Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/29

 such vanities, decreed that the plant should not be grown on the face of the earth, whereupon the people promptly dug it up from their gardens and planted it in boxes on the roof.

The Japanese section of Yokohama is naturally less Japanese than places more remote from foreign influence, but the stranger discovers much that is odd, unique, and Oriental. That delight of the shopper, Honchodori, with its fine curio and silk shops, is almost without a shop-window, the entire front of the cheaper shops being open to the streets. But the old lacquer and bronzes, ivory, porcelains, enamels, silver, and silks of Chojiro, Matsuishiya, Musashiya, Shieno, Shobey, and Kinuya are concealed by high wooden screens and walls. The silk shops are filled with goods distracting to the foreign buyer, among which are the wadded silk wrappers, made and sold by the hundreds, which, being the contrivance of some ingenious missionary, were long known as missionary coats.

Benten Dori, the bargain-hunter’s Paradise, is a delightful quarter of a mile of open-fronted shops. In the silk shops, crapes woven in every variety of cockle and wrinkle and rippling surface, as thin as gauze, or as thick and heavy as brocade, painted in endless, exquisite designs, are brought you by the basketful. Each length is rolled on a stick, and finally wrapped in a bit of the coarse yellow cotton cloth that envelopes every choice thing in Japan, though for what reason, no native or foreigner, dealer or connoisseur can tell.

Nozawaya has a godown or fire-proof storehouse full of cotton crapes, those charmingly artistic fabrics that the Western world has just begun to appreciate. The pock-marked and agile proprietor will keep his small boys running for half an hour to bring in basketfuls of cotton crape rolls, each roll measuring a little over eleven yards, which will make one straight, narrow kimono with 13