Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/75

 of city life, confined chiefly to the winter months. The annual losses of Japan through conflagrations are very great, and Tokio has been destroyed many times. The flimsy little straw-matted, wooden houses are always ready to blaze; and if a lamp explodes, a brazier upsets, or a spark flies, the whole place is in flames, which leap from roof to roof until the quarter is kindled. Each time a burned district is rebuilt the streets are widened, a measure which preserves property but ruins picturesqueness, for the broad thoroughfares, lined with low, unpainted buildings, make the modern Japanese city monotonous and uninteresting.

The diminutive Japanese dwellings, of toy-like construction, rest on corner posts set on large rocks, and made stable by their heavy roofs of mud and tiles. Fires are stemmed only by tearing down all buildings in the path of the flames, which is done as easily as a house of cards is overturned. A rope, fastened to one of the upright corner posts, brings the structure down with a crash, while the heavy roof covers it like an extinguisher. The ordinary city house or shop may have twelve feet of frontage, and even a second story seldom raises the roof more than fifteen feet from the ground. To hear of a thousand houses being burned in a night is appalling, but a thousand of these Lilliputian dwellings and their microscopic landscape gardens would not cover more area than two or three blocks of a foreign city.

Each section or ward has a high tower or ladder, with a long bell, and from this lookout the watchman gives the alarm or the near policeman sounds the fire-bell. Pandemonium follows, for a more excitable being than the Japanese does not exist, and the fire-bell’s clang is suggestive of many sad and terrible experiences. Besides the municipal fire brigade with their ladders and hand-pumps, each ward maintains private watchmen and firemen. These watchmen roam their beats from dusk to 59