are kept hourly busy by the constant pledging and redeeming of these customers, and sometimes they will, when they have confidence in their honesty, take for their loans nominal pledges, such as an old pipe or towel. These regular customers pay the pawnbroker ten or twenty per cent. of their daily earnings.
Next to the pawnbroker, the busiest is the usurer, whose loans are returned in daily instalments. The usual method is to lend one yen to be returned in forty daily instalments of three sen each, or eighty sen to be refunded in fifty instalments of two sen. In either case the rate of interest is fifteen per cent. per month, without taking into account the fact of daily payment; but as the usurer deducts five sen as commission before handing the money, the actual rate is much higher. If the debtor fails in his daily instalment, the usurer returns him part of the money already repaid and renews the term of the loan; and in this manner, a debtor can seldom extricate himself from the usurer’s toils. The usurer’s profits are very large since he can lend out the instalments again as soon as they come in. He will also lend on future contingencies. Just as theatrical managers often make a loan by agreeing to give the creditor a benefit on a certain day, the poor will give as security their gains on a fixed day. Thus the jinrikisha-man, when hard-pressed at the end of the year, will raise the wind on his probable receipts during the first three days of the new year. He may thus borrow fifty or sixty sen, and yet his earnings on those days may amount to a yen or more, the whole of which he must give the usurer, though if the three days are continually wet, he may be unable to make good even the principal.
The next most important person to the poor is the sonryoya, who lets out clothes, beddings, and vehicles. Bed-clothes are hired out at from eight-tenths of a sen to two sen. Dresses worn by low-class performers of all kinds are lent at rates ranging from three to six sen. Ordinary clothes, and
