Japanese dishes fail to satisfy European cravings. Imagine a diet without meat, without milk, without bread, without butter, without jam, without coffee, without salad or any sufficient quantity of nicely cooked vegetables, without puddings of any sort, without stewed fruit and with comparatively little fresh fruit, the European vegetarian will find almost as much difficulty in making anything out of it as the ordinary meat-eater. If Dr. Johnson had ever partaken of such a dinner, he would surely have described the result as a feeling of satiety without satisfaction, and of repletion without sustenance. The food is clean, admirably free from grease, often pretty to look at. But try to live on it—no! The Japanese, doubtless, being to the manner born, prefer their own rice and other dishes for a continuance. At the same time, they by no means object to an occasional dinner in European style, and their appetite on such occasions is astonishing. Experts say that Japanese food, though poor in nitrogen and especially in fat, is rich in carbon, and amply sufficient to support life, provided the muscles be kept in action, but that it is indigestible and even deleterious to those who spend their time squatting on the mats at
mably from American stock—have been raised at Kawasaki, near Yokohama, to supply foreigners tables. None such are to be obtained in the country at large. The native nashi, though generally translated "pear," is quite a different fruit—round, wooden, and flavourless; the native peach is first-cousin to a brickbat. Of the apple, which only became common towards the close of the nineteenth century, a fairly palatable variety is grown. There are few cherries (despite the wealth of cherry-blossom), no raspberries, no currants, scarcely any gooseberries, no mulberries although the land is dotted with mulberry-bushes to feed the silkworms), no tropical fruit of any sort. Figs are scarce and poor, grapes not abundant except in the single province of Kōshū, strawberries neither good nor abundant, plums and apricots mediocre, the Japanese medlars (biwa) not to be compared with those of Southern Europe. The best fruits here are the orange, one or two kinds of melon,—and for those who like it—the persimmon, though it, too, shares in the woodenness and coarse flavour characteristic of Japanese fruits. Probably two causes have led to the result here noticed. The first is founded on the climate, the best-flavoured fruits being produced in dry climates, whereas in Japan the heat and wet come together, and make the fruit rot instead of mellowing. Thus European stock, which has improved in America and Australia, rapidly deteriorates in Japan. The second cause—itself partly dependent on the first is that the national taste for fruit is unformed, fruit never having been here regarded as a regular article of diet, and circumstances having accustomed the Japanese to prefer that such fruit as they do take should be hard.
