Yesterday we had our first taste of the Noh drama. We got there before nine in the morning, and I left before two to go to Mr. Naruse’s funeral, but Mamma stayed till nearly three when she had to go to speak at a school. Mamma can give you a much more intelligent idea of it than I can, but the building is a kind of barnlike structure—the Elizabethan theater with a vengeance, and no stage properties except some little live pines and a big painted one, and except costumes which are rich and expensive and the masks which are likewise. It is an acquired taste, but one which can be acquired very rapidly. If they weren’t done with such extraordinary art and technique they would probably be stupid, to a foreigner anyway, but as it is they are fascinating, though it is hard to say what the source of the fascination is aside from the perfection of technique. Conscious control was certainly born and bred in Japan.

Mr. Naruse had a very strong hold on people, and his funeral was an event—all the autos and most of the ’rickshas in Tokyo must have been there, and some eight or ten speakers, and even to me who could understand nothing it was very impressive. One of the civilized things is that before the speaker bowed to the audience—and they all bowed back—he bowed to the remains, Which were in a coffin on the platform with flowers, and more flowers than at an American funeral.

We were to have gone to Baron Shibusawa’s for tea and dinner this afternoon, but his influenza has gone into pneumonia.

To go back to Saturday. The reception was pleasant. We met the Americans who are educators and in the missionary schools and colleges; intelligent and well disposed, so far as I have seen. The criticism of the missionaries seems to be rather cooked up. Just now there is a fuss over them in Korea, because there is some agitation going on there for independence, and it seems to have started with Koreans who had been in missionary schools. The missionaries here seem much divided, some of them blaming the missionaries over there, saying they will bring Christianity into disrepute everywhere in Japan, and some saying that it proves Christian teaching amounts to something and that it will have a good effect in improving conditions, leading to foreign criticism and publicity, and causing the Japanese to modify their colonial policy, which seems to be under military rather than civil control. There is a rumor that the ex-Emperor of Korea didn’t die a natural death, but committed suicide, with the hope of putting off or preventing the marriage of his oldest son to a Japanese princess—they were to have been married very soon. No one seems to know whether the story was invented to encourage the revolutionaries in Korea or has truth in it. Meanwhile they say the wedding is going to take place, and the Japanese are sorry for their poor princess, who is sacrificed to marry a foreigner.

Thursday evening Mamma invited the X——’s and some others, eight including ourselves, to supper in a Japanese restaurant, a beef restaurant—they are all specialized—where we not only sat on the floor and ate with chop sticks, but where the little slices of thin beefsteak were brought in raw with vegetables to flavor, and cooked over a little pan on a charcoal hibashi, one fire to each two persons. Naturally it was lots of fun, a kind of inside picnic.

Oh, yes, something happened Friday. We went to the Imperial Museum in the morning and the curator showed us about—I won’t describe a museum—but on the way home we were taken into a pipe store and Mamma purchased three little Japanese pipes, ladies’ pipes, to take home. Quite cunning, and the dealer said this was the first time he had ever sold anything to a foreigner, so he presented her with a little ladies’ pouch and a pipe holder, both made from Holland cloth, not anything very precious, but probably worth as much as her entire purchase, certainly more than the profit on his sales. These things are quite touching and an offset to the stories about their bad business methods, because it is really a matter of hospitable courtesy to the foreigner, though he said himself they generally put the price up for the foreigner on antiques.