The Inland Sea and Nagasaki
dian region. The landlocked Japanese water is abroad lake over two hundred miles long, filled with islands, and sheltered by uneven shores. Its jagged mountains of intensest green nowhere become wild enough to disturb the dream-like calm. Its verdant islands lie in groups, the channel is always broad and plain, and signs of human life and achievement are always in sight. Along the shores stretch chains of villages, with stone sea-walls, castles, and temples soaring above the clustered roofs or peeping from wooded slopes, and the terraced fields of rice and grains ridging every hill to its summit and covering every lower level. Stone lanterns and torii mark the way to temple groves, and cemeteries with ancient Buddhas of granite and bronze attest that these little communities are centuries old. Junks and sampans lie anchored in fleets, or creep idly across the water, and small coasting steamers thread their way in and out among the islands. Only one port of the Inland Sea between Kobé and Nagasaki is open to the foreigner, and except by authority of his passport he cannot set foot on these tantalizing shores save at Hiroshima, where the Government naval station is.
At Shimonoseki the Inland Sea ends, and ships pass out by the narrowest of its channels—a channel that boils with tide-rips and across which a chain once held all craft at bay. New forts replace the old ones bombarded by the combined English, Dutch, French, and American fleets in September, 1868. The “Shimonoseki Affair” is conspicuous in the annals of the scandalous diplomacy and international bullying that has constituted the policy of Christian nations in their relations with Japan. The United States did, indeed, make a late and lame apology for its disgraceful share in the plundering of a weaker people, by restoring its portion of the indemnity, thus tardily acknowledging the injustice of its conduct.
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