Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/494

482 In making up accounts, they write down the figures first, the corresponding items next.

Politeness prompts them to remove, not their head-gear, but their foot-gear.

Their needle-work sometimes curiously reverses European methods. Belonging as he does to the inferior sex, the present writer can only speak hesitatingly on such a point. But a lady of his acquaintance informs him that Japanese women needle their thread instead of threading their needle, and that instead of running the needle through the cloth, they hold it still and run the cloth upon it. Another lady, long resident in Tōkyō, says that the impulse of her Japanese maids is always to sew on cuffs, frills, and other similar things, topsy-turvy and inside out. If that is not the ne plus ultra of contrariety, what is?

Men in Japan are most emphatically not the inferior sex. When (which does not often happen) a husband condescends to take his wife out with him, it is my lord's jinrikisha that bowls off first. The woman gets into hers as best she can, and trundles along behind. Still, women have some few consolations. In Europe, gay bachelors are apt to be captivated by the charms of actresses. In Japan, where there are no actresses to speak of, it is the women who fall in love with fashionable actors.

Strangest of all, after a bath the Japanese dry themselves with a damp towel!

 Torii is the name of the peculiar gateway, formed of two upright and two horizontal beams, which stands in front of every Shintō temple. According to the orthodox account, it was originally a perch for the sacred fowls (tori="fowl;" i, from iru,="dwelling"), which gave warning of daybreak; but in later times—its origin being forgotten—it came to be regarded as a gateway or even as a merely symbolic ornament, so that whole avenues of torii were sometimes erected, while the Buddhists also adopted it, employing it to place tables on with inscriptions, and ornamenting it in various newfangled ways, such as turning