Читать книгу A Yankee in the Far East - George Hoyt Allen - Страница 7

I believe I ended my last letter by ho-ing the land, and hanging a shipload of passengers over the rail, sailing into Yokohama harbor.

When a shipload of passengers get off at Yokohama, there is joy among the rikisha boys, and the passengers who are getting their first ride in a rikisha have an experience they will never forget. The first ride in a jinrikisha in Japan is an experience to lay away among one's choice collection of experiences.

A first ride in a rikisha has been fully described by myself and published, and to go into it in these letters would be to plagiarize myself: so, on to Tokio, the capital and largest city in Japan – the same old tremendous town, only more so – Greater Tokio has three million souls today. Compared to one of our great cities Tokio has the appearance of an overgrown village.

Many wide thoroughfares and narrow streets lined with low one- and two-story buildings – a clean city, covering a tremendous area.

You occasionally see a three-story building and they have one "skyscraper" that towers up into the air five stories – a landmark.

The Mitsukoshi, Japan's one great department store, is now housed in a modest three-story building, but they are building a new store.

The general factotum of the store who can speak English showed me a drawing of the new store. I exclaimed with admiration: "And she is going to be five stories high, isn't she?" "Yes," he said, proudly, "and a basement."

The government buildings are not so imposing as in many other of the world's capitals, and there is no single business center. The business of the city is widely scattered. Rapid transit in Tokio is in a state of transition. The trolley has come, but not sufficiently strong to be adequate for the traffic, but enough to discourage the rikisha boys – the rikisha boy has run his legs off in Tokio. He is still here, but in decreasing numbers, and what there is left of him is the beginning of the end, so far as Tokio is concerned.

He is an expensive proposition. He wants ten cents to take one any distance at all, and that is equivalent to a ten-cent car ride at home; and to take one any considerable distance is twenty-five cents.

They have the taxicab, but someone else had it during my three days' stay. They have automobiles, but not to such an extent that one has to do much dodging. In an hour's ride across the city I counted six – and it was a fine day for automobile riding, too.

To get around in Tokio is a problem. Like Washington, it is a city of magnificent distances. The street cars go where you want to go, but they don't come where you are. The charge is only two and one-half cents for a ride, but it costs ten cents for a rikisha boy to take you to the car. The boy will land you where you want to go for twenty-five cents, but there is a two and one-half cent street car fare against a twenty-five cent rikisha ride; so you tell your boy to take you to the car. Then it percolates into your mind that you have ten cents invested in that ride. But there is still a fifteen cent salvage if you take the car, less the two and one-half cents the car will cost – twelve and one-half cents net. While you are working out the problem your car passes, and you tell your boy to go on and take you there – you'd only save twelve and one-half cents anyway.

But that's another ride – twenty-five cents – new deal – and you sigh for the days of your old Tokio, before the street cars came to fuss you up.

Also, they have raised the price of laundry in Tokio – yes, sir, the price of laundry has gone up. They now have the effrontery to charge you two and one-half cents to wash a handkerchief or a pair of socks. Of course it's two and one-half cents for a shirt, a white coat, or a pair of pants – flat rate, two and one-half cents, "Big or little piecee all samee." But it used to be one and one-half cents.

Those were the days when you didn't have to hold a shirt in one hand while you speculated with the other as to whether it would go one more time – under that old scale you just put it in the wash.