all foreigners likely to require licenses come under the 20 yen clause.[1] The shooting season, speaking generally, lasts from the 15th October to the 15th April. These dates will seem late to English sportsmen; but it must be remembered that the seasons begin later in Japan than in England, spring as well as autumn.
Siebold. Philipp Franz, Freiherr von Siebold (A.D. 1796-1866), author of many books, both in Latin and German, on the zoology, botany, language, and bibliography of Japan and the neighbouring lands, and best known by the magnificently illustrated folio work entitled Nippon, Archiv zur Beschreibung von Japan,[2] which is in itself an encyclopaedia of the information concerning Japan which existed in his day, came of an old Bavarian family. Like Kaempfer a century and a half before him, he judged, and judged rightly, that the service of the Dutch East India Company was the royal road to a knowledge of the then mysterious empire of Japan. Appointed leader of a scientific mission, fitted out at Batavia, he landed at Deshima, the Dutch portion of Nagasaki, in the month of August, 1823. By force of character, by urbanity of manner, by skill as a physician, even by a system of bribery which fell in with the customs of the country, and which surely, under the circumstances, no sensible man of the world will condemn, he obtained an extraordinary hold over the Japanese, suspicious and intractable as they then were. Having, in 1826, accompanied to Yedo the Dutch embassy which went once every four years to pay its respects to the Shōgun, Siebold made great friends with the Court astronomer, Takahashi by name, and received from him a map of the country which in those days it was high treason to put into the hands of any foreigner. When, two years later, the affair leaked out, Takahashi was cast into a dungeon where he died, Siebold's house was searched, his servants were arrested and tortured, and he himself had to appear on his knees before the Governor of Nagasaki to
