Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/273

 to be twisted, tied, and woven either at home or across the seas. Compressed into bales of a picul’s weight, or 133½ pounds, the raw silk finds its way to market, or, woven in hand looms in the usual thirteen-inch Japanese widths, or in wider measures for the foreign trade, it is again sold by weight, the momé being the unit. One hundred and twenty momé are equal to one pound. Twenty-five yards of fine white handkerchief-silk weigh from 150 to 200 momé, and 100 momé of such silk varies in price from six to seven dollars, gold.

Steam-looms are fast supplanting the old hand-machines in Nishijin and Josho. The Government sent men to study the methods in use at Lyons and bring back machinery, and now there are filatures and factories in all the silk districts. Private corporations are following the Government example. At the Kwangioba no Shokoba the first exhibition of foreign machines, with instruction in their use, was given. To-day the lively clatter of the Jacquard loom is heard above the slow, droning noise of the hand-loom behind Nishijin’s miles of blank walls. Slowly the weavers are abandoning the rude loom, which was probably in use, like gunpowder, at an age when Europeans clothed themselves in skins and lived in caves; and the singing draw-boy is descending from his high perch, where he has so long been lifting the alternating handful of threads that make the pattern.

In a tour of the Nishijin factories, one scorching August day, we saw many of these primitive hand-looms, with half-clad weavers tossing the shuttles of silk and gold thread, their skin shining with the heat like polished bronze, and marked all over with the scars of moxa cones. Everywhere were gathered books upon books filled with samples of superb brocades, many of them more than a century old. Everywhere we were regaled with sweets and thimble-cups of lukewarm amber tea, 257