Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/107

 apprehended and held in custody until the occasion is past. It is characteristic of the difference between Kyōtō and Ōsaka that the pickpockets of the latter city work on a much larger scale than their Tōkyō confrères, and apply the proceeds of their earnings differently; the Tōkyō practitioner being a dissipated spendthrift, who seldom ventures beyond the limits of the metropolis, never grows rich, and is content to hide his true calling under some petty disguise; whereas the Ōsaka man extends his operations to Tōkyō itself, engages in much larger and more risky enterprises, applies his illicit gains to the purposes of honest trade, and is not infrequently found in the position of a merchant at the head of a considerable business while in secret he employs a band of boy pickpockets. An instance of the ingenuity of these lads is their device to take a lady's clogs from her feet. As she stands in a crowd at some fête, she feels an irritation on her left foot, for example, and removing the right from its clog, she uses the toes to scratch the offending place. Presently the irritation transfers itself to the right foot, and the process of scratching is effected with the left. Finally the lady walks away, ignorant that she has slipped her feet, one by one, into common cheap clogs, leaving her handsome lacquered foot-gear in the possession of the boy with the straw. The race of pickpockets seems to be steadily increasing. Latest statistics showed