Here we are in the Florence of Japan, and even more to see if possible than in Italy. We have had a rainy day to-day, which is perhaps a good beginning for a week of constant sightseeing. This morning we spent in Yamanaka’s—the most beautiful shop I ever saw, composed of the finest Japanese rooms of the finest proportions and filled with the most beautiful art specimens of all kinds. But the kinds are properly assorted in true Japanese fashion. I bought a red brocade. It is a panel, old red with figures of gold and some dark blue, peonies and birds. It is what the Buddhist priests wear over the left arm in procession. We have the certificate that it is over a hundred years old. The panel is about five feet long and one wide, the strips which compose it are four in number, sewed in seams, which turn the corners in mortise fashion, and yet they all match perfectly. Most of these strips are woven in these ribbons and sewed together. I got a second one which is purple with splendid big birds and peonies again. I like the peony in brocade much better than the chrysanthemum or the smaller flowers. Some fine ones with pomegranates are tempting, but I did not buy the most beautiful on account of the prospects of spending money better in China. I also bought a pretty tea set which I have here in my room—it cost 30 sen, which means fifteen cents for teapot and five cups, gray pottery with blue decorations. There are many cheaper ones that are pretty too. Tomorrow we go to the original temple where the tea ceremony originated and are to participate in the tea ceremony, which the high priest will perform for us. You better get a guide book and read about the temples of Kyoto, as they are too numerous to tell about in letters. We have the municipal car for all these occasions. Good thing we do, for Kyoto has shrunk like a nut in its shell since the days of its ancient capital size and the distances between temples are enormous. Next day we go to the Imperial Palaces, and so go on and on getting fatter and fatter.

The weather and the spring time are superb. Cherry blossoms were gone when we got here, but the young leaves of the maples are lovely green or red and the whole earth is paradise now. The hills are nearer than in Florence, the mountains higher, so that Kyoto has every natural beauty. We shall only have a week here and then go to Osaka, where the puppet theater is and where there is a school of drama, of which Ganjiro is the leader. It is the doll theater we want to see, because that is the origin of all acting in Japan. Many of the conventions of the theater are based on the movements of the puppets.

Kyoto in many respects is the most lovely thing the world has to show, such a combination of nature and art as one dreams of. These wonderful temples of enormous size, of natural wood filled with paintings and sculpture of an ancient and unknown kind, fascinate one to the point of feeling there must be many more worlds when such multiplicity of ideas and feelings can exist on a single planet, and we live unconscious of the whole of it or even of any part of its extent. The gardens we have seen to-day are the old Japan unchanged since they were made a thousand years ago, when they took the ancient ideas of China and India for models. The temples of Tokyo seem like shabby relics of a worn-out era, but here the perfection of their art remains and is kept intact. The landscape of the first Buddhist monastery, where the tea ceremony originated, has the same rivers and islands and little piles of sand which were placed in the beginning, all in miniature, and planted with miniature trees, all imitations of real scenes in China when China was the land of culture. Now they say even the originals are destroyed in China, which is so out of repair that it depresses every one who sees it. Fifty years ago they advertised for sale here in Nara, a lovely pagoda five stories high for fifty yen. It is obviously necessary for some American millionaire to buy up the massive gates and pagodas and temples of China in order to redeem them from complete ruin. The Japanese are the one people who have waked up in time to the value of these historic things, and several of the temples have been rebuilt before the old material was so rotted as to make them hopeless. Wood is a magnificent material when it is used in such massive structures as it is here. The biggest bell in the world, twelve feet high, is hung on a great tree trunk in a belfry with a curled-up roof of flower-like proportions, first having been hauled to the top of the high hill. We shall hear it boom next Saturday. We heard the one in Nara, the deepest thing I ever thought to hear, nine feet high. They are beautiful bronze and they are very mellow and melodious and reach to the center of whatever the center of your being may be and leave you to hope the greater unknown of the judgment day may be a call like that sound.

We had lunch with Miss D——. She tells stories about the efforts of the Japanese girls to get an education that make you want to sell your earrings, even if you have none, in order to give the money to these idealists. They are as much pioneers as our forebears who chopped down the trees, but they can’t get at a tree to chop. She says she wants me to go back to America and to go to every Congregational church there and tell them they must send money here to give education to the people.

One day we have the mayor’s car to go about in and the next day the University hires a car for us and we indulge ourselves in all kinds of doings we do not deserve and sometimes wonder if we shall have to commit suicide after it ends in order to condone the point of honor. Certainly these people have a nobility of character which entitles them to race equality.

I want to find a nice quiet place to stay and come back and see the sights at greater length. The paintings on the walls are mostly ruined, but the kakemonas and the screens and the makemonas, those are wonderful and I am glad to say that we have got over seeing them as grotesque, and we feel their beauty. When once you see that the trees in the ground are real and that they look just as the trees in the pictures have always looked, then you begin to appreciate both nature and human nature as depicted.