IN THE PALACE GARDENS
The peeresses waiting in that sunny garden were most brilliant figures, rivalling the glow of the flowers in their splendid old brocade robes. At last came the Empress and the whole gorgeous train of her attendants, following the shore of the mirror-like lake, past camellia hedges to the esplanade of the upper garden of the great Asakasa park. As the Emperor was housed by illness, the Empress, for the first time, conducted a general court ceremony alone. Her costume consisted of the loose hakama, or divided skirt, of the heaviest scarlet silk, under a long loose kimono of dull heliotrope, brocaded with conventional wistarias and the imperial crests in white. No outer obi, or sash, was worn, and the neck was closed high with surplice folds of rainbow-tinted silks. Many under-kimonos of fine white and scarlet silk showed beneath the long, square sleeves of the heavy brocade kimono. The imperial hair was stiffened into a thin halo behind the face, falling thence to the waist, but tied here and there with bits of silky white rice-paper, like that of a Shinto priestess. Above her forehead shone a little golden ornament in the shape of the ho-o, or phœnix, and she carried a parasol and an old court fan of painted sticks of wood, wound with long cords of many-colored silks. The dignity and majesty of the little woman were most impressive. Every head bowed low, and when she had passed eyes were lifted to her reverently and admiringly. All the princesses and peeresses following her wore a similar costume, many of their brocade kimonos being stiffened with embroidery and gold thread, and making dazzling effects of color. When, in the brilliant sunset flush, the imperial train retraced its steps, its kaleidoscopic flashes of white and gold and color reflected in the still lake, and showing vividly as the ladies formed in a semicircle on the lawn, while the Empress withdrew to her apartments, there ended a series of pictures so beautiful that they seemed an illusion of the imagination.
Before the following April Paris fashions had set in with great rigor, and all the soft, pink reflections from the clouds of cherry blossoms in the Hama Rikiu palace garden could not give the groups of little women in dark, ugly, close-fitting gowns any likeness to the beautiful assemblages of other years. Gone were poetry and picturesqueness. Progress and Philistia were come. Except for the costumes of the Chinese and Korean legations, and that of the Chinese Minister’s wife, with its cap-like ornaments of filigree and pearls, and tiny jewelled slippers, nothing Oriental or Asiatic in aspect remained to that court gathering.
The Empress ordained and defended this change of dress in a famous court circular, whose chief argument seemed to be that the alteration from the sitting and kneeling etiquette of the Orient to the standing etiquette of the Occident required western fashions for women as well as men. Every lover of the picturesque protested, but it was suspected that this manifesto was a shrewd political move of Count Ito’s to convince the treaty powers that the Japanese do not differ from other civilized people. Should the sacrifice of the old life and the beautiful national dress help to secure for Japan a revision of the shameful and unjust treaties forced upon her from 1854 to 1858, and promote the political liberty and commercial prosperity of the country, the Empress’s patriotic iconoclasm may be justified.
IN THE PALACE GARDENS