Glimpses of Japan and Formosa

Until familiarity dulls the attention, one misses the sight of animals and of pastureland in Japan except in Hokkaido to the north. Perhaps there are a few more horses to the square _ri_ in half-tropical Kyushu than on the long main island, but even there mankind furnishes the great majority of beasts of burden-and of milch animals, too, one might be so frank as to add, for Japanese children are habitually, and unsecretively, suckled long after they can walk and talk. Japan, like South America, outside the narrow llama-zone, was not supplied by nature with four-footed assistants. The first horses are said to have reached the islands from Korea late in the third century of the Christian era, and they are still far from numerous. With a people doomed to do nearly all its own hauling and carrying, it is not so strange that the horse is a kind of sacred animal of Shintoism.

Without horses there was no great reason for roads, and to this day the Japanese do not fully realize the importance of good highways and solid bridges, so that the automobile has not been much of a relief to their horseless condition. Besides, the Government seems to regard this new contraption from the West as a luxury to be kept out of the hands of the people, and to be saddled with a staggering proportion of the tax-returns. In addition to a heavy import duty and all that goes with it, the yearly licence-fee for an automobile in Tokyo is three hundred dollars. One might easily suspect a policy of keeping the government railways free from competition, and be thankful that at least these only serious means of transportation by land in the empire are being steadily extended.