Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/366



Commodore Perry opened Japan to the world his countrymen have been consuming more and more of its teas each year, the United States and Canada being almost her only customers, England and Russia, the great tea-drinking countries of Europe, buying hardly enough to serve as samples. Each year the United States pays over $7,000,000 for the nerve-racking green tea of Japan. Besides the price of the tea, a trifle of $11,000,000 goes to Japan for raw silk and cocoons. In return, Japan imports from America less than $2,000,000 in kerosene oil, and another $1,000,000 in clocks, watches, and leather. It is this balance of trade that disturbs United States officials in Japan, who see England selling that thrifty nation over $18,000,000 in cotton, woollen, and iron goods, and taking from it a little over $3,000,000 of manufactured silks, curios, and art goods. Meanwhile Russian petroleum arrives by ship-loads, and, handled by the largest English firm in the East, is being pushed and sold by the smallest retailers at less than the Standard Oil Company’s fluid.

The tea-plant, as every one knows, is a hardy evergreen of the camellia family. It grows a thick and solidly-massed bush, and at a first glance at a field regularly dotted and bordered with the round bushes setting closely to the ground, one might easily mistake it for box. In the spring the young leaves crop out at the ends of the shoots and branches, and when the whole top of the bush is covered with pale golden-green 350