TOILET OF JAPANESE GIRLS. 
359 
xvii ] 
this bad habit, which still often makes the European desperate, 
it will not perhaps be long necessary to complain, for everything 
indicates that the Japanese too will soon be carried along at the 
endlessly roaring speed of the Steam Age. 
When we had at last got horses we continued our journey, first 
in a carriage to Tokio, then by rail to Yokohama, arriving there 
on the afternoon of the 6th October. From this journey T shall 
only relate an incident which may form a little picture throwing 
light on life in Japan. 
While we halted for a short time in the morning of the 6th 
October at a large inn by the roadside, we saw half a dozen 
young girls finishing their toilets in the inn-yard. In passing 
we may say, that a Japanese peasant girl, like girls in general, 
may be pretty or the reverse, but that she generally is, what 
cannot always be said of the peasant girls at home, cleanly and 
of attractive manners. They washed themselves at the stream 
of water in the inn-yard, smoothed their artistically dressed hair, 
which, however, had been but little disturbed by the cushions on 
which they had slept, and brushed their dazzlingly white teeth. 
Soap is not used for washing, but a cotton bag filled with bran. 
The teeth were brushed with a wooden pin, one end of which 
was changed by beating into a brush-like collection of wooden 
cords. The tooth-powder consisted of finely powdered shells and 
corals, and was kept in small, neat wooden boxes, which, along 
with tooth-brushes and small square bundles of a very strong 
and cheap paper, all clearly intended for the use of the peasants, 
were sold for a trifle in most of the innumerable shops along 
the road. For such stupid regulations as in former times in 
Europe rendered traffic in the country difficult, and often obliged 
the countryman to betake himself to the nearest town to buy 
some horse-shoes or a roll of wire, appear not to be found in 
Japan, on which account most of the peasants living on a 
country road seek a subsidiary way of making a living by 
trafficking in small articles in request among the country people. 
