the triumphs of all time, is touched by a taste unknown elsewhere." Mr. Lowell, as an artist in words, does not add what we, simple recorders of facts, are bound to do, that with so much to appeal to the eye, Tōkyō also has not a little that appeals to the nose.
Books recommended. For facts, Murray's Handbook for Japan; The Castle of Yedo, by T. R. H. McClatchie, in Vol. VI. Part I., and The Feudal Mansions of Yedo, by the same author, in Vol. VII. Part III. of the "Asiatic Transactions". For picturesque descriptions and for "talky-talky," the pages of globe-trotters and book-makers innumerable.
Carving. The earliest specimens of Japanese carving—if we may so call objects more probably moulded by the hand are the rude clay figures of men and horses occasionally found in the tumuli of Central and Eastern Japan (see Article on Archæology). But the art made no progress till the advent of Buddhism in the sixth century. A stone image of the god Miroku was among the earliest gifts of the Court of Korea to that of Japan. Wooden images came also. The Japanese themselves soon learnt to carve in both materials. The colossal figure of Jizō, hewn in relief on a block of andesite on the way between Ashinoyu and Hakone, is a grand example. Like so many other celebrated Japanese works of unknown antiquity, it is referred by popular tradition to the Buddhist saint, Kōbō Daishi (ninth century), who is fabled to have finished it in a single night. The art of wood-carving has always been chiefly in Buddhist hands. The finest collection of early religious statues is that in the museum at Nara, brought together from various temples in the surrounding country.[1] Much later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are the charming painted carvings of flowers and birds in the Nikkō temples and in those at Shiba and Ueno in Tōkyō.
- ↑ Whether some of the best of these statues are of native Japanese, or of Chinese or Korean workmanship, is a point still disputed among experts. On the one hand, it is alleged that nothing of equal merit has been discovered either in Korea or in China. On the other, there seems something strange in the fact of Japanese statuary being practically confined to the earlier ages, while all the rest of the fine arts went on improving until a culminating point was reached in the eighteenth century.
