XIV. The Children of Topsy and Turvy Land
Wouldn't you like to visit some children who never cry when they are babies? No, they are not Indians, although they ride around on their mother's backs. Their faces are yellow. Their almond-shaped black eyes are slanting. They wear ki-mo'nos, They wipe their little noses on little paper handkerchiefs that they carry up their wide sleeves.
Japanese children! You have seen them in picture books. But how shall we really go to see them?
Let us go back to the City of the Golden Gate. One part of it is like fairy stories. The fronts of the shops are covered with red and gold dragons. This is called Chinatown because the Chinese people live there. If we hunt a long time maybe we will find a Japanese shop. The merchant is yellow, like the Chinese, but he wears American clothes and cuts his hair short. He speaks very good English. We will buy some tea, or a roll of silk, or a blue and white china bowl. If we are very polite, and we tell him we are going to get on a ship and go to Japan, perhaps he will give us a letter, and ask us to call on his brothers and sisters in Tok-io. Won't that be fine to visit Japanese children in their own home?
We get on the big steamship. It is not like the little sailing vessel—the Mayflower—that the Puritan children came in, three hundred years ago. It is a floating hotel, six stories deep, a hundred feet wide and as long as a city block. We sit on the roof of the ship. It is called the deck. The ship plows its way across the ocean. It goes very fast, but it takes days and days to get to Japan because this ocean is nearly five thousand miles wide. When we get to Japan we notice a strange thing. We may look back over the ocean we have crossed and see the sun rise! Japan is called the Land of the Rising Sun. The big rising sun is on all the Japanese flags. They float from ships in the harbor, and from tall houses in the city.
Here come the children, down to the dock, to meet us! They look just like their pictures. They are all dressed alike in blue or gray or flowered cotton ki-mo'nos, down to their straw or wooden sandals. We have to turn them around to see which are boys. The girls tie their sashes in big butterfly bows. The boys tuck in the
