Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/288

 —Every one of these halls and galleries had its appellation, as, the "hall of everlasting benevolence," the "hall of sweet savour," the "hall of perpetual peace," the "hall of virtue and justice," and so on.  —Hence the wife of a nobleman was usually called Kita-no-kata, or "the northern personage."  —The dimensions of a mat were invariably six feet by three. It served as a unit of superficial measurement. Instead of saying that a room measured so many feet each way, people said that so many mats could be spread there. Two mats made a tsubo (six feet by six feet), the unit of area for lands and buildings alike. The convenience of this method of measurement is great. If a house is said to have so many feet of frontage and so many feet of depth, little idea of its accommodation is conveyed to ordinary minds, and even the dimensions of a room, when stated in feet, are difficult to picture to the imagination. But when a Japanese hears that a house has fifty tsubo, for example, of superficies, he knows that one hundred mats can be spread there, and as he is quite familiar with the space enclosed in a room of six mats, or eight mats, or ten mats and so on, he obtains at once a clear conception of the number of rooms that such a house may contain and their size. He speaks, also, of the cost of building at so much a tsubo, and can thus estimate at once the expense of erecting a house with a given amount of accommodation.  —The paper of that time was not sufficiently tough to be fitted for such a purpose.  —Echigo is now the chief centre of kerosene production in Japan.  —The custom of putting red and gold on the lip had not yet been introduced.  —Tea and two varieties of sake. The sake, or rice-beer, of that time was brewed just as it is at present. But, after brewing, it was often mixed with ashes of the Clerodendron tricotomum to give it a bitter taste. It then received the name of "black sake."  —It is uncertain when tea was introduced into Japan. As early as the reign of Shomu (724-748), a tea-drinking entertainment took place in the Palace. The Buddhist <section end="Note 57" />