presides over the adornment of the houses in purely Japanese style.
Happily these expensive and unbecoming innovations have scarcely
affected female dress, and some ladies who adopted our fashions
have given them up because of their discomfort and manifold
difficulties and complications.

The Empress on State occasions appears in scarlet satin hakama, and
flowing robes, and she and the Court ladies invariably wear the
national costume. I have only seen two ladies in European dress;
and this was at a dinner-party here, and they were the wives of Mr.
Mori, the go-ahead Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs, and of the
Japanese Consul at Hong Kong; and both by long residence abroad
have learned to wear it with ease. The wife of Saigo, the Minister
of Education, called one day in an exquisite Japanese dress of
dove-coloured silk crepe, with a pale pink under-dress of the same
material, which showed a little at the neck and sleeves. Her
girdle was of rich dove-coloured silk, with a ghost of a pale pink
blossom hovering upon it here and there. She had no frills or
fripperies of any description, or ornaments, except a single pin in
her chignon, and, with a sweet and charming face, she looked as
graceful and dignified in her Japanese costume as she would have
looked exactly the reverse in ours. Their costume has one striking
advantage over ours. A woman is perfectly CLOTHED if she has one
garment and a girdle on, and perfectly DRESSED if she has two.
There is a difference in features and expression--much exaggerated,
however, by Japanese artists--between the faces of high-born women
and those of the middle and lower classes. I decline to admire
fat-faces, pug noses, thick lips, long eyes, turned up at the outer
corners, and complexions which owe much to powder and paint. The
habit of painting the lips with a reddish-yellow pigment, and of