Home › Outdoor Affairs › A Japanese Garden Party
A Japanese Garden Party
GIRL who wished to entertain for a visiting school friend one evening in midsummer sent out invitations to a Japanese Garden Party. She wrote them on the pretty little hand-decorated place-cards which are to be found in most shops now. The Japanese writing paper which comes in rolls is another possibility for them.
She had a wide porch and a big lawn which she decorated for the occasion with strings of pink, yellow and green Japanese lanterns with electric bulbs inside. Settees and wicker chairs were scattered in cosy groups through the shrubbery, and there was a faint odor of burning incense.
For entertainment there was dancing on the porch to the tune of a phonograph and a program of Japanese music, including some selections from "Butterfly" and "The Mikado." [66] A clever reader gave one of the Hashimura Togo stories, and also the hostess had arranged some artistic tableaux in Japanese fashion.
When it was refreshment time, cunning little girl friends of the hostess appeared in Japanese kimonos, hair done high and stuck full of tiny fans or flowers. They bore Japanese lacquer trays with tiny sandwiches (filled with preserved ginger), cherry ice and rice wafers. A wee Japanese flag was stuck in each portion of cherry ice.
The favors were wee Japanese doilies which the guests were bidden to hunt for under a certain group of trees. While doing so, a sudden surprise shower of seeming cherry blossoms covered them with pink and white petals. These were really confetti petals obligingly scattered by the nimble little waitresses perched in the branches above. [67]
An evening party on a porch and lawn, lit with paper lanterns, with a programme of music, readings and tableaux and a tray of small refreshments. The theme is a period costume fantasy, and it needs saying plainly before anything else.
- Almost nothing on the page is JapaneseThe music offered is Butterfly and The Mikado, an Italian opera and a British comic opera, and the reading is from a popular American comic series written in mock Japanese-English. The hostess’s young friends are dressed in kimonos to carry trays. This is a costume party about an idea of Japan, and no host would stage it now. What is worth keeping is the lighting, the seating and the finish.
- The electric bulb is the newsStrings of pink, yellow and green Japanese lanterns with electric bulbs inside. The author troubles to specify the bulbs, which tells you it was not yet what a reader would assume; paper lanterns had been lit with candles. The specification is there because it was an improvement worth mentioning.
- Seating in the shrubberySettees and wicker chairs were scattered in cosy groups through the shrubbery. Furniture carried out of the house and arranged in small clusters away from the main space is the best idea on the page and the one most often forgotten: a garden party needs somewhere to sit in twos and threes, out of the light.
- Preserved ginger sandwichesChopped stem ginger in syrup between thin buttered bread. They are good, and the practical point the page omits is that the syrup will soak through: drain the ginger well, butter both slices to the edges, and cut them not long before they go out.
- Cherry ice is a water iceSugar syrup and cherry juice, frozen, with no dairy in it. That is the reason it is on the menu: an ice cream would not have survived a tray carried round a summer porch, and a water ice can be served softer without looking wrong.
- The petal shower needed children in the treesThe confetti petals that fall on the guests are scattered by the small waitresses, who have climbed into the branches. The effect is genuinely charming and the staffing is not: it is done now by hand from a balcony, or from a net, and the surprise survives the change.
The page is a record of how easy the Japanese theme was to buy. Hand-decorated place cards are to be found in most shops now, the writing paper comes in rolls, the lanterns, the lacquer trays, the fans and the little doilies are all stock items, and the incense is on sale too. A vogue becomes a party theme at the point when the props reach the ordinary stationer, and that is what has happened here. The other thing the page shows, without remarking on it, is who did the serving: the hostess’s younger friends, costumed, acting as waitresses and then climbing the trees. Children were part of the decoration as well as the labour.