Jinrikisha Days in Japan
—a broad and most liberal education for a maiden even of high degree.
Upon her marriage, an extraordinary life opened before the little Empress, demanding a very unusual activity and study, courage, adaptiveness, and comprehension. She is poetic as well as practical, and her poems are not only traced on imperial screens and kakemono in autograph characters, but several of them have been set to music as well.
Even now, her Majesty is more delicately pretty than her younger sisters, although for years an invalid. She is short in stature, slender, and small, with the long, oval face and refined features of the ideal aristocratic type of Japanese beauty. At her marriage, she shaved her eyebrows, painted two shadowy suggestions of them high up on her forehead, and blackened her teeth, in accordance with Japanese custom; but after a few years, she ceased to disfigure herself in this way. It was an event, in 1873, when she gave her first audience to the envoys’ wives. It cost the court chamberlains months of study to arrange for the appearance of the Emperor and Empress together, to reconcile the pretensions of their suites as to rank and precedence, and to harmonize the Occidental, chivalrous ideas of deference to women with the unflattering estimate of the Orient. When, on the day of the declaration of the new constitution (February 11, 1890), the Emperor and Empress rode side by side in the same state carriage through the streets of Tokio, and when, that night, he offered his arm to lead her to a twin arm-chair in the state dining-hall, a new era was begun in Japanese history.
The Empress has her secretaries and readers, and gives a part of each day to informal audiences. She visits her schools and hospitals, and makes liberal purchases at charity bazaars. She exercises in the saddle within the palace grounds, and drives in a brougham
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