ixty miles west of Tokio.
Its crest is covered with snow most of the year. Twenty thousand
pilgrims visit it annually. Its name may mean Not Two (such), or
Peerless.

Yet all these things seem dull and lifeless when thus severed from the
quaint cheeriness of their true home. To those familiar with Japan, that
bamboo fan-handle recalls its graceful grassy tree, the thousand and one
daily purposes for which bamboo wood serves. We see the open shop where
squat the brown-faced artisans cleverly dividing into those slender
divisions the fan-handle, the wood-block engraver's where some dozen
men sit patiently chipping at their cherry-wood blocks, and the
printer's where the coloring arrangements seem so simple to those used
to western machinery, but where the colors are so rich and true. We see
the picture stuck on the fan frame with starch paste, and drying in the
brilliant summer sunlight. The designs recall vividly the life around,
whether that life be the stage, the home, insects, birds, or flowers. We
think of halts at wayside inns, when bowing tea-house girls at once
proffer these fans to hot and tired guests.

The tonsured oblique-eyed doll suggests the festival of similarly
oblique-eyed little girls on the 3rd of March. Then dolls of every
degree obtain for a day "Dolls' Rights." In every Japanese household all
the dolls of the present and previous generations are, on that festival,
set out to best advantage. Beside them are sweets, green-speckled rice
cake, and daintily gilt and lacquered dolls' utensils. For some time
previous, to meet the increased demand, the doll shopman has been very
busy. He sits before a straw-holder into which he can readily stick, to
dry, the wooden supports of the plaster dolls' heads he is painting, as
he takes first one and then another to give artistic touches to their
glowing cheeks or little tongue. That dolly that seems but "so odd" to
Polly or Maggie is there the cherished darling of its little owner. It
passes half its day tied on to her back, peeping companionably its head
over her shoulder. At night it is lovingly sheltered under the green
mosquito curtains, and provided with a toy wooden pillow.

The expression "Japanese Art" seems but a created word expressing either
the imitations of it, or the artificial transplanting of Japanese things
to our houses. The whole glory of art in Japan is, that it is not Art,
but Nature simply rendered, by a people with a fancy and love of fun