On the evening of the tenth of May we reached the estuary near the head of which is Yokohama and further on is Tokyo. For at least two hours we steamed past a low-lying shore line before we came in sight of the sweep of steep cliff to the southward which forms the great outer harbour.

There was just one thing that we could really look at; one insistent, dominant point in the landscape which caught us and held us fascinated⁠—Fujiyama. I had seen Fujiyama on screens and fans and porcelains all my life, but I had no conception of it. For one half hour this “Queen of Mountains”⁠—rightly called⁠—rising thirteen thousand feet out of sheer sea-level, perfect in form, snow-capped, majestic, blazed for us against the western sky. Then a cloud curtain fell⁠—and the sun went down.

As we steamed up close to the breakwater in the grey light of late evening we could see nothing but the dark outlines of many ships and a long row of substantial looking buildings, under high arc lights, stretching along a wide, waterfront street which I was afterward to know as The Bund.

We wanted to go ashore, but it was not possible. We had to lie outside the breakwater and wait for the doctors to come aboard. “Wait for the doctors to come aboard;” how familiar that proceeding becomes to the traveller among the ports of the East, and especially, of Japan. You arrive at Yokohama and are examined there; you go just around the bend of the coast line and arrive at Kobe and you are examined there; you go on through the Inland Sea to Nagasaki and again you are examined. Wherever you arrive in this land of much caution you must “wait for the doctors to come aboard.”