"What class of people are these?" Geoffrey asked.
"Oh, shop-people, I think, most of them," said Yaé, "and people who work in factories."
"Good class Japanese don't come here, then?" Geoffrey asked again.
"Oh no, only low class people and students. Japanese people say it is a shameful thing to go to the Yoshiwara. And, if they go, they go very secretly."
"Do you know any one who goes?" asked Reggie, with a directness which shocked his friend's sense of Good Form.
"Oh, my brothers," said Yaé, "but they go everywhere; or they say they do."
* * * * *
It certainly was an ill-favoured crowd. The Japanese are not an ugly race. The young aristocrat who has grown up with fresh air and healthy exercise is often good-looking, and sometimes distinguished and refined. But the lower classes, those who keep company with poverty, dirt and pawnshops, with the pleasures of the saké barrel and the Yoshiwara, are the ugliest beings that were ever created in the image of their misshapen gods. Their small stature and ape-like attitudes, the colour and discolour of their skin, the flat Mongolian nose, their gaping mouths and bad teeth, the coarse fibre of their lustreless black hair, give them an elvish and a goblin look, as though this country were a nursery for fairy changelings, a land of the Nibelungen, where bad thoughts have found their incarnation. Yet the faces have not got that character for good and evil as we find them among the Aryan peoples, the deep lines and the firm profiles.
"It is the absence of something rather than its presence which appals and depresses us," Reggie Forsyth observed, "an absence of happiness perhaps, or of a promise of happiness."
The crowd which filled the four roads with its slow grey tide was peaceable enough; and it was strangely silent. The drag and clatter of the clogs made more sound than the human voices. The great majority were men, though there were women among them, quiet and demure. If ever a voice was lifted, one could see by the rolling walk and the fatuous smile that its owner had been drinking. Such a person would be removed out of sight by his friends. The Japanese generally go sight-seeing and merry-making in friendships and companies; and the Verein, which in Japan is called the Kwai, flourishes here as in Germany.