Page:Through the torii (IA throughtorii00noguiala).pdf/33

is so perfectly strange to many of us. I hear a whisper too often at some street corner: “Is it really our Japan?” I know that old true Japan, every inch of it, was the very handiwork of the people in general, while “New Japan,” “the rising country of first class in the world,” as it was proudly written by a newspaper man, as I can imagine, who wears a single eyeglass straight from London, was created by a few hundred men, we might say, the Westerners born in Japan, whose hopeless ignorance of the old civilization of their old country, strange to say, helped them up to fill the highest place in the public estimate. They were almost reckless to bring everything from abroad, good or bad; we did not mind trying it under one condition, that we might change it for another if it was not fitting. We discovered profitably Shakespeare and even Ibsen lately; and it seems to me that a copy, doubtless, of the American edition of “How to Build a City” fell one day in the hands of the Mayor of Tokyo, who proclaimed in the voice of a prophet that the city should be rebuilt in the very fashion nobody, at least in