Oil is most extensively used for lighting purposes; but gas and electricity are also employed, and bring good dividends to companies furnishing such illumination. A very large amount of oil has been annually imported from the United States and Russia; but as rich fields have been found in Northern Japan,[35] the Standard Oil Company is also interested in a Japanese corporation, the International Oil Company, organized to work Japanese fields. Foreign capital has also been invested in the Ōsaka Gas Company, and is sought by the Tōkyō Gas Company, as well as by several electric and steam railway companies. The first buildings erected for the Imperial Diet were supplied with electric lights, but caught fire in some way, and were totally destroyed. This calamity was laid at the door of a flaw in the electric lighting apparatus, and so frightened the Emperor that he decided not to use the electric lights in the palace; but if my memory serves me rightly, after one or two nights of imperfect and unsatisfactory lighting, he resorted once more to electricity. The foreign trade of Japan had increased from $13,123,272 in 1868 to $265,017,161 in 1902,—twenty-fold in a third of a century.[36] Of recent years the imports have been larger than the exports; in 1898 they were more than $55,000,000 in excess; in 1900, almost $41,500,000 in excess; but in 1901 the difference was only about $1,750,000. The chief articles of export are silk (either raw, or partly or wholly manufactured), cotton yarn and goods, matches, coal, high-grade rice, copper, camphor, tea, matting, straw braid, and porcelain. The principal imports are raw cotton, shirting and printed cotton, mousseline, wool, cotton velvet, satin, cheap rice, flour, sugar, petroleum, oil cake, peas and beans, machinery, iron and steel (including nails and rails), steamers, locomotives, and railway carriages. The exports are sent chiefly to the United States, Great Britain and colonies (especially Hongkong), China, and France; while the imports come mostly from Great Britain and colonies (especially England, India, and Hongkong), the United States, Germany, France and colonies, and China. The variety in the geographical distribution of the imports of Japan may be faintly illustrated by the following partial list of supplies taken by an American family from Tōkyō to the summer resort of Hakone: soap from England and America, cocoa from England, butter from California, cornstarch from Buffalo, N. Y., Swiss milk, Holland candles, pickles from England, Scotch oatmeal, American rolled oats and cracked wheat, flour from Spokane Falls, Washington, canned goods from San Francisco, Kansas City, Chicago, and Omaha, and evaporated cream from Illinois. The first mixed corporation, composed of Japanese and foreigners, to be licensed under the new Commercial Codes after the new treaties went into effect in 1899, was the Nippon Electric Company, in which a large electric company of Chicago is specially interested.