JAPAN 2: The letter from Harvey Phillips continued.

“We go into the stores, pricing, bargaining and looking at kimonas, china, tortoise shell, brassware, lacquerware, cloisonne and satsuma ware. When you find something that you like, the dealer tells you it is 100 yen, you offer him 60, and if you walk out of the store a few times and bargain right you get it at your price. The dealers told us that although we pulled them way down on their prices and they didn’t make much on their sales to us that they would make it up and plenty more the next day when the Belgenland was due to land on its world cruise.

“What first strikes one in Japan is the large number of children. Every family seems to have five or six. You see little girls and boys running around with babies slung on their backs, never paying the least bit of attention to them and playing their games, etc. 

“The following day we decided upon a trip to see the Great Buddha. Kamakura lies about forty minutes by railroad south of Yokohama on the sea. (We) visited the Buddha and innumerable Shinto Shrines and Buddhist Temples — the Hachiman Shrine and the Yoritomo Shrine being the most interesting. The Great Buddha is well worth seeing, and was formerly enclosed in a temple which fell in a great tidal wave in the fifteenth century and now stands out in the open. This makes it far more impressive for an observer to view it. The reason the shrines and the temples have lasted so long is not due to the dryness of Japan — for in reality it is a very damp and foggy country most of the year — but rather to the red lacquer which protects the wood indefinitely.”

More to come.