Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/299

 Cotton goods are largely manufactured in Kioto, and at all seasons the upper reaches of the Kamogawa’s broad, stony bed are white with bleaching cloth. The Kamogawa’s water, which is better for tea-making, for rice-boiling, and for mixing dyes than the water of any other stream in Japan, is also sovereign for bleaching, and its banks are lined for a long distance with dyeing establishments. The river-bed, paved with stones under each of its great bridges, is dreary, wind-swept, and colorless in winter-time, as compared to its summer brilliancy; but in January it is the place of the kite-flyers, and Hideyoshi’s bronze-railed Shijo bridge—the southern end of the Tokaido, the centre from which all distances are measured—commands a view of an unexampled aerial carnival. Thousands of giant kites float upward, and the air is filled with a humming, as they soar, sweep, and circle over the city like huge birds. Kite combats take place in mid-air, and strings covered with pounded glass cut other strings, and let the half-animate paper birds and demons loose. Jinrikisha coolies on bridges and streets must dodge the hanging strings, and boys run over and into each other while watching their ventures; but the traditional kite-flying grandfathers whom one reads about in Western prints are conspicuous by their absence.

There is a game of battledore and shuttlecock much played at the same season by the girls, the battledore a flat wooden paddle ornamented with gaudy pictures of Japanese women. The game is a pretty one, and the girls are wonderfully graceful in playing it, the long sleeves and the flying obi-ends taking on expressive action when these charming maidens race and leap through its changes.

Kioto is not without its theatres and places of amusement, ever ready to beguile one from the sight-seeing and shopping rounds. Its great actor is Nakamura, and it maintains an academy for the training of maiko and 283