The Japanese are a curious people, blending as they do in their manners and customs, in their ways of thought and mental tendencies, in their childish acceptances and intellectual eagerness, naive simplicity and artistic perceptivity; a strange union of the primitive, the ancient, and the modern, all instinct with present vitality. In their musical system and musical practice, they inherit a long past, prehistoric; and, in their way upward through the centuries, seem to have developed an absorbing power, enabling them to acquire the new without foregoing the ancient, and to blend all that they acquire with a spontaneous ease that is less art than happy nature, making in every sense the best of everything. Adhering to the traditional, yet unfettered by the pedantic formality which so cripples the progress of the Chinese, they are able to advance with freedom, and to affiliate whatever seems to them good. In the Japanese musical system, we find the ancient pentatonic scale, the old Greek scales, and the equal semitonal division of the octave, all coexisting; the latter being to them indistinguishable from our equal temperament, which we assume to be so modern. Hence our pianoforte is naturally acceptable to them for its progression of scale, although their ears do not yet make the demand for harmony which is characteristic of the western nations. [Illustration: _Japanese Pitch Pipes._ _Full Size._ _Fig. 32._] The illustration given is full size. It is of a set of Japanese pitch pipes, consisting of six little bamboo tubes, threaded at the middle on a copper wire, which, merely flattened at the ends, serves to hold all the pipes together. At each end of each pipe is a little hollow plug, which fits in tightly; and at the point which is cut on the slant a small brass plate is fixed, as shown in the sketch at top, which is drawn twice the size of the original; and in the middle of the plate is a tiny reed, cut in the plate by a fine chisel. This reed lifts up its tip in a fine delicate curve, like the curve of “my ladye’s eyelash”; and each of these minute hairlike reeds is formed to give the desired pitch for one of the twelve semitones of the compass of the octave. To obtain exactness, the tips of some of the reeds have a tiny bit of beeswax, loading them to the degree of the slower movement of vibration which the artist’s ear demands.