Jinrikisha Days in Japan
their need of the small pittance, there is no pushing or fighting. Foreigners who live near godowns complain of the babble of the coolies before daylight, and a tea-firing godown always declares its nearness by the confused hum of the several hundred cheerful voices all day long. The Japanese lower classes are the most talkative people under the sun, and rows of jinrikisha coolies never sit quietly in waiting, like the red-nosed Parisian cabmen, dozing or reading feuilletons, but are always jabbering, laughing, playing games and tricks on one another. The long, hot day’s work does not check the tea-firers’ loquacity in the least, and at dusk they are as sociable as at dawn. One frenzied resident, whose door-steps, window-sills, and shady curb-stones were favorite resting-places for the tea-firing coolies, determined to know the subjects discussed with such earnestness and sonorous phrases. His interpreter reported on three consecutive mornings that, for three mortal hours, one group of ten coolies, sitting on patient heels, cheerfully discussed the coming rice crop.
Philanthropists see fit to drop a tear over the lives of the workers in the tea-godowns, although these victims seem as cheerful and well satisfied with their lot as human beings can be. The women and young girls are rather picturesque with their blue cotton towels folded over their heads, and as the Japanese have remarkably pretty hands, the play of their fingers in the moving streams of tea-leaves is pleasant to watch. How they endure the slow, killing heat of the charcoal fires in torrid weather, on their diet of tea, rice, and shreds of cold fish, is a marvel to indolent, meat-eating foreigners. The pathetic sights are the women with young babies on their backs trudging home from the godowns at sunset, the babies having been danced around on the backs of older children in the godown-yard all day, or laid down in some safe corner near the mother's charcoal-pan. I asked a
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