THE contents of this book are primarily personal experiences of a seven years' stay in the house of a Japanese nobleman, having been gleaned from jottings in my diary and such reminiscences as my memory recalls. In writing of a country so steeped in centuryold traditions and of a people so loath, in many ways, to adopt Western culture, it is necessary to introduce a little history at the outset, for the reader will have to familiarize himself with certain strange names and systems that had dominated the social order in Japan without change for generations, and still influenced both ruler and ruled at the time of my arrival in that country in 1901.