Here are Hokusai's own figures walking about in straw raincoats, and
immense mushroom-shaped hats of straw, and straw sandals--bare-limbed
peasants, deeply tanned by wind and sun; and patient-faced mothers with
smiling bald babies on their backs, toddling by upon their geta (high,
noisy, wooden clogs), and robed merchants squatting and smoking their
little brass pipes among the countless riddles of their shops.
Then I notice how small and shapely the feet of the people are--whether
bare brown feet of peasants, or beautiful feet of children wearing tiny,
tiny geta, or feet of young girls in snowy tabi. The tabi, the
white digitated stocking, gives to a small light foot a mythological
aspect--the white cleft grace of the foot of a fauness. Clad or
bare, the Japanese foot has the antique symmetry: it has not yet been
distorted by the infamous foot-gear which has deformed the feet of
Occidentals. Of every pair of Japanese wooden clogs, one makes in
walking a slightly different sound from the other, as kring to krang; so
that the echo of the walker's steps has an alternate rhythm of tones. On
a pavement, such as that of a railway station, the sound obtains immense
sonority; and a crowd will sometimes intentionally fall into step, with
the drollest conceivable result of drawling wooden noise.