They passed through iron gates, like the gates of a park, where two policemen were posted to regulate the traffic. Beyond was a single line of cherry-trees in full bloom, a single wave of pinkish spray, a hanging curtain of vapourous beauty, the subject of a thousand poems, of a thousand allusions, licentious, delicate and trite,--the cherry-blossoms of the Yoshiwara.
At a street corner stood a high white building plastered with golden letters in Japanese and English--"Asahi Beer Hall."
"That is the place," said Yaé, "let us get out of this crowd."
They found refuge among more dirty tablecloths, Europeanised _mousmés_, and gaping guests. When Yaé spoke to the girls in Japanese, there was much bowing and hissing of the breath; and they were invited upstairs on to the first floor where was another beer-hall, slightly more exclusive-looking than the downstair Gambrinus. Here a table and chairs were set for them in the embrasure of a bow-window, which, protruding over the cross-roads, commanded an admirable view of the converging streets.
"The procession won't be here for two hours more," said Yaé, pouting her displeasure.
"One always has to wait in Japan," said Reggie. "Nobody ever knows exactly when anything is going to happen; and so the Japanese just wait and wait. They seem to like it rather. Anyhow they don't get impatient. Life is so uneventful here that I think they must like prolonging an incident as much as possible, like sucking a sweet slowly."
Meanwhile there was plenty to look at. Asako could not get over her shock at the sea of wicked faces which surged below.
"What class of people are these?" Geoffrey asked.
"Oh, shop-people, I think, most of them," said Yaé, "and people who work in factories."
"Good class Japanese don't come here, then?" Geoffrey asked again.
"Oh no, only low class people and students. Japanese people say it is a shameful thing to go to the Yoshiwara. And, if they go, they go very secretly."
"Do you know any one who goes?" asked Reggie, with a directness which shocked his friend's sense of Good Form.
"Oh, my brothers," said Yaé, "but they go everywhere; or they say they do."
It certainly was an ill-favoured crowd. The Japanese are not an ugly race. The young aristocrat who has grown up with fresh air and healthy exercise is often good-looking, and sometimes distinguished and refined. But the lower classes, those who keep company with poverty, dirt and pawnshops, with the pleasures of the _saké_ barrel and the Yoshiwara, are the ugliest beings that were ever created in the image of their misshapen gods. Their small stature and ape-like attitudes, the colour and discolour of their skin, the flat Mongolian nose, their gaping mouths and bad teeth, the coarse fibre of their lustreless black hair, give them an elvish and a goblin look, as though this country were a nursery for fairy changelings, a land of the Nibelungen, where bad thoughts have found their incarnation. Yet the faces have not got that character for good and evil as we find them among the Aryan peoples, the deep lines and the firm profiles.