognizes the Japanese as the fine flower of the Orient, the most polite, refined, and æsthetic of races, happy, light-hearted, friendly, and attractive.

The bold and irregular coast is rich in color, the perennial green of the hill-side is deep and soft, and the perfect cone of Fujiyama against the sky completes the landscape, grown so familiar on fan, lantern, box, and 1