SI MO DA. 405 



It is spread witli stuffed mats, and is divided into several compartments by means of sliding 

 panels. This house within a house may be applied to all the various purposes of trading, eating, 

 sleeping, and receiving company, according to the pleasure or necessities of the proprietors. 

 This cage or platform is used as the workshop by some of the various handicraftsmen, as, for 

 example, the carpenters and lacquer varnishers ; the blacksmiths and stonecutters, however, 

 perform their heavier work upon the ground. 



The houses intended for lodgers are generally clean and neatly spread with the usual soft and 

 thick mats, which serve the double purpose of seats by day and beds by night. The names of 

 the guests are recorded as with us, but somewhat more publicly as they are affixed to the door 

 posts on the street. The aristocratic gentry have their coats of arms emblazoned in full 

 and displayed upon wide banners, stretched in front of their stopping places. The interiors of 

 these hotels are by no means very magnificent in appearance or complete in appointment. The 

 entire absence of tables, chairs, sofas, lamps, and other essentials to comfort, interfere very 

 seriously with a guest taking his ease at his Japanese inn. Moreover, the want of pictures, 

 looking-glasses, and other pleasing appeals to the eye, gives to the establishment a very naked, 

 cold look to a traveller who has a vivid recollection of the warm snugness of an English inn or 

 the luxurious completeness of an American hotel. 



The whole number of houses in Simoda is estimated at about a thousand, and the inhabitants 

 are supposed to amount to nearly seven thousand, one-fifth of whom are shopkeepers and 

 artisans. There are in the town, as elsewhere in Japan, a disproportionate amount of officials, 

 soldiers, and retainers, of the various princes and dignitaries, who add nothing to the productive 

 resources of the country, but are great consumers of the results of the labor of the lower classes^ 

 who are forced to do much work and are allowed to enjoy but little of the profit. The people 

 have, notwithstanding, a tolerably thriving appearance, and it is seldom that a beggar is seen. 

 The streets, with the exception of the few shops which do but little business, sliow no signs of 

 trading activity. There is no public market place, and all the daily transactions of buying and 

 selling are conducted so privately and quietly that, to a passing stranger, Simoda would appear 

 as a place singularly devoid of any regard to the concerns of this world. 



The people have all the characteristic courtesy and reserved but pleasing manners of the 

 Japanese. A scene at one of the public baths, where the sexes mingled indiscriminately, 

 unconscious of their nudity, was not calculated to impress the Americans with a very favorable 

 opinion of the morals of the inliabitants. This may not be a universal practice throughout 

 Japan, and indeed is said by the Japanese near us not to be ; but the Japanese people of the 

 inferior ranks are undoubtedly, notwithstanding their moral superiority to most oriental nations^ 

 a lewd people. Apart from the bathing scenes, there was enough in the popular literature, 

 with its obscene pictorial illustrations, to prove a licentiousness of taste and practice among a 

 certain class of the population that was not only disgustingly intrusive, but disgracefully 

 indicative of foul corruption. 



The chief diet of the inhabitants of Simoda consists of fish and vegetable food. There are 

 poultry, chickens, geese and ducks, and some few cattle, but the latter are used only for beasts 

 of burden, and their flesh is never eaten. Rice, wheat, barley, and sweet potatoes are the chief 

 articles raised in and about Simoda, although Irish potatoes, buckwheat, Indian corn, taro, 

 beans, cabbages, cresses, and egg plants are produced to some extent. The wheat and barley are 

 reaped in May, and the rice, which is first sown and then transplanted, as in Lew Chew, is 



