Japan and the Japanese illustrated . that he cannot abate a farthing in the shopmen are carrying the bales, of which the purchaser is taking an invoice, ontheir shoulders. The money is in little straw bags, which the coolies cany atthe ends of their bamboos. Everything is conducted with the order and regularity 344 LIFE IN JAPAX. becoming to a great house. The smallest details are drawn with the care which wouldbe bestowed upon a serious composition. It is in this kind of comic art, childish orheroic by turns, that the Japanese display most ease and originality. I frequently noticed
Japan and the Japanese illustrated . that he cannot abate a farthing in the shopmen are carrying the bales, of which the purchaser is taking an invoice, ontheir shoulders. The money is in little straw bags, which the coolies cany atthe ends of their bamboos. Everything is conducted with the order and regularity 344 LIFE IN JAPAX. becoming to a great house. The smallest details are drawn with the care which wouldbe bestowed upon a serious composition. It is in this kind of comic art, childish orheroic by turns, that the Japanese display most ease and originality. I frequently noticed a dash of satire of a political kind in the numerous andvaried sketches whose subject is furnished by the trains of the Daimios. Forinstance, I have seen many in which the personages of the cortege, beginning with theprince himself, arc represented as foxes or monkeys. The satirical intention is not less manifest in those pictures in which we see thesuperior of a bonze-house with a wolfs head, and a group of nuns under the image of. THE HAHE AKTi THE WILD BOAIl. weasels. The most expressive picture I have seen of this kind represents an audiencein which a hare has prostrated himself, trembling, at the feet of a wild boar. Thehare is a little hattamoto out of employment, and the wild boar is a high-classfunctionary in Court dress, who wears the toque of Kioto. The taste for the fantastic goes along with that for caricature. In .lapan, politicalinstitutions, religion, and nature, all concur to excite the imagination and to set itwandering to the region of chimeras. On the sea-shore, the basaltic rocks take formsnow grotesque and now frightful. The ocean itself is a world of , when it is very dark, a light may be seen under the water which resembles CHIMERAS. 345 <t dragon. Sailors luive scon sholLs darting along among the waves. Under the watersof the Strait of Simonosdki is a giotto, or rather a temple, encrusted with pearlsand motluT-of-pearl. It is called
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1870, bookidjapanjapanes, bookyear1874
