ABSTRACT
THE face of Japan, as it presents itself to the fascinated, but often bewildered Occidental, appears always three-fold in character. There is Japan the land, compound in one’s consciousness of scenes innumerable-the straggle of an average city; the sight of Fujiyama changing its form as often as its coat, and, as if to symbolize the people around it, standing to-day firmly rooted to the land, to-morrow suspended in mists; the ubiquitous pine trees, with their air of deliberate detachment from the landscape and arrachement from the soil; the countryside that takes unkindly to the discipline of tillage, yielding what it can be made to yield as if à contre-cœur; the sea, dull silver breaking on sands grey with melancholy and dignity. And all this is in a light that ever startles with its clarity, as if indeed the sun were really always rising on this land, as its famous name implies.
