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 this purpose are very primitive and insufficient, and the daily and nightly labour of more than a hundred men is often required to keep this enemy at bay. It sometimes happens that the whole mine has to be abandoned, when the water, especially in April and June, has flooded the mine unusually and demands excessive labour and expense to remove it. A number of defective bamboo pumps, together with small hydraulic foot wheels, constitute the only machinery for removing the water. The combined system of sucking and forcing pumps, used in Western mines, is not known in Japan, whilst the use of steam as a motive power has as yet been introduced in but very few cases.

To bring the ore to light, the Japanese miner goes to the mine in the morning with a primitive kind of Roman lamp, consisting of a shell or small basin filled with oil, and a wick made of the pith of a kind of rush. He detaches the ore with two kinds of instruments, one of which closely resembles our double cutlass, the other being a mining chisel and hammer. The ore is nearly always extracted in small pieces to prevent the falling down of the inside of the mine, though proper care is taken to support it by wooden stays. A straw or bamboo basket receives the ore, but cannot contain more than 80-90 lbs. of mineral. The filled baskets are then dragged along the often long and steep incline of the road by means of a straw rope bound round the body of the workman or of women or children. Sometimes the baskets are carried on the backs of the miners. The wages paid to the miner are mostly according to the weight and quality of the haku-ishi (ore) brought out by him. The ore is cleaned from the adhering stones by hammering, mostly done by women and children. Thus prepared it is ready to be roasted and melted. The roasted ore is then powdered and afterwards melted, till the so called blistered copper (schwarz-kupfer) (Jap. ara-do) is obtained. In former times this ara-do was sent to the imperial copper refining works at Osaka. Here it was lengthened and refined to get pure “bar copper” (tough or poled copper) (Jap.