American Fisheries Socvety. 119 
The bamboo plant, which grows all over the country and is 
widely cultivated, is useful in the fisheries in numerous ways. 
Live-cars or baskets for sardines and other small fishes employed 
as bait in the line fisheries are usually made of bamboo. Some 
of them are colossal; one I saw drying on the beach in a southern 
province was 10 feet in diameter. 
The Japanese have a great many national holidays. One of 
them is devoted to girls, and another, in May, is the special 
property of boys. Besides the games and festivities which per- 
tain especially to boys, a peculiar feature of this holiday is the 
throwing to the breeze, from nearly every house, of hollow paper 
and cloth fishes, some of them 20 feet long. 
The octopus or devil-fish is abundant, and is an important 
food-product, although my personal opinion is that it does not 
appeal strongly to the American palate. The octopus is caught 
im various ways, one of the most interesting of which is by the 
use of earthen-ware pots, which are lowered to the bottom by 
means of cords; they are entered by the octopuses, which having 
insinuated themselves are reluctant to withdraw, so that the pots 
may be pulled to the surface before the animals try to escape. 
I bring up this fishery in order to refer to a very ingenious corol- 
lary, which was first mentioned to me by a professor in the impe- 
rial university and later verified by myself. More than a century 
ago a vessel laden with a very valuable cargo of porcelains from 
Korea destined for the imperial household was wrecked in the 
Inland Sea; the captain and other officers did what seems to have 
been a favorite amusement of the olden days, namely, they com- 
mitted suicide just before the vessel sank in deep water. Re- 
cently the fishermen have been recovering pieces of this pottery, 
which now has an appreciated value, by tying strings to octo- 
puses and lowering them in the vicinity of the wreck. The ani- 
mals enter the vessels and retain their hold of them while being 
drawn to the surface. Several pieces of this porcelain which I 
saw were gems, seeming but little the worse for their prolonged 
submergence. 
Japan has an abundance of frogs. Every one of the million 
or more rice fields, with its numerous ditches, is a natural frog 
farm, and the croaking of frogs is the characteristic sound out- 
side the cities; but, singularly enough in a country where few 
