I went back to my present abode, for it was my At Home day, and I entertained some Japanese, who were charmed with Arthur Rackham’s illustrations of _Rip Van Winkle_, and thought they showed something of the spirit of Japanese art, which I think is true.
I flew down to the station for Yokohama, and dined there with Mrs. L----, and dressed in a fancy dress costume and set out with her and her daughter to a _mi-carême_ ball. I enjoyed the dance hugely.
=March 27.=--Rushed up to Tokio in the morning; to the University for lunch, where I had a long talk with the Dean. The Mitsui family (the Japanese Rothschilds) gave the money for the fossil laboratory and part of the apparatus, and the Dean proposes (now that everything is practically finished in the making of the arrangements) to give a tea-party in the Botanic Gardens to show the building apparatus and slides (I have cut 221 so far), as well as the new herbarium buildings. As I have often remarked, he is very English in his tastes and culture, and he planned to give what would be usual in England--tea and coffee and cakes. But when I saw him yesterday, how he had fallen! Nothing less than meats and wines and jellies would satisfy him. It was not his own wish, but he had been driven into it by the strength of the custom in Japan, which demands that if you have guests at all (even at 3 or 4 in the afternoon) you must give them a meat feed, and that they must eat like greedy schoolboys. Whence comes it? This mad ostentatious display, and the guzzling, which is so foreign to their real culture. A mutation derived from crossing such distinct cultures as those of Japan and Europe, not even a hybrid with the characters of one of the parents. Well, I laughed at Professor _S----_, for he said he hated the custom and had hoped to set the fashion for simplicity in this party of his, but that he was really afraid to do so; he would be the laughing-stock of the Japanese if he _only_ gave tea, coffee, and chocolate, ice-cream, cakes and sandwiches from 3 to 6 o’clock! I asked him where the spirit of his Samurai ancestors lay sleeping--asked him who could set the fashion for reasonable entertainments if not himself, in his exalted position of Dean of the University--and got him to swear to me that he would be a pioneer, that he would be brave and face the ordeal of being the laughing-stock of the Japanese. I wonder how it will go.