I heard from an old resident (thirty years here) that the Japanese are the most sentimental people under the sun. Oh, ye who stop at home and dream your dreams about Japan! Stay there.
March 9.—The following happened a few days ago, and I should have put it in then, but I forgot. The day was miserable, wet, cold, and windy, with snow blustering about, and instead of quietly having lunch in the warm Institute I was told we were to go to the big state-rooms at the other side of the gardens. There I found that all the Biology students and the Botanical and garden staff were lunching in Japanese style. There was a special kind of pink rice, with small beans boiled with it, and the various more or less savoury pieces of fish, vegetables, and a kind of pancake that go to make up a bento. Afterwards we all had packets of highly ornamental sticky cakes, chiefly made of the stodgy bean-paste I cannot eat, but some were good. This was the feast of the God Inari (the God of Rice), who is very appropriately worshipped by the botanists. After the feast we cowered under our umbrellas and went a pilgrimage through the gardens to his shrine, where we found the hundred-year-old blue cotton banner put up outside. Within the shrine was incense, lit by the Botanical Laboratory attendant, and a great tray of cakes, the same as we had been eating. Led by the Staff, we all rang the bell to call Inari’s attention to our visit, and clapping our hands in prayer we gave him a few sens each, throwing the copper coins in among the cakes. Then we ploughed our way through the bog-like paths to the Institute.
March 10.—So seedy that I did not get up at all. It is the very first day in my life that I have ever spent in bed (except for the measles, when I was too ill to notice anything much), and I feel it a solemn and important event. The first half of the day sped on magic wings, and I wondered how one could be so bête as to find bed a wearisome place when one is surrounded by the lovely golden lights on bare wood. How we spoil wood by staining and painting it! The range of delicate colour in the woodwork of my room is a perfect delight. Then I had also a little tree, shaped like a weeping-willow, but one mass of rosy pink plum blossom, some flowers wide open, with recurved petals and a flare of silver stamens, others in perfectly round crimson buds, alluring as only roundness can be.
Till 3 o’clock in the afternoon that tree and the wood made me blissfully happy, but the hours between 3 and 5 seemed terribly long, and by night I was sated with the delights of bed. The next day seemed very far off.
March 13.—I went to the Institute in the morning and cut some fossils. It has simply been an influenza cold, but it has rather played havoc; after lunch at the Faculty and a long and varied talk with the Dean, I wasn’t fit to do any more, so I called on the B——s and went to tea with the Charmer on my way home to bed. I went to bed before 6 o’clock, and was so worn out that I howled for an hour, but dinner revived me, and I am now as cheerful as if I hadn’t contemplated suicide two hours ago. Tokio is a terrible place for ups and downs. To-day it is fearfully cold, even my bath towel frozen; and a week ago it was like summer for two days—one day a miserable snowstorm, the next glowing blue skies.
March 14.—In the afternoon a party had been arranged to visit a noted plum garden at Omori, and have tea in a tea-house. As the H——s had asked me to go home with them to dinner and sleep, I went, though by the end of the day I was far too tired out. We carried cakes, trusting the tea-house for cups and hot water. The plum garden was indescribably beautiful, and a typical “Japanese” scene. The garden sloped in the double hollow of a shell-shaped valley, and the rich white bloom on the trees surged up it as the thick drifting mists surge up a mountain pass. Standing out from the cloud-sea of blossoms, like peaks from out the mists, were two or three tea-houses, white papered and inhabited by gaily-decked maidens, and men who admired the plums, in grey silk. The sky was clear sapphire, and the sea beyond lay like a blue gauze veil along the horizon. While the others went on into the midst of the trees, I left the garden and sat in the sun on the steps of a little temple, which was a perfect harmony of curves, and behind lay a bamboo grove.
Tea was amusing, for Captain S—— would not take off his boots, and therefore had to walk with his feet in the air; which he did on his knees or hands. The tea-house was perched on the side of a hill, and looked down on rice fields and woody patches on little elevations. After tea we explored the temple and its pretty groves, and had a lovely merry-go-round ride on the old revolving library, a huge thing, but so perfectly poised that we could all sit on it and go round without its even creaking.
March 16.—Called on Mrs. P—— on my way to the Institute in the morning. She captured me, and then and there my clothes were taken off and I was put to bed—and was secretly thankful to be there. She is quite exceptionally kind to take me in in this way.
March 25.—At work all day over fossils—then dressed in my green-and-gold Venetian dress and called on Mrs. G—— on the way to the Embassy dinner. She and her children were having a preliminary view of some of the gowns—she is, alas, still in bed. The party was splendid—several Japanese were there in magnificent old court dresses and simply marvellous arrangements for their hair. Baroness S—— also wore Japanese court dress. Perhaps I had better shortly describe it. The lower part consists of scarlet trousers with extremely wide stiff legs, and the garment is much like our “divided skirt” of some years ago, but the cloth is much stiffer. Over it is a gorgeously embroidered kimono, with sweeping train. Some of the hair ornaments are extremely bizarre, others (according to the period) rather simple, the hair falling down the back and tied in three places.
