Jinrikisha Days in Japan/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
YOKOHAMA
The Settlement is bounded by the creek, from whose opposite side many steep hill-roads wind up to the Bluff, where most of the foreigners have their houses. These bluff-roads pass between the hedges surrounding trim villas with their beautifully set gardens, the irregular numbering of whose gates soon catches the stranger’s eye. The first one built being number one, the others were numbered in the order of their erection, so that high and low numerals are often side by side. To coolies, servants, peddlers, and purveyors, foreign residents are best known by their street-door numeration, and “Number four Gentleman” and “Number five Lady” are recurrent and adequate descriptions. So well used are the subjects of it to this convict system of identification that they recognize their friends by their alias as readily as the natives do.
Upon the Bluff stand a public hall, United States and British marine hospitals, a French and a German hospital, several missionary establishments, and the houses of the large American missionary community. At the extreme west end a colony of Japanese florists has planted toy-gardens filled with vegetable miracles; burlesques and fantasies of horticulture; dwarf-trees, a hundred years old, that could be put in the pocket; huge single flowers, and marvellous masses of smaller blossoms; cherry-trees that bear no cherries; plum-trees that bloom in midwinter, but have neither leaves nor fruit; and roses—that favorite flower which the foreigner brought with him—flowering in Californian profusion. A large business is done in the exportation of Japanese plants and bulbs, encased in a thick coating of mud, which makes an air-tight case to protect them during the sea-voyage. Ingenious fern pieces are preserved in the same way. These grotesque things are produced by wrapping in moist earth the long, woody roots of a fine-leafed variety of fern. They are made to imitate dragons, junks, temples, boats, lanterns, pagodas, bells, balls, circles, and every familiar object. When bought they look dead. If hung for a few days in the warm sun, and occasionally dipped in water, they change into feathery, green objects that grow more and more beautiful, and are far more artistic than our one conventional hanging-basket. The dwarf-trees do not stand transportation well, as they either die or begin to grow rapidly.
The Japanese are the foremost landscape gardeners in the world, as we Occidentals, who are still in that barbaric period where carpet gardening seems beautiful and desirable, shall in time discover. Their genius has equal play in an area of a yard or a thousand feet, and a Japanese gardener will doubtless come to be considered as necessary a part of a great American establishment as a French maid or an English coachman. From generations of nature-loving and flower worshipping ancestors these gentle followers of Adam’s profession have inherited an intimacy with growing things, and a power over them that we cannot even understand. Their very farming is artistic gardening, and their gardening half necromancy.
On high ground, beyond the Bluff proper, stretches the race-course, where spring and fall there are running races by short-legged, shock-headed ponies, brought from the Hokkaido, the northern island, or from China. Gentlemen jockeys frequently ride their own horses in flat races, hurdle-races, or steeple-chases. The banks close, a general holiday reigns throughout the town, and often the Emperor comes down from Tokio. This race-course affords one of the best views of Fuji, and from it curves the road made in early days for the sole use of foreigners to keep them off the Tokaido, where they had more than once come in conflict with trains of travelling nobles. This road leads down to the water's edge, and, following the shore of Mississippi Bay, where Commodore Perry’s ships anchored in 1858, strikes across a rice valley and climbs to the Bluff again.
The farm-houses it passes are so picturesque that one cannot believe them to have a utilitarian purpose. They seem more like stage pictures about to be rolled away than like actual dwellings. The new thatches are brightly yellow, and the old thatches are toned and mellowed, set with weeds, and dotted with little gray-green bunches of “hen and chickens,” while along the ridge-poles is a bed of growing lilies. There is an old wife's tale to the effect that the women’s face-powder was formerly made of lily-root, and that a ruler who wished to stamp out such vanities, decreed that the plant should not be grown on the face of the earth, whereupon the people promptly dug it up from their gardens and planted it in boxes on the roof.
The Japanese section of Yokohama is naturally less Japanese than places more remote from foreign influence, but the stranger discovers much that is odd, unique, and Oriental. That delight of the shopper, Honchodori, with its fine curio and silk shops, is almost without a shop-window, the entire front of the cheaper shops being open to the streets. But the old lacquer and bronzes, ivory, porcelains, enamels, silver, and silks of Chojiro, Matsuishiya, Musashiya, Shieno, Shobey, and Kinuya are concealed by high wooden screens and walls. The silk shops are filled with goods distracting to the foreign buyer, among which are the wadded silk wrappers, made and sold by the hundreds, which, being the contrivance of some ingenious missionary, were long known as missionary coats.
Benten Dori, the bargain-hunter’s Paradise, is a delightful quarter of a mile of open-fronted shops. In the silk shops, crapes woven in every variety of cockle and wrinkle and rippling surface, as thin as gauze, or as thick and heavy as brocade, painted in endless, exquisite designs, are brought you by the basketful. Each length is rolled on a stick, and finally wrapped in a bit of the coarse yellow cotton cloth that envelopes every choice thing in Japan, though for what reason, no native or foreigner, dealer or connoisseur can tell.
