Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/331

 II much colour had been washed out of the fore-going picture by Western disapproval, filtering through merchants and missionaries, I was curious to learn. To their credit or discredit be it said, none of my Tōkyō friends cared to visit the Shin-Yoshiwara in the company of an alien. They were not exactly hindered by moral scruples, but rather by a disinclination to disclose the seamy side of their fellow countrymen to censorious eyes. They professed ignorance and changed the subject to railways or ironclads. However, one evening I met by chance the secretary of a famous lawyer-politician, who was taking a country cousin to see the sights of the capital; and, as he obligingly invited me to join the party, we made our way together through the maze of variety-shows and toy-shops which surround the Temple of Kwannon at Asakusa, until we reached the high embankment of Nihon-tsutsumi.

As we stood on the great dyke in a whirr of hurrying rickshaws, the country on the outer side stretched away into darkness, like the waste tracks which border the northern exterior boulevards of Paris. But at our feet, brilliant with light and clamorous with samisens, lay a clustering mass of lofty buildings, their roofs