It was a miniature country once
To my imagination; Home of the Short,
And also the academy of stunts
        Where acrobats are taught
     The famous secrets of the trade:
     To cycle in the big parade
While spinning plates upon their parasols,
Or somersaults that do not touch the ground,
        Or tossing seven balls
In Most Celestial Order round and round.

A child’s quick sense of the ingenious stamped
All their invention: toys I used to get
At Christmastime, or the peculiar, cramped
        Look at their alphabet.
   Fragile and easily destroyed,
   Those little boats of celluloid
Driven by camphor round the bathroom sink,
And delicate the folded paper prize
        Which, dropped into a drink
Of water, grew up right before your eyes.

Now when we reached them it was with a sense
Sharpened for treachery compounding in their brains
Like mating weasels; our Intelligence
        Said: The Black Dragon reigns
    Secretly under yellow skin,
    Deeper than dyes of atabrine
And deadlier. The War Department said:
Remember you are Americans; forsake
        The wounded and the dead
At your own cost; remember Pearl and Wake.

And yet they bowed us in with ceremony, 
Told us what brands of Sake were the best,
Explained their agriculture in a phony
       Dialect of the West,

Meant vaguely to be understood
As a shy sign of brotherhood
In the old human bondage to the facts
Of day-to-day existence. And like ants,
       Signaling tiny pacts
With their antennae, they would wave their hands.

At last we came to see them not as glib
Walkers of tightropes, worshippers of carp,
Nor yet a species out of Adam’s rib
       Meant to preserve its warp
    In Cain’s own image. They had learned
    That their tough eye-born goddess burned
Adoring fingers. They were very poor.
The holy mountain was not moved to speak.
       Wind at the paper door
Offered them snow out of its hollow peak.

Human endeavor clumsily betrays
Humanity. Their excrement served in this;
For, planting rice in water, they would raise
       Schistosomiasis 
    Japonica, that enters through
    The pores into the avenue
And orbit of the blood, where it may foil
The heart and kill, or settle in the brain.
      This fruit of their nightsoil
Thrives in the skull, where it is called insane.

Now the quaint early image of Japan
That was so charming to me as a child
Seems like a bright design upon a fan,
        Of water rushing wild
    On rocks that can be folded up,
    A river which the wrist can stop
With a neat flip, revealing merely sticks
And silk of what had been a fan before,
        And like such winning tricks,
It shall be buried in excelsior.