Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/370

 years, severe nerve and stomach trouble being brought on by the constant sipping of so much powerful stimulant. Of course they command high salaries. Astonishing stories are told of the acuteness of their sense of taste and the certainty of their judgments. Their decision sets the price, and the dickering with the Japanese commission merchant is always settled by the tea-taster’s estimates.

In the tea-firing godowns the dried leaves are stacked in heaps as high as a haystack, when it makes a solid, cohesive mass, that can be cut off like hay with a patent hay-knife. In nearly every case the firing is superintended by a Chinese compradore, and his assistants are Japanese.

The tea-firers bring their cooked rice and their own teapots with them, and snatch refreshment whenever there is a lull in the work. They are searched at night when they leave, and with the sweet simplicity of children they keep on trying to secrete the leaves, always being caught at it. Their work consists in standing over round iron pots sunk in a brick framework for the thirteen hours of a day’s work, and stirring and tossing tea-leaves. There are charcoal fires under the iron pans, and all day they must lean over the hot iron and brick. The tea is given this extra firing to dry it thoroughly before its long sea-trip, and at the same time it is “polished,” or coated with indigo, Prussian blue, gypsum, and other things which give it the gray lustre that no dried tea-leaf ever naturally wore, but that American tea-drinkers insist on having. Before the tea-leaves are put in the pans for the second firing men, whose arms are dyed with indigo to the elbows, go down the lines and dust a little of the powder into each pan. Then the tossing and stirring of the leaves follows, and the dye is worked thoroughly into them, the work being regulated by overseers, who determine when each lot has been fired enough. It 354