d of pure
white light, and you have a faint image of Japan. Perhaps it is not,
naturally, more beautiful than the British Isles--few countries are. But
it is unspoilt by man, or almost so. Osaka, indeed, is as ugly as
Manchester, Yokohama as Liverpool. But these are small blots. For the
rest, Japan is Japan of the Middle Ages, and lovely as England may have
been, when England could still be called merry.

And the people are lovely, too. I do not speak of facial beauty. Some
may think, in that respect, the English or the Americans handsomer. But
these people have the beauty of life. Instead of the tombstone masques
that pass for faces among Anglo-Saxons, they have human features, quick,
responsive, mobile. Instead of the slow, long limbs creaking in stiff
integuments, they have active members, for the most bare or moving
freely in loose robes. Instead of a mumbled, monotonous, machine-like
emission of sound they have real speech, vivacious, varied, musical.
Their children are the loveliest in the world; so gay, so sturdy, so
cheeky, yet never rude. It is a pure happiness merely to walk in the
streets and look at them. It is a pure happiness, I might almost say, to
look at anyone, so gay is their greeting, so radiant their smile, so
full of vitality their gestures. I do not know what they think of the
foreigner, but at least they betray no animosity. They let his stiff,
ungainly presence move among them unchallenged. Perhaps they are sorry
for him; but I think they are never rude. I am speaking, of course, of
Old Japan, of the Japan that is all in evidence, if one lands, as I did,
in the south, avoids Osaka, and postpones Yokohama and Tokio. It is
still the Japan of feudalism; a system in which I, for my part, do not
believe; which, in its essence, in Japan as in Europe, was harsh,
unjust, and cruel; but which had the art of fostering, or at least of
not destroying beauty.

And in this point feudalism in Japan was finer and more sensitive, if it
was less grandiose, than feudalism in Europe. There is nothing in Japan
to compare with the churches and cathedrals of the West, for there is no
stone architecture at all. But there is nothing in the West to compare
with the living-rooms of Japan. Suites of these dating from the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are to be seen in Kyoto and
elsewhere. And till I saw them I had no idea how exquisite human life
might be made. The Japanese, as is well known, discovered the secret o