proclaims that it nowadays costs as much to live here in exile as at home in Europe, with the additional drawback that you get less for your money, except it be comparative ease of mind in the matter of servants. Grumblers among the tourists give vent to complaints of similar tenour. Travelling in Japan, they allege, is as expensive as in America, and infinitely less comfortable. To our mind the question, so far as travellers are concerned, really reduces itself to this: are you willing to forego some of your home conveniences, are you willing to spend money, in order to study a unique civilisation in one of its most interesting phases? If not, if your object in coming abroad is to find or make everything exactly the same as at home, then you have miscalculated.
Statistics published towards the end of 1900 showed the average prices of the forty principal staples of Japanese production to have advanced forty-two per cent, between the years 1896 and 1899 alone. This extraordinarily rapid rise was ascribed by the then Minister of Finance to inflation consequent on the successful war against China in 1894-5. Doubtless that was one cause. Side issues branching out from it may be discovered in the doubling of the personnel of the army which was then commenced, and which, while taking away hands from production, added idle mouths. Furthermore, the emigration of artisans and coolies to Formosa contributed to a rise of wages in Japan proper, and may have affected prices in other ways; for so potent a cause cannot have remained without far-reaching results. Be this as it may, and without attempting to treat the question exhaustively, but merely mentioning a few items at haphazard, we note that the price of land in Tōkyō trebled during the last four or five years of the nineteenth century, that house rent has trebled during the last thirty years (for the very poor it has quintupled), that the average price of labour has trebled, that hotel charges have trebled, washing has nearly doubled, jinrikisha hire has quadrupled, and that it costs three times as much to build a house now as it did then. University students, who
