110 Shadowings 



in the lists of names given further on. Ai in 

 Romaji, for instance, may signify either " love " 

 or " indigo-blue " ; Cbo, " a butterfly," or " su- 

 perior," or " long " ; Ei, either " sagacious " or 

 " blooming " ; Kei, either " rapture " or " rev- 

 erence " ; Sato, either " native home " or 

 " sugar " ; Tosbi, either " year " or " arrow- 

 head " ; Taka, " tall," " honorable," or " fal- 

 con." The chief, and, for the present, insuperable 

 obstacle to the use of Roman letters in writing 

 Japanese, is the prodigious number of homonyms 

 in the language. You need only glance into any 

 good Japanese- English dictionary to understand 

 the gravity of this obstacle. Not to multiply 

 examples, I shall merely observe that there are 

 nineteen words spelled cho ; twenty-one spelled 

 hi; twenty-five spelled to or to; and no less 

 than forty-nine spelled ko or ho. 



Yet, as I have already suggested, the real signi- 

 fication of a woman's name cannot be ascertained 

 even from a literal translation made with the 

 help of the Chinese characters. Such a name, 

 for instance, as Kagami (Mirror) really signifies 

 the Pure-Minded, and this not in the Occidental, 

 but in the Confucian sense of the term. Ume 



