in population after these are Nagoya with 244,000, Kobe with 215,000, Yokohama with 193,000, Hiroshima with 122,000, and Nagasaki with 107,000; and there are now twenty-one cities of over 50,000 inhabitants, sixty-one more having over 20,000.
While Japan remained closed, plague and famine helped from time to time to keep the population down. World-wide intercourse now completely obviates an} recurrence of famine, and scientific hygiene restricts epidemic diseases within narrow limits. But emigration has stepped in as a new depopulating agency. Yezo, an empty and barbarous waste, which hardly counted as part of Japan proper till about 1870, has to be filled up; Formosa, since its annexation in 1895, requires at least officials and soldiers; Hawaii, lying so near at hand, and with a native population too idle to perform much work in the sugar-plantations, has for several years past offered a tempting field to Japanese labour; Hongkong, Singapore, even the American and Australian Pacific ports attract numbers of young men of a slightly higher class, who go off to seek their fortune as clerks, shopboys, hairdressers, domestic servants, etc.; and the mere knowledge that emigration is practised by Europeans has been a factor favouring it in the minds of several of the leaders of this most imitative nation.
Notwithstanding all this, it is plain to every observer that emigration does not genuinely suit the Japanese bent. Yezo itself, rich though it be, and despite some colonies officially planted, does not get filled up. Thousands, it is true, cross over there even season for the fisheries and fortune-hunting generally; but with the approach of winter, the} fly home to the Main Island. The same thing happens with the emigrants to Hawaii. They are but contract labourers taken over for a time in batches, managed for corporately, and all returning home as soon as their little pile is made. Climate may have something to do with it. The Japanese, unlike the Chinese, do not habituate themselves readily either to heat or to cold. Their method of house-building, which they carry with them unaltered, is singularly ill-suited to a cold climate, neither is it well-suited to a hot
