And all this came about from an excess of politeness. The East has always been the land of flowery compliments, also the land of hyperbole. I once saw the answer the Viceroy of India had received from a certain tributary Prince, who had been reprimanded in the sharpest fashion by the Government of India. The native Prince had been warned in the bluntest of language that unless he mended his ways at once he would be forthwith deposed, and another ruler put in his place. A list of his recent enormities was added, in order to refresh his memory, and the warning as to the future was again emphasized. The Prince's answer, addressed direct to the Viceroy, began as follows:
"Your Excellency's gracious message has reached me. It was more precious to the eyes than a casket of rubies; sweeter to the taste than a honeycomb; more delightful to the ears than the song of ten thousand nightingales. I spread it out before me, and read it repeatedly: each time with renewed pleasure."
Considering the nature of the communication, that native Prince must have been of a touchingly grateful disposition.
The late Duke of Edinburgh was once presented with an address at Hong Kong from the Corporation of Chinese Merchants, in which he was told, amongst other things, that he "was more glorious than a phoenix sitting in a crimson nest with fourteen golden tails streaming behind him." Surely a charming flight of fancy!
True politeness in China demands that you should depreciate everything of your own and exalt everything belonging to your correspondent. Thus, should you be asking a friend to dinner, you would entreat him "to leave for one evening the silver and alabaster palace in which you habitually dwell, and to condescend to honour the tumble-down vermin-ridden hovel in which I drag out a wretched existence. Furthermore, could you forget for one evening the bird's-nest soup, the delicious sea-slugs, and the plump puppy-dogs on which you habitually feast, and deign to poke your head into my swill-trough, and there devour such loathsome garbage as a starving dog would reject, I shall feel unspeakably honoured." The answer will probably come in some such form as this: "With rapturous delight have I learnt that, thanks to your courtesy, I may escape from the pestilential shanty I inhabit, and pass one unworthy evening in a glorious palace of crystal and gold in your company. After starving for months on putrid offal, I shall at length banquet on unimagined delicacies, etc." Should it be a large dinner-party, it must tax the host's ingenuity to vary the self-depreciatory epithets sufficiently.
The mention of food reminds me that it is an acute difficulty to the stranger in Japan, should he wander off the beaten track and away from European hotels. Japanese use neither bread, butter, nor milk, and these things, as well as meat, are unprocurable in country districts. Europeans miss bread terribly, and the Japanese substitute of cold rice is frankly horrible. Instead of the snowy piles of smoking-hot, beautifully cooked rice of India, rice in Japan means a cold, clammy, gelatinous mass, hideously distasteful to a European interior. That, eggs, and tea like a decoction of hay constitute the standard menu of a Japanese country inn. I never saw either a sheep or cow in Japan, as there is no pasture. The universal bamboo-grass, with its sharp edges, pierces the intestines of any animal feeding on it, and so is worse than useless as fodder for cattle or sheep. All milk and butter are imported in a frozen state from Australia, but do not, of course, penetrate beyond Europe-fashion hotels, as the people of the country do not care for them.
The exquisite neatness of Japanese farm houses, with their black and white walls, thatched roofs, and trim little bamboo fences and gates, is a real joy to the eye of one who has grown accustomed to the slipshod untidy East, or even to the happy-go-lucky methods of the American Continent. I never remember a Japanese village unequipped with either electric light or telephones. I really think geographers must have placed the 180th degree in the wrong place, and that Japs are really the most Western of Westerns, instead of being the most Eastern of Easterns. Pretty and attractive as the Japanese country is, its charm was spoilt for me by the almost total absence of bird and animal life. There are hardly any wild flowers either, except deliciously fragrant wild violets. Being in Japan, it is hardly necessary to say that these violets, instead of being of the orthodox colour, are bright yellow. They would be in Japan. This quaint people who only like trees when they are contorted, who love flowerless gardens, whose grass kills cattle, who have evolved peach, plum and cherry trees which flower gloriously but never bear any fruit, would naturally have yellow violets. They are certainly a wonderfully hardy race. I was at beautiful Nikko in the early spring when they were building a dam across the Nikko river. The stream has a tremendous current, and is ice-cold. Men were working at the dam up to their waists in the icy river, and little boys kept bringing them baskets of building stones, up to their necks in the swift current. Both men and boys issued from the river as scarlet as lobsters from the intense cold, and yet they stood about quite unconcernedly in their dripping thin cotton clothes in the keen wind. Had they been Europeans, they would all have died of pneumonia in two days' time. A race must have great powers of endurance that live in houses with paper walls without any heating appliances during the sharp cold of a Japanese winter, and that find thin cotton clothing sufficient for their wants.