Show QUEER LOOKING CREATURES 3icrro LoLl Describes the Personal Appearance Ap-pearance of Jananoso Women c Very ugly those poor little Japanese women I prefer to make this brutal statement i state-ment at once to attenuate it later with mincing prettiness graceful drollery adorable ador-able little hands and then rice powder rose and gold on the lips all manner of artifices Hardly any eyes at all so little as to be almost nothing two narrow slits oblique and diverging where roll wily or cajoling eyeballs as between the barely opened lids cf those cats whom the glare of daylight makes weary Above those little updrawn eyesbut very far above highly perched are out 1 lined the eyebrows as fine as pencil marks and not at all oblique not at all parallel with the eyes that they accompany so badly but straight on the same line contrary con-trary to what it has been the custom to represent in our European pictures whenever when-ever the artist has had to portray a Japanese Jap-anese woman I believe that the particular strangeness of those little faces of women is entirely due to that disposition of the eye which is general and also to the development of the cheek which is always swollen to roundness like a dolls moreover in thrjr pictures the artists of the country never fail to reproduce exaggerating them even to improbability those characteristic signs of their race The other features are much more changeable varying with individuals and especially with social conditions Among the common people the lips remain thick the nose Hat and short among the nobil i n a ily the mouth becomes thinner tile nose longer and finer sometimes even curves in the shape of a slender eagles beak There is no country where the feminine types are so clearly defined between different differ-ent castes Brown peasant women bronzed like Indians well balanced on their slim waists plump and muscled beneath their everlasting dresses of blue cottonade etiolated etio-lated women of the cities real diminutives of women white and wan like sickly Eu Topeans with I know not what of hollowed hol-lowed of undermined beneath the flesh which is the sign of races that are too old all these working women of the great i cities seem to have been worn out heredi I tarily worn out before their birth by too long a continuity of labor and of tension of mind over minute trifles It seems as though upon their frail forms weighed all the weariness of having constantly con-stantly produced since centuries those millions of baubles those innumerable little lit-tle works of exhausting patience of which Japan is full And among the princesses the refining influence of aristocracy so far back does it date has finished by fashioning fashion-ing extraordinary little artificial persons with childish hands and busts whose painted faces whiter and pinker than afresh a-fresh bonbon indicate no age Their smile is far away like that of ancient idols their updrawn eyes have an expression of both youth and deathPierre Lotiiu Harpers |