JAPAN
verses are composed in her praise, and in each house a table is set, bearing offerings of saké, rice-dumplings, potatoes, chestnuts, persimmons, and pears. This custom, however, like so many of the people's traditional habits, is gradually falling into disuse. In the great cities, Tōkyō, Ōsaka and Kyōtō, it has lost much of its romantic and poetic character, but its vogue is likely to be preserved by climatic and commercial influences. The delightful freshness of early autumn nights renders the moon-fête a welcome excuse for the heat-weary citizens to spend an evening on the water, and owners of river-side restaurants and pleasure-boats contribute industriously to the people's love of these Venetian entertainments. The water of Kyōtō, celebrated for its purity and bleaching properties, comes to the city in little rivulets, and the so-called Kamo River is but a paltry stream trickling seaward over a wide bed of gravel-banks and boulders. But the make-believe faculty with which the Japanese are richly endowed, invests this arid area with all the properties of a broad-bosomed river, and the people sup there under the moonlight, as contentedly as though cool currents were rippling around them and the breath of cataracts fanning their faces. Ōsaka citizens, happier in the possession of the Yodo River, which, taking its way direct from the great lake of Biwa, sweeps generously but gently through their streets, spend much of their summer-evening life floating on the water amid
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