These two customs, then, naturally create a large demand for confectionery of all kinds. The most common cake for making a present of is a sort of sponge-cake. It is not of Japanese origin, but appears to have been introduced by the Spaniards in the early days of foreign intercourse more than three centuries ago. It is put in a cardboard or wooden box; and, in view of the custom above referred to of passing a present on from one to another until it grows stale, the best confectioners in Tokyo now put on the box the date of its sale so that their reputation may not suffer through the deterioration of their confection by its repeated travels. The precaution, however, is hardly necessary as the custom is too widely known for any one who receives musty sweetmeats to accuse their maker of dishonesty. [Illustration: A BOX OF SPONGE-CAKE.] The bulk of confectionery is made of rice, red beans, millet, or sugar. Glutinous rice is steamed, pounded in a wooden mortar into a pasty consistency, and left to cool. This is made into little cakes, which are boiled and eaten with greens in soup at the beginning of the year and are at other times baked and dipped in soy and sugar. But for making confectionery, the pounded rice is not allowed to cool as it is, while hot, soft enough to take any shape. It usually forms the outer cover of dumplings filled with a sugary mixture. The red bean is boiled, pounded, and strained through a coarse cotton bag to get rid of the skin, though the latter is sometimes retained, in which case the straining is unnecessary, and finally mixed with sugar. This red bean jam is the most important ingredient of Japanese sweetmeats as there is in our confectionery no other equivalent of the fruit jam. Sometimes, however, other beans are substituted for it, especially when a white jam is needed. The red-bean jam is also used in making red soup into which small rice dumplings are thrown; this soup is much in demand, especially in winter, to while away the tedium of long evenings. The red bean is also boiled with rice to give it a colour; the red-bean rice is eaten in old-fashioned families three times a month, on the first, fifteenth, and twenty-eighth. A kind of white candy is made from a mixture of glutinous rice and rice-yeast. Agar-agar, or the Bengal isinglass, which is obtained from a seaweed, is used for making jellies. Starch extracted from the root of the _kuzu_ (_pueraria Thunbergiana_) is also much employed in confectionery.