Jinrikisha Days in Japan

There are no such holiday-makers as the Japanese. The whole twelvemonth is fête-time, and the old year held three hundred and sixty-five festivals and anniversaries. All the great days of the Chinese calendar are observed, and the death-day of past sovereigns, instead of the birthday; while each religion, each sect, each temple, and each neighborhood has its own fête or matsuri, religious in its origin. Every night different temple grounds and different streets glow with lanterns and torches, an out-door fair is in full progress, and happy, laughing, chattering men, women, and children enjoy it all. The evening flower-fairs are as characteristic and picturesque as anything in Japan. The smoke of blazing flambeaux, the smell of the women's camellia seed hair-oil, and the mingled odors from booths and portable restaurants, are not enticing on a hot night, but at least they offend in an "artless Japanese way."

The booths along the whole length of the Ginza offer innumerable odd notions, queer toys, pretty hair-pins, curios, and indescribable trifles, every night in the year. The Japanese hair-pin, by-the-bye, is a dangerous vanity, the babies often twisting themselves into the range of its point, and the mothers impaling them on it in shaking them up higher on their backs and tightening the bands that hold them. The comic and ingenious toys, embodying the simplest principles of mechanics, and by the aid of a little running water, or the heat of a candle, performing wonderful feats, are such trifles of bamboo, thin pine, paper, or straw, as American children would destroy at a touch. Yet the more truly civilized Japanese little people play with them for weeks; and they toddle home with minute wicker cages of _semi_, or cicada, on one finger, content to hang them up and listen peaceably to the strident captives' chirping mi-mi-mi all day long.