On the characteristics of Japanese art European writers have varied greatly, but in considering only the art of the people there are perhaps fewer difficulties or differences, and we come, I think, to four--value of space, desire for line, sobriety of taste, and thoroughness of workmanship. I do not include the dislike of symmetry, because a want can hardly be called a characteristic. Symmetry is more properly a characteristic of our art. The Japanese dislike it, they make nothing in pairs, and if certain things, such as candlesticks, are required in twos, each one, though resembling the other in the main idea, always differs from it in detail. The sense of the artistic value of space shows itself everywhere, in every form of decoration and design, as well as in every object of art. In Japan there is no such thing as overcrowding. It is one small leaf which decorates the sheet of paper wrapping. It is the scarcity of articles in the Mitsui which accounts for nine-tenths of the artistic effect of that draper’s interior. If ever a nation has thoroughly and æsthetically realised the psychological fact on which much of our theory of backgrounds is based, that we only really see an object by its outlines, it is the Japanese. They have worked out this fact to its last artistic value. In a Japanese room there hangs one picture; on the raised and polished platform of the _tokonoma_, the artistic altar of the room, there is set one bronze or porcelain vase of flowers, one ornament. These are changed as often as the fortune or the taste of their owner permits. When a Japanese comes to Europe he complains that our drawing-rooms, with their dozens of pictures and their scores of ornaments, are “like warehouses”; and after this first disturbing feeling of crowd, when he has lived in that drawing-room for several months and finds that the ornaments are never changed, only perhaps added to, he complains then of the monotony. For he knows and has realised another psychological fact, that it is in the freshness of observation that the eye sees clearest and the brain works best.