“It is very difficult to explain the meaning,” he says. “It is simple to a Japanese, but impossible to a foreigner. The first character is a tortoise, which to us is the symbol of wisdom and eternity. The next means to pray. The last shows pilgrims climbing the sacred mountain, Fujiyama. That straight dash with the cross-beams is the crater with clouds floating about it.”
“The motto thus means, ‘Pray that you may be as a tortoise on the sacred mountain.’”
“Yes. It means to wish eternal wisdom and happiness to the dweller in this room.”
Kato looks again. “Hiburimo Ito,” he spells. “The Marquis Ito.”
“The motto was given by him to the master of this house. See! the yellow and red seals are his. He did the work himself. This is the mark of his brush.”
“No. But the master has a friend who came from the same province, Tosa, in the south. It is called the Statesman Province, for Ogura and Komura also came from there, while Satsuma in the west, from which Yamagata, Oyama and Hirose came, is called the Warrior’s Province. This friend went to school with the Marquis Ito when they were both poor and now that the Marquis is rich and powerful his friend asked him for some motto of good fortune. And he was given this. It is a custom.”
The Marquis Ito says but little. Of whatever subjects he speaks he illumines, and he never hesitates to break into a conversation if it interests him. Some time ago he rivaled that unknown New Yorker who achieved fame for a single toast of nine words:
“The new woman, once our superior, now our equal.”
It was at a reception and the Marquis interrupted a discussion of the difference between American and Japanese women to say to an American: “When I marry I take on a head servant; when you marry you become one.”
It was only last week at a banquet that Mrs. Wood, wife of the United States Military Attaché at the legation here, was asking Baron Komura, Minister of Foreign Affairs, if it was true that the Japanese government had made an appropriation to buy back the heirlooms which needy Japanese of good family had sold abroad.
“No,” said Komura, “we are too poor. What is gone is gone. It may be that some private parties are buying them up, but not the government. I have heard that even some of the temple relics, their most prized bronzes and lacquers, have gone. The people forsake the old gods, the priest gets poor, the curio man comes with gold and away go the musty monuments of centuries.”