Thou also, dwellest in eternity

and Kepler’s aspiration, “My wish is that I may perceive God whom I find everywhere in the external world in like manner within and without me.”

FOOTNOTES: 

[107] One of the reasons assigned for the suicide of the General was thoughts of his responsibility for the terrible slaughter in the assaults on Port Arthur.

[108] Mrs. Yanagi is one of the best contraltos heard at the now numerous Japanese concerts of Western music.

[109] Shinju, or suicide for love, the girl often being a geisha, is common.

[110] “I am inclined to think,” wrote Yanagi in 1921, in a paper on Korean art, “that we have paid if anything rather too much attention to European works while making little effort to pay attention to what lies much nearer to us.”

[111] POLICE STANDARDS.—­The sale of one issue of the magazine was prohibited by the police, who found a nude “antagonistic to the ordinary standard of public morals.”  The editors’ answer next month—­the police standard being, “No front views”—­was to publish half a dozen more nudes with their backs to the reader.

[112] It will be remembered that this conversation took place in the summer of 1915 at the outset of my investigation.  Since then, as noted throughout this book, economic questions have increasingly pressed themselves forward.  I may mention that in 1919 Yanagi wrote a vigorous and moving protest against misgovernment in Korea.  In a recent letter to me he says:  “You know that I am going to establish a Korean Folk Art Society in Seoul.  This is a big work, but I want to do it with all my power for love of Korea.  I approach the solution of the Korean question by the way of Art.  Politics can never solve the question.  I want to use the gallery as a meeting-place of Koreans and Japanese.  People cannot quarrel in beauty.  This is my simple yet definite belief.”  Yanagi’s manifesto on his project made one think of the age when the great culture of China and India glowed across the straits of Tsushima in the wake of early Buddhism.

[113] A well-known member of the Shirakaba group started two years ago an “ideal village” among the mountains.  It is an effort towards social freedom in which the police manifest a continuous interest.

ACROSS JAPAN (TOKYO TO NIIGATA AND BACK)

CHAPTER XII

TO THE HILLS

(TOKYO, SAITAMA, TOCHIGI AND FUKUSHIMA)

Nothing which concerns a countryman is a matter of unconcern to me.—­TERENCE

During the month of July I went from one side of Japan to the other, starting from Tokyo, across the sea from which lies America, and coming out at Niigata, across the sea from which lies Siberia.