To secure the harbor and town these same lords were bound to march with their vassals at the first alarm. The princes of the provinces of Hizen and Chikuzen were obliged to furnish alternately, each for a year, the guard at the entrance of the harbor, which was independent of the governors. The inhabitants of the water-side streets of Nagasaki supplied the _Funaban_ or ship-guard with its guard-boats to watch foreign ships in the harbor. There was another fleet of boats employed ordinarily in whale-fishing but whose business it also was to see all foreign vessels well off the coast, to guard against and to arrest smugglers, and to prevent any foreign vessels from touching elsewhere than at Nagasaki. Finally, there was the spy-guard, stationed on the top of neighboring mountains, to look out for the approach of foreign vessels; and on one of these hills was a beacon, which, being fired, served, in connection with other similar beacons, to telegraph alarms to Yedo. Next in rank to the governors were four mayors or burgomasters, whose office, like most others, had become hereditary, and two deputy-mayors, principally for the affairs of the new town. They would seem to have once been the actual chief magistrates, but their authority had been greatly eclipsed by that of the imperial governors. There were also four other officers annually appointed to solicit the interests of the town’s people at the court of the governors, and to keep them informed of the daily proceedings of the mayors, for which purpose they had a small room at the governor’s palace, where they were always in waiting. There was no town-house nor other public place of assembly. When the magistrates met on business, it was at the presiding mayor’s house. Besides the various bodies of interpreters and others, connected with the foreign trade, there was a particular corporation of constables and bailiffs, consisting of about thirty families, who lived in a street by themselves. Their office was reputed military and noble, and they had the privilege of wearing two swords,—a privilege which the mayors and mercantile people did not possess. The tanners, obliged to act also as public executioners, were held in execration, yet they also wore two swords. They lived in a separate village near the place of execution, placed as everywhere in Japan at the west end of the town. But the most remarkable thing in the municipal government of Nagasaki (and the same thing extended to all the other Japanese towns) was the system of street government, mentioned in the narratives of Don Rodrigo, Caron, and others, but which Kämpfer more particularly describes.