144 
FROM HONG-KONG TO YOKOHAMA . 
and short boots with side-elastics. The wealthy often add a watch and chain to their 
personal adornment. 
The numerous curiosity-shops of the Japanese quarter afford a never-failing source of 
amusement and instruction to the visitor to Yokohama, who feels attracted as much by the 
variety and artistic merit of the objects offered for sale, as by the uniform civility, patience, 
and good-humour of the tradesmen. Some of these shops are stocked with second and 
third rate articles of European manufacture. A comparison of such with the shops exhibiting 
Japanese goods leads to conclusions by no means flattering to the over-praised civilisation of 
the West. The native stores, with their stock of bronzes, porcelains, lacquer-ware, carvings 
in wood and ivory, are museums of art which the most accomplished artist of Europe would 
think it no condescension to enter for the purpose of study. The contents of the importer’s 
bazaar, while they prove the undeniable superiority of European mechanical appliances, 
betray a poverty of artistic resources and a misapplication of ornament which are rather 
humiliating. If, in consequence of our advance in physical and mathematical science, and 
in the mechanical arts, there are many things which the Japanese may learn from us—and they 
have already displayed a surprising facility in adopting and working our most useful 
inventions, such as the railway, the telegraph, the printing-press, the sewing-machine, &c.— 
they will amply repay us by giving to our workers some much-needed lessons in the art of 
design and ornamentation. The Japanese show superior skill in the free adaptation of natural 
forms, whether borrowed from plants, animals, the human figure, or landscape, for decorative 
purposes. Like other Eastern nations, they excel us in the difficult art of covering a plain 
surface with a tasteful combination of lines and colours, and, with very few exceptions, the 
creations of the Japanese artist are unsurpassed for the wonderful patience and exquisite 
finish displayed in the execution of even the minutest detail. The vendor of European 
goods may possibly have looked with a feeling of superiority upon his neighbour the 
dealer in Japanese bric-a-brac , and might have been greatly surprised had he known that 
the traveller who had just passed his door felt thoroughly ashamed at the contrast between 
cheap gaudiness on the one side and real artistic merit on the other. 
On the 27th April our vessel left Yokohama for repairs, and proceeded to the 
Japanese Government dockyard at Yokoska. The latter is situated in a quiet secluded bay 
about twelve miles to the southward of Yokohama, and in the midst of finely wooded hills, 
