To me
it brought no such memory, and the fact that this effect, common in
Japan, is technically known as "a nightingale squeak," perhaps supports
my insensitiveness.
If old Japan is to be found anywhere it is in Kyoto--in spite of its
huge factory chimneys. In Tokio, complete European dress is common in
the streets, but in Kyoto it is the exception. Tokio also wears boots,
but Kyoto is noisy with pattens night and day. Not only are there
countless shops in Kyoto given up to porcelain, carvings, screens,
bronzes, old armour, and so forth, but no matter how trumpery the normal
stock in trade of the other shops, a number of them have a little glass
case--a shop within a shop, as it were--in which a few rare and ancient
articles of beauty are kept. A great deal of Japan is expressed in this
pretty custom.
THE RICE FIELDS
My first experience of Japanese scenery of any wildness was gained while
shooting the rapids of the Katsuragava, an exciting voyage among
boulders in a shallow and often very turbulent stream in a steep and
craggy valley a few miles from Kyoto. Previous to this expedition I had
seen, from the train, only the trim rice fields,--each a tiny
parallelogram with its irrigation channels as a boundary, so carefully
tended that there is not a weed in the whole country. Japan is cut up
into these absurd little squares, of which twenty and more would go into
an ordinary English field.
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