RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
of the Japanese currency from the silver to the gold standard, which was a great step in Japan’s progress toward a place among the world’s powers. He had been made a life peer and sat in the Upper House. At the luncheon he wore a frock coat which Mr. Taft felt confident he recognised as an old college friend of the ’seventies. In those days the Japanese wore their “foreign clothes” only on “foreign occasions” or at court. They kept them carefully folded up and put away, and they had not yet come to recognise the desirability of pressing them when they took them out for use. Also a silk hat once was a silk hat always; vintages didn’t trouble them, and they didn’t mind in the least which way the nap was brushed.
Baron Tajiri wanted to be appointed Minister of Finance when Yamagata retired, but he was put, instead, at the head of the Board of Audits, a life position. Marchioness, now Princess Oyama, wife of the Field Marshal, told my husband this on the occasion of his second visit to Japan, and said that the disappointment had made Tajiri very much of a recluse. Jn any case, Mr. Taft has never seen him again, although he has tried to seek him out and has made inquiry about him every time he has been in Japan.
We were very much interested in our Legation at Tokyo. It was the first one we had ever seen that the American goverment owned. The house was not what it ought to have been, but it was surrounded by spacious and beautifully kept grounds and was so much better than the nothing that we have in other countries that we liked to dwell upon it as an honourable exception to the disgraceful and miserly policy pursued by Congress in dealing with our representatives to foreign capitals.
Mrs. Wright, with her daughter Katrina, had decided to remain with us in Yokohama for the summer, so we took a cottage together on The Bluff, a high foreign residence sec-
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