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Updated: June 18, 2025
At another spot you find peep-shows, stalls at which hairpins, paints, and powder-boxes, and a thousand other trifles, are sold; archery galleries, where you may fire twenty arrows at a target for a halfpenny; booths, where acrobats, conjurers, and jugglers are performing, and tea-houses without number, where the faithful are sipping their tea or sake and puffing at their tiny pipes.
For Chrysantheme is pretty, there can be no doubt about it. Yesterday evening, in fact, I positively admired her. It was quite night; we were returning with the usual escort of little married couples like ourselves, from the inevitable tour of the tea-houses and bazaars.
"A fellow marries a Japanese girl, and he finds he has to keep all her lazy relatives as well; and then a crowd of half-caste brats come along, and he doesn't know whether they are his own or not." "It is more than that," was the emphatic answer. "Men with white wives have worry enough; and a man can go gay in the tea-houses, and none the worse.
Now their wives want to know all about them so they can set up opposition in their homes to the many tea-houses which offer European food as an extra attraction. And depend upon it, if the women start to learn, they stick to it till there is nothing more to know on the subject.
Last of all, an aged Japanese optician, who assumes a most knowing air, a look of sublime wisdom, goes off to forage in his back shop, and brings to light a steam fog-horn, a relic from some wrecked steamer. After dinner, the chief event of the evening is a deluge of rain which takes us by surprise as we leave the tea-houses, on our return from our fashionable stroll.
Here the water course is bounded by fashionable tea-houses, many stories high, and here the great arched bridges are always crowded. Leaving this busy heart of things, they sauntered northward, finding lonelier shores, and soon wide fields of green, until they reached a bank whereon grew a single leaning willow.
The numerous and pleasant tea-houses that skirt the Tokaido have a great deal to do with rendering travelling popular, A smiling welcome from the pretty waitresses employed at these places may always be anticipated by the weary wayfarers; and, however slight their requirements may be, they are certain to be promptly and courteously attended to.
The breakers approach and recede, keeping time to the inimitable music of the surf; vessels are dotting the blue expanse; villages and tea-houses are seen resting along the crescent-sweep of the shore for many a mile ahead, where Fuji slopes so gracefully down from its majestic snow-crowned summit to the sea.
After luncheon we proceeded to take what is called the "Bubbling Well Drive," first exploring two interesting tea-houses, one called the "Mandarin Teahouse" being very elegant in all of its appointments. It had a garden arranged in conventional Chinese style, with a rockery, miniature lake, and dwarf trees.
Well, a thousand years hence the Japs may be ruling in Jerusalem; the modern Japs who no longer live in paper houses, but in sweated factories and slums. But though we may think the Christian chapels as thin as Japanese tea-houses, they will still be Christian; though we may think the sacred lamps as cheap as Chinese lanterns, they will still be burning before a crucified creator of the world.
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