Glimpses of Japan and Formosa

Were facetiousness toward so solemn a people permitted, one might say that the Japanese are imitators at top rather than at bottom. The nation has apparently almost no notions of its own in the matter of head-dress; but certainly no one can accuse it of copying its footwear from extraneous sources. Fortunately the "derbies" and "bowlers" which topped off kimonos and European garb alike a decade or two ago seem to have passed into the limbo befitting such eyesores; but the foreign adaptations that have taken their place are little less incongruous. A group of Japanese males in their native costume, to which three out of four of them still cling more or less unalterably, and wisely, look as if they had been suddenly beset by a whirlwind in a foreign land, and had borrowed for the return journey whatever head coverings their hosts could spare them. Fedoras, caps, slouchy felts, particularly, now that summer was spreading northward across the empire, stiff straw hats, loomed forth on every hand-or head. Is it because the Restoration caught them with nothing between the fantastic hair-dress of _shoguns_ and _samurai_, still retained in a modified form by their hog-fat wrestlers, and the parasol-like sun- and rain-shades of the peasants, that most of the nation copies with such poor success our Western styles of head-dress? Personally I much prefer the bareheaded tooth-brush pompadour or closely clipped pates of most boys and of no small number of men of old-fashioned or indifferent attitude. The distinctly national feminine coiffure, too, never covered with anything but a parasol or an umbrella, helps to save the situation.

The two-toed human biped, reminiscent of the primitive horse, the cloven-hoofed mortal who shuffles his way in many millions through the islands of Japan is, however, unknown in all the rest of the round world. No other race has had the genius-to use a polite word-to evolve that cross between a stocking-foot and a foot-mitten, the great toe separated from the rest, which rounds off Japanese bare legs, irrespective of sex. Beneath this may be seen every manner of makeshift, always gripped by the independent great toe,-wooden clogs of many shapes and sizes, _getas_ ranging from flat boards to veritable stilts that raise the wearer a foot above the ground in the rainiest muddy weather, matted-topped sandals of wood, slippers-if a mere sole with a V-shaped cord as upper may be so called-for house wear, of a score of different forms and materials, slippers for the hallways, others for certain unmentioned chambers, special rubber slippers for the bath-room, crude straw _waraji_ for pilgrims and peasants, worn-out examples of which lie strewn along any traveled road, varied and special footwear for every time, place, and occasion.