y distinguishable from
an Englishman except for a certain grace and maturity, reassured him.
No doubt his wife would have cousins like this; clean, manly fellows
who would take him shooting and with whom he could enjoy a game of
golf. He thought that Kamimura must be typical of the young Japanese
of the upper classes. He did not realize that he was an official
product, chosen by his Government and carefully moulded and polished,
not to be a Japanese at home, but to be a Japanese abroad, the
qualified representative of a First Class Power.

Kamimura left the boat with them at Colombo and joined them in their
visit to some tea-planting relatives. He was ready to do the same at
Singapore, but he received an urgent cable from Japan recalling him at
once.

"I must not be too late for my own wedding," he said, during their
last lunch together at Raffles's Hotel. "It would be a terrible sin
against the laws of Filial Piety."

"Whatever is that?" asked Asako.

"Dear Mrs. Barrington, are you a daughter of Japan, and have never
heard of the Twenty-four Children?"

"No; who are they?"

"They are model children, the paragons of goodness, celebrated because
of their love for their fathers and mothers. One of them walked miles
and miles every day to get water from a certain spring for his sick
mother; another, when a tiger was going to eat his father, rushed to
the animal and cried, 'No, eat me instead!' Little boys and girls in
Japan are always being told to be like the Twenty-four Children."

"Oh, how I'd hate them!" cried Asako.

"That is because you are a rebellious, individualistic Englishwoman.
You have lost that sense of family union, which makes good Japanese,
brothers and cousins and uncles and aunts, all love each other
publicly, however much they may hate each other in private."

"That is very hypocritical!"

"It is the social law," replied Kamimura. "In Japan the family is the
important thing. You and I are nothing. If you want to get on in the
world you must always be subject to your family. Then you are sure
to get on however stupid you may be. In England you seem to use your
families chiefly to quarrel with."

"I think our relatives ought to be just our best friends," said Asako.

"They are that too in a way," the young man answered. "In Japan it
would be better to be born without hands and feet than to be born
without relatives."

CHAPTER IV

NAGASAKI

_Hono-bono to
Akashi no ura no