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corn. The beans split only enough to show the white heart. 

 They are quite solid and hard but if held in the mouth for a 

 few minutes become soft. The sora mame have a sweetish taste 

 and when cooked as a vegetable are further sweetened with 

 sugar. Many of these beans seem naturally more sugary than 

 the sugar beet. 



When the sora mame is fully grown it becomes the big flat 

 Ota Fuku (S. P. I. No. 34647), a huge bean with a tough olive 

 skin that has to be removed by scalding with wood ashes before 

 it can be cooked at all. Sugar or sweet shoyu are usually 

 boiled with it when served as a vegetable. They are also 

 popped and they are so very hard that it requires several 

 minutes steaming in the mouth before the teeth can make an im- 

 pression. In view of this hardness and the great food value of 

 these large beans, it would be interesting to know if toasted 

 ota fuku beans would not be as useful to the pedestrian and 

 mountain climber as the traditional raisin held in the mouth, 

 or the compact piece of chocolate. 



Shiroi Endo (S. P. I. No. 34648), Aoi Endo (S. P. I. No. 

 34649), and Aka Endo, (S. P. I. No. 34650) are classed as 

 beans, used as such and sold at bean shops, but are peas named 

 for their distinguishing colors - white, blue and red. All 

 three are sold toasted, and they are boiled and coated with 

 sugar in several colors and become the favorite sweet of the 

 children, who get a half pint of go-shiki-mame (five-colored- 

 beans) for a penny. The aka endo, as brightly red as adzuki, 

 are often boiled in sugar and used to decorate and encrust 

 balls and cakes of bean paste or rice dough. 



To Roku mame (S. P. I. No. 34651), which is a white bean 

 the size of a small lima bean, gets its name To (10) Roku (6), 

 because ten such beans laid in a row equal six sun or Japanese 

 inches. It is boiled and rolled in sugar and is a very satis- 

 factory sweet for the tea tray. 



Shiroi daidze (S. P. I. No. 34654), the commonest and 

 cheapest of all Japanese beans, is most used for the manufac- 

 ture of tofu, or bean curd, and for shoyu, the pungent fer- 

 mented sauce that we know as Worcester sauce when treated to 

 capsicum and other hot spices. Shiroi daidze is used to make 

 a cheaper white bean paste. This bean looks like a dried pea, 

 but when soaked for even an hour in water it elongates to an 

 oval bean. It is suspected that this bean is used in the 

 manufacture of the many unsweetened brands of condensed milk, 

 the taste of raw beans being unmistakable in all brands. Also, 

 the milky fluid resulting from the first maceration of the 

 beans for tofu was thrown away as useless until a few years 

 ago, when a chemist discovered that it had the same chemical 

 qualities as milk and all its nutritive value. Since then, 

 the tofu factories have regularly made and sold "artificial 

 milk", made by a process patented five years ago by Mr. Shugo 

 Takano , a graduate of the Tokyo Bacteriological Laboratory. 



