habits, manners, arts and sciences of other nations. Every visitor to Japan was struck with their intellectual superiority over all other Easterns—their sound sense, and powers of reasoning, their ready wit, keen perception, and great taste. The Jesuits, the soldiers and merchants of Europe, all bear testimony to their quickness in acquiring languages—their love for the exact as well as speculative sciences. The self-possession and self-respect, so apparent in the present day amongst all classes, was constantly noted. “Their rustics,” said Ambassador Spex, “appear gentlemen by the side of our churls:” and it was remarked, in favourable contrast to the relative position of European classes of the community in those days, that although the inferiors were most respectful to their superiors, their superiors were ever mindful of civility to those beneath them. Brave, prone to appeal to arms, and ruthless in battle, the Japanese exhibited at the same time a strange contrast in a hardened indifference to the sufferings of his fellow-creature: there was a total absence of all public charity for the relief of the aged or diseased; infanticide was frequent; and there was an anomalous mixture of love and respect for women and the sanctity of the marriage tie, with legalised prostitution and public indecency. Then, as to-day, the stranger visiting a Japanese city, was struck with the strange olio of civilisation and utter barbarism—of extreme delicacy and good taste, combined with grossness, and disregard of those commonest conventionalities which raise us above the beasts of the field. Take, for instance, the preceding illustration, that of a street in the suburb of Yedo. Evening is setting in; travellers are unloading their horses and seeking a hostelry for the night. Mark the advanced condition of civilisation in the appearance of the dwellings, the neatness of the road, the trees allowed to grow as ornament and shade, the monumental arch erected to woman’s virtue, or man’s valour, the policeman in the distance; and, above all, the mingling of the sexes, so different to what is generally witnessed in the East; and, lastly, mine host, of the Hotel of Ten Thousand Centuries, praising the advantages of his establishment to the passing traveller. Then look at the reverse. The hotels are to be recognised by the courtesans, who both in the balconies and on the door-steps are inviting the passers-by. The three travellers in the fore-ground are criticising the poor girls, and debating at which house to put up. Neither parties seem in the least ashamed of the part they are performing. This is a truthful every-day scene, sadly illustrative of the remarks we have just made; and we fancy the admirers of the ancient civilisation of Greece and Rome, will in Japan find a strong and living example of the stand point to which those various nations reached.
We have hundreds of sketches made by natives, illustrative of the wayside scenes of Japan. They were not made for the purpose of impressing foreigners with the comfort and well-to-do appearance of the people, any more than of the beauty of the scenery in the interior: yet there is in all a total absence of squalor, misery, or want. Could an artist, in most continental countries of Europe, we ask, sit down and sketch what was passing before him in a street or on a highway, without introducing figures from which one would turn with loathing? Not only does it appear to be otherwise in Japan, but the remarks of European travellers in the interior confirm the fact to a very great degree. We do not in Japan find, as in India, the roadside leading to some great shrine or temple beset with starving disease-stricken pilgrims; neither, as Abbé Huc has recently seen in China, do you meet with the tens of thousands who formerly inhabited some prosperous province, forced by war or famine to leave their home, and marching in quest of sustenance—an army of starving creatures, more dangerous than wild beasts, more destructive, wherever they come, than locusts. Beggars there are in Japan; but it appears to be a lawful institution, not an unpleasant occupation, and kindly supported out of the surplus of their neighbours,—somewhat resembling the religious mendicant societies once so common in Europe. Yet the Japanese mendicants are original: the beggars do not trust to your mere charity to move your heart. If they be old, and fail to move you with the tale of their wants, they immediately, we are told, change from grief to gaiety, and either perform “coach-wheels,” as the London gamin does, or tell you some witty tale, or sing a song,—in short, attest the fact that they are jolly beggars after all, and are ready to earn their penny if you will let them.
The mendicant priesthood of Fusi-hama, men who form their homes in lonely spots or dangerous places around the immortal shrine they worship, who give themselves up to the contemplation of what they believe to be the good and pure, praying ever for the sinning sons and daughters of Nipon, only mortify the flesh by abstaining considerably from ablutions and in forswearing razors; but they have cosey houses burrowed out amongst rocks and forest-covered ravines. Of course they are necromancers; so were our early monks; but these worthy Yamanboos—priests of the mountain—marry and bring up their families of mountaineers, of whom the young lady portions are notorious for their beauty, and would we could say for their virtue also. These children—at least the daughters of the mountain-priests—are born to beg, as mendicants, unless their beauty or talents induce the wealthier sons of the plains to raise them from their humble occupation to be the mistresses of their households. Under the term Bikuni, these pretty damsels travel in pairs, clothed in a dress not unlike that of a sister of charity, and frequenting the great routes which, at certain seasons, are thronged with pilgrims and travellers, these fair nuns are said to seldom beg in vain. The artful hood hides a laughing black eye and rosy cheek, the modest robe covers far too faultless and well developed a form to pass unscathed where warm hearts are untrammeled, in a climate of Italian fervour, by those social rules which we have the Poet Laureate’s authority for saying, “Sin against the strength of youth.”
More than that, love and religion in Japan have a certain mystic connection on which it were not well to dwell. It comes of old, old time, and is