Rensselaer Journal, Volume 11, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 October 1901 — Tokyo is City of Pleasure. [ARTICLE]

Tokyo is City of Pleasure.

Of all the lands in the world, none exerts the peculiar fascination of Japan. Others have equal beauty of scenery, greater grandeur, more noble works of art, more interesting problems of society. But none possess an

equal fascination. No one who has been in the real Japan which lies outside the treaty ports and the foreign hotels and railways, ever could or ever would forget his experience. No one, If he could, would ever fail to return. The gteat secret of this charm lies with the people themselves. They have made a fine art of personal relations. Their acts are those of good taste and good humor. Two cities of about the same s'zs and relative importance are Paris and Tokyo. No two could show a greater contrast in spirit, says David Stan Jordan in Humanitarian. Both are, in a sense, cities of pleasure. Tokyo is a city of continuous joyousness, little pleasures drawn from simple things, which leave no sting and draw nothing from future happlnrs?. Paris is feverish and feels the “difference in the morning" and the “hard, fierce lust and cruel deed” which go with the search for pleasure that draws on the future for the joys of the present No one who catches the spirit of Paris can fail to miss the underlying sadness, the pity of it all. The spirit of Tokyo—not of all Tokyo, but of its life as a whole—is as fresh as the song of birds, as “sweet as children’s prattle is," and It is good to be under its spell.