Jinrikisha Days in Japan
a pair of big sleeves. These goods are woven in the usual thirteen-inch Japanese width, although occasionally made wider for the foreign market. A Japanese kimono is a simple thing, and one may put on the finished garment an hour after choosing the cloth to make it. The cut never varies, and it is still sewn with basters’ stitches, although the use of foreign flat-irons obviates the necessity of ripping the kimono apart to wash and iron it. The Japanese flat-iron is a copper bowl filled with burning charcoal, which, with its long handle, is really a small warming-pan. Besides this contrivance, there is a flat arrow point of iron with a shorter handle, which does smaller and quite as ineffectual service.
To an American, nothing is simpler than Japanese money. The yen corresponds to our dollar, and is made up of one hundred sen, while ten rin make one sen. The yen is about equal in value to the Mexican dollar, and is roughly reckoned at seventy-five cents United States money. One says dollars or yens indiscriminately, always meaning the Mexican, which is fire current coin of the East. The old copper coins, the rin and the oval tempo, each with a hole in the middle, are disappearing from circulation, and at the Osaka mint they are melted and made into round sens. Old gold and silver coins may be bought in the curio shops. If they have not little oblong silver bu, or a long oval gold ko ban, the silversmith will offer to make some, which will answer every purpose!
When you ask for your bill, a merchant takes up his frame of sliding buttons—the soroban, or abacus—and plays a clattering measure before he can tell its amount. The soroban is infallible, though slow, and in the head of the educated Japanese, crowded with thousands of arbitrary characters and words, there is no room for mental arithmetic. You buy two toys at ten cents apiece. Clatter, clatter goes the soroban, and the calculator asks you for twenty cents. Depending entirely on the soroban,
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