I always agree with that man who said, “Let me make the nation’s songs and I care not who frames her laws,” or words to that effect, for, in my opinion, nothing so well indicates national character or so keenly accentuates the difference between individuals and nations as the way in which they spend their leisure hours; and the theatres of Japan are thoroughly typical of the people’s character. It would be utterly impossible for the Japanese to keep art out of their lives. It creeps into everyth

A Japanese authority has boasted that the only living art of to-day is the art of Japan; and the remark is not so much exaggerated as it may appear at first sight to the European. Art in Japan is living as art in Greece was living. It forms part and parcel of the very life of the people; every Jap is an artist at heart in the sense that he loves and can understand the beautiful. If one of us could be as fortunate as the man in the story, who came in his voyages upon an island where an Hellenic r

The methods of painters all over the world are very much alike. In fact, the methods of great masters (no matter of what nationality, and whether of this period or of centuries past) are often precisely similar, while there can be no doubt but that some of the finest masterpieces ever painted very closely resemble one another. I was once taken to see two photographs, one a portion of a figure by Michael Angelo, and the other a portion of a Japanese buddha by one of Japan’s greatest masters; and

In Japan there is no such thing as accident. A scene which in its beauty and perfect placing appears to the visitor to be the result of Nature in an unusually generous mood, has in reality been the object of infinite care and thought and anxious deliberation to these little Japanese artists, the landscape gardeners. That temple which seems to place itself so remarkably well in relation to the big lines of Nature, its background, has been carefully built and thought out from that standpoint alone

Throughout this book I have talked of Japan purely from the artistic standpoint. I have talked principally of the living art of the country and of its exquisite productions, and I firmly believe that it is because the Japs are a people of imagination that they will at no distant date forge ahead of other nations (who are depending solely upon their muscle) and become a dominating power. At the same time, it must be clearly understood that the artistic is not the only quality in which the Japs ex

It is not easy to describe the fascination of a Japanese garden. Chiefly it is due to studied neglect of geometrical design. The toy summer-houses dotted here and there, the miniature lakes, and the tiny bridges crossing miniature streams, give an air of indescribable quaintness. Yet, in spite of the smallness of the dimensions, the first impression is one of vastness. “Who discovers that nothingness is law—such a one hath wisdom,” says the old Buddhist text. That is the wisdom the Japanese gard

One of the chief characteristics of the Japanese, which especially distinguishes them from Europeans, is their intense fondness for flowers—not the fondness which many English people affect, but an instinctive love of the beautiful, and a poetical appreciation of symbolism. The Japanese nature is artistic in essence, and in no more delightful manner is the art of the people expressed than in the cultivation of flowers. Flowers to them are a source of infinite and unending joy, of which the chief

With all their practical gifts—which, as one of themselves has remarked, will enable them to beat the world with the tips of their fingers—and all the power of assimilating and adapting to their own purposes the best that other nations have to offer them,—the Japanese are essentially and beyond all a nation of artists. It is not only in the work-shop and the studio, but also in the simplest act and detail of daily life, that this sense of the decorative oozes unconsciously forth, and most of all

A cluster of little Japanese children at play somehow suggests to me a grand picture-gallery, a picture-gallery of a nation. Every picture is a child upon which has been expended the subtle decorative sense of its family or neighbours, as expressed in the tint of its dress and sash and in the decoration of its little head. It is in the children that the national artistic and poetic nature of the Japanese people most assuredly finds expression. Each little one expresses in its tiny dress some con

It was with a view to decorating my newly-built London house that I paid a second visit to Japan, being convinced that it was possible to handle the labour there at a cheaper rate and with finer results than in Europe. My experience proved that I was right. Before leaving England, however, I was carefully informed by all my friends of the exceedingly bad reputation that the Japanese have gained commercially. I was told that they were treacherous and unscrupulous in their dealings, and that I was

Perhaps one of the most admirable features in the character of the Japanese is their great power of self-control. The superficial observer on his first visit to Japan, because of this very quality of theirs, is at first liable to imagine that the Japanese have no emotion. This is a mistake. I have lived with them; I know them through and through; and I know that they are a people of great emotions, emotions that are perhaps all the deeper and stronger because they are unexpressed. Self-control i