Shikata na gai_" (All right; it can't be helped). In the shops
and stores one passes a few men clad only in their own integrity and a
loin-cloth, and both children and grown people dress with a hundred
times more disregard of convention than the negroes in America.

Of shoes, there is an equally great variety as of clothing, {11} but
the majority of men, women, and children (in muddy weather at least)
have compromised on the "getas," a sort of wooden sole strapped on the
foot, with wooden pieces put fore and aft the instep, these pieces
throwing the foot and sole about three inches above ground. It looks
almost as difficult to walk in them as to walk on stilts, but away the
people go, young and old, and the muddy places marked by the strange
footwear look as if the corrugated wheels of a hundred mowing-machines
had passed along! In most cases the clatter of the "get as" is the
loudest noise on the streets, for the Japanese are remarkably quiet:
in Tokyo to-day I saw a thousand of them waiting to see the Empress,
and an American crowd would literally have made more noise in a minute
than they made in an hour.

On entering their houses, as we have already noticed, the people take
off their getas, sandals, shoes or whatever outer footwear is
used--for the very good reason that the people sit on the floor (on
mats or on the floor itself), eat on the floor (very daintily,
however), and sleep on the floor, so that to walk over the floor here
with muddy feet would be the same as if an American should walk
roughshod over his chairs, table and bed. Even in the Japanese
department store I visited this morning cloth covers were put on my
shoes, and this afternoon at the Ni-no Go Reiya Shinto temple I had to
go in my stocking feet.

Then the babies--who ever saw as many babies to the square inch? About
10 per cent of the male population seems to be hauling other men, but
50 per cent, of the female population seems hardly enough to carry the
wise and happy-looking little Jap babies--not in go-carts (a go-cart
or a hired nurse is almost never seen), but on the back. And these
little women who when standing are only about as tall as you are when
sitting--they seem hardly more than children themselves, so that you
recall Kipling's saying of Japan: "A four-foot child walks with a
three-foot child, who is holding the hand {12} of a two-foot child,
who carries on her back a one-foot child."

Boys in their teens are also seen with babi