home. This would account for the healthy looks of the coolies, and for the too often dyspeptic and feeble bodily habit of the upper classes, who take little or no exercise. A foreigner forced by circumstances to rely on a Japanese diet should, say the doctors, devote his attention to beans, especially to the bean-soup called miso. Fortunately of this dish—and of this only—custom permits one to ask for a second helping (o kawari).
There is a circumstance connected with Japanese dinners that must strike every one who has seen a refectory where numbers of students, monks, soldiers, or other persons under discipline are fed, the absence of clatter arising from the absence of knives, forks, and spoons. A hundred boys may be feeding themselves with the help of chopsticks, and yet you might almost hear a pin drop in the room. Another detail which will impress the spectator less favourably is the speed at which food is absorbed. In fact, some classes—the artisans in particular—seem to make a point of honour of devoting as little time as possible to their meals. To this unwholesome habit, and to the inordinate use of pickles and of green tea, may doubtless be attributed the fact that hara ga itai ("I have a stomach-ache") is one of their commonest phrases.
Most Japanese towns of any size now boast what is called a seiyō-ryōri, which, being interpreted, means a foreign restaurant. Unfortunately, third-rate Anglo-Saxon influence has had the upper hand here, with the result that the central idea of the Japano-European cuisine takes consistency in slabs of tough beefsteak anointed with mustard and spurious Worcestershire sauce. This culminating point is reached after several courses,—one of watery soup, another of fish fried in rancid butter, a third of chickens drumsticks stewed also in rancid butter; and the feast not infrequently terminates with what a local cookery book, unhappily disfigured by numerous misprints, terms a "sweat omelette."
Foreign Employés in Japan. Though European influence, as we have elsewhere set forth, dates back as far as A.D. 1542, it
