CHAPTER 1. Individuality.
The boyish belief that on the other side of our globe all things are of
necessity upside down is startlingly brought back to the man when he first
sets foot at Yokohama. If his initial glance does not, to be sure, disclose
the natives in the every-day feat of standing calmly on their heads, an
attitude which his youthful imagination conceived to be a necessary
consequence of their geographical position, it does at least reveal them
looking at the world as if from the standpoint of that eccentric posture.
For they seem to him to see everything topsy-turvy. Whether it be that
their antipodal situation has affected their brains, or whether it is the mind
of the observer himself that has hitherto been wrong in undertaking to
rectify the inverted pictures presented by his retina, the result, at all events,
is undeniable. The world stands reversed, and, taking for granted his
own uprightness, the stranger unhesitatingly imputes to them an obliquity
of vision, a state of mind outwardly typified by the cat-like obliqueness of
their eyes.