be understood than a mechanical
explanation of technique and style.

The description of the intrigue and officialism, the perpetual panic in
which the foreign professors at the university lived, given by Hearn in
a letter to Ellwood Hendrik, is extremely funny. Earthquakes were the
order of the day. Nothing but the throne was fixed. In the Orient, where
intrigue has been cultivated as an art for ages, the result of the
adoption of constitutional government, by a race accustomed to autocracy
and caste, caused disloyalty and place-hunting to spread in new form,
through every condition of society, and almost into every household.
Nothing, he said, was ever stable in Japan. The whole official world was
influenced by under-currents of all sorts, as full of changes as a sea
off a coast of tides, the side-currents penetrating everywhere, swirling
round the writing-stool of the smallest clerk, whose pen trembled with
fear for his wife's and babies' rice.... "If a man made an observation
about facts, there was instantly a scattering away from that man as from
dynamite. By common consent he was isolated for weeks. Gradually he
would collect a group of his own, but presently somebody in another part
would talk about things as they ought to be,--bang, fizz, chaos and
confusion. The man was dangerous, an intriguer, etc., etc. Being good or
clever, or generous or popular, or the best man for the place, counted
for nothing.... And I am as a flea in a wash-bowl."

The ordinary functions and ceremonials connected with his professorship
were a burden that worried and galled a nature like Hearn's.

Every week he was obliged to decline almost nightly invitations to
dinner. He gives a sketch of the ordinary obligations laid upon a
university professor: fourteen lectures a week, a hundred official
banquets a year, sixty private society dinners, and thirty to fifty
invitations to charitable, musical, uncharitable and non-musical
colonial gatherings, etc., etc., etc.

No was said to everything, softly; but if he had accepted, how could he
exist, breathe, even have time to think, much less write books? At first
the professors were expected to appear in a uniform of scarlet and gold
at official functions. The professors were restive under the idea of
gold--luckily for themselves.

He gives a description of a ceremonious visit paid by the Emperor to the
university; he was expected to put on a frock-coat, and headgear that
inspired the Moham