XVII.] JAPAN AND THE FOREIGN POWERS. 649 



the Europeans themselves than on the Japanese. For the 

 European merchants are said not to find it so easy to cut gold 

 here with a case-knife as before, and the ambassadors of the 

 Great Powers find it day by day more difiicult to maintain their 

 old commanding standpoint towards a government which knows 

 that a great future is before the country, if inconsiderate ambi- 

 tion or unlooked-for misfortune do not unexpectedly hinder its 

 development. Another reproach, that the Japanese can imitate 

 what another has done, but is unable himself to invent -anything 

 new, appears on the other hand to be justified in the meantime. 

 But it is unreasonable to demand that a nation should not only 

 in a few decades pass through a development for which centuries 

 have been required in Europe, but also immediately reach the 

 summit of the knowledge of our time so as to be at the same 

 time creative. But it would be wonderful, if the natural science, 

 literature, and art of the nineteenth century, transplanted among 

 a gifted people, with a culture so peculiar and so pervasive, and 

 with an art-sense so developed as those of Japan, did not in 

 time produce new, splendid, and unexpected fruit. The same 

 irresistible necessity which now drives the Japanese to learn all 

 that the European and the American know, will, when he has 

 reached that goal, sj^ur him on to go further up the Nile river 

 of research, 



A short distance beyond Takasaki the road to the volcano to 

 which we were on our way, was no longer along Nakasendo, and 

 we could therefore no longer continue our journey in carriages 

 drawn by horses, but were compelled to content ourselves with 

 jinrikishas. In these, on the 29th of September, we traversed 

 in five and a half hours the very hilly road to Ikaho, noted for 

 its baths, situated at a height of 700 metres above the sea. 

 The landscape here assumes a quite different stamp. The road 

 which before ran over an unbroken plain, thickly peopled, and 

 cultivated like a garden, now begins to pass between steep un- 

 cultivated hills, overgrown with tall, uncut, withered grass, 

 separated by valleys in which run purling rivulets, nearly con- 

 cealed by exceedingly luxuriant bushy thickets. [Ikaho is 

 celebrated for the warm, or more correctly hot, springs which 

 well up from the volcanic hills which surround the little town, 

 which is beautifully situated on a slope. As at the baths of 

 Europe, invalids seek here a remedy for their ailments, and the 

 town therefore consists almost exclusively of hotels, baths, and 

 sIkjjos fin* the visitors. The baths are situated, partly in large 

 open wooden sheds, where men and women bathe together 

 without distinction, partly in private houses. In every bath 

 there is a basin one metre in depth, to which a constant stream 

 of water is conducted from some of the hot springs. The spring 

 water has of course cooled very much before it is used, but is 



