Here is neither shop nor house, nor passer-by, the restless hum of life itself has ceased. It is quieter than a forest, for in these artificial squares of railed-in trees nothing stirs. Men’s gardens are always three parts dead. The broad road widens still; white as fuller’s earth and hard, it stretches like an avenue between high walls of smooth white brick, laid flat and thin as Roman tiles, on thick layers of pale white mortar. Two carefully paved-in streams of fresh grey water run between wall and road. And streams and road and walls go on and on. It is the Palace of the Heir Apparent. The walls are twelve feet high, the stream is three feet wide; and still my _kurumaya_ runs. The pale white walls stretch down the road like parallels in Euclid. It is the Palace of the Princes of the Blood. And still he runs. The pale white walls, thin tiles set in their thick layers of mortar, run as he runs. I have lost sense of the city now, lost memory of the gardens, lost belief in life itself. The world is a dead white road between white walls. This is the Palace of the Son of Heaven, one speck of brown breaks the interminable line of white, the carved gateway whence the great _Tenshisama_ issued once a year to visit the temple. One other speck, the gate by which he returned. And then the pale white walls, thin tiles set in thick layers of mortar, stretch out of sight. Inside these miles of walls, in his artificial solitude, year in, year out, the Son of Heaven dwelt. The life of the city, surging through its streets, surged up in vain; he could not see it, hear it, nor conceive it. Lord of a world he did not know, the Son of Heaven lived, while all around the sons of earth fought and toiled, were born and died, and not a murmur of their being passed his Palace walls. Shut up in his rose-garden world, fictitious, quite unreal, the Son of Heaven augustly ruled. And while the thousands in the city and the millions in the land held him divine, so that whoso looked upon his face did surely die, the men who looked usurped his power, crowned or deposed him; ruled in his name, but reigned supreme, and fought to reign. The history of Japan lies there. War and worship, divine unquestioned right and civil strife, never rebellion, each army fighting in the name of the ever-sacred Son of Heaven, to use victory for its own ends. And the living son of these dead Emperors, brought up as they, Son of Heaven still, though without the walls, a modern monarch holding levees and cabinet councils, does that fictitious rose-garden world lie about him yet shutting out the real? * * * * * “And always in Japan,” says my _kurumaya_, “the Son of Heaven augustly rules.” And he sings: “Kimi ga yo wa Chiyo ni yachiyo ni Sazaré ishi no Iwaho to narité Koké no musu madé.”