decided talent for learning foreign tongues, the speech of the most numerous body of foreigners—the English—has come to be the medium of intercourse. It is not pure English, but English in that modified form known as "Pidgin-English."[1] In Japan, where the conditions are reversed, we have "Pidgin-Japanese" as the patois in which new-comers soon learn to make known their wants to coolies and tea-house girls, and which serves even as the vehicle for grave commercial transactions at the open ports. A Yokohama resident of old days, Mr. Hoffman Atkinson, made up a most entertaining little book on this subject, entitling it Exercises in the Yokohama Dialect, but its humour cannot be fully appreciated except by those to whom real Japanese is familiar.
In the dialect under consideration, a "lawyer" is called consul-bobbery-shto, a "dentist" is ha-daikusan (literally "tooth carpenter"), a "lighthouse" is fune-haiken-sarampan-nai-rosoku, a "marine insurance surveyor" is sarampan-fune-haiken-danna-san, and so on.
Pilgrimages. The reputation of most Japanese shrines is bounded by a somewhat narrow horizon. The Yedo folk—the Eastern Japanese—make pilgrimages to Narita, and up Fuji and Oyama. Devout natives of the central provinces round Kyōto repair to the great monastery of Koya-san, or perform what is termed the "tour of the holy places of Yamato" (Yamato-meguri), including such celebrated temples as Miwa, Hase, and Tonomine; and they also constitute the majority of the pilgrims to the shrine of the Sun-Goddess in Ise. The religious centre of Shikoku is a place called Kompira or Kotohira; in the North that rank belongs to the sacred island of Kinkwa-zan, while the Inland Sea has another sacred and most lovely island—Miyajima—where none are ever allowed either to be born or to be buried, and where the tame deer, protected by a gentle piety, come and feed
- ↑ "Pidgin" is believed to be a corruption of the word "business."
