A stranger could hardly have arrived in Tokio at a more interesting time. For ten days after the year has opened Japan is more characteristically Japanese, perhaps, than at any other period. It is one universal festival. Among the upper classes visits of ceremony are exchanged; the streets are crowded with rickshaws drawn by coolies in fantastic costume—mushroom hats and waterproofs of reeds. They worm their way through throngs of adults and children bouncing balls, playing at battledore and shuttlecock, flying kites, tumbling over each other in their happy frolicsomeness. Shopkeepers are to be seen carrying specimens of their wares to their customers; brightly-clad geishas add grace and picturesqueness to the scene. Every variety of costume is to be met with, from the correct frock-coats of the government officials to the strange mixture of billycock and kimono which lesser folk sometimes affect. Every house is decorated; here and there a juggler or a showman provides elementary entertainment at the price of three-farthings, and the unwary visitor, enticed into a booth by the promise of great marvels, finds that the magic is nothing more startling than an electric shock, or that the advertised fire-breathing dragon is no more than a moon-faced performing seal. At night paper lanterns dangle from every rickshaw shaft, making the streets a moving panorama of fairyland; and from the low one-storied houses proceeds the quaint barbarous music of the samisen—the native guitar twanged by smiling geishas entertaining their employers’ guests with dance and song.