Excerpt from The Heart of Japan: Glimpses of Life and Nature, Far From the Travellers Track, in the Land of the Rising Sun We lived so far from the travellers' track in Japan, - often where no foreigner had been before, - and had seen and heard so much of what seemed to us humorous, tragic, quaint, or thought-worthy, that we dared to believe sometimes that we were getting glimpses of the real inner spirit of the native life - a spirit far different from that of the tourist-worn borders of this ancient and fascinating Land of the Rising Sun. Whether or not we are flattering ourselves unduly, the five years that one of us spent in the interior of Japan, sometimes teaching English in the Government schools, sometimes idling, always living as the natives live, were crowded with joyous entertainment. In striving to reproduce some faint tint of this charm, it seemed wisest to present each episode or impression separately - here a personal experience, there a story heard in some peasant's hut or among the temples, or from some old warrior of the feudal days, and again a ventured comment, picturing different phases of the life of Japan, one after another, as on a screen - seemingly detached, perhaps, yet knit together by the underlying desire to present the native point of view. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.