Tanners preëmpt an unsavory ward. Shoemakers claim for themselves a
network of small streets. The dry-goods merchants command an avenue.
Pipe-sellers, wine-merchants, tobacconists, book-sellers, marketmen,
carpenters,--each guild tends to make a centre for itself. Perhaps, as
one consequence of this segregation, Tokio becomes the stronghold of
street peddlers. It matters little to the housewife that the nearest
market is four miles away, when sections of that market, strapped to
boyish shoulders, go crying past her gate with the punctuality of
planets. Tokio is a place where circulating libraries literally
circulate; where perambulating oil-shops fill lamps on the patron's
kitchen step or in the glass frame at his gate, and then stop to light
them; where the tailor finishes a quilt or an overcoat on the bedroom
floor, and the hair-dresser needs no local habitation.
In a great semicircle crowded near the Red Gate of the Imperial
University, live and study and brawl and bluster the students,--the
future Nogis, Togos, Kurokis, Saigos, Itos, and Oyamas of their
race,--now no more than restless young spirits in a recognized democracy
of their own. Some of them cook their own meals and patch their own
faded hakama,--a species of heroism to make death on a battlefield grow
tame. Others "board" in one of the long, barn-like dormitories, or in a
convenient cheap lodging-house, often three and four in a room, at the
enormous rate of fifty cents a week. Poverty seems to them admirable,
nothing whatever to be ashamed of. The Japanese youth of the samurai
class is bred to a distaste of bodily luxury. Should one of their number
show a leaning toward soft cushions and rich food, the others ridicule
him, call him "O Sharé Sama," the Tokio equivalent of "Dandy," and say
that his soul grows fat.
Yuki sped through all, breathless with the wonder of home-returning. The
three jinrikishas, Tetsujo, of course, in the lead, went one after the
other in a straight line, as though on an invisible track. Whether in a
lane four feet wide, or in an avenue two hundred, this goose-like manner
of procedure never changed. Old familiar street-corners, familiar pines,
changed shop fronts, appealed to the girl with a sense of reality. Her
eyes filled and her heart beat faster as she caught her first glimpse,
after four years, of towering moated walls where crawled the "Dragon
Pines" of Iyemitsu, and of the high dark roof now sheltering her beloved
ruler.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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