If I Had Kept To Nikko, Hakone, Miyanoshita, And Similar
Places Visited By Foreigners With Less Time, I Should Have Formed A
Very Different Impression.
Is their spiritual condition, I often
wonder, much higher than their physical one?
They are courteous,
kindly, industrious, and free from gross crimes; but, from the
conversations that I have had with Japanese, and from much that I
see, I judge that their standard of foundational morality is very
low, and that life is neither truthful nor pure.
I put up here at a crowded yadoya, where they have given me two
cheerful rooms in the garden, away from the crowd. Ito's great
desire on arriving at any place is to shut me up in my room and
keep me a close prisoner till the start the next morning; but here
I emancipated myself, and enjoyed myself very much sitting in the
daidokoro. The house-master is of the samurai, or two-sworded
class, now, as such, extinct. His face is longer, his lips
thinner, and his nose straighter and more prominent than those of
the lower class, and there is a difference in his manner and
bearing. I have had a great deal of interesting conversation with
him.
In the same open space his clerk was writing at a lacquer desk of
the stereotyped form - a low bench with the ends rolled over - a
woman was tailoring, coolies were washing their feet on the itama,
and several more were squatting round the irori smoking and
drinking tea.
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