eys high, but when we get into the town we see at first only
rows and rows of one-storey houses. There are frequent earthquakes in
Japan, and to build many-storeyed blocks would mean frightful disaster
and loss of life. As it is, the people can rush quickly out of their
little homes into the streets at the first signs of a shaking.

What do you notice about the streets that strikes you most particularly?
To me it is the colouring--blue. You remember that in Burma there was
practically no blue; the people wore red and pink and magenta and
orange, but they seemed one and all to avoid blue. I used to think it
was because they knew that blue would not suit their sallow, yellowish
complexions; but the Japanese are just as yellow, in fact more so, for
the Burmese yellow is a kind of coffee colour, and theirs real saffron,
and yet the Japs are very fond of blue. The coolies and work-men all
dress in it, with those astonishing signs on their backs that we noticed
first at Yokohama, and the shops have blue banners hanging out beside
them. These are for their names--they are signboards, in fact. Instead
of running across horizontally, as our writing does, the Japanese
writing--which is the same as the Chinese, though the spoken language is
different--runs vertically. A Jap does many things exactly the opposite
way from what we do. He begins to read a book from what we should
consider the end, backwards, and instead of going along, he goes up and
down a line; and the long thin strips, with those mysterious cabalistic
signs on them, are the shopkeepers' names and businesses. The shops are
all open to the street, without glass, in this quarter; they are just
what we should call stalls; most of them seem to be greengrocers' or
fruiterers'. And in the first there are always prominently in front huge
vegetables like gigantic radishes or elongated turnips; the people eat
them largely, though to a European both the flavour and the smell are
nasty. In the fish shops the funniest things to be seen are great black
devil-fish, or octopuses, with their lumpy round bodies and black
tentacles stretching out on all sides. They are loathsome to look at,
but the Japs are not the only people who use them for food; in parts of
Italy the peasants eat them as a staple dish whenever they can catch
them.

There are no pavements here, and the streets are very muddy after last
night's heavy rain, but it doesn't seem to matter a bit to the numerous
inhabi