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“The streets still re-echo the names of the trees of the forest,
As if they fain would appease the Dryads whose haunts they molested.”
We should perhaps make an apology for selecting so homely a subject as that which we bring before this cultured audience this evening. Let us see what may be learned from the street-names of the capital of the city of Japan, and how much light they throw upon the national character and history.
In the first place, we find an almost total absence of the names of great battle-fields, or places of victory, and indeed of nearly everything betokening military glory. Notwithstanding that Japan has been the theatre of conflict for many centuries, so that war may be said to have been the normal, and peace the exceptional condition of its inhabitants, and notwithstanding the invasion, conquest, and long possession of Corea, it does not seem to have been the custom to record the names of battles or of victory in the street-names of the capital, as is the custom in Europe and America. Yet the reason is evident. Notwithstanding long civil wars and occasional warlike excursions, the natives of Japan delight to call their country the “Land of Great Peace,” and a successful invasion of Japan has not yet been made. With the exception of Corea, Japan has been almost entirely without foreign enemies. For obvious reasons, none of the great victories gained by Japanese heroes over their own countrymen have found a monument in the street nomenclature of Yedo. It would have been unwise policy in the great unifier of Japan, Iyeyasŭ, to have given to the streets in the capital of a nation, finally united in peaceful union, any name that would be a constant source of humiliation, that would keep alive bitter memories, or that would irritate freshly-healed wounds. The anomalous absence of such names proves at once the sagacity of Iyeyasŭ, and is another witness to the oft-repeated policy used by the Japanese in treating their enemies, i.e., to conquer them by kindness and conciliation.
In the second place we have noticed that very few of the national heroes or really great men of Japan
