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Captain Brinkley tells us: "There is no Japanese music that will not serve as accompaniment for the Japanese stanza, and the stanza, in turn, adapts itself perfectly to the fashion of the Japanese dance. The law of the unities seems to have prescribed that the cadence of the stanza should melt into the lilt of the song, and that the measure of the song should be worked out by the 'woven paces and waving hands' of the dance. The affinity between them is so close that it is difficult to tell where one begins and the other ends."

Japanese poetry is also conspicuously different from that of the Occident. It is a form of word painting in brief lyrics, and "it is primarily an expression of emotion." The odes which all Japanese learn to compose are verbal melodies which can be neither transposed nor translated. Owing to the nature of the Japanese language, there are no accented syllables, nor is there any quantity, nor any rhyme. This is well explained by Aston in his "History of Japanese Literature." He says:—

"As every syllable ends in a vowel, and as there are only five vowels, there could only be five rhymes, the constant reiteration of which would be intolerably monotonous. . . . The only thing in the mechanism of Japanese poetry which distinguishes it from prose is the alternation of phrases of five and seven syllables each. It is, in fact, a species of blank verse."

The art of dancing, which consists mainly in rhythmic posturings, often of great beauty, and re-