So far, all these things, rice-fields, sacks, and food, with the sole exception of the blankets and hair brushes, have been exclusively Japanese, the nation has evolved them in itself, and by itself, and consequently in comparing them with things European it has only been possible to take similar and not identical objects. But since their first contact with Europe, and more especially during the last thirty years, the Japanese have borrowed a certain number of articles directly from the West. They have borrowed beer-glasses, windows, and wall-papers. And from the Dutch, three-hundred years ago, they took pipes and tobacco pouches. A light kind of _lager_ beer is rapidly becoming a universal drink in Japan. There are several native breweries, and those places where beer has not penetrated are considered hopelessly “old-fashioned.” After the beer came the beer-glasses, and though the art of the nation has not been long at work upon them, they are already very different from their European models. It must be remembered, too, that glass was unknown to the Japanese until it was introduced from the West. The first thing which the nation did when it set to work upon beer-glasses was to reduce the size, otherwise they would have been out of all proportion to the rest of the dinner service, and so the beer-glasses of Japan are small as dolls’ tumblers in which, if you are lucky, you will find three sips of beer under the egg-white froth. If this example illustrates the love of the little, generally supposed to be the chief characteristic of the Japanese, the case of the windows will show their dislike to unredeemed blank space, and at the same time their knowledge of the artistic value of space in design. So long as windows only existed in houses built in the style called “foreign,” they remained severely Western, just another European object like the railway or the telegraph set up in the land, but when they began to be introduced into Japanese houses, then the art of the nation set to work upon them. They are still rare, but in a few private houses and in some of the best native hotels windows exist. They do not open. They were not introduced to supply ventilation, an unnecessary consideration in a Japanese house, which is all draughts, nor really for light, the paper panes of the _shōji_ admitting light readily; but just in order that the person inside might have another picture before his eyes--the picture of what lies without. The window then is not a glass fitting to an oblong hole knocked into a wall, but a broad band of glass running round the whole length of the _shōji_ at just that distance from the ground which will allow anyone sitting on his heels on the floor to see through comfortably. A pattern on this glass window would have interfered with the view, and the window was there expressly for the view. So the glass is empty and clear, but not blank. Then it would have been merely useful, and the Japanese never stop at utility; it