Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/70

58 whips, ladders, yard-measures, bows and arrows, coolies hats, submarine hedges for the collecting of oysters and of edible sea weed, hedges also round houses, embankments for rivers (large stones being placed for this purpose in bamboo crates), clapboarding, ornamental floors for verandahs and tea-rooms, travelling trunks, torches, chopsticks, spits, bird-cages, fish-traps, flutes, trumpets, picture-frames, cask hoops, even nails (for being non-conductors of heat and non-corrosible, bamboo nails do better for certain purposes than metal ones), ladles, tea-scoops, sieves, shutters, fans, even flower-vases, special apparatus of various sorts for use in the arts, toys and ornaments of innumerable kinds, are all manufactured out of bamboo. Nothing makes a better tube for keeping unmounted photographs from the damp than does a section of bamboo. The dried sheath of the culm of the young bamboo serves for wrapping up such things as rice sandwiches, meat, and cakes, which are apt to stain their receptacles; also for the manufacture of sandals and the soles of wooden clogs. The leaves of the bamboo grass (which is a sort of bamboo) provide a clean, cool surface on which to lay fish in a basket, the basket itself being often of bamboo split and twisted. Such twisted split bamboos also serve to make strong hawsers, which are employed to swing ferry-boats, and even for the construction of bridges in certain rural districts, as no other material is so cheap and so easy to handle. One kind at least can, by a process of boiling, be flattened out into trays which are much prized. Another species, which is non-hollow, is cut into seals. The above list could easily be extended. But it may suffice to show that Japanese life without the bamboo is almost as hard to picture to oneself as pastry without butter, landscape without light, or a Britisher with out a grievance.

The numerous plants which common parlance lumps together under the general name of "bamboos" really form three distinct genera, known to botanists as Bambusa, Arundinaria, and Phyllostachys, each including many species. The number of species of bamboo found growing in Japan at the present day is stated by