Democratic Sentinel, Volume 13, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 November 1889 — Pitti Sing Does Not Kiss. [ARTICLE]

Pitti Sing Does Not Kiss.

Young Japanese girls are as nature made them, and very sweet they are, too, in their quaint dresses showing the plump chest and rounded arms. Pages could be written about their charms. What dear, dainty little dolls they are! Such white teeth, rosy lips, and coy smiles! Who shall describe them? and what next? A kiss, perhaps? Not over here. Oh, never! They never do. They don’t know how, actually, don’t know how, and even peasant girls are closely guarded. Fancy a young man in cotton kimono and wooden clogs stealing a chance to walk with his best girl under the blooming cherry trees, explaining the constellations and quoting sentimental poetry; telling her that he “hung upon her eyelids,” that “her voice was like a temple gong;” in fact, that he loved but her alone, and then making her several formal bows at the door of her father’s strawthatched hut as they parted in the moonlight. Can any American lover stretch his imagination enough to believe in a sweetheait not kissing those pretty lips, paint and all, by a sort of “natural selection?” ’Tis a melancholy fact, but a Japanese has no such impulse. No lover courts his mistress with “sweetest, persuasive kisses.” No mother kisses her baby as she cuddles it against her bosom. Parting husband presses the hand of his wife and bends his forehead to the mats in sad farewell. Our salutations run through the crescendo of bow, handshake, kiss and kiss. I can’t explain the difference in grade between the last two, but everybody knows. But in Japan the expression of regard is regulated by the number and length of the salaams.