Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/391

 color seems to leave the Japanese when they use foreign materials. The people who have all their lives wrought and used and worn the most harmonious combinations of color in their garments and household goods, will execute monstrosities in Berlin wools in place of the rich old fukusa, and combine the crudest and most hostile hues with unconcern. The very use of foreign furnishings or utensils seems to abate the national rage for cleanliness, and in any tea-house that aspires to be conducted in foreign fashion, one discovers a dust, disorder, shabbiness, and want of care that is wholly un-Japanese.

Nor in other ways has contact with foreigners wrought good to these people. Conservative families have been mortified and humiliated by what seems to them the roughness and vulgarity of the manners of their sons and daughters who had been educated abroad. Many gentlemen even, in Tokio, long refused their daughters a foreign education for this reason. The mission-schools for girls found it necessary to engage masters of cha no yu and of native deportment and etiquette, to instruct the pupils ill their charge. Among the lower classes the decay of courtesy, under foreign influences, was rapid. The bold, impertinent, ill-mannered coolies and nesans of the treaty ports are as unlike as possible to the same people in interior or remoter towns.

If the people are to lose their art, the fine finish of their manners, the simplicity of living, all the exquisite charm of their homes. Commodore Perry should be rated as their worst enemy. If they refine and make better what they now receive from the Occident, as they did with what China gave them long ago, is it not possible that Japan will surpass the world in the next century? Already the art workshop of the globe, has it no greater mission, as travel brings all countries nearer together, than to become the play-ground and holiday country of all 375