Our Little Japanese CousinWade, Mary Hazelton Blanchard
General
Our Little Japanese Cousin
Wade, Mary Hazelton Blanchard
Children -- Japan -- Juvenile literature; Japan -- Social life and customs -- Juvenile literature
Spring comes, and with it, tops, and kites, and stilts. The stilts are
very high, and Toyo puts his toes through parts of the wooden lifts.
He and the other boys run races and even play games on stilts, and
think it great fun. But the kites! Yours are just babies beside them.
Some of them are so large that it takes two men to sail them. In fact,
grown-up people, in Japan, seem as fond of kite-flying as the children.
Many of these toys have neither tails nor bobs. You wonder how they
manage to get up in the air at all, till you see that the strings are
pulled in such a way as to raise them. They are of all shapes. The boys
sometimes play a game with their kites. They dip the strings in glue
and afterward in powdered glass; then they run with the kites and try
to cross each other's strings and cut them. The boy who succeeds wins
the other's kite. Toyo lost his the other day, and what do you think he
did? Pout, or exclaim, as you sometimes do, "I don't care, that isn't
fair?" By no means! He made three beautiful bows and gave up his kite
with a polite smile. Maybe he did not feel any happier about it than
you would, for it was a fine new one, but he wouldn't show his grief,
at any rate.
Toyo sometimes wrestles with the other boys, but they are not rough and
noisy about it. They wrestle gently, if you can imagine such a thing.
They have often seen the trained wrestlers at the shows; such big, fat
men. They must weigh at least three hundred pounds. The fat fairly
hangs upon them. The Japanese people are generally slim and rather
small, but if a man is going to train himself to be a wrestler, he eats
everything that will help to make him fat. I should think they could
not get hurt, for they look as though they were cushioned in fat.
The boys of Japan have marbles and tops, just as you do; in fact,
nearly all the games which you like best were played by your far-away
cousins long before there was a white child on this great continent
of ours. "Blind man's buff," "Hide the thimble," and "Puss in the
corner," are great favourites with the Japanese. Instead of hiding
the thimble, however, they use a slipper, and instead of puss in the
corner, they play that it is the devil. You must not forgot that the
Japanese believe there are many devils, or bad spirits, as well as good
ones who are ready to help. They even think of them in their games.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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