November 28.—A day at the Institute spent in soaking the fossils in gelatine—a tedious but necessary job which I must do myself. Oh, Tokio in the rain, what a place it is! In London we grumble if by accident we step into a “mud pie” left by the street cleaners at some corner of the road, but in Tokio in the wet one must walk through one continuous soft mud pie, along roads where there is no footpath. Of course, take a kuruma, is the native reply, but kurumas, though cheap, will easily run up into three or four shillings a day at that rate, and they jolt one’s spine to a jelly. The Japanese who walk do so on wooden clogs of a curious kind, with two high stilt-like parts of quite thin wood, so that it is difficult to balance. I fall off even the low kind, and could not walk in them any distance, even if I didn’t fall, as one must take such short steps.
November 29.—Still pouring wet. I went to lunch at the Faculty lunch; however, the Dean was most charming, and the President of the University did his best to be, but speaks very little English, so that we say much the same kind of things to each other every day. How ridiculous are the people who imagine “all Japanese are alike”; as I look along the table I see every possible type (except the brutally coarse or sensual one), which may be seen in the English nation, so beyond the fact that all are rather darkly brown or slightly yellow, what need to describe them?
In one way, how much more important the University professors are to their country than is a similar body of Englishmen to England! They represent practically all the science in the country, and the Emperor receives them at Court thrice a year, when they wear beautiful uniforms covered with gold lace, and in their hands lies largely the honour of the country, the old spirit of nobility, as distinct from commercialism and apart from mere militarism, both of which are now getting so rampant here.
November 30 to December 6.—No time to write this up, though I have been doing a lot of things.
December 7.—There was an interesting meeting at the University to-day, when Professor S—— was fêted, because it is the 25th anniversary of his professorship, as well as his silver wedding. The meeting was held in the hall in the Botanical Gardens, where the room opens out Japanese fashion on to the garden, just where it is prettiest, with its ponds and landscape trees. About 200 were there, I should imagine, and I was the only foreigner—his wife and daughters the only other ladies. The speeches, of course, were in Japanese, so I understood very little, but things were explained to me. They have collected about £300, and will devote it to a prize for research in chemistry. They have also got a nice likeness of him, which goes to his family. Baron Kikuchi made the chief speech; he had met him first in England, when they were university students together.
As I cannot understand enough to follow the sense of the speeches, my attention is concentrated on the eloquence or otherwise of the speakers and the musical qualities of the language. Judged from the individual words one would expect it to be a very flowing and beautiful speech, as every syllable ends in a vowel, but alas, it loses so much from the abrupt breaks they make in the middle of the sentences, e.g. “Ano-né—anata nó—kiodai wa—uchi ní—mairimasho ká.” It is impossible to give the rather staccato effect with pauses between the words. Also, even the good speakers are very apt to hesitate for exactly the right word, even more than our speakers do. This is not to be wondered at, for, as well as their own language, they have incorporated the entire Chinese language and classics (with a special pronunciation of their own), as well as a good many words from other tongues. I know a man who has studied steadily for forty years and is making a dictionary which surpasses any that the Japanese themselves have produced, and yet every day he learns some new fact about a word, or some new word.
December 8.—To-day was wet and cold, so I stopped at home (it was Sunday) and had visitors in the afternoon. We have had some frightfully cold weather these last few days, and my furs are very useful. One curious thing that I have noticed here, the gravel of the path to the Institute is lifted several inches up in the air by little delicate ice pillars, and these support the pebbles and sheets of mud so that the path looks quite as usual until one treads on it, when, of course, down one goes. The pillars are of clear ice, 1 or 2 inches high, and less than a pencil stem in thickness, growing in a forest like moss together. They even raise very heavy slabs of solid stone 20 or 30 pounds in weight, but they only come when the night is clear and still.
December 11.—A beautiful, warm, sunny day, the sky as blue as midsummer and the air sweet. At the Institute doing nothing worth recording in the day-time. In the evening I had been asked to give a short address to some of the students of the Law Department of the Imperial University. I spent more than an hour getting there, for “No. 3” Y—— Street represents at least thirty houses, as is so often the case in Tokio, so that one must go from door to door asking the householder’s name. Indeed, this is a “Land of Approximate Time.”
The club was small and very jolly, and I quite enjoyed the evening. There was only one Japanese lady there, the mother of one of the students, who was herself half German. She was very charming and much more intelligent-looking than the pure Japanese women. There was a small earthquake this evening.
December 12.—Another earthquake this morning! but quite small, and still a third at midday, also too small to be any fun. We are having lovely, hot, sunny weather, and for the first time there were a number of house flies in my room.