Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/297

 as is our striped pole of the Occidental barber’s premises.

Kioto fans are celebrated, but they are no better now than those of other cities, and prettier Japanese fans are sold in New York for less money than in Japan, because the enormous foreign demand keeps the best fan-painters and fan-makers of Kioto constantly employed on export orders. American importers send their buyers to Kioto and Osaka every spring to order fans for the following year. Designer and maker submit hundreds of models, and the buyer offers suggestions as to color and shapes. The men who execute these large orders seldom have an open shop or sales-room, and their places are known only to the trade. Thousands and hundreds of thousands of ogi, or folding fans, go annually from the port of Hiogo-Kobé to America, and as many more from Yokohama; while of the flat fans with handles, the uchiwa, the number is even greater. One American railroad company has for years taken a hundred thousand uchiwa each season for advertising purposes, one side being left plain, to be printed upon after they reach the United States.

The fan is the most ancient and important utility in Japan, and since Jingo Kogo invented the ogi, after the model of a bat's wing, men, women, and children have never ceased carrying one in their summer obi folds. Fans are the regulation gift upon every occasion and lack of occasion, and a large collection is acquired in the fewest summer weeks. Every large shop and tea-house has its own specially decorated and perfectly well-known uchiwa to be given to patrons, who in that way declare their wanderings; and at feasts each guest receives a plain white ogi, upon which poems, autographs, and sketches are to be traced by his fellow-guests.

Formerly, Kioto shops exhibited many more kinds of fans than at present. Among them were the court fans, 281