A Japanese wooden house looks pretty when new; but after some years when the outside is weather-beaten, the pillars begin to warp and the walls to crumble, its charms, too, are on the wane. A well-built house may be comfortable for twenty or at most thirty years, after which it is uninhabitable without considerable repairs. The few private houses which still remain that were built before the Restoration are at best rain-proof, and afford little protection against wind. There are certainly public buildings, such as shrines and temples, which have survived many centuries and are not unfrequently picturesque as they peer through their groves; but a close inspection would soon reveal the repairs they have undergone, pillars repainted, roofs retiled, gable-ends regilt, and the interior generally renovated. There is wanting in Japanese dwelling-houses that poetical charm which age lends to brick and stone buildings in the West with their dark-stained casements and ivy-mantled walls; and time which mellows and imparts a deeper hue to stone dry-rots wood and saps it of its strength, and long before storms make any impression upon brick, the frame-house falls to the ground. But in Japan it is not merely wind and rain that houses have to contend against; the earthquake is the foe that makes them to totter. Every earthquake, by shaking them up, tends to loosen the joints and disturb the equilibrium of the building; and as a good many such shocks, about a hundred and fifty, occur in the course of a year, their combined effect is by no means negligible. Houses have therefore to be built with the possible effects of earthquakes in view.