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30 breeze to swell the sails and allow the boatmen a respite from their toil. But all this hard labor developed, of course, a strength of limb and a power of endurance that even in recent years have enabled the Japanese soldiers to march and fight in either the piercing cold and deep snow of Manchuria or the blistering heat of Formosa. A life of constant outdoor exposure to wind, rain, cold, or heat has toughened and browned the skin, and made an altogether hardy race out of the common people; while the lack of this regular exercise and calisthenic training has left its mark in the comparatively weak constitutions of those who travelled, not on their own feet, but on the shoulders of others.

The common vehicles of the olden days were ordinary carts for freight and norimono and kago for passengers. The norimono is a good-sized sedan-chair or palanquin, in which the rider can sit in a fairly comfortable position. The kago is a sort of basket in which the traveller takes a half-sitting, half-reclining posture, not altogether comfortable—at least for tall foreigners. At present the norimono is seldom if ever employed except for corpses or invalids, but the kago is still used in mountainous regions, where nothing else is available. It must be understood, of course, that the nobles and their retainers often rode on horseback; but the great mass of the people walked and the few rode in kago or norimono.

Now, however, modes of travel have changed greatly, and are changing year by year. There are still many pedestrians; the kago is yet to be seen;