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A Game of Snowball 3 Boys' Concert—Flute, Drum, and Song 5 Lion Play 6 Ironclad Top Game 7 Playing with Doggy 9 Heron-Legs, or Stilts 11 The Young Wrestlers 13 Playing with the Turtle 15 Presenting the Tide-Jewels to Hachiman 18 "Bronze fishes sitting on their throats" 19 The Treasure-Ship 23 Girls' Ball and Counting Game 26 Firemen's Gymnastics 28 Street Tumblers 29 Eating Stand for the Children 31 Fishsave riding the Dolphin 35 Bowing before her Mother's Mirror 37 Imitating the Procession 39 The Two White Birds 41 Eye-Hiding, or Blindman's Buff 47 Stilts and Clog-Throwing 48 Playing at Batter-Cakes 49 Hoisting the Rice-Beer Keg 51 Getting ready to raise the Big Humming Kite 60 Daruma, the Snow-Image 62

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INTRODUCTION

In almost every home are Japanese fans, in our shops Japanese dolls and balls and other knick-knacks, on our writing-tables bronze crabs or lacquered pen-tray with outlined on it the extinct volcano [Fuji San][1] that is the most striking mountain seen from the capital of Japan. At many places of amusement Japanese houses of real size have been exhibited, and the jargon of fashion for "Japanese Art" even reaches our children's ears.

Yet all these things seem dull and lifeless when thus severed from the quaint cheeriness of their true home. To those familiar with Japan, that bamboo fan-handle recalls its graceful grassy tree, the thousand and one daily purposes for which bamboo wood serves. We see the open shop where squat the brown-faced artisans cleverly dividing into those slender divisions the fan-handle, the wood-block engraver's where some dozen men sit patiently chipping at their cherry-wood blocks, and the printer's where the coloring arrangements seem so simple to those used to western machinery, but where the colors are so rich and true. We see the picture stuck on the fan frame with starch paste, and drying in the brilliant summer sunlight. The designs recall vividly the life around, whether that life be the stage, the home, insects, birds, or flowers. We think of halts at wayside inns, when bowing tea-house girls at once proffer these fans to hot and tired guests.

The tonsured oblique-eyed doll suggests the festival of similarly oblique-eyed little girls on the 3rd of March. Then dolls of every degree obtain for a day "Dolls' Rights." In every Japanese household all the dolls of the present and previous generations are, on that festival, set out to best advantage. Beside them are sweets, green-speckled rice cake, and daintily gilt and lacquered dolls' utensils. For some time previous, to meet the increased demand, the doll