Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 November 1885 — Some Japanese Etiquette. [ARTICLE]

Some Japanese Etiquette.

The usual dinner hours are four, six and seven. As soon as Vhe guests are seated on tho mats, two and sometimes three, small, low lacqurired tables are brought to each. On that one immediately in front of him the guest finds seven little covered bowls, with, next his left hand, rice; next his right, fermented bean soup; the others containing roast fish, roast fowl, boiled meat, raw fish in vinegar and a stew of vegetables. On the second table will be five other bowls, consisting of two soups (ono of carp), more raw fish, fowl and kurage, a kind of jelly fish. The third, a very small table, should hold three bowls, of baked shell fish, lobster and fish soup. Except at great feasts, a beginning is made with the rice; and here the etiquette is very strict, and as complicated as the old “Here’s a health to Cardinal Puff!” Take up the chopsticks with the right hand, remove the cover of the rice bowl with the same hand, transfer it to the left, and place it to the left of the table. Then remove the cover of the Bean soup, and plaoe it on the rice cover. Next take up the rice bowl with the right hand, pass it to the left, and eat two mouthfuls with the chopsticks, and then drink (the word drink must be used here) once from the bowl. And so on with other dishes, nevflromitting to eat some rice between each mouthful of meat, fish, vegetable, ox soup. Rice wine goes round from the beginning of the meal. The most trivial breaches of etiquette are unpardonable sins, and they are all gibbeted by special names. One is drinking soup immediately on receiving a bowl of it, without first depositing it on the table; another is hesitating whether to drink soup or oat something else; a third is, after eating of one dish to begin on another without going back to the rice. For cakes the guest must be provided with pieces of paper ad hoc. He should pick up a cake with the chopsticks, place it on a piece of paper, break it in two and eat the right piece first.

These minutiie are nothing to those of tea drinking, or aha no yu, which properly takes place at noon, and the ritual of which was fixed by a master of the art who flourished in the middle of the fifteenth century. It is far too serioiiH a matter for tho tail of an article. Indeed, one sosho, or master in the polite arts, goes so far as to lay down, as the essential of a tea-party, purity, peace, reverence and detachment from all earthly cares. “Without these,” said this sage, “we can never hope to have a perfect tea party." St. James Gazette.