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One player stands in each corner where I have put the crosses, one with a cup and the other with a saki-bottle. At a signal they both start running, the one with the bottle chasing the one with the cup. The rules are that you must always keep on the lines, and that you may never turn back. As soon as the two face each other on the same line, the one with the cup is caught, and must take a sip from the catcher’s bottle. While we ran, one of the geishas beat a very rapid tune on her little drum.
When we sat down to rest (on the floor, of course) we played a finger game. A clenched fist means a stone, a fist with the forefinger straight out means a knife, and an open hand means a handkerchief. Whatever the first player makes, the second player must make something better. If I make the handkerchief, you must make the knife that cuts the handkerchief; if I make the knife, you must make the stone that blunts the knife; and if I make the stone you must make the handkerchief that covers the stone, This sounds like a baby game, but just try to play it very, very quickly, and see how sure you are to get excited and make the wrong thing. If I make the knife, and you answer with the handkerchief, you pay forfeit, for my knife will cut your handkerchief; if I make a stone, and you make a knife, out of the game you go, for my stone will ruin your knife.
Talking about games reminds me that I started to tell about the children, and then forgot them. One thing that seems queer to us foreigners is that even the tiny babies are dressed just like the grown people, in long kimonos or loose gowns lapped over in the front, and held together by the wide sash called an obi. But such pretty gay kimonos, covered with flowers or birds or butterflies, tied with sashes of red or pink or yellow or light green!
A streetful of children looks like a walking flower-bed. The streets are always full of children, too. You see, in Japan there are hardly any horses, and no automobiles and trolleys and delivery-wagons. Even the drays are. small enough to be drawn by one bare-legged coolie in a mushroom hat rather bigger than he is, and instead of taking a carriage you take a jinrikisha, that funny little buggy on two wheels, with a funny little man bobbing up and down between the shafts to pull it. Your ‘rickshaw-boy is a very strong, sturdy person, by the way, and he ‘ll trot you about smilingly from morning till night, if you ‘ll only let him stop at almost every tea-house you pass for a swallow (out of a tiny cup without a handle) of pale-green bitter tea. So there ’s nothing in the streets to harm a child, and even the tiny tots play alone there all day long.
How do you suppose the babies take an airing? In baby-carriages, you say? Of course not: the Japanese never do anything the way we do it. When the baby ’s about three days old, it goes out for its first glimpse of the world strapped on somebody’s back, and that ’s the way it goes every day till it can go on its own feet. Sometimes its mother or its nurse takes it, but very often it rides on the back of a brother or sister, who is perhaps not more than four or five years old. These little nurses don’t seem to be troubled at all by their charges, as you would suppose; they play ball and tag, and run races and fly kites, in spite of the heavy loads on their backs. What is more remarkable, the babies are perfectly happy, and hardly ever cry, though when their young nurses run with them, the poor babies’ faces bang back and forth against their caretakers’ shoulders till an American baby would howl with pain and rage.
One day we were climbing a steep flight of fifty or sixty stone steps leading to an old Japanese temple, when a flock of boys and girls, almost all with babies on their backs, began chasing one another down the stairs. They were wearing geta, wooden clogs three inches high held on by a cord over the toes. You could n‘t walk in them two steps on level ground without falling on your precious nose. But these children, babies and all, raced down the steep stairs, and nobody even stumbled. The chil-