Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 6.djvu/265

 events represented, but the motions and poses of the dancers are radically different. It may also be noted that the dances imitative of the movements of animals, so common among the autochthons of Africa, Asia, and Australasia, have very few parallels in Japan. The salient exception is the Dance of the Dog of Fo (shisbi-odori), which had its origin in China.  —These conceptions are all of Chinese origin.  —Meaningless interjections, thrown in by the musicians.  —An allusion to a method of divining.  —A game in which one player guesses the number of small objects—generally fragments of a chop-stick—concealed in the hand of the other.  —The Government of the Restoration (1867) distinguished itself by drastic legislation against transactions that pledged women to a life of shame. It issued a law dissolving, without reserve, all existing covenants of that nature and annulling any monetary obligations connected with them. It proclaimed that all capital invested in immoral enterprise should be treated as stolen, and that, since prostitutes and geisha had dehumanised themselves, moneys due by them, or by others on their account, could not be recovered; and it prescribed severe penalties for any attempt to bind a girl to degrading service. But that passion of reform was soon cooled by contact with conditions that have proved too strong for legislation in all ages, and the statesmen of Japan, finding they could not eradicate the evil, adopted the wiser course of regulating it.  —There are, nevertheless, some fifteen thousand licensed yu-jo in Tōkyō and its suburbs. The total sum squandered yearly on this kind of debauchery by the capital, with its million and a quarter of citizens, is two and one quarter million yen, which is found to be an average of eighty-eight sen (about 45 gold cents) per head of those that spend it.  —A boat having its middle part covered by a roof (yane) under which the pleasure-seekers sit. <section end="Note 33" /> <section begin="Note 34" />—The rakugo-ka uses a fan only at his performance. He is not provided with the paper baton (bari) of the koshakushi. This trifling difference is nevertheless characteristic. <section end="Note 34" /> <section begin="Note 35" />—Anrakuan Shakuden, originally called Hira- <section end="Note 35" />