In this enumeration of the characteristics of Japanese art, you will perhaps wonder why I have omitted the very popular one of their love of the little, the small, the minute. I have left it out simply because I do not believe it exists as such. Many writers have exclaimed in paragraphs sprinkled with interjections on this passion for the little which they say the Japanese possess; and they have apparently seen in it nothing but a blind unreasoning prejudice for the something small as opposed to the something great. I think this opinion is mostly due to the “little knowledge” of the tourist or the restricted knowledge of the specialist. It leaves also entirely unexplained and inexplicable the _Dai Butsu_ of Kamakura, a bronze statue of Buddha, fifty feet high and of the most exquisite workmanship; the Buddhas of Kyoto and of Nara; the big bronze bell of Kyoto, the largest hanging bell in the world, besides that at Chion-in, the second largest, and at Nara, the third; the _Hongwanji_ at Kyoto, the walls of the castle at Osaka--and the battle of Mukden. A wider acquaintance with the Japanese people and the realities of their daily life will show, I think, that this so-called love of the little is really a highly cultivated and acute sense of proportion, where it is not purely ethical. The Japanese beer-glass, you will remember, was the size of a doll’s tumbler. “Why?” “Oh, because they have a passion for little things” is certainly the easiest and most obvious answer. But follow that glass to its home on its Japanese dinner tray, in its Japanese room, and you will see that its littleness is in exact proportion to the tray and the room. Nor are the rooms so small, but because we insist on bringing our encumbering “foreign” ideas into them. There is no furniture in a Japanese room, no furniture of any kind whatsoever. Two kneeling-cushions and a round box, a brazier, are the only possible objects which could come under that heading, therefore the whole space within the four walls of a room is space for movement. If a measurement were taken of the actual feet of free space in many a modern European drawing-room, I believe that it would be found to be something _less_ than that in the “tiny” Japanese apartment. Another thing to be borne in mind is that life in Japan is lived, not above the floor on chairs, but on the floor itself. Try living on the floor and you will find the whole horizon of a room opening out in the most astonishing way. What we call a stool, for instance, represents the same level as a table. The actual difference in the height of the eyes sitting on one’s heels on a Japanese floor and on a chair is really between two and three feet, while it must also be remembered that Japanese eyes, belonging as they do to a body shorter on the average than our own, come still nearer to the ground.