Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/270

 skin. Back, breast, arms, and thighs are often covered with elaborate tattooed pictures in blue, red, and black on the raw-umber ground. His philosophy of dress is a simple one. When the weather is too hot to wear clothes they are left off, and a wisp of straw for the feet, a loin-cloth, and a huge flat hat, a yard in diameter, weighing less than a feather, are enough for him. When there is no money to buy raiment he tattoos himself with gorgeous pictures, which he would never hide were there not watchful policemen and Government laws to compel him into some scanty covering.

The diet of these coolies seems wholly insufficient for the tremendous labor they perform—rice, pickled fish, fermented radish, and green tea affording the thin nutriment of working-days. Yet the most splendid specimens of physical health are reared and kept in prize-fighting condition on what would reduce a foreigner to invalidism in a week. I remember that while resting one hot morning under Shinniodo’s great gate-way, my coolie, who by an unusually early start had been interrupted in his breakfast of one green apple, asked for some tea-money. I watched the hungry pony while he treated his companions to a substantial repast of tea and watermelon. Strengthened and recuperated, he came back, shouldered camera and tripod, and as he walked down the hot flagging, complacently picked his teeth with the sharp point of one tripod stick—a toothpick four feet long! 254