Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/104

92 Every piece so promoted loses its original character, except the hisha and kaku to which the movements of the kin are added. As already indicated, a captured piece may be employed at any time for either attack or defence. To checkmate with the fu is a thing vetoed—or at least considered "bad form"—in this non-democratic game, neither is stale-mate permissible in Japanese chess. You wait until the adversary makes a move which admits of free action on your part. The object of the game is, as with us, to checkmate the king.

 Children. Japan has been called "a paradise of babies." The babies are indeed generally so good as to help to make it a paradise for adults. They are well-mannered from the cradle, and the boys in particular are perfectly free from that gawky shyness which makes many English boys, when in company, such afflictions both to others and to themselves. Pity only that a little later they are apt to deteriorate, the Japanese young man being less attractive than his eight or ten-year-old brother,—becoming self-conscious, self-important, sometimes intrusive.

The late Mrs. Chaplin-Ayrton tried to explain the goodness of Japanese children by a reference to the furniture-less condition of Japanese houses. There is nothing, she said, for them to wish to break, nothing for them to be told not to touch. This is ingenious. But may we not more simply attribute the pleasing fact partly to the less robust health of the Japanese, which results in a scantier supply of animal spirits? In any case, children's pretty ways and children's games add much to the picturesqueness of Japanese life. Nothing perhaps gives the streets a more peculiar aspect than the quaint custom which obtains among the lower classes of strapping the babies on to the back of their slightly older brothers and sisters, so that the juvenile population seems to consist of a new species of Siamese twins. On the 3rd March every doll-shop in Tōkyō, Kyōto, and the other large cities is