192 JAPANESE CUSTOMS AND HABITS. 



most common instruments resembles a banjo. The 

 sounds they manage to produce from this are more like 

 a repetition of twangs than anything else, and a deal of 

 patience is required to sit still and listen to it. At any 

 great entertainment given by a prince or daimio this 

 description of music, accompanied by singing, is always 

 part of the ceremony. 



Professional singing-girls are hired for the occasion. 

 These girls are a regular institution of the country; and 

 rather a strange circumstance regarding them, consider- 

 ing the general frailty of their sisterhood, is, they 

 are invariably virtuous. If any of them happen to go 

 astray, she is at once discharged from their community, 

 and her place filled by a new one. Their style of sing- 

 ing is almost more discordant and trying than their 

 style of music. All the notes are made to pass 

 through their noses, and this imparts such a quantity 

 of nasal sound, that when — often for absolute polite- 

 ness' sake — I had to listen to this combination, the 

 result was usually a bad headache. 



It is curious that so many things are done in Japan 

 just in the opposite way to what is invariably the custom 

 elsewhere. For instance, in planing wood, they draw the 

 instrument towards them, instead of, as we do, pushing 

 it from us. The teeth of their saws slope in the contrary 



