Jinrikisha Days in Japan

Since Commodore Perry opened Japan to the world his countrymen have been consuming more and more of its teas each year, the United States and Canada being almost her only customers, England and Russia, the great tea-drinking countries of Europe, buying hardly enough to serve as samples. Each year the United States pays over $3,000,000 for the nerve-racking green tea of Japan. Besides the price of the tea, a trifle of $13,000,000 goes to Japan for raw silk and cocoons. In return, Japan imports from America $5,000,000 in kerosene, $13,000,000 in raw cotton, and $1,000,000 in flour and machinery. In 1889 Japan's imports from the United States amounted to $19,107,947, and its exports to this country to $31,959,635, while its imports from England had a value of $22,418,497, and its exports to England $5,635,385, a balance of trade disturbing to American commercial pride. Meanwhile Russian petroleum arrives by ship-loads, and, handled by the largest English firm in the East, is being pushed and sold by the smallest retailers at less than the Standard Oil Company's fluid.

The tea-plant, as every one knows, is a hardy evergreen of the camellia family. It grows a thick and solidly-massed bush, and at a first glance at a field regularly dotted and bordered with the round bushes setting closely to the ground, one might easily mistake it for box. In the spring the young leaves crop out at the ends of the shoots and branches, and when the whole top of the bush is covered with pale golden-green tips, generally in May, the first picking takes place. The second picking belongs to the fire-fly season in June, and after that great festival tea comes in from the plantations in decreasing quantities until the end of August. The choicer qualities of tea are never exported, but consumed at home. Choice basket-fired tea, such as is used in the homes of the rich and well-to-do Japanese, sells for one and two dollars a pound. There are choicer, more carefully grown and prepared teas, which cost as high as from seven to ten dollars a pound; but such teas are shaded from the hot suns by matted awnings, and the picker, going down lines of these carefully tended bushes, nips off only the youngest leaves or buds at the tip of each shoot. The average tea, bought by the exporters for shipment to the United States and Canada, is of the commonest quality, and according to Japanese trade statistics, the average value is eleven cents a pound as it stands, subject to the export duty and ready for shipment abroad. There are often sales of whole cargoes of Japan tea at auction in New York for fifteen cents a pound. Families who buy this same brand from their grocers at forty or sixty cents a pound may judge to whom the greater profits accrue.