the little boys on the 5th May, as explained in the Article on Children. From another point of view, the 1st January may be considered the universal birthday; for the Japanese do not wait till the actual anniversary of birth has come round to call a person a year older, but date the addition to his age from the New Year, as already explained on page 12. The sixty-first birthday is the only one about which much fuss is made. This is because the old man or woman, having lived through one revolution of the sexagenary cycle, then begins a second round, which is in itself an extraordinary event; for the Japanese reckon youth to last from birth to the age of twenty, middle age from twenty to forty, and old age from forty to sixty. This last term corresponds to the Psalmist's "three score and ten," as the natural limit of human existence.
Blackening the Teeth. This peculiar custom is at least as old as A.D. 920; but the reason for it is unknown. It was finally prohibited in the case of men in the year 1870. Even women have now abandoned it in Tōkyō, Kyōto, and the circumjacent provinces; and to see it surviving as a means of feminine adornment (?), one must repair to certain remote rural districts, the north-west coast, for instance, or the extreme north-east, where distance and poverty have acted as conservative forces. Every married woman in the land had her teeth blackened, until the present Empress set the example of discontinuing the practice. Fortunately, the efficacy of the preparation used wears out after a few days, so that the ladies of Japan experienced no difficulty in getting their mouths white again. Mr. A. B. Mitford, in his amusing Tales of Old Japan, gives the following recipe for tooth-blacking, as having been supplied to him by a fashionable Yedo druggist:—"Take three pints of water, and, having warmed it, add half a teacupful of wine.[1] Put into this mixture a quantity of red-hot iron; allow it to stand for five or six days, when there will
- ↑ By "wine," must of course be meant Japanese sake.
