Page:Sketches of Tokyo Life (1895).djvu/132

100 catch a night-bird, they may also pass the whole night in vain expectation. Street stalls for dispensing wine and food to these night jinrikisha-men and others are to be seen in all the principal streets.

The street jinrikisha-men are among the most improvident and impecunious of men. They live in very poor tenements, consisting of long one-storied blocks partitioned into little hovels twelve feet by nine, the rent of which varies from a yen to a yen and twenty sen per month. There are in Tokyo special quarters of these slums, which form communities isolated from the rest of the city. They have an economical system of their own. They obtain their food from traders of the locality who collect with great assiduity such provisions as are out of season or have been rejected in better quarters. As the inhabitants of these slums mostly live by their daily labour, wet weather, trade depression, or sickness or idleness of the bread-winners causes them great suffering; and in such cases they resort for the supply of their immediate wants to the local pawnbrokers, usurers, or lottery-promoters, who, especially the first two, drive a fine trade as is evident from the appearance of their houses, with stoutly-built gates, black-plastered godowns, and strong brick-walls surmounted with chevaux-de-frise, standing in conspicuous contrast to the squalor in which their patrons are content to live.

The pawnbroker’s customers are navvies, day-labourers, jinrikisha-men, paper-pickers, mountebanks, dealers in disused articles, carriers, artizans, etc. They repair to his shop morning and evening. Their usual pledges are clothes, beddings, and mosquito-nets, but they will at a pinch bring rice-boxes, pots, pans, kettles, hats, and braziers, nor will they stick at rags, old cotton, pails, dressers, cart-wheels, or clogs. They hesitate to dispose of nothing that the pawnbroker will accept, the least that he will lend being ten sen. To the pawnbroker the most welcome pledges are clothes; but he will not refuse beddings,