The suburban citizen., 1902-08-30

but to color them to an improbable
crimson. She may keep her fan and
her smoking materials in her sleeve,
but she more often has them suspended
from buttons.
The Japanese do not use buttons for
buttonlng; they stick them through
their sashes and let them hang down
by silver chains or silken cords. to the
other end Of which they attach their
fans, their smoking kit, their medicine
chests and perhaps their pen and ink.
All this sounds formidable, not to say
unlikely. but there is still method In
the Japanese madness.
The medicine chest Gnro) consists Of
little trays fitting into each other and
cover, and would 20 into a cigar
case; the ink is in the dry Indian form;
and their pen is paint brush stuck
in the end Of bamboo shoot.
They carry their tobacco in purse,
and smoke it in q little brass ripe
hardly big enough to hold a cigarette.
1t only holds about three whiffs, which
would be iaConvenlent in land where
the natives do not use matches, though
they forge foreign brands, If it We're
not for the fact that there Is hardly
a room in japan which has not a piece
of charcoal smoulderlng in 1t on
tobacco stove tobacco mono), a finger
stove (hibachD, or q cooking stove,
which looks like tool box with its lid
~ tt,l. f,,11
ash. The pen and the pipe have each
a case made like the cardboard cases
in which ra2ors are sold, but of elegant
workmanship and often of costly ma.
terials.
1t is only In cases and buttons that q
japanese woman can indulge her taste
for jewelry. The japanese have no
such thing as jewelry in our sense of
the word any more than they have
oaths or bad language.
] have said that the lower a Japanese
woman is in class the more considera-
tion she receives; it is true, also, that
the lower her class, the prettler she is.
a japanese grisette-the mousmee OF
llterature-is capable Of being as pretty
as any grlsette ever painted by Greuze.
The type Greuze painted for his "Girl
at the Fountain" is a thoroughly char
acteristic type of the japanese NOUS
NEE. Her eyes are mostly black, but
unless she has a spark Of good breed.
ing they need not be almond shaped
and differ little from those of Euro
peans. The lower class Japanese have
a racial element in them which has
never been satisfactorily accounted
for.
1t is the custom to say that the
Japanese ore a half Malay, half Mon
golian pSople, the Mongolian type
being more prominent in the aristoc.
racy and the Malay in the people. But
these two races do not, in my mind,
account for this type.
One could readily believe that the
soft beauty of the Japanese peasant
girl is accounted for by an infusion
of the blood of the gentle brown races
of the South Pacific Islands, with
whose nature she has so much in com.
mon.
1t is lucky for her that she is pretty I
and gentle and good for Japan is a
mans country, where women are re- |
garded as mere conveniences. The .
japanese talk of the three obedlences
For a woman. She has to obey her fa-
her till she is married, her husband
while she Is married, and her sons il
she is left a widow with children.
And even that is not the worst of It.
'or her wifely obedience extends to her
parents and any elder
1rothers he may have. A Japanese
woman is often married because her
wants some one to wait
m her; in fact, she has no particular
prospects in life until she becomes a
nother-ln-law herself-of sons wife.
nat Is to say-not OF a daughters
Japanese mothers-in-law are proyerb-
nlly harsh to their daughters-iD-law:
fact the only capacity in which
woman has decent chance of mis-.
herself in Japan is that Of
nother-in-law.-Douglas Sladen, in the
tew York Sun.