ABOUT THE JAPANESE.

Matamata Record, Volume VI, Issue 474, 24 September 1923, Page 4

ABOUT THE JAPANESE.

——',.;.:: ♦ — ■ A TASTE FOR NATURE. No people have so keen an emotion in the face of nature as the Japanese. In spite of a fairly severe winter climate, it is with reluctance that they close their houses against what is for them a perpetually renewed spectacle of beauty (writes Louis Couchoucl in "Japanese Impressions.") The fundamental principle on which Japanese taste is based would seem to be a constant application of refinement and a conservation of simplicity. In Japan people neither embrace nor shake hands. A Japanese is accustomed to place a flower in his room not as an ornament but as a companion. Buddhism has exalted in the Japanese that sympathy for everything animate which is natural, it seems, to the various Asiatic peoples. We are perpetually struck by the Japanese taste for a countryside seen under snow or under moonlight. The French child who tries his hand at drawing first makes a house or a man; the little Japanese draw? a tree or the curve of a fingernail. Nothing in Japan equals the popularity of the Red Cross, and every mousme wishes to crown her dark hair with a white muslin cap. The Japanese is one of the least emigrant of nations. In spite of the density of its population, Japan is not overcrowded, and in all the northern portion of the country there is ample space. Japanese life and thought have a social intimacy which is conducive to sympathy, and there is no country where opinion and enthusiasm blend more freely. Japan, with her civilisation equal to, and of older origin than, European civilisation, constantly disregarded Europe as'Tong as she considered that Europe had nothing important to teach her.