PC_256_Poe_1910_1911_Typescript_013

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style. My shoes left at the door, we sat on mats and ate
the bon-ton native food and I reckoned myself fortunate
in completing the meal with chop-sticks without once re-
sorting to the knife and fork which the young Japanese wom-
an brought me as a life-preserver. She pronounced me "very
skillful" which compliment I thought, however, a rather extreme
illustration of Japanese courtesy. I by no means begrudge
the six yen the experience cost, but so far as sheer enjoyment
of food is concerned I should rather have five cents worth of
cheese and crackers or a penny stick of striped candy. Soup,
raw fish, two kinds of cooked fish with Oriental sauce and
no bread, a kind of nut (so I was told) that tasted like a
sweet potato and was best of all, Japanese green tea (they
use no cream or sugar in it) and their national drink, sake,
which was also too Japanesy in taste for my palate. The nic-
est thing about the meal was the pretty Japanese girl who
waited on us, with whom I talked with Ohara as interpreter.
We had no singers or dancers as Ohara said cultured gentle-
men do not; that only the lower classses do, as a rule; but
there was music near-by in the less honorable room to which
we first went--"music" for all the world like "tuning up" in
America and nothing else--literally and absolutely. I now
understand the Li Hung Chang story!

September 22nd.

In morning read with much interest Percival Lowell's "Soul
of the Far East" and other Japanese books after which I did
some writing, immediately after tiffin going to see Dr. Juichi
Soyeda, President of the Industrial Bank of Japan, and one