Nozawaya has a godown or fire-proof storehouse full of cotton crapes, those charmingly artistic fabrics that the Western world has just begun to appreciate. The pock-marked and agile proprietor will keep his small boys running for half an hour to bring in basketfuls of cotton crape rolls, each roll measuring a little over eleven yards, which will make one straight, narrow kimono with a pair of big sleeves. These goods are woven in the usual thirteen-inch Japanese width, although occasionally made wider for the foreign market. A Japanese kimono is a simple thing, and one may put on the finished garment an hour after choosing the cloth to make it. The cut never varies, and it is still sewn with basters’ stitches, although the use of foreign flat-irons obviates the necessity of ripping the kimono apart to wash and iron it. The Japanese flat-iron is a copper bowl filled with burning charcoal, which, with its long handle, is really a small warming-pan. Besides this contrivance, there is a flat arrow point of iron with a shorter handle, which does smaller and quite as ineffectual service.
To an American, nothing is simpler than Japanese money. The yen corresponds to our dollar, and is made up of one hundred sen, while ten rin make one sen. The yen is about equal in value to the Mexican dollar, and is roughly reckoned at seventy-five cents United States money. One says dollars or yens indiscriminately, always meaning the Mexican, which is fire current coin of the East. The old copper coins, the rin and the oval tempo, each with a hole in the middle, are disappearing from circulation, and at the Osaka mint they are melted and made into round sens. Old gold and silver coins may be bought in the curio shops. If they have not little oblong silver bu, or a long oval gold ko ban, the silversmith will offer to make some, which will answer every purpose!
When you ask for your bill, a merchant takes up his frame of sliding buttons—the soroban, or abacus—and plays a clattering measure before he can tell its amount. The soroban is infallible, though slow, and in the head of the educated Japanese, crowded with thousands of arbitrary characters and words, there is no room for mental arithmetic. You buy two toys at ten cents apiece. Clatter, clatter goes the soroban, and the calculator asks you for twenty cents. Depending entirely on the soroban, they seem unable to reckon the smallest sums without it, and any peddler who forgets to bring his frame may be puzzled. The dealer in old embroideries will twist and work his face, scratch his head, and move his fingers in the air upon an imaginary soroban over the simplest addition, division, and subtraction. At the bank, the shroff is a soroban a yard long; and merchants say that in book-keeping the soroban is invaluable, as by its use whole columns of figures can be added and proved in less time than by our mental methods.
By an iron bridge, the broad street at the top of Benten Dori crosses one of the many canals extending from the creek in every direction, and forming a net work of water passages from Mississippi Bay to Kanagawa. Beyond the bridge is Isezakicho, a half mile of theatres, side-shows, merry-go rounds, catchpenny games, candy shops, restaurants, second - hand clothes bazaars, labyrinths of curio, toy, china, and wooden-ware shops. Hundreds of perambulating restaurateurs trundle their little kitchens along, or swing them on a pole over their shoulders. Dealers in ice-cream, so called, abound, who will shave you a glass of ice, sprinkle it with sugar, and furnish a minute teaspoon with which to eat it. There are men who sell soba, a native vermicelli, eaten with pungent soy; and men who, for a penny, heat a big grid-iron, and give a small boy a cup of batter and a cup of soy, with which he may cook and eat his own griddle cakes. There the people, the middle and lower classes, present themselves for study and admiration, and the spectator never wearies of the outside dramas and panoramas to be seen in this merry fair.
Pretty as she is on a pictured fan, the living Japanese woman is far more satisfying to the æsthetic soul as she patters along on her wooden clogs or straw sandals. The very poorest, in her single cheap cotton gown, or kimono, is as picturesque as her richer sister in silk and crape. With heads elaborately dressed, and folds of gay crape, or a glittering hair-pin thrust in the smooth loops of blue-black hair, they seem always in gala arrays and, rain or shine, never protect those elaborate coiffures with anything less ornamental than a paper umbrella, except in winter, when the zukin, a yard of dark crape lined with a contrasting color, is thrown over the head, concealing the whole face save the eyes. A single hair-pin of tortoise-shell, sometimes tipped with coral or gold, is all that respectable women of any class wear at one time. The heavily hair-pinned women on cheap fans are not members of good society, and only children and dancing-girls are seen in the fantastic flowers and trifles sold at a hundred shops and booths in this and every street.
The little children are the most characteristically Japanese of all Japanese sights. Babies are carried about tied to the mothers’ back, or to that of their small sisters. They sleep with their heads rolling helplessly round, watch all that goes on with their black beads of eyes, and never cry. Their shaven crowns and gay little kimonos, their wise, serene countenances, make them look like cabinet curios. As soon as she can walk, the Japanese girl has her doll tied on her back, until she learns to carry it steadily and carefully; after that the baby brother or sister succeeds the doll, and flocks of these comical little people, with lesser people on their backs, wander late at night in the streets with their parents, and their funny double set of eyes shine in every audience along Isezakicho.
These out-of-door attractions are constantly changing. Native inventions and adaptations of foreign ideas continually appear. “Pigs in clover” and pot-hook puzzles followed only a few weeks behind their New York season, and street fakirs offer perpetual novelties. Of jugglers the line is endless, their performances filling 
JAPANESE CHILDREN