Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/402

390 and damp one as, for instance, that of Formosa, They long for Japanese food, for the Japanese hot springs, for such Japanese social pleasures as go with the twanging of the samisen, for the thousand and one little amenities and facilities of Japanese life. Officials sent even to the provinces of Japan proper eat their hearts out yearning for Tōkyō, which is to them all that Paris ever was to the typical Frenchman. How much worse must they find their exile, when set down on some distant shore!

A sore point with those Japanese who favour genuine emigration is the discovery, made for them by statistics, that the class by which, of all others, they would least wish their country to be represented abroad is that which emigrates most, at any rate to the China ports and as far south as Singapore. The subject is a delicate one; but we shall be understood if we say that, at more than one census, it has been found that the young female Japanese residents in such ports outnumber the males. Strenuous efforts are made to prevent emigration of this particular kind; but the cunning with which they are evaded is often remarkable. Another particular calling for improvement is the behaviour of Japanese emigrants towards less civilised races. Every one who has seen them in Formosa, and especially in Korea, tells of supercilious and often brutal conduct. They have imitated the white man in everything, even in his ill-treatment of what he contemptuously terms "natives." Hence the bitter hatred with which the Japanese are regarded throughout Korea, where, of all countries in the world, it would have been expedient to court popularity, and endeavour thus to efface the recollection of old-time wrongs.

 Porcelain and Pottery. At the end of the sixteenth century after Christ, the Korean polity and civilisation were ruthlessly overthrown by Japanese invaders. The Korean art of porcelain-making then crossed the water. All Japan's chief potteries date from that time, her teachers being Korean captives. What had gone before ,yas but preparatory,—such things, we mean, as the