of any increased demands on comfort by the people at large. True, all classes now display a somewhat greater inclination towards expensive habits than of old. But the change has been slow and comparatively slight,—nowise equal in magnitude to the political change, nor yet equal to that general rush for luxury which has revolutionised the whole life and manners of the agricultural and artisan classes in England during the last two generations. Speaking generally and subject to certain reservations of detail, the Japanese peasant or artisan of to-day lives as he always Jived, inhabits the same sort of wood and paper house, eats the same light food, wears the same garments, goes about his daily avocations and his occasional amusements in the same manner.
The constantly increasing price of living weighs heavily on persons having small incomes or fixed salaries,—very heavily, for instance, on all the lower officials. If, nevertheless, the shops lack not customers, and the theatres, though expensive, are always crowded, the reason lies in the rapid development of a class hitherto unknown, an upper middle class of contractors, speculators, bankers, mine-owners, railway magnates. At its head stand such nouveaux riches as the Iwasakis, the Shibusawas, the Ōkuras, the Furukawas, for whom the feudal society of Old Japan would have had no place.
Logic in the Far East works by laws differing appreciably from those which the Western mind acknowledges. We have quoted in another part of this volume the recent decision of a learned judge, who ruled that a firm which had imitated the registered label of a brand of mineral water need not be restrained from so doing, because, as it was winter time, few persons would be drinking water, and the proprietor of the label did not therefore stand to lose much by the theft. We must allow a quantum of sense in this decision:—it is not altogether unreasonable. At the same time, the sense is not that to which our Western reason would lead us. Four or five years ago, the postmen of a certain
