We drive through many winding streets and draw up in one not different to the others, and, lifting up the black draperies, enter. There may, perhaps, be a few bronze or lacquer articles spread about, but nothing to indicate the priceless art-treasures that we are presently going to see. With hands on knees, sliding down with bows of reverence, and the gasping produced by sucking in of breath between the teeth, stands the proprietor, surrounded by a background of assistants. With deferential encouragement he leads you to the backmost recesses of the shop, through winding passages, across paved squares, until you come to the prettiest little picture of a garden made out of a courtyard of a few square feet, and here in rooms opening out of this, surrounded by fire-proof godowns, far away from the eyes of an inquisitive crowd of passers-by, he shows forth his precious treasures. This courtyard is so artfully arranged as to deserve description. There will be, perhaps, a clump of bamboos in one corner, a stone lantern on one side, a piece of water with gold fish in it in the centre, and an azalea on bamboo supports trained round it; a bronze urn with drinking water and a wooden scoop by it, and a green metal stork. First of all tea is brought, and the smoking boxes, which contain the hot ashes in a bronze or china urn, and the bamboo trough for the used ashes; then the real work commences. An art museum, the labour of hundreds of years ago, when a man devoted his life-time to the production of one or two works of art, are laid on the matting before you.
From behind cabinets, from underneath tables, boxes are silently produced, and from out of folds of soft crêpe or flannel, and many paper wrappers come lovely objects, lovingly, caressingly fingered and stroked by their owner. There are vases of rock crystal, jade, plaques, and trays of the most exquisite cloisonné, when a magnifying glass is gently pushed into your hands that you may enter into the minutest details of the minute work. Bronzes, and satsuma china, inro or lacquer medicine boxes, with their succession of trays for powders, and those lovely Netsuke or carved ivories where each wrinkle and hair, each line and feature are so faithfully graven in the quaint heads and groups. The prices asked are fabulous, but I often scarcely thought that the dealer wanted to part with his curios, he seemed so proudly fond of them.
I confess that our taste inclined often to the baser kind of shops, where the goods were of doubtful origin, but Japan has, in the last few years, been so overrun with curio buyers and Americans, that the few really antique things left are scarce, and hard to find. The Japanese, like the Chinese, always reserve their best things to the last, and then somewhat reluctantly produce them. We haunted the old shops where great golden Buddhas sat enthroned amidst a most miscellaneous collection—men in armour, memorial cabinets, huge bronze vases, inlaid swords with quaint tsuba, or sword guards, mingling with lovely china vases, which, if modern, are nevertheless a joy for ever to possess—to feast your eyes on their delicate shiny surfaces of ruby sang-de-bœuf, imperial yellow, lilac, blue, apple-green, or rose pink, strewn with a spray of snowy blossom or a spiky shaft of bamboo, where little birds fly across the pale sea of colour, or solemn storks perch beside some waving reeds.
Again and again we are made to wonder how these small shops, so meagre and unpretentious outside, find the capital and become possessed of such wondrous treasures. Hours you can spend there, and hours they will be pleased to show you these, for in Japan no one is ever in a hurry. Life is very leisurely.
The "curio fever" is upon us. To anyone who has visited Japan the description of a Canadian authoress is but "too intensely true."
"You don't 'shop' in this country. Shopping implies premeditation, and premeditation is in vain in Japan. If you know what you want, your knowledge is set aside in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, and your purchases gratify anticipations that you never had, to be paradoxical. And you never fully know the joy of buying until you buy in Japan. Life condenses itself into one long desire, keener and more intense than any want you ever had before—the desire of paying and possessing. The loftiest aims are swallowed up in this; the sternest scientist, or political economist, or social theorist that was ever set ashore at Yokohama straightway loses life's chief end among the curios, and it is at least six weeks before he finds it again. And as to the ordinary individual, without the guidance of superior aims, time is no more for him, nor things temporal; he is lost in contemplation of the ancient and the beautiful in the art of Nippon, and though he sell his boots and pawn his grandfather's watch, he will carry it off with him to the extent of his uttermost farthing...."
And so we felt.
But of course it is the crêpe and silk shops that woman-like fascinate me most. Those lovely, soft, crisp, textiles, in rose-pink, coral, lilac, blue, and silver-grey, in sea-green, mignonette, and chrysanthemum-yellow, shades that you can find in no other country, because the secret of these heavenly dyes is known only to the Japanese. Oh! they are things to make your coveteousness strong, your heart ache, unless your purse is full and deep. Then there are the common washing crêpes, with their graceful running designs so artistically disposed, their harmony of colouring, and of which I order kimonos for dressing-gowns for all the children of the family. There is a lovely crêpe with rainbow stripes, not as you who have seen the brilliant orange-green and purple rays of the original would imagine, for it is a white filmy texture, with only a suspicion of pale melting zephyr stripes, slanting across it.
Then there are the silks and crêpes embroidered with blood-red autumn sprays, with butterflies, pink dolphins and sea-shells, or panels of satin of such exquisite workmanship, with ever recurring views of Fuji, and hanging kakemonos and screens and coverlets, all so beautiful, and of such faithful artistic merit. We are shown specimens of a newly-revived industry, handed down from ancient dyers, where pictures rich and soft are raised in velvet, against a pale silk or satin ground. By an ingenious process of wires, running parallel with the hard thread of the woof, bearing the outline of the picture in velvet, which are, after the dyeing and steaming cut out, these quaint pictures, which at first you think painted, are produced. Everything you see in Japan is art. It is brought into the manufacture of the commonest things of daily life, and seen to perfection in these cut velvets and rich embroideries. It is in the air they breathe. For even as we pass out from this rich inner sanctum, into the open street shop, where the crowd of customers, each seated on cushions on the counter step, with a salesman squatted before him, swiftly running the counters of his abaca up and down, multiplying and dividing like lightning by this ingenious machine, we see piles of coloured goods, of quite common quality only one degree less delightful in colour and design, than those we have chosen from. I must not forget to mention in our shoppings the photographs, which are extraordinarily good and very cheap. It might also be of use to someone to know that we found at Kioto, Daimaruicha and Co., and Takashimaya Ilda and Co., the best shops for crêpes, silk, embroideries, and kimonos, made to order, and Nishimura for the cut velvets, these shops having but one price, and with the goods marked in plain figures.
We get up early the next morning, for now that we are so soon leaving Japan, we feel that every hour is wasted that we are not out and about, drinking in last scenes from these bewitching streets. We direct our jinrikishas into a distant quarter of far-reaching Kioto, into the meanest and dirtiest of streets, where most of the shops are full of old iron, and hung round with second-hand goods like a pawnbroker's, but where we are told that the real old-fashioned curio-shops, not got up collections of curio for the circumnavigator, still exist. I must say that they seemed full of impossible rubbish.