to this family they wear
the same crest embroidered on the centre of the backs of their coats.

[2] _Arima_ was one of the daimios or landed nobleman, nearly three
hundred in number, out of whom has been formed the new nobility of
Japan, a certain number of which are in the Upper House of the Imperial
Diet.

[Illustration: Boys' Concert--Flute, Drum, and Song.]

[Illustration: Kangura, or Korean Lion Play]

Korean Lion is the title of the picture which forms the frontispiece; it
represents a game that children in Japan are very fond of playing. They
are probably trying to act as well as the maskers did whom they saw on
New Year's Day, just as our children try and imitate things they see
in a pantomime. The masker goes from house to house accompanied by one
or two men who play on cymbals, flute, and drum. He steps into a shop
where the people of the house and their friends sit drinking tea, and
passers-by pause in front of the open shop to see the fun. He takes a
mask, like the one in the picture, off his back and puts it over his
head. This boar's-head mask is painted scarlet and black, and gilt. It
has a green cloth hanging down behind, in order that you may not
perceive where the mask ends and the mans body begins. Then the masker
imitates an animal. He goes up to a young lady and lays down his ugly
head beside her to be patted, as "Beast" may have coaxed "Beauty" in the
fairy tale. He grunts, and rolls, and scratches himself. The children
almost forget he is a man, and roar with laughter at the funny animal.
When they begin to tire of this fun he exchanges this mask for some of
the two or three others he carries with him. He puts on a mask of an old
woman over his face, and at the back of his head a very different second
mask, a cloth tied over the centre of the head, making the two faces
yet more distinct from each other. He has quickly arranged the back of
his dress to look like the front of a person, and he acts, first
presenting the one person to his spectators, then the other. He makes
you even imagine he has four arms, so cleverly can he twist round his
arm and gracefully fan what is in reality the back of his head.

[Illustration: Ironclad Top Game.]

The tops the lads are playing with in this picture[3] are not quite the
same shape as our tops, but they spin very well. Some men are so clever
at making spinning-tops run along strings, throwing them up into the air
and catching them with a tobacco-pipe, t