During this journey I attended a dinner of officials and leading agriculturists and had the odd sensation of making a short after-dinner speech on my knees.  At such a dinner the guests kneel on cushions ranged round the four walls of the room, and each man has a low lacquer table to himself, and a geisha to wait on him.  When the geisha is not bringing in new dishes or replenishing the sake bottle, she kneels before the table and chatters entertainingly.  The governors of the feast visit the guests of honour and drink with them.  In the same way a guest drinks with his neighbour and with his attendant geisha.  I have a vivid memory of a grave and elderly dignitary who at the merry stage of such a function capered the whole length of the room with his kneeling-cushion balanced on the top of his head.  There is a growing temperance movement in Japan but a teetotaller is still something of an oddity.  My abstinence from sake was frequently supposed to be the result of a vow.

Although the average geisha may be inane in her patter and have little more than conventional grace and charm, I have been waited on by girls who added real mental celerity, wit and a power of skilful mimicry to that elusive and seductive quality that accounts for the impregnable position of their class.  At one dinner impersonations in both the comic and the tragic vein were given by a girl of unmistakable genius.  Frequently a plain, elderly geisha will display unsuspected mimetic ability.  Alas, behind the merry laugh and sprightliness of the girls who adorn a feast lurks a skeleton.  One is haunted by thoughts of the future of a large proportion of these butterflies.  No doubt most foreigners generalise too freely in identifying the professions of geisha and joro.  In the present organisation of society some geisha play a legitimate role.  They gain in the career for which they have laboriously trained an outlet for the expression of artistic and social gifts which would have been denied them in domestic life.  At the same time the degrading character of the life led by many geisha cannot be doubted.  Apart from every other consideration the temptation to drink is great.  The opening of new avenues to feminine ability, the enlarged opportunities of education and self-respect and the increasing opening for women on the stage—­from which women have been excluded hitherto—­must have their effect in turning the minds of girls of wit and originality to other means of earning a living than the morally and physically hazardous profession of the geisha.

When we left Matsue by steamer on our way to Tottori prefecture I saw middle-school eights at practice.  An agriculturist told me of the custom of giving holidays to oxen and horses.  The villagers carefully brush their animals, decorate them and lead them to pastures where, tethered to rings attached to a long rope, “they may graze together pleasantly.”  One of the islands we visited bore the name of the