The Japanese show a refined taste in the coloring and decoration of rooms; natural woods, painted and polished, are common; every post and board standing erect must stand in the position in which it grew.  A Japanese knows at once whether a board or post is upside down, though it would often puzzle a Westerner to decide the matter.  The natural wood ceilings and the soft yellows and blues of the walls are all that the best trained Occidental eye could ask.  Dainty decorations called the “ramma,” over the neat “fusuma,” consist of delicate shapes and quaint designs cut in thin boards, and serve at once as picture and ventilator.  The drawings, too, on the “fusuma” (solid thick paper sliding doors separating adjacent rooms or shutting off the closet) are simple and neat, as is all Japanese pictorial art.

Japanese love for flowers reveals a high aesthetic development.  Not only are there various flower festivals at which times the people flock to suburban gardens and parks, but sprays, budding branches, and even large boughs are invariably arranged in the homes and public halls.  Every church has an immense vase for the purpose.  The proper arrangement of flowers and of flowering sprays and boughs is a highly developed art.  It is often one of the required studies in girls’ schools.  I have known two or three men who made their entire living by teaching this art.  Miniature flowering trees are reared with consummate skill.  An acquaintance of mine glories in 230 varieties of the plum tree, all in pots, some of them between two and three hundred years old.  Shinto and Buddhist temples also reveal artistic qualities most pleasing to the eye.

But the main point of our interest lies in the explanation of this characteristic.  Is the aesthetic sense more highly developed in Japan than in the West?  Is it more general?  Is it a matter of inherent nature, or of civilization?

In trying to meet these problems, I note, first of all, that the development of the Japanese aesthetic taste is one-sided; though advanced in certain respects it is belated in others.  In illustration is the sense of smell.  It will not do to say that “the Japanese have no use for the nose,” and that the love of sweet smells is unknown.  Sir Rutherford Alcock’s off-quoted sentence that “in one of the most beautiful and fertile countries in the whole world the flowers have no scent, the birds no song, and the fruit and vegetables no flavor,” is quite misleading, for it has only enough truth to make it the more deceptive.  It is true that the cherry blossom has little or no odor, and that its beauty lies in its exquisite coloring and abounding luxuriance, but most of the native flowers are praised and prized by the Japanese for their odors, as well as for their colors, as the plum, the chrysanthemum, the lotus, and the rose.  The fragrance of flowers is a frequent theme in Japanese poetry.  Japanese ladies, like those of every land, are fond of delicate scents.  Cologne and kindred wares find wide sale in Japan, and I am told that expensive musk is not infrequently packed away with the clothing of the wealthy.