A VISITOR'S IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3174, 31 August 1881, Page 3

A VISITOR'S IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN.

Yokohama is a modern city, built by people of our day. There is nothing novel in the foreign portion of Yokohama, but in the old part of Japan you begin to find the architecture that is peculiar all through that country. Japan is a country of earthquakes. You hear of great destruction of houses, where 300 or 400 or 1000 houses are destroyed. If a good stout man leans up against a Japanese house, the house will go over. They are built of bamboo, without window or window glass. The Japanese are just beginning to use widow glass. You occupy the centre of a room on a mat made of bamboo. There is no furniture in the room. You get down on your knees. It was awfully uncomfortable to some of us. You use little trays and utensils that are made to be convenient while you are down on your knees on the floor. I had an order for a set' of Japanese furniture to be sent Home. They wanted it genuine. Yon can imagine what a good time I had, when I found the only set that was in Japan was made in France, and was in the Emperor's Palace. The Japanese use little trays that you see in our shops. They warm you with a little square box, in which are some ashes and charcoal. You can manage to warm one or two good sized fingers at a time, while the balance of your body freezes. The Japanese use what we call coverlets. They have quilted ones with holes, and they wrap themselves in them and lie down to slumber. Tho lecturer paid a tribute to the industry of the people of Japan. Everybody works in japan. While the man is cultivating the rice-field, the ladies of the house, besides attending to their household duties, do a little weaving and spinning and feeding their silk worms. He entered at length into the system of Japanese cooking, anof described the eleven courses he had at one meal in a Japanese restaurant, commencing with tea and closing with oranges. ' You travel,' he said, ' in what they call a gin-rik-sha, which is nothing but a baby carriage, large enough to hold a full grown person. The Japanese mail service was formerly carried by runners. These runners are tattced all over their bodies with Indian ink, with different colors representing the different professions to which they are called. The runners are not allowed to be tattoed to-day, and are obliged to wear a respectable amount of clothing. These men will teke hold of a gin-rik-sha

with a good-sized man in it and will travel a mile in six minutes. They will take you eight miles in fifty-three minutes. We were curious to test this, and we tested it witli a pedometer. We tried it two miles, and the pedometer so recorded it. When the pedometer recorded eight miles we had been fifty-three minutes in making it. It is the most exhilarating way of riding I ever experienced.'