her emotional and intellectual life is missing also from her
industrial and commercial life,--largeness! The land remains what
it was before; its face has scarcely been modified by all the
changes of Meiji. The miniature railways and telegraph poles, the
bridges and tunnels, might almost escape notice in the ancient
green of the landscapes. In all the cities, with the exception of
the open ports and their little foreign settlements, there exists
hardly a street vista suggesting the teaching of Western ideas.
You might journey two hundred miles through the interior of the
country, looking in vain for large manifestations of the new
civilization. In no place do you find commerce exhibiting its
ambition in gigantic warehouses, or industry expanding its
machinery under acres of roofing. A Japanese city is still, as it
was ten centuries ago, little more than a wilderness of wooden
sheds,--picturesque, indeed, as paper lanterns are, but scarcely
less frail. And there is no great stir and noise anywhere,--no
heavy traffic, no booming and rumbling, no furious haste. In
Tokyo itself you may enjoy, if you wish, the peace of a country
village. This want of visible or audible signs of the new-found
force which is now menacing the markets of the West and changing
the maps of the far East gives one a queer, I might even say a
weird feeling. It is almost the sensation received when, after
climbing through miles of silence to reach some Shinto shrine,
you find voidness only and solitude,--an elfish, empty little
wooden structure, mouldering in shadows a thousand years old. The
strength of Japan, like the strength of her ancient faith, needs
little material display: both exist where the deepest real power
of any great people exists,--in the Race Ghost.

(1) In one limited sense, Western art has influenced Japanese.