Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/97

, as the contest still rages between the two sides of the city, as to whether the vapors from the moats, or those from the exposed mud flats and made ground of the Tsukiji section, are most pernicious.

The festival of the kiku, or chrysanthemum, in autumn, decks the whole empire with red, white, and yellow flowers. The sixteen-petalled chrysanthemum is the imperial or government crest; and the Emperor’s birthday, the third of November, coming in the height of the season, is made a gala-day in every province, and the occasion of gorgeous flower shows. The Western mind is filled with envy to discover that the wide-spreading, spicy flowers selling here for a few coppers each, cost as many dollars under new names across the water. Dango-zaka, dismissed with a line in the guide-book, is more picturesquely Japanese in autumn than any other suburb of Tokio. A community of florists tend, prune, dwarf, and cultivate their chrysanthemum plants in obscurity until the blossoming time makes Dango-zaka a gay fair. The unique productions of their gardens are set pieces of flowers on a gigantic scale. Under matted sheds, which are so many temporary stages without footlights, groups with life-sized figures are arranged, whose faces and hands are of wax or composition, but whose clothes, the accessories, and scenery are made of living flowers, trained so closely over a framework that the mechanism is not even suspected. The plants forming the flower-pieces are taken up with all their roots, wrapped in straw and cloths, propped up inside the skeleton framework, and watered every day. The flowers, drawn to the outside and woven into place, produce a solid surface of color, and are shaded with the most natural effects. The tableaux represent scenes from history and legend, and from the latest plays, or even illustrate the last emotional crime of the day. Here are seen whole mountainsides of flowers, with water-falls of white blossoms 81