ABSTRACT
ONE must needs make haste to describe Tokyo, Japan's capital-the centre of the Japanese Revolution in Being. For before the ink of one's writing is dry the description may be a reminiscence of the past, an anachronism, a memory. Your ' yesterday' of to-day may be tomorrow's ' last century' as to the streets of Tokyo ; as to its architecture, its shops, its very topography, and its moats of slimy green water and their gloomy walls, cyclopean built. For one thing, Tokyo suffers from fires. In the old days the fires made a new city of it every seven years. Nowadays two hundred houses are a night's mouthful to their terrible maws. But the Municipality tries to get even with the dragon and make the future of Tokyo great by pigeon-holing the ground plan of a new Tokyo against to-morrow's fire. Tokyo's i congested areas' are glorified there into schemes of ample avenues, which will starve the fire dragon, make the city great, and bewilder the stranger who knew Tokyo last year. Tokyo, it seems, is always in the hands of the scene-shifters. It is a dissolving view ; almost a mirage, so fleeting-the hoary permanence of our English towns being considered-are the images of wood and stucco which abide for a day within its ample circuit. The founda-
T H E METROPOLIS OF A REVOLUTION 19
tion of the city was three hundred years ago, but were it not for its moats and its tombs, one could not assure oneself that one beholds Antiquity anywhere in Tokyo.
