BY ALFRED PARSONS WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 1896 Copyright, 1895, by Harper & Brothers . All rights reserved.          ...

W E had left Hong-Kong enveloped in its usual spring fog, and for five long, weary days had steamed across the China Sea in regular monsoon weather, gray and wet and miserable, but during the fifth some rocky islands, outlying sentinels of the three thousand which compose the Mikado’s realm, and occasional square-sailed, high-sterned boats, showed that we were near Japan, the Far East, the Land of Flowers and of the Rising Sun, the country which for years it had been my dream to see and paint; a

I T is difficult nowadays to imagine how the Japanese managed to live without tea; everybody drinks it at all hours of the day, and the poorest people rarely get a chance of drinking anything stronger, and yet it is, as things went in old Japan, a comparatively recent introduction. Tea was introduced with Buddhism from China, and though some plants were brought as early as the ninth century, it was not much grown until the end of the twelfth. Daruma, an Indian saint of the sixth century, often r

T HE damp heat of the Japanese summer, which is so trying to human beings, encourages all vegetation to grow with surprising luxuriance and rapidity; the buds of yesterday are flowers to-day, and to-morrow nothing is left but the ruin of a past beauty, making the painter’s struggle most arduous just when he has least energy to contend with nature. The young bamboo shoots come up like giant asparagus, growing so fast that one can almost see them move; some of them are cut and eaten while young an

CAMPANULAS ON FUJI T HE great mountain of Japan is well known to us all; its form appears on countless screens and fans, and its foreign name, Fusiyama, is as familiar as Mont Blanc or Pike’s Peak. By the Japanese it is called Fuji, or Fujisan, or sometimes Fuji-noyama when speaking poetically: it is difficult to understand how an s came to be substituted for the j by foreigners, but under any name there is a peculiar fascination about the mountain, and the first sight of it, from the hundred st

Oct. 3, 1892. Fuji is quite free from clouds this morning, and in the soft autumnal sunshine every detail is clearly visible as I sit with the shutters wide open and eat my breakfast. The foreground is a level plain of rice-fields, which stretches away for three or four miles to where the first gentle ascent is marked by a line of villages and trees, and in some THE FLOWERY MOORLAND     places, where irrigation is possible, the terraced fields climb a little way up the mountain. Above them is a

T HE lakes which lie to the north of Fuji are not much visited by foreigners; they are rather difficult of access, and the accommodation in the tea-houses in that district is not luxurious; but for those who can walk well, and put up with ordinary Japanese food and lodging, the scenery will atone for everything. The old hills on the north once looked over a great sloping plain to the shore of Suruga Bay, but the upstart Fuji arose and blocked their view to the south; streams of lava poured from

F ROM the spring-time, when I reached Japan in the rain and began to grumble at the weather, and all through the damp and the downpour of the summer months, I had been consoled by the promises of my friends. They assured me that when the autumn came I should have week after week of glorious sunshine, a clear fresh air, and probably not a wet day between Michaelmas and Christmas. Either the season was an exceptional one, or else this is a cherished myth; there certainly were more fine days in Oct