There are even more scenes suitable to depict in miniature, in these dishes, than there is variety in the dishes themselves, for the artist can choose from the whole field of Nature. Land and sea, hill and woodland, rocky isles and grassy slopes he can reconstruct in little, or he can represent historic temples, spots famous in history or mythology, or scenes celebrated in poetry and literature.
They are not merely toys for children, but their construction is considered a real art, and rightly; for is not the baldest labour, if sincerely and lovingly performed, raised to the status of an art?
Competitions of Hachi Niwa are yearly held in Kyoto and occasionally in Tokio, and are attended by the highest nobles and statesmen and connoisseurs of art in the land. Foreigners laugh at this, as another example of the puerility of the Japanese mind. It strikes me as suggesting exactly the opposite. Did hot baths in the winter camps in Manchuria imply effeminacy, or lack of courage and strategic ability, in the Japanese soldier? Did the sailors who sent home Tanka (‘short poems’), written in leisure moments during the blockade of Port Arthur, go down in their ships any the less courageously, gloriously, because they were poets at heart?
Years ago, on my first visit to Japan, in a little fishing village where in great contentment
