=October 25.=--A very full day, which I began by calling on the Vice-Minister of Education, to whom an official call has long been due. Once more I had to grieve over the poverty and bad taste of the European furniture with which so many official Japanese are replacing their own simple and dignified arrangements.
I then went to a Faculty lunch at the University--to-day being the day when all the professors of the Science College meet and lunch together. Through the week the other colleges and faculties have their day. I met many friendly people, Professor _S----_ being particularly charming. The dining-hall is in Japanese style, but tables and food European. The floor mats being Japanese, we must take off our boots and patter about in slippers, which are all made of one size and belong to the University. I can’t keep them on, and people are always fetching me new ones when I quietly discard an importunate pair.
The Minister of Education has this year started a sort of Academy of Pictures, and gave me an invitation for the private view. There were three sections, Japanese paintings proper, oils after the manner of foreigners, and sculpture. The latter very bad; the two former sections, though containing only about a couple of hundred exhibits, yet had a larger number of beautiful things than our Academy ever shows. The selection had been very careful, eight out of every ten rejected, and each hung with at least 1 foot of wall space all round it, and nothing skied!
=October 26.=--A party from the Botanical Institute went on a botanical excursion to Nikko, a very renowned and lovely district about 2000 feet above the sea. The temples there are marvellous, and the whole region one of the “three places” of Japan, and so well known and often described that I shall not attempt to give any account of its technical glories. A few things struck me specially, but the glorious carving and gilding and rich beauty of the temples I am not qualified to describe. In the temple I specially liked the Sacred Horse. Dear beast (he is alive, of course), he had been at the war and come through safely, but his rider, a prince of the Imperial house, who had been a High Priest up to the dis-establishment of the priesthood, was killed. The horse now lives in his beautiful dwelling in the temple, and is fed by the faithful on beans, which are sold at a farthing a dish. It seems so cruel to give him such small helpings at a time that I gave him half a dozen simultaneously, and so the keeper-priest gave me a picture of this animal in all his sacred trappings.