In imagining a Japanese hotel, good reader, please dismiss all architectural ideas derived from the Continental or the Fifth Avenue.  Our hotels in Japan, outwardly at least, are wooden structures, two stories high, often but one.  Their roofs are usually thatched, though the city caravansaries are tiled.  They are entirely open on the front ground floor, and about six feet from the sill or threshold rises a platform about a foot and a half high, upon which the proprietor may be seen seated on his heels behind a tiny railing ten inches high, busy with his account-books.  If it is winter he is engaged in the absorbing occupation of all Japanese tradesmen at that time of year—­warming his hands over a charcoal fire in a low brazier.  The kitchen is usually just next to this front room, often separated from the street only by a latticed partition.  In evolving a Japanese kitchen out of his or her imagination, the reader must cast away the rising conception of Bridget’s realm.  Blissful, indeed, is the thought as I enter the Japanese hotel that neither the typical servant-girl nor the American hotel-clerk is to be found here.  The landlord comes to meet me, and, falling on his hands and knees, bows his head to the floor.  One or two of the pretty girls out of the bevy usually seen in Japanese hotels comes to assist me and take my traps.  Welcomes, invitations and plenty of fun greet me as I sit down to take off my shoes, as all good Japanese do, and as those filthy foreigners don’t who tramp on the clean mats with muddy boots.  I stand up unshod, and am led by the laughing girls along the smooth corridors, across an arched bridge which spans an open space in which is a rookery, garden, and pond stocked with goldfish, turtles and marine plants.  The room which my fair guides choose for me is at the rear end of the house, overlooking the grand scenery for which Kanozan is justly famous all over the empire.  Ninety-nine valleys are said to be visible from the mountain-top on which the hotel is situated, and I suspect that multiplication by ten would scarcely be an exaggeration.  A world of blue water and pines, and the detailed loveliness of the rolling land, form a picture which I lack power to paint with words.  The water seemed the type of repose, the earth of motion.

Enjoying to the full that rapture of first vision which one never feels twice, I turned and entered the room, which made up in neatness what it lacked in luxury.  Furniture in a Japanese house there is none.  Like all the others, the floor of my room was covered with soft matting two inches thick, made into sections six feet long and three feet wide, and bound with a black border.  The dimensions of a room may always be expressed by the number of mats.  The inside of the mats is of rice straw, the outside is of the finest and smoothest matting.  There are no chairs, stools, sofas or anything to sit down upon, though, having long since forgotten the fact, we find a ready seat on the floor.  On one