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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. 
