We subsequently saw the many processes through which cloisonné passes, and it is not until you have seen the skill and delicate workmanship required, that you really begin to appreciate cloisonné. And the same may be said about lacquer, which requires knowing to be fully understood. First the vase must be fashioned in copper, then the designer must delineate from memory some intricate design of flowers or birds or landscape. This again has to be reproduced in tiny pieces of wire, pinched and twisted deftly into shape and soldered on to the copper. The interstices of the wire are filled in with the brilliant colours that we see in the saucers by the side of the workers, and the mixing of these is the secret which ensures success. Five times the colours are "filled," and five times burnt in the kilns, and then the polisher with his different coarsenesses of stones polishes it into a burnished and chaste work of art.
Apart from temples, there is not much to see at Tokio, but it is the streets which fascinate you so completely, that waking and sleeping you dream of these, and you want to be always out and amongst the bright life that flows through them. To get any idea of Japan you must always remember that everything is so ridiculously small. Life here is in miniature. Everything is lilliputian; beginning with the little houses, continuing with the little men and women and their tiny children, and ending with the little ponies, for there are no horses in Japan. And so to imagine a Japanese street, you must picture to yourself rows of little brown houses, many of only one storey, with large overhanging eaves. The interior is wide open and only raised one step from the street, and you look across the brightly burnished floor through the opening of the paper sliding screens, which are thrown back in the daytime, and catch pretty glimpses of the home life in the back yard. Many of the shops are hung with funereal-looking purple and black hangings, inscribed with white hieroglyphics giving the names and nature of their wares. You recognize the chemist's shop by the gold tablets setting forth the details of the pharmacopœia within. There are barbers' shops, with a half-shaven customer with upturned chin seated in the chair; drapers' with samples of bright-coloured stuffs hung round a revolving wheel outside; toy-shops where are sold those paper kites and tiniest of shuttlecocks, or hobgoblin horses and animals of impossible shape and size, with which the children play in the street. There are others hung with nothing but strings of straw sandals, or wooden clogs; grain shops where the clean white green and red seeds are sorted into baskets of samples. Here is one for the sale of saké, the brandy of Japan, piled up with huge barrels, and with those tapering blue and white bottles which we are accustomed to use for flower-vases, but which are really manufactured to hold this popular beverage. And then the china shops; they are an incessant delight, with their hundreds of dear little common blue and white rice bowls, their artistic tea-pots of pale green ware with a spray of apple blossom, their hibachis, or china flower-pots of deep blue, green or bronze ware, which are used for the hot ashes to light the pipe with, and are found on the floor of all tea-houses. Again, we must look at this stationer's, where that soft crinkled tissue paper is sold, and the brushes with which the Japanese write so swiftly and deftly, that the ink is absorbed without blotting into the paper. In Japan they do everything upside down. The horses stand with their tails in their mangers and their heads where their tails should be. Locks revolve contrariwise, and the carpenters plane towards, instead of away from the person. So with writing; they write from the bottom of the page to the top, and from right to left, and the number of their characters is appalling. You must know from 3000 to 4000 characters to write Japanese at all, and an educated man will require some 6000; and the disappointing thing is that when a foreigner has mastered this, the literature opened up to him offers no reward for his labour, as it practically does not as yet exist.