The Inland Sea and Nagasaki
the tea trade to the upper end of the Inland Sea, around which lie the great tea districts of Japan. Its coal mines and its million-dollar dry-dock make it a harbor that no ships pass by, more vessels entering annually than at Yokohama. All the naval fleets coal here, and buy the greater part of their supplies in this cheap market, and fleets of foreign men-of-war are always at anchor. Russian convict ships on their way to Vladivostock touch at Nagasaki, but only the few shipping merchants who provision them are allowed on board during the few days which precede the departure of the gloomy hulks for Siberia.
By losing its tea trade and becoming chiefly a station for coal and supplies, Nagasaki remains less affected by foreign influences than any other open port in Japan. Its people are more conservative than those of the northern island, and cling to inherited customs and costume tenaciously. The old festivals are kept up with as much spirit as ever, and boat-loads of farmers praying for rain often make Nagasaki’s harbor ring with their shouts and drum-beating. Twenty of these rustics, sitting by the gunwales in one long boat, and paddling like so many Indians in a war-canoe, go up and down the narrow fiord waving banners and tasselled emblems.
While the inhabitants kept it, Nagasaki’s observance of the Bon, the festival of the dead, was even more picturesque than the Daimonji of Kioto. On the night when Nagasaki’s spirits were doomed to return to the place of the departed, lights twinkled in all the graveyards, and the mourners carried down to the water’s edge tiny straw boats set with food offerings. These they lighted and started off; and the tide, bearing the frail flotilla here and there, finally swept it out to sea—a fleet of fire, a maze of floating constellations. Many junks and bridges were burned on these festival nights, and the authorities have forbidden the observance.
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