PREFACE

THE GLAMOUR, REFLECTED from the Land of the Rising Sun, is indeed dazzling, since by it both friends and enemies are blinded as to the character of the Japanese, in whom they later can see no merit, the former no fault. If both are to be believed, this race is at once the most brave and the most cowardly, the most honour-loving and the most dishonest, the most exalted and the most depraved, of mankind. When acute settlers differ, how shall a passing rhymer decide? His wiser course is to suspend judgement for the moment, remarking only what droll figures his own countrymen cut when festooned and fettered by Oriental intercourse, much as the Dango-zaka dolls are by trammels of chrysanthemum. Here and there an artist or an archaeologist subsides happily into an environment, which fancy gilds or knowledge palliates, but nine-tenths of the foreigners, who arrive prepossessed in favour of native life and character, are forced by the logic of a hundred facts, to live as isolated in their settlements as any Jew in his medieval ghetto. But in the twinkling of an eye all this is to be changed; the blessed words ‘Mixed Residence’ have been pronounced; the correlative event is awaited by all with hope or apprehension. It may be that the writer has caught the last glimpse of unassimilated contraries; that when he returns to Japan, if he ever should, all the world will wear kimono or trousers. At any rate, these rhymes are written of, and for, those Anglo-Saxon aliens, who are quick to perceive, and generous enough to enjoy, the humorous side of their pathetic endeavours to live in both hemispheres at once.

THE MERCHANT AT YOKOHAMA