distinguished banker I visited is also an adopted son; and in a comparatively brief list of eminent Japanese, a sort of abbreviated national "Who's Who," I find perhaps twenty cases in which these eminent officials and leaders have been adopted and bear other family names than those with which they were born.

The willingness to give up one's name in adoption, viewed in the light of the excessive devotion to one's own ancestors and family name, is only another illustration of Japanese contrariety. It is a land of surprises.

Miyanoshita, Japan.

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II

SNAPSHOTS OF JAPANESE LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY

"What is a Japanese city like?" Well, let us "suppose," as the children say. You know the American city nearest you, or the one you live in. Suppose then you should wake up in this city to-morrow morning and find in the first place that forty-nine people out of every fifty have put on such unheard-of clothing as to make you rub your eyes in wonder as to whether you are asleep or awake; next, that everybody has become six inches shorter, and that all these hundred-thousand five-foot men and four-foot women have unanimously developed most violent sunburn--have become bronzed almost beyond recognition.

Moreover, the high buildings you once knew have all disappeared, and a wilderness chiefly of tiny one and two story houses has taken their places, wherein the first story, even in two-story buildings, is so low that all your new brown friends warn you by a gesture to duck your head as you go through the doors, while the second story is usually little more than a garret.

Next, a wild jargon of unmeaning voices strikes your ear and you discover that ninety-nine people out of a hundred have forgotten how to speak English. More than this, the English signs are no more, and on the billboards and before the business offices are marks that look as if a thousand ostriches fresh from a thousand ink barrels had been set to scratching new signs to take the places of the old. You pick up a book {10} or the morning paper, and the same thing has happened--pig tracks, chicken tracks, and double bowknots fantastically tied instead of English type--and everybody begins at the back of the book and reads toward him instead of reading the way you have grown used to!

And the buggies, carriages, and automobiles: what on earth has become of them? There's hardly a horse in sight, but dozens or scores of men with bare legs and odd clothes, each flying around pulling a light two-wheeled jinrikisha, a man or a woman seated in each man-drawn "buggy"; and there are dozens of other bare-legged men laboriously pulling heavy loads of vegetables, freight, and even lumber and giant telegraph poles! You jump into one of the rickshaws and forget your strange little Puck-like steed in the marvel of your surroundings till a voice from the shafts makes you feel like Balaam when the ass spoke to him!

By this time you begin to get a hazy idea as to how the people are dressed, and as nearly as you can make out, it is something like this:

Evidently all the inhabitants of an ancient Roman city, a modern American town, a half-dozen Hindoo villages, and several thousand seashore bathers have all thrown their clothes--(or the lack of them!)--into one tremendous pile, and everybody has rushed in pell-mell and put on the first thing, or the first two or three things, that came to hand. There is every conceivable type of clothing, but perhaps the larger number have wound up with something like a light bathing suit and a sort of gingham dressing-gown belted over it; and if one has less than this, why, then, as the Japanese say, "Shikata na gai" (All right; it can't be helped). In the shops and stores one passes a few men clad only in their own integrity and a loin-cloth, and both children and grown people dress with a hundred times more disregard of convention than the negroes in America.

Of shoes, there is an equally great variety as of clothing, {11} but the majority of men, women, and children (in muddy weather at least) have compromised on the "getas," a sort of wooden sole strapped on the foot, with wooden pieces put fore and aft the instep, these pieces throwing the foot and sole about three inches above ground. It looks almost as difficult to walk in them as to walk on stilts, but away the people go, young and old, and the muddy places marked by the strange footwear look as if the corrugated wheels of a hundred mowing-machines had passed along! In most cases the clatter of the "get as" is the loudest noise on the streets, for the Japanese are remarkably quiet: in Tokyo to-day I saw a thousand of them waiting to see the Empress, and an American crowd would literally have made more noise in a minute than they made in an hour.

On entering their houses, as we have already noticed, the people take off their getas, sandals, shoes or whatever outer footwear is used--for the very good reason that the people sit on the floor (on mats or on the floor itself), eat on the floor (very daintily, however), and sleep on the floor, so that to walk over the floor here with muddy feet would be the same as if an American should walk roughshod over his chairs, table and bed. Even in the Japanese department store I visited this morning cloth covers were put on my shoes, and this afternoon at the Ni-no Go Reiya Shinto temple I had to go in my stocking feet.

Then the babies--who ever saw as many babies to the square inch? About 10 per cent of the male population seems to be hauling other men, but 50 per cent, of the female population seems hardly enough to carry the wise and happy-looking little Jap babies--not in go-carts (a go-cart or a hired nurse is almost never seen), but on the back. And these little women who when standing are only about as tall as you are when sitting--they seem hardly more than children themselves, so that you recall Kipling's saying of Japan: "A four-foot child walks with a three-foot child, who is holding the hand {12} of a two-foot child, who carries on her back a one-foot child."

Boys in their teens are also seen with babies strapped on their backs in the same loose-fitting, sack-like baby-holders, and after work-time the father takes a turn at the same business. You are reminded of the negro who said to another: "'Fo Gawd, Bill, you's got the mos' chillun any nigger I ever seed. Why, I passed yo' house yistiddy mornin' at nine erclock and throwed a brick on top and hollered 'Fiah!' an' at five erclock in the evenin' nigger chillun was still runnin' out!" It seems sometimes as if such an incident, with Jap children substituted for negroes (I doubt if there is a negro here), might actually happen in Japan.

And those two men bowing to each other as they meet--are they rehearsing as Alphonse and Gaston for the comedy show to-night, or are they serious? No, they are serious, for yonder is another pair meeting in the same way, and yonder another couple separating with even more violent "convulsions of politeness"--and nobody laughing but yourself. No wonder the Japanese are strong: they only need to meet a few friends a day to get exercise enough to keep them in trim! Look again: those women meeting at the depot, for example (for there are familiar-looking street cars and less familiar-looking passenger cars amid all these strange surroundings). There is the woman with her hair combed straight back, which, I am told, means that she is a widow; one with an odd Japanese topknot, which means that she is married, and a younger one whose hair is arranged in the style of unmarried girls; and though they are evidently bosom friends, they do not embrace and kiss at meeting--to kiss in public would be shocking to the Japanese--and you can only guess the depth of their affection by the greater warmth and emphasis of their bows to one another.

{13}