Dr. Hirai speaks the English of a generation gone, with the clear cut pronunciation of another age when men and women had time to do things well, and as he speaks English, so he stands at the head of one of the great railroads of the world, with the gentle suavity and calm reflective face of a scholar, not a man of affairs, with a serene self-possession which is the unmistakable mark of genius combined with self-mastery. He is more like the great Dr. Charcot than any man I ever met, and I remembered on coming home that in Dr. Charcot’s Paris house was placed, in his vast library, a statue of Buddha.
MADAME SHIMODA
Madame Shimoda is one of those rare beings, who have the singular fortune to have not only fame, but what is far more to be coveted, a place, in the hearts of thousands of her countrymen and women.
Hardly any one in Tokyo, who reads at all, but could guide you to the little wooden house, on the hill, one of a million homes of her city, where this virile and delicate woman lives, surrounded by the care of relatives and friends, who it is easy to see give her, not only care, but love.
Born in a feudal castle in the picturesque country of the Japan mountain region, with the country spirit still in her, which the life for many years in the palace of Tokyo could not destroy, that spirit you feel in the touch of her diminutive hand, in the glance of her powerful eyes, where dwells unquenched the freshness of free spaces.
Before she was twenty she was a reader to Her Majesty the Empress and began the severe training of court etiquette, with its demands, more than those of a soldier for self-control, yet even after years of such experience and the still more severe drill as a teacher of young ladies she has as charming a naturalness as a girl, so great is the gift of the “kind old Nurse” Nature.
These men and women of Japan, who have crossed the half century line, are all of them, more or less, the inheritors of the chivalry of the ages gone by, and of all those ideas which Japan once held as absolutely necessary to the making of a lady or a gentleman.
They tell us with a soft resigned sigh, that those ideals are passing away before the inroads of western civilization, and who can not regret it?