carpenter pulls, instead of pushing, his extraordinary plane and saw.
Always the left is the right side, and the right side the wrong; and
keys must be turned, to open or close a lock, in what we are
accustomed to think the wrong direction. Mr. Percival Lowell has
truthfully observed that the Japanese speak backwards, read
backwards, write backwards,--and that this is "only the abc of their
contrariety." For the habit of writing backwards there are obvious
evolutional reasons; and the requirements of Japanese calligraphy
sufficiently explain why the artist pushes his brush or pencil
instead of pulling it. But why, instead of putting the thread through
the eye of the needle, should the Japanese maiden slip the eye of the
needle over the point of the thread? Perhaps the most remarkable, out
of a hundred possible examples of antipodal action, is furnished by
the Japanese art of fencing. The [8] swordsman, delivering his blow
with both hands, does not pull the blade towards him in the moment of
striking, but pushes it from him. He uses it, indeed, as other
Asiatics do, not on the principle of the wedge, but of the saw; yet
there is a pushing motion where we should expect a pulling motion in
the stroke .... These and other forms of unfamiliar action are
strange enough to suggest the notion of a humanity even physically as
little related to us as might be the population of another
planet,--the notion of some anatomical unlikeness. No such
unlikeness, however, appears to exist; and all this oppositeness
probably implies, not so much the outcome of a human experience
entirely independent of Aryan experience, as the outcome of an
experience evolutionally younger than our own.

Yet that experience has been one of no mean order. Its
manifestations do not merely startle: they also delight. The delicate
perfection of workmanship, the light strength and grace of objects,