JAPANESE BLOSSOMS

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 72, 18 December 1928, Page 41 (Supplement)

JAPANESE BLOSSOMS

* * # Springtime in the East In the picturesque language of old Japan, Spring is the Time of Blossoms, and if that time comes in the mist of a warming rain, it is held as a good symbol for the coming season. Indeed, mists and gently falling rain seem more characteristic of Japan than does sunshine, but to atone for the greyness. Nature sends flowers and there is a riot of colour in the beauty of the cherry blossom, sweetpeas, the peach and the plum. The voices of many Buddhist bells, deep-toned and sonorous, or with a _lighter tinkling note fills the warm moist air with a music that welcomes the pilgrims as they come iu their thousands to pray before the wooden image of the Goddess of Mercy that stands where thousands perished in the earthquake fires so short a time ago. The streets are full of smoothly running ’rikisha men, the little carriages gliding along behind, tightly closed to protect their occupants from the rain. Japanese maidens carry oiled paper umbrellas of subdued colours, and pick their way through the mud, with the high wooden sandals that raise them high above the slushy thoroughfares. Farmers leading their horses through the streets to the marketplace, are garbed in rice straw that makes each seem a living haystack. From tiny huts in the low-lying rice fields, and small houses on the hillsides . come village folk to join the strollers, with which the Ginza is crowded at night, and to see spring in the dusty streets of the cities. The Imperial Palace must, of course, be visited, and the country men pause before its gate across the moat, there to clap their hands thrice and bow in reverence to the home of the August Mikado as they do at a Shinto shrine. However, dearly as they love their national shrines, they are over-come with awe and wonder at the sight of the Marunouehi Building, called the Marubil by the Japanese. It is a great new village of brick and stone. Its seven stories are the highest in Eastern Asia, and the Japanese impart new wonder to their own manufacturers when they are given the name of Marubil. Is Japan’s beauty of centuries the nation’s heritage, to be buried in such piles of brick and stone as. the Marubil?, ,She must not give all her beauty in exchange for imported industrialism, much an .she needs it, _