Japan and the Japanese

806 JAPAN. A. D. 1C90 ICO'2.
let the smoke through. Here foot travellers and ordinary peopla
live, among the servants. People of fashion are accommodated in
the back part of the house, which is kept clean and neat to admi-
ration. Not the least spot is to be seen upon the walls, floors,
carpets, windows screens, in short, nowhere in the room, which
looks as if it were quite new, and but newly furnished. There are
no tables, chairs, benches, or other furniture in these rooms. They
are only adorned with some Miseratsie, of which more presently,
put into or hung up in the rooms, for travellers to amuse their
leisure by examining, which, indeed, some of them very well de-
serve. The Tsubo, or garden behind the house, is also very curi-
ously kept, for travellers to divert themselves with walking in it,
and beholding the beautiful flowers it is commonly adorned with.
" The rooms in Japanese houses have seldom more than one
blank wall, which is plastered with clay of Osaka, a good fine sort,
and so left bare, without any other ornament. It is so thin that
the least kick would break it to pieces. On all other sides the
room has either windows or folding screens, which slide in grooves,
as occasion requires. The lower groove is cut in a sill, which runs
even with the mats, and the upper one in a beam, which conies
down two or three feet from the ceiling. The beams in which the
grooves run are plastered with clay of Osaka. The ceiling, to
show the curious running of the veins and grain of the wood, is
sometimes only covered with a thin, slight layer of a transparent
varnish. Sometimes they paste it over with the same sort of vari-
ously colored and flowered paper of which their screens are made.
The paper windows, which let
light
into the room, have wooden
shutters on both sides, taken off in the day time, but put on at
night.
" In the solid wall of the room there is always a Toko, as they
call it, or sort of a cupboard, raised about a foot or more above the
floor, and very near two feet deep. It commonly stands in that
part of the wall which is just opposite to the door, that being reckoned
the most honorable. Just before this toko two extraordi-
narily fine mats are laid, one upon the other, and both upon the
ordinary mats which cover the floor. These are for people of the
first quality to sit upon, for, upon the arrival of travellers of less
note, they are removed out of the way. At the side of the toko is