[95] The tea in common use, Golownin, like other travellers in Japan, observed to be of a very inferior quality. Green tea was used as a luxury on occasions of ceremony. Sugar was rare and costly, being brought from Batavia by the Dutch, and packed for retail in small baskets. Golownin saw also a very inferior kind, which he concluded to be of domestic manufacture. [96] This was the name of one of Golownin’s fellow-prisoners, who had made himself quite famous among the Japanese by his skill as a draftsman. [97] Golownin mentions the scurvy as a prevailing disease among the Japanese, perhaps occasioned by their thin diet. [98] These released Japanese were sent to Matsumae, and, after remaining about a week, were forwarded to Yedo. The shipwrecked men did not give, so Golownin was informed, a very favorable account of their entertainment in Kamtschatka. Ryōzayemon praised Irkutsk, but represented eastern Siberia and Okhotsk as a miserable country, where scarce anybody was to be seen except beggars and government officers. He thought very meanly of the Russians, a few individuals excepted. From their military spirit, even the boys in the street playing soldier, he thought they must meditate conquest, probably that of Japan. [99] There has been a great alteration in the last twenty years. Siebold states that sixty-eight square-rigged vessels—mostly, no doubt, American whalers—had been counted by the Japanese as passing Matsumae and Hakodate in one year. According to a memorandum furnished to Commodore Perry during his recent visit to Hakodate (May 3, 1854), there had been, in the years 1847-1851, no less than five foreign vessels wrecked in that vicinity. [100] In Japan, as elsewhere, etiquette requires a good many things to be done under feigned pretences, and on many occasions an affected ignorance of what everybody knows. The Japanese have a particular term (_naibun_) to express this way of doing things. [101] Yet Kahei wore two swords, though perhaps he did it in the character of a ship-master, or as an officer in authority in the island to which he traded from Hakodate, carrying on the fishery there chiefly by means of native Kuriles. These islands appear to have been farmed out by the government to certain mercantile firms, which thus acquire a certain civil authority over the inhabitants. The privilege of wearing swords, like other similar privileges elsewhere, is probably rather encroached upon by the unprivileged. On festival days, even the poorest inhabitants of Nagasaki decked themselves out, according to Kämpfer, with at least one sword. The present of a sword as a marriage gift—and it is ceremonies practised among the mercantile class, to which reference is made—is mentioned on p. 181.