All Japan is like a museum. You can travel about for years and daily find new gems of natural beauty and of the most perfect art. Everything seems so small and delicate. Even the people are small. The roads are narrow, and are chiefly used by rickshas and foot passengers. The houses are dolls' closets. The railways are of narrow gauge, and the carriages like our tramcars. But if you wish to see something large you can visit the Buddhist temple in Kioto. There we are received with boundless hospitality by the high priest, Count Otani, who leads us round and shows us the huge halls where Buddha sits dreaming, and his own palace, which is one of the most richly and expensively adorned in all Japan.
If you wish to see something else which does not exactly belong to the small things of Japan you should visit a temple in Osaka, the chief manufacturing town of Japan. There hangs a bell which is 25 feet high and weighs 220 tons. In a frame beside the bell is suspended a beam, a regular battering-ram, which is set in motion up and down when the bell is sounded. And when the bell emits its heavy, deafening ring it sounds like thunder.
Kioto is much handsomer than Tokio, for it has been less affected by the influence of Western lands, and lies amidst hills and gardens. Kioto is the genuine old Japan with attractive bazaars and bright streets. Shall we look into a couple of shops?
Here is an art-dealer's. We enter from the street straight into a large room full of interesting things, but the dealer takes us into quite a small room, where he invites us to sit at a table. And now he brings out one costly article after another. First he shows us some gold lacquered boxes, on which are depicted trees and houses and the sun in gold, and golden boats sailing over water. One tiny box, containing several compartments and drawers, and covered all over with the finest gold inlaying, costs only three thousand yen, or about three hundred pounds. Then he shows us an old man in ivory lying on a carpet of ivory and reading a book, while a small boy in ivory has climbed on to his back. From a whole elephant tusk a number of small elephants have been carved, becoming smaller towards the point of the tusk, but all cut out in the same piece. You are tired of looking at them, they are so many, and they are all executed with such exact faithfulness to nature that you would hardly be surprised if they began to move.
Then he sets on the table a dozen metal boxes exquisitely adorned with coloured lacquer. On the lid of a silver box an adventure of a monkey is represented in raised work. Pursued by a snake, the monkey has taken refuge in a cranny beneath a projecting rock. The snake sits on the top. He cannot see the monkey, but he catches sight of his reflection in the water below the stone. The monkey, too, sees the image of the snake, and each is now waiting for the other.
Now the shopman comes with two tortoises in bronze. The Japanese are experts in metal-work, and there is almost life and movement in these creatures. Now he throws on to the table a snake three feet long. It is composed of numberless small movable rings of iron fastened together, and looks marvellously life-like. Just at the door stands a heavy copper bowl on a lacquered tripod, a gong that sounds like a temple bell when its edge is struck with a skin-covered stick. It is beaten out of a single piece, not cast, and therefore it has such a wonderful vibrating and long-continued ring.
Let us also go into one of the famous large silk shops. Shining white silk with white embroidered chrysanthemum flowers on it—women's kimonos with clusters of blue flowers on the sleeves and skirt—landscapes, fishing-boats, ducks and pigeons, monkeys and tigers, all painted or embroidered on silk—herons and cranes in thick raised needlework on screens in black frames—everything is good and tasteful.
Among the most exquisite, however, are the cloths of cut velvet. This is a wonderful art not found in any other country than Japan. The finest white silken threads are tightly woven over straight copper wires laid close together, making a white cloth of perhaps ten feet square, interwoven with copper wires. An artist paints in bright colours on the cloth a landscape, a rushing brook among red maples, a bridge, a mill-wheel, and a hut on the bank. When he has done, he cuts with a sharp knife along each of the numberless copper wires. Every time he cuts, the point of the knife follows one of the copper wires, and he cuts only over the coloured parts. The fine silk threads are thus severed and their ends stand up like a brush. Then the copper wires are drawn out, and there stand the red trees, hut, and bridge in close velvet on a foundation of silk.
In all kinds of handicrafts and mechanical work the Japanese are experts. A workman will sit with inexhaustible patience and diligence for days, and even months and years, executing in ivory a boy carrying a fruit basket on his back. He strikes and cuts with his small hammers and knives, his chisels and files, and gives himself no rest until the boy is finished. Perhaps it may cost him a year's work, but the price is so high that all his expenses for the year are covered when the boy is sold to an art-dealer.