We had now been in their waters about eight days, during which we had only one opportunity of noticing things and people, near by on shore, and then for not a very long time. But what we had been able to observe, assured us that the Japanese were a superior race, though they might belong to the same variety of the human family as their pig-tail neighbors. Their complexions were better, their features more regular, they had not a great obliquity of eye; their manners were more collected and impressive, their bearing more dignified, their costume less sacerdotal; and their crowns, instead of displaying a patch of hair the size of a dinner-plate behind, with a pendent plait, were shaven in an oval on the top, around which the hair was brushed perpendicularly, and pomatumed, terminating in a tie, from which the united ends, adhering together with the pomatum, laid like a cheroot-cigar in form, the end pointing to the brow, in the centre of the place that the razor has denuded. They look like the literary gentlemen whose bald heads cause their foreheads to run back nearly to their coat-collar. Certain it is that they can hardly be deemed descendants of the son of Manoah, of whom it was prophesied—“_and no razor shall come on his head_.” Their boats were sharp, and by the continued action of the sculls—instead of rowing on their sides—were impelled with greater speed than the boats of the celestials; while the nice bows to their junks indicated great superiority, and the single white canvass sail, stretched by a yard from their enormous mast, was far more pleasant to the eye and sensible than the dingy mat-sail of the Chinaman. Their plan of reducing sail is singular: instead of lessening the hoist of the sail as other nations do, as in reefing, they reduce the width of their sail by unlacing a cloth from either side. We did not on this visit get in the vicinity of the large capital but could form some idea of its consumption by the immense number of coasting-junks for ever going up and returning, keeping white the bay, with their singular sails, in centre of which black characters told the district they were from, or it was indicated by strips of black cloth hanging on either end of the yard. It was soon apparent, and the Japanese were no doubt aware that we knew it, that if it should become necessary to resort to offensive measures, that the blockading of the custom-port of Uraga, and the stoppage of the passage of their junks with their supplies to the immense city, would make them very effective. Their forts would not have been able to have raised the blockade; we could have kept out of the reach of their guns, and peppered them with the long range of our own.