JAPAN IN LONDON

Greymouth Evening Star, 23 May 1910, Page 4

JAPAN IN LONDON

Last week the Anglo-Japanese Exhibition was opened in London without much ceremony, and will doubtless attract thousands of visitors during the coming English summer. The Japanese section “in this great _ "While City” is the most representative and beautiful ever seen in London. For instance, a Japanese'- garden on scale of compressed beauty new to Europe 1 is one of the features of the Exhibition at Shepherd’s Bush. Up the mountain side, clothed with juniper, climb trees that look as if they had grown on the spot for years. They include a weeping elm, an elder bush, and a maple on the summit. An old Japanese house, on piles rooted in the hike has been erected and a bridge. is arched over the water. For the gardener the crowning, wonder is a collection of wistarias, 40 to 50 years old, with twisted trunks about a span and a half in girth, which have been safely conveyed from Japan and planted along*a pergola or "wistaria shade.” In Japan in a good year these trees bear blossoms sft long. The influence of the voyage on the bloom is being watched anxiously, and is an experiment in gardening that may have 1 many sequels. One of the gardens has been designed according to the style of the Sincfu school, which has been established in Japan for some 500 years. The garden will be “the eye of the exhibition.” Within an acre you have cascades, streams, lakes, bridges, hills, rough garden patches, trim garden patches, pergolas, groves, lawns, and a variety of strangely beautiful landscape effects. Tire island of Miyajima, or Itskushima, island of light, is dedicated to the goddess Boutin. It is rocky, richly wooded, and about 1500 feet high, and is one of the Sankei’pr three chief sights of Japan. Tiro great temple, being partly built oyer the sea on piles, appears at high tide to float on tho surface of the water. This is perhaps tho most marvellous of the exhibits arranged by the skilful and artistic “brown man” ; other arrangements are only a shade below the general standard of this “garden of gardens.” Tor instance, in the great hall near the Wood Lane entrance a piece of richly-wrought Oriental architecture gives an idea of the surroundings in which the visitor will find himself in the summer. This is a massive and realistic reproduction of the famous Temple Gate at Nara, Japan’s ancient capital, and its sumptuousness has a sombre relief of dark cedars, with stone lanterns set among them. Through this gate visitors will pass to inspect tho twelve life-size tableaux illustrative of Japan’s two thousand five hundred years of history. The four seasons as they appear in Japan will be represented by four large natural tableaux, each of

which will be a miniature landscape through which visitors will be .able to walk. There is a Japanese house in one of the buildings, with a painting of a tree on one of its walls so realistic that it looks as though its leaves might be plucked. In a Mother building a largo space is devoted to the native pottery, and such things as punch bowls, flower vases, teapots and services, and incense-burning fantastic Oriental designs, will be on view, the potters will be seen at their work.” Truly, the Japanese are every day proving their claim to be regarded as one of the most, industrious, progressive and intelligent nations of the earth.