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The carpets or mattings on his floor are of Japanese manufacture. His furniture is supplied by a Japanese cabinet-maker. His suits, shirts, shoes, walking-cane, umbrella, are "Japanese make": even the soap on his washstand is stamped with Japanese ideographs.
If the Polynesians came upon any of the stone builders, they had killed or absorbed them. The interpretation of the curious ideographs carved on wood in Easter Island by some of the Polynesians there half a century ago would denote there had been intercourse with the people who had made them, and who were not the Polynesians.
As the Chinese ideographs associate all things weak or vile with women, so the tell-tale words of Japanese daily speech are but reflections of the dogmas coined in the Buddhist mint. In Japanese, chastity means not moral cleanliness without regard to sex, but only womanly duties.
Nintoku's first act on ascending the throne explains the ideographs chosen for his posthumous name by the authors of the Chronicles, since nin signifies "benevolence" and toku, "virtue." During those three years the palace fell into a condition of practical ruin, and tradition describes its inmates as being compelled to move from room to room to avoid the leaking rain.*
The strange sweetness of the voice is haunting, makes me even wish to have some pains, that I might pay five hundred mon to have them driven away. I lie down to sleep, and I dream. I see Chinese texts multitudinous, weird, mysterious fleeing by me, all in one direction; ideographs white and dark, upon signboards, upon paper screens, upon backs of sandalled men.
They are divided in their estimate of his literary capacity. Some point to his letters, which, while they display a not inconsiderable familiarity with Chinese ideographs, show also some flagrant neglect of the uses of that script.
And at other times in the busiest moments of his busy life the clamor of the great shop dies; the ideographs of his ledger dim and vanish; and a plaintive little voice, which the gods refuse to silence, utters into the solitude of his heart, like a question, the single word, "Anata?" "Thou?" The foreign concession of an open port offers a striking contrast to its far-Eastern environment.
The Japanese language was then undergoing a transition. In order to fit it to the Chinese ideographs for literary purposes, it was being deprived of its mellifluous polysyllabic character and reduced to monosyllabic terseness. The older words were disappearing, and with them many of the old traditions.
The possibility of simplifying the colossal task of memorizing these uncorrelated ideographs does not seem to have occurred to the Japanese; though it is now being attempted by the foreigner. Perhaps a partial explanation of this apparent exception to the usual flexibility of the people in meeting conditions may be found in their relative lack of originality.
But the many hundred forms and signs, of which the holy scriptures of the Egyptians are composed, could not well be of an altogether alphabetic nature, and a further study of the subject brought the explorer to the conclusion that ideographs were interspersed among the alphabetical signs in order to make the alphabetic words more comprehensive.
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