Yokohama was, before the enfranchising of the ports, a miserable little fishing village containing about a hundred houses. It was opened to foreign commerce in 1858 in the place of Shimoda, which was thought to be badly situated. It is a town of 170,000 inhabitants, having sprung up after the mushroom fashion hitherto deemed peculiar to America, and is the third largest port in the Far East, being alone surpassed by Hong-Kong and Shanghai; but its streets appear much less animated than those of the last-named ports. The Bund, the principal thoroughfare by the sea, always seems rather deserted. On the other hand, on the hill above, to the south of the concession, is the European quarter, which is full of delightful houses, surrounded by lovely gardens. There are about 1,800 foreigners of various nationalities, exclusive of Chinese, settled here, a good half being English. The port is very spacious and commodious, and the biggest ships ever built can anchor quite close up to the quay. The total value of the exports in 1896 was £6,169,600, the imports £7,280,400, making a total of £13,450,000, or about half the foreign commerce of Japan, which, during the same year, reached the very important figure of £28,500,000.[16] But this brand new town is not particularly interesting, and the traveller will do well to hurry on to Tokio. The capital of Japan is the largest town in Asia, and the seventh in the world. On December 31, 1895, it was reputed to contain 1,268,930 souls, and must by this time, owing to the rapid increase of its population, have attained 1,400,000. It is spread over an enormous space, much larger than that occupied by Paris. The reason why it covers such an amazing extent is that everybody lives in his own house, which is never more than one story high, and then, again, nearly every house has its little garden. Under these conditions, it is, therefore, not surprising that such an enormous population requires unlimited space in which to accommodate itself. Moreover, Tokio contains a great many open spaces, and, odd to relate, most of these are to be found in the centre of the town in the neighbourhood of the Imperial Palace. These ‘building sites,’ if one might so call them, were formerly occupied by the palaces of the great daimios, the majority of which were surrounded by bastions, supported on a cyclopean stone wall rising from a deep moat. When the daimios first received permission to leave Tokio, a few years before the downfall of the old Government, they retired to their castles in the provinces, and, at the abolition of the feudal system in 1872, their lands became, as we have seen, the property of the State. On the site of several of them immense public buildings have been erected after the European fashion, among which are the palaces of the various Ministries, and also the Parliament House; but many other wide, open spaces are still waiting to be utilized, and, being weed-grown and disorderly,