THE PARADISE OF TRAVELLERS.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XII, Issue 57, 7 March 1877, Page 4

THE PARADISE OF TRAVELLERS.

"Japan is the travellers' paradise," remarks Sir Charles Dilke in an article contributed to the Foxtnightly Review. Through a strange medley of pines and palms, of rice aud buckwheat, of bamboos and elms, of tea and cotton, through azalea thickets and cameiia groves, across tobacco fields and past rocks covered with evergreen ferns of a hundred kinds and crowned with grotesque remains; through tussock grass, and forests of scarlet maple, ahd over mountains clad in rich greenery, you may journey in perfect peace, safe from robbery, safe from violence, safe even from beggars, never troubled, never asked for anything, except by a civil policeman for your passport, and that with the lowest of low bows. The maidens say " Ohio " sweetly to you as you pass, where eight years ago you might have been sliced up by the sharp swords of the Samurai. " Ohio," too, call the laborers in tbe fields, leaving their work to come and bow at the road side ; not as the Japanese bow to the Dutch, but with the bow of equal to equal, the bow of infinite politeness. Without servant or interpreter, a European can travel in safety throughout the land. The people and their houses have been described too often. One cannot but love their fun, their cleanliness, tbeir inborn sense of art. It is impossible to realise that the Japanese are real men and women. What with the smallness of the people, their incessant laughing, chatter, and their funny gestures, one feels one's self in in elf-land. On a fine day the men appear as grinning demons in black tights, streaked all over with blue heraldry. On wet days, the long rush coats and long-sided straw hats equally remove all vestige of humanity. When we turn over Japanese pictures in our English homes we fancy that both the faces and the dress must be unlike real life. On the contrary, they are very like the old fashions of the wealthy class, with whom faces are as much made up, and are as much a matter of fashion as are clothes. It is the country people of Japan who are my elves — the tiny, jovial, coppercolored poor. Were I describing rural Japan at length, I would try to show that it may be looked at from a point of view from which it ha3 not as yet been much considered. Japan is the last refuge of the joyous life. See the Thames on a fine Saturday in July, or the fair of St Cloud on the last Sunday evening of its reign, and you may for a moment believe that even in Europe the joyous life is not even yet extinct, but the fun of the Thames is vulgar, and the loose morality of St. Cloud is venal. The joyous life of the Middle Ages may hava been bad or good — in Europe it is gone, and let us speak well of the dead — but it is neither venal nor vulgar; that life still lives in 'Japan, where no paganism of antique grandeur dwells, but rollicking, unthinking fun. All who love children must love the Japanese, the most gracious, the most courteous, and the most smiling of all people, whose rural districts form, with Through-the-Look ing-glaes-Country and Wonderland, the three kingdoms of merry dreams.