Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/112

100 Tōkyō receives one or two. The months liable to typhoons are (in a decreasing order of severity) September, August, October, and July. Typhoons have, it is true, been experienced as early as the end of March; but this is quite exceptional.

The climate of Japan is stated on the highest medical authority to be excellent for children, less so for adults, the large amount of moisture rendering it depressing, especially to persons of a nervous temperament and to consumptive patients. Various causes, physical and social, contribute to make Japan a less healthy country for female residents of European race than for the men.

The table on page 97 gives the average of twenty-five years observations [1876-1900], made at the Central Meteorological Observatory, Tōkyō.

Japan has been divided, for meteorological purposes, into ten districts, namely, I. Formosa and Luchu; II. the southern half of Kyūshū and Shikoku; III. the Inland Sea; IV. N. W. Kyūshū and the west coast of the Main Island up to the latitude of Kyōto; V. the Pacific coast from Ise to Tōkyō and the River Tonegawa; VI. the interior provinces to the north of the fifth district, from Hida on the west to Iwashiro on the east; VII. the N. W. coast from Wakasa to Ugo; VIII. the Pacific coast from the River Tonegawa to Sendai and Miyako; IX. the province of Rikuoku and the western half of the Island of Yezo; X. the eastern half of Yezo and the Kurile Islands.

 Cloisonné. The art of cloisonne enamelling has been known in Japan since the sixteenth century and possibly earlier; but it has only been brought to perfection within the last thirty years. The few examples in the Nijō Palace at Kyōto (erected in 1601) are small and extremely rough. Mr. Namikawa, the great cloisonne-maker of Kyōto, will show visitors specimens that look antediluvian in roughness and simplicity, but date back no further than 1873. 