0th May. We reprinted last week from a San Scott headed Unjapanned Japan," in Francisco paper an article by Mr. Clement
which that lively writer treated the Tapanese girl almost as unfairly in one direction as his chief, Sir Edwin Arnold, has done in another. Sir Edwin Arnold was, as the world knows only too well, completely infatuated by the Japanese girl; he found her not only all that, bat a great deal more. than, the fancy of globe-trotters, poetasters, and wandering artists had painted her; and he entirely refused to see how much of it was paint. But we do not. remember that he ever compared the English or American girl unfavourably with her; if he did, he is not the kind of man to have done it in England or America. But Mr. Scott was under the impression, it would seem, even before he reached Japan in the course of his circumnavigation of the globe, that Sir Edwin Arnold and hix susceptible predecessors had dared to prefer the Japanese to any other kind of girl; the fact being that it was the scarcity of the highest type of girl in Inpan, and the superiority' in attractiveness of the Japanese girl to the Asiatic type generally, that had made her admirers praise her-so highly. Buruing unfortunately, that women in Japan with premature and' unnecessary wrath to-day may still be sold to houses of against' file supposed traducers of the ill-fame, but who. buys and - sells Anglo-Saxon girl, Mr. Clement Scott them? 'The men of Japan. Who has made a flying visit.to the tea-houses of made the laws that' permit such sales the open ports in' Japan, where the|'The men of Japan, and upon tle men passing seaman is invited to the enjoy- of Japan should fall the disgrace of ment of the drinks that he prefers, these things, not upon their victims." and there, of course, he found full! The refutation of Clement Scott is sum-confirmation of his previously conceived med up in this last paragraph, and in theory that the Japanese girl of Sir, the obvious assertion that he made the Edwin Arnold had no existence in fact, acquaintance of only a certain class of and he painted Japanese girlhood in; Japanese girl. He started for Japan with the blackest colours in "O Shine San:") his mind in revolt against Sir Edwin "Your senseless, everlasting grin, your Arnold's exaggerations, and with the mis-Proclaim your Ma narsupial, your auees- beings shape taken idea that there were somewhere tow an aps beings endowed with reason who put the You ture the European on, admire his Japanese git) on a higher level than inge and coll: the girl of England or America, He er really his lips, invariably went to Japan at the wrong time of year, for Japan is a playground that We'd ull forgive thy grin, guffaw, and rancid-smelling tresses, Should be shut up altogether in the If we could trace thy fraud, O San, winter, His thoughts were of the half a dozen gues es." ideal that he was about to meet in San This is partly prejudice, partly ob-Francisco, and all these things combined servation of the lowest class of Japanese to make him unfair to the real muswne girls who come in contact with foreign-Jas she is. Let him come back to Japan ers; and it needs no refutation to any "in the season, and see the mu sume away one who has been any farther in Japan from the contaminations of the ports, than the tea-houses frequented by and he will regret that he ever wrote sailors in the open ports.
Possibly it O Shine San or Unjapanned Japan. is this conviction that, as far as we have seen, has restrained the Japan THE CUSTOMS GAZETTE, Mail, whose sword we should have expected, in the words of Burke, to
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.