It might be thought that a truly artistic people, who are also somewhat immoral, would have developed much skill in the portrayal of the nude female form.  But such an attempt does not seem to have been made until recent times, and in imitation of Western art.  At least such attempts have not been recognized as art nor have they been preserved as such.  I have never seen either statue or picture of a nude Japanese woman.  Even the pictures of famous prostitutes are always faultlessly attired.  The number and size of the conventional hairpins, and the gaudy coloring of the clothing, alone indicate the immoral character of the woman represented.

It is not to be inferred, however, that immoral pictures have been unknown in Japan, for the reverse is true.  Until forcibly suppressed by the government under the incentive of Western criticism, there was perfect freedom to produce and sell licentious and lascivious pictures.  The older foreign residents in Japan testify to the frequency with which immoral scenes were depicted and exposed for sale.  Here I merely say that these were not considered works of art; they were reproduced not in the interests of the aesthetic sense, but wholly to stimulate the taste for immoral things.

The absence of the nude from Japanese art is due to the same causes that led to the relative absence of all distinctively human nature from art.  Manhood and womanhood, as such, were not the themes they strove to depict.

A curious feature of the artistic taste of the people is the marked fondness for caricature.  It revels in absurd accentuations of special features.  Children with protruding foreheads; enormously fat little men; grotesque dwarf figures in laughable positions; these are a few common examples.  Nearly all of the small drawings and sculpturings of human figures are intentionally grotesque.  But the Japanese love of the grotesque is not confined to its manifestation in art.  It also reveals itself in other surprising ways.  It is difficult to realize that a people who revel in the beauties of nature can also delight in deformed nature; yet such is the case.  Stunted and dwarfed trees, trees whose branches have been distorted into shapes and proportions that nature would scorn—­these are sights that the Japanese seem to enjoy, as well as “natural” nature.  Throughout the land, in the gardens of the middle and higher classes, may be found specimens of dwarfed and stunted trees which have required decades to raise.  The branches, too, of most garden shrubs and trees are trimmed in fantastic shapes.  What is the charm in these distortions?  First, perhaps, the universal human interest in anything requiring skill.  Think of the patience and persistence and experimentation necessary to rear a dwarf pear tree twelve or fifteen inches high, growing its full number of years and bearing full-size fruit in its season!  And second is the no less universal human interest in the strange and abnormal.  All primitive people have this