expensive display consists of a sprig of pine and bamboo.  Poor people have to be content with a yard-high pine branch with a French nail through it at either side of their doorway.  I have been ruralist enough to harbour thoughts of the extent to which the woods are raided for all this New Year forestry.  Some prefectures, in the sincerity of their devotion to afforestation, forbid the New Year destruction of pine trees.

I remember the gay and elaborate dressing of the horses during the New Year holidays.  I saw one driver of a wagon who was not content with tying streamers on every part of his horse where streamers could be tied:  he had also decorated himself, even to the extent of having had his head cropped to a special pattern, tracts of hair and bare scalp alternating.

It was pleasant to learn that a fine chrysanthemum show arranged in an open space in Tokyo was free to the public.  Some plants, by means of grafting, bore flowers of half a dozen different varieties.  Several plants had been wondrously trained into the form of kuruma, etc.  Not a few of the varieties exhibited were, according to our ideas, atrocious in colouring, but many were beautiful and all were marvels of cultivation.  Even greater manipulative and horticultural skill was represented in the chrysanthemums I saw at the Imperial garden party.  A chief of a department of the Ministry of Agriculture told me that from a chrysanthemum growing in the ground it was possible to have a thousand blooms.

In a Japanese room the timber upright alongside the tokonoma is always a tree trunk in the rough.  If it be cherry it has its bark on.  The contrast with the finely finished wood of the rest of the room is arresting.  It is said that the use of the unplaned upright is not more than three or four hundred years old and that it had its origin in Cha-no-yu affectations of simplicity.

I was visited one evening by an agricultural official who had returned from a visit to Great Britain.  He spoke of the “lonelyism” of our best hotels.  In a Japanese hotel of the same class one’s room is so simple and the view of the garden is so refreshing that, with the beautiful flower arrangement indoors, the frequent change of kakemono, the serving of one’s meals in a different set of lacquer and porcelain each day and the willing and smiling service always within the call of a hand clap, there comes a sense of restfulness and peace.  The drawback which the Western man experiences is the lack of any means of resting his back but by lying down and the inability to read for long while resting an elbow on an arm rest which is too low for him.[218] A Japanese often reads kneeling before a table.

Here I am reminded to say that the development of the desire for books and newspapers in the rural districts is a noticeable thing, if only because it is new.  It is not so long ago that reading was considered to be an occupation for old men and women and for children.  The samurai had few books and the farmers fewer still.  But the idea of combining cultivation and culture was not unknown.  I have heard a rural student humbly quote the old saying, Sei-ko U-doku (literally, “Fine weather—­farming—­Rainy weather—­reading").