shock, and you will become, as I have become, an enemy of the Romaji-
Kwai--that society founded for the ugly utilitarian purpose of
introducing the use of English letters in writing Japanese.

2

An ideograph does not make upon the Japanese brain any impression
similar to that created in the Occidental brain by a letter or
combination of letters--dull, inanimate symbols of vocal sounds. To the
Japanese brain an ideograph is a vivid picture: it lives; it speaks; it
gesticulates. And the whole space of a Japanese street is full of such
living characters--figures that cry out to the eyes, words that smile
or grimace like faces.

What such lettering is, compared with our own lifeless types, can be
understood only by those who have lived in the farther East. For even
the printed characters of Japanese or Chinese imported texts give no
suggestion of the possible beauty of the same characters as modified for
decorative inscriptions, for sculptural use, or for the commonest
advertising purposes. No rigid convention fetters the fancy of the
calligrapher or designer: each strives to make his characters more
beautiful than any others; and generations upon generations of artists
have been toiling from time immemorial with like emulation, so that
through centuries and centuries of tire-less effort and study, the
primitive hieroglyph or ideograph has been evolved into a thing of
beauty indescribable. It consists only of a certain number of brush-
strokes; but in each stroke there is an undiscoverable secret art of
grace, proportion, imperceptible curve, which actually makes it seem
alive, and bears witness that even during the lightning-moment of its
creation the artist felt with his brush for the ideal shape of the