e no rules, and to the fact that the people have not
been taught those underlying principles of high courtesy which are
applicable on all occasions.

An impression seems to have gained currency in the United States that
the unaesthetic features seen in Japan to-day are due to the debasing
influences of Western art and Occidental intercourse. There can be no
doubt that a certain type of tourist, ignorant of Japanese art, by
greedily buying strange, gaudy things at high prices, has stimulated a
morbid production of truly unaesthetic pseudo-Japanese art. But this
accounts for only a small part of the grossly inartistic features of
Japan. The instances given of hideous worsted bibs for babes and
collars for dogs, combining in the closest proximity the most
uncomplementary and mutually repellent colors, has nothing whatever to
do with foreign art or foreign intercourse. What foreigner ever
decorated a little lapdog with a red-green-yellow-blue-and purple
crocheted collar, four or five inches wide?

Westerners have been charmed with the exquisite colored photographs
produced in Japan. It is strange, yet true, that the same artistic
hand that produces these beautiful effects will also, by a slight
change of tints, produce the most unnatural and spectral views. Yet
the strangest thing is, not that he produces them, but that he does
not seem conscious of the defect, for he will put them on sale in his
own shop or send them to purchasers in America, without the slightest
apparent hesitation. The constant care of the purchaser in selection
and his insistence on having only truly artistic work are what keep
the Japanese artist up to the standard.

If other evidence is needed of aesthetic defect in the still
unoccidentalized Japanese taste let the doubter go to any popular
second-grade Shinto shrine or Buddhist temple. Here unaesthetic objects
and sights abound. Hideous idols, painted and unpainted, big and
little, often decorated with soiled bibs; decaying to-rii; ruined
sub-shrines; conglomerate piles of cast-off paraphernalia, consisting
of broken idols, old lanterns, stones, etc., filthy towels at the
holy-water basins, piously offered to the gods and piously used by
hundreds of dusty pilgrims; equally filthy bell-ropes hung in front of
the main shrines, pulled by ten thousand hands to call the attention
of the deity; travel-stained hands, each of which has left its mark on
the once beautiful enormous tasselated cord; ex-voto