Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/328

316 Massage is much to be recommended to tired pedestrians and to persons suffering from lumbago, rheumatism, and other pains and aches. The old-fashioned Japanese shampooers, however, make the mistake of shampooing down instead of shampooing up. A portion of the good done is thus neutralised, one object of scientific massage being to help back towards the centre the blood which is lingering in the superficial veins. This fact is now beginning to be known and acted on in Japan,—one of the fruits of German medical tuition.

 Metal-work. Bronze was introduced into Japan from China via Korea, and the Japanese still call it "the Chinese metal" (Kara kane). But it is the metal in which Japanese art was already winning its brightest laurels over a thousand years ago. The chief forms are the mirror, the temple bell, the gong, the vase (originally intended for the adornment of Buddhist altars), the lantern, and the colossal representation of divine personages. The temple bells at Ōsaka, Kyōto, and Kara count among the largest in the world; but the grandest example of Japanese bronze-casting is the Dai-butsu (literally, "great Buddha") at Kamakura, which dates from the thirteenth century. He who has time should visit this Dai-butsu repeatedly; for, like Niagara, like St. Peter s, and several other of the greatest works of nature and of art, it fails to produce its full effect on a first or even on a second visit; but the impression it produces grows on the beholder each time that he gazes afresh at the calm, intellectual, passionless face, which seems to concentrate in itself the whole philosophy of Buddhism,—the triumph of mind over sense, of eternity over fleeting time, of the enduring majesty of Nirvana over the trivial prattle, the transitory agitations of mundane existence.

Armour is another use to which metal (iron and steel) was put from the very earliest ages. The best examples of iron and steel armour date from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The