ing and selling is still in the
hands of mercantile freebooters, who will take an advantage wherever it
is possible to get one, in whose morality honesty has no place, and who
have not yet discovered the efficacy of that virtue simply as a matter
of policy. Their trade, conducted in a small way upon small means, is
more of the nature of a game, in which one person is the winner and the
other the loser, than a fair exchange, in which both parties obtain what
they want. It is the mediaeval, not the modern idea of business, that is
still held among Japanese merchants. With them, trade is a warfare
between buyer and seller, in which every man must take all possible
advantage for himself, and it is the lookout of the other party if he is
cheated.

In T[=o]ky[=o], the greatest and most modernized of the cities of the
empire, the shops are not the large city stores that one sees in
European and American cities, but little open-fronted rooms, on the edge
of which one sits to make one's purchases, while the proprietor smiles
and bows and dickers; setting his price by the style of his customer's
dress, or her apparent ignorance of the value of the desired article.
Some few large dry-goods stores there are, where prices are set and
dickering is unnecessary;[*264] and in the _kwankoba_, or bazaars, one
may buy almost anything needed by Japanese of all classes, from house
furnishings to foreign hats, at prices plainly marked upon them, and
from which there is no variation. But one's impression of the state of
trade in Japan is, that it is still in a very primitive and undeveloped
condition, and is surprisingly behind the other parts of Japanese
civilization.

The shopping of the ladies of the large _yashikis_ and of wealthy
families is done mostly in the home; for all the stores are willing at
any time, on receiving an order, to send up a clerk with a bale of
crepes, silks, and cottons tied to his back, and frequently towering
high above his head as he walks, making him look like the proverbial ant
with a grain of wheat. He sets his great bundle carefully down on the
floor, opens the enormous _furushiki_, or bundle handkerchief, in which
it is enveloped, and takes out roll after roll of silk or chintz, neatly
done up in paper or yellow cotton. With infinite patience, he waits
while the merits of each piece are examined and discussed, and if none
of his stock proves satisfactory, he is willing to come again with a new
set of wares,