One of the most common and most important indications of a great change in the life and civilization of Japan is to be seen in the improved modes of travel and transportation. The ancient method, though in some sections pack-horses and oxen were used, was essentially pedestrian. The common people travelled on foot, and carried or dragged over the road their own baggage or freight. Couriers, carrying the most important despatches, relied upon fleetness of foot. The higher classes and wealthy people, even though not themselves making any exertions in their own behalf, were carried about in vehicles by coolies, who, with their human burdens, tramped from place to place. On water, too, travel and transportation depended mostly upon human muscular exertion, as all boats, small or large, had to be propelled by oars or poles, except when favored with a breeze to swell the sails and allow the boatmen a respite from their toil. But all this hard labor developed, of course, a strength of limb and a power of endurance that even in recent years have enabled the Japanese soldiers to march and fight in either the piercing cold and deep snow of Manchuria or the blistering heat of Formosa. A life of constant outdoor exposure to wind, rain, cold, or heat has toughened and browned the skin, and made an altogether hardy race out of the common people; while the lack of this regular exercise and calisthenic training has left its mark in the comparatively weak constitutions of those who travelled, not on their own feet, but on the shoulders of others. The common vehicles of the olden days were ordinary carts for freight and _norimono_ and _kago_ for passengers. The _norimono_ is a good-sized sedan-chair or palanquin, in which the rider can sit in a fairly comfortable position. The _kago_ is a sort of basket in which the traveller takes a half-sitting, half-reclining posture, not altogether comfortable—at least for tall foreigners. At present the _norimono_ is seldom if ever employed except for corpses or invalids, but the _kago_ is still used in mountainous regions, where nothing else is available. It must be understood, of course, that the nobles and their retainers often rode on horseback; but the great mass of the people walked and the few rode in _kago_ or _norimono_.