August 21.—I worked all day at fossils, and was much vexed to find that the powerful heat has brought bubbles in the Canada Balsam of nearly every slide! Botanists alone will understand the tragic significance of this, and they will sympathise and be merciful when I bring the bubbly preparations home!
You at home can hardly understand how hot the sun is, really burning hot, and many of my trays were so placed that the sun has been falling on them all the time I was away, resulting in thousands of bubbles. I discovered it by chance to-day, when I had mounted and examined some, and then left them for an hour where the sun got at them, and I found a thousand minute bubbles in each of the scorching slides. Alack!
August 27.—This morning at breakfast, thinking over cones, a question arose in my mind about those of Cryptomeria which I could not settle without a specimen, and which checked my line of thought, so I gave it up and glanced out of the window beside which I was sitting in search of lighter amusement (for there is a nice vine there whose tendrils curl round and round in a very pretty way), and by my hand, growing on the little hedge I had never noticed very specially before, was a Cryptomeria cone! Having associated the Cryptomeria always with the stately giants that surround the temples, I had never associated these green hedges, three feet high, with them, nor did I realise that they could bear cones while so young. It still remains a problem whether perhaps a fairy, listening to my thoughts, had not touched with her magic wand the branch nearest me, so that it produced the cone, for not another was to be found anywhere around.
I gathered it, cut it open, and settling the point I wanted, was able to pick up all the dropped stitches of the argument and carry it on. Fairies are most useful creatures to scientists!
August 28.—As my bicycle was once more having a puncture mended, I had to go in the tram, as it is far too hot to walk all the way. In this boiling weather the tram was as full as ever, 50 people where but 20 should be, standing so thickly all down the middle that they were pressed against each other on all sides, and every window and every ventilator and the door all closed! I slammed down two windows, but could not reach the ventilators, as they are so high up; directly I got the chance, I opened a window on the opposite side, but no one else followed the example, though the Japanese seem to feel the heat much more than I do, when not in a foreign style vehicle or house.
Taking this in conjunction with the remarks Japanese have often made to me about the foreigners’ dislike of fresh air, and in conjunction also with numerous other observations of a similar nature, I am forced to conclude that the Japanese, as a nation, are not at all sensitive to bad air. Their houses, built according to the ancient plan, force them, by their construction, to live in ideally fresh rooms, but put them in a foreign house, and everything is hermetically sealed.
August 29.—I went into one of the Laboratories to-day, and found four men, three gas burners, and a stove at work, without an inch of window open—it nearly stifled me. I have noticed this Laboratory before, and never, all through this scorching summer, have I seen the windows unclasped. It is a foreign style building, of course.
August 30.—I got up very early and set off on my bicycle to see the sacred lotus flowers on the great pond near Oyeno Park, but I did not get there in time to see them burst open, for that takes place at sunrise, but the flowers were fresh and fair, still unfaded by the heat of the day when I got to the edge of the water. There must have been several acres of them, with their great leaves overtopped by huge rosy flowers. The purity and radiance of their opaque yet lustrous petals is something I have never seen surpassed in any other flowers, and as they stand up in a rich succession of curves to form a 9-inch bowl, their cumulative effect is magnificent, while in them glows a golden radiance of captured sun-rays. Glorious flowers!
A little island lies in the pond, which is reached by a bridge, and on it is a temple, with shrines standing on it. There those who come to see the lotus worship in their simple way, pulling the temple bell and clapping their hands to ensure that the gods hear the short muttered prayer and put to their credit the half-farthings they bestow. One is always hearing of the lack of religion among the Japanese, but there never was a land with so many shrines and temples. On my way back I passed a shrine under a tree trunk on a crowded thoroughfare. It was only a toy building a couple of feet high, but a workman was busy arranging his offering of dangling white papers. Religion and daily life are mingled here.
September 2.—I set off for Hayama, a little seaside place not far from Tokio, hoping to escape this dreadful heat. Though really a very trifling journey, it takes several hours, as the trains are so slow. It lies beyond the well-known Kamakura, and is much more beautiful and open, as it is round the point of the bay, and is mercifully free from most of the crowd that overwhelms Kamakura in summer.