Some displays of the art-impulse, as inspired by the war, have been made in directions entirely unfamiliar to Western experience,—­in the manufacture, for example, of women’s hair ornaments and dress materials.  Dress goods decorated with war pictures have actually become a fashion,—­especially cr[^e]pe silks for underwear, and figured silk linings for cloaks and sleeves.  More remarkable than these are the new hairpins;—­by hairpins I mean those long double-pronged ornaments of flexible metal which are called kanzashi, and are more or less ornamented according to the age of the wearer. (The kanzashi made for young girls are highly decorative; those worn by older folk are plain, or adorned only with a ball of coral or polished stone.) The new hairpins might be called commemorative:  one, of which the decoration represents a British and a Japanese flag intercrossed, celebrates the Anglo-Japanese alliance; another represents an officer’s cap and sword; and the best of all is surmounted by a tiny metal model of a battleship.  The battleship-pin is not merely fantastic:  it is actually pretty!

As might have been expected, military and naval subjects occupy a large place among the year’s designs for toweling.  The towel designs celebrating naval victories have been particularly successful:  they are mostly in white, on a blue ground; or in black, on a white ground.  One of the best—­blue and white—­represented only a flock of gulls wheeling about the masthead of a sunken iron-clad, and, far away, the silhouettes of Japanese battleships passing to the horizon....  What especially struck me in this, and in several other designs, was the original manner in which the Japanese artist had seized upon the traits of the modern battleship,—­the powerful and sinister lines of its shape,—­just as he would have caught for us the typical character of a beetle or a lobster.  The lines have been just enough exaggerated to convey, at one glance, the real impression made by the aspect of these iron monsters,—­vague impression of bulk and force and menace, very difficult to express by ordinary methods of drawing.

Besides towels decorated with artistic sketches of this sort, there have been placed upon the market many kinds of towels bearing comic war pictures,—­caricatures or cartoons which are amusing without being malignant.  It will be remembered that at the time of the first attack made upon the Port Arthur squadron, several of the Russian officers were in the Dalny theatre,—­never dreaming that the Japanese would dare to strike the first blow.  This incident has been made the subject of a towel design.  At one end of the towel is a comic study of the faces of the Russians, delightedly watching the gyrations of a ballet dancer.  At the other end is a study of the faces of the same commanders when they find, on returning to the port, only the masts of their battleships above water.  Another towel shows a procession of fish in front of a surgeon’s office—­waiting their turns to be relieved of sundry bayonets, swords, revolvers, and rifles, which have stuck in their throats.  A third towel picture represents a Russian diver examining, with a prodigious magnifying-glass, the holes made by torpedoes in the hull of a sunken cruiser.  Comic verses or legends, in cursive text, are printed beside these pictures